Julie Andrews is standing in the dark in a Broadway house in 1956, waiting on a cue, twenty years old, with a whole show about to be hung on her diction. My Fair Lady. She'd already done the thing you only get to do once — her first Broadway opening in The Boy Friend, in 1954, the night before her nineteenth birthday, which is a sort of present nobody can wrap. Then two and a half years of Eliza, eight a week. People talk about that voice as though it arrived finished. It arrived early, which is different, and then it got worked.
Cut to a television studio, spring of 1957, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella, written for her, going out live. No second take. Cameras on cables, floor crew crouched out of frame, a stage manager counting. Something like a hundred million people watching it happen at the same moment, which is a number I can't really hold in my head — in my house a full night is three hundred and twenty seats and a queue for the ices.
She was born in Walton-on-Thames in 1935. When the film of The Sound of Music came round, we ran it for weeks and I learned to tell from the booth which song was coming by how the audience went quiet. They went quietest before she sang, not during.
Constance, the touring child's meal is its own thing — something hot between the matinee and the evening, eaten standing up in a corridor, nothing that sits heavy because you've got to breathe in an hour. Years of that before anyone hears a finished note.
She wrote children's books too, as Julie Edwards — Mandy, and then The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, which is a word I'd keep whatever the book was like. I've had two copies of the Whangdoodles through the shop and both were read to pieces at the spine.