The Now & Future Queen

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The most celebrated movie actress in the U.S. eats "squashy and gorgeous" boiled-potato sandwiches and drives around Hollywood singing at the top of her lungs. She doesn't do these things at the same time, but nobody would be surprised if she did. In a town where everybody plays the angles and wholesomeness is something of an aberration, Julie Andrews, 31, is tolerated as a delightful kook.

She is rarely seen at the "in" Restaurant-of-the-Month, never swings at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs. She doesn't play the tables at Vegas or pick up a cue in the billiard room of the Beverly Hills Daisy; where Frank Sinatra bides his time, she abides not. If she isn't at home, she is likely to be found with her four-year-old daughter at Hamburger Hamlet or at the Los Angeles Zoo or at a local art gallery. Her night on the town is the Bolshoi or a concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

Julie, in short, is something else--in Hollywood, but not with it. Unencumbered by the cotton-candy fantasy life in which most stars invariably shroud themselves, she has stayed resolutely honest and unspoiled. She is an actress, as Librettist Alan Jay Lerner once remarked, who achieved stardom "with nothing to offer but talent, industry and an uncorrupted heart."

Imp Girl. They don't make them that way in show business much any more, and Americans seem to sense it. Her perfect-pitch soprano has a crystal clarity and superb diction, and yet it can be as warm and soft as a purr. She does not radiate sensuality, nor is she the pulp of publicity campaigns. She is everybody's tomboy tennis partner and their daughter, their sister, their mum. To grown men, she is a lady; to housewives, the gal next door; to little children, the most huggable aunt of all. She is Christmas carols in the snow, a companion by the fire, a laughing clown at charades, a girl to read poetry to on a cold winter's night.

There is something irresistibly luminous and mischievous in her radiant face and blue eyes--not the glaze of an It girl, but the glow of an imp. It is doubtful that the boys in Viet Nam regard her as their favorite pinup. She does have more sex appeal than, say, ZaSu Pitts, but it is also obvious that a Liz Taylor she's not. If there is an animal splendor about her, it is more pussycat than panther. Her curves do not pop the eyes. Her legs are a little too lean and a mite long (she is 5 ft. 7 in.). Her jaw is on the prognathous side. Her feet are a little less than dainty (size 8); when she played Cinderella on TV, her slipper could almost have fit the Prince. And she's got freckles on her nose.

Favorite Co-Stars. If it is not sex appeal, what is it? Julie has a copy of a privately published little book of poetry, written by T. H. White, author of The Once and Future King, from which Camelot was drawn. In it, White wrote "For Julie Andrews":

Helen, whose face was fatal, must have wept

Many long nights alone

And every night men died, she cried,

And happy Paris kept sweet Helen.

Julie, the thousand prows aimed at her heart,

The tragic queen, comedian and clown,

Keeps Troy together, not apart,

Nor lets one tower fall down.

Less poetical, but no less rapturous, is Richard Burton, who starred with Julie in Camelot. Recently, a reporter brought the question to Burton:

How do you explain Julie?

"Don't know. Tell me what makes stars of two such dissimilar gents as R. Hudson and Eddie G. Robinson. She is among my three favorite costars, others being E. Taylor and P. O'Toole."

Is she insipid?

"On the contrary. Don't muck about with her--you'll see nature red in eye and tongue."

Intelligent?

"She is very intelligent, but not, I think, intellectual."

Peaches and cream? Curds and whey? Bubble and squeak?

"I don't know what she is, but she is very edible."

Her talents?

"Charm, intelligence, wit, mischief and very hard work. Friends of mine, mostly Americans, drool at the sound of her voice."

Her forte?

"Radiance, shafts of gold, bars of light--all that stuff. Every man I know who knows her is a little in love with her."

Guttural Guttersnipe. So are Julie's audiences, who have caught that one essential quality--her believability--that shines through every one of her important roles. Says Robert Wise, who directed her in The Sound of Music, "It can't be all just talent. A lot of talented people don't begin to make it the way she's made it. There is a genuineness about her, an unphoniness. She goes right through the camera onto film and out to the audience. Julie seems to have been born with that magic gene that comes through on the screen."

