Читать книгу Charlize - Chris Karsten - Страница 7

When referring to Charlize’s ancestry, overseas publications have often mentioned that on her mother’s (Maritz) side she is of German descent and on her father’s (Theron) side of French descent. Charlize is directly descended from the first Huguenots who came to South Africa. In 2004, after she had won the Oscar for Monster, the genealogical department of the Huguenot Memorial Museum in Franschhoek, near Cape Town, published an article about the connection between Charlize and Commandant Danie Theron, famous Boer hero of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The article caught the attention of members of the American Huguenot Society, who were busy at the time with a series of projects about the French Huguenots’ contribution to American society, especially in the theatre and the arts.

Two years earlier the name Danie Theron had also been in the news worldwide: In 2002, Nelson Mandela unveiled a statue of Danie Theron at the Voortrekker Monument at Fort Schanskop in Pretoria. Having been imprisoned for nearly three decades himself, Mandela, speaking mainly in Afrikaans, paid homage to Theron, who had fought against British imperialism and died for the Afrikaner cause.

The original Theron ancestor is thought to be Jacques Thérond, who was born in Nîmes, Languedoc, France, on 11 May 1668 and died at Drakenstein near Cape Town on 2 December 1739. He was married to Marie Jeanne Du Pré of Béthune in Artois, who died in the Tulbagh district in 1763. Daniel Johannes Stephanus (Danie) Theron was born at Tulbagh on 9 May 1872, the ninth of Willem Wouter Theron’s fifteen children.

Large families were not uncommon among the unsophisticated farmers of the time, and were certainly not restricted to Afrikaners. Charlize’s grandmother Bettie comes from a large family too, and she had six children herself. On her back porch in Kuruman, at the age of 78, she shared with me the secret of the “old” people’s large families. Everyone went to bed early after a hard day’s honest labour, she said. And they were up before the sun was out. It was customary for the first one awake, usually a child, to wake everyone else in the house before lighting the fire and boiling the water for coffee. It was then, during that short respite before the coffee came, that the chance was grabbed in the main bedroom to extend the family!

The Boer scout Danie Theron qualified first as a teacher and then as a lawyer and opened his own legal practice in Krugersdorp, just west of Johannesburg. He met Hannie Neethling and they became engaged. But in August 1898, Theron was deeply shocked when Hannie died unexpectedly of pneumonia. Some time after her death a rebellious streak, characteristic of the Therons, made the public take notice of Danie.

Six months before the onset of the Anglo-Boer War, in April 1899, W F Moneypenny, fresh from England, had been the editor of The Star in Johannesburg for barely two months. In a climate not at all conducive to good relations between Afrikaner and Brit, Moneypenny deemed it proper to refer scornfully in his newspaper to “the ignorant Dutch”. Like many Boers of the time, Theron had a short patriotic fuse, and demanded an apology from Moneypenny. When the latter refused, Theron beat him up, shattering his spectacles. On Tuesday, 25 April 1899, Theron appeared in court on a charge of assault. His defence was “extreme provocation”. He was sentenced to a prison term of two months or a hefty fine of £20, which his supporters at court promptly collected and paid.

Shortly after the war broke out, he established the Theron Verkenningskorps (TVK) – a body of scouts – which concentrated on spying and launching guerilla attacks on the British forces. On 5 September 1900 he was killed in battle in the Gatsrand near Fochville, between Johannesburg and Potchefstroom. His TVK men buried his remains in the Pienaar family graveyard at Elandsfontein, and in 1903 he was reinterred next to his fiancée, Hannie, on the family farm, Eikenhof, beside the Klip River. He had never been married and thus left no direct descendants.

One of his brothers was Charles Jacobus (Charlie) Theron, child number thirteen, who later became a farmer and speculator in Namaqualand, operating as far north as Vioolsdrif on the Orange River, the border between South Africa and Namibia. Charlie named one of his sons Danie, after his brother, the Boer hero.

Namaqualand is a harsh region, named after its indigenous Namaqua-Khoi inhabitants, with place names that speak of a spirited attachment to the soil. Tradition has it that Vioolsdrif got its name from a fiddler simply remembered as Jan Viool.

