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After Miss Hewitt's she got a good small part on Broadway in It's a Gift. "Talk began to go around," says Director Anthony, "about this scrawny creature with such extraordinary power." She was hired by the Old Vic as an onstage moan in Oedipus. One night she forgot to take off her wristwatch before her big scene, and after it Sir Laurence Olivier, well aware that the Greeks did not have wristwatches, remarked with chill politeness: "Well, my dear, you certainly bitched that up." '
After that came a summer of stock in Bridgton, Me., and before the summer was over, she also read her lines before a justice of the peace with Jay Julien, a young lawyer-producer (his latest play: A Hatful of Rain).
Back in New York she joined the Actors' "Studio, and had three small parts on Broadway. "I was using my guts, all right," she says, "but not my head. I hadn't learned the difference between inspiration and technique. In The Young and Fair she played a boarding-school kleptomaniac, and under Harold Clurman's direction she began to meld emotion with intelligence. On opening night she stopped the show with her big scene.
Exquisite Problem. The lightning had struck, and as Julie's fame flickered hopefully, Director Clurman poured on it some explosive material: the part of Frankie in Carson McCullers' Member of the Wedding. It was make or break for Julie. At 24, she was asked to play a girl of twelve, a poor little nobody-wants-it that has just burst angry out of the egg to stagger about on guessing feet, with one world in pieces behind it and the next not yet ready to offer its warm wing. The part was cruelly long and difficult, and the actress found herself braced between fierce tensions. The mood was Tarkington, but it was Proust as well. Frankie was a kind of kitchen Hamlet but a kind of failed Huck Finn besides, and almost more boy than girl. She was the apotheosis of the awkward age, and an ungentle reminder that it may last from 8 to 80. She was, in short, the hurt little truth about growing up, and it was Julie's exquisite problem to make people laugh at her and cry at themselves in the same breath.
She did. She saw in Frankie a magnificent chance to suffer the unhappy childhood she had been denied, and she suffered it right down to her dirty toes. As she splattered through her supper, grumped at cards, slashed about the kitchen with a carving knife or preened luridly in a grown-up's party dress, the wound of adolescence opened slowly on the stage for all to see. At season's end she got a Donaldson award as the year's best supporting actress. A year later she went to Hollywood to make the movie version.
Best Actress. In the land where girls are classed as oranges, grapefruits and lemons, Julie on her own report was received as "a strange object." On the set she scuffed about barefoot "to get into the mood for the part." A columnist reported that whenever Director Fred Zinnemann made a suggestion, she would say quietly: "This is the way we did it in the play." He would retire and the shooting would continue. Offstage she lived "a monastic life," although she did at last get to meet Bette Davis. "She was wonderful!" says Julie. "She looks just like she does in the movies."