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In Intimate Audrey<\/em><\/a>\u2014a new biography of Audrey Hepburn, out now from Grand Central Publishing\u2014there are images that feel immediately familiar. Audrey<\/a> with the French writer Colette, whose novella Gigi<\/em> gave Hepburn her first role on Broadway; Audrey in the garden at La Paisible, her home in Switzerland; Audrey greeting director William Wyler as Gary Cooper looks on during the filming of Love in the Afternoon<\/em>. They are the images<\/a> that have etched her into our collective memory as a poised, luminous, fully formed star.<\/p>\n But what lingers\u2014what will stop even the most devoted Hepburn admirer mid-page\u2014are the book\u2019s childhood mementos. A photograph taken shortly after Hepburn\u2019s birth in Brussels. The snapshot of a small girl standing alone, absorbed in a book. And, most unexpectedly, a series of delicate drawings: dresses rendered in careful strokes, Christmas scenes imagined in soft washes of color, children gathered in quiet anticipation. They are not the work of a future icon, but of a child\u2014one whose life, as her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer makes clear, was as much shaped by absence and austerity as by her own imagination.<\/p>\n Intimate Audrey<\/em>, written with Wendy Holden\u2014a former war correspondent (and no relation to William Holden)\u2014is Ferrer\u2019s second book about his mother, following 1999\u2019s Audrey Hepburn: An Elegant Spirit<\/em>. But where that first work was, as he describes it, \u201can emotional\u2026a spiritual biography,\u201d this new volume aims to be something more definitive.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery year people would say, \u2018When are you going to have the ultimate, the authorized, the real biography about Audrey Hepburn?\u2019\u201d he tells me. \u201cAnd finally, I thought, if I\u2019m going to do this\u2014because, you know, like the Hippocratic Oath, you don\u2019t treat your own family members\u2014I needed someone to be a filter, to be the liver of this book.\u201d<\/p>\n The structure quickly came into focus, beginning with the Second World War and concluding with Hepburn\u2019s work as a UNICEF ambassador. \u201cWe sat down and we started creating a spine\u2014a skeleton of the book,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd you realize very quickly that everybody knows the films, and there\u2019s not much to tell there. She was a professional, she was nice to the crew, she showed up on time, she didn\u2019t make scenes.\u201d What interested him instead were the quieter, more difficult truths. \u201cThrough the little things, you get to realize who the person was,\u201d he notes. \u201cBecause she\u2019s becoming\u2014or has become\u2014such a legend, she\u2019s sort of floating away like a balloon at a birthday party, and I wanted to bring her back and ground her again.\u201d<\/p>\n Those \u201clittle things\u201d are not always gentle. Hepburn\u2019s father left when she was six years old\u2014walking out of her life without warning\u2014which she would later describe as the most traumatic event of her childhood. She cried for days, and the loss would remain with her well into adulthood. It is this kind of detail\u2014intimate, destabilizing, and deeply human\u2014that Ferrer returns to again and again, not to diminish the myth, but to contextualize it.<\/p>\n The drawings included in the book, many of which survived the war tucked into family albums, offer a glimpse into her interior world. One, dated 1944, shows children watching a puppet show\u2014an image of innocence produced in the midst of wartime. Another depicts a Christmas tree, lit and adorned, at a time when such abundance would have been out of reach. \u201cThey really had nothing during the war,\u201d Sean says. \u201cSo it\u2019s sort of a child\u2019s hope of what the world will be like when things go back to normal\u2014the expectation, the dream.\u201d<\/p>\n That tension\u2014between austerity and imagination, between hunger and beauty\u2014would come to define Hepburn\u2019s adult life as well. \u201cI wanted to say to people, she\u2019s a real story, she\u2019s a real person,\u201d Ferrer says. \u201cShe had to struggle\u2014and yet she became this extraordinary symbol, and still remained a lovely, decent, humble person.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n