TONY AND I ushered in the New Year sadly and quietly. We asked a few lonesome Brits stranded in New York to join us for Christmas Day. One was Paul Scofield, the wonderful actor who was brilliantly portraying Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons on Broadway.

Paul is very shy and modest, and I had asked him to arrive at our apartment at roughly eleven o’clock Christmas morning. Our doorbell rang exactly on the hour, and although showered and ready, I was still in my dressing gown. As I opened the door, Paul’s face became ashen. In a mortified voice he said, “Did you mean eleven P.M.? Have I made a dreadful mistake?” I assured him we were anticipating his arrival and welcomed him in.

In spite of the quiet beginning, 1962 turned out to be a very busy year.

BACK IN EARLY 1960, Lou Wilson had said to me, “There’s a young girl on Broadway I want you to meet. Her name is Carol Burnett. She’s starring in a show called Once Upon a Mattress, and she’s wonderful. I’m going to get tickets for you to see her.”

I’m not sure why Lou was so insistent. Maybe he already had conscious—or unconscious—plans for us both. But I went along with his enthusiasm, and, in due course, I saw Carol’s show. I just loved it; loved all that she was, all that she exuded. Her performance was completely original and wonderfully funny.

Lou and a friend of his, the producer Bob Banner, took us to supper after the show, and from then on the poor guys never got a word in edgeways. Lou and Bob just sat back, bemused smiles on their faces, as Carol and I chatted on and on. It was as if we suddenly discovered we were living on the same block. We bonded instantly.

Though Carol and I are from very different parts of the world, our childhoods were somewhat similar. We also seem to have an instinct, one for the other, as to how our brains work, our thoughts, feelings. It’s always been understood that we are chums: we probably were in a past life, as well. Unhappily, Carol and I don’t visit each other as much as we’d like to. Sometimes we’re both too busy, or distance separates us, but when we do get together, we always pick up where we left off and never stop talking.

After that first supper, I didn’t see Carol again for some months, but once Camelot was up and running in New York, I received an invitation to appear on The Garry Moore Show, a weekly television series on which Carol was a regular. It was coproduced by Lou’s friend Bob Banner and a tall, rangy-looking gentleman by the name of Joe Hamilton. Joe was an endearing rogue, full of dry humor and camaraderie, and he always sported a pair of bright red socks, no matter what his outfit. He and Carol were dating, and eventually they married.

I was intrigued by the invitation, and wondered what on earth I would do on the show. How would I fit in? Ken Welch, a talented gentleman who wrote all the musical material for Garry Moore, asked me if there was anything I had always wanted to try but had never been able to. Any fantasy? Any silly dream? Facetiously, I replied, “I’ve always wanted to do a Western. Be a cowgirl, an English sheriff; turn it on its head somehow. I never could, of course.”

The next thing I knew, he came up with the idea of Carol and me doing the song “Big D” from the musical Most Happy Fella. It was sublime fun. Because Carol is brave, and willing to take a crack at anything, I lost my own inhibitions and felt free beside her, teaming with her to perform this riotous number staged by the choreographer Ernie Flatt. Dressed in outrageous cowboy chaps and large Stetsons, we flung our lot together with gusto, and the result was a resounding success and a big rating for Garry Moore. He later told Carol that it was the first time he had ever known a studio audience rise to give a standing ovation.

A few months later, I was invited back to join Carol on another Garry Moore Show. I did four in all, three of them in 1961, and one in early 1962. In February of ’62, I also taped a terrific television special entitled The Broadway of Lerner and Loewe. Bobby Goulet, Stanley Holloway, and Maurice Chevalier were in it, and Richard Burton came over from Rome and performed the scene from the magnificent Great Hall at the end of Act I in Camelot. It was a lovely and successful telecast.

Meanwhile, Lou Wilson’s agile mind was churning. Having some clout with CBS (they had funded both My Fair Lady and Camelot), he and Bob Banner came up with the crazy idea that Carol and I should do a televised concert evening at prestigious Carnegie Hall. To put two young musical comedy ladies in such a legitimate, classical setting seemed wildly improbable, yet no one else was the least bit daunted. Ken Welch again went to work. Most of the production team from The Garry Moore Show came aboard, including Ernie Flatt. Joe Hamilton coproduced and directed the show.

Carol and I both knew Mike Nichols fairly well. From time to time, Tony and I would go over to Mike’s apartment and spend a lazy Sunday with him. We’d bring smoked salmon and bagels for lunch, and Mike would make bullshots, a potent combination of bouillon and vodka. Mike would lie full length on his sofa while we stretched out on the floor, and we’d listen to Callas, who was the rage at the time, or talk about theater and read all the Sunday papers.

