Spotlight on the Arts: Emma Walton Hamilton

the number you have dialed is not in service [Music] welcome to spotlight on the arts I'm Patrick Cristiano your host the publisher of theatre live.com website for theatre buffs covering Broadway and off-broadway theater in New York City and we're coming to you from the LTV studio where I have a really special guest today Emma Walton the daughter of the legendary Julie Andrews and they've written a new book homework hi Patrick hi thank you for coming thank you for having me it's a pleasure to have you well I'm delighted to be here and and you've written a new book with your mother homework about her Hollywood years yes and it covers from it covers this is the second installment in her memoirs so she published the first one first one was called home and that was published 10 years ago and that cover it was a memoir of her early years as the subtitle memoir of my early years and that covered the time from her birth up until all through her childhood performing in vaudeville in England during the Blitz during the Second World War and then coming eventually to New York to perform on Broadway and My Fair Lady and Camelot and the boyfriend first the boyfriend and then my fair lady in Camelot and it ended when Walt Disney came backstage at Camelot and offered her the role as Mary Poppins that was he under the fur at the end of the first book this book picks up with her that that moment when she lands in Los Angeles to begin work on Mary Poppins and it goes through all of her films in the sort of primary Hollywood years until through the last film that she did with her husband Blake Edwards my stepfather and that was a film called that's life and that was the last film they did together and it was right before she came back to New York and to Broadway to do Victor Victorious Wow figured that was a good stopping point so you don't you don't get into Victor Victoria do you we don't that's for another day another very chapter you have a third from your readers today you you're a kind of an only child with your with your father Tony I am an only child although I do have a lot of siblings kind of a paradox yeah so I wanted to go with that so you got so through these Hollywood years you were an only child go traveling with your mother I was I have step-siblings so my both my parents remarried fairly early on in my childhood and I inherited an older brother and sister from my stepfather and a younger sister from my from my stepmother and then my mother and my stepfather adopted two children and so I have step siblings and I have half siblings and I have adopted siblings but technically I'm the only child of my mother and my father so I grew up with siblings in the house and we all you know went to the set when mom was working and so forth so you these Hollywood years that she's written about in homework I was there you were there I were you aren't every said yeah one more yeah dude you have recollections of some of it I do I mean not so much of the early early films sadly not so much of Sound of Music and Mary Poppins because I was very small and even the first few films and music Mary Poppins the Americanization of Emily Hawaii those films were all made before I was three and so I thought yeah so I was I was very small and I don't really have much memory of you know a flash hearing yeah yeah but but from you have pictures of um on the sets like that Sam your book yeah yeah there's a very sweet picture a couple of sweet pictures in the book but there's one of mom as Maria in her nun's habit holding me as a baby and just sort of nose to nose as a baby it's very sweet there's some lovely pictures in the book let's show the audience to cover the book I think we have a question of the book I love that photograph you said that's a bird stir that is a bird stern the very famous photographer Bert Stern of course had a home in Sag Harbor he did and he did a you know so many photos of Maryland and I believe this was for a magazine shoot I can't recall which one but it's it's a magnificent picture and we loved it for the cover because it has just enough spirit to it it's not a it is glamorous but there's just a bit of mischief and twinkle and rumpled hair to suggest that there's glamorous because your mother has the glamorous look but it really isn't but it's very humid exactly so we felt that it was a nice reflection of the candor in the book you know in terms of the sort of the gentle must look the book comes out October October 15 take it down it comes out October 15 October 5th and right away you have stuff she has stuff both we both you people are going to go on a book tour we are yes we're actually there's quite a bit of publicity and promotional events lined up so I can own that magic yeah that very for you before going to charge just want to shut up but did we have also have a lovely picture of the two of you is that in the book - that is not in the book because that was that of course is after when the book ends I was quite a bit younger than that when the book ends just before she came back - to Broadway's so so this is just before Victoria Victoria this this picture was taken when we started writing together and that's more that's about 20 years all right so take the picture down yeah you opened up a halt when you started writing together you know we have to tell the audience you guys have written over there over 30 