Julie Andrews and James Garner reunite in One Special Night
From the earliest moments of One Special Night, you know that Catherine (Julie Andrews) is driving a uniquely impractical car in a snowstorm for a reason. Less expected, perhaps, is the explanation—it’s to help facilitate a meet-cute in a hospice.
That’s where she goes to pass quiet moments in the room where her late husband stayed. That the room is seemingly available on-demand is one of many contrivances here, in this 1999 holiday telefilm that aired on CBS. It’s also where she meets Robert (James Garner), a devoted husband visiting his dementia-afflicted wife, who has suffered a series of heart attacks.
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.
Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil are Alaska-bound in Five Easy Pieces
Turner Classic Movies kicks off their annual 31 Days of Oscar special tonight with a slate of films from the 1970s: Jaws, The Hospital, Network, and, my personal favorite of the bunch, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Don’t just watch it because it contains what is arguably Jack Nicholson’s finest performance (he used to give good ones, you know), or because Karen Black earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for her role as his needy girlfriend Rayette, whose hair, makeup and general dizziness paved the way for countless Jennifer Coolidge characters.
Watch it because Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe author and celebrated zany sweater-wearing Match Game panelist Fannie Flagg appears in a bowling alley scene. Watch it because of the comically angsty lesbian hitchhikers Palm and Terry (played by Helena Kallianiotes and “Mickey” singer Toni Basil), who are picked up by Nicholson and Black. Watch it because it has a wonderful supporting performance by Lois Smith. You won’t find any of those things in Jaws.
Flagg: “Old Man Periwinkle told her to put the sandwich where?”
And gluttons for punishment, take note: Darling Lili, another of those Blake Edwards movies with Julie Andrews that manages to seem oddly gay even when the proceedings are assuredly heterosexual, will air after Five Easy Pieces for reasons known only to God, if God exists, and the TCM programmers. Andrews has about as much chemistry with costar Rock Hudson as Lily Tomlin had with John Travolta in Moment by Moment, for those of you who revel in that sort of thing.
