Carmerella’s Reviews > Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years > Status Update

Standing in the bright spotlight, I attracted a host of fans from the insect world, ending up with a moth in my bra, another in my eye, and one in my mouth. Since I was mid-song, I pocketed the latter in my cheek and eventually swallowed it at a discreet moment. Yuck.

we were invited to a party at the home of a very powerful Hollywood agent. I can’t remember why we chose to attend; we were so seldom partygoers. When we arrived at the house, we were confronted by a classic “scene” for those days, but one that I had yet to witness. A group of guests were doing lines of coke in the sunken living room. During dinner, the coke was passed around as dessert.

Blake and I spent the first two months of the New Year writing. He was finishing the screenplay he had started in Switzerland, a western called Wild Rovers. I was trying to push forward with Mandy (children’s book)

I was frightened he’d be unapproachable and that we wouldn’t connect, but he turned out to be just the opposite. He was funny and lugubrious about himself, and I learned that he was a great connoisseur of wine and art. I left feeling excited to be working with him. - Julie on meeting Alfred Hitchcock

I missed Tony’s friendship, his dignity and gentleness, and wanted to hold on to that. I worried that I risked losing it by not making up my mind. My sleep was chaotic and disrupted, and I wrestled with fearful dreams, loneliness, and depression.

I never visited the real von Trapp villa while filming The Sound of Music, but fifty years later, when Diane Sawyer and I were in Salzburg for the anniversary of the film, we went there and we both got chills.

home is a feeling as much as it is a place; it is as much about loving what I do as being where I am. - Julie Andrews

To me, it’s an anthem that speaks to one’s homeland, no matter where that may be, and it moves me deeply. I spent so much of my early life trying to unify my need for home with my commitment to work. These days, I’ve come to realize that home is a feeling as much as it is a place; it is as much about loving what I do as being where I am.

“Edelweiss” is the last song Oscar Hammerstein ever wrote, and it is my favorite song in the film, despite the fact that I only sing it with the von Trapp ensemble. I have, however, sung it many times in the years since.

I had expected 20th Century Fox to be bustling with activity, but it seemed eerily quiet. The studio had just produced Cleopatra, starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rex Harrison, at enormous cost, and as a result Fox was virtually bankrupt.