books together nerdy yes mostly for children horse which we'll get around to later in writing I do I do I teach writing it watch it I know anybody teachers because I have no patience well I actually love teaching I find that I've learned more from teaching than all the years I studied it you know so teacher tells me that yeah and I used to teach my background was in theatre and my husband and I as you know started Bay Street Theatre here in Sag Harbor almost 30 years ago and so I used to teach acting and I used to teach playwriting particularly acting to adults but playwriting to high school and middle school students and you know dramatic writing is dramatic writing whether you're writing the stage or the screen or from a memoir or a children's book it's still three acts you know and it's still a beginning a middle and an end and there's still a dramatic narrative so what that really prepared me very well I think look you edited to your mother's book right you're the editor of it um actually the first book I edited with her okay this book I'm we had a we had a wonderful editor actually we had wonderful editor on both the same editor on both books Leslie Wells who lives in East Hampton as a matter of fact but this book I was her co-author I was her cook he wrote yes so I wrote it with her I'm sorry I'm missin ya no no that's fine and actually I mean my job in writing it we did this on the first book as well but in this book I get credit for it which is lovely and it's it's a function of kind of organizing the writing process in such a way that she can tell her story as easily as possible so what I did was I made I started out by making a big timeline of her life and you know all the sort of major professional points each year and other things moves to different houses or children arriving or you know news rules or whatever when you draw where do you find all this well she was what does she do to keep you she was and is an immaculate diary keeper so in the first few years of Victorian architecture of the first few years it was an immaculate diary keeper doesn't mean every morning and evening or just well well first of all she has date books every single year with like everything worth it but at a certain point in her life right around the time that she and my father was separating she started also keeping a journal and in the beginning it was journals that's you know it's very very healing in the beginning it was usually around a project like a film or a vacation or an event you know it would be the diary of a Christmas vacation or the diary of a film project and eventually it became a daily practice and so part of my job after creating this timeline from all of her date books was to read all of her Diaries and then to flag sections that would about anybody else read her Diaries but you I bet not I don't think so do you do you get a lot of surprises when you read her Diaries well you know what was surprising I'll tell you what was it was quite funny actually because we both thought this is going to be a piece of cake because we've got all these Diaries so we can just turn to the diary and it'll be there but of course you know if you think about it I don't know if you've ever kept a journal I to keep it you do keep a journal so you don't necessarily record things like what's going on in the world at the time are you you're recording like what you dreamt last night or what you ate for dinner or yield or what you feel exactly and so I you know I thought I was gonna get all of these sort of details about the day-to-day events on the set or the day-to-day events in the world that was affecting her life and instead what we found was a lot of meals and a lot of dreams and not that there isn't of course that material as well but you know there were plenty of moments when I would say to her you know mom you didn't even mention the lunar landing happened this day you know so you had to go back to the timeline of history what was really a balancing act exactly but we do we excerpt her Diaries a lot in the book and we you know we of course interviewed I interviewed her many many many hours of us just talking to each other and when you interview her did you put it on tape yes yeah we listened to it afterwards too well we have it transcribed actually she is a wonderful assistant who did this for the first book as well and yeah so she would listen to the interviews and transcribe everything you know and then you both we read them and then we both then I take the transcript and kind of convert it into a rough form of narrative and then we both re-read it and edit it together and and then of course we interviewed other people as well we interviewed the rest of the family in terms of their memories we interviewed my father we interviewed her siblings we you know lots and lots of other friends and family members to make sure we had our facts right and this memory is an interesting thing it doesn't always know I was because I was gonna ask you one of the things I was gonna ask you and I kind of shied away from it like when you when you were reading her Diaries like what she's probably never you never read them before this is probably NASA yes but also does she remember all the stuff that's was I was gonna know that was the fascinating thing so we would there's so much you can't there's so much and we would say to me something like oh well when we get to such-and-such