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When she was twelve, her stepfather, "a whiz at selling anything," got Julie a spot with the "Starlight Roof" revue at the London Hippodrome. On her first night she stopped the show with an incredible F above high ¶in Titania's aria in Mignon. Immediately, her parents' agent, "Uncle Charlie" Tucker, moved in, arranged to get Julie's buckteeth straightened. Within a year, she was belting out her "bastardized opera" in a special command performance. "You sang beautifully, Julie," Her Majesty, now the Queen Mother, told her. She had become, at 13, the family's prime breadwinner.
It was suggested at the time that Julie go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; she would undoubtedly have been the better actress for it. But Mum ruled that practical experience was best. "We decided," she says, "that a little toughening up as far as the theater world was concerned would be good. So we took her into our act. Let's face it: it didn't hurt the act either. Of course, we weren't always in the same show." One summer at the resort of Blackpool, for instance, "we were on the pier, and she was in the big theater in town, really a step above us."
Gawking Soon. Meanwhile, Ted Wells saw to it that neither Julie nor her younger brother John lacked for his companionship. He frequently took the children picnicking, boating, swimming, climbing. Says Wells, 58, who now lives in rural Oakley, 40 miles southwest of London: "When I realized that she had this gift, I felt that she needed some kind of antidote to the artificiality of the stage. I remember when she was singing at the Winter Garden in Bournemouth, I went down with John to visit her. It was a blowy, gusty sort of day, and when I asked them what they wanted to do, they chose the beach. It was deserted; we improvised a shelter, then we splashed into the wild sea. Or evenings, boating on the Wey River, those two would literally fight for the privilege of taking the oars. To this day, Julie is naturally a country girl. There is nothing she likes better than to get down here, tramping about, shedding it all, serving tea with the local ladies at a cricket match."
Soon Julie was playing the prestigious pantomime circuit—Britain's traditional holiday-season pageants for children. During the run of a Christmas "panto" in London, she met Tony Walton, who was 14 and, coincidentally, also nailed from Walton-on-Thames (though there is no connection between the family name and that of the town). She remembers Tony as "one of three goons from home" gawking from the front row. He remembers her "for those long, bandy, chocolate-covered legs."
Her career continued to blossom. "I thought I was the luckiest girl alive," she says. "I did not know it was bad for a young girl to be singing in a sophisticated revue." But Tony remembers that her diary in those days "was filled with fanciful images of what a beautiful, happy family life she had and what a glamorous existence she led, when in reality it was plenty seedy."