“When the liberation finally came,” said Audrey, “I took up my ballet lessons, [and] went to live in Amsterdam. Housing was very, very short at the time; it was a country that lay in ruins. I lived in a room with my mother, in a house which we shared with another lady, a writer.” This was, in fact, the publishing house editor who was working on Anne Frank’s diary.
Ella and Audrey finally made the move from Velp at the end of October 1945. Mother took a job in the recovering food industry, first as a produce buyer and then as a caterer. Daughter began dancing with Sonia Gaskell in her new, state-funded dance school. These were the leanest times of all, the period with Ella’s funds frozen in Arnhem as she still managed to provide for Audrey and herself.
Sonia Gaskell accepted Audrey as a student knowing that the young dancer couldn’t afford to pay for lessons but thought she deserved a chance as yet another hopeful who had been derailed by the war. Not that Gaskell was soft-hearted. She wasn’t. She was a tough, disciplined taskmistress who in Audrey’s case built upon the relentless work ethic that had already been instilled, first by Ella, then by Marova. As Audrey expressed it, the Gaskell way reinforced the dancer’s iron will: “Don’t complain, don’t give in even if you’re tired, don’t go out the night before you have to dance. Sonia taught me that if you really worked hard, you’d succeed, and that everything had to come from the inside.”
Annemarth Visser ’t Hooft would later make her way to Gaskell’s studio and confirm Audrey’s assessment. “I remember she was an extremely strict teacher,” said Annemarth of Sonia Gaskell, “austere and very disciplined and close to the rigid traditional classical forms of dance. She was not easy to please.”
Ella and Audrey would make a return visit to Velp in spring 1946 for the purposes of dance. At the invitation of Dr. van der Willigen and Dr. Visser ’t Hooft, Audrey headlined a benefit for the Red Cross at the N.H.V. building on Stationsstraat. The date was 25 April 1946.
Audrey Hepburn-Ruston’s first public performance since the days of the zwarte avonden was accompanied by pianist Willem Goedhart, who provided music by her old favorites Bach, Chopin, and Debussy.
Rosemarie Kamphuisen attended the recital with her parents. “I remember it was all solo,” she said. “I remember that she made a tour around the limits of the stage, and I see her going around in very elegant positions.”
Rosemarie also remembered the other act on the bill with Audrey, none other than Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and his comedy troupe, for this occasion composed of his fellow doctors and some nurses from the Velp hospital. The doctor himself had written the script and created the act. It was, recalled Rosemarie, “a hilarious presentation of a ‘leg amputation’ on stage. The doctor was in a leading part with an enormous saw, with a separate underleg that fell on the floor and a lot of flowing blood!”
The next day, the Velpsche Courant newspaper reviewer had eyes only for Audrey and remarked on the way the sixteen year old expressed herself through interpretive dance, describing this as “her great gift.” The reviewer likened her performance to “a fresh, bright spring morning” and said, noting that the great Sonia Gaskell was now Audrey’s instructor, “We can expect a successful future for this artist.” At the end of the performance, Audrey was showered with bouquets from all quarters.
One month later Gaskell chose Audrey to appear with another dancer in a performance at the Hortus Theater in Amsterdam. A reviewer said Audrey’s technique wasn’t the best but noted that “she definitely had talent.”
As 1946 gave way to 1947, and 1947 to 1948, Audrey continued to study with Gaskell while on the side she employed her fit dancer’s body as a photographer’s clothes model to make extra money. She also finally got herself a part in a movie. To Ella’s delight, Audrey was cast in a low-budget travel homage to the Netherlands called Nederlands in Zeven Lessen. So dear was film stock to the project that the filmmakers cut Audrey’s impromptu screen test into their feature. They asked her to begin the test on the far side of a busy Amsterdam street, make her way toward the camera while dodging traffic, stop under the camera, which was perched in a second-story window, and smile. The footage, which exists today, shows Audrey gliding with a dancer’s grace, showing just enough leg in her slim skirt to impress the filmmakers and land the role of a KLM stewardess. Her roughly four minutes of screen time in the feature were shot at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and the experience convinced the dancer that “I am not an actress.” She was wearing her hair curly these days and her weight was up—facts preserved for posterity in Nederlands in Zeven Lessen.
