Julie Andrews

My Friend, Carol Burnett (Good Housekeeping, January 1972) from http://julieandrews.co.uk
By Julie Andrews as told to Joseph N. Bell

While we were doing our second television special in New York last summer, my friend, Carol Burnett, was invited to join Dick Cavett on his network talk show. Even though Carol and I had just spent ten hours together rehearsing, I turned on the telly in my hotel room because I never tire of watching Carol or listening to her ad-lib.

On this night, about halfway through the show, Cavett went to the audience for questions, and a young woman in the back row asked Carol if she would mind saying hello to her sister in Idaho. Sure would be exciting for her sister with all those millions of people watching, said the lady. Carol's been around this circuit. She knew what would follow that request. But she asked the sister's name, then looked directly into the camera and said hello to Idaho.

Instantly a hundred other hands shot up, and Carol was inundated with the names of cousins in Iowa and grandparents in Maine. She never flinched. She was rattling them off as fast as she could make out names until Cavett mercifully stepped in. If he hadn't, I suspect Carol would have gone through every state in the Union and half the countries of the world.

I might have made the first mistake, but after that I would have said, "C'mon, ask me something I can really answer." I would probably have been annoyed. But not Carol. Since that's what the audience asked of her, she responded willingly-and with grace. Few people really understand that Carol does practically everything with grace. Sometimes she tries to look and sound awkward and tell those outrageous stories about herself, but beneath the joking she's always a gracious lady.

I know. I've seen it again and again-even though our relationship has been somewhat intermittent. When we're working together, we're as close as two friends could possibly be for several months at a time. Then our paths separate, and we may go for months, even years, without seeing each other. But as soon as we get together again-well, almost as soon- the same chemistry starts working.

Our recent TV special started-as these things always do-with a lot of talk over a long period of time. It finally solidified into a concrete project last spring. There were a good many planning sessions with Carol's husband, Joe Hamilton, who was to produce the show. Then, in early summer, Carol and I got together in a CBS rehearsal hall to buckle down to serious business. It was the first time in the nine years that had passed since our first special that we had been in close, daily contact with each other. I don't know how Carol felt-I've never discussed it with her-but as I look back on it now, I know that we walked around each other a bit those first few days, very gently and warmly, but maybe a little warily, too. A lot had happened to both of us in those nine years, and it seemed we were asking each other, silently: Have you changed? What's really with you these days?, and: Are things going to be the way they were before?

Then, a few days into rehearsals, just like that, it all came together again and we were off and running. Although we both had new family responsibilities, we discovered that there was really nothing to brush aside before we found one another again. Then, it was fun; really fun. We worked like dogs from early morning right through lunch hour until about 4:30 every day. And then we had what Carol called our nervous breakdowns. By that time we'd worked so hard in such a concentrated way that madness would set in. Acting out relieved our tensions, and there was no more working after that, even when we tried.

That sort of thing doesn't come easy for me, and maybe that's the greatest gift Carol has given me, that sort of release. When we get together, it's rather like shucking off responsibilities and playing with one's best friend again. I get very bawdy when I'm around Carol (which is odd, since she's really something of a Puritan). She releases some inhibition in me. I'm not sure why.

Normally, when I work, I'm here and the audience is there, and I hope to hell that they'll like me-but I stay terribly reserved just in case they don't. Carol knocks that out of me totally, and I'm able to clown around without destroying my defenses, because I know I have an ally up there with me. I'm not frightened by an audience when I'm performing with Carol; I'm hardly aware of the audience. It's some weird thing that happens-and I know that with me a much more real quality comes through. God knows, Carol doesn't need this; yet I must give her something back, because so often I feel that magic happens when we work together. I felt it especially in the medley we did in our last show-both when we were doing it and when Carol and I saw a rough cut in Los Angeles a month after we'd finished shooting.

Joe and Carol came to our house for dinner that evening, and we talked about why Carol and I work so well together and decided it was because we are both rather "tacky" people. Carol maintained that I was the tackiest person she knows-in other words, deep down underneath, I was earthy and bawdy in spite of all those British inhibitions on the surface. And Joe said, "No, Carol is really the tacky one when all is said and done."

