by Barry Paris
RISKS HAD TO BE weighed before every trip—even to the United States. After the Pan-American disaster over Lockerbee, European fears of airline terrorism reached panic levels. But Audrey had agreed to a six-city American fund-raising tour for UNICEF, including Atlanta, where former president Jimmy Carter was to give her an award. She and Rob flew first to Los Angeles to see Connie Wald and there, at dinner one night, they met former ambassador Anne Cox Chambers and her good friend William Banks. Chambers, the publishing heiress and daughter of 1920 Democratic presidential nominee James M. Cox, turned out to be chairperson of the Atlanta UNICEF event—a pleasant coincidence with a pleasant outcome: She offered Hepburn and Wolders a “lift” in her private plane, to spare them another commercial flight.
“Audrey asked what time,” recalls Chambers, “I said, ‘Oh, around noon, but there’s no hurry. Just come when it suits you.’ When we arrived at noon, she was already there—this radiant creature standing at the top of the steps in the doorway with that lovely smile, saying, ‘Welcome aboard your own airplane!’” As the plane was revving up, William Banks said half-facetiously, “I always say a prayer at takeoff,” and Audrey replied, “Oh, I just hold Robbie’s hand.” The Hepburn-Wolders friendship with Chambers and Banks was instant: All four of them had not only UNICEF in common, but also gardens—and dogs.85cc
At the Atlanta ceremony, Jimmy Carter presented her with her award and said, “When I was young, guess who I wanted to be? You may think Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson—not at all. I wanted to be Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire or Cary Grant, I was so filled with envy of them being kissed by Audrey Hepburn.” Audrey replied, “I’ll fix that,” and gave him a big kiss. They would often work together later on UNICEF causes.
William Banks was as impressed with Rob as with Audrey and, even more, with their relationship. “It was obvious that he adored her and she adored him,” says Banks, a courtly southern gentleman. “I’ve never seen a better marriage, even though they were not married. When the cameras converged on Audrey, Rob always stepped out of range in the most graceful way. He basked in the admiration people felt for her. He was self-effacing but not self abnegating, and she looked up to him so.”86
Rob was always there, says John Isaac, in every way:
“She would see him running around and say, ‘Isn’t he wonderful? I don’t know what I’d do without my Robbie.’ Always ‘my Robbie.’ Day in and out, he made sure everything was right.” Audrey often declared, “I could never have done all this work with UNICEF without Robbie.... He does a million things.”87
Jeffrey Banks summed it up: “The overwhelming thing about Audrey was that men wanted to protect and shield her from all the bad in the world. That was my instinct at age eleven, for instance. But Rob’s the one who truly did it.”88
Wendy Keys enjoyed watching their “sense of playfulness” together: “At the Peninsula Hotel after they’d just flown in, Rob and I were talking across a coffee table. She was busy unpacking, but he said, ‘Audrey, could we move these flowers? I can’t see Wendy.’ She swept them away and then plunked down a teeny little flowerpot instead and said, ‘Now can you see Wendy?’ She took advantage of the moment and the prop. It was delicious.
“Another time, she and I were gossiping with our legs swung over our respective sofas, yakking away. Rob came out of the shower in a terry-cloth robe and sat down to reveal a beautiful leg. She winked at me, and the two of us started to giggle. One of those moments—that constant twinkle in her eye.
“They shared a lot of things—their commitment to other people and to UNICEF. Rob’s own enormous UNICEF commitment was rarely acknowledged, and he didn’t want it to be. But he was certainly the best man in her life. The others were appalling, or normal, depending on your point of view. What a wonderful thing that she and Rob found each other.”
The press, meanwhile, kept asking the same old question: Were they going to get married?
“Why bother?” she replied to one reporter. “It’s lovely this way ... more romantic. It means we’re together because we want to be, not because we have to be. It’s a slight difference, but maybe it’s a very good one.”89
THE SEVENTH JOURNEY: VIETNAM—OCTOBER 1990
Of all Audrey Hepburn’s remarkable UNICEF journeys, the least remembered is her visit to Vietnam. Unlike the others, it received little coverage except in France, whose ties to Vietnam were historic. For America and the American media, more recent wounds were still unhealed. Audrey was too apolitical to get the virulent criticism dealt to Jane Fonda for going to Vietnam during the war itself. Instead, she got the silent treatment.