And on the stage. In that most believable of all musical comedies, My Fair Lady, Julie was an Eliza Doolittle that Shaw himself would have done heel clicks to see. Her progress from a guttural guttersnipe to lady of fashion was one of the most joyous stage transformations in memory. Night after night, her painfully halting and then triumphantly moving Rain in Spain number enthralled audiences and drenched the house with empathy. When she left the show, so did the fairest lady.

She literally floated into the movies on a cloud in Mary Poppins, gliding over the London skyline to become the nanny to a worm can of incorrigible kids. When she opened her carpetbag of tricks and proclaimed in a polysyllabic nonsense song that life was good and golden, neither the children on the screen nor the audience in the house had the slightest doubt that Julie Andrews was--well, supercalifragilisticex-pialidocious. So was the box office. Poppins was 1965's biggest-grossing picture, has earned $31 million.

Memorable Moments. It was Julie's all-conquering way with children that helped make Sound of Music such a smash. Take that stormy first night when she moves in as governess to the Trapp children, as mean a bunch of brats as ever suffered under a tyrannical father. On that night, thunder shakes the Schloss. In terror, the seven kids sneak into Julie's bedroom. She hauls the lot of them into her bed and heart, lullabying away their fears and wringing tears from the audience. The movie is about to become the alltime moneymaker in film history, beating out Gone With the Wind, which grossed $41 million in five different releases over a period of 27 years. Sound has done it in only 22 months, strictly on a reserved-seat basis in 53 cities.

Hawaii, her latest movie, also has its memorable moments, and most of them are Julie's. Her cool portrayal of the wife of an ascetic missionary underscores the hopelessness of the life she has chosen, and the scene in which she gives birth is so harrowingly realistic that it surely must stir remembered pain among the women in the audience. Not surprisingly, ticket buyers are streaming into Hawaii like lava.

It would be too much to expect of any human being that a gene like Julie's could develop its magic without encountering a patch of resistance. And only in Hollywood, where the reigning pop art is armchair psychiatry, would the inmates feel free to probe for it. Thus the diagnosis is that Julie 1) never had a childhood, and 2) became a star before she became a person. As it happens, there is rough truth here. Julie has been in show business for 19 of her 31 years. She has known scarcely any kind of life except footlights and make-believe.

Immature Yma. She was born in October 1935 in Walton-on-Thames, a flat green middle-class suburb 30 minutes by train from London. Her father, Ted Wells, a brisk, resolute, intelligent man, was a manual-training teacher; her mother Barbara was a piano accompanist who was caught up on the periphery of vaudeville. They were divorced when Julie was four.

And then, says Julie, "a personality as colorful and noisy as show business itself came thundering across my childhood." He was a boisterous Canadianborn tenor named Ted Andrews. Mum and Andrews got married and formed a vaudeville team, touring the provinces from Brighton to Aberdeen. "We were never top of the bill," recalls Barbara. "After all, we were musical, not comedy, and the comedians got the best billing. But we were the second feature, a good supporting act with a drawing-room set and ballads--nice family-type entertainment."

During the London blitz, the Andrews family moved to Kent and Julie took her stepfather's name. She recalls that Ted Andrews gave her voice lessons "in an attempt to get closer to me." It was then that her parents discovered that Julie had more than just an ordinary gift. "I had an enormous freak voice with a range of four octaves," she says. "I sounded like an immature Yma Sumac."*

When she was twelve, her stepfather, "a whiz at selling anything," got Julie a spot with the "Starlight Roof" revue at the London Hippodrome. On her first night she stopped the show with an incredible F above high P:in Titania's aria in Mignon. Immediately, her parents' agent, "Uncle Charlie" Tucker, moved in, arranged to get Julie's buckteeth straightened. Within a year, she was belting out her "bastardized opera" in a special command performance. "You sang beautifully, Julie," Her Majesty, now the Queen Mother, told her. She had become, at 13, the family's prime breadwinner.

It was suggested at the time that Julie go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; she would undoubtedly have been the better actress for it. But Mum ruled that practical experience was best. "We decided," she says, "that a little toughening up as far as the theater world was concerned would be good. So we took her into our act. Let's face it: it didn't hurt the act either. Of course, we weren't always in the same show." One summer at the resort of Blackpool, for instance, "we were on the pier, and she was in the big theater in town, really a step above us."