you'll see it's it's very funny you know and I would have read ahead and I would say actually mom that's not how it happened you know it wasn't in the dressing room it was outside or whatever and she'd be like no it wasn't and then we'd get to the diary entry and you know it would be completely contradictory to the way we remembered it yeah so it's fascinating I think it's that that makes a comment about all of us that we want to remember things in the way that we remember the exact times instead of exactly how that whatever serves us in that particular moment right yeah and so that was challenging for her because there was you know there were obviously it's a lot of her life represented here and there were some you know you know it was a time of tremendous success on the one level but there were also some tremendous challenges and struggles yeah and revisiting all of that in her Diaries and reliving it always was a challenge for her and for both of us to kind of walk through together so it was a great honor to it is continues to be a great honor now there was something else happening the first week I forgot what it was yeah so the first week the book comes out October 15th and we'll be doing a lot of media in New York that we write and the end of the week on the weekend we're doing we're doing a talk at the 92nd Street Y I was going to do jack some a net in store foo is a great film historian and coincidentally my son's teacher at Columbia University because yeah he did film studies there and she was a teacher yeah he's graduated now but that was his his so he's a filmmaker yes yeah and so we're doing that on Friday the 19th at the 92nd Street Y and that same weekend mom is presenting a series of films that she curated of her husband that Blake Edwards films at the Metro graph in New York City the Metro graph is downtown in New York it's a it's kind of a it's a new classic cinema in in that they have they they show films in their original format in 16 millimeter or 33 millimeter and they do these great events and talk backs and presentations and it's a real cinema Center way it's small but there's a restaurant association I don't know the address by heart but with an image again Metro graph metro graph and dimension are they going to show these sales that well it's it's a whole series and it goes on for a little while but but it launches on Saturday the 19th since our Saturday and Sunday all the films of Blake Edwards of your mother not all the films but all the ones Institute the way that she's chosen that for her favorites and of course our audiences know they were married they were managing projects together yeah and this and and incidentally this this event was coordinated and organized by Julia Daniel Avalon who is another wonderful film historian who will be and already is actually the artistic director of the new psych Harbor cinema oh yeah yeah so she and she was my mom just was honored at the Venice Film Festival and Julia was the one who presented that award and organized that for a lifetime achievement for lifetime achieve and when we were talking just a minute your mother is also a dame she was honored by the Queen of England she doesn't we were talking she doesn't really like to be called today she's a little shy about it it's funny she just prefers to be called Julie or Jules as her mom but that I said earlier that your mother's essence is not shall we it's yeah why I shouldn't want to flaunt it not at all she's very shy about it I mean she's enormous ly honored and thrilled both to have received that honor but she doesn't she doesn't feel comfortable being referred to as danger but she went got it right oh yeah I was there I was there with her yeah that was quite a day well who was got about you here Elizabeth Taylor oh yeah she was the one of the other major figure there that that year but there hundreds and hundreds of people I know and honor to the same day it was quite an astonishing Sarah so how did you two get together writing children's books how that happened well Sarah motivation my mother started writing children's books when I was a child in the 70s and she basically had always been a terrific reader and it always loved writing stories when she was a child when she was touring in vaudeville she would write stories to amuse herself and her tutor it was as before we release yeah before yeah exactly is that her tutor would allow hurt it like if you finish your math you can write a story kind okay you know and so she she she was very lonely because she was touring a lot and she wasn't in school and instead of have to work it's all have to work so books were her company and her solace and and she loved to write stories as well dissolve in the 70s she was working on a film called Darling Lily with Blake and they had just gotten together though they weren't even married yet and my stepsister and my step-brother with us and we were spending the summer with them while they were shooting in Europe and we apparently were quite we were terrors you know we were messy we were girls you weren't yeah no my my siblings and I we were like not very good about brushing our teeth or cleaning our room exactly act so my mom set up this game of like if you do this and you if you brush your teeth and you pick up your clothes and you'd you know make your bed and all of this you know you can win a prize and if you don't or if you forget you have