Becoming Eliza: early character publicity for My Fair Lady, January 1956
By the time My Fair Lady reached Broadway in March 1956, its visual world appeared fully formed: Cecil Beaton’s costumes, Oliver Smith’s sets, and Julie Andrews’s carefully calibrated transformation from Covent Garden flower girl to Ascot spectacle. The publicity portraits taken during rehearsals two months earlier tell a more provisional story — one of adjustment, exploration, and discovery — captured just weeks before the show encountered its first audiences.
Produced during January rehearsals in New York, these images formed part of the show’s early publicity campaign overseen by press agent Richard Maney (Maney 1957, pp. 219-220). Formally engaged by producer Herman Levin in late November and active from early January 1956, Maney would remain a constant presence throughout My Fair Lady’s Broadway run (McHugh 2012, p. 42). From the outset his task was paradoxical: to circulate press images that projected confidence and coherence even as the production’s visual identity was still being worked out.*
That tension — between fixity and experimentation — is visible across these character portraits. By this point, Beaton’s costumes were largely settled. Indeed, as profiled in an earlier post, Beaton had already staged a very early costume shoot with Andrews and Rex Harrison at Covent Garden in December 1955, before either star had even departed for New York. What remained fluid were the elements that would animate those costumes onstage: gesture, expression, lighting — and, most conspicuously, hair.
Across the portraits, Andrews’s Eliza appears in subtly different guises, with hair carrying much of the expressive work. In some images her hair is lighter, longer, and framed by pronounced side curls; in others the tone deepens, the silhouette tightens, and the look becomes more graphic. These variations register an ongoing negotiation about how Eliza should read visually — not only as a figure of transformation, but as a character legible at a glance. Levin himself suggested shifting Andrews’s hair toward “an auburn shade,” remarking that her natural colour seemed “rather drab” (quoted in McHugh 2012, p. 43). The creative team, meanwhile, continued to refine and “brighten” the tone, testing how hair, costume, and lighting registered together under stage conditions.**
The labour behind these refinements was substantial. Ernest Adler — signed in December to oversee “all hair stylings and coiffures” (McHugh 2012, p. 42) — assumed responsibility for one of the production’s most intricate, if frequently overlooked, design elements. Hair functioned not as ornament but as structure, shaping Eliza’s visual progression from street seller to society spectacle and requiring meticulous rehearsal at every stage.
Presiding over a complex system of wigs, falls, and hairpieces that demanded precision, speed, and constant adjustment, Adler regarded his work on My Fair Lady as his “greatest” achievement. He later recalled that the production spent thousands of dollars on hair alone, with entire ensembles — most famously in the 'Ascot Gavotte' — wearing custom-built coiffures integrated directly into their hats (Battelle 1957; Danzig 1957).
Adler took particular pride in Andrews’s coiffures for Eliza, noting that they were subsequently adopted by salons as everyday fashion. “She had eleven coiffures in that show,” he explained, “because each one had to progress as she became more and more like a lady” (Holmes 1961, p. 44).
In her memoirs, Andrews vividly recalled the labour this progression entailed:
My own hair was long, and pieces were added to it throughout the show as necessary. My first costume called for long, straggly curls beneath my shabby straw hat. Once Eliza was accepted into the Higgins household, I wore a long “fall” at the back of my head, attached with a velvet bow, followed later by a beautiful twisted chignon for the ballroom scene. I not only had costume changes, quick changes, the underdressing, but also hairpiece and hat changes, too (Andrews 2008, p. 199).
Julie was not the only performer negotiating hair-related contingencies. Rex Harrison, balding and long reliant on hairpieces, found himself temporarily without one upon his arrival in New York (Maney 1957, pp. 219-220). As Walter Winchell reported with relish in his syndicated gossip column, Harrison spent his first two weeks of rehearsals being photographed for publicity “indoors and out” wearing a hat, having informed Maney that his hairpiece had been delayed “in customs” (Winchell 1956).
Seen now, these rehearsal-era publicity portraits capture My Fair Lady in a state of becoming: images designed to stabilise an identity that was still being formed. They remind us that the show’s eventual visual coherence was not inevitable, but carefully constructed — strand by strand, image by image — under the pressures of rehearsal, publicity, and expectation.
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* Some of Maney's publicity images captured material that would soon vanish. A New York Times photograph published on January 1, for example, showed dancers rehearsing with choreographer Hanya Holm — almost certainly documenting the elaborate first-act transformation ballet that would be cut during the show's out-of-town try-out (McHugh 2014, p. 64).
** It is worth noting that the publicity portraits circulated at this stage present Eliza exclusively in her Act I, pre-transformation guise. The absence of her later Ascot and ballroom looks appears deliberate, preserving the visual impact of her metamorphosis for the theatre rather than the press.
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Andrews, J. (2008). Home: A memoir of my early years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Battelle, P. (1957, September 26). Ernest Adler does a wave in short time. The Cedar Rapids Gazette, p. 10.
Danzig, F. (1957, December 19). Ernest Adler can stake claim to Yankee Clipper. Daily News, p. 6.
Garebian, K. (1993). The making of My Fair Lady. Toronto: ECW Press.
Holmes, M. B. (1961, October 9). Hair stylist’s role important to a play. The New York Times, p. L-44.
Maney, R. (1957). Fanfare: The confessions of a press agent. New York, NY: David McKay Company
McHugh, D. (2012). Loverly: The life and times of My Fair Lady. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McHugh, D. (Ed.). (2014). Alan Jay Lerner: A lyricist’s letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winchell, W. (1956, February 20). On Broadway. News Journal, p. 14.
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