Read Online Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris - Free Book Online Page A

dehydration, and eighty-four cents a year to stop a child from going blind. “How is it that governments spend so much on warfare and bypass the needs of their children, their greatest capital, their only hope for peace?” 75
    It was a strong political stand, carefully worded. UNICEF, she went on, was the one international organization with the infrastructure and diplomatic leverage to channel aid directly to children and not through governments.
    When she finished, UNICEF executive director Jim Grant spoke bluntly to the committee of Audrey’s import to the cause:
    â€œAt the heart of whether we succeed is public opinion.... It isn’t the question of funding anymore. In the Sudan, it’s public opinion that is going to keep the pressure on the two sides to allow the supplies to move.... Ms. Hepburn will be going to Sudan next week to keep world public attention on it. [With her,] we have a new capacity to talk to people. Television picks up a picture in the Sudan and says, ‘Ms. Hepburn is there ... children are dying but there is still time to do something about it.’ Last fall, the media weren’t able to get in there. Then, you saw only the bodies of the dead four months later.” 76
    It’s just a six-minute drive from the Capitol to the White House, but a much greater distance psychologically. After her congressional appearance, Audrey and Rob were invited to a state dinner there for Israeli Prime Minister Shamir. “Bush was very considerate,” Rob recalls. “He put Audrey on his left.”
    He was doing himself a favor, of course. But it gave Audrey a perfect chance to speak with him about what mattered to her. When she mentioned her forthcoming “emergency” trip to Sudan, he introduced her to Cable News Network’s Bernard Shaw and suggested that his network ought to cover it. (Bush was an avid CNN fan.) Before leaving, Audrey arranged to come back for a private chat with the woman of the house, as Barbara Bush remembers:
    Audrey came to call on me the next day to talk about her work with UNICEF. I had met her once before in Rome at a luncheon when George was vice president. Audrey felt passionately about two things, both of which mattered to me also: She loved children and became an advocate for young people in distress around the world; and she adored dogs.... She played with Millie’s puppies, and I was slightly surprised that Millie let her pick them up without even a small protest.... How the world admired that lovely creature! 77

THE FIFTH JOURNEY: SUDAN—APRIL 1988
    Just days after that White House visit, Hepburn and Wolders found themselves in Sudan to witness the start of a miraculous UNICEF-sponsored relief effort called “Operation Lifeline.”
    â€œSudan is an outpost of despair, but it has astounding beauty,” Rob recalls. “I remember Audrey looking down from the plane at where the Blue Nile and the White Nile branch out and saying she had this great feeling of gladness. It’s wrong to think we’d go to a place like that and immediately be immersed in misery. There was a period of assimilation.”
    UNICEF’s Jim Grant had been appointed special envoy to the Sudan and was largely responsible for the negotiations that led to Operation Lifeline. Its goal was to ferry food to southern Sudan, which was cut off from all aid because of the civil war. Audrey and Rob watched the first ship with food and medical supplies leave Khartoum for Kosti on the Nile.
    The next day, while visiting a remote Sudanese refugee camp, Audrey noticed a fourteen-year-old boy lying on a dirt floor and asked what was wrong with him. The answer was terribly familiar: acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema, due to malnutrition. “That was exactly the same way I finished the war—that age, with those three things,” she said, noting that even when fed, starving children often never recover from the neurological