The Vietnam trip had been suggested in 1987 by UNICEF’s Jack Glattbach, who now accompanied her on what turned out to be a highly useful mission. As in Bangladesh, the main purpose was to get the government behind the UNICEF-supported immunization and water programs. And as in Bangladesh, Audrey went everywhere.
At Mo Vang Commune in Hoang Lien Son Province, the children handed her flowers and performed a martial-arts demonstration in her honor. “How do you say thank-you in Vietnamese?” we hear her ask in the video documentary footage. “Ka-mun,” she is told—and thereafter uses it freely. A child hands her a rose, whose stem pricks Audrey’s finger. “All roses have thorns,” she smiles. Priming a new pump, she splashes water on her face and proudly proclaims that UNICEF supplied the materials but that the wells “have all been made by the Vietnamese themselves.”
The tour was going so well that, midway, Glattbach briefed her on Vietnam’s unique “structural adjustment” policies and asked if she would emphasize that in the documentary they were shooting. “Oh, that’s too complicated for me,” she replied. “Really, if I don’t understand it, I can’t speak it.” Glattbach said fine, never mind. But soon after, he recalls, “watched by a few hundred Vietnamese villagers and with absolutely no ‘fluffs,’ she spoke four minutes to camera and covered every point from the discussion she ‘didn’t understand.’ It was one of the best summaries I ever heard. It got seven minutes on ABC prime-time news and incredible TV pickup around the world.”90
The video footage shows it clearly: Everywhere she goes in Vietnam, Hepburn is greeted lovingly and the mood is upbeat, with no recriminations about the war. She meets the heads of several unions, all of them women. But her most important meeting is the last—a “summit” indeed, with General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam’s deputy prime minister and great war hero, the field commander most responsible for defeating the mighty United States.
“This general and UNICEF—we have a lot in common,” she said formally, in his presence. “We have both fought many battles for children. I just hope we will be as triumphant as you have been, and conquer all the children’s diseases.”
Giap said UNICEF’s help was crucial to a country that had suffered so many years of war. In response, she said, “I find your country miraculous, and I think UNICEF has never had a more ideal situation to take care of children because you always have given children the priority in spite of war.... Your education and literacy are very high, and immunization almost completed.”
Clearly charmed, General Giap smiled and said, “You have so many praises! But we feel we have so much more work to do.”
AUDREY’S OWN WORK took many forms, including the artistic. A UNICEF Christmas card these days was adorned with her sketch of an Ethiopian mother carrying a baby, simply but beautifully done. The original was donated to the Finnish UNICEF committee and sold at auction in Helsinki for $16,500.
“It was a fund-raiser for camels,” says Rob Wolders. “For the vaccination campaign in Chad, they used camels with solar-energy panels in order to keep the vaccine refrigerated. They could buy a lot of camels with that $16,500.”
The following year, she launched the UN’s “Rights of the Child” postage-stamp series in Geneva with a first-day philatelic envelope of her own design.
In August 1990, she went to Oslo, Norway, to cohost the “Concert for Peace,” sponsored by the Elie Wiesel
Foundation, with Jimmy Carter, François Mitterrand and Nelson Mandela among the participants. Audrey introduced Václav Havel and James Galway, and conductor Lukas Foss led the Oslo Philharmonic. Havel made a great impact on her and, soon after, she deftly worked his significance into her remarks at UNICEF’s Universal Child Immunization kickoff ceremony in Rome:
“I didn’t think I’d live to see the end of [the Cold War]. I had grown up with it and it was part of all our lives. Then the world changed dramatically. Like the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire, the old order has come tumbling down. We now have something that is so rare in the course of civilization: a second chance....