Which was interesting to me because I've never thought of Carol in quite that way. She constantly comes out with things that rock me because they are so funny, yet when I think about it, I've seldom heard her swear or use the sort of language that comes easily to me when I'm irritated or upset. She can be totally open on a show, wear what she wants, say what she likes, yet she's never an exhibitionist about it. And I've decided that it's simply because she's a lady with a very special kind of code that she never wears on her sleeve but which is always there.

I've never heard her mention religion or try to lay her thing-whatever it is-on anyone else. But the other day I made a phone call from her office at the studio and while I was standing there waiting for an answer, I noticed two prayers, typed and a little dog-eared, stuck up on her wall. It was a side of her I didn't even know existed, and I was quite surprised.

I don't really know why, but the greatest danger in trying to describe Carol is always that she'll come through as a sort of one-dimensional Goody Two-shoes, a modern Mary Poppins strewing goodness and light wherever she goes. Carol is so much more than that. She's complex and subtle and many-dimensional. She's wonderfully uninhibited, but she can also be a very private person. The surprises in her are hard to see and harder to describe to people who don't know her.

She loves, for example, to put herself down-something for which the performer's ego normally has a rather low toleration point. When she wrote about me in Good Housekeeping eight years ago, she described our first meeting, how she-the panic-stricken ingénue-was ushered into the presence of the Big Broadway Star-me. That's nonsense! True, I was in My Fair Lady, which was doing rather well at the time. But the only people who had heard of me were the relative handful who had seen the show. Carol was then playing the lead on Broadway in Once Upon a Mattress, but she had also built a huge following on the Garry Moore television show, and whenever we got together, she was the one who was recognized and fussed over, not me.

I'm no psychologist, but I suppose there's something of a defense mechanism involved in these self-put-downs. Whenever we take off on some famous team-Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, for example-she always impersonates the man. She simply assumes from the beginning that's the way it will be. And of course she goes out of her way to take on characters and costumes that keep her out of direct competition with the other beautiful ladies in the world; she's always happier in a charwoman's dress than in a ball gown.

I don't know any woman who wouldn't like to see herself as an exotic beauty-including Carol The difference, I suppose, is that most women kid themselves on the positive side while Carol does just the opposite. (She has a sign in her dressing room that says: "Don't Envy Me. It Isn't Easy Being a Sex Symbol.") I think she's beautiful, and so do a lot of other people I know. But Carol's own lack of assurance in that direction has often influenced her to cover up her own assets. It seems to me she is changing, though. She bothers more now than she used to, and although she dresses very simply, it is always in smashingly good taste.

There we come back to grace-and taste-again. And while we're pointing out that things aren't always the way they seem, you should know that I sweated profusely in those heavy costumes we had to wear for our last special, while Winifred the Woebegone never even got damp. You should know, too, that there's a devil-or perhaps a wicked little girl would be more accurate-behind that sincere exterior of Carol's.

Maybe you spotted a piece of it, if you saw the special. There's one number in which Carol has these huge, sagging bosoms built into her dress for a grande dame role in which, as usual, she looks a mess and I'm made up to look absolutely gorgeous. Every time she got into this costume during rehearsal, she'd do all sorts of outrageous things-like lifting her bosoms and wiping the perspiration under them. And her husband, who was on hand for all the work, would pretend apoplexy, shouting at her that she'd better not do anything like that when the show was filmed.

They tease one another as only two people who are very secure in their relationship can. Joe has been a marvelous influence in Carol's life in a rather paradoxical way. There is never any doubt about who is running things. Joe organizes Carol's time absolutely; yet he makes sure that a large part of it is left free for her children and family, and I know of no one with a more freewheeling, satisfying life than Carol.

But when Carol thinks Joe is leaning too hard, she has some rather potent retaliatory weapons-which she used in the saggy-bosom saga. Although she was always contrite after Joe chastened her during rehearsals, she followed the letter but hardly the spirit of his orders when we did the bosomy-dress number on the night of the show. Smiling benignly into the camera, she crossed her arms in front of her and squeezed. She simply had to do it. And she created the effect she wanted. Joe said afterward, "Damn that woman; I knew she'd get around it some way. She always does."

