The Theater: A Fiery Particle

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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 theater 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 whisky 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 soignee 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.

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