When actors work together, there is a tacit understanding that the show and its message are what matters above all else. Personal issues are set aside once the curtain is up. I hadn’t felt much trust between Rex and me in the early days, but as the months in My Fair Lady passed, we came to a place of mutual respect, and our work together became all about performing the glorious verbal music of George Bernard Shaw.
I didn’t say anything to Tony that first evening. Perhaps Richard was just having a rotten night. But when he behaved the same way at the next performance, my anger became icy. I then spoke to Tony, and he came down to the theater to observe the odd phenomenon. He asked me if I would like him to speak to Richard. I replied, “Don’t you dare! This is between us, and I have to figure it out for myself.”
Tony said that for roughly a week, our performances in Camelot were quite electric. I realize now I was an idiot not to stop the foolishness. I should have asked Richard what the hell he was up to. But I began to sense something, which was confirmed the following matinee when he knocked at my dressing room door. He was all smiles and tenderness, looking for a hug, asking if I was all right. I suddenly guessed that he had been trying to manipulate me into a state of despair concerning his behavior. I think I was the only woman in the company who hadn’t succumbed to his overwhelming allure—and maybe this was supposed to be my moment.
“Piss off, Richard!” I said to him, surprising myself with my venom.
A smile played around his mouth, and he dallied a little longer. But I meant what I said, and he eventually got the message. It didn’t help matters, for we then suffered through two more miserable performances. But at the end of the third show, he took my hand as we made our bows and said, cheekily, “Who do you love?” I was staggered by his audacity, and caught off guard. I replied something dumb like “You, I think.” As the curtain finally settled, he threw up his hands, and said, “Okay! I’m sorry.” He pinched my bum, I pinched his, and we never had another bad moment after that.
IN SEPTEMBER, RICHARD and Roddy left the cast. They were both heading for Rome to make the film Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Rex Harrison. My last months in the show were much harder without them.
I received a photograph of Rex, Richard, and Roddy, taken on location in their Roman costumes. Each had signed it with a silly personal note, and the photograph means a lot to me. I suspect that sweet Roddy was the instigator of the idea.
Richard’s replacement in Camelot was William Squires, a talented, decent gentleman. But it was an extremely tall order to match up to the power and charisma of Richard Burton.
ON DECEMBER 21, 1961, almost exactly a year after his second heart attack, Moss suffered another—a massive one. He and Kitty were in Palm Springs, and had been alerted to the possibility of trouble by a toothache, which always seemed to presage Moss’s attacks. He collapsed in his driveway while heading for the hospital, and died instantly.
It was simply devastating. He was only fifty-seven years old.
Before I departed for California, Moss had visited the theater several times, and one night he came to my dressing room and presented me with his own copy of Lady in the Dark. He asked if I would be interested in doing a new production of it onstage, and I said I would read it. Fool that I was, I thought it a little dated. Gertrude Lawrence had starred in it with such success, but I was frightened, and didn’t trust that Moss could pull it off again with me, though I was incredibly flattered that he asked me. At the time of his death, I had not yet returned his copy of the play, and when I eventually asked Kitty if she would like it back, she said, “No, you keep it. I’d like you to have it.”
FORTY-SEVEN
TONY AND I ushered in the New Year sadly and quietly. We asked a few lonesome Brits stranded in New York to join us for Christmas Day. One was Paul Scofield, the wonderful actor who was brilliantly portraying Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons on Broadway.
Paul is very shy and modest, and I had asked him to arrive at our apartment at roughly eleven o’clock Christmas morning. Our doorbell rang exactly on the hour, and although showered and ready, I was still in my dressing gown. As I opened the door, Paul’s face became ashen. In a mortified voice he said, “Did you mean eleven P.M.? Have I made a dreadful mistake?” I assured him we were anticipating his arrival and welcomed him in.
In spite of the quiet beginning, 1962 turned out to be a very busy year.
BACK IN EARLY 1960, Lou Wilson had said to me, “There’s a young girl on Broadway I want you to meet. Her name is Carol Burnett. She’s starring in a show called Once Upon a Mattress, and she’s wonderful. I’m going to get tickets for you to see her.”
I’m not sure why Lou was so insistent. Maybe he already had conscious—or unconscious—plans for us both. But I went along with his enthusiasm, and, in due course, I saw Carol’s show. I just loved it; loved all that she was, all that she exuded. Her performance was completely original and wonderfully funny.
Lou and a friend of his, the producer Bob Banner, took us to supper after the show, and from then on the poor guys never got a word in edgeways. Lou and Bob just sat back, bemused smiles on their faces, as Carol and I chatted on and on. It was as if we suddenly discovered we were living on the same block. We bonded instantly.
Though Carol and I are from very different parts of the world, our childhoods were somewhat similar. We also seem to have an instinct, one for the other, as to how our brains work, our thoughts, feelings. It’s always been understood that we are chums: we probably were in a past life, as well. Unhappily, Carol and I don’t visit each other as much as we’d like to. Sometimes we’re both too busy, or distance separates us, but when we do get together, we always pick up where we left off and never stop talking.
