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.
Tomboy
On the smallholding Charlize developed into a pretty little toddler. At the age of six, she was already showing a love and an aptitude for dance, and she was taken to her first dance lesson. In 1997, during the first wave of interviews after the release of her first two films, 2 Days in the Valley and That Thing You Do!, she said that ballet had been her substitute for the movies. When she danced, she imagined that she was a princess or a fairy. In that way she had always acted in her own little movies, she said.
After the release of these films, there was an almost insatiable demand to talk to this ravishing young beauty from Africa, to ask her opinions about everything under the sun. Her face and body sold magazines from Turkey to Sweden, from Hungary to Australia, and her publicity footwork was nimble and spontaneous, her sensuality fresh yet restrained. She knew the game: the secret not to reveal everything at once, to tease.
In an interview in 1998 she remembers her growing-up years: “It was the kind of village where kids rode donkeys to school. My best friend was my pet goat named Bok. I was the kind of child who had incredible dreams. I’d want to be a guitar player and a dancer and always my mother would try to accommodate those dreams.”
In another interview she says: “I didn’t grow up wealthy, but every dream I had, even if it was crazy, my mother took seriously. If one week I said I wanted to be a classical guitar player, somehow I ended up getting guitar lessons. If I said, ‘Mom, I want to paint,’ she’d say, ‘Okay – art classes.’ When I wanted to perform, she’d pull all the men out of a business meeting and make them sit in the living room where I’d lip-synch and dance in her outfits and shoes. That’s how I grew up. Whenever people were around, it was: Entertain!”
Charlize began her school career at the Putfontein Primary School, about three kilometres from their plot in Seventh Road. As befits a conservative Afrikaans community, the Dutch Reformed Church of the Benoni East congregation was next-door to the school and they shared the enormous shade trees in Church Street.
It was a place where children went to school in bare feet. Did they really ride to school on donkeys? Well, perhaps, but I doubt it. In 2008 I heard a story that Charlize had driven to school in an electric golf cart, or, alternatively, a beach buggy. The golf cart is possible, for her father spoilt her rotten. But the donkeys, I suspect, were invented
