What Audie Murphy meant to me. (Timeline: My Life)

In a way one might say that Audie Murphy's influence in my life started before I was born, though of course I didn't realize it at the time. My country, Denmark, was occupied by Hitler's troops during WWII. My father was a policeman and was therefore sent to a German concentration camp. If it hadn't been for Audie and all his brave fellow soldiers of the Allied Forces, who knows when, or even if, my father would have been released. One thing I have in common with the sons and daughters of a lot of policemen is that I was born just about 9 months after their release from the concentration camps. One of my friends as a teenager was a girl also named Eva, also a policeman's daughter, and born one day after me.

My first exposure to Audie was at a movie theatre. My mother and I went to a Saturday late night double feature. The second feature was 'Den Vilde Rytter' ('Cast a Long Shadow'). I was impressed with him, so when I had a chance a few weeks later to see him in another movie, I jumped at it. That movie was none other than 'Helvede Retur' ('To Hell and Back'), which was being shown as a limited re-release in one theatre in the center of Copenhagen. That did it for me! Not only was he a good actor, but he was a REAL hero, not just a pretend hero. AND he was also a horse lover like myself. I was determined to find out more about this fascinating person. I searched for information everywhere I could. I haunted libraries, newspapers, news agencies, and the film companies that released his movies in Denmark. One of the results of this search was a pretty substantial collection of pictures, both from the films and otherwise.

A couple of years later I had a chance to move to the United States. Through an agency I found a job as a mother's helper for a family in Whittier, CA. who had 3 boys aged 3, 4, & 6. Because of the waiting list it took 10 months for my visa to clear, but FINALLY, just before Christmas 1964, I was standing on American soil.

Thus it started. Now I was actually in the same city as this fascinating person. All I had to do was to find him. "Maps of Movie Stars' Homes" didn't help. SAG didn't help. Universal Studios didn't help. All I had was a picture of Audie and his two boys outside their home that happened to show the street number. Not the street name, only the number. Every week, on my day off, I would take the bus to a different area in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, walk through the streets looking for that house number and checking whether the house that bore that number looked anything like the corner of the house in the picture. At one point I wrote a letter to one of Audie's co-stars that DID have his home listed in the "Maps of Movie Stars' Homes", Dan Duryea, asking if he could help me in my quest. He sent back an autographed picture and a very nice letter, saying that he didn't have Audie's address, but believed he lived "somewhere in the Toluca Lake Area". This gave me a place to focus on. Finally, one day, I found it! The house had changed a lot, there was now a brick and wrought iron fence around it, but the corner of the neighbor's house still looked identical to the one in the picture. I went back home feeling pretty good, and determined to come back the next week when I wasn't all tired and dusty.

Finally the day came. You wouldn't believe the butterflies in my stomach. I had come 7,000 miles for this, walked I don't know how many miles for this, but the hardest of all was those last few feet up to that front door. I don't know where I got the courage, my knees were shaking. I told myself that he probably wouldn't be home. I told myself that he had probably moved since the picture had been taken. I knocked on the door, and THERE HE WAS! After stammering a bit I finally got up the courage to talk to him. This gracious person invited me into his home, introduced me to his family and the dog, showed me around the house, talked to me just as if I was his equal. I had brought a couple of small presents for him from Denmark. He seemed pleased. He asked me how I had found the house, so I showed him the picture and told him about all the walking.



We talked for a while, and then I decided I'd better head for home before I wore out my welcome. He gave me his phone number and told me I was welcome to come back any time.

I visited from time to time. Not really often, I didn't want to be too pushy. Sometimes he was out of town, so I visited with Pam. I remember one time I was there and he had left his saddle on the railing by the stairs. He was in Israel at the time, I believe working on a movie. (Hindsight tells me it must have been 'Trunk to Cairo'.) Pam had just left the saddle where he'd put it, not realizing that it was NOT an appropriate place for a saddle for any long period of time, the skirt was getting all bent up. Funny what sticks in one's mind. The saddle was tan and with a basket weave pattern.

When I had been in Whittier for close to 5 years, the family I was working for decided that their boys were old enough so they no longer needed a live-in babysitter / housekeeper / jack-of-all-trades. I don't REMEMBER mentioning it to Pam, but I must have, because Audie called and told me that some horsey friends in Ontario were looking for someone. He came up to the house to pick me up and we drove out to see the people. It was a big Thoroughbred farm. They said I could bring my 3 horses, they could use my Arab stallion as a teaser stallion. I didn't like that much, I don't think it is fair to a stallion to ask him to get all excited over a girl, only to see her walk over to fool around with another guy. Therefore, after some soul searching, I didn't take the job. That was the last time I saw Audie.

Soon after, I found a temporary job with some other horsey people, room and board only for helping with their horses. I had to take a factory job to feed my OWN horses. I struggled for a while, had no time or energy to go visiting. It was a rough period of my life.

One evening, after I had been out riding, my mare wouldn't eat her dinner. I sat in the car with the radio on, keeping an eye on her. That was when I heard that Audie's plane was missing. We all know how that came out. I clipped the notices in the papers, but I never read them, just packed them down with all the other stuff. I pushed everything away, refusing to face the fact that this man was gone forever. My pain was such that I couldn't even face his wife, so I never sent my condolences to her or the boys. How utterly, utterly selfish of me! I was thinking only of my own pain, rather than that of his family, who must have been suffering so many times worse.

I bummed around for a few years before I finally found a good profession and was able to stabilize my life again. The horses were always cared for though. I'd live off pork and beans and later rice and potatoes just so they could eat. I dragged the boxes with Audie's pictures and other stuff with me wherever I moved to, but I never opened them. For many years I couldn't even bear to watch his movies when they were shown on TV. Finally, almost 20 years after his death, I've been able to, and I now record his movies any time I get the chance.

It still hurts. When I wrote the above down for The Audie Murphy Research Foundation some years back I had a big box of kleenex right next to me; it was much needed at the time and my eyes are misting up again as I am going over what I wrote.

Note: If you click on the title of this blog entry, it will take you to the Audie Murphy Memorial Website.