Gawking Soon. Meanwhile, Ted Wells saw to it that neither Julie nor her younger brother John lacked for his companionship. He frequently took the children picnicking, boating, swimming, climbing. Says Wells, 58, who now lives in rural Oakley, 40 miles southwest of London: "When I realized that she had this gift, I felt that she needed some kind of antidote to the artificiality of the stage. I remember when she was singing at the Winter Garden in Bournemouth, I went down with John to visit her. It was a blowy, gusty sort of day, and when I asked them what they wanted to do, they chose the beach. It was deserted; we improvised a shelter, then we splashed into the wild sea. Or evenings, boating on the Wey River, those two would literally fight for the privilege of taking the oars. To this day, Julie is naturally a country girl. There is nothing she likes better than to get down here, tramping about, shedding it all, serving tea with the local ladies at a cricket match."

Soon Julie was playing the prestigious pantomime circuit--Britain's traditional holiday-season pageants for children. During the run of a Christmas "panto" in London, she met Tony Walton, who was 14 and, coincidentally, also nailed from Walton-on-Thames (though there is no connection between the family name and that of the town). She remembers Tony as "one of three goons from home" gawking from the front row. He remembers her "for those long, bandy, chocolate-covered legs."

Her career continued to blossom. "I thought I was the luckiest girl alive," she says. "I did not know it was bad for a young girl to be singing in a sophisticated revue." But Tony remembers that her diary in those days "was filled with fanciful images of what a beautiful, happy family life she had and what a glamorous existence she led, when in reality it was plenty seedy."

"The Terror." In 1953, Vida Hope, director of the London musical hit, The Boy Friend--a campy spoof of the 1920s--offered Julie the lead in the Broadway company. "My first thought," she remembers, "was 'Oh, good Christ, the idea of leaving my home and family'--I couldn't do it." But she tried the idea on "my Dad--my real Dad--the wisest and dearest man I knew." Said Dad: Take it. On the night of the New York opening, Julie turned 19--and the critics turned out the superlatives. She was a star.

But she did not live like one. For one thing, she was always too homesick and broke. About two-thirds of her $400 weekly salary went to taxes, to her manager and to her family (John, two half brothers, a half sister, as well as her mother and stepfather). Much of what she had left she spent on phone calls back to Britain. Her half brother Donald still tells how he used to kick the family Welsh corgi, Humpty, to make him bark a transatlantic hello.

"Stolen Time." Clowning as a flapper was one thing. Carrying the difficult role of Eliza in My Fair Lady demanded a depth that Julie had to struggle to reach. It was almost a year after Boy Friend opened that she was offered the part in Fair Lady--and she nearly threw it away, so intimidated was she by the awful challenge of the trinity of Rex Harrison, Director Moss Hart and George Bernard Shaw. When she failed to get a fix on the mercurial part of the cockney flower girl, Director Hart put Julie through what he called 48 hours of "the Terror."

"It was the sort of thing," Hart said later, "that you couldn't do in front of a company without destroying a human being. We met in this silent, lonely, dark theater, and I told her, 'Julie, this is stolen time--time I can't really afford. So there can be no time for politeness, and you mustn't take offense, because there aren't any second chances in the theater. There isn't time to sit down and do the whole Actors' Studio bit. We have to start from the first line and go over the play line by line.' " And so they worked, Julie rehearsing, Hart cajoling, pleading, threatening. "You're not thinking," he would say. "You're just oozing out of the scene. You're not sustaining it. You're gabbling. You haven't any idea how to play that. You're playing this like a Girl Guide." After the second late night, reported Hart, Julie came through with "that terrible English strength that makes you wonder why they lost India."

"Good Trouper." By the time Fair Lady opened in New Haven, Julie was the onstage backbone of the show and a walloping hit. Backstage she was the funny bone of the company--brewing up high tea every afternoon, expertly picking every pocket in the cast, bounding into her old music-hall routines. Everyone but Harrison was amused, but in the New York premiere he, too, came to appreciate Julie. As the stage manager recalls it, during the first act when Eliza, Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering fall back on the couch together after The Rain in Spain, Harrison suddenly dried up. He couldn't remember his next line, and the audience held its breath--until Julie grabbed hands and pulled them back to their feet. "Let's take a little bow, boys," she chirped. They did--and Harrison picked up his line. The house broke up and then just relaxed and capitulated to what was to become the longest-running musical in Broadway history--2,717 performances.

