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One weekend she treated the whole cast to a bus trip from their Salzburg location to Munich to see Britain's Royal Ballet, and throughout the 60-mile ride did an uproarious imitation of an English tour guide. But she did not entirely win friends and influence coworkers. When she was guilelessly sweet, says one actor, she was almost too sticky. "Working with her," he said, "was like being hit over the head every day with a Hallmark card." At times, when she was working out a piece of business, driving single-mindedly for perfection, she struck some of the troupe as deceptively tyrannical. "She's like a nun," said one man, "with a switchblade." What showed on the screen, at any rate, was a zingy score, picture-postcard scenery and the warm story of the famed Trapp family who sang their way out of Nazidom. Julie saved the show from the supercilious performance of Co-Star Christopher Plummer who, behind everybody's back, referred to the film as "The Sound of Mucus." The picture fairly rocked with her personal magnetism. As one friend put it: "She came off looking like the world's most beautiful birthday cake."
Reserved Admiration. Sound of Music put Julie in the top-money class—$750,000 plus 10% of the gross—right after Audrey Hepburn and Liz Taylor and Shirley MacLaine, who command up to $1,000,000 apiece. It also entitled her to pick a wrongo for her next film. Hitchcock's Torn Curtain was a heavy Iron Curtain melodrama that Julie privately asked her friends to avoid. Still, largely because it stars Julie Andrews, Curtain is building up the biggest grosses for a straight drama in the Universal studio's history.
Hawaii was an extra challenge for Julie because, she explains, "I didn't feel completely in tune with the missionary lady I played. I admired her, but I had reservations. She has left a man she loves to marry a missionary, and when the lover returns and offers her another chance, she stays with the missionary. I don't know that I would have done that." She has reservations about the movie as a whole. But at least one rave from a member of her family has cheered her immensely. Says Ted Wells: "It was the first one that convinced me she could act in the movies. Everything else—Poppins, Sound of Music—has been a Cakewalk. This was the first time I could tell her, 'Now you're an actress.' "