Ralph L Roberts.com

Time Magazine - November 28, 1955 Julie Harris as Joan in "The Lark"  [View Scan Version]

A Fiery Particle 
    The new girl in Miss Hewitt’s Classes was small and scrawny, with lank orange hair that hung to her shoulders and a worried little button mouth that made her look like a newborn mouse. She stood stiffly in a corner like a broom somebody had left there, while the other girls smiled and pulled their sweaters down and wondered what the awkward little newcomer was doing in the drama class. When the teacher came in, she asked each girl in turn to say why she wanted to act. “Well, it’s better than ballet,” one saucy subdeb said, and another replied: “Mother thinks it will give me poise.” When the question was put to the girl in the corner, she lifted her quiet grey eyes to the teacher’s face and said simply: “It’s my life.” 
    The teacher gasped – and many others since that day have gasped at Julie Harris. In the last dozen years, the girl with the plain little face and childlike limbs has laid her life upon the stage like a candle upon an altar, and the still, strong flame of her talent shines through the nervous wattage of Broadway with a prime and steady light. In a comparatively short career – until last week she had played only three major parts on Broadway – Julie Harris has established herself as, at the very least, the best young actress in America. A European director calls her “one of the few great actresses of the age.” The critics, forgetting their normal caution, have noted her “enormous range,” her “incomparable sensibility,” her “genius.” Her fellow actors agree. Helen Hayes has solemnly passed on to her the handkerchief that Sarah Bernhardt gave to Julia Marlowe – sure symbol of her succession as first lady of the American theater. Ethel Barrymore, after Julie’s success in Member of the Wedding and I Am a Camera, concluded: “That girl can do anything.” 
    Giant Abstraction. Julie would be the last to agree with the Barrymore boast – but the dare was exciting. Last week on Broadway she took it. She opened as Joan of Arc in Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of The Lark from the French of Jean Anouilh. Her previous roles, no matter how complex, had kept within the limits of “colloquial drama.” She had played people of life size in a theater of the norm, and she had only to cut herself to make her characters bleed. Joan, however, was not merely a human being, into whose feelings an actress can properly project her own. She was also a historic idea, a giant abstraction. To bring her alive would require no little of that art divine that made the statue of Galatea move. Julie knew that she was about to challenge “greatness” as that word was made woman in Bernhardt and Duse and Terry – to challenge it, moreover, as an actress still on the green side of 30.
    Out in front, as the seconds ticked toward curtain time, the first-night audience fell into a tense and unaccustomed hush. They liked Julie’s nerve, but they feared her fate. They remembered, too, the Joans of Katharine Cornell (1936), of Ingrid Bergman (1946) and of Uta Hagen (1951). Could Julie top them? The auguries had been uncertain. “Joan of Arc was put into history,” one critic had said grandly, “so that Julie Harris could play the part.” However, the play had proved a flop in London with another Joan, and the table talk at Sardi’s had it that Julie “hasn’t got the diaphragm for these big things, you know.” 
    Eternity & Everywhere. The curtain rises to a rising ah of delight that passes into a volley of applause. The setting by Jo Mielziner is a striking thing. Instead of painted scenery, he has used a simple cotton scrim that sets the time at eternity, the place at everywhere. The forestage is filled with what looks like a mighty cubistic boulder on which Joan sits pale and still, like a piteous Prometheus in the midst of her tormentors. The tableau breaks, and the trial, which is the metaphor the action moves in, takes its course. In a matter of moments it is clear that the London fiasco is not to be repeated by Producer Kermit Bloomgarden. For that production Christopher Fry had done a literal translation from the French. For this one Lillian Hellman has cut 43 pages of Anouilh – and ennui. What is left, while faithful to the original in scenic form, has been trenchantly rewritten by one of the ablest theater minds in the U.S., and the result is intellectual theater at close to its best. The ideas that the drama deals in are among the grandest in the human range, and as they marshal and maneuver on the stage, the audience feels caught and carried in the icy passion of a superhuman chess game in which the stakes are life or death for more than Joan. Compared of course to the virile mace-work of George Bernard Shaw in his Saint Joan, it is sometimes oversubtle rapier play in the Gallic fashion that scores points but does not really make a wound. The actors, however, under brilliant coaching by Director Joseph Anthony, use their weapons with such skill and fury that the beholder can often mistake words for swords. In all, the play lacks the emotional substance of important drama, bit it has the cerebral excitement and the visual flair of superior theater.
