#mfl60

[paralleljulieverse]

“Next week on the 20th of May, I proclaim ‘Liza Doolittle Day!”

Julie Andrews as Eliza Dolittle on the cover of Tatler, June 1958. Photograph by Cecil Beaton.

[paralleljulieverse]

London theatres have an age-old tradition of hosting special gala performances of long-running shows in support of various public charities or philanthropic causes. Typically presided over––or at the very least sponsored by––a royal patron, these galas rose to prominence during the reign of Queen Victoria and were, by the start of the twentieth century, a regular highlight of the London social calendar (Bevan, 15ff). Ticket prices for these galas were generally more expensive than for regular performances––sometimes, exponentially so––with the increased profits boosting funds for the designated charity. 

As the biggest London show of 1958, My Fair Lady was the recipient of several gala benefits, especially in the summer season immediately following its smash opening at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. In a previous post we profiled two of the earliest and most prominent galas attended by the Queen and Princess Margaret, respectively. Sandwiched in between these twin royal performances was another gala benefit on 14 May in support of the Royal Alexandra and Albert School, an establishment in Surrey for the educational care of orphaned children.

Nearly all the gala performances of My Fair Lady had bespoke souvenir programmes designed for them, with advertising space serving as a further form of fundraising. For the most part, these programmes were pretty sober affairs, aesthetically-speaking, with a plain, text-dominant design that reflected the convention-bound dynamics of royal protocol. The programme for the Royal Alexandra and Albert School Gala is a standout exception to this trend. 

With a striking trichromatic layout of blacks, blues and browns, the programme is a captivating exemplar of fifties graphic design at its stylish best. It was produced by Downton Advertising, a Fleet Street agency that had strong connections with the British entertainment industry––they designed most of the film posters for Rank during the mid-century, for example (Branaghan, 118ff)––and it exhibits the agency’s characteristic flair for simple but eye-catching composition. The cover sports a stylised reworking of the classic Hirschfeld marionette logo from the show’s original poster and the internal layout continues with double-page spreads featuring a thematic collage of hand-drawn illustrative motifs and photographic cutouts. It is, in our opinion, among the nicest of any programme design used for My Fair Lady. 

Sources:

Bevan, Ian. Royal Performance: The Story of Royal Theatregoing. London: Hutchinson, 1954.

Branaghan, Slim. British Film Posters: An Illustrated History. London: BFI, 2006.

© 2018, Brett Farmer. All Rights Reserved

[paralleljulieverse]

Stage Door Julie

Julie Andrews at the Artists’ Entrance of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane during the London run of My Fair Lady (1958/59)

[paralleljulieverse]

As the hottest West End show of 1958, My Fair Lady attracted its share of celebrity theatregoers in the weeks, months, and, indeed, years following its spectacular London opening, sixty years ago this week. Without doubt, the most high profile visitor to Drury Lane was the Queen herself who presided over a Royal Gala Performance on May 5 in aid of King George’s Pension Fund for Actors and Actresses. 

Looking resplendent in a full-length evening gown of silver lame with a white fur stole and diamond tiara, the Queen arrived at Drury Lane amidst a flurry of reporters and onlookers. She was accompanied by husband Prince Philip, first cousin Princess Alexandra, and Chief Lady-in-Waiting, Lady Pamela Mountbatten (Tanfield, 12). It was the Queen’s first public engagement following a respiratory illness that had kept her bed-bound for over a week and, such was the interest of the time in royal minutiae, that press reports noted how Her Majesty “coughed several times” during the performance (“Queen, All A-Glitter,” 9). 

The press also made much about the show’s celebrated use of mild profanity in the Ascot scene when Eliza screams, “Come on, Dover, move your bloomin’ arse!” This comic line was one of several innovations by Alan Jay Lerner to  the source script of Shaw’s Pygmalion as the original line––“Not bloody likely”–– was deemed too mild for a 1950s musical (Goring 5). It seems impossibly quaint today but there was quite passionate public debate as to whether such vulgarity was fit for royal ears with some suggesting the line be dropped for the Royal Performance (“Fears,” 11; Goring, 5). In the end, it remained in the show and newspaper reports recount that:

During the Ascot scene when THAT word which was intended to shock was uttered by Julie Andrews the Queen sat bolt upright without smiling while Prince Philip laughed heartily and Princess Alexandra put up her gloved hand to her face” (“Queen, All A-Glitter,” 9).

