Wasn't It Loverly?

The life -- and early misfortunes -- of a star who sang so sweetly.

HOME

A Memoir of My Early Years

By Julie Andrews | Hyperion. 339 pp. $26.95

JULIE ANDREWS

An Intimate Biography

By Richard Stirling | St. Martin's. 376 pp. $27.95

Why on Earth would Julie Andrews decide to write an autobiography? There's no question that her life is eminently worth recounting: Though Home politely but firmly shuts the door on her readers in 1963, before she'd made a single movie, her first 27 years turn out to have been rich in both fame and misfortune. But Andrews herself has rarely shown the kind of appetite for public introspection that suggests a natural memoirist. She "submits to an interview like a Victorian wife submits to sex," a reporter complained in the 1970s. Even in her best-known screen roles, Andrews is sunny but cool. Questions about her backstory are not encouraged. As biographer Richard Stirling notes, she simply glides in from the sky ("Mary Poppins"), the sticks ("Thoroughly Modern Millie") or a nunnery ("The Sound of Music") and triumphs on the strength of her best-foot-forward approach and, of course, her radiant soprano.

That voice was, we learn in Home, a meal ticket before the little girl who possessed it knew how singular her talent was. Born in 1935, Andrews grew up in a struggling family that made sure she had singing lessons even if that meant she had to perform in socks full of holes. Urged onto the stage by her mother, a pianist with fierce showbiz ambition, the child prodigy was toted all over England, from music hall to radio show to command performance.

Well before she was out of her teens, she had endured her parents' divorce, more than one attempt at molestation by her alcoholic stepfather and her mother's decision to pull her out of school the minute it was legal so that she could work more. Andrews wondered at the time how she'd ever get an education; her mother, meanwhile, threw a party, she dryly notes, "to celebrate my 'liberation.' " One night, on the way home from yet another fete at which she'd been made to sing, Andrews was told by her mother that the stranger for whom she had just performed was her actual father, a one-night stand from 14 years earlier. "I tried to react carefully," Andrews writes. "Keeping my eyes on the road, I said something banal like 'Oh, that's interesting. How do you know?' "

Small wonder that when she was offered a contract for the 1954 Broadway musical "The Boy Friend," she experienced only slight anguish before putting an ocean's distance between herself and her childhood. At 19, she was a star; at 20, opening opposite Rex Harrison in "My Fair Lady," she was on her way to becoming an international phenomenon.

As a storyteller, Andrews is evocative and evasive in equal measure. Andrews is someone who has always tried to do what is asked of her, and although Home, written with the encouragement, research assistance and interviewing skills of her daughter Emma, is commendably thoughtful, it sometimes has the feeling of a portrait that has been painstakingly coaxed from a less than enthusiastic subject, especially when Andrews's public life begins.

A staggering parade of celebrities -- Ingrid Bergman, Truman Capote, Grace Kelly, Laurence Olivier, Helen Keller -- pays homage at Andrews's dressing room doors; each of them is politely described. (Capote was "diminutive"; Bergman was "tall.") We hear of Harrison's imperious surliness and Richard Burton's drinking, but no more than is necessary. Andrews writes with passion about her own experiences on stage -- the passages about her learning to sing and act the part of Eliza Doolittle are among the best in the book -- but her innate discretion renders her sketches of others less vivid than they might have been. She seems to sense the problem, too: "In those days I walked with giants," she writes. "Why didn't I think to ask the hundreds of questions that haunt me today whenever I think about them? I suppose I was too busy finding out who I was."

That may have been a tall order, since, according to her first husband, Tony Walton, Andrews, as a child, kept diaries that were "fanciful images of what a beautiful, happy life she had . . . when in reality it was pretty seedy." Home is at its most moving when you feel her struggle to unlock emotions that she has long kept at arm's length -- her feelings about her mother, about her stepfather and about that unknown man who turned out to be her father (dispatched from Andrews's life, and from the book, in two wrenching paragraphs that show the actress at her toughest).

Stirling's Julie Andrews, which bills itself as "an intimate biography" but is actually even less intimate than Home, does, at least, cover the next 45 years of her life. Though Stirling talked to Andrews a few times over the years, on the evidence of his book, their conversations primarily covered a period that is conveyed more effectively by the actress's own book. And as his chronology moves through Andrews's film career and marriage to Blake Edwards, he eventually succumbs to a march through her considerable list of movies, award shows and public appearances.

As clip-job bios go, however, Stirling's has its strengths: Learning that Andrews will sue the pants off of anyone who libels her, "swears like a Marine" and has a bawdy sense of humor makes one hope she'll try her hand at a more revealing second volume. Given Andrews's formidable circumspection, that seems unlikely. "I cannot say in all honesty that I knew her any better at the end of those seven years than I did at the beginning," wrote Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist of "My Fair Lady" and "Camelot." Thanks to Home, we do -- but only a little. ·

Mark Harris is the author of "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood."