matthew’s alibi

Julie Andrews speaks at Royce Hall during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Photo © Jasula via Flickr

The main reason to come back to the festival for the second day, as far as I’m concerned, was Julie Andrews. Sure, she’s a festival staple, but I’m not interested in hearing her read children’s books, I want the dirt behind Mary Poppins.

Well, Julie Andrews’ new autobiography, Home, is presumably a volume 1, as it stops short of the world’s favorite nanny. It ends, in fact, shortly after an offer from Walt Disney himself to come out to California to “hear some of the music for a new movie.”

But amazingly, Disney’s offer is not the most Cinderella-esque feature of her early life.

Andrews, it turns out, had a pretty grim upbringing: hiding out in the subways as the bombs ravaged Britain, touring the country in a barely-making it family Vaudeville act, and compensating on the stage for a father who was sometimes too drunk to work.

But, amidst the hard times, there were some really remarkable events. Andrews described meeting the Queen Mum (the Queen at the time) when she was only 10 years old. She was the youngest performer ever to play a command performance for the royals. And, when she was playing a panto (Cinderella, of course) in London, she was seen by some New York producers, who cast her for the soon-to-be smash Broadway play The Boy Friend.

Then, just when her run in the show was ending and she was ready to go home to her family in England, she got a call from the representative of a couple of Broadway tune smiths named Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who wanted her to hear a few songs from their upcoming musical My Fair Lady. Which is where she was seen by Walt Disney.

But there were plenty of hard times first; Andrews said “I thought I knew a lot [about my own life], and I did,” but she said she found some extra perspective on it by writing her story down and then re-reading her own account.

Interviewer Patt Morrison asked her what sort of things she had realized. “I thought I had a very happy childhood, and to my surprise, I found out maybe I didn’t. I kept telling my daughter, ‘I hope this isn’t too depressing…’.”

Andrews reports that many years ago, she had been approached by a publishing house to write her autobiography, and she had thought at the time that if she ever did, it would be “for my grandchildren,” and she didn’t see the point in publishing it.

Later, she said, re-reading Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, she realized that by telling the story of her childhood, she could document a part of theater history in an entertaining way, as Hart did. Andrews’ book is about the last days of Vaudeville; when the glamor was starting to fade, the theaters were becoming run down, but television had not yet taken over as the primary entertainment medium.

She may have underestimated the interest in her life; this week, her book hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Andrews, as you might imagine, is the very paragon of style and class. She’s totally enchanting, and it’s easy to see why she’s popular with such a wide cross-section, from gays to grandmas. She speaks with thoughtfulness and polish, moves with grace, and laughs with a throaty naughtiness when she tells stories like the one she told on Sunday about her preparations to go topless for the movie S.O.B., or when describing the flatulence of My Fair Lady co-star Rex Harrison.

She is willing to make fun of herself (as when she imitated her first, admittedly lousy, performance on the legitimate stage, in a bad Tennessee accent, with lines like “you cain’t die, Joe!” and “[I'm] jes’ skimmin’ rocks on Turkey Creek!”), but equally aware of her legacy. When Morrison asked Andrews whether she had negative feelings about subsequent actresses who played Eliza, Andrews answered humbly that she considered herself lucky to have been chosen to be in the original cast of what was one of the greatest musicals of Broadway’s golden age.

(Morrison was one of the better interviewers I saw over the weekend, but she seemed a little murky on My Fair Lady - she asked Andrews at one point to confirm whether she was the first actress to “sing” the Shaw play. Also, Wikipedia says it’s Morrison’s trademark, but where I come from, it’s considered good manners to take your hat off when you enter a theater, and always when you’re interviewing Julie Andrews.)

Andrews said she’s often asked for advice by young people, and she says she advises them to think of themselves at the center of the pie. She says she tells them to pick out the things they’re interested in, the things they might want to do, and envision each of them as a radius from their place at the center. In that way, she says, no matter which direction you choose, it’s a direction you like. And, when you veer off, you’ll be in another direction that you like.

I’ve found myself thinking about that advice several times over the past two days; it’s some of the soundest I’ve heard for creative, ambitious young folks. Half the time, it seems like my biggest enemy is that I have so many interests and so much I want to do with my time that I end up feeling overwhelmed and don’t do much of anything. Or, that I’m not satisfied only doing what will fit into a day. But Andrews says, line up the options you like most, and then go full force in one of the directions. Sounds like a plan.