Julie Andrews: The Family Jools

Dame Julie Andrews — “Jools” to her family and friends — lives in a world that encompasses her past, present and future all at once.

First of all, with her daughter, Bay Street co-founder and author Emma Walton Hamilton, she is hard at work on her third autobiographical tome, tentatively titled “Home Stretch,” following the success of “Home” and “Home Work.” Plus, the Sag Harbor Cinema is currently offering “The World of Julie Andrews,” a retrospective of Andrews’s works on screen. “Victor/Victoria” was shown at the cinema on June 18, followed by a Q&A with Andrews, and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” is being screened on August 26 with a talkback featuring film and Broadway producer, director and choreographer Rob Marshall, who is a friend of Andrews. In the months ahead, there are more films to come.

Another chance for reflection came in the form of the recent American Film Institute (AFI) Lifetime Achievement Award, which Andrews was actually honored with toward the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, but was only able to celebrate in June of this year.

There are also more children’s books coming up, along with a staged musical reading of her collaborative book with Walton Hamilton, “The Great American Mousical” at Bay Street Theater on Monday, August 22. And if you think that’s it, well, you don’t know Jools.

But first, the Sag Harbor Cinema retrospective. What other films will be shown? “I can’t be sure,” said Andrews in a recent interview, “but I think they’ll certainly do ‘Poppins’ and probably ‘Sound of Music,’ but I think they’ll do some unusual ones too.”

What are some of her favorite roles? She smiled. “Well, the pleasure is that every one is interesting because they’re all so different. They may not seem that way, but they are. I loved doing ‘The Americanization of Emily’ with James Garner.” In 2018, Andrews took part in a Q&A at a screening of the film held at Sag Harbor’s Pierson High School while the movie theater was being renovated.

She also included among her favorite roles, Jerusha Bromley in “Hawaii” and Millie Dillmount in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

“I loved making ‘Millie,’ because it was such a wacky, silly film that everybody could enjoy. It was just camp and sweet. I loved everybody in it. It was with Mary Tyler Moore, and we loved each other.”

In the coming months she’s also hopeful that the Sag Harbor Cinema will not only screen her movies, including the many she made with her late husband, director Blake Edwards, like “10” or “That’s Life!” (in which Walton Hamilton plays her daughter), but might show one of the CBS Television Specials she performed with her lifelong BFF, Carol Burnett. And “Mary Poppins” since it’s the one film where she collaborated with her first husband and childhood sweetheart, Tony Walton, who died this past March and is interred at Sag Harbor’s Oakland Cemetery.

But conjecture aside, Andrews has another connection to Sag Harbor Cinema — her grandson, Sam Hamilton, son of Walton Hamilton and her husband, director Stephen Hamilton, is the theater’s communications manager.

“Not only that, but he works making the little documentaries that are shown there of people in the neighborhood and in the village and so on in the surrounding area,” Andrews said, with a little bit of proud granny gushing. “He also helps me record my ‘Bridgerton’ voiceovers and the ‘Minions’ voiceovers and things like that; because of COVID so much has had to be done at home,” she said.

“Thanks to my beloved grandson, he set up this crazy little studio in my closet upstairs in my guest bedroom, and it’s just such fun to work with him. He sends all the tapes, we get the scripts and I go over them with him. He’s actually very, very helpful. He’s not only electronically brilliant with all the different things to do with the recording and computers and so on, but he’s also very, very thoughtful and got a great ear so that he can say, ‘Granny, try that or try that and maybe a bit slower on that.’ And he’s absolutely right, every time.”

Her recent AFI recognition brought a smile to her face again, not because of the award itself as much as the people she got to see on her trip to Los Angeles.

“My friend Carol Burnett was the hostess for the evening, and she’s such a great chum,” she said. “We’ve known each other for 60 years now or more. She’s the first one I told I was pregnant with Emma. And she’s Emma’s godmother. As far as the AFI award, I knew nothing of what they were going to show or how they were going to do it. It was sort of partially kept from me as a surprise.”

Andrews and Burnett “go back so far that there’s that wonderful bond of affection and trust. We’re dead honest with each other. That night at the AFI, we were whispering away about various things that we wanted to find out about.”

