Blake Edwards loves a woman with a cigar.

The reports are in, and the only lesbian relationship that Dame Julie Andrews, everyone’s favorite singing nun and medicine-peddling nanny, cops to in her new autobiography, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, is her lengthy marriage to filmmaker Blake Edwards. As Daily Mail writer Michael Thornton recounts for anyone who has been cryogenically frozen for the last forty years and isn’t aware of rumors that romantically linked Andrews to her BFF Carol Burnett:

Just before she left the Broadway cast of Camelot, Andrews filmed a TV special with the American actress and comedienne Carol Burnett, her closest friend. It was titled Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall.

Two-and-a-half weeks later, Andrews discovered that she was pregnant. When her daughter, Emma Walton, was born on November 27, 1962, Carol Burnett became her godmother. But was she also a lover?

This is the extraordinary suggestion which has found its way onto the internet, a rumour that in fact goes back as far as 1965, the year in which Andrews made The Sound of Music.

On January 18 of that year, prior to their appearance on stage at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Inaugural Gala, Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett were observed kissing passionately in public in a Washington hotel.

The clinch, which both women later claimed was a stunt staged to amuse their friend, actor and movie director Mike Nichols, was witnessed by the President’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, who unexpectedly stepped out of the hotel elevator at that moment.

This incident, sadly, is missing from Dame Julie’s new book, in which she says of her chum Carol, “I loved all that she was, all that she exuded — we bonded instantly,” adding: “I lost my own inhibitions and felt free beside her.”

“And I loved making her yodel like Tarzan in bed,” the passage most assuredly does not continue.

Why hasn’t the whimsical “We were doing it to amuse Mike Nichols” defense caught on, by the way? I’ll do my best to use it next time I’m caught in a compromising position, but can you imagine if federal agents had approached Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen” about their hotel room tryst and they both replied, “Oh, that? We were doing it for Mike Nichols. He loves that kind of stuff!” (Better yet, what if the agent countered, “We’ve already talked to Mike Nichols, sir, and he was in Los Angeles the night of your appointment.” To which Spitzer would be forced to sputter, “Did I say Mike Nichols? I meant Elaine May.”)

P.S. Because no Julie Andrews item would be complete without it, here, once again, is a link to The Scene from The Sound of Music.