It is at Springbok, principal town of this arid region (the springbok is also the national animal emblem of South Africa), that Danie Theron of Pofadder married the attractive Bettie Beets of Vioolsdrif on 8 August 1947, at the onset of Namaqualand’s world-renowned wild-flower season. Bettie was only seventeen and already five months pregnant. Their first child, Charles, was born a few months later, on 27 November 1947.

Charles later married Gerda (Maritz) and they had a daughter, Charlize.

The genealogy on the Maritz side is still incomplete and has only been traced back to Gerda’s grandparents, Phillipus Rudolf Maritz and Gerda Jacoba Aletta Kruger of Tsumeb (Namibia). Charlize’s grandfather and grandmother Maritz (Gerda’s parents) were Jacob Johannes Maritz and Johanna Maria Barindina Stofberg. Gerda was born at Prieska in the Northern Cape, one of four children.

Besides Charles, three other children, Hennie, Danie and Elsa, were born out of Danie and Bettie Theron’s union before the marriage began to flounder. The aforementioned rebellious streak aside, the Theron men often came into conflict with their wives about their heavy drinking. The Theron women, on their part, were strong and outspoken, and would not bend the knee to any man.

With her marriage on the rocks, Bettie Theron moved with her three youngest children across the Orange River to the southern region of South-West Africa (currently Namibia), where she met her second husband, Willie Kruger. They had two more daughters, Yvonne and Karen, before he died.

Bettie’s eldest, Charles, stayed behind at boarding school in Springbok when his mother moved to South-West Africa. In his final year at school he was head boy. He was an academic achiever and a good sportsman, but his mother chiefly remembers him as a conscientious and hardworking youngster on his parents’ farm.

In 2008 I called on Bettie at Kuruman and we spoke about her son Charles and her granddaughter Charlize, who has inherited so many of her father’s good qualities. She spoke of the many nights the boy had slept in the orchard, to be ready in the early hours when it was their turn to irrigate from the canal.

After all the years, Bettie still became emotional when mentioning her beloved son, especially when she spoke about the manner of his death. And when she spoke of Charlize, whose name combines those of her grandmother and her father (Charles and Elizabeth) and who has renounced her grandmother, I could see that these so-called strong women actually have soft hearts.

After finishing school, Charles joined his family in South-West Africa. They were now in Otjiwarongo, in the north of the country. In 1968 Charles noticed the pretty Maritz girl. Gerda’s railway-worker father had died in an accident on 9 February 1968, barely ten days after Gerda’s fifteenth birthday. She was in standard eight, and six years Charles’s junior. Her hair was honey-blonde, her skirts short, and everyone knew her as Koot. Later she became known as Gerda and occasionally she called herself Gerta. But as Koot, she lived with her sister, two brothers and her widowed mother, Hannie, in a station house beside the railway line in Otjiwarongo. She excelled at athletics, but the family was poor and there were few opportunities available to her.

In 2004 Charlize lifted the curtain slightly on her mother’s childhood. “She was blonde where her siblings were dark; tall where they were short. And she was not content with the narrow range of options presented to her as the youngest child of the family – to stay at home and take care of her mother. She was very talented. She was a gymnast, good in sports. But it was never encouraged. Many times it was taken away from her. All the other kids left and she had to stay home. At the age of nineteen she rejected this role and left. Years later the days on which she visited her mother were the only ones guaranteed to put her in a bad mood.

“I felt the impact of her background in the way she raised me. Everything she didn’t have, she wanted to be able to give me. By 19, when she fucked off, she was like, ‘Now I want all those things I never had in my life.’” (In reality, Gerda did not leave home at nineteen, for at eighteen she was already married to Charles.)

At Otjiwarongo, Charles, an attractive young man, was the de facto breadwinner and caretaker of his widowed mother and five siblings. But Bettie decided to move south, back to Keetmanshoop, where the cost of living was lower and she would be able to afford a large house with enough room for everyone. Gerda, madly in love with Charles, left school, left her mother, Hannie, and her brothers and sister, and moved to Keetmanshoop with the Therons. Charles found her a job as a telephonist with his employer.

