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In November 1951 Julie opened in her second hit. John Van Druten, who was casting I Am a Camera, an episodic play about a young English writer and an amoral, intellectual girl in the Berlin of the decadent early-thirties. Sally Bowles was a hippy little chippy with a roll in her eye; Julie was no "relief map" and anything but a fast girl with a garter; but on opening night she was such an extravagant titter that the comedy ran on Broadway for almost eight months, and Julie won another Donaldson award, this time as best actress of the year.
As her career was building up, her marriage was breaking down. "Jay and Julie gave each other everything they had," says a friend, "and it wasn't enough." In the summer of 1954, after making East of Eden in Hollywood, Julie got a divorce in Juarez, Mexico. Two months later, while working in England on the film version of I Am a Camera, she was married to Gurian, stage manager of the show.
No Words. The time had been trying. Julie was not a type to change husbands casually. She was emotionally exhausted. One night she fell asleep while eating dinner and toppled off her chair onto the floor. She was already committed to rehearsals for The Lark, but her husband insisted that she rest -and then she found out that she was pregnant. The Gurians had a long loaf in Barbados, came back to New York to have the baby. "It's a boy -Peter," she wrote a friend, "and he is lovely lovely lovely -there aren't any words." She took care of him herself from the first day she was home from the hospital. "I had to convince myself that I should go back to the theater," she says. "I found out that I was happy just being a mother."
Rehearsals for The Lark began Oct. 3, but Julie had been building what she knew to be her stiffest part, line by line, for more than a year. She read dozens of books and plays on her subject, but the literary and theatrical Joan she found impossibly confusing. Shakespeare had made her an unwed mother, Schiller a sort of Carmen on horseback. Mark Twain wrote her up, so Shaw remarked, as "an unimpeachable American schoolteacher in armor," and Shaw himself presents her as a political tomboy and "the pioneer of rational dressing for women." Anouilh used her in his play, which was intended as a sort of poetic recruiting poster, as a medieval Marianne waving the bleu-blanc-rouge and calling all Frenchmen to their former greatness. Julie went back to the historical Joan, and found her an even more prodigious figure of unreason -a military saint whose wounds miraculously healed when she prayed, an unlettered peasant girl with a genius for artillery. She was "belle et bien formee" but when she came in the door all sexual desire went out the window.