“UNICEF and the World Health Organization [have] achieved their goal of universal child immunization by 1990. This is the miracle of this decade. It does not mean we have immunized every child. It does mean that 80 percent of the world’s one-year-olds have been immunized against the six major child-killing diseases—four out of five children on the whole planet! ... In 1974, only 5 percent of the developing world’s children were vaccinated.
“The day people can count on having two children survive, they will have two instead of having nine in hopes that two will live.... China, Indonesia, Thailand and Mexico have proven that population can be slowed [through] education and family planning. Letting children die is not the remedy to overpopulation.” 91
The immunization campaign had been the most monumental global mobilization in the history of UNICEF—if not the history of the world. But ironically, she told Harry Smith on CBS This Morning, the immunization rate in America was decreasing. In North Africa, 79 percent of all children were now vaccinated against measles; the figure was 58 percent in Houston and 52 percent in Miami! When her time was up, she would not let Smith cut her off. “May I tell you one more thing?” she pressed. “Rotary International has raised three-quarters of a billion dollars for immunization over ten years—an extraordinary example of what people can do.”
A sweet smile of triumph crossed her face: She had managed to slip in one last plug.92
In view of those measles statistics and the fact that one in five American children lives in poverty, Smith asked if we should be more concerned with our own kids, rather than the world’s. “I think we can do both,” she replied. “Sure, we take care of our own children first. Charity begins at home. But there’s no reason why we can’t have love or time or money or food for children in Africa.93 It’s the endless wars that have destroyed what we’ve tried to do [there]. Adults fight and children die. Peace is what I’m pleading for, because until there’s peace we won’t be able to construct.”94
That was the message she took to Washington once again in June 1991 for her second congressional appearance, at the invitation of senators Philip Leahy of Vermont and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, to urge a boost in aid for Africa.
“We tried to plan a time when she and I could both be in Africa together,” recalls Senator Kassebaum, “but we never could get it worked out. She was very shy, and she looked very frail. She did such a tremendous job of calling attention to the plight of children in ways that nobody else could.”95
THE LAST JOURNEY: SOMALIA—SEPTEMBER 1992
Somalia, torn to shreds by war and famine, was hell on earth—eight million people in a land the size of Texas, most of them starving to death. Hepburn had wanted to go there a year earlier but the New York office thought other assignments more urgent and Somalia too unsafe. Now, as she and Rob left Switzerland, Somalia was still on the back pages of the papers. But Audrey Hepburn’s last mission was about to rivet the world.
“Apocalyptic,” she called it. “I walked into a nightmare.... I have seen famine in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, but I have seen nothing like this—so much worse than I could possibly have imagined. I wasn’t prepared for this. It’s so hard to talk about because it’s unspeakable.”96
Among many images that haunted her was the first, from the air, as they flew into Kismayu from Nairobi over the desert:
“The earth is red—an extraordinary sight—that deep terra-cotta red. And you see the villages, displacement camps and compounds, and the earth is all rippled around them like an ocean bed. And those were the graves. There are graves everywhere. Along the road, around the paths that you take, along the riverbeds, near every camp—there are graves everywhere.”97
Kismayu’s huge displaced-persons camp held 20,000 people, but it took a while for it to dawn on Audrey that there was something missing. “There were no babies and practically no infants, because they are the most fragile,” she said.98 “They were just all snuffed out like candles.”99 At the feeding center in Baidoa, “One of the first sights I saw was that they were loading the bodies of that night onto a truck, and most of them were very small. Just one night’s dead. Around a hundred. Children were sitting around waiting to be fed, but they were beyond wanting food. Some of them had to be more or less force-fed with little tiny spoonfuls. They are just totally spent.”100
Many of the children and adults were maimed. Those who could still walk looked like ghosts, caught between the worst drought in history and a horrifying civil war that had destroyed whole families, whole villages—the whole country. There were no highways, no phones, no sanitation. You didn’t need a visa to get in because there was no government to care. “There’s nothing left,” Hepburn said. “The cattle are dead, the crops are gone, whatever there was has been looted. Anarchy. It’s a country without a government—a mayhem of marauding bandits who are likely to hold up a convoy or loot a storehouse.101
“This is the first in history that a country has been totally held together by individuals, by relief workers, these incredible, heroic people [from] Save the Children, Care, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières. But there are very few of them.”