For the next two years, Gerda was accepted into the bosom of the Theron family, and Bettie, the matriarch, had her hands full with all the children. Bettie remembers that Gerda, or Gertruida, showed a stubborn streak even then – she wore mini skirts, so shamelessly short that her panties showed at the slightest movement. And her temper! The saying went that she would take out your appendix without an anaesthetic.

Charles was twenty-three when he married Gerda on 29 January 1971, two days after her eighteenth birthday. He was working for a road-construction company at the time, and initially he and Gerda led a nomadic life, staying in caravans on road-construction sites in the Northern Cape. Living in such stark isolation, the roadworkers often found distraction in the bottle. Charlize later maintained that her father had initially stopped drinking after his marriage to her mother, but Gerda seems to be the sole source of this information.

When Charles and Gerda moved to the Witwatersrand, Charles became involved with the rental and management of the heavy equipment used for earthworks and road construction. When his employer sent him to Scotland for a few months to gain experience, the young couple was keen to make use of the opportunity.

By Christmas 1974, after their return to South Africa, Gerda was pregnant. She was twenty-two when their daughter was born on Thursday, 7 August 1975. The delighted father immediately sent a telegram to his mother in the Northern Cape. The telegram, addressed to “Bettie Kruger” and stamped “Birchleigh” (a suburb of Kempton Park on the East Rand) announced that a seven-pound daughter had been born and that both mother and daughter were doing well.

Bettie, who still keeps the telegram in an album with many other mementos, photographs and letters from Charlize to her grandmother, thinks that the postal worker who had sent the telegram might have made a mistake when typing “seven pounds”. According to her, Charlize had been a puny little thing, without a single hair on her head.

But the hairless baby became a beautiful little girl with a soft round head. Her proud father loved to stroke the little head with the palm of his hand. It reminded him of the smooth head of a walking stick, or knob- kerrie, and he gave her the Afrikaans nickname “Kieriekoppie”. This pet name stuck with her in an abbreviated form, and to friends and family Charlize became “Kerrie”. Even after the fame brought by the Oscar, the family still speak with warmth and pride of their own little Kerrie who has achieved so much, and her mother still calls her Kerrie in private conversations.

Charlize herself has said that her hair didn’t begin to grow until she was four, about the time that they moved to the plot at Putfontein. As she grew older, Charlize’s baby-blonde hair changed to light brown, its natural colour, as seen in In the Valley of Elah (2007). “That’s really me. That’s my natural hair colour. That’s me with very little make-up. That’s what I look like,” she told an Irish reporter in 2008.

Shortly after Charlize’s birth, Charles was presented with a chance to start his own business. As always before making any important decisions, he turned to his mother in Kuruman for advice. He hesitated about taking such a big step, for there was now a child in their home in Farrarmere, Benoni. But he could get a contract for earthmoving work at Bapsfontein, and a second bond on their home would enable him to acquire his first machinery. He discussed it with Gerda too and decided to take the plunge. (In later interviews, Charlize often uses the metaphor of swimming or drowning to describe her own journey through life.)

It was a sound decision by Charles. At his death scarcely twelve years later, the somewhat exaggerated claim was made that Charles Theron owned more road-construction equipment than the Transvaal Provincial Administration.

In 1980 Charles bought a plot of 2,237 hectares at the Rynfield agri-cultural smallholdings, also known as Putfontein, where there was enough space for his growing business. On Plot 56 in Seventh Road, Cloverdene, about 14 km from Benoni, east of Johannesburg, Charles and Gerda began to rent out construction machinery, and they registered the companies G & C Construction and G & C Plant Hire. It was a rural neighbourhood, and the plot was big enough to park the large vehicles, to accommodate the operators, and to keep a few cows and dogs. The industrialisation of the Witwatersrand had already caught up with this outlying plot area, so that it was ideal for running a business, with easy access to the main routes to the East Rand with its adjoining industrial and mining centres, such as Benoni, Boksburg, Brakpan, Germiston and Springs – all the way to Johannesburg.

