The so-called Age of the Memoir has brought with it a wide variety of suspect motives for committing one's experiences to paper -- the desire for easy notoriety or family revenge, or the chance to pull off some unethical fabulism -- but in Julie Andrews' case, the goal was a little different.
"I wanted to write a memoir of what it was like to be around at the end of the vaudeville years in England," she said last week in conversation with Patt Morrison of The Times at a Town Hall's Writers Bloc event in Beverly Hills (the two women will revisit their chat on Sunday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA).
Even devoted Andrews fans may not know much about Andrews' history in vaudeville, that vanished diversion of the emerging Victorian-Edwardian middle classes that gave audiences everything from dancing poodles to slapstick comedy, and in Andrews' case, four-octave-range preteen singers. By age 12, the actress who would later rise to worldwide fame as Eliza Doolittle in the stage version of "My Fair Lady," then on film as Maria in "The Sound of Music" and, of course, as the original supernanny, Mary Poppins, was hitting a high F above C in a London musical review called "Starlight Roof." Her astonishing performances had British reviewers labeling her "the prodigy with pigtails." (Regrettably, she says, complications from surgery to her vocal cords in the late 1990s have left her vocally impaired.)
But, as "Home: A Memoir of My Early Years" explains, all was not precocious on-stage triumph for young Julie. In fact, while her evenings may have been ripe with song in a cavalcade of rundown English theaters, her days were characterized by wartime air raids, shaky finances, the specter of alcoholism, barely dodged molestation and uncertain parentage. If her first word was, as she reports on Page 1, "home," it eventually became a lament, shorthand for a childhood sacrificed to talent and other people's demons.
Her mother deserted the upstanding country schoolteacher who, for years, Andrews believed to be her biological father. The boozing troubadour with whom her mother then took up and married later made unsuccessfully lecherous visits to Andrews' bedroom. Then she learned that Dad actually wasn't -- that her birth had been the result of an adulterous tryst between her mother and a man whom Andrews is at one point introduced to, but whose identity we never learn.
The twin revelations of "Home" were tightly held secrets for Andrews until the book's publication this month. "I didn't speak of it until now because I didn't want to hurt the family," the 72-year-old dame commander of the British Empire said. This is an interesting admission, given that she also revealed that, in writing the memoir, extensive therapy had failed to completely resolve her family issues.
"I realized that I was still unconsciously angry with my mother," she said, after receiving a standing ovation from the Writers Bloc audience, who ranged in age from those who remember the Broadway run of "My Fair Lady" to those who know Andrews as Queen Clarisse Renaldi in "The Princess Diaries" movies.
Her fans have definitely gotten behind the memoir -- it shot to the top of the bestseller lists, and this Sunday it will top out at No. 1 among hardcovers tracked by the New York Times. "The success of the book has been dreamlike," she said. "But I've had a fairly acute shyness and reserve all my life, and now I've said to myself, 'Oh, my God, I've got to talk about it!' "
"Burn After Reading," a dark spy-comedy by Oscar-winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen, will open this year's Venice Film Festival.
