Ken Burn's The Civil War replayed this week on public television. Many of the famous voices who spoke for his still images of that conflict were hauntingly familiar -- none more than Julie Harris as the southern diarist Mary Chestnut.
Julie Harris has died recently, a fact respectfully noted in all the serious media. This is as it should be for she was a great actor. My memory of her, helped by on line research, is surprisingly concentrated in the 1950's, though her career only ended with her death this year. I missed a lot, but what I saw (to channel Spencer Tracy on Katherine Hepburn) was "cherse."
Her debut was as Frankie in Carson McCullers' Member of the Wedding with co-stars Ethel Waters and Brandon deWilde. This fine trio first played Broadway in 1952, and recorded it on film as well. I saw it in 1953 at a special free showing offered by my employer. I was a new college graduate that year breaking into journalism as a tyro reporter for the Daily Oklahoman. The Oklahoman was no better a newspaper than it had to be, but I am grateful at least for that lovely, out of character, gift.
The Frankie character was that of a lonely lass of 12, which I am amazed to learn sixty years later was played by Harris at 25. Frankie fantasized about a wedding in the family, convincing herself that she would be happily welcomed to accompany them on their honeymoon. Harris made you ache for Frankie's inevitable, casual rejection by the departing couple.
That same year Harris starred in the wildly different role of Sally Bowles on Broadway, and later (1955) on film, in I Am A Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood's Good-bye to Berlin, a memoir of Germany primed for the Nazi era. Harris played the vivaciously amoral Sally as if she had learned to party in the womb. Her film co-star was British actor Lawrence Harvey, as her willing chump. Isherwood's musings were also transmuted into the musical Cabaret!.
Next was her turn opposite the incomparable James Dean in the film classic East of Eden. She shifted almost imperceptibly from the intended of Dean's insufferable brother, beloved by Dean's father, played masterfully by Raymond Massie, to the side of Dean, who has been rejected by his God-fearing father as spawn of a wayward wife plying the old trade in town. Jo Van Fleet. in cameo as the mother, and Burl Ives, as the local sheriff, complete a stellar cast that act a taut script picked from John Steinbeck's sprawling novel..
My last remembered encounter was perhaps her best for me. It was a Hallmark reprise on television of Jean
Anouilh's 1952 play The Lark, with Harris as Joan of Arc. She won a Tony for the play, which I never saw, but then I never saw her in person on the stage where she lived and dominated. Her record of eleven Tony nomination and five awards is unequaled.
I know I saw her one other time, but memory fails. She had a supporting role in an excellent but unheralded 1967 film, Reflections in a Golden Eye, based squarely and uncompromisingly by director John Huston on Garson McCuller's dark novel of sexual conduct on an army base. Marlon Brando as the latent homosexual officer and Elizabeth Taylor as his sneering dominating wife (cavorting in the bushes with Brian Keith) displayed such scenery chewing fire power that Harris as Keith's neglected wife (who can blame him?) faded away.
Julie Harris also won three Emmy's and was nominated once for an Oscar (Frankie!). In later years she was all over television but not for me. My aversion for the tube's offerings is such that, except for PBS, I seldom turn it on. Her life and career is extensively reprised by Wikipedia and a host of other sites known to Google. I would have most liked to see her as Emily Dickinson in The Bell of Amherst and as Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.
