How Audrey Found UNICEF

by John Williams

You would think that the naming of Audrey Hepburn as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador would have been the result of careful planning at the highest level. Here, after all, was one of the greatest film stars of all time, who, we learned later, was one of those millions of children safeguarded by UNICEF after World War II. And this child had not forgotten us; had grown up remembering us fondly as the affection in those clear eyes showed.

But no. There is no evidence at all that there was any top level plan. Even now the details are fuzzy. It seems that Christa Roth of UNICEF Geneva met Audrey at a gala in Tokyo. Someone from the Portuguese Committee for UNICEF was also there. They were planning a different gala in Macau, then a Portuguese colony. Christa met Audrey and asked her colleague, Jack Glattbach of UNICEF Bangkok, to brief Audrey who gave the Macau event her support.

News of all of this took forever to reach New York, and the roles of Christa, Jack and Horst Cerni, who was in charge of Special Events, and who briefed Jim Grant, seems to have been forgotten. (If I have left anyone out, my apologies).

Suddenly all the lights were flashing green. A few days later as Director of Information, I found myself sitting in Audrey’s home on the lakeside between Geneva and Lausanne, helping to plan Audrey’s first field trip which was to Ethiopia which was in the midst of a civil war. Alongside sat Victor Soler Sala, Director of UNICEF Geneva.

The coffee table nearby was piled with documents and reports about Ethiopia. “Are you going to read all of these?” I asked her jokingly. It was already decided that I would accompany her in Ethiopia.

“Thanks, I have read all those”, she replied “but I need more” and to that she added the sectors and places that she wanted more information on.

Years later, in New York on the night that Audrey had died in Switzerland, unable to sleep, I got up and started to write about her. At dawn I emailed the article to the International Herald Tribune in Paris for whom I occasionally wrote. The article was reprinted in whole or in part in various papers on the anniversaries of her death.

Here is most of it published on January 26,1993.

Audrey Hepburn was a wonderful woman. Like most young men in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was enchanted by her elfin mischief in “Roman Holiday”, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and other films. Unlike most of her admirers, I got to spend time with Audrey Hepburn—almost three decades later.

In March 1988, she, Robert Wolders, her devoted protector and I flew across the country in comfort-less, clattering transport aircrafts. Audrey usually sat next to the pilot, gazing down at dried river networks, naked mountains shimmering under burning blue skies, and occasional patches of green, teeming with people. She was awed.

By the second day Audrey knew the name and background of each of the twenty people accompanying her— European pilots, Ethiopian minders, American journalists, and UNICEF officials.

The elf was always in her. Her gentle sense of irony and her gift for mimicry kept everyone at ease. Once, in a hotel lobby, she inadvertently sat on my sun hat. She stood, jammed the crushed results on to her head and pretended to be me, producing hilarity among all. Then she carefully pushed out the crumples and, with a grin, a little bow, and a kiss, returned the hat to my head.

With children she was magnetic. As we approached our first village and I saw her wiping her face and hands on a paper towel, I thought that this frail-looking, elegant lady was too far from her own environment. A minute later she had gathered a flock of dusty, scabby children to her, hugging and holding hands. She cradled screaming infants in the immunization tent and chatted, despite the lack of a common language, to young women suckling babies. Her compassion and tenderness came from deep inside.

She never complained—and not in beautiful Italianate Asmara, then under siege where the hotel had no water, nor of the grueling schedule, the unpaved tracks and the late aircraft. Her concerns were always for others, like the orphans in Mekele lining up for a lunch of grain or for the hundreds of girls and women in rags, slopping buckets of swamp water to build an earthen dam.

She was critical only of herself. Back in Addis Ababa, preparing for a news conference, she was determined to master every nuance of the labyrinthine politics of war and drought. We spent hours over questions and answers. In the news conference she was magnificent, combining passion and logic in an alliance of eloquence for children. Only she thought she could have done better.

For me, her most endearing quality was her lack of pomp. More than once in New York and elsewhere, I saw her step— somehow always politely —-around a line of dignitaries gathered to greet her. With open arms and a big smile, she would greet a friend, old or new, high or low, or not at all on the protocol ranking. It did not matter a wit to her.

In New York, on the day she died in Switzerland, we talked about her with our

22-year-old son. “She wasn’t just a great star of your time, but of my time too. She doesn’t really have a time.”

Audrey would have seen that off with light self-mockery.

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