That doesn't mean, however, that she's self-indulgent or unprofessional. Never. When she does these things, they invariably turn out well, and I've never seen her do them at the expense of someone else. I remember with a little embarrassment when we were singing a song from Love Story and she bawled all over me and I tried to comfort her. Every time we rehearsed this scene, she ad-libbed outrageously, and it always broke me up. I was worried right up to the night of the performance that she might take even further license before a live audience. I should have known better. There's the kind of honesty about her that simply wouldn't permit that, because there was the chance that doing so might have thrown me. Instead, she scaled down her performance, as I should have known from the beginning she would do.

The same thing is true of dancing-only in reverse. For some reason, Carol feels I can pick up dance steps more quickly than she, and because she's a thorough professional, she simply isn't satisfied to fake any part of it. And so after a dance rehearsal, she would tell me to go off somewhere and do something else while she kept plugging away at the dancing. It means a great deal to her to get it right-to her satisfaction-and I have tremendous respect for her demands on herself.

In this carnivorous business we're in, there's absolutely no jealousy, no upstaging, no competition between Carol and me-and I'm not sure why. I suppose it could be because neither of us sees the other as a threat; we each have our own area in which we do reasonably well, yet I think we feel stronger when we work together.

That doesn't mean, however, that we fall all over each other all the time. Actually, we're constantly trying to put one another down in a nice way. Carol hates phoniness of any kind. She won't tolerate canned laughter, for example, and she hates false notes in human relations just as passionately. Still, it's very rarely you see her expose emotion in any sad way. Usually it's a funny way-like the story she tells over and over about falling in love with her doctor and going to him for a shot and trying to act nonchalant when he told her it would have to be in the fanny. When he finished, she got up, walked straight into his closet instead of the corridor, and huddled there for 15 minutes, too humiliated to come out.

But there's so much more to Carol than her delightful self-deprecation, even though this is all most of us ever see. Carol has a wall behind which she retreats, and I think there is one part of her always behind it. I like to feel that, because of our friendship, she sometimes takes me back there, but it hasn't happened very often.

I'm sure much of Carol's private world is built and populated from her early life, of which I know very little. Her parents were divorced when she was quite young and she moved from Texas to Los Angeles with her mother, who died a few years later. Carol lived with her grandmother and helped raise her sister in a rather modest Hollywood apartment house, and she must have done a lot of thinking about her mum in those years. In one of her rare moments of introspection-and I can't even recall now what brought it on-she choked up and told me, "It's times like this I wish my mother was alive. She was really some lady."

But our relationship isn't the soul-baring kind. Neither one of us is very good at that. I respect her private world, and she, mine. I have enormous regard for her as an individual, for the qualities that make her what she is. It's not just that we sing and dance and shout with one another. It's much more than that. I like her-as a friend and as a human being.

I guess that was true from the beginning, although I have a tendency to sniff around things longer than Carol might. When my agent got us together in New York ten years ago, because he thought we would like one another, I resisted in the same way my eight-year-old daughter resists having me introduce her to a new friend I think is just right for her. I met Carol with some trepidation, but-as Garry Moore said later-it was like two kids on the same block discovering each other for the first time. Although I liked her instantly, I didn't really think, at that first meeting, that we'd become the great friends we are now.

That relationship started when we worked together. I appeared with Carol for the first time on The Garry Moore Show for one simple reason: I needed the money. Also, they promised I wouldn't have to sing anything from Fair Lady. When Carol asked what I wanted to do, I cast around rather wildly and said I wanted to do a cowgirl because it was the most inappropriate thing I could think of. So we did the "Big D" number that went over so well that it later became the climax of our first TV special.

On The Garry Moore Show, Carol and I discovered we could work together really well; and during the rehearsals for the first special, we found we were also good friends. She was the first person I told when I suspected I was pregnant. I confided to her that I'd just sent off a specimen and if the little mouse died, I'd know for sure. And she said: "Send me a message, no matter where I am, when you find out."

It was several weeks after our show was televised that I got the work. I phoned CBS and was told Carol was rehearsing and couldn't come to the phone, so I asked the operator just to give her my message. Carol insisted that at one point all the loud speakers at CBS announced: "We have a message for Carol Burnett from Julie Andrews: The mouse is dead."

