After a period of time Wise was promoted to assistant film editor, and finally, in 1938, he became a full-fledged film editor. His many editing credits include The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and My Favorite Wife. The highlight of his “cutting” days came when he edited the movie many regard as the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane. The skill and imagination Wise demonstrated in Kane led director Orson Welles to hire him again on his movie The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Then came an unexpected opportunity. While Welles was shooting a film in South America as part of the US government’s good-neighbor policy, studio heads discovered from previews that Ambersons needed some additional scenes. In Welles’s absence, the studio assigned Wise to direct the scenes.
After that, Wise began bombarding studio executives with requests to direct. Then, in 1943, he was editing The Curse of the Cat People when its director, far behind schedule, was fired. Wise was given the job, and the movie became a hit. His career as director was now firmly established.
Over the years Wise directed films on so many different topics, themes, and moods that he was known as one of the most versatile directors in the business. A sampling of his credits before Music includes: the boxing picture Somebody Up There Likes Me, the horror film The Haunting, the science fiction cult favorite The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the Oscar-winning musical West Side Story. It was his brilliant work on West Side Story that paved the way for his directing Music.
JULIE ANDREWS
Julia Elizabeth Wells was born on October 1, 1935, in Walton-on-Thames, England, and was exposed to dance and music even before she could walk or talk. Her mother, Barbara, played piano at her sister’s evening dance school so night after night the toddler was shuttled off to dance class, where she watched rehearsals. Her parents divorced when she was four, and she went to live with her mother and her stepfather, Ted Andrews, whose name she legally adopted. Soon after their marriage, Barbara and Ted Andrews formed a vaudeville act, thus introducing young Julie to performing as well. When Ted Andrews discovered that his stepdaughter had perfect pitch, he enrolled her in singing lessons.
At ten Julie joined her parents’ vaudeville act and became so popular that at twelve she opened on her own at the London Hippodrome. Her career soon eclipsed her parents’, and at thirteen she performed for the queen. Her parents retired as Andrews’s career blossomed, making the teenager the breadwinner for her parents and siblings.
Andrews was performing a pantomime of Cinderella at the London Palladium when Vida Hope, the director/producer of London’s smash hit The Boy Friend, spotted her and offered her the leading role in the American version of his musical. Andrews made her Broadway debut in 1954 in the old-fashioned musical whose plot revolved around an aspiring actress given the chance to go onstage when the prima donna fractures her ankle. America was smitten with this teenage star, and only a year later she capped her Boy Friend success by winning the starring role in the new Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady.
In this now-celebrated show Andrews was to play a cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, who is transformed into a lady by Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins. But even though Andrews was already a seasoned performer, she had never had such a substantial acting role. Rehearsals started off poorly, and Andrews was worried that she might not be able to handle the part. “This was my first legitimate role,” she recalled. “Although I had done The Boy Friend, it was a rather silly piece. This character was totally different. Eliza is a great role for women. It has everything. But the weight of the show and the role itself were so demanding, I hadn’t a clue as to how to play it.”
It wasn’t just the role that had her feeling lost, it was also her costar, Rex Harrison. “Rex was scared to do a musical, and he was very involved in getting it right, so, consequently, he was very demanding. Moss [director Moss Hart] was so busy helping Rex that he didn’t have time for any of the rest of us. I just sat around thinking, ‘Well, I guess someone’s going to get to me.’ I was really afraid I would be sent back to London if I didn’t get it soon. I’d heard of that happening before.”
The rehearsals got to be so bad that Hart finally sent the whole company home and asked them not to return to the theater for forty-eight hours. But he asked Andrews to stay; he wanted to work with her on the part. For two days, according to Robert Windeler’s biography, Julie Andrews, Hart “bullied and pleaded, coaxed and cajoled” her. Andrews took the abuse so well, however, that when Hart went home, he told his wife, “She has that terrible English strength that makes you wonder why they lost India!”
Hart’s lessons paid off. Both the play and Julie Andrews became tremendous hits in New York and London. Soon after Lady closed in London, Andrews returned to Broadway to play the beautiful but unfaithful Queen Guinevere in Camelot. She and her costar, Richard Burton, got along famously, although he later commented that she was the only leading lady he never went to bed with. According to Windeler, when the actress heard that line she countered, “How dare he say such an awful thing about me!”
Walt Disney went to see a matinee of Camelot one afternoon and knew immediately that Andrews would be perfect to play the role of the magical nanny in P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books. But Andrews wasn’t so sure. “Do you think I ought to work for Walt Disney?” Windeler quotes her as asking her friend Carol Burnett. “The cartoon person?” Burnett assured Andrews that Disney did more than just cartoons and, after Andrews gave birth to her daughter, Emma Kate (with husband art designer Tony Walton), she journeyed to California to make her movie debut.
