Richard Stirling - Julie Andrews

An Intimate Biography

RICHARD STIRLING

St. Martins GriffinNew York

For Jamie

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1915

ON A June day in 1997, at Manhattans Mount Sinai Hospital, Scott M. Kessler MD started surgery on his patients throat. Removing a cyst seemed a relatively ordinary procedure, but there was nothing ordinary about the patient and everything extraordinary about the throat. For fifty years, the voice produced therein had given billions of people the sound of music.

Then suddenly, the rest was silence. Julie Andrews, the singing nun, would sing no more.

The vocal gift that had guided a bandy-legged little English girl from Walton-on-Thames on to the cinema screens of the world was gone for ever. And, in fighting back, the former Queen of Hollywood would need every scrap of the determination that had inspired one colleague to label her a nun with a switchblade.

Ive got a good right hook, she once told me. I believed her.

* * *

Julie Andrews, said Moss Hart, the director of her colossal stage hit My Fair Lady, has that terrible English strength that makes you wonder why they lost India. There can never be another career like hers. The music halls from which she sprang have disappeared. There are precious few screen musicals. And the values that shaped her talents are dead and gone.

It fell to Julie, by timing as much as talent, to buttress Old Hollywood against the winds of change. However, if the studio moguls saw her as their salvation, it was not long before they were disabused. In 1965, The Sound of Music rescued Twentieth Century Fox from bankruptcy. Three years later, Star! almost put the studio back under, and the leading lady of both films fell as spectacularly as she had risen. But, as a child of the London Blitz, this most unlikely film legend was always going to survive and, in 2000, like a respectable London store, she was granted a royal badge of honour to stick on her front. As Dame Julie Andrews, she now had the best role of her career.

The critic David Thomson once called Julies career evidence that people go to the cinema for reasons that escape me. According to Sir Richard Attenborough, however, the reasons were obvious: Julie Andrews is, quite simply, a phenomenon. She has probably brought more joy to more people than any other star of her generation. In the BBCs 2002 line-up of The 100 Greatest Britons, she was voted into the top sixty, the only actress in the list. At the same time, the success of The Princess Diaries and Shrek 2 unexpectedly restored her as a serious commercial prospect not bad for a lady whose film career was declared moribund thirty-five years earlier.

Wearing her three score years and ten lightly, Julie Andrews still convinces as a show-business Peter Pan. She has kept the figure of her salad days, standing 5ft 7in and weighing about one hundred and twenty pounds. Never a sex symbol (except perhaps to superannuated schoolboys), her long legs have always been rather too slim, her jaw slightly too strong, her size eight feet somewhat too large. Somewhere, too, is the very faintest hint of the gawky kid with the boss eye and teeth her mother once called the sort that could be cleaned with her mouth shut.

Yet she has always had a rare, vital beauty of her own. The retrouss nose still surprises, and the blue, blue eyes are as clear as ever. There are lines around them now, suiting her; otherwise, her skin is as smooth as her explanation for ageing so well: I dont think Id get up in the morning and give an interview without being a little prepared. I wouldnt want to frighten people... this business is all about image.

And her image is as a triptych: Eliza Doolittle, Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp in, respectively, the biggest Broadway hit of its day, an Oscar-winning screen debut and the most profitable movie then made. But, marvellous though the parts were, they only ever showed one side of Julie. There was still a long, long way to run.

* * *

Julie Andrews left the stage door of the Marquis Theatre on Sunday 8 June 1997, ending a seventeen-month run in Victor/Victoria, the Broadway version of her last film hit. Unknowingly, she had also ended her musical career.

During her final months, the star had missed more than thirty performances, suffering from bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia. The most persistent of her troubles, despite repeated medication from the well-reputed Dr Kessler, nephew by marriage to the opera star Beverly Sills, related to her throat. Half a century of singing had inevitably taken its toll. As far back as 1956, triumphant in My Fair Lady, Julie had been in a ragged state from night after night of belting. In 1960, her tonsils had been removed, which seemed to stand her in good stead for decades to come. But, even at the zenith of her fame, she admitted, singing has never been particularly easy for me.

By the opening of Victor/Victoria on 25 October 1995, days after her sixtieth birthday, the long-term prospects for Julies voice had been depreciating for some while. And after almost six hundred performances of the show, she was in deep trouble; a cyst had appeared on the left side of her throat. But, very soon after the subsequent operation at Mount Sinai Hospital, Julie sensed something else was wrong. During the procedure, she later told Larry King on CNN, a piece of my vocal cords was taken away... I get a kind of fried sound, and there are certain notes that just dont appear. They dont come.

Over the next year, everyone was quiet. Everyone waited. At the end of 1998, the star and her husband of three decades, Blake Edwards, appeared to be at odds over the issue. I dont think shell sing again its an absolute tragedy, he told Parade magazine in November. She was told shed be OK in six weeks, the voice would actually be better. Its over a year, and if you heard it, youd weep.

The tabloid press said she was furious with him a charge that Barbara Walters later put to her on ABC television. I guess because Im private, a very private person, said Julie, surprising nobody. Blake is completely the opposite and he just says what he feels.

Her friends were more circumspect. Robert Wise, the director of her greatest film success, confined himself to quoting publicly from a letter she had written him: As always, the wretched press have overblown facts to such an extent that everybody thinks Im practically at deaths door. So, dear friend... I think you know that I did have an operation on my vocal cords and certainly recovery has been very slow...

With time and perseverance, she hoped to sing again, though perhaps not The Sound of Music.

But, to Barbara Walters, Julie let the mask slip: to not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice which I have done all my life... I think I would be totally devastated. And, if things stayed that way, I think it will change something inside of me for ever.

She went to therapy but also bared her teeth. On 15 May 1999, the Guardian newspaper in England reported that Julie was considering action against the American magazine Globe, for publishing what her publicist Gene Schwam called the blatantly false headline that she had checked in to the Sierra Tucson clinic in Arizona to combat a drug dependency problem.