By this time, the Dutch police in Arnhem had opened a full investigation of Ella’s pro-German activities up to 1942. It was part of a countrywide purge of the ten percent of the adult population that had sided with the occupier, and everyone in all corners of the Netherlands began scrambling. It wasn’t a matter of the ten percent maintaining their innocence; all Dutch citizens wanted to prove their loyalty. Friends asked friends to verify every act of defiance against the Reich large and small, from sabotage to stealing food to tearing down a tacked-up German edict. Members of the Resistance sent requests to the United States for letters of reference from American airmen they had fed or sheltered. The worst thing one could be in the post-war Netherlands was a verified Nazi collaborator.
Ella’s vulnerability began in 1935 when she had traveled to Munich with Ruston and met Hitler, then had written about the experience in not one but two British Union of Fascist newspaper articles. Another damning fact was that she had worked for Pander and Zonen, which sold furniture, yes, and made aircraft and other equipment for the Reich. Witnesses against Ella included the director and staff of Arnhem’s war hospital the Diaconessenhuis, as well as Arnhem civilians, plus the police detective in Arnhem who had inspected Ella’s mail in 1939.
Finally, on 25 June 1948, Ella was called in to testify under oath, and gave a lengthy statement defending herself against several serious accusations that had been presented to police through sworn statements and also in writing. She admitted to National Socialist activities from 1934 to 1936 but only as influenced by a husband later proven disreputable; their marriage ended shortly after the trip to Germany. She denied having a flag with a swastika in her apartment, as had been charged; she denied any intimate relationship with secret police officer Oestreich or association with German nationals working at the hospital. Her cultural activities came under scrutiny as well, and Ella denied her pro-German activities. She was steadfast in stating she had done nothing against the Dutch at all. In her statement she claimed she had quit her job with Pander as soon as she learned they made German military equipment when in fact she had held that job for two more years. She claimed there was no Nazi paraphernalia in the apartment on Jansbinnensingel other than a paperweight in Ian’s bedroom that may have had a Reich emblem on it, but that symbol meant nothing to anybody. She denied any association with German officers even though she had been seen in their company in public settings. She explained that she had taken the job at the hospital as a favor to her father to improve relations between the German workers and Dutch staff. Her mission had been to improve care to patients, not to further the German cause. Her most significant misstatement claimed that the Mozart celebration she directed had taken place in January 1940 before the occupation, when in fact it occurred seventeen months after the Germans marched in and was very much a pro-Nazi evening for an artist “claimed” by the party.
As always, Audrey lived and breathed dance. Now age nineteen, she faced a crossroads in Amsterdam when funding cuts at the Gaskell school necessitated the dancer be removed from the roster. But she remained “eager to become a prima ballerina” and applied to the Marie Rambert School of Ballet in London. An endorsement from Madame Gaskell helped to secure Madame Rambert’s interest, but an audition would be required.
Sonia Gaskell herself spent endless hours preparing Audrey for the audition. “You know,” said Audrey, “I always tell this story when people ask about turning points in my life. This Russian ballet teacher worked and worked with me, preparing me for my audition, going through such paces, training, sweating. And on my last day we went through it all again, and she gave me a big hug and said, ‘Now, you forget everything I told you. From now on it all has to come from inside you.’ And this has got me out of any amount of scrapes. I’ve been constantly in situations in my life and career where I’ve had no technique, but if you just feel enough, you will get away with murder.”
For the first time in nine years Audrey separated from her mother (and her mother’s legal troubles) and traveled to London—the fact that she was the daughter of British citizen Joseph Ruston and therefore British herself made this action possible. It didn’t matter that Ruston had been considered a traitor and was imprisoned during the war. An Englishman was an Englishman, and his daughter was also English.
