Julie Newmar, the original Catwoman: ‘MeToo? Men are men and women are women’

When it comes to assessing the other actresses who have played Catwoman, the role that she pioneered in the 1960s Batman TV series, Julie Newmar keeps to one simple rule: don’t. “It’s rather sweet and nice to be the first person of many who will play this character,” she says. “It’s like Carmen. How many great sopranos have done Carmen? It’s silly to compare. We’re all wonderful in our differences.”

She has yet to see Zoe Kravitz in The Batman anyway but she doesn’t like the sound of the movie any more than she enjoyed the “morbid, joyless, dissonant dirges” that came before. Why does she think that the default setting for Batman movies is furious gloom?

“God bless them, producers and directors are imitating life at large as they see it,” she says. “They are accurately mirroring society. But you, me, we can live in the world of our making. I call it living above the morass. I don’t listen to the news much anymore. I watch French television because they’re always talking about gardening and food.”

Now 88, Newmar still has the diction and class of old Hollywood, punctuating her answers with a sleek murmur: “Mmm.” She’s at home in Los Angeles, looking out over her magnificent garden. “I think to live safely to the age of 90, you have to make a mental decision to enjoy these sweet days left in your life,” she says. “I’m looking out my window now and I’m looking at paradise.”

Batman, which ran from 1966 to 1968, could never be mistaken for a grim commentary on a society riddled by violence and corruption. It blasted camp and pop art into America’s living rooms when both concepts were relatively new. Newmar was 32, living in New York, and recovering from the cancellation of her robot sitcom My Living Doll when she received a call about joining the show’s first season as Batman’s flirtatious foil. 

She’d never seen an episode or read a comic book but her younger brother John was a fan and insisted she take the audition. She flew out to LA that weekend, got the script on Monday and was on set by Wednesday. “Well, you can tell by the make-up,” she says. “I had to do it myself and probably took 45 minutes. But golly gee, thank god the costume fit.”

A fashionista to this day, she customised her Lurex catsuit (“It’s all in the seams”) and shifted the belt from waist to hips, creating an instantly iconic look that had a galvanising effect on the imaginations of male viewers. “It’s the fit of the costume that gets the reaction from young boys,” she says with a trill. 

And what about the girls? “Oh, altogether different! It took many more years for the feeling to get through to me. They said, You were a strong persona. And I agree with them. It was a delight to be that forthright because girls generally get rewards for being kind, soft, accommodating — all those qualities attributed to females. I think, all in all, men and women are growing up together. It’s remarkable to see it.”

Due to movie commitments, Newmar was replaced in the final season and spin-off movie but it’s her costume that now resides in the Smithsonian collection. She got $1,250 an episode and a reputation for life. Some actors might feel ambivalent about being permanently associated with a light-hearted role they played for just a dozen episodes more than half a century ago. Newmar is not one of those people. 

Although she receded from acting in the 1980s to move into real estate and cultivate her garden, she has voiced Catwoman in animated Batman movies as recently as 2017, merrily attended fan conventions, and called her 2011 book of advice The Conscious Catwoman Explains Life on Earth. 

She is currently in the middle of writing her autobiography. She’s a deft writer whose occasional website bulletins range from op-eds on Bernie Sanders and Medicare expansion to glamorous anecdotes, like the day, sometime in the 1950s, she had ice cream in Manhattan with Salvador Dalí. He gave her a small signed drawing, which must now be worth a packet, but she has no idea where it is. “Of course I’ve mislaid it! I don’t collect signatures of famous people.”

How did they meet? “He admired me because he admires beauty,” she says matter-of-factly.

It was no surprise that Newmar caught Dalí’s eye. Just shy of six feet tall, she was a prima ballerina for the Los Angeles Opera in her teens. “That was the real me,” she says. “What I loved most in life to do, and what I was built to do, was dancing. Life expressed itself through my body. Physicality was a way of being seen in the universe. Acting was easier. Isn’t speech easier than dance? Mmm. Sure it is. And you make more income from it.”

As Julia Newmeyer, Newmar had dancing roles in movies such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers before breaking into theatre, winning a Tony award for The Marriage-Go-Round. As a publicity stunt, one Broadway producer announced that he’d insured her legs for $1m. Her breakthrough role in the 1961 movie version of The Marriage-Go-Round reduced the New York Times film critic to an unseemly puddle of drool, calling her “a specimen of modernity the likes of which we have never expected to see”.

In a way, Newmar danced her way through Batman. She was a genuinely feline Catwoman, standing apart from the bam-pow shenanigans with an air of cool, unflappable amusement. Rumours of a relationship with Batman actor Adam West were good publicity but untrue. She says that he had a carapace of mannered charm. “I think that actors very often bring their on-screen personas into real life, hoping that relationships will be at this impossibly higher level.” 

There was a financial incentive, too. West made more money from personal appearances and autographs than he did from the show, and the punters expected Batman. “That’s where the monetary reward was, so why spoil that?”

Did she expect the show to be such a hit?

“Everything one does must start with success in mind,” she says, slipping into life-coach mode. “You 100 per cent give yourself over to a production and it will take you into the unknown. Sometimes it’s a disaster, sometimes it’s a marvellous experience. Who knows what will the outcome will be? But that’s life, isn’t it?”

On her website in 2017, Newmar celebrated the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and wrote for the first time about a five-hour physical assault at the hands of a “psychotic” actor in the 1950s, which “left my face so swollen, my voice so damaged, my eyes shut, and my body barely able to walk.” Now, though, she’s reluctant to dwell on the negative. “Oh, MeToo, MeToo, MeToo, MeToo” she sighs. “Men are men and women are women. I love what the French say: vive la difference. Mmm.”

Don’t you think you had to put up with too much? “No! Men generally treat me in a respectful way. It depends what your expectations are.”

She wants to emphasise the good times. Although she was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam war (“We diminished ourselves”), her work epitomises the side of the 60s that was a wonderful, full-colour romp. She describes her guest appearances on some of the most celebrated shows of the 60s – The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Monkees – as “a great feast which you’re invited to for a week. You allow it to happen it to you. Doing The Monkees was a piece of heaven.”

Over time, she realised she had a gay fanbase, too. She made a cameo appearance in the 1995 drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and danced alongside Linda Evangelista and Tyra Banks in the video for George Michael’s 1992 single Too Funky, orchestrated by fashion designer Thierry Mugler. 

“It was an extraordinary event,” she says. “Mugler had this grand idea. The producer collapsed in my arms after two-and-a-half nights of shooting this spectacle which went over $1m and just wasn’t coming together. Finally, George Michael took over and it turned out wonderfully.”

Michael is gone now, as are all her old Batman castmates except Burt “Robin” Ward but Newmar remains gloriously vital. One day, the first line of every Julie Newmar obituary will inevitably mention Catwoman and she’s absolutely fine with that.

“You won’t get the years of healthy life through bitterness,” says the cosmic Catwoman. “You have to think of yourself as eternal and not worry about death. There’s two things I consider very important in my 80s. One is integrity: everything you do, think or write has to be with integrity. And the other thing is kindness. That’s it.”