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The only real crisis of Julie's childhood was The Crash of 1929. When the dust had settled, a few servants were gone, but there were still plenty left. Daylong Julie played on the wide lawns that ran down to Lake St. Clair. In the winter there was skating on the lake, and in summer the whole family moved to the exclusive Huron Mountain Club, set in a tract of virgin wood and trouty freshet. "She was such a normal little girl," her mother remembers. However, there were suggestions of sensibility. When anybody told ghost stories she was an easy haunt, and to this day she is afraid to put her feet on the floor when she is alone in a room at night -a disembodied hand, the subject of a radio thriller she heard when she was twelve, might come crawling across the carpet and grab her ankle.
Ape & Lady Bracknell. The movies caught her imagination early. What she saw on the screen she became in real life -at least for the rest of the day. After the weekly Weissmuller, she and her two brothers played Tarzan in the sumac ("I was an ape"). As the movie-madness grew, she became Vivien Leigh, Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland. She filled dozens of scrapbooks with pictures of her favorites. The high point of her girlhood came when a schoolboy said she reminded him of Bette Davis. Gone With the Wind she saw 13 times, and in one month of 1942 she sat through 52 motion pictures.
At six Julie went to dancing class, and from the first she took leads in the plays at Grosse Pointe Country Day School, where she made a perky, 90-lb. Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. She always had a curious sensation of being more alive when she was playing somebody else than when she was being herself. At eleven she confided passionately to the Harris cook: "I'm going to be an actress -or bust!"
The acting, she now recalls, made up for everything: bird-legs, teeth braces and no beaux. "The only boys who liked me were characters -you know, intelligent. I wanted one like Robert Taylor." At 16 she heard about an acting camp in Colorado run by Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield, and there was no holding her. For three summers in a row she ran off with almost all the best parts. "At night I dreamed about being a great star like Bernhardt," she says. Nor was Bernhardt enough in those days; she also intended to be Pavlova. Her family had taken her to the Ballet Russe. "When Eglevsky leaped, I used to shriek the way other little girls did at Sinatra."
First Joan. From histrionic heaven she was sent straight to scholastic hell: a better-class boarding school in New England. "It was all girls." Next fall she persuaded her family to send her to Miss Hewitt's Classes in Manhattan, where she took Broadway for her major subject. For the drama class she played Shaw's Saint Joan, and was offered a Broadway job as an understudy, but her parents said she was too young (18) to quit school.