Whether in spite or because of such earthy comedy, the Queen enjoyed My Fair Lady enormously with one account reporting that she "laughed and applauded as delightedly as the rest of the gala charity benefit audience” (“Did Queen Blush,” 1). Another noted pointedly how the Queen and Prince “laughed gayly when Eliza’s father...staggered out of a stage pub and told the landlord to ‘send the bill to the palace’” (“Queen and Prince Laugh Gayly,” 11). 

With all the attendant ceremony, Royal Performances can be notoriously protracted affairs and it was nearly midnight before the audience sang “God Save the Queen” to mark the close of the public part of the evening (“Queen and Prince Laugh Gayly,” 11). As is customary, the Royal Party then went backstage to greet the cast, where the Queen is reported to have remarked, “I simply loved the show...it is very gay”. She asked Julie “how she kept up the cockney accent so well” to which, with typical modesty, Julie replied that “she found it difficult to put one on at all” (“Queen, All A-Glitter,” 9). 

Later that same month, the Queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret officiated at another Gala Performance of My Fair Lady on 22 May 1958, this time in aid of the Royal College of Nursing. Popularly viewed at the time as the glamorous ‘movie star’ member of the royal family, Margaret had a grand reputation for high fashion and society partying that pushed her to the height of public celebrity. When the Princess came to see My Fair Lady, commentators were agog at her daring strapless gown of dark crimson taffeta with reporters nicknaming her “The Deep Pink Lady” (Tanfield c: 1).  

Interestingly, Princess Margaret was reported to “be an old friend of My Fair Lady” with accounts noting that she was one of the first Britons “to receive a copy of the now famous long-playing record” (Tanfield c: 1). Yet, when the Queen saw the show two weeks earlier, she made a point of commenting that she’d “not heard any of the music before (“Queen, All A-Glitter,” 9). Given Margaret’s longstanding familiarity with the album, one wonders if the Queen was being totally frank here or, possibly, exercising diplomatic tact. 

Due to territorial licensing agreements, the cast album of My Fair Lady was not legally available for sale or even public broadcast in the UK, Europe and Commonwealth countries till after the show’s London debut (“Columbia,” 6; “Britain is Smitten,” 22). However, such was the interest in the new big hit musical that, as Alan Jay Lerner (1978) notes:

“within three months of the New York opening, the black market sale of the American album became a flourishing industry in England. Stewards on ocean liners and airplanes were smuggling them in by the thousands and selling them at twice and three times the original price” (127; see also, “Columbia,” 6). 

Now, far be it from the Parallel Julieverse to suggest that Her Majesty might have been party to the receipt of musical contraband––but for someone who’d never heard the score before she certainly took a very quick fancy to it. Barely days after the Royal Performance, the Queen and the rest of the royal family were spied dancing into the wee hours to My Fair Lady tunes at a military ball in Windsor (Tanfield b: 1). Which just goes to show that, in the heady season of 1958, My Fair Lady was a musical to which even the Queen of England could have danced all night!

Sources:

Andrews, Julie.  Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008.

“Britain is Smitten by ‘Fair Lady’.” Life. 44 (9), 12 May, 1958: 20-25.

“Columbia ‘Fair Lady’ Set for London.” Billboard. 14 April 1958: 6

“Did Queen Blush at ‘My Fair Lady’?” The Baltimore Sun. 6 May 1958: 1.

“Fear Saxon Word May Shock Queen Elizabeth.” Port Angeles Evening News. 1 May 1958: 11.

"From New Playing Fields to 'My Fair Lady': Royal Events in England and in Belfast." Illustrated London News. 17 May 1958: 813.

