By George, I Think She's Got It

 

 

 

 

On the left we have Audrey Hepburn, the right Julie Andrews. And if you look in the lower right-hand corner, you'll see a statuette. Recognize it? Somebody won something, but for what, exactly?

No, that's not God in the upper left-hand corner of the Al Hirschfeld-drawn Broadway

poster above, but instead a caricature of a deceased man who didn't even believe in God, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. In the early 1910s, Shaw had written a play titled Pygmalion, an Edwardian era updating of an ancient Greek myth about a statue that comes to life. Only in this update the statue is an already-alive-but-poverty-stricken Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle, who learns to speak the de-Cockneyefied King's English from one Henry Higgins, a brilliant but irascible professor of phonetics. After a rough start, Higgins is able to pass Eliza off as a member of royalty, thus exposing the folly of the European class system as it existed on the eve of World

War I. Unfortunately, though Higgins sees himself as a reformer, he's too misanthropic to take anything other than monetary satisfaction (he wins a bet) from his exposé.  Higgins' idea of a classless society is one where he gets to treat everyone equally like shit, including Eliza, no matter what her syntax. This all may sound like heavy going, but Shaw's genius was making weighty philosophical, political, and economic concerns acceptable subject matter for drawing room comedies. Audiences laughed as they ruminated. In its West End premiere, Eliza was played by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Higgins by Sir Herbert Tree, at the time two well-known figures of the London stage.  It did very well, running for 118 performances. However, audiences did sometimes express disappointment that Eliza and Higgins don't get together in the end, much to Shaw's irritation. It's not supposed to be a love story! But what it's supposed to be can change over time. In 1938, a very good British film version came out, with Wendy Hiller as Eliza and Leslie Howard as Higgins. It was here that the famous "rain in Spain" line made its debut. Shaw, now 82, was one of three screenwriters credited (out of reportedly six altogether) and probably not the one who pushed the ending closer to romantic reconciliation by having Eliza pay a visit to the lonely phonetics professor. Shaw died in 1950 at the age of 94, clearing the way for an unapologetically romantic reboot as a Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, the poster of which, of course, sits at the top of this very long paragraph (and it ain't over yet!) If you've read the poster, you'll have figured out that Higgins is now played by Rex Harrison, and Eliza is now brought to life by newcomer Julie Andrews. 

 The daughter of show biz parents, Julie Andrews made her Broadway debut at age 19 when a West End musical she was starring in, The Boy Friend, made its Broadway debut. She got a lot of good notices, won the Theatre World Award, and eventually came to the attention of librettist/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, who had taken it upon themselves (before they had even secured the rights) to turn Shaw's play into a musical, and figured a show that takes place in England might as well have for its female lead a woman who had grown up in England. That she could sing up a storm probably didn't hurt either. My Fair Lady was  the biggest Broadway hit of the 1950s. Also the 1940s, '30s,'20s, etc, as it went on to run a then-record 2,717 performances. When it came time to cast the film version, Andrews was considered a...

...shoo-in?

So what gives?

     

Jack L. Warner, that's what. By the early 1960s the only Warner brother still at Warner Bros, his studio at his direction shelled out $5.5 million, a record sum at the time, for the film rights to My Fair Lady. Since he ran the place, Warner also had final say on the casting. According to his autobiography, there was "nothing mysterious or complicated" about his decision to bypass Andrews in favor of Audrey Hepburn for the part of Eliza Dolittle. He simply wanted somebody famous. "In Clinton, Iowa and Anchorage, Alaska, and thousands of others cities and towns in our 50 states and abroad you can say Audrey Hepburn, and people instantly know you're talking about a beautiful and talented star." OK, fine, but was Julie Andrews, herself beautiful and talented, really that obscure a figure in 1962? She had followed her stage success in My Fair Lady with another Lerner and Loewe's Broadway smash, Camelot, playing Guinevere opposite Richard Burton's King Arthur. I'll grant you that Broadway stardom may mean something in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut but little anywhere else. However, in 1957, Andrews also played the title character in Rodgers and Hammerstein's live TV version of Cinderella, seen by 100 million people, presumably including those living in Clinton, Iowa. She was a guest star on TV shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, and Garry Moore, all big names in their day. In 1962, Andrews and then-Gary Moore sidekick Carol Burnett got their own TV special, Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, which won an Emmy. I think it can be said that Julie Andrews was a fairly well-known name by the time Jack Warner purchased the My Fair Lady film rights. True, she had not at that point attained the most exalted show biz title of all, "movie star", having appeared in no movies, but there's a first time for everything. A first time for Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall, all of whom rose to fame during Jack Warner's long reign as a movie mogul. Perhaps it's because Warner was turning 70, and even though he was his eponymous studio's president and majority stockholder, his position may have been less secure as it seems. In the past ten years he had seen fellow movie moguls Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, and David O. Selznick either get pushed out of their jobs or just quit because they couldn't adapt to changing times. Competition from television and an antitrust suit that had forced the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains (or the other way around) meant movies were no longer as profitable as they once were. So Warner just wanted a sure thing. "In my business I have to know who brings people and their money to a movie theater box office," he wrote. "I knew Audrey Hepburn has never made a financial flop." 

 

Even if she wasn't on the Warner's lot singing in a Cockney accent, Julie Andrews spent at least five months of 1963 in front of a motion picture camera in Southern California. Seems there were a few people who DID think she could be a movie star. One was Robert Wise, who wanted to bring a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical to the screen. And there was producer Martin Ransohoff and director Arthur Hiller, who wanted her opposite James Garner in a film shot from a Paddy Chayefsky screenplay titled The Americanization of Emily. Andrews eventually became involved with both of those projects. But not before a man known more for animated cartoons than live-action features got to her first. Actually, Walt Disney had been producing live-action features for a little over a decade, with a few hits here and there, when he showed up backstage at Camelot to talk about her starring in a children's musical for which he had high hopes. Not knowing anything about pre-production and the length of time between an actor agreeing to do a movie and actually doing the movie, which for an elaborate production may take up to a year, she regretfully told him she was three months pregnant. Disney assured her he could wait.

The wait was worth it.

Take it away, Bob...

Julie Andrews also won a Golden Globe that year. Perhaps because those awards aren't as prestigious as the Oscars (though the open bar brings out the stars anyway), she felt she could be a little mischievous in her acceptance speech:

I'm not sure if Warner was laughing or crying. Maybe both.

None of this is meant to reflect poorly on Audrey Hepburn. She did nothing wrong but accept a role she would have been crazy to turn down. And as you saw at the very top of this post, she let herself be photographed with Julie after the latter won her Oscar. The two women eventually became good friends (meanwhile, Hepburn had her own reasons to be miffed at the studio after she found out that, unlike Funny Face or even Breakfast at Tiffany's, it wouldn't be her voice audiences heard during the musical numbers but dubber extraordinaire Marni Nixon.) The competition from television must not have been all that intense in 1964 for there were enough moviegoers to make box office hits of both Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady (which won the Best Picture Oscar.) And the success of the two films marked the beginning of a whole new round of big budget movie musicals, including this monster hit from 20th Century Fox:

 

In her own way, Julie Andrews exposed the folly of the Hollywood class system as it existed on the eve of the Vietnam War. Once a statue comes to life, not even Jack L. Warner can turn it back to stone.