What Drives Julie Harris? : Star of “Miss Daisy” is on a heroic tour

The sunlit hotel apartment on top of Nob Hill had large windows and a view of the Bay. Great clouds were swirling in the skies. The rain had stopped for a day and Julie Harris was walking around the casual disorder of the room: A welter of paper, books, clippings and mailing supplies covered a table, a dresser and at least two chairs.

The encampment of an actress on tour.

Harris was into the fifth week of a six-week San Francisco stand with Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Driving Miss Daisy.” The production opens Friday at Los Angeles’ Henry Fonda Theatre on the 13th leg--the last for Harris--of a multi-city tour.

“I love Daisy Werthan,” she said, sitting on the edge of the sofa. “I love Alfred’s play. By now having done it seven months, it’s so ingrained in me. But originally, if I can go back and try to remember what impulses propelled me to say ‘Oh, yes, I must do this play, I must be part of this,’ it was the fact that I as a young girl came from a community bound by prejudice.

“Not the insidious and very painful prejudice that was begun when we started to take people from Africa and brought them here as slaves. I have always felt very moved about that. (I came from a) community in Michigan, where there were barriers and people were excluded. Minorities were just not there; you didn’t see them. When my horizons widened and I did see them, I began to question why and the answer was ‘Well, we just don’t accept them.’ That rocked me and I thought I mustn’t stay here. This isn’t right.

“Daisy herself doesn’t escape the perils of prejudice,” Harris continued. “She considers herself enlightened and nonprejudicial but, in fact, she does carry the burden of that with her. Prejudice never made any sense to me,” she added, still puzzled. “All my life I have felt truly that we are all equal. And this play addresses that in such a humorous, beguiling way, it’s one of the reasons I love it.”

The three characters in Uhry’s play are the aging Miss Daisy, a former schoolteacher who has always relied on herself and cannot stand the thought of being dependent on anyone; Miss Daisy’s son Boolie, who knows his 72-year-old mother must learn to depend on someone else, and Hoke Coleburn, the 60-year-old black man Boolie hires to drive her around--against Miss Daisy’s autocratic wishes.

The play chronicles that reluctant relationship over 25 years, and the characters are composites inspired by Uhry’s Atlanta grandmother and her friends.

“Daisy was important to Alfred (Uhry, playwright) because she was his mother’s mother, but she is like the millions of us who live lives nobody hears about,” Harris said. “The person who loved her and knew and observed her is a poet and a writer and now he has left us her portrait. Daisy takes her place among (the ladies of) Southern literature now, the Eudora Welty, the William Faulkner people.

“Everybody can identify with some aspect of this play,” she reasoned, because, increasingly, we all know of or have elderly parents in that difficult, dependent position.

“It’s not that Daisy’s living her life in quiet desperation,” she said, “but there is an element of that, because she’s alone now; her only son is embarked on his own life. The housekeeper comes three times a week and, like my dear friend (actress) Shirley Booth,” her neighbor on Cape Cod, where Harris makes her home, “she’s alone the rest of the darn day. There’s a kind of heroism in that life.”

There’s also a kind of heroism in doing the kind of touring that Harris is embarked on. Since September, she and co-stars Brock Peters (Hoke) and Stephen Root (Boolie) have played Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Wilmington, Ft. Lauderdale, St. Petersburg, Palm Beach, Lexington, Dallas and San Francisco. Seattle follows, then Los Angeles. But Harris seems unfazed.

“It’s comfortable,” she said. “It’s not moving every week, which, if I went on with the tour (after L.A.), would be required. That would be tiring. This way we’ve stayed in some places over a month.”

For Harris, part of the giddiness of the tour is the contrast with the seven years during which she was chained to TV’s “Knots Landing,” playing the eccentric Lilimae--an opportunity she’s glad she had, but which was restrictive nonetheless.

“Except for those six weeks of hiatus,” she said, “when I did do ‘Under the Ilex’ with the St. Louis Repertory and at the Long Wharf, and then when I worked on ‘Countess’ with (playwright) Donald (Freed)--and ‘Bronte.’ But other than that I didn’t do much on stage, except an occasional reading.”

Yet it was a movie that first got her attention and talent when she said goodby to the series in 1987.

“I was cast in a very small part, which became even smaller, in ‘Gorillas in the Mist,’ ” she said with a laugh. “I played (Dian Fossey’s) great American friend who settled there, in Rwanda, and married an Englishman, but you don’t know any of that. You just know that she’s someone Fossey finds in that area and who’s kind to her. However, they cut the two best scenes I had. So if you ask someone what part did Julie Harris have in this movie they’ll say, ‘Oh, you see her for a few minutes and then you don’t see her again.’ ”

But being the face on the cutting room floor did not dampen Harris’ enthusiasm for Africa. When the film crew moved to Kenya, Harris went along, waiting to shoot a final scene scheduled four weeks later and opting to visit Africa rather than go home.

“I went on a few trips. I have a great interest in Isak Dinesen, and Bill Luce (who wrote “Bronte” as well as “The Belle of Amherst,” her one-woman portrait of Emily Dickinson) has started to write a play about her called ‘Lucifer’s Child.’ When I was in Nairobi I went out to see her farm, which is now a sort of museum. And to the grave of (her lover) Denys Finch Hatton.”

Never one to let an opportunity slip by, Harris arranged to go to Copenhagen on her way home from Africa, to see Rungstedlund, Dinesen’s house in Denmark.

“Amazing,” she said, pensively. “Amazing to see her little Corona, all the things from Africa . . . It was like Emily Dickinson’s house, or the Brontes’ house. You walk in and realize that a very distinctive person lived there.”

A five-time Tony winner, Harris has continually startled theatergoers with the depth and breadth of her talent, playing everything from Charlotte Bronte to brash Sally Bowles (“I am a Camera”) to St. Joan (“The Lark”) to 12-year-old Frankie Addams in “Member of the Wedding,” the role that, in 1950, first brought her national attention.

Since her return from Africa, Harris has done more television (“The Christmas Wife” for HBO), more film (she played the mother of Wallis Simpson in TV’s “The Woman He Loves”) and a play--James Prideaux’s “Tusitala,” about Robert Louis Stevenson’s life in the South Seas. It was staged at the Berkshire Festival last summer, not far from the Cape Cod cottage she calls home.

Like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter, Harris is never without a stage project or three. When she finishes the “Daisy” tour, she’ll resume work with playwright Freed on “Is He Still Dead?”, a two-character play about James Joyce and his wife Nora during Joyce’s final illness in 1940. (Freed describes it as “a comedy in the Joycean sense.”) And then there’s “Lucifer’s Child,” of course.

Meanwhile, she’s been approached by director Gerald Freeman to play Madame Arkadina in “The Seagull” in Cleveland.

“I’d love to do Chekhov,” she said wistfully, “and I suppose the only way I could do it is in a regional theater.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” said this actor’s actor. “I wouldn’t mind spending a season or two as part of a regional company now. I would find that exciting.”