    For her judges, Joan plays out the great scenes of her life: the coming of the voices, the assignation with angels and the beating she got when her father thought they were men, the political rehearsal with a rural winesack (Theodore Bikel), the advent at Chinon, the brotherhood in arms (Bruce Gordon) and the rich reek of fighting France – stale wine, hot harness – that kept her head clear through the glory and the banners and the blood. Scene follows scene without shift: past follows present follows past as sun follows shadow on a dappled day. As Joan strides through her story, the lights minister her mood and clothe her in whatever world she needs as vividly as any scenery could, while the responsive scrim behind her glitters with cathedral glass or glooms with dungeon night. The climax comes in her quenchless defiance of the inquisition: “What I am, I will not denounce. What I have done, I will not deny.” 
    The sound of Violins. As the drama was resolved in flames, the first-night audience went up in smoke. From her first speech, Julie Harris had held them, as her Joan was held, in the bright wonder of a visitation. In the power of the English (Christopher Plummer) she sat in the cruel dock, a brave but pathetic young girl; yet as she played her life out on the stage, a beauty of holiness unfolded out of her and beat upon the faces of the crowd like great white wings. They followed the gleam of her sincerity as she led the through a thicket of theology, that man cannot be true to God except he be true to himself. When other actors faltered – and every member of the excellent cast, except Boris Karloff as the judge, was jittered off top form on opening night – Julie upbore them. As the final curtain fell on a flaunting pageant the Dauphin (Paul Roebling), the first-nighters rose with a roar. They gave the cast eight curtain calls and Julie a standing ovation as she dissolved into tears.
    The critics put aside their typewriters and brought out the violins. “For many years I have treasured the word ‘great,’” the Daily News’s John Chapman wrote. “This morning it belongs to Miss Harris.” The Post’s Richard Watts declared that he had “never seen a finer portrayal of Joan,” and Walter Kerr of the Trib pronounced her “fiercely, wonderfully believable” in her “dazzling honesty.” The Times’s Brooks Atkinson called her a “fiery particle” and Joan “her finest, most touching performance.” 
    At 1 o’clock the next morning, as the early editions thudded on the sidewalks of Broadway, the status of Julie Harris had changed – from rising star to reigning diva. Yet to the hundreds of well-wishers who tramped through her dressing room it was puzzlingly apparent that this diva was perhaps the most improbable mutation of the type since Charlotte Cushman hauled on tights and ranted Romeo to her sister’s Juliet. 
    Goodbye to All That. The leading lady of the great tradition is expected to resemble the gyascutus, prock, tree squeak and swamp gaboon rolled into one. Bernhardt, it is said, would swirl onstage with “eyes that resembled holes burned into a sheet of paper”; her lines she sang in a melodious but somewhat fruity “voice of gold.” Rumor had it that she slumbered in a coffin lined with silk. The majestic Modjeska once held a U.S. audience “clutched in [her] spell” with a heart-breaking recital of what she later admitted was the Polish alphabet, and the mighty Duse would petulantly play her big scenes hidden from the audience. 
    Julie Harris is an absolute goodbye to all that. As Playwright John van Druten puts it: “Onstage she is a flame, but as she leaves it she turns into a wisp of smoke.” Not since Maude Adams has a famous actress cherished such a private private life. She and her husband, Stage Manager Manning Gurian, manage to live in midtown Manhattan, not ten blocks off Broadway, as quietly as two deaf mice in a kettledrum. They seldom go out, seldom entertain. Julie does the housework when she doesn’t have a play, and takes care of the baby, Peter, who is four months old; Manning does a fair share of the cooking. “I’d like to lead a glamorous life,” she says, “but it tires me out.” As it is, she scarcely drinks four shots of whiskey in a year, and a taxi ride is almost like a spree. She has no jewelry, no furs. She still wears some blouses that she bought in high school. The spice of her life is a window-shopping walk down Fifth Avenue. 