Carol and I took a deep breath and asked Mike if he would consider writing some extra material for our show, especially some voice-over sketches that would keep our audience happy while we girls were changing our costumes between numbers. Mike consented, but being so well known, he preferred to use a pseudonym on the credits, calling himself Igor Peschkowsky…which was in fact his real name.

Everything seemed to fall into place, to be serendipitous. Ethel Merman and Mary Martin had once teamed together for a television special, and that had been very successful. Carol and I called ourselves “The B-Team”—the poor man’s Ethel and Mary.

I took a week off from Camelot, except for one performance when Colonel John Glenn came to see the show. To honor his remarkable achievement in space, it seemed important to have the full company present, and I went back to perform that night.

We filmed Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall on March 5, 1962. We rehearsed on stage and blocked the day before, then taped a dress rehearsal the following afternoon in case of accidents, and played the real show to a packed house in the evening.

Just before we made our first entrance, I recall standing in the wings on one side of the stage, looking across at Carol on the other. We were both nervous, excited, and wound up like racehorses at the starting gate. Our eyes met, we smiled, nodded, indicating we were there for each other, and blew a kiss before entering to meet center stage.

After an introductory number entitled “Together,” we did a send-up of The Sound of Music, called The Swiss Family Pratt. I portrayed the mother, Carol was “Cynthia,” the last child and only girl in a family of twelve boys, played by our wonderful dancers. It was great fun, and I had no idea at the time that I would later be asked to play Maria in that beautiful film.

There was another musical skit in our show, based on the Russian dance troupe the Moiseyev—we were called “The Nausiev.” We also each sang a solo, and performed a huge twelve-minute medley together featuring the greatest songs of the decade. We repeated our “Big D” number at the end of the show, having enlarged and improved it to make it even better.

It poured with rain that day, and Carol later said that rain was our lucky omen, for it rained when we did a subsequent show together a decade later, and even during one a decade after that. All three shows were hugely successful, the bulk of them written by Ken Welch and his wife, Mitzie, who have both remained friends to this day.

Wherever we go, Carol and I are asked if we are ever going to do another show together. Our friendship hasn’t changed over the years, but it has evolved. The first time we worked with each other, it was all about “Who are you dating?” or “How’s married life?” The next time, it was “Sorry, gotta dash for a parent/teacher conference” or “I’ve got to take the kids to the dentist.” The last time, it was more “How are your joints holding up?” and “Do you take Metamucil?”

We hoped to do a series of these specials—Julie and Carol at the London Palladium, Julie and Carol in Paris, Julie and Carol at the Kremlin, Julie and Carol at the Great Wall of China—but they all proved to be too expensive. We vowed that our final show, should we ever do another, would be Julie and Carol in the Swimming Pool of the YMCA.

TWO AND A half weeks after our Carnegie Hall outing, I received the joyous news that I was pregnant. The first person I told was Carol. I had tipped her off earlier that I was going for a pregnancy test.

“Oh, Jools!” she said. “I’m working at CBS, but whatever you do, call me. Leave a message if I can’t come to the phone.”

In those days a pregnancy test involved the use of a little mouse. If the poor creature died from an injection of one’s urine, it confirmed you were pregnant.

When I received the news, I tried to reach Carol, but was told she was locked in rehearsals. The operator asked if I wished to leave a message.

“Could you please tell Miss Burnett that Miss Andrews called,” I said. “Just simply say ‘the mouse died.’”

I imagined that the message would be delivered to Carol privately, but apparently the operator paged her over the P.A. system, her voice echoing through the halls of CBS. “Miss Burnett, Miss Burnett…telephone message for you. Miss Andrews called to say, ‘The mouse died.’”

At the end of the Pratt Family sketch on the Julie and Carol show, the choreography called for Carol to whack me “accidentally” in the stomach, and for me to double over. When Carol found out I was pregnant, she was horrified to think back on that moment.

“If I’d known you were pregnant, I never would have touched you!” she exclaimed. Then she added, laughing, “But I bet that’s when it connected!”

I told Tony the great news that same day, of course. I wanted to shout it to the world. Tony was designing sets and costumes for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It had an amazing cast: Zero Mostel, David Burns, Jack Gilford, John Carradine. Tony was attending rehearsals in the theater, and I rushed there to find him, but the first person I bumped into was Stephen Sondheim, who was walking up the aisle. I blurted out my great news to him. Tony still occasionally chastises me for telling Steve before I told him, but then he smiles, so I don’t think he really minded.