to pay a forfeit and my stepsister my older stepsister Jennifer said well you have to play too and my mom said sure okay what do I have to do and she said you have to stop swearing she's where's my mother swears a lot so so of course she was the first to lose and here she couldn't stop wherein stop swearing and she said all right all right what's my forfeit and Jennifer said write me a story and so that story that she wrote from my sister became her first published children's book and that was a book called Mandy which was published in the 70s and then she wrote another book after that called the last of the really great Wang doodles and those two books I'm happy to say are still in print and she published them under the name of Edwards her married name rather than Andrews because she didn't want to she just wanted the the writing to speak for itself if it was any good and you know she and what do they teach is really very courageous because why I mean because as Julie Andrews you know they're going to be a hit and as Edwards say my flop whether she's often credited with being the first sort of celebrity author of children's author anyway but she you know she took it but did she's the first one that goes to use a pseudonym - probably yeah I mean it was a long time ago anyway because other people like to flaunt their time most people are the opposite of what your mother's entities she's a good egg that way I'm really lucky to have such a I am but years later she was asked she they were talking about oh that years later she wrote two chapter books about a little cat ships cat actually and and with that same publisher Hyperion she was working on her first memoir and they said have you ever written anything for younger children would you consider writing a picture book for very young children and at the time my son was just a year old oh it was perfect and she said to me gosh I I wouldn't know where to begin to write for very very young children like what would what would you want for San if you can find any book you know that would be the perfect thing for him and he was and still is a complete truck freak like he just only wanted to read books about trucks and play with toys that were trucks and wear pajamas that had trucks on them and sleep on sheets that had like it was trucks trucks trucks all the time now it's classic cars he drives a Mustang it's very cool that was my first car yeah it's a 66 Mustang he restored himself that's great but anyway I said I you know that I would love to have like a series about trucks that had some value to it so it was character driven had some somatic value and so forth but they're kind of few and far between between most of them are nonfiction and so forth she said well let's write it together so that was the first book that was the first book we wrote together it was called dumpy the dump truck and it was the first in a series of books about that character dumpy and other trucks on the farm and it was sort of it's set in a town that's modeled after Sag Harbor and my father did the illustrations told them yeah oh how cool yeah we loved your father he said I was how is he by the way he's good good I was just asking about it yeah yeah fierce he's my my father for viewers who don't know is a Broadway production designer and did the sets and costumes for my for Mary Poppins and for many shows on Broadway but he's also an illustrator and so he did the illustrations for those books and then from there we just get a very generous beer - he is he's very much you have two really cool parents thank you you think so - yeah but I'm a little biased you can so thirty books thirty some books later we've written a number of picture books we've got a series about called the very fairy princess about a little girl who just is convinced you have some stuff here well let me see if I can I try not to bring up paper but that's okay we have the very fairy princess which is the number one New York Times best seller yeah the dumpee the dump truck we just talked about Simon's gift Simeon's Kissimmee yes there's a lovely story about that actually in which which is that that's based on a story that we wrote together when I was five and my my parents had separated and we're living on separate coasts or had divorced actually which is hot was that hard for you which was hard and because I was traveling back and forth between the two a lot and so my mom had fortunately they were childhood sweethearts and so they remained very good friends and to this day they are very very good friends and I can't imagine if those two people wouldn't do it any other way yeah I mean they worked hard at it but it but they really but that's who they it was important to them they work hard of stuff yeah they do but anyway my mom had this idea that if she and I wrote a story together and I brought it to my father to illustrate and he Illustrated it then she could have it bound and I would have this memento that would make me feel like we were still a family in some way and instead of low career well after we wrote dumpy the dump truck and many of the books in that series we went back and I found this beautiful bound book that my mom had made for me of simians gift it was had a different title than and we were looking at it together we thought it was called Charlie the Englishman and and so we thought well maybe we can you could subtitle it that almost yeah really