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JULIE'S BIOGRAPHY
by Ronald L. Smith
(updated, with portions adapted from the book "Sweethearts of 60's TV" by Ronald L. Smith)
If ever the term goddess applied to an actress, it's to five-foot-ten, 145-pound, 38-23-38, 135-IQ Julie Newmar. She even seems to have the life-span of a goddess, her beauty unchanged in three decades.
Born (not created in a lab) on August 16, 1935, in Los Angeles, Julia Chalane Newmeyer's mother was redheaded Helen Jesmer, star of the Follies of 1920. Her father, six-foot-four Donald Newmeyer, was a professor at Los Angeles City College and at one time a Chicago Bears football player. "Chalane," by the way, is her mother's real maiden name.
Julie, the child of this perfect match, took piano lessons, getting up at six A.M. to practice. She also studied dance, everything from Flamenco to classical ballet (with Nijinsky's sister as her teacher!) A brilliant student, she graduated from John Marshall High when she was fifteen and spent a year touring Europe with her mother and brother.
She became prima ballerina for the Los Angeles Opera, attended UCLA to study classical piano, philosophy and French, and made her movie debut as a dancer in a very brief scene in The I Don't Care Girl.
Demetrius and the Gladiators, Slaves of Babylon and Serpent of the Nile are memorable early films with Julie as a dancer, the latter featuring her in gold body paint! The first role she considers important was in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
She used her money to come to New York and try out for Broadway musicals. She was startling in an ultra-skimpy costume for Broadway bound Ziegfeld's Follies, but the show (starring Tallulah Bankhead) closed in Philadelphia. So in 1955 Julie made her Broadway debut as the ballerina in Silk Stockings.Magazines began to beg for "photo ops," and the chance to get some pictures of the rising star.
Her photos sometimes turned up on album covers, too. Even if she had nothing to do with the music inside.
She won acclaim for her ninety-second role as Stupefyin' Jones in Li'l Abner.
This was the first of Julie's many supernatural roles. Stupefyin' Jones was a Medusa in reverse, a woman so beautiful she turned men to stone.
She won a Tony award for her very next Broadway role. She was Best Supporting Actress in Marriage-Go-Round. She played a sexy Swede who nearly breaks up Charles Boyer's marriage to Claudette Colbert. Today the role of a lusty, busty Swedish girl is a cliche, but at the time she virtually originated the concept, and played it to the hilt - for laughs.
The highlight scene had Julie strut into the professor's den wearing nothing but a towel. Julie recalls an ardent fan who came to the show night after night: "His wife told me, 'He's certain one night that towel's going to fall off.'"
She was called "out of this world," "awe-inspiring" and "amazing," both for her mind and body. But this wasn't what Julie particularly wanted. She explained to The New York Times, "Tell me I'm beautiful, it's nothing. Tell me I'm intellectual - I know it. Tell me I'm funny and it's the greatest compliment in the world anyone could give me.''
Julie also earned great reviews touring in "Stop The World I Want to Get Off" (opposite her life-long friend Joel Grey) and as Lola in "Damn Yankees." Here's the cover for the "Damn Yankees" Playbill.
Promoting her various Broadway and off-Broadway show appearances, Julie often posed for glamour publicity pictures. These include now-famous sessions with Peter Basch and Peter Gowland. Many of the beach, lingerie and swimsuit photos turned up in the men's magazines of the day, although Julie didn't specifically pose for ANY of them, major (Playboy) or minor (Swank). But at the time, any magazine that could grab a Julie promo photo was assured of getting some newsstand placement! Not that it saved Spotlight or other obscurities such as Eye. Today these men's magazines are highly prized by collectors.
The secret of Julie's appeal is just that: a sense of fun that puts the perfection of mind and body just slightly askew. Perfection is boring; Julie is not. Within an hour of casual conversation she'll giggle like a girl, laugh like a wicked catwoman, whisper passionately in making a point, begin a sentence with deep philosophical and intellectual intent, and end it with a poker-faced aside brimming with humor. Call her unpredictable - or just a lot of fun.
Some degree of her heat, coolness, and comedy was captured on Broadway. She was known as Broadway's most beguiling blonde. But as the '60s turned, she was still looking for the right vehicle to put it all together. She appeared in the movie versions of Lil Abner and Marriage-go-Round and for both performances, she had a growing cult of fans around the world.She also starred in "The Rookie," with the failed comedy team of Noonan and Marshall. Well, it was popular enough to evidently become a favorite in Mexico!