These cities that have mushroomed around Johannesburg, and also those to the west, are included in the name Witwatersrand, where the world’s richest gold veins were discovered in the nineteenth century and are still being mined. A visitor is greeted by the sight of mine dumps, shafts and smokestacks that extend far past Putfontein – a slightly different picture from the one sketched in an interview Charlize gave Tatler in 2000: “She grew up half a world away [from Los Angeles] on an isolated farm near a small town called Benoni, about an hour’s drive through the bush from Johannesburg.”

It is this kind of reference to Charlize’s rural background that fascinates Europeans and Americans and surrounds this star from Africa, who began to make a name for herself in Hollywood in the mid-nineties, with an almost exotic aura. And Charlize was clearly reluctant to set the record straight. She has an intuitive understanding of the industry. Not only does she have a love affair with the camera, but she also has a remarkable appreciation of how minds work behind the scenes. She knows the value of perception and image, and what could be more alluring to Hollywood than a breathtakingly beautiful farm girl from Africa?

The Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, who won two Oscars despite his outspoken cynicism about the film industry, wrote in his autobiography, A Child of the Century, that fame in Hollywood can be kept alive simply by employing a good publicity agent. Charlize understands this and pushes all the right buttons – relentlessly, some people say. For this she commands the respect of the Hollywood bigwigs, for they themselves are relentless.

The years following their baby daughter’s birth were difficult for Charles and Gerda. They worked hard at their new business, but Charles had a passion for work that had already distinguished him as a schoolboy. Gerda was a hard worker too, even though her time was now divided between work and the baby. Within a few years she and Charles began to reap the benefits.

Charles was proud of his pretty wife and daughter, but even before their wedding people had wondered whether their divergent temperaments would be reconcilable. Charles was sociable and warm, he loved company, and everyone was welcome in his house and at his bar, his sister, Elsa, told me. It was the place where friends and family gathered to laugh and chat and have a good time. Gerda was more private, to the point of appearing unfriendly and sullen when her house was invaded by guests. And she had a sharp tongue. Her husband’s jovial nature and his drinking with his buddies irritated her. The clash of their personalities led to arguments, and when he came home late, she would sometimes lock the doors so that he was forced to sleep outside in the caravan.

As far as Charlize’s upbringing was concerned, it was chiefly Gerda who took charge of parental discipline, who plied the hairbrush or the shoe when it was necessary to bend the twig in the right direction. Charlize later mentioned that Gerda had once even grabbed a clothes hanger to spank her with. Her aunt, Elsa Malan, remembers how she once intervened when Gerda had wanted to give Charlize a hiding for neglecting to put conditioner on her hair after spending hours in the pool. Gerda was upset because the child’s beautiful long hair might have been damaged by the sun and the chemicals.

About her mother’s discipline Charlize has said: “I got spanked hard on the butt. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. My mother disciplined me. It couldn’t happen in America today, because she’d be put in jail, and to me that’s a very sad thing, because I always deserved it. Never once did I go, ‘God, this is so unfair’. Afterwards I would go up to her and apologize, because I knew that I had been wrong.

“She’d hit me with anything that was around: a hairbrush, a shoe – the shoe was a big one. Once I was spanked because I was rude to an older woman in a store. On another occasion I went to school with imprints of Disney cartoons all over my thigh from a hanger that she had grabbed that had all these cutouts on them. I had disobeyed her by eating a bowl of tomato soup while still wearing my school uniform and spilling the soup on my uniform. I deserved that one because that was very disrespectful. She did all the washing and laundry and cooking; she ran the house while running the business. I completely understand. I have to be respectful. I am not washing the clothes, she’s washing them.”

Charles sometimes raised his voice in an effort to teach Charlize manners, but raising his voice was about all he could manage. He was wary of Gerda’s short temper, and tried to curry favour when he got into her bad books, which was often, for he was no angel. But Charlize was the apple of Charles’s eye. She was pretty and talented, and he liked to show her off. He would urge her to sing when the family were visiting, and she would pick up the guitar and sing and dance.

She was born for the limelight. In an interview with the Afrikaans magazine Huisgenoot, Gerda remembers how Charlize used to take her guitar to school to entertain the other children when she was in the first grade. At twelve she played the guitar in a shopping mall in Benoni and on a good day she would earn R50 in pocket money.