“Julie Andrews” by Gloria Steinem, was originally published in the March 1965 issue of Vogue.
For more of the best from Vogue’s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here.
The secret of Julie Andrews’s success is very simple: she just manages to be regal and gauche, witty and non compos mentis, dewy-eyed ingénue and old theatrical pro, sweet-tempered and acerbic, level-headed and wacky, monumentally sexy and quite ladylike all at the same time.
Consider, for instance, her recent impact on the glazed habitués of a New York discothèque.
She entered wearing a plain white shirtwaist and dark skirt, quite a contrast to the pavé jewels and drooping necklines around her. “How sweet!” said one woman. “Who’s Miss Goody Goody Two Shoes?” said another. She danced a few sinuous frugs, her face a picture of girlish concentration on getting-it-right and the rest of her getting it very right indeed. By now, it was clear that five feet seven inches of sensational figure was encased in that schoolgirl outfit, and her translucent English skin was glowing with excitement. “I don’t think she has any makeup on at all,” said one woman. One of the men watching her dance asked who she was. “That’s Julie Andrews?” he exclaimed. “But here she’s quite sexy and on stage she seemed so… so cool.”
As the music switched to three-quarter time, Miss Andrews led her partner and two other couples in a blank-faced, outrageous burlesque of an English hesitation waltz. There was appreciative laughter all around. Miss Andrews fixed the laughers with the aloof stare of a dowager and an imaginary lorgnette. More laughter. “Who,” asked a gossip columnist, “is that man she’s with?” “Her husband,” his neighbor replied. She left the floor with her friends, executing a small vaudeville exit step as she went. The man who found her sexy stopped her to say hello and to exclaim over her successes in Hollywood; Miss Andrews listened with delight. “Obviously,” said the man’s wife sotto voce to the columnist, “all that ladylike business is a pose. She’s just another starlet.” The man introduced his wife. “Oh,” said Miss Andrews enthusiastically, “what a perfectly marvelous dress!” Looking down at her own shirtwaist, she added that she felt rather silly dressed like this, but she and her husband had decided to come only at the last moment. She straightened her skirt and looked uncertain. “Never mind,” said the wife, now completely won over, “you look beautiful.”
The evening proceeded. Miss Andrews drank brandy and soda sparingly (“I always think brandy is so much healthier than gin, don’t you?”) and danced a lot. In between, she played a favorite game with her friends: one person pantomimes a famous cinematic moment and the others must guess what movie it’s from. First she was Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear, then Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, and was equally convincing as both. The rest of the group—including expert movie buffs Stephen Sondheim and Mike Nichols, as well as her husband, designer Tony Walton—howled with delight. People at surrounding tables caught the spirit and smiled too. Mr. Sondheim did Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, and Miss Andrews guessed it. (“You know,” said the wife, “she’s one of the few beautiful women who looks friendly.”)
Now, even the dour columnist smiled. He continued to smile as he watched her get up to leave and cover the cotton shirtwaist with a full-length pastel mink. “She’s the kind of girl,” he said, groping for the last word, “that you could take home to Mother. Providing, of course, that you could trust Dad.”
Miss Andrews, had she heard, would have been delighted that anyone was worried about trusting Dad. One year as the marzipan heroine of The Boy Friend, three years as My Fair Lady, and one more as Queen Guinevere in Camelot left her feeling hopelessly type-cast as a lady, and a singing lady at that. (“My problem,” she explained gloomily, “is that everybody thinks I’m a square.”) A television show called Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall gave her some relief: she still sang, but she clowned as well. “Carol Burnett is one of my closest friends,” she said. “With her, I can talk dirty and act wacky and not be a lady at all.” Her role in the movie of Mary Poppins—as the magical nanny who is “practically perfect in every way”—won her an Academy Award nomination and the status of a Hollywood star, but still she sang and still she was terrifyingly, if idiosyncratically, well-bred.
“Please don’t think,” she explained, “that I’m not proud of those roles and very grateful for them. I love the musical theatre and don’t want to drop it. I adored doing Mary Poppins; it opened a whole new world for me and I’d like to do a film every year. But thank God for Emily. Without her, I might have sung ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ forever.”
For those who don’t know her and can’t see her in discothèques, the film of The Americanization of Emily—released last year just one month after Mary Poppins—was the first introduction to the unladylike, uncool, and non-singing Miss Andrews. Some critics had doubts about the film itself, but they all welcomed her enthusiasm, wit, and faintly tangy quality as blessed relief in a world of saccharine ingénues. And Emily was no lady. As an English girl besieged by American soldiers in London, Miss Andrews played love scenes that might have shocked Eliza Doolittle. Most of all, the screen did justice to qualities lost on the stage: a face that registers each emotional nuance, and a rare kind of close-up radiance.
In her third movie, The Sound of Music, Miss Andrews sings again, but by the time that is released this month, she will be at work on a fourth called Hawaii, in which she will hardly sing, if at all. After that, she will do the film of Peter Schaffer’s play The Public Eye, in London.
After that—well, there are all her secret ambitions. For instance:
To make a real old-fashioned Western movie. (“If I didn’t sound British, I’d make a super singing cowgirl. Perhaps Yves Montand and I could be strangers come to town.”)
To do the life story of a burlesque queen. (“That should put an end to the lady image.”)
To play Salomé in the opera. (“All that blood and lust—marvelous!”)
To sing light opera. (“I did so many drastically cut versions as a child; I’d love to get my voice in shape for one good crack at the real thing.”)
Miss Andrews, now twenty-nine, has been singing since the age of eight, when her mother and stepfather, a vaudeville team in the English provinces, discovered that she had a rare voice with a range of four or five octaves. She performed with her parents on BBC broadcasts and army-camp tours, and looks back on all of World War II as a continuous soprano rendition of “The White Cliffs of Dover.”
After the war, she continued singing on television, and in vaudeville, musical revues, and children’s shows. She met Tony Walton at a performance of Humpty Dumpty, in which she played the egg. She was thirteen; he was a year older, and they began a correspondence. Ten years later, in 1959 (the egg had by then hatched Eliza Doolittle), they were married, and now have a very blond two-year-old daughter named Emma Kate.
“Tony is undoubtedly the biggest single influence on my life,” said Miss Andrews. “He even kept Hollywood from changing my nose, which may—who can tell?—have made the difference between success and failure. ‘Touch that nose,’ he said, ‘and I’ll kill you.’”
There was, in fact, some concern over how the very English Miss Andrews would get on in Hollywood. The answer is just another proof of unpredictability: she loves it. She loves the weather and the salads and the freedom of driving around in her own little car. She even loves the workdays that begin at 6 A.M. “Between scenes,” she explained, “I practice singing or write letters or read; no wasted time. By the end of the day, I really feel I’ve accomplished something!”
Success in films has given Julie Andrews more confidence than all her years in My Fair Lady. (“I feel a little less like a scared beginner. I can try to make it now on my own.”) But she is still periodically dismayed by what she considers her own ineptitudes; her difficulty, for instance, in remembering names, even if they are attached to her employers.
After one such incident (she saw a Broadway playwright with whom she had recently had dinner, and called him by the name of a Hollywood director she barely knows), she suggested she be described this way: “Miss Andrews is tall, has long arms, and makes faux pas.”