Audrey passed her audition and began instruction under Marie Rambert in a London still cleaning up from five brutal years of air raids and V1 and V2 attacks. Destroyed blocks and neighborhoods still marred the urban landscape—a constant reminder of where she, and the world, had just been.
According to Hepburn biographer Barry Paris: “To describe Rambert is to describe the history of British ballet. Agnes de Mille called her ‘Queen hornet, vixen mother.’ By age sixty, when Audrey met her, she was legendary, her credentials dating to the days when she coached Vaslav Nijinsky in The Rite of Spring.”
Said Audrey as she was about to begin at the prestigious school, “Suddenly, I faced a problem: I could get no money from home.” Ella’s funds were still tied up in her legal defense, prompting Rambert, an empty nester with two adult daughters living on their own, to become the second ballet mistress to befriend the waif; she invited Audrey to live with her as Ella endured legal scrutiny in Arnhem and The Hague.
Which is not to say that ballet mistress Rambert had mellowed. Audrey said of Rambert that when she “would catch us folding our arms or slouching our shoulders, she’d give us a good rap across the knuckles with a stick.”
In London, a male dancer noticed “this very pretty, strange Dutch girl who suddenly arrived at the Rambert School….” But here and now, Audrey faced a shock. After practicing under Marova and then under Gaskell in a Netherlands where ballet had just begun to take hold, Audrey was in the presence of a “queen hornet” who had trained the founders of the Sadler’s Wells and Royal Ballets. The “strange Dutch girl” took her place at the barre next to “girls who had had five years of Sadler’s Wells teaching, paid for by their families,” said Audrey, “and who had always had good food and bomb shelters.” The Dutch girl had had none of these things. Quite the contrary; she had lost well over a year of instruction due to battles, shelling, malnutrition, and illness. Most horrific of all, in a line of dancers each the ideal height of 160 centimeters, she towered at 170—an inelegant five-foot-seven.
The writing was on the wall; the dancer was devastated. But she remained her mother’s daughter: tough, hungry, and above all, practical. A crowded ballet roster and her own gangly height required a strategy shift, which she made on a dime based on her experience back with Marova designing her own dances. “I wanted very much to become a choreographer,” she said, “and Rambert was known for developing young choreographers. So I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn and a choreographer as well.”
She salved the trauma of her foundering ballet career with a new best friend: food. For many who had endured starvation conditions in the Hunger Winter, the once-normal relationship with food would forever be altered. Taste buds changed, as did appetites. The sensation of being hungry became elusive, and what did it feel like to be “full”? When was enough enough? For some, food that had been deprived for so long now represented security and with so much of it around, those who had once nearly starved couldn’t help themselves. Audrey shared these new challenges with millions of Dutch survivors. She admitted to a reporter in 1959 that after the war she “began to overcompensate and eat everything in sight.”
“I went on an eating binge,” she admitted. “I would eat anything in sight and in any quantity. I’d empty out a jam jar with a spoon.” As a result, she admitted, “I became quite tubby and put on twenty pounds.”
Audrey remained with Rambert because she still loved ballet and couldn’t give it up. At the same time, she said, “I had been told that my height was a handicap in ballet and that I might have to slave for years to achieve only limited success. I couldn’t wait years; I needed money badly…. I chose the stage.”
London was returning to life, literally. With all the servicemen back, there were babies everywhere, it seemed. Bombed-out buildings were being removed brick by brick, some becoming car parks. The new communications medium of television appeared. The rationing of bread, begun in 1946, finally ended in July of 1948 just in time for the Summer Olympic Games, which were held in London despite shortages and rubble. It was a grand place to be, London, and Audrey remained determined to work and prosper. She could only hope that sooner or later her mother would be free of obligations in the Netherlands and join her, and Audrey must be ready for that day.