Goring, Edward. “Naughty Word Stays in for the Queen.” Daily Mail. 30 April, 1958: 5.

Lerner, Alan Jay. The Street Where I Live. New York: Norton, 1978.

“Queen and Prince Laugh Gayly at Showing of ‘My Fair Lady’” Daily News. 6 May 1958: 11.

Tanfield, Paul. “Watches the Royal Performance of ‘My Fair Lady’.” Daily Mail. 6 May, 1958: 12.

__________. "The Queen Dances Until Dawn." Daily Mail. 17 May 1958: 1.

__________. "Stepping Out with My Pink Lady." Daily Mail. 23 May 1958: 14.

“The Queen, All A-Glitter, Sees ‘My Fair Lady’.” Daily Express. 6 May, 1958: 9.

© 2018, Brett Farmer. All Rights Reserved

[paralleljulieverse]

When Julie Andrews returned to England in April 1958 to prepare for the London opening of My Fair Lady, she flew into the eye of a veritable media storm. The phenomenal success of My Fair Lady in America had generated intense public interest and acclaim, and the return of the show’s British stars was greeted as nothing short of a triumphant national homecoming.

While Rex Harrison and, to a lesser extent, Stanley Holloway garnered their share of attention, notably in the more ‘serious’ male-oriented press (Smith, 12), it was Julie who received the overwhelming bulk of popular media exposure. Her status as “local girl turned big star” was the stuff of cultural legend and the mainstream press was eager to mine its fairytale appeal. As discussed in a previous post, Woman magazine, the biggest-selling British periodical of the era, devoted a lavish five-issue celebrity profile to Julie to mark the opening of My Fair Lady where she was explicitly fêted as a real-life Cinderella: “a rather plain little girl…from an English village”, “a dreamy little girl who has made her dreams come true” and found “dazzling fame and fortune” as “The Golden Girl of Broadway” (Reeder, 29). 

When the “Golden Girl” touched down at Heathrow on April 6, “so great was the crush around Julie” that her family had to wait over twenty minutes before they could greet her (Wilcox, 1). Scores of cameramen scrambled to get near her and even the most sober Fleet Street reporters grasped for superlatives. “Julie Andrews, the British actress who went to Broadway to make her name, came back to England yesterday–a STAR,” trumpeted the front page of the Daily Mirror (Wilcox, 1). 

But alongside the breathless allusions to jet-setting celebrity and fabulous wealth––“Julie [is] reported to earn £1,000 a week,” gasped the Daily Mail–– there was a marked emphasis on the untarnished naturalness of “our Julie” and how she remained "just an ordinary girl…who adores her home, her family and the neighbours” (Reeder: 29).  Almost to a person, reporters highlighted her guileless simplicity and girlish nervousness––“’I’m terrified of the opening night at Drury Lane,’ she confessed” (Wilcox, 1)––and profiled her interest in such homespun concerns as childhood sweethearts––"I love him! I love him! I love him!”–– “brothers, aunts and uncles,” and, even, her pet canary:

“It would be an understatement to say that she remains unspoilt by success. This adorably freckle-faced young lady, as simply dressed as the girl next door, made me feel as if we had known each other all our lives and it was hard to believe she had ever moved more than ten miles from home at Walton-on-Thames” (Johns, 35).

Following the airport media call, Julie was indeed whisked home to Walton-on-Thames for a neighbourhood reunion, a pack of camera-clicking newshounds in eager tow. As befitting this most homely of Home Counties stars, the party was a decidedly domesticated affair: fizzy drinks and ale, LPs on a portable player, and a Dolly Varden cake! Julie was even photographed perched on the floral chintz single bed of her childhood:

“Julie Andrews, honey-haired star of My Fair Lady and the toast of Broadway was the toast of Walton-on-Thames, her home town, last night. Nearly a hundred friends and relatives were there at her parents’ home to welcome back the girl who knocked New York sideways…Julie was so busy shaking hands and kissing old friends that she did not have time to change out of the white jersey frock she arrived in. Amid cries of ‘Julie, Julie, you haven’t changed a bit,’ her mother shouted, ‘Telephone, Julie. Quickly now, dear.’ And, as Julie rushed to the phone Mrs. Barbara Andrews explained proudly, ‘Some of the people here tonight were actually at Julie’s christening’” (”Toast of the Town,” 8).