After that first supper, I didn’t see Carol again for some months, but once Camelot was up and running in New York, I received an invitation to appear on The Garry Moore Show, a weekly television series on which Carol was a regular. It was coproduced by Lou’s friend Bob Banner and a tall, rangy-looking gentleman by the name of Joe Hamilton. Joe was an endearing rogue, full of dry humor and camaraderie, and he always sported a pair of bright red socks, no matter what his outfit. He and Carol were dating, and eventually they married.
I was intrigued by the invitation, and wondered what on earth I would do on the show. How would I fit in? Ken Welch, a talented gentleman who wrote all the musical material for Garry Moore, asked me if there was anything I had always wanted to try but had never been able to. Any fantasy? Any silly dream? Facetiously, I replied, “I’ve always wanted to do a Western. Be a cowgirl, an English sheriff; turn it on its head somehow. I never could, of course.”
The next thing I knew, he came up with the idea of Carol and me doing the song “Big D” from the musical Most Happy Fella. It was sublime fun. Because Carol is brave, and willing to take a crack at anything, I lost my own inhibitions and felt free beside her, teaming with her to perform this riotous number staged by the choreographer Ernie Flatt. Dressed in outrageous cowboy chaps and large Stetsons, we flung our lot together with gusto, and the result was a resounding success and a big rating for Garry Moore. He later told Carol that it was the first time he had ever known a studio audience rise to give a standing ovation.
A few months later, I was invited back to join Carol on another Garry Moore Show. I did four in all, three of them in 1961, and one in early 1962. In February of ’62, I also taped a terrific television special entitled The Broadway of Lerner and Loewe. Bobby Goulet, Stanley Holloway, and Maurice Chevalier were in it, and Richard Burton came over from Rome and performed the scene from the magnificent Great Hall at the end of Act I in Camelot. It was a lovely and successful telecast.
Meanwhile, Lou Wilson’s agile mind was churning. Having some clout with CBS (they had funded both My Fair Lady and Camelot), he and Bob Banner came up with the crazy idea that Carol and I should do a televised concert evening at prestigious Carnegie Hall. To put two young musical comedy ladies in such a legitim
ate, classical setting seemed wildly improbable, yet no one else was the least bit daunted. Ken Welch again went to work. Most of the production team from The Garry Moore Show came aboard, including Ernie Flatt. Joe Hamilton coproduced and directed the show.
Carol and I both knew Mike Nichols fairly well. From time to time, Tony and I would go over to Mike’s apartment and spend a lazy Sunday with him. We’d bring smoked salmon and bagels for lunch, and Mike would make bullshots, a potent combination of bouillon and vodka. Mike would lie full length on his sofa while we stretched out on the floor, and we’d listen to Callas, who was the rage at the time, or talk about theater and read all the Sunday papers.
Carol and I took a deep breath and asked Mike if he would consider writing some extra material for our show, especially some voice-over sketches that would keep our audience happy while we girls were changing our costumes between numbers. Mike consented, but being so well known, he preferred to use a pseudonym on the credits, calling himself Igor Peschkowsky…which was in fact his real name.
Everything seemed to fall into place, to be serendipitous. Ethel Merman and Mary Martin had once teamed together for a television special, and that had been very successful. Carol and I called ourselves “The B-Team”—the poor man’s Ethel and Mary.
I took a week off from Camelot, except for one performance when Colonel John Glenn came to see the show. To honor his remarkable achievement in space, it seemed important to have the full company present, and I went back to perform that night.
We filmed Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall on March 5, 1962. We rehearsed on stage and blocked the day before, then taped a dress rehearsal the following afternoon in case of accidents, and played the real show to a packed house in the evening.
Just before we made our first entrance, I recall standing in the wings on one side of the stage, looking across at Carol on the other. We were both nervous, excited, and wound up like racehorses at the starting gate. Our eyes met, we smiled, nodded, indicating we were there for each other, and blew a kiss before entering to meet center stage.
After an introductory number entitled “Together,” we did a send-up of The Sound of Music, called The Swiss Family Pratt. I portrayed the mother, Carol was “Cynthia,” the last child and only girl in a family of twelve boys, played by our wonderful dancers. It was great fun, and I had no idea at the time that I would later be asked to play Maria in that beautiful film.
There was another musical skit in our show, based on the Russian dance troupe the Moiseyev—we were called “The Nausiev.” We also each sang a solo, and performed a huge twelve-minute medley together featuring the greatest songs of the decade. We repeated our “Big D” number at the end of the show, having enlarged and improved it to make it even better.
It poured with rain that day, and Carol later said that rain was our lucky omen, for it rained when we did a subsequent show together a decade later, and even during one a decade after that. All three shows were hugely successful, the bulk of them written by Ken Welch and his wife, Mitzie, who have both remained friends to this day.
Wherever we go, Carol and I are asked if we are ever going to do another show together. Our friendship hasn’t changed over the years, but it has evolved. The first time we worked with each other, it was all about “Who are you dating?” or “How’s married life?” The next time, it was “Sorry, gotta dash for a parent/teacher conference” or “I’ve got to take the kids to the dentist.” The last time, it was more “How are your joints holding up?” and “Do you take Metamucil?”
