Charlize. Chris Karsten
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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.”
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