Umm...what is going on here?

Julie and Sondheim also happen to have a long personal association. Both intensely private personalities, it’s difficult—and, ultimately, not appropriate—to know the depth of their friendship but it has clearly been longstanding and, at times at least, quite intimate. In a wide-ranging 1993 interview with Christopher Durang, published in two instalments in Theater Week, Julie recounts how she first met Sondheim, or “Steve” as she calls him, back in her early Broadway days.

“When I was in Fair Lady, my then-to-be husband, Tony Walton, and I moved with a whole crowd: people like Steve. And Mike Nichols was part of the group. And we would have Sunday brunch together or meet at a party and so on. (Durang, 1993)

Indeed, Tony Walton was the scenic and costume designer on Sondheim’s 1962 show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and there is a famous shot from this era of Sondheim, resting his head in Julie’s lap, who was heavily pregnant at the time, while holidaying with her and Walton at their summer home on Alderney. As it happens, Sondheim was one of the very first people to find out Julie was pregnant. In her autobiography, Home (2009), Julie recounts that as she was rushing to the theatre to tell her husband that her pregnancy test had just been confirmed, she bumped into Sondheim “walking up the aisle” and “blurted out my great news to him,” adding with a smile, “Tony still occasionally chastises me for telling Steve before I told him” (p. 307). Elsewhere, in a 1979 interview, Julie confided that Sondheim also liked to psychoanalyse her: “Stephen Sondheim once said that because you got into the theater when you were just 12 years old and were deprived of so much of your childhood, your way to compensate for this was to become the biggest star in the world.”