    Strong Light. The plain life expresses some remarkably solid virtues. She burns continuously with what a friend calls “unmitigated sincerity.” She loves or she hates; she gives everything or nothing. She is a one-man woman with a one-track mind. The theater is her religion and she serves it like a vestal. She has almost no material concerns. “She would work 20 hours a day for $20 a week if I didn’t watch out,” her husband says. It is hard for her to tell a lie, and she blazes in defense of the truth as she sees it. 
    So strong a light must necessarily cast a strong shadow; and Julie, so her friends think, has been too much afraid of the dark in human life for a grown-up girl. She agrees. “I haven’t got a good capacity for suffering. I crack too quickly under the stress of it. I give up and I go away from what is hurting me. I don’t want a life of continual fighting. I have a longing for peace. I wish I had more fight, but when I fight I lose my work – the feeling goes out of it.” 
    In the last year, since her second marriage, Julie’s roots in real life are better fed, and the vital shapes of a permanent feeling and experience are filling her child face. She no longer lives so one-sidedly, and is beginning to accept her weaknesses as well as her strengths. As a result, she makes fewer strict rules for herself and sets fewer standards for others. Her innocence of the world is warming to a womanly kind of realism. 
    Sometimes, though, fed up with her good-girl reputation, Julie has a tomboy temptation to bitch it up a little. She can use a four-letter word when she has to; and one day when a shapely young actress was making her usual bid for attention, Julie sneered: “Oh, if I had a bosom, I could rule the world!” Says Julie: “I really hate to be well-bred!” The fact is, she has little choice in the matter. 
    Julia Ann Harris was born Dec. 2, 1925, well on the right side of the Detroit tracks. Her father, an investment banker, was a rich man by inheritance and a scholar by nature. Her mother, a girl from Jersey City, is described as “a charming and soignée woman.” The family was conservative, but there was a theatrical taint in the blood. Julie’s great-grandfather had a longing to tread the boards, but mounted the pulpit instead. He became the second Episcopal bishop of Michigan. 
    The only real crisis of Julie’s childhood was The Crash of 1929. When the dust had settled, a few servants were gone, but there were still plenty left. Daylong Julie played on the wide lawns that ran down to Lake St. Clair. In the winter there was skating on the lake, and in the summer the whole family moved to the exclusive Huron Mountain Club, set in a tract of virgin wood and trouty freshet. “She was such a normal little girl,” her mother remembers. However, there were suggestions of sensibility. When anybody told ghost stories she was an easy haunt, and to this day she is afraid to put her feet on the floor when she is alone in a room at night – a disembodied hand, the subject of a radio thriller she heard when she was twelve, might come crawling across the carpet and grab her ankle. 
    Ape & Lady Bracknell. The movies caught her imagination early. What she saw on the screen she became in real life – at least for the rest of the day. After the weekly Weissmuller, she and her two brothers played Tarzan in the sumac (“I was an ape”). As the movie-madness grew, she became Vivien Leigh, Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland. She filled dozens of scrapbooks with pictures of her favorites. The high point of her girlhood came when a schoolboy said she reminded him of Bette Davis. Gone With the Wind she saw 13 times, and in one month of 1942 she sat through 52 motion pictures.
    At six Julie went to dancing class, and from the first she took leads in the plays at Grosse Pointe Country Day School, where she made a perky, 90-lb. Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. She always had a curious sensation of being more alive when she was playing somebody else than when she was being herself. At eleven she confided passionately to the Harris cook: “I’m going to be an actress – or bust!” 
    The acting, she now recalls, made up for everything: bird-legs, teeth braces and no beaux. “The only boys who liked me were characters – you know, intelligent. I wanted one like Robert Taylor.” At 16 she heard about an acting camp in Colorado run by Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield, and there was no holding her. For three summers in a row she ran off with almost all the best parts. “At night I dreamed about being a great star like Bernhardt,” she says. Nor was Bernhardt enough in those days; she also intended to be Pavlova. Her family had taken her to the Ballet Russe. “When Eglevsky leaped, I used to shriek the way other little girls did at Sinatra.” 
    First Joan. From histrionic heaven she was sent straight to scholastic hell: a better-class boarding school in New England. “It was all girls.” Next fall she persuaded her family to send her to Miss Hewitt’s Classes in Manhattan, where she took Broadway for her major subject. For the drama class she played Shaw’s Saint Joan, and was offered a Broadway job as an understudy, but her parents said she was too young (18) to quit school. 
