Practically perfect in every way.
I ran.
I got lost.
I ran the other direction.
Out of breath, I walked through the doors.
I didn’t eat dinner.
Oh well, I didn’t really care. I had a date with Julie Andrews.
“Hello Apollo people!” she greeted us, reminiscent of her line “Goodbye trolley people!” in The Princess Diaries.
A standing ovation ensued and there wasn’t a person around that didn’t have a goofy smile across their face.
“London is a charming place but it badly needs a roof, doesn’t it?” she said.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. The day had been filled with the kind of on-again-off-again showers that could drive you mad if you let it. For the next two hours I listened as she indulged me in her world of fame and music. And, because I am a journalist, I took notes.
While she is best known for her roles in Sound of Music and Mary Poppins (my personal favorites), the long story that got her to those roles made me admire her even more than I did before.
Learning that she could sing was a fluke; something to keep her occupied. At the age of eight, WWII had closed her school and her stepfather, Ted, and mother Barbara decided that Julie needed something to do during the day. A musical act themselves the couple soon learned of Julie’s “freakish” (as she called it) ability to sing four octaves.
Voice teacher Lillian Styles Allen knew she was something special. After chuckling and smiling as Julie performed an aria, Allen told Julie she didn’t want to coach her yet so that she could have a little bit more of a childhood. But, as you can imagine, she was uncontainable. Julie joined her mother and stepfather, making up the act of Ted, Barbara and Julie Andrews.
Eventually, after moving to New York and starring in several Broadway shows, Walt Disney visited her backstage and asked her to be apart of the first live action animated movie, Mary Poppins. The rest is history. But, I bet you didn’t know that Julie’s first husband Tony, a set designer, created main street, the inside of the Banks house and all the costumes for the movie.
Enter, Pamela Travers. I found it funny that Julie acknowledged the recent film Saving Mr. Banks as fairly accurate in the portrayal of Mary Poppins writer Pamela Travers. The day after giving birth to her first daughter Emma, Julie lay in the hospital and received a phone call from Ms. Travers. The author told her that she was “far too pretty but had the right nose” to play her beloved Mary Poppins.
But filming Mary Poppins was no “jolly holiday”. In order to ensure that the majority of the scenes were filmed, the more difficult stunts, such as the chimney sweep scene and flying on a cloud, were left until the last week. While being held up by pulleys and sandbags by a man in the back of the room, the harness gave way. Still levitating in the air Julie kindly asked that she be let down gently once the scene was over. As the message was relayed back to the operator she crashed to the floor.
“Is she down yet?” he yelled.
“There were multiple Anglo Saxon four letter words that had never been heard in Disney Studios and haven’t been since,” Julie said.
Along with her acting career, she was a member on the founding board of Operation USA, or as she calls it, “the little engine that can”. The organization helps communities at home and abroad overcome the effects of disasters, disease and endemic poverty by providing privately funded relief, reconstruction and development aid. She continues to serve on the board and travel to as many places as she can to see and help the cause. She and her daughter Emma also write and publish children’s books.
What astounded me most about this night was her air. She switched from being madly in love and married to her childhood sweetheart Tony Walton to the love of her life Blake Edwards without any hesitation. She is as poised, graceful and illuminating as she appears on the silver screen.
To cap the night off she sang her favorite Sound of Music song (and coincidentally, mine) Edelweiss with the audience.
I then floated home on Mary Poppins cloud.