Television viewers had to be intrigued with Julie's portrayal of a blonde devil in a Twilight Zone episode that aired in April 1963. From a devil, she became a doll: the beautiful brunette Rhoda the robot on My Living Doll. The sitcom had an enthusiastic cult following, and there are still many Julie fans who consider "Rhoda the Robot" their favorite Julie Newmar role. Though on opposite NBC's #1 hit "Bonanza," the show lasted a full year and brought Julie great fame. One example...she was the cover girl for an issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
It took a few years, but Julie's next supernatural role would be her biggest hit. "I have yet to have the perfect explanation of why that show was so successful for me, " Julie says today. She still gets tons of fan mail from people trying to express their delight with her performance as Catwoman on Batman. She reads from one recent letter: "You've always been my favorite villainess and you'll never know how much I long to be one of your goons. You were always so nice for someone who was supposed to be evil..."
The character was perfect for her in every way. She had the ultimate Catwoman body, personality and even voice. At last, Julie's unique and expressive voice was used as a key to her character. It can register gently lilting calm one minute, passionate intensity the next. She could be as gleeful as a child when taunting Batman; cool and intellectual when plotting a crime; and dryly humorous in both triumph and defeat.
Among the movies Julie appeared in at the time was the all-star film Mackenna's Gold. The film, alas, was a severe disappointment to all concerned. But worse, she was unavailable for the next Catwoman episode. Her part was taken by Eartha Kitt. And Lee Meriwether would take the part in the movie version.
Julie has nothing but good things to say about all the subsequent Catwomen. But Julie fans can't help but wish she was able to play the role more often. And they agree with Alan Napier (Alfred on the show) who said "Julie Newmar was the best Catwoman."
As fans of "classic TV" know, Julie was very busy in the 60's and 70's, making guest appearances in a wide variety of hit shows including The Monkees, Bewitched, Get Smart, F-Troop and Star Trek. She also co-starred in several TV movies. In The Feminist and the Fuzz she played a hooker, a role she played quite often, the casting logic evidently being that the average mortal could get this larger-than-life beauty only for a price. She also played a variety of eccentrics (A Very Missing Person, Terraces). "I always get a little put off when people say 'kooky,' and yet they're right," Julie admits. 'I think that's because I've never been on the inside. I'm a person who's an outsider. Not desiring to get in, by the way"
She toured the country in stage productions of Damn Yankees, Dames at Sea, and even The Marriage-Go-Round, as beguiling as ever. In 1977 Julie turned up in People almost nude; demurely turning her back to the camera, wearing nothing but high heels and revealing pantyhose. She was promoting her invention, 'Nudemar" pantyhose. Thanks to an elastic back seam, the product could turn a woman's derriere into a round "apple instead of a ham sandwich."
Of course, Julie looks great in any lingerie!
Although she was seen sky diving on ABC's Wide World of Sports and she played New York's most impressive hooker in Streetwalkin', Julie was not seen on TV or in films that often in the 80's; she was busy raising her son. She was also putting her energies into the real estate business. "My mother owned some rather dilapidated property and reluctantly - very reluctantly - gave me the managership of it...But it took a lot of studying and at night I would go to UCLA and take real estate courses, and I could barely understand what they were saying about finance. They were very sophisticated classes..."
Fans were eager for her next movie or play...or just a photo of her.In 1991 Julie toured in a stage production of The Women, playing the Rosalind Russell role. She delighted fans with a cameo in Too Funky, a George Michael rock video in 1992. That wasn't a fantasy role - she did indeed become a fashion model in real life, strutting Thierry Mugler's line of clothing at chic Paris shows. It was Mugler who designed the updated catsuit that she wears when she's asked to pose as "Catwoman" for magazine articles.
She still will take a TV or film role if it amuses her, enjoys meeting fans at some of the bigger memorabilia conventions, and is still a breathtaking, awesome, superb Goddess! Some of her secrets for staying young are hardly secrets at all: good diet and exercise:
"I take a ballet class at least three times a week. It's so hard, it's just killing, but it's really beautifying." Julie believes in hard work, but not pain. "It must feel right. I've never ever hurt myself. Not even a strained muscle. Never hurt yourself! Love yourself! You're the universe from which you see other universes, other people out there."
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Where did you get the idea Julie Newmar was a man?
Mimi
Thank you so much for letting the wind out of the sails of that! Yikes! She was, after all, the sexiest Catwoman, after all, and it would've done my boyhood memories NO good at all to have them dashed against the rocks of a sex change operation. Thanks for getting the facts straight, wild thing! 
