A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR
Complex and caring, Julie Andrews lives up to her delightful billing
She stands before me in dove-grey jersey tunic and trousers, still brimming with the quick-witted moral energy we all know from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music.
Julie Andrews, 84, is promoting the second volume of her autobiography, Home Work, (Hachette Books, 2019), a beautifully written, charming and candid memoir of her Hollywood years, filled with behind-the-scenes peril and pranks.
How did she feel when she discovered, at age eight or so, that she had this tremendous vocal range and ability?
“I recognized quite early, I think,” she says. “It was a gift and I treated it as such. It actually saved me, in a way. Having a talent gave me an identity. It was a passport to a world I could never have imagined.”
Andrews wrote her memoir in three years with her oldest daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, 56, who lives near her on Long Island, N.Y. Together, they have also written 32 children’s books, including The Great American Mousical.
What was it like looking back over everything?
“It was alternately hugely moving, disturbing ... I had many a sleepless night,” she says. “Writing a memoir is like living your life all over again — the first time round you’re so busy just dealing with what’s coming at you.”
The main subject of her latest memoir is the tension that lies at the heart of a woman with skyhigh standards, dedicated to her work and equally devoted to her demanding extended family.
The “practically perfect” tag that clings to Andrews does her a disservice.
We may like our stars to have a few flaws, but Andrews’s resilience and control is hard-won — heroic, even. Her struggles in life have been legion.
Her childhood was often lonely and painful. “It wasn’t your average version of cosy,” she says.
Her mother, a piano teacher, left her teacher father for a Canadian tenor when Andrews was three, sending for her shortly afterward to live with her in London, leaving her brother, Johnny, with their father in Surrey.
Andrews became part of the family vaudeville act, helping her mother cope with her stepfather’s alcoholism, travelling miles alone for her own theatrical engagements, looking after her half-brothers when her mother started drinking heavily herself.
The main breadwinner by her mid-teens, Andrews found herself playing 18 shows a week in music hall and pantomime, and at 17 took over the mortgage.
In 1950, Andrews attended a party with her mother in a nearby town where the host asked her question after question. On the way home, her mother confessed that the man at the party was in fact her biological father — the result of a brief affair. After discussing this the following day, they never spoke of it again.
In 1959, Andrews married Tony Walton, her childhood sweetheart, and Emma was born in 1962. She and Walton divorced a few years later, but remain friends.
Despite a gruelling work schedules, Andrews was always trying to keep the peace between her mother and aunt, attempting to help her half-brother address his addiction problems, providing regular restorative holidays for her father, stepmother, aunt, mother and siblings.
She doesn’t say so specifically, but it seems clear she was financially supporting everyone, too.
Then, in her marriage to Hollywood filmmaker Blake Edwards, whom she met in 1966 and stayed with until his death in 2010, she had to reckon with his frequent low moods, hypochondria and dependency on prescription opioids.
Andrews also tried to support Edwards’s emotionally unstable ex-wife while ensuring her teenage stepchildren were as happy as possible and her own daughter was thriving.
While all this was going on in the ’70s, she and Edwards adopted two Vietnamese babies.
Psychoanalysis, which she began in the mid-’60s, has proven invaluable, she says.
“I think it helped me be a better mom and a better wife, and clear the clutter from my head. This brand-new world (of stardom) was coming at me extremely fast, and I was feeling a lot of things that needed sorting and understanding, and I really did feel I needed some answers. Psychoanalysis helped me stick to essentials, and I was very fortunate to have a very wise man who helped enormously.”
Having appeared as a child in the West End, she made her Broadway debut in 1954, in The Boy Friend, at 19, and was billed as “Britain’s youngest prima donna.”
It proved to be a launch pad for a seven-decade career that includes some of musicals’ most timeless, beloved roles.
What does she think of #Metoo, the international movement against sexual harassment that has prompted astonishing falls from grace for some of Hollywood’s most famous men.
“I think it’s hugely important,” she says. “Things are changing and that is very, very good.”
There is little sign of Andrews retiring from show business any time soon.
She is about to play Lady Whistledown, a mischievous, Regency-era gossip columnist, in the new Netflix series Bridgerton. She is also planning the next volume of her memoirs.
Her latest takes us up to her Oscar-nominated performance in 1982’s Victor/victoria, an aheadof-its-time musical farce about gender identity-swapping.
A third volume would mean writing about the routine throat surgery in 1997 that she alleges tragically destroyed her singing voice, leading her to concentrate on acting roles such as The Princess Diaries series of Disney films and animated voice-overs (Queen Lillian in Shrek, Gru’s mother Marlena in Despicable Me).
I tell her that after a difficult doctor’s appointment with my mother, we wrote lists of our favourite things. Mine included dresses with silk-satin linings, but my mother’s had the names of all her children and grandchildren. I felt shallow.
“Forgive yourself kindly there,” she says. “But, certainly, I’d side with your mom. My kids and my family, my garden, my home life is the thing that I guard most of all, because it is precious to me. And thank God for it.”
We shake hands goodbye and as I lean forward, she gives me a kiss.
Writing a memoir is like living your life all over again — the first time round you’re so busy just dealing with what’s coming at you.