We kept in touch-but not that closely-during the years between our two specials. We saw each other when we could, but we were both going through some adjustments in our lives and going our separate ways. So when we got together four the special we just finished, both of us had very definite patterns to our lives-which was quite a contrast to the more-or-less carefree ladies we'd been nine years before.

This tine-at least during the preliminary rehearsals in Los Angeles-most of our talk was about children and families. Right in the middle of a number, Carol might say, "Oh God, I've got to make sure Carrie is picked up from school today," or I'd gasp and say, "Damn, I completely forgot Emma's dental appointment." And at the end of our working day each of us went back into her own private world to get children bathed and to bed and all that sort of thing. Carol used to say that the greatest luxury she could conceive was knowing that she had nothing to do the next day and could watch old movies on TV until four in the morning.

Then we went to New York to do the show, and for two weeks it was more like playing hooky than working. The two girls on the block meeting again, with their responsibilities 3,000 miles away. Gosh, it was fun; one round after another of one-upmanship-a game Carol doesn't lose very often. Like during the final rehearsal for our medley when she was singing so loudly-with her mouth right up to my ear-that she almost deafened me. Afterward, while I was trying to decide whether I would ever hear again, she put her hand on my shoulder and said to me, dead serious, "Don't worry, I won't fake it like that when we do the show!"

Yet we were ready to go bark to our families again and pick up that life when the show was finished-and there, I guess, is the difference between now and then. Hooky is fun, but our real lives are with our families I don't see Carol too often with her children, but when I do, I'm filled with admiration for her. She has great empathy with them, and when she tells me stories about them, the warmth and love spill out. During the earthquake we had here in Los Angeles last year, she and Joe were tumbled out of bed, and they raced off to the children, he to the two eldest, she to the baby, so they could collect them and all die together, if that was the way it was to be. Carol found her three-year-old wide-awake, bright and cheerful, watching her mother through the sides of a bed that was shaking like an aspen in a hurricane. As Carol grabbed for her, the child said, very clearly, "I've decided I want to wear my pink dress today." And the household panic stopped instantly.

Carol relates to her own children in the same warm, generous, outgoing way she relates to every human being I've ever seen her come in contact with. She has time for people, no matter how trivial or irritating their wants may be. I've never seen a chink in that attitude, and it definitely isn't a gimmick. That's just the way she is, and I guess I admire her all the more for it because I'm not capable of it myself.

I've been with her many times in restaurants or on the street when a crowd has gathered, and she has never ceased to be courteous. Generosity is simply a way of life with her, and I suppose it boils down to the simple fact that, as far as I've been able to discern, she genuinely likes people-all people. When she walks on a set or down corridors in a building where we may be working, everyone she meets calls her by her first name, and you can tell they adore her. And of course this is reflected in her work. She likes to be in touch-and people respond.

I've never seen her really angry. I asked Joe about this recently, and he said that when she is, she just becomes absolutely silent. But in all the time we've spent together, I've never seen this happen.

We've both matured, I hope, a good deal since we first met, but Carol hasn't really changed in any basic way-only that she's more sure of herself now, more secure in who she is and what she is about, in her work and her marriage and her children. I suppose that's the main reason she doesn't talk with me much about her past; I don't think one dwells on the past when one has such a satisfying present.

I hope we can continue to work together, for she enriches my life whenever we do. We'd love to do a movie together, and we have talked about it many times. Nothing firm, just talk. But we're looking for a property, and if we find one and it turns out anything like the TV specials, it would be the greatest fun in the world.

And I think it will turn out. Everything else we've wanted to do together has. I remember that during the first special nine years ago, Carol and I had an absolute fixation. We wanted to sing Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie. No one would hear of it, and so we reluctantly forgot about it until last spring, when we mentioned it once more. And again, no one would hear of it. But we kept plugging away, and when the planned finale didn't work, we persuaded Joe to let us try Nellie, fully expecting he would say, "No." But he didn't, and it was the most tremendous fun to do. That's the way it has been with everything Carol and I have ever done together. I have the feeling it will always be that way.

Article thanks to Michele Glaser

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