In 1947, a young woman travelled from Holland to London and went through a pregnancy in secret, living and working amid a ballet company. Two years later, in 1949, she began an acting career and gave her child away to another young actress on the London stage. The mother was Audrey Hepburn, and in a few years she was famous. Her son, meanwhile, had been taken to America by his English adoptive mother and her husband, a U.S. military pilot who was stationed in England. He grew up in secrecy in Maryland. He was named Stuart Byczynski, and this book is about Audrey's life, her son's birth and adoption, and Audrey's conflicted and menacing behavior toward him.
Not a photo book, this work explores the dark side of Audrey Hepburn's career, revealing new information about her and correcting some of the misinformation in the existing literature.
To make her career in films, Audrey had to suppress any information that she had had a child, as well as her family ties to the Third Reich during WWII. She interfered with the author and arranged for minor Hollywood people to enter his life as acquaintances in order to gather information. In her final years, in the aftermath of the publicity about Joan Crawford's parenting, Audrey did volunteer work for Unicef, perhaps out of guilt over her own abandoned child, but more likely to polish her public image. This book is the kind of thing Audrey dreaded, and it was originally intended for publication while she was alive.
