Stars: The Now & Future Queen

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A worse disappointment was the news from Hollywood. Jack Warner, who had paid $5,500,000 for the film rights to My Fair Lady, did not want Julie for Eliza; it was the simplest sort of Hollywood economics: by Hollywood calculations, she was not an important enough marquee name to risk in a major film. Audrey Hepburn got the part, but though her performance was admirable, her cockney character lacked the wondrous snippety snarl that Julie had given the role; Eliza's singing, moreover, was largely a product of outside dubbing, and short of Julie's performance at that. In any event, Julie bore Hepburn no grudge, although on many occasions later, while driving past the Warner studios, she would give out with a ladylike war whoop and cry, "And a good morning to you, Mr. Warner, and the best of luck!"

Consolation Oscar. For a little bit of luck, up popped Walt Disney, who wanted Julie to play Mary Poppins and Walton to do the set and costume-design. Julie was dubious. Recalls Julie's pal Carol Burnett: "She asked me, 'Do you think I ought to? Go to work for Walt Disney? The cartoon person?' " Carol assured her that Disney did indeed do other things besides cartoons. Later, Julie got a telephone call from Poppins' author, Pamela Travers. "P. Travers here," said P. Travers briskly. "Speak to me. Can you be tough? Can you be tender?"

She was both, and an Oscar winner to boot, although there was no doubt that the award was at least partly a consolation prize from Hollywood sentimentalists who thought Julie should have got the film role in Fair Lady.

Despite Poppins' success, Julie fretted "that everybody will think I'm a square." It was a fair fret: they did. Suddenly Americans saw her, says Carol Burnett, as "Gwendolyn Goody Two-shoes." Julie began to worry about being typecast, doomed to be always the governess, never the mistress. She saw the humor in the sudden rash of bumper stickers: MARY POPPINS is A JUNKIE (her friend Mike Nichols affixed one to her car), but it didn't console her much at all. It was largely in an effort to change the image that Julie took on a straight role in The Americanization of Emily. She played a freshly widowed World War II British Army chauffeur whose notion of rest and rehabilitation for the wounded went considerably beyond TV and touch football. Her loyal friends say that she never performed better, but Julie, perhaps her own best critic, is convinced that she was "rather lost."

Frenzied Flamenco. By the time she was ready for Sound of Music, Julie was showing new attack and authority in her work. She knew when a page of script somehow didn't play right. And she insisted on sound-track retakes when everybody else was satisfied, frequently drove some of the crew members up the wall with frustration over her demands for perfection. Between takes, she was the old Julie, cutting an incongruous figure in her postulant's costume and behaving like an old busker: hammering out a furious Hawaiian War Chant, whistling through her teeth, clacking out a frenzied flamenco, tossing off bawdy songs, warbling Indian Love Call, and hitting a clinker at just the right moment.