maybe we can rewrite it and maybe you know we could see if it has life it could be published and so we did we rewrote it Charlie became simian and but that one part of the book that we wrote when I was five is is still about a third of the book now that's published and later we had the great good fortune to adapt it for the stage and for the symphony it's a book about music and the story follows this young musician as he's minstrel actually as he's going in search of his muse and we performed it at Bay Street and when did you do that I didn't know I didn't miss this and didn't know about it yeah this was like 2002 three early or in the early 2000s and and then it went to do a full run it was a workshop so it was it was two pianos and but it was a full cast and we did a couple of we did several performances and then it went out on to a symphonic tour and we had the extraordinary gift of hearing it played by a full orchestra of 88 pieces and mom toured with it to a couple of different venues and did the narration for it and so that was quite an experience to see it you know adapted for the stage and for symphony and then we wrote a couple of middle grade novels together and and now these memoirs Wow know we have what you've done so much stuff I mean it's just it's incredible and we didn't even get your yet to your teaching but I first I want to show the audience just a schedule of the tours you're happy the book is going to go on a tour can we this is a tour nowhere what's the website if they want to check this out further okay great so Julie Andrews collection calm Julie our collection calm yes the website you can go there and find you these tour dates if you want to meet Julie talking about her book yeah and are there you're going on the tour I am I'm going on most of these events with her I won't be in Los Angeles or Chicago but I'll be everywhere else with her and and I'm looking forward to it yeah these are these are actually just the venues where she's presenting and doing speaking engagements and then of course there will be a good deal of publicity and press and television and radio and and so forth know we only have a few minutes left but you know tell us a little bit about this is you just right oh just right for kids yeah you you teach you teach writing for kids I do I teach writing actually primarily I teach writing at Stony Brook at Stony Brook University on the South Hampton campus I always do a website that people can go and learn more about you this is absolutely my website which is Emma Walton Hamilton calm and and then of course they're all the courses at Stony Brook are on Stony Brook's website which is Stony Brook edu but if you weren't specifically to know about the children's lit program's Stony Brook a edu /children slit and so there I teach for the MFA and I teach children's writing for the master's program when did you start doing that in 2008 oh wow yeah so I've been there a while and how many classes you teach it depends on the year okay so like this year so well I do various different things but this year I'll be teaching my the main course I'll be teaching will be in the spring but I also run the children's lit Fellows Program which is a certificate program where I have 12 students a year and then some alums doing postgraduate work that I that I supervise as they are mentored by other faculty members in finishing their books they've got your books and their novels and so forth and then I also run the children's lit conference there in the summertime where we have workshops in writing for children picture-book middle grade and young adult so that's at Stony Brook's South Hampton campus but I also teach online and those are my courses just write for kids just write children's books so those are independent study courses that you can just sign up for and work your way through independently and then I'm part of another online several other different online education programs but there's a conference called picture book summit coming up October 5th that I'm one of the cofounders of some it's all quite extraordinary you and your mother have created quite a legacy yes well you do what you have to do Patrick I think you do what you do what you have to do and you do what you want to do of course you do what you do what is in your heart and what you're interested in and I love writing and I love I love writing and I love the arts and so it all kind of dovetails together very nicely thank you so much for coming we're about out of time we have about 30 seconds thank you for having me I look forward to reading your mother's book I can't I just your big fan of hers some love to the Victoria Victoria victor/victoria Broadway the movie was good too but movies good she was wonderful did she win the Tony Award for that she did she was nominated but it didn't but she served yeah she actually um refused to the nomination that year because she was the only member of the company that was nominated and she was a fan yeah so she probably would have won otherwise I like to think so I'd like to think she's being I got to be an Emmy Grammy Oscar Tony winner was I important I wasn't meant to be thank you for thanks Patrick for having me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TheaterBuffs

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Id: Cc6_29fnYM4

Length: 27min 55sec (1675 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019