The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘It’s the fit of the costume that gets to the young boys’
With cinema’s friskiest feline back on screen, meet the original Catwoman
Whenever Julie Newmar is asked to rank the other actresses who have played Catwoman, a role she pioneered in the 1960s Batman TV series, she demurs. “It’s like Carmen,” she says now. “How many great sopranos have done Carmen? It’s silly to compare. We’re all wonderful in our differences.”
Newmar has not yet seen Zoe Kravitz’s performance as Catwoman in The Batman, but she suspects the gloomy new film, which is currently top of the worldwide box office, won’t be to her taste. So many of the character’s recent screen outings have struck her as “morbid, joyless, dissonant dirges” – which, at the age of 88, is frankly the last thing she needs.
“God bless them, producers and directors are imitating life at large as they see it,” she says. “They are accurately mirroring society. But you, me, we can live in the world of our making. I call it living above the morass. I don’t listen to the news much any more. I watch French television because they’re always talking about gardening and food.”
Newmar – who is talking down the line from her home in Los Angeles, while gazing out at her beloved garden – retains the diction and class of old Hollywood. “I think to live safely to the age of 90,” she adds, “you have to make a mental decision to enjoy these sweet days left in your life.”
The Batman TV series, which ran from 1966 to 1968, could never be mistaken for grim social commentary. It blasted a camp, pop-art aesthetic into America’s living rooms at a time when that was still relatively novel. Newmar was 32, living in New York, and recovering from the cancellation of her robot sitcom My Living Doll when she received a call about joining the show’s first season as the caped crusader’s flirtatious foil.
She’d never seen an episode, let alone read a comic book, but her younger brother John was a fan and insisted she take the audition. She flew out to Los Angeles that weekend, got the script on Monday and was on set by Wednesday. “Well, you can tell by the make-up,” she says. “I had to do it myself and probably took 45 minutes. But golly gee, thank God the costume fit.”
Before the cameras rolled, Newmar – who would go on to patent and sell her own underwear designs in the 1970s – customised the Lurex catsuit she was required to wear on screen (“It’s all in the seams”) and shifted Catwoman’s belt from waist to hips.
Catwoman’s recent outings are ‘morbid, joyless, dissonant dirges,’ says Newmar
“It’s the fit of the costume that gets the reaction from young boys,” she says with a trill. And what about the girls? “Oh, altogether different! They said, ‘You were a strong persona’. And I agree with them. It was a delight to be that forthright because girls generally get rewards for being kind, soft, accommodating.”
Owing to a scheduling conflict with a film shoot, Newmar was replaced – by Eartha Kitt, no less – in the final season of Batman, but it’s her costume that now resides in the collection of the Smithsonian museum. As Catwoman, she got $1,250 (£956) an episode – and a reputation for life. Some actors might feel ambivalent about being permanently associated with a light-hearted role they played for just a dozen episodes more than half a century ago; not Newmar. Although she receded from acting in the 1980s to move into real estate, she has voiced Catwoman in animated Batman movies as recently as 2017, gamely
attended superhero fan conventions, and in 2011 published a self-help book entitled The Conscious Catwoman Explains Life on Earth.
Born Julia Chalene Newmeyer, in 1933, to an American footballer father and a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer mother, Newmar is currently working on her autobiography. She’s a deft writer whose occasional website bulletins range from punchy opinion pieces on Bernie Sanders and Medicare expansion to glamorous anecdotes about such experiences as the day, in the 1950s, she had ice cream in Manhattan with Salvador Dalí. “He admired me because he admires beauty,” she says, matter-of-factly. It’s no surprise that Newmar caught the surrealist’s eye. Just shy of six feet tall, she made her stage debut as a prima ballerina for the Los Angeles Opera in her teens. “That was the real me,” she says now. “What I loved most in life to do, and what I was built to do, was dancing. Life expressed itself through my body. Physicality was a way of being seen in the universe. Acting was easier. Isn’t speech easier than dance? Sure it is. And you make more income from it.”
Newmar had dancing roles in films including 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and, the following year, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers before breaking into theatre. In 1959, she won a Tony Award for The Marriage-Go-Round in which she played a Swedish professor’s statuesque daughter. Following the show’s success, one Broadway producer announced that he’d insured her legs for $1m. Two years later, Newmar reprised the same role in the 1961 film adaptation – and inspired the swooning New York Times critic to declare her “a specimen of modernity the likes of which we have never expected to see”.
In a way, Newmar danced her way through Batman: her genuinely feline Catwoman has an air of cool, unflappable amusement that sets her apart from the show’s bam-pow shenanigans. Rumours of a relationship with Batman actor Adam
West that circulated at the time made for good publicity but were, she says, untrue: she rarely saw beyond her co-star’s carapace of mannered charm. “I think that actors very often bring their onscreen personas into real life, hoping that relationships will be at this impossibly higher level.”
Did she expect the show to be such a hit? “Everything one does must start with success in mind,” she says, slipping into lifecoach mode. “You 100 per cent give yourself over to a production and it will take you into the unknown. Sometimes it’s a disaster, sometimes it’s a marvellous experience. Who knows what the outcome will be? But that’s life, isn’t it?”
On her website in 2017, Newmar celebrated the downfall of studio mogul Harvey Weinstein and wrote for the first time about her own five-hour physical assault at the hands of a “psychotic” actor in the 1950s, which “left my face so swollen, my voice so damaged, my eyes shut, and my body barely able to walk”. Now, though, she’s reluctant to dwell on the negative. “Oh, MeToo, MeToo, MeToo, MeToo,” she sighs, when I raise the subject. “Men are men and women are women. I love what the French say: vive la différence!”
Does she never think, as an actress seeking fame in less enlightened times, she had to put up with too much?
“No! Men generally treat me in a respectful way. It depends what your expectations are.”
She prefers to emphasise the good times. Although she was a staunch opponent of America’s involvement in the Vietnam war (“We diminished ourselves”) her work epitomises the lighter side of the 1960s that was a wonderful, full-colour romp. She describes her guest appearances on some of the most celebrated shows of the decade — The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Monkees — as “a great feast which you’re invited to for a week. You allow it to happen to you.
Doing The Monkees was a piece of heaven.”
Over time, Newmar – who has one son from her seven-year marriage to Texan lawyer John Holt Smith – realised she had a gay fanbase, too. She made a cameo appearance in the 1995 drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and danced alongside Linda Evangelista and Tyra Banks in the video for George Michael’s 1992 single Too Funky, orchestrated by fashion designer Thierry Mugler.
“It was an extraordinary event,” she says. “Mugler had this grand idea. The producer collapsed in my arms after two-and-a-half nights of shooting this spectacle which went over $1m and just wasn’t coming together. Finally, George Michael took over and it turned out wonderfully.”
Michael is gone now, as are all her old Batman castmates except Burt “Robin” Ward, but Newmar remains gloriously vital. “You have to think of yourself as eternal and not worry about death,” says the cosmic Catwoman. “There’s two things I consider very important in my 80s. One is integrity: everything you do, think or write has to be with integrity. And the other thing is kindness. That’s it.”