We hoped to do a series of these specials—Julie and Carol at the London Palladium, Julie and Carol in Paris, Julie and Carol at the Kremlin, Julie and Carol at the Great Wall of China—but they all proved to be too expensive. We vowed that our final show, should we ever do another, would be Julie and Carol in the Swimming Pool of the YMCA.
TWO AND A half weeks after our Carnegie Hall outing, I received the joyous news that I was pregnant. The first person I told was Carol. I had tipped her off earlier that I was going for a pregnancy test.
“Oh, Jools!” she said. “I’m working at CBS, but whatever you do, call me. Leave a message if I can’t come to the phone.”
In those days a pregnancy test involved the use of a little mouse. If the poor creature died from an injection of one’s urine, it confirmed you were pregnant.
When I received the news, I tried to reach Carol, but was told she was locked in rehearsals. The operator asked if I wished to leave a message.
“Could you please tell Miss Burnett that Miss Andrews called,” I said. “Just simply say ‘the mouse died.’”
I imagined that the message would be delivered to Carol privately, but apparently the operator paged her over the P.A. system, her voice echoing through the halls of CBS. “Miss Burnett, Miss Burnett…telephone message for you. Miss Andrews called to say, ‘The mouse died.’”
At the end of the Pratt Family sketch on the Julie and Carol show, the choreography called for Carol to whack me “accidentally” in the stomach, and for me to double over. When Carol found out I was pregnant, she was horrified to think back on that moment.
“If I’d known you were pregnant, I never would have touched you!” she exclaimed. Then she added, laughing, “But I bet that’s when it connected!”
I told Tony the great news that same day, of course. I wanted to shout it to the world. Tony was designing sets and costumes for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It had an amazing cast: Zero Mostel, David Burns, Jack Gilford, John Carradine. Tony was attending rehearsals in the theater, and I rushed there to find him, but the first person I bumped into was Stephen Sondheim, who was walking up the aisle. I blurted out my great news to him. Tony still occasionally chastises me for telling Steve before I told him, but then he smiles, so I don’t think he really minded.
FORTY-EIGHT
ALTHOUGH I HAD stolen a few days from Camelot in order to do Carnegie Hall, I still had five weeks in the show before my contract expired. I suddenly received word that Walt Disney was coming to see us, and had asked if he could come backstage afterward to meet me. I was flattered, and thought it very polite of him.
When Walt appeared in my dressing room, he exuded natural charm and friendliness. After the formalities, he told me and Tony about a combination live action/animated film that he was planning to make, based on the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers. I was familiar with the title, but had never read the books.
Walt described it a little, and said that his staff at the studio were in the preproduction process. He asked if I might be interested in playing the role of Mary, the English nanny, and whether, after I was finished with Camelot, I would like to come out to Hollywood to hear the songs and see the designs that had been created thus far.
Apparently the co-producer and co-screenwriter of Mary Poppins, a dear man called Bill Walsh, had recommended me to Walt. He had suggested that Walt come and see the show, and Walt must have felt sure enough about my performance to make an immediate offer. I was overwhelmed by this sudden turn of events, but had to tell him that I was pregnant, and therefore it would not be possible for me to do the film.
Walt gently explained that his team wouldn’t be ready to commence shooting until some time after our baby was born. He turned to Tony and said, “And what is it that you do, young man?” Tony explained that he was a scenic and costume designer.
“Then when you come to California, you should bring your portfolio with you,” Walt replied.
MY FINAL PERFORMANCE of Camelot was on Saturday April 14, 1962. Mum and Dad Walton were in New York and attended that night.
I bid a loving farewell to the company. I had never missed a performance due to sickness through the entire eighteen months of the run, and my faith in my ability to survive the rigors of Broadway had been restored. Now that my tonsils were no longer poisoning my system, I discovered what it was like to actually feel healthy.
I spent the following week in midnight sessions with my chum Caro
l, recording the album of Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall for Columbia Records. I then traveled to Washington to join Tony and see A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in previews there. What a wonderful, joyous show Forum is! I still rank it among my six favorite musicals—West Side Story, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy… and My Fair Lady, of course. But those are just the first favorites, for I have many, many more.
Tony’s designs were a riot of marvelous color. There was one curtain in the show that was a radiant, translucent red—almost a signature of his work. Burnt oranges, reds, and corals are particular palettes Tony loves to use, as well as midnight blues, aquamarines, and ocean colors. No one can equal his eye for mixing the tones so uniquely, not to mention his ability for creating drawings that appear utterly facile and free.
It’s a rare talent that makes everything seem so easy that it belies the dedication and hard work behind it. Astaire had it, Rubinstein, Baryshnikov, Segovia, certain painters, writers, and poets—the ones who convey the feeling that there’s so much strength and energy left unused. It’s a quality supremely to be desired.
Forum opened on Broadway on May 8, and received great notices. Two days later, on our third wedding anniversary, Tony and I flew to California to meet with Walt Disney, as arranged.
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