There’s a moment of wistfulness when discussing Tony Walton and Blake Edwards. “First of all, I’m so terribly glad that I knew them both. I mean the affection for both gentlemen never went away. Tony and I knew each other since childhood. So how could we be estranged in any way? We were very close through all the years, and I trusted his advice and loved when I saw him,” she said.

“Oddly, I wouldn’t have thought so, but putting it in perspective, they were fairly similar — big egos, but beloved, humorous people who just loved work.”

“The First Notes: The Story of Do, Re, Mi,” another illustrated children’s book by Andrews co-written with Emma Walton Hamilton (the duo have created over 30 books together), comes out any moment. It tells the remarkable story of the medieval Italian monk, Guido D’Arezzo, who invented the musical scales as we know them today. It doesn’t hurt that the book is also tied to a song made famous by Andrews in “The Sound of Music.”

“There was no music written a thousand years ago. It was all passed on from person to person and quite often misrepresented because of that,” explained Andrews. “This wonderful monk, Guido, devised the solfège, which is do-re-mi-fa-so. He called it that. Actually in his language, it was ut–re–mi–fa–so–la. Then eventually it was changed to ‘do.’ ‘Ti’ was added years later. He named all the notes from the first syllable of every line of a hymn that he’d been humming to himself.” Eventually D’Arezzo “was asked to visit the pope and teach him in those times and that’s a thousand years ago.”

But at the moment, Andrews has mice on the brain. Singing and dancing mice that live under a theater, which is the story of “The Great American Mousical,” a book written by Andrews and Walton Hamilton and illustrated by Tony Walton, which will be performed at Bay Street on Monday.

Andrews acknowledged that she had initially thought it might do well as an animated film. “That’s the way I visualized it, I think, when Emma and I wrote it together.” But when a book was sent to the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, the site of many a workshopped musical, “Almost instantly, they wrote back and said, ‘Have you thought of developing it as a musical for the theater?’ They were willing to get on board and they were so gung-ho about it. They wanted to snap it up right away. So we began working on it and we’re so lucky to find Hunter Bell, who did the wonderful little treatment of the book for the stage, and then Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich. Zina writes the music and Marcy does all the lyrics and they’re brilliant. We could not have been more happy with that collaboration because we all spoke the same language.”

Andrews is also directing the staged reading at Bay Street, which is a benefit for the theater, and her granddaughter, Hope Hamilton, is playing the part of “Pippin” — the familial connections and love go on and on.

Andrews fondly recalls, with a laugh, cleaning the lobby of Bay Street on its opening night back in the early 1990s. “I swabbed the lobby. Yes, I did. In my Wellington boots.” She has also offered herself for fundraising events there over the years, as well as directing a 2003 production of “The Boy Friend” — the show in which Andrews made her American stage debut as Polly Brown in 1954. Tony Walton designed the set for the show.

“Really, between the library, the cinema, the theater, this is quite a wonderful little village for all the artists,” she said.

There are two more illustrated children’s books in the pipeline as well, due in 2023 and 2024. At 86, Dame Julie has plans that take her years into the future, but she is still living in a world full of poignant recollections. With her latest memoir, “I’m finding it difficult,” she said. “It is the third book, in which Blake passes, Tony passes, and so many, many good friends. I’m beginning to feel I’m the only one here to represent them all, because people like Robert Preston and William Holden and all of the lovely friends that we had — Sally Kellerman — are all gone now.”

She paused. “I’m not sad. I’m just grateful that I knew them all. I will write about them, but it’s going to be a hard biography, this one. Winding it all up. We’ll see what happens, and it’s still going to be my family and I and all our connections. We’re all hilarious. I hope it’ll be funny as well as moving.”

“The Great American Mousical” will be presented at Bay Street Theater at 7 p.m. on Monday, August 22, as part of the Music Mondays series. Directed by Julie Andrews, music is by Zina Goldrich, lyrics by Marcy Heisler and book by Hunter Bell. A talkback with Andrews and Walton Hamilton follows. All proceeds from the event benefit Bay Street Theater’s development of new works and training of future artists. Tickets are $250 to $500 at baystreet.org.