Says Harrison, in what must pass for overbrimming enthusiasm: "One thousand performances over three years is three thousand hours: four months and five days of 24 hours a day--I had my secretary figure it out one day. That is quite a hell of a long time to have vis-`a-vis with somebody. Through summers hot, winters cold, that sort of thing. Julie was always, always--a very boring old word--a good trouper. She plowed on through thick and thin. Highly professional from the word go." Characteristically, Julie says of it all: "You know, I never got that part under control."

Street Arab. Toward the end of her Fair Lady run, Julie and Tony Walton got married. He had become a noted stage and costume designer in London, and for a brief moment Julie considered retiring. "But," as Tony says, "work was the only thing she knew." And besides, Moss Hart, with Lerner and Frederick Loewe, authors of My Fair Lady, wanted Julie to play opposite Burton in Camelot, a stylish retelling of the Arthurian legend. Camelot lacked the magic of Fair Lady, but audiences loved it. Julie had a ball too. Recalls Burton: "One night a large, woolly dog in the show elected to empty himself in a huge lump in center stage. In full view of the audience, Julie danced around it singing 'It's May! It's May! The merry month of May!' And the look she gave the audience when an actor read the next line, 'I think there's a hint of summer in the air,' had me and the audience in hysterics. She's as wicked as a street Arab."

Offstage as well. Once Burton phoned her out of the blue: "I don't think you should say those awful things about me," he kidded. "I hear you said you were the only leading lady I hadn't slept with." Replied Julie sweetly: "Richard, do you think that I'd want that sort of thing to get around?" But, inevitably, the kidding had to stop. Camelot, despite the big names, did not live up to the extravagant expectations; it was too much a light opera, too little a musical comedy. Julie decamped after 18 months.

A worse disappointment was the news from Hollywood. Jack Warner, who had paid $5,500,000 for the film rights to My Fair Lady, did not want Julie for Eliza; it was the simplest sort of Hollywood economics: by Hollywood calculations, she was not an important enough marquee name to risk in a major film. Audrey Hepburn got the part, but though her performance was admirable, her cockney character lacked the wondrous snippety snarl that Julie had given the role; Eliza's singing, moreover, was largely a product of outside dubbing, and short of Julie's performance at that. In any event, Julie bore Hepburn no grudge, although on many occasions later, while driving past the Warner studios, she would give out with a ladylike war whoop and cry, "And a good morning to you, Mr. Warner, and the best of luck!"

Consolation Oscar. For a little bit of luck, up popped Walt Disney, who wanted Julie to play Mary Poppins and Walton to do the set and costume-design. Julie was dubious. Recalls Julie's pal Carol Burnett: "She asked me, 'Do you think I ought to? Go to work for Walt Disney? The cartoon person?' " Carol assured her that Disney did indeed do other things besides cartoons. Later, Julie got a telephone call from Poppins' author, Pamela Travers. "P. Travers here," said P. Travers briskly. "Speak to me. Can you be tough? Can you be tender?"

She was both, and an Oscar winner to boot, although there was no doubt that the award was at least partly a consolation prize from Hollywood sentimentalists who thought Julie should have got the film role in Fair Lady.

Despite Poppins' success, Julie fretted "that everybody will think I'm a square." It was a fair fret: they did. Suddenly Americans saw her, says Carol Burnett, as "Gwendolyn Goody Two-shoes." Julie began to worry about being typecast, doomed to be always the governess, never the mistress. She saw the humor in the sudden rash of bumper stickers: MARY POPPINS is A JUNKIE (her friend Mike Nichols affixed one to her car), but it didn't console her much at all. It was largely in an effort to change the image that Julie took on a straight role in The Americanization of Emily. She played a freshly widowed World War II British Army chauffeur whose notion of rest and rehabilitation for the wounded went considerably beyond TV and touch football. Her loyal friends say that she never performed better, but Julie, perhaps her own best critic, is convinced that she was "rather lost."