For over half a century, these unashamedly sentimental themes of nostalgic domesticity and familial warmth have continued to define the Julie Andrews star image, cemented with abiding force in her iconic screen persona as the world’s favourite super-nanny and played out since in various forms of repetition, revision and refusal––on-screen and off. It was perhaps inevitable then that when the star herself came to publish her own memoirs in 2008, she would give the book the simple one-word title: Home. 

“I am told that the first comprehensible word I uttered as a child was ‘home.’ My father was driving his secondhand Austin 7; my mother was in the passenger seat beside him holding me on her lap. As we approached our modest house, Dad braked the car to turn onto the pocket-handkerchief square of concrete by the gate and apparently I quietly, tentatively, said the word. ‘Home.’ My mother told me there was a slight upward inflection in my voice, not a question so much as a trying of the word on the tongue, with perhaps the delicious discovery of connection . . . the word to the place. My parents wanted to be sure they had heard me correctly, so Dad drove around the lanes once again, and as we returned, it seems I repeated the word. My mother must have said it more than once upon arrival at our house—perhaps with satisfaction? Or relief? Or maybe to instill in her young daughter a sense of comfort and safety. The word has carried enormous resonance for me ever since. Home.” (Andrews, 1)

Sources:

Andrews, Julie.  Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008. 

John, Eric. “My Freckled Lady.” Theatre World. Vol. 54. No. 401, June 1958: 35-36.

Reeder, Joan. “Introducing Julie Andrews’ Own Story.” Woman. 26 April 1958: 29.

Smith, Godfrey. "Fair Lady's Man." Sunday Times. 13 Apr. 1958: 12.

“Toast of the Town is ‘My Fair Lady’.” Daily Mail. 7 April, 1958: 8.

Wilcox, Desmond. “I Love Him! I Love Him! I Love Him! Says Julie Andrews.” Daily Mirror. 7 April, 1958: 1

© 2018, Brett Farmer. All Rights Reserved

[lionessofwindsor]

One last post in My Fair Lady’s 60th Anniversary year.

Julie receives a standing ovation after her final performance as Eliza Doolittle in the musical’s original London production at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

I’m sure Eliza would be yelling at 2016 to “move [its] bloomin’ arse” right about now

and grab a pint afterwards:

Photograph from The Sphere, dated August 22nd, 1959.

Gif for ants from How Sweet It Is (1974).

[paralleljulieverse]

A final post in honour of this year’s 60th Anniversary of My Fair Lady...and one with an appropriately seasonal theme, what’s more.

It can be surprising to learn that, prior to the nineteenth century when Dickens and the English Victorians turned December 25 into “the most wonderful time of the year”, Christmas Day was not an especially significant holiday in the Western calendar (Storey, 17ff). Many businesses and traders didn’t even bother closing for the day and the rituals of tree trims, family reunions and gift-giving that we know and love today were practically unheard of (Connelly, 5ff).

Other holidays, by contrast, assumed much greater prominence. The Eve of the Epiphany or ‘Twelfth Night’ -- so-called because it occurs twelve days after Christmas -- was, for many centuries, a much bigger event than Christmas Day. In pre- and early modern England, Twelfth Night signalled the end of the mid-winter cycle and was one of the grandest festivals of the year celebrated with masques, feasts, and riotous merry-making (Roud, 11ff).

