Charlize. Chris Karsten
marriage. It was good for me to be at boarding school so I didn’t witness that.”
In 1996, in an interview after the release of That Thing You Do! (about American pop culture in the sixties) she spoke about her isolated youth on the plot: “I grew up five years behind everybody else in terms of pop culture. But my mother used to sneak me in under a blanket to the drive-in to see R-rated movies. When I was ten I saw The Shining. When I was thirteen, she gave me the birds-and-the-bees talk, and then we watched Fatal Attraction. She was so cool. Movies were a way for my mom to explain the mysteries of life to me, so I lived my life vicariously through film.”
Her so-called handicap as far as pop culture was concerned was one of the strange examples she often used when interviewed during her rise to fame in Hollywood, to portray an image of innocence – artlessness, even. But never naivety.
It is hard to believe that a teenager whose mother had taught her life’s lessons at the hand of Dirty Dancing and Fatal Attraction, a confident girl, who entertained shoppers at a mall and her friends at boarding school by playing the guitar and singing, could have been so out of touch with modern pop culture. In the same year (1996) that she made the remark about not being au fait with pop, she attended a Cyndi Lauper concert in Los Angeles and remarked afterwards what a big fan of Lauper’s she had been as a teenager, mentioning that she had once even dyed her hair pink.
A high-school friend speaks of the fun they had at boarding school, with Charlize always taking the lead. She would stand on her bed, and while “Black Velvet” (Alannah Myles’ 1990 hit) was playing, she would sing along, make moves and throw candy from her cupboard for them to catch.
And she would groan: “Oh, Keanu Reeves, Keanu Reeves . . .”, like any typical standard-seven schoolgirl with a crush on the big actor. Years later the friend watched Sweet November and could hardly believe her eyes . . . there was Charlize, kissing Keanu Reeves!
Grandmother
As a little girl, Charlize was close to her grandmother Bettie. Some time after Charlize’s birth, Bettie remarried and settled in Kuruman in the Northern Cape with her new husband, Christo Moolman, an auto-electrician. She still regularly visited Benoni, where her daughter Elsa and her family had settled on Plot 25 at the corner of Cloverdene Road and Third Road, near Charles and Gerda.
After her father’s death, Charlize and her mother refused to have any further contact with Bettie and the rest of the Theron family. Never in any interview did Charlize refer to her grandmother again. It later became clear that Charlize had cut her ties with her grandmother after Bettie had insinuated that Charlize’s behaviour on the evening of her father’s death might indirectly have contributed to the tragedy.
But the earlier loving relationship between grandmother and granddaughter (Charlize was Bettie’s first grandchild) is evident from the numerous letters, photographs and small gifts from Charlize to her grandmother.
After several conversations with Charlize’s aunt Elsa, I began to get a picture of complex family relationships, especially with Gerda. I also discovered that the Therons were a close-knit family, and that they had all but hero- worshipped Charles, who had, as a young boy, helped keep the family together in the absence of a father and who had fulfilled that central role until the time of his death. (I also heard Elsa ending every call from her home in George to her mother, Bettie, in Kuruman with the words: “I love you, Mommy.”)
In 2008 I went to Kuruman to visit Bettie Moolman. She and her elderly husband, who was still working at the time, were living in a two-bedroomed flatlet within walking distance of the Dutch Reformed Mother Church, on a property belonging to another granddaughter. An enormous camel thorn tree grows on the pavement in front of the house. We sat on garden chairs under a roofed area at the back door. With her grey-white hair loose on her shoulders, Bettie called for tea and lit a cigarette, not the first one of the morning. She laughed: “The children want me to quit.” Behind Bettie, her garden was a blaze of bright colours. She told me she got up early every morning to tend to her flower beds. On 30 January 2009 she would be seventy-nine, and she had already lost a kidney and part of her colon through cancer.
I searched her features for a likeness to her beautiful, world-famous granddaughter. There was a marked resemblance around the mouth, but it is difficult to compare faces where there is an age gap of forty-six years.
“What colour are Charlize’s eyes really?” I asked. “Some people say they’re blue, others say green, and some say they’re somewhere in-between.”
“Grey.” Her answer came without a moment’s hesitation. “Her eyes are exactly the same shade of grey as her father’s. Charlize has Charles’s dreamy eyes, the same sad eyes . . .”
She pronounced the name “Charlees”.
The tea tray arrived, the cups arranged on the cloth that had covered the top-loader washing machine a moment before.
She pointed at the rolled-up doors of the double garage. Inside the garage there were sofas and easy chairs. “We’re turning the garage into a sitting room. The flat is too small. In the garage we’ll have enough seating when the children and grandchildren come to visit.”
She poured more tea and lit another cigarette. “But I don’t know if Charlize will ever come from Hollywood to visit us. One of the children said they read somewhere that [Stuart] Townsend wants us to reunite, but apparently Gerda doesn’t approve. That Gerda . . .”
A Hollywood star in a garage-cum-sitting room?
Bettie got up to show me around the flat. On the walls and tables and cabinets she proudly pointed out photographs of her beautiful daughters and granddaughters. She paused at each picture, telling a little story. A sepia photograph is of her younger sister. “See how beautiful she was,” said Bettie. The Theron women, I thought to myself, are indeed not only strong, but beautiful as well; the good genes that Charlize has inherited are in evidence on both sides of the family, for Gerda is an attractive woman too.
Among all the framed photographs it suddenly struck me – not what was there, but what was conspicuous by its absence: Where was Charlize? There was no picture to pay tribute to the famous granddaughter. No public display of the world-renowned Theron offspring. No photograph of Charlize with her Oscar, even though the entire Theron clan had been bursting with pride on the night, together with the rest of South Africa.
The answer is sad and tinged with irony: thousands of photographs have been taken of Charlize, highlighting every aspect of her career; she even has her own personal photographer. But her grandmother has never received a special photograph of her granddaughter to frame and hang on the wall. She has to share the images of Charlize that appear so regularly in the media with strangers from across the world. The only photographs she has are the ones she once received from a little girl.
Back outside, Bettie brought out the special Charlize album and a small red tin box. She might not occupy a place of honour on the wall, but Char-lize is cherished in an album and a tin box. From the box Bettie produced a packet of embroidered handkerchiefs that a young Charlize had once given her grandmother as a gift. Lovingly the fingers stroked the handkerchiefs. She put them back and clicked the lid shut. I would have liked to know what was going through her mind at that moment. It was touching to see her silent devotion to a memento that was almost twenty years old.
There were also gifts brought back after a holiday in Mauritius. And the letters, together with the photos Charlize had sent her grandmother as a little girl, were all formally arranged in the album. There was Charlize in school uniform, in ballet outfits, with her dog Lulu, a pink bow around its neck.
Countless families have albums with similar photographs of little girls, all looking more or less the same. Some smile toothlessly, others are camera shy, some are sulky, others precocious. Charlize looks as if she was born to be in front of the lens; she looks completely at home posing for the camera – a striking, natural beauty. It would not have taken a fortune teller to predict her future.
Bettie showed me a head-and-shoulders photograph of Charlize in her primary-school