    After Miss Hewitt’s she got a good small part on Broadway in It’s a Gift. “Talk began to go around,” says Director Anthony, “about this scrawny creature with such extraordinary power.” She was hired by the Old Vic as an onstage moan in Oedipus. One night she forgot to take off her wristwatch before her big scene, and after seeing it Sir Lawrence Olivier, well aware that the Greeks did not have wristwatches, remarked with chill politeness: “Well, my dear, you certainly bitched that up.” 
    After that came a summer of stock in Bridgton, Me., and before the summer was over, she also read her lines before a justice of the peace with Jay Julien, a young lawyer-producer (his latest play: A Hatful of Rain). 
    Back in New York she joined the Actors’ Studio, and had three small parts on Broadway. “I was using my guts, all right,” she says, “but not my head. I hadn’t learned the difference between inspiration and technique.” In The Young and Fair she played a boarding-school kleptomaniac, and under Harold Clurman’s direction she began to meld emotion with intelligence. On opening night she stopped the show with her big scene. 
    Exquisite Problem. The lightning had struck, and as Julie’s fame flickered hopefully, Director Clurman poured on it some explosive material: the part of Frankie in Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding. It was make or break for Julie. At 24, she was asked to play a girl of twelve, a poor little nobody-wants-it that has just burst angry out of the egg to stagger about on guessing feet, with one world in pieces behind it and the next not yet ready to offer its warm wing. The part was cruelly long and difficult, and the actress found herself braced between fierce tensions. The mood was Tarkington, but it was Proust as well. Frankie was a kind of kitchen Hamlet but a kind of failed Huck Finn besides, and almost more boy than girl. She was the apotheosis of the awkward age, and an ungentle reminder that it may last from 8 to 80. She was, in short, the hurt little truth about growing up, and it was Julie’s exquisite problem to make people laugh at her and cry at themselves in the same breath. 
    She did. She saw in Frankie a magnificent chance to suffer the unhappy childhood she had been denied, and she suffered it right down to her dirty toes. As she splattered through her supper, grumped at cards, slashed about the kitchen with a carving knife or preened luridly in a grown-up’s party dress, the wound of adolescence opened slowly on the stage for all to see. At season’s end she got a Donaldson award as the year’s best supporting actress. A year later she went to Hollywood to make the movie version. 
    Best Actress. In the land where girls are classed as oranges, grapefruits and lemons, Julie on her own report was received as “a strange object.” On the set she scuffed about barefoot “to get into the mood for the part.” A columnist reported that whenever Director Fred Zinnemann made a suggestion, she would say quietly: “This is the way we did it in the play.” He would retire and the shooting would continue. Offstage she lived “a monastic life,” although she did at least get to meet Bette Davis. “She was wonderful!” says Julie. “She looks just like she does in the movies.” 
    In November 1951 Julie opened in her second hit. John Van Druten, who was casting I Am a Camera, an episodic play about a young English writer and an amoral, intellectual girl in the Berlin of the decadent early-thirties. Sally Bowles was a hippy little chippy with a roll in her eye; Julie was no “relief map” and anything but a fast girl with a garter; but on opening night she was such an extravagant titter that the comedy ran on Broadway for almost eight months, and Julie won another Donaldson award, this time as best actress of the year. 
    As her career was building up, her marriage was breaking down. “Jay and Julie gave each other everything they had,” says a friend, “and it wasn’t enough.” In the summer of 1954, after making East of Eden in Hollywood, Julie got a divorce in Juarez, Mexico. Two months later, while working in England on the film version of I Am a Camera, she was married to Gurian, stage manager of the show. 
    No Words. The time had been trying. Julie was not a type to change husbands casually. She was emotionally exhausted. One night she fell asleep while eating dinner and toppled off her chair onto the floor. She was already committed to rehearsals for The Lark, but her husband insisted that she rest – and then she found out that she was pregnant. The Gurians had a long loaf in Barbados, came back to New York to have the baby. “It’s a boy – Peter,” she wrote a friend, “and he is lovely, lovely, lovely – there aren’t any words.” She took care of him herself from the first day she was home from the hospital. I had to convince myself that I should go back to the theater,” she says. “I found out that I was happy just being a mother.” 