By this time Andrews had already lost the role of Eliza Doolittle in the film version of My Fair Lady. Jack Warner, who was producing Lady, felt that he needed a “name” to sell the picture and cast Audrey Hepburn instead, although it was well known that Hepburn could not sing. (Her singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon.) Even though this would have been the part of a lifetime, Andrews took the disappointment well.
“I totally understood why Audrey got the part,” Andrews said. “I hadn’t done any films yet. I was known only as a Broadway actress.” Andrews had Mary Poppins to soften the blow. And when the 1964 Academy Awards rolled around, Andrews even got her revenge. My Fair Lady was nominated in every major category but Best Actress. That statuette went to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins.
Andrews went from Poppins to a non-singing role in The Americanization of Emily. In this black comedy by Paddy Chayefsky, she played a World War II widow who falls for an American commander, played by James Garner. Willy Wyler had been correct when he prophesied that Andrews would be right for the role, but despite the long-distance phone calls from Salzburg, Wyler never directed the picture. That assignment went to Arthur Hiller.
It was while filming Emily that Andrews was approached for The Sound of Music.
CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER
“[Christopher Plummer is] one of the most incisive and exciting actors of the English speaking world …” wrote New York magazine’s Broadway critic John Simon of this Canadian leading man.
Christopher Plummer, born on December 13, 1927, always wanted to be a great concert pianist. A native of Canada, where his great-great grandfather, Sir John Abbott, was once prime minister, Plummer found acting the most attractive of all the arts his mother introduced him to in his hometown of Toronto. An only child of divorced parents, Plummer was bored by his peers, so he acted out stories. His first acting role was that of Darcy in a Montreal High School production of Pride and Prejudice. This led to other amateur productions, many of them Shakespearean, and when he turned seventeen he landed his first professional engagement with a visiting English repertory company that played in Ottawa, Canada.
His first acting experience outside Canada was in a repertory company in Bermuda. There he appeared with such classical actors as Florence Reed, Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, and Edward Everett Horton. Horton invited Plummer to join the American touring company of their show Nina, and that brought the young actor to the United
States in 1953.
Plummer’s Broadway career started off slowly. He began as an understudy in the touring company of The Constant Wife, which starred Katherine Cornell, and then, in 1954, he had roles in two Broadway shows that closed after short runs. His first substantial role on Broadway was in Christopher Fry’s drama The Dark Is Light Enough, which ran for two months in early 1955 and then toured American cities. On July 12, 1955, Plummer opened in Julius Caesar at the Stratford Company and stayed with the group for The Tempest.
Plummer’s ambition was to play all the great classics before he turned thirty. He not only fulfilled that dream but became a leading Shakespearean actor in Canada, the United States, and England, performing in both French and English. He won London’s West End Best Actor Evening Standard Award for his work on the London stage, and his Hamlet, produced on television by the BBC and filmed in the original setting of Elsinore Castle in Denmark, was a great success.
In 1956 Plummer married actress Tammy Grimes, who soon gave birth to his only child, actress Amanda Plummer. The next year Plummer made his film debut in Sidney Lumet’s Stage Struck, playing a young playwright in love with stage-struck Susan Strasberg. From there he went on to appear in Wind Across the Everglades and The Fall of the Roman Empire.
In 1960 he and Tammy Grimes divorced, and in 1962 he married British journalist Patricia Lewis. A year later Plummer was first approached to play Captain von Trapp in Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, and were it not for the director’s
insistence, Plummer might never have taken the part.
3
“Search High and Low …”
CASTING
Ernest Lehman was convinced from the beginning that there was only one actress perfect for the part of Maria von Trapp, and that actress was Julie Andrews. In fact, at a meeting with Richard Rodgers, Rodgers stated, “I suppose you’re going to cast Doris Day, huh?” to which an adamant Lehman replied, “As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one person to play this role, and that’s Julie Andrews.”
Lehman said the same thing to Wise when Wise was hired as director/producer. But there was a rumor circulating around town that Andrews was not photogenic—at least that was the excuse Warner Brothers mogul Jack Warner had used for not casting her in the movie version of My Fair Lady. Although Andrews had already completed two films, neither of them had been released, so no one had seen her yet on the big screen. One of the first things Wise and Lehman did was go to Disney Studios and look at some footage of the not-yet-released Mary Poppins. After only a few minutes Wise turned to Lehman and said, “Let’s go sign this girl before somebody else sees this film and grabs her!”
Interestingly enough, Andrews had already played the role of Maria. During the run of Camelot in 1962, Andrews had costarred in a television special with her friend Carol Burnett. (This was her third television special; she had already played opposite Bing Crosby in High Tor and had starred in the title role in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.)
This special, Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, included a parody of what was Broadway’s biggest hit at the time—The Sound of Music. According to biographer Robert Windeler, Andrews and Burnett joked about the musical. They made fun of “that happy nun.” In “The Pratt Family of Switzerland,” Julie performed a campy imitation of Mary Martin’s “Maria.” It never occurred to her that three years later that very role would put her career over the top.
