Free Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris Page B

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.
    â€œThis 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.”
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    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.
    â€œIt was a fund-raiser