    Rehearsals for The Lark began Oct. 3, but Julie had been building what she knew to be her stiffest part, line by line, for more than a year. She read dozens of books and plays on her subject, but the literary and theatrical Joan she found impossibly confusing. Shakespeare had made her an unwed mother, Schiller a sort of Carmen on horseback. Mark Twain wrote her up, so Shaw remarked, as “an unimpeachable American schoolteacher in armor,” and Shaw himself presents her as a political tomboy and “the pioneer of rational dressing for women.” Anouilh used her in his play, which was intended as a sort of poetic recruiting poster, as a medieval Marianne waving the bleu-blanc-rouge and calling all Frenchmen to their former greatness. Julie went back to the historical Joan, and found her an even more prodigious figure of unreason – a military saint whose wounds miraculously healed when she prayed, an unlettered peasant girl with a genius for artillery. She was “belle et bien formée,” but when she came in the door all sexual desire went out the window. 
    How could such a contradiction of qualities be brought together in one presence on the stage? Julie found the answer in a remarkable statue of Joan by an unknown medieval sculptor – “the figure of a sturdy, stocky girl,” as Director Joseph Anthony describes it, “with thick hands, almost like a man’s, laid together heavily in prayer. Her head is slightly raised – but demanding, not beseeching, God to hear. Her shoulders are hunched in heavy, earthbound determination, like and animal’s. Eye and body and brain are united without strain in simple existence.” 
    A Great Mountain. To Julie, this was Joan; but to Anouilh, Joan was “the lark” – a spirit of “unbodied joy” that sings down out of unseen height upon the desperate world and lifts the human heart up to its hope. Julie set grimly to work, 15 hours a day, to reconcile these opposites in her performance. At the first run-through she had such power that a critical audience of theatrical professionals was sobbing unashamedly at the final line. At the Boston opening the critics cried “tremendous,” but one of them fairly noted the she was sometimes “a little childish.” Under the strain of the huge part her voice gave out, and one night before the show she broke down and wept in a panic. “I feel as if I’m climbing a great mountain,” she told a friend, “and I’m bruised and hurt. In my part a simple country girl has such faith that she can move mountains. I think if only I had that faith I could do the part.” 
    The Quality of Radiance. No matter how hard she tried, Julie could not make her Joan as good as she wanted it to be – or, indeed, as good as most of the critics said it was. It said nothing particularly good about human life; but it did say new and vital things about Julie Harris and about her warm young art. 
    It said that her essential quality as a performer, as a person, is radiance. Her emotions do not flame out in all directions at her audience. The fire draws inward to a center, and there burns in a still whiteness not unlike the brightness that the mystics live. 
    In this sense, Julie’s emotional power is the opposite of the kind most strong emotional actors have. It is intensive, not extensive. From Booth to Brando, audiences have loved the actor who can spill his guts in their laps. Julie’s instinct is not toward dissolution, but solution. In her search for clarity she has developed a more conscious craft than most of her contemporaries have. “When Julie is at the height of her most emotional scene,” says Fellow Actor Karloff, “she is always in complete control of herself, just as a fine pianist is always master of his music.” Says Anthony: “The most talented of our young actors are all unpredictable stuff. They don’t know where their inspiration comes from when it comes, or where it goes when it goes. The source can dry up and they are dead. But Julie knows. She works with herself as a conscious artist works with his materials. She’s the only one of them who is sure to grow, who is sure to be a star for the rest of her life.” 
    Julie nevertheless has the vices of her virtues, and she knows it. “An actress,” she says, “needs all the emotionality she can get.” And Julie, though she has plenty of a high and special kind, has less of the more everyday varieties. “What she needs now, if she is going to grow,” a friend says, “is to have a woman’s life, and to suffer a woman’s portion, and to wait for a woman’s strength to come to her out of the dark.” Director Clurman agrees: “Julie hasn’t developed what I call genius – an out-of-bounds personality. And there is no way you can go out and get it. Tragedy can develop it, but you just can’t go out and have a tragedy.” 
    You can’t go out and get it, but you can go in and find it. If Julie dares to find it, there can be little doubt that the theater will be the richer for her experience, and she herself may one day be able to cry with Eleonora Duse: “There are a thousand women within me, and each one makes me suffer in turn … How I have loved life!”