“I thought [the movie] might be awfully saccharine,” Andrews was quoted in the biography. “After all, what can you do with nuns, seven children and Austria?” Besides, after doing a straight role in Emily, Andrews thought she might want to play a nonmusical part again.
Before Robert Wise came aboard, other actresses had been suggested for the part of Maria von Trapp. Stage star Mary Martin never had a chance because of her age: Maria had to be in her early twenties, which Andrews, twenty-eight in 1963, could pass for; Martin, at fifty, could not, because although the stage can create many illusions, the camera does not lie. Wyler had once suggested Audrey Hepburn, and of course Paramount had originally bought the German films with her in mind. Doris Day’s husband, Martin Melcher, campaigned very hard for her to get the role.
When Wise eventually signed on to do the picture, he made a list of the actresses he was considering. They included:
Julie Andrews
Leslie Caron
Grace Kelly
Anne Bancroft
Angie Dickinson
Carol Lawrence
Shirley Jones
But there was only one person Wise and Lehman seriously considered—Julie Andrews.
When Andrews was offered the role, she had two concerns. First, of course, was the amount of “sugar” in the role. Her second concern was the fact that Fox wanted to tie her into a four-picture commitment with the studio. Her agent didn’t like that idea. So she and Fox finally agreed on a two-picture contract. (The second film turned out to be the ill-fated Star!, also under Robert Wise’s direction.) Andrews signed a contract to star in both The Sound of Music and the second film for the flat fee of $225,000, with no share in either movie’s profits. The following year, when her name would be connected with “The Golden Trio”—the stage version of My Fair Lady and the movies Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music—her price would skyrocket to $1 million per picture.
“The Pratt Family of Switzerland.”
Wise, who was off scouting locations at the time, was not involved in Andrews’s negotiations at all. But every day, Wise and associate producer Saul Chaplin checked their hotel for a message from the studio. They were anxious to know how Andrews’s negotiations were progressing, but they heard nothing. Finally Chaplin learned from a friend, who had read the news in Louella Parsons’s column, that Andrews was on board. Wise and Chaplin were elated, although somewhat disgruntled that they had not been informed of this important decision directly.
Right after Wise returned from his trip, he went over to MGM, where Andrews was filming Emily, and invited her to lunch at Twentieth Century Fox on her next available afternoon. The studio’s executives wanted to meet their new star. A week later Andrews took him up on his invitation. She was still a bit leery about her new role, and as Wise led her into the private executive dining room in the Fox commissary, she stopped him and asked, “How are you going to get all the sugar out of this picture?”
Wise grabbed her hand and replied, “My dear, you and all the rest of us are thinking the same way.”
He then explained his ideas for extracting the excess sweetness from the story without taking away from its appealing qualities. Wise wanted to keep the picture visually clean and spare. No filigree, no turreted castles, no carved woods. This would work in counterpoint to the romance and music of the film. Andrews listened to Wise’s concept, and when she was satisfied with his ideas, she shouted, “Then let’s get to it!”
When a director, producer, and casting assistant start bandying names about for their casting lists, the results are often like what happens when you throw a net out in the middle of the ocean: you catch a lot of fish, regardless of whether or not you can use them. And sometimes the results are a little wild. Two names that kept surfacing on most lists for Captain von Trapp were Bing Crosby and Yul Brynner.
But Wise had other ideas. He wanted an actor with more of an edge. The Captain in the stage version was a stock character. Wise wanted to juice him up a bit. He remembered being impressed by Christopher Plummer, whom he had seen onstage in New York. Six feet tall and dangerously handsome, Plummer not only was leading man material but also displayed an unsettling restraint in his film and stage roles that could sometimes seem menacing. There was an intensity in his characterizations that made for some powerful performances.
In the fall of 1963, after garnering only modest success in his first three pictures, Plummer wasn’t particularly anxious to sign on for another movie; he much preferred the stage. Yet, when his agent first approached him to play the role of Captain von Trapp, P
lummer thought it might be a good idea. He was planning on doing a musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac onstage, and he thought that doing a film musical might be good practice.
Ironically, just as Andrews had once played the role of Maria von Trapp, albeit comically, Plummer too had previous experience with the role of the Captain.
Many of Hollywood’s top stars were considered for the major roles in the film.
“I was doing The Lark on Broadway with Julie Harris,” recalled Plummer, “and I was told that Mary Martin wanted to meet me. They were considering me for the part of the Captain in the stage version. Now, I was only twenty-six years old at the time, and Martin must have been about fifty or so. The Captain was supposed to be older than she was! So I went to Mary’s penthouse to meet with her. She was like a little pixie; she came dancing out to greet me. Rodgers and Hammerstein were also there.
“So I told them, ‘I hate to say this, but don’t you think our age differences are a little staggering?’ Well, they were stunned. Apparently, they were just seeing anybody who was hot at the time, and some casting director made a boo-boo.”
The Sound of Music Page 6