Frenzied Flamenco. By the time she was ready for Sound of Music, Julie was showing new attack and authority in her work. She knew when a page of script somehow didn't play right. And she insisted on sound-track retakes when everybody else was satisfied, frequently drove some of the crew members up the wall with frustration over her demands for perfection. Between takes, she was the old Julie, cutting an incongruous figure in her postulant's costume and behaving like an old busker: hammering out a furious Hawaiian War Chant, whistling through her teeth, clacking out a frenzied flamenco, tossing off bawdy songs, warbling Indian Love Call, and hitting a clinker at just the right moment.

One weekend she treated the whole cast to a bus trip from their Salzburg location to Munich to see Britain's Royal Ballet, and throughout the 60-mile ride did an uproarious imitation of an English tour guide. But she did not entirely win friends and influence coworkers. When she was guilelessly sweet, says one actor, she was almost too sticky. "Working with her," he said, "was like being hit over the head every day with a Hallmark card." At times, when she was working out a piece of business, driving single-mindedly for perfection, she struck some of the troupe as deceptively tyrannical. "She's like a nun," said one man, "with a switchblade." What showed on the screen, at any rate, was a zingy score, picture-postcard scenery and the warm story of the famed Trapp family who sang their way out of Nazidom. Julie saved the show from the supercilious performance of Co-Star Christopher Plummer who, behind everybody's back, referred to the film as "The Sound of Mucus." The picture fairly rocked with her personal magnetism. As one friend put it: "She came off looking like the world's most beautiful birthday cake."

Reserved Admiration. Sound of Music put Julie in the top-money class--$750,000 plus 10% of the gross--right after Audrey Hepburn and Liz Taylor and Shirley MacLaine, who command up to $1,000,000 apiece. It also entitled her to pick a wrongo for her next film. Hitchcock's Torn Curtain was a heavy Iron Curtain melodrama that Julie privately asked her friends to avoid. Still, largely because it stars Julie Andrews, Curtain is building up the biggest grosses for a straight drama in the Universal studio's history.

Hawaii was an extra challenge for Julie because, she explains, "I didn't feel completely in tune with the missionary lady I played. I admired her, but I had reservations. She has left a man she loves to marry a missionary, and when the lover returns and offers her another chance, she stays with the missionary. I don't know that I would have done that." She has reservations about the movie as a whole. But at least one rave from a member of her family has cheered her immensely. Says Ted Wells: "It was the first one that convinced me she could act in the movies. Everything else--Poppins, Sound of Music--has been a Cakewalk. This was the first time I could tell her, 'Now you're an actress.' "

And now the hills are alive still with the sound of success. Julie's recording of the Sound of Music holds the sales record (7,000,000) for all LPs, and her album of My Fair Lady (6,000,000 copies) is second. This month her LP of Christmas songs, recorded as a special premium offer for Firestone, is selling like crazy at Firestone dealers for $1 a throw. Even her rare appearances on television ring up records. Her last TV special, in November 1965, pulled 35 million viewers--more than the Streisand show or the Carol Channing show or the Sinatra show that season. Small wonder that the Motion Picture Herald poll of exhibitors, to be published next month, will name Andrews as the No. 1 box-office star of the year.* She has already completed her fifth movie, Thoroughly Modern Millie, a Boy Friend-like musical about the '20s, and will soon start Star, a biography of Gertrude Lawrence ("Their lives are somewhat similar," notes Director Robert Wise. "Gertie was also a product of music halls and a broken home"). She hopes one day to do a show with Mike Nichols; he wanted her for the Broadway lead in The Apple Tree, but signed Barbara Harris when Julie's film commitments obliged her to turn him down. It was probably just as well: Julie would have been hopelessly miscast in that show.