A central feature of the celebrations was a special Twelfth Night cake which was traditionally baked with a bean or token inside, the recipient of which would be crowned king or queen of the festivities. English social historian, Margaret Brentnall (1975) notes that, up until the nineteenth century, “Twelfth Night cakes were in great demand and the pastrycooks of London did an enormous trade constructing vast cakes in elaborate forms” (186). By the twentieth century, however, “the custom had dwindled almost entirely - except for some instances in the world of the theatre” (ibid.).*

One of the most celebrated theatrical vestiges of the custom is the “Baddeley Cake” which is still served each year at London’s famed Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It is named in honour of Robert Baddeley, an 18th century actor and former pastrycook who was a resident player at Drury Lane and who left a special stipend in his will for the supply of a “twelfth cake with wine and punch” to players at the theatre “so their merrymaking should prevail” (Halliday, 755). Since his death in 1794,  the cutting of the “Baddeley Cake” has been an annual custom at Drury Lane, attended by the castmembers of whatever production is currently in residence at the theatre.

In April 1958, Drury Lane saw the arrival of one of its most celebrated productions with the London premiere of My Fair Lady, a show that would play at the historic theatre for a full five years till 1963. For each of those years on January 6 the cast of the hit show would assemble in the theatre’s Grand Saloon, still in make-up and costume from that night’s performance, to slice the “Baddeley Cake” and raise a glass to the memory of their benefactor.

The first of the My Fair Lady “Baddeley Cake” celebrations in January 1959 was presided over by none other than the original Eliza Doolittle, Julie Andrews. Due to the extraordinary level of public interest in the show, that year’s cutting of the cake was among the most publicised in the tradition’s 200 year history with reporters and photographers from all over the world in attendance. The BBC even sent a TV news crew to cover the event.

The ceremony was emceed by Austin Melford, a noted British director and scion of a theatrical dynasty with close ties to Drury Lane, who gave a brief speech and led the toast. Joining Julie in the celebrations were the show’s other principals: Stanley Holloway, Robert Coote and Betty Woolfe, all prominently featured in photographs, as well as cast, crew and invited guests. Notable by his absence was Rex Harrison. At the time, Harrison was still in the London production of My Fair Lady -- he would play the part of Higgins till the end of March 1959 -- but for some reason he must have been out that night, possibly due to illness. Indeed, photos show that standing to the left of Julie in Professor Higgins costume was Charles Stapley, one of two understudies for Harrison during the West End run -- the other being Max Oldaker -- and who would eventually assume the role of Higgins full-time at Drury Lane in 1961.

Another final tidbit of Julie-related trivia is that the benefactor of the Drury Lane “twelfth cake”, Robert Baddeley was actually an ancestor of the great English comic actor, Hermione Baddeley who would appear with Julie in Mary Poppins (1964) in the part of Ellen the maidservant to the Banks household (Baddeley, 233). Wonder if the two women ever chatted about the cake during one of their tea breaks on the Disney set?

Notes:

* Variations on the tradition of the Twelfth Night cake persist in some European cultures such as the galette des rois in France.

Sources:

Baddeley, Hermione. The Unsinkable Hermione Baddeley. London: Collins, 1984.

Brentnall, Margaret. The Old Customs and Ceremonies of London. London: B.T. Batsford, 1975.

Connelly, Mark. Christmas: A History. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Halliday, Andrew. “A Cake for Fame.” Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading. Vol. 6, 12 December 1868: 754-757.

Roud, Steve. The English Year. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008.

Storey, John. “The Invention of the English Christmas.” Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture. Ed. Sheila Whiteley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

© 2016, Brett Farmer. All Rights Reserved

[paralleljulieverse]

Sleigh bells ring...city sidewalks dressed in holiday style...yep, it’s the most wonderful time of the year, and that can only mean one thing here in the Parallel Julieverse: time for our annual 12 Days of Christmas Julieganza!

Previous years have seen 12 Days with Dame Julie and 12 Days with the Von Trapps...this year in honour of the 60th Diamond Anniversary of My Fair Lady, the Parallel Julieverse’s 12 Days of Christmas is proudly presented by none other than the darling of Covent Garden (formerly of Lisson Grove), Miss Eliza Doolittle.  So practice diligently, remember it’s Ay not I, O not Ow...and, come Christmas Day, by George, you’ll get it!