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"The Terror." In 1953, Vida Hope, director of the London musical hit, The Boy Friend—a campy spoof of the 1920s—offered Julie the lead in the Broadway company. "My first thought," she remembers, "was 'Oh, good Christ, the idea of leaving my home and family'—I couldn't do it." But she tried the idea on "my Dad—my real Dad—the wisest and dearest man I knew." Said Dad: Take it. On the night of the New York opening, Julie turned 19—and the critics turned out the superlatives. She was a star.
But she did not live like one. For one thing, she was always too homesick and broke. About two-thirds of her $400 weekly salary went to taxes, to her manager and to her family (John, two half brothers, a half sister, as well as her mother and stepfather). Much of what she had left she spent on phone calls back to Britain. Her half brother Donald still tells how he used to kick the family Welsh corgi, Humpty, to make him bark a transatlantic hello.
"Stolen Time." Clowning as a flapper was one thing. Carrying the difficult role of Eliza in My Fair Lady demanded a depth that Julie had to struggle to reach. It was almost a year after Boy Friend opened that she was offered the part in Fair Lady—and she nearly threw it away, so intimidated was she by the awful challenge of the trinity of Rex Harrison, Director Moss Hart and George Bernard Shaw. When she failed to get a fix on the mercurial part of the cockney flower girl, Director Hart put Julie through what he called 48 hours of "the Terror."
"It was the sort of thing," Hart said later, "that you couldn't do in front of a company without destroying a human being. We met in this silent, lonely, dark theater, and I told her, 'Julie, this is stolen time—time I can't really afford. So there can be no time for politeness, and you mustn't take offense, because there aren't any second chances in the theater. There isn't time to sit down and do the whole Actors' Studio bit. We have to start from the first line and go over the play line by line.' " And so they worked, Julie rehearsing, Hart cajoling, pleading, threatening. "You're not thinking," he would say. "You're just oozing out of the scene. You're not sustaining it. You're gabbling. You haven't any idea how to play that. You're playing this like a Girl Guide." After the second late night, reported Hart, Julie came through with "that terrible English strength that makes you wonder why they lost India."