Midnight Birds. With all her success, Julie is now facing up to the inevitable cliche that infects married couples who get deeply involved in their separate professions: Whither goest who? The answer is that Walton goeth to London, Julie to Hollywood. The result is that they are separated by more than an ocean and a continent. At one point, they corresponded on tape. "Every day, out went the tapes," says Tony. "Julie saying how frightened she was of acting, how unreal the whole thing was. But we got too good at the tapes and a bit too tricky. Every once in a while I'd get one from Julie saying 'It's midnight and I'm just dragging in from rehearsal,' and I could hear the birds singing in the background." Julie's mother cannot understand why Walton would not move permanently to Hollywood to work, but Tony would not settle for a career of being Mr. Julie Andrews. "Some husbands of stars can fit into the 'agent-manager' role," he says, but "I'm not agently inclined, and there's the other thing--pride--involved too."

To add to the complications, Julie has fallen in love with California, has bought an eight-room house in Coldwater Canyon near Hollywood. "I used to loathe Hollywood," she says. "It seemed miles from anywhere. The papers seemed just local gossip, and I felt unconnected with the rest of the world. But now I think that Hollywood is as real as New York or as real as London or as real as Venice. There's no place I'd rather be. When I'm away for very long, I can't wait to get back."

She and Walton talk on the trans atlantic telephone often. "We are good friends, as corny as that sounds," she explains. Her favorite date is Director Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Pink Panther, The Great Race). As Julie says: "People will talk and gossip, and there is nothing you can do about that, so you might just as well go your own sweet way. I don't think anybody goes out of her way to be a scarlet woman, but then there is very little I can do about it if that's what they want to make of it."

Icky Wine. The center of Julie's life, however, is Daughter Emma (pronounced Emmer by the family), a blue-eyed blonde who most resembles her father. Julie chauffeurs her to nursery school every day in her 1965 Falcon station wagon, and at least one day a week sends the nanny off and takes over completely. The two paint together (Julie took up oils this fall) or belt out duets of Daisy, Daisy, although Emma doesn't like to hear Mummy rehearse--which is why she has to practice while driving to work.

Her social life is focused on a small group of friends--Edwards, Mike Nichols, Carol Burnett, Composer-Conductor Andre Previn and his wife Dory. At Christmastime, she invites them all in, and "to everyone's annoyance and chagrin, I make mulled wine, all icky and sticky. I'm the only one who likes it." When she can manage to avoid the endless squads of fans, she sneaks off to concerts (preferences: Mahler, Rachmaninoff), but no longer goes to the movies. Instead, for privacy's sake, she runs films in her home--"on the smooth wall of the playroom if it's a good movie, on the brick wall of the living room if it's bad." She cares little for haute couture. Dory Previn charitably describes Julie's wardrobe as "old-fashioned"; the less charitable call it "frumpish." Burton's exwife, Sybil Christopher, adds that "Julie is hopeless with servants, and they take advantage of her. She ends up pouring their tea."

Ambivalence. In her more introspective moments, Julie suffers the familiar agony of one who has risen high but cannot comprehend the forces that lifted her. She sees a psychoanalyst once a week ("My Ju? Bloody nonsense," huffs her mother. "Of course, you understand we still look on them as quacks in England"). Says Julie: "I needed some answers, and I think I'd have been a rotten mother without analysis." She is concerned about "the real me. I have an absolutely fearful temper. I always get upset when people don't get on with the job at hand. I always feel like saying 'Let's get on with it; it's the piece that matters, not our own personal thing.' I suppose another of my failings is that I am a thoroughly ambivalent person. Ambivalence can either be a vice or a virtue. But I am able to see both sides of anything to such an extent that it is terribly hard for me to make a decision or do anything involving a drastic change."

Her main concern is "not to be totally bracketed" and not to repeat herself. "Strangely enough," she says, "singing has never been particularly easy for me. Particularly singing the way I want to. I have not found the easy, enjoyable way of singing. I think I have a fear of finding it, probably from having a little too much of singing when I was young. In the back of my mind and the bottom of my heart I want to lick that."

It is Tony Walton's guess that Julie's self-concern stems from "this guilt feeling about taking it easy," but she is probably a lot healthier than even she gives herself credit for. After all, any girl who eats boiled-potato sandwiches and goes around in a car singing at the top of her lungs can't be all bad.

* A deep-bosomed, lynx-eyed Peruvian songstress, now retired, who also had a four-octave range. * The rest of the top ten, in order: Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Lemmon, Richard Burton, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Doris Day, Paul Newman, and Elvis Presley.

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