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"Good Trouper." By the time Fair Lady opened in New Haven, Julie was the onstage backbone of the show and a walloping hit. Backstage she was the funny bone of the company—brewing up high tea every afternoon, expertly picking every pocket in the cast, bounding into her old music-hall routines. Everyone but Harrison was amused, but in the New York premiere he, too, came to appreciate Julie. As the stage manager recalls it, during the first act when Eliza, Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering fall back on the couch together after The Rain in Spain, Harrison suddenly dried up. He couldn't remember his next line, and the audience held its breath—until Julie grabbed hands and pulled them back to their feet. "Let's take a little bow, boys," she chirped. They did—and Harrison picked up his line. The house broke up and then just relaxed and capitulated to what was to become the longest-running musical in Broadway history—2,717 performances.
Says Harrison, in what must pass for overbrimming enthusiasm: "One thousand performances over three years is three thousand hours: four months and five days of 24 hours a day—I had my secretary figure it out one day. That is quite a hell of a long time to have vis-à-vis with somebody. Through summers hot, winters cold, that sort of thing. Julie was always, always—a very boring old word—a good trouper. She plowed on through thick and thin. Highly professional from the word go." Characteristically, Julie says of it all: "You know, I never got that part under control."
Street Arab. Toward the end of her Fair Lady run, Julie and Tony Walton got married. He had become a noted stage and costume designer in London, and for a brief moment Julie considered retiring. "But," as Tony says, "work was the only thing she knew." And besides, Moss Hart, with Lerner and Frederick Loewe, authors of My Fair Lady, wanted Julie to play opposite Burton in Camelot, a stylish retelling of the Arthurian legend. Camelot lacked the magic of Fair Lady, but audiences loved it. Julie had a ball too. Recalls Burton: "One night a large, woolly dog in the show elected to empty himself in a huge lump in center stage. In full view of the audience, Julie danced around it singing 'It's May! It's May! The merry month of May!' And the look she gave the audience when an actor read the next line, 'I think there's a hint of summer in the air,' had me and the audience in hysterics. She's as wicked as a street Arab."
Offstage as well. Once Burton phoned her out of the blue: "I don't think you should say those awful things about me," he kidded. "I hear you said you were the only leading lady I hadn't slept with." Replied Julie sweetly: "Richard, do you think that I'd want that sort of thing to get around?" But, inevitably, the kidding had to stop. Camelot, despite the big names, did not live up to the extravagant expectations; it was too much a light opera, too little a musical comedy. Julie decamped after 18 months.