Hepburn’s presence in Somalia coincided with that of her journalist friend Anna Cataldi, who confirmed Audrey’s assessment in the story she sent back to Milan:
“The volunteer workers with Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders] look at us with dazed expressions. Clearly, they are in a bad way. Malaria, amoebas, and now that they’ve had so much contact with blood, they are testing them for AIDS as well. These brave people stayed in Somalia even during the bombardments, when everyone else had left.”102
The brighter side was that food was now arriving under the protection of UN peacekeepers and the U.S. Navy. Audrey was profoundly moved during a visit to the USS Tarawa aircraft carrier and its 2,400 sailors and Marines. “We were there for less than an hour and at the end were handed a check for $4,000, which the boys had collected,” she said, weeping at the recollection. “You see, there I go again. But I don’t want people to feel helpless. Everything is needed—blankets, clothes. The rains are coming now. Rain brings more death. In one camp where one night the death toll was sixty, it rose to over one hundred the next night because of the rain, because they’re so fragile, and the chill—it’s just too much for them.”103
Bryant Gumbel on the Today show later asked if, in view of the anarchy, any amount of assistance was more than just a Band-Aid?
“Survival means much, much more than a Band-Aid,” she said. “I wouldn’t call a good doctor that saves your child from dying a Band-Aid. You may say that only tiny numbers of people can be helped. But the numbers are getting bigger. I go through my soul-searching. What can I do? What am I going to go and do there? But for all of us there’s something we can do. It’s true you can’t take care of 1,000. But finally, if you can save one, I’d be glad to do that.”
Among her challenges was to try to explain a complex colonial history—the difference between Somalia and Somaliland, for example, so named by the territory’s Italian and British conquerors, respectively. “Are we not reaping the mess we made so many years ago when we enriched ourselves?” she said. “We didn’t do a hell of a lot for those people, did we? That’s why it’s right that we do now.”104
Audrey was asked not to dwell on that with the press, as UNICEF was now getting mone
y from both the Italian and British governments. But Cataldi was able to be more fierce about the politics of it: “We Italians are responsible for Somalia,” she wrote, as a result of which, hundreds of thousands of people were now dying “without even knowing why they are dying. They can’t comprehend the ocean of rhetoric surrounding them, because this people of poets doesn’t know how to read. Illiteracy in Somalia is the highest in the world: 95 percent.”105
Why had the world been so slow to react? Audrey made a telling comparison. “People in Florida complained bitterly when aid took five days to get to the area hit by the hurricane,” she said. “We’ve always been too late. In Ethiopia—a million people were dead before the BBC ever showed those pictures. In the Sudan, a quarter of a million died. Perhaps we’re too late in Yugoslavia.... You could not get into Somalia to know really what was going on—to get inland and see the extent of the devastation.... You can’t show pictures or write stories until you can go there and tell the world about it.106 I came to Somalia because there cannot be enough witnesses.”
Before leaving Africa, she held a press conference in Nairobi on September 22 and then granted a private interview to Nairobi TV reporter Katherine Openda—perhaps the most poignant she ever gave. “Somalia is one of the worst tragedies ever,” she said. “It has gone over the edge. I want to be very careful how I say this. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic. But you really wonder whether God hasn’t forgotten Somalia.”
Openda asked how she personally coped with it, and she replied, “Perhaps I don’t. I give in sometimes. It is heartbreaking.... You never walk away from it, ever again. It’s an image you carry with you for the rest of your life.”
Hepburn’s Somalia mission was followed by press conferences in London, Geneva and Paris and a host of television appearances in the United States. Not least of her skills was that she could speak with reporters in a variety of languages. More than any other, this round of interviews generated an unprecedented amount of international coverage and captivated the world. In all of them, she looks a bit tired but otherwise healthy, betraying no hint of the fact that she had just fifteen weeks to live.
