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Memorable Moments. It was Julie's all-conquering way with children that helped make Sound of Music such a smash. Take that stormy first night when she moves in as governess to the Trapp children, as mean a bunch of brats as ever suffered under a tyrannical father. On that night, thunder shakes the Schloss. In terror, the seven kids sneak into Julie's bedroom. She hauls the lot of them into her bed and heart, lullabying away their fears and wringing tears from the audience. The movie is about to become the alltime moneymaker in film history, beating out Gone With the Wind, which grossed $41 million in five different releases over a period of 27 years. Sound has done it in only 22 months, strictly on a reserved-seat basis in 53 cities.
Hawaii, her latest movie, also has its memorable moments, and most of them are Julie's. Her cool portrayal of the wife of an ascetic missionary underscores the hopelessness of the life she has chosen, and the scene in which she gives birth is so harrowingly realistic that it surely must stir remembered pain among the women in the audience. Not surprisingly, ticket buyers are streaming into Hawaii like lava.
It would be too much to expect of any human being that a gene like Julie's could develop its magic without encountering a patch of resistance. And only in Hollywood, where the reigning pop art is armchair psychiatry, would the inmates feel free to probe for it. Thus the diagnosis is that Julie 1) never had a childhood, and 2) became a star before she became a person. As it happens, there is rough truth here. Julie has been in show business for 19 of her 31 years. She has known scarcely any kind of life except footlights and make-believe.
Immature Yma. She was born in October 1935 in Walton-on-Thames, a flat green middle-class suburb 30 minutes by train from London. Her father, Ted Wells, a brisk, resolute, intelligent man, was a manual-training teacher; her mother Barbara was a piano accompanist who was caught up on the periphery of vaudeville. They were divorced when Julie was four.
And then, says Julie, "a personality as colorful and noisy as show business itself came thundering across my childhood." He was a boisterous Canadianborn tenor named Ted Andrews. Mum and Andrews got married and formed a vaudeville team, touring the provinces from Brighton to Aberdeen. "We were never top of the bill," recalls Barbara. "After all, we were musical, not comedy, and the comedians got the best billing. But we were the second feature, a good supporting act with a drawing-room set and ballads—nice family-type entertainment."
During the London blitz, the Andrews family moved to Kent and Julie took her stepfather's name. She recalls that Ted Andrews gave her voice lessons "in an attempt to get closer to me." It was then that her parents discovered that Julie had more than just an ordinary gift. "I had an enormous freak voice with a range of four octaves," she says. "I sounded like an immature Yma Sumac."*