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Catching up with Catwoman

Actress Julie Newmar on camp, ‘Batman,’ advice for living and ‘To Wong Foo’

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14 years ago

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Actress Julie Newmar has discovered a passion for writing. Her advice book ‘The Conscious Catwoman’ is out now. She plans future books on gardening and childhood celebrity crushes. (Photo by Alan Mercer; courtesy Julie Newmar)

‘The Conscious Catwoman Explains Life on Earth’
By Julie Newmar
Eleven Books
75 pages
$18.95
julienewmarwrites.com

 

Fall’s a busy time and things only seem to accelerate as the year winds down and the holidays loom. So I’m taking care of some regretfully unfinished 2011 business.

Last September I spent a purrrrfectly — OK, sorry, couldn’t resist — delightful hour on the phone with Julie Newmar from her Los Angeles home about two miles from Brentwood. Everybody remembers her as Catwoman on the campy ‘60s TV show “Batman,” but serious fans know she’s also a Tony-winning actress who’s had triumphs on both stage and screen (both TV and film).

Unlike some actors who only begrudgingly acknowledge or discuss roles that, for whatever reason, got etched into the pop culture collective consciousness to a disproportionate degree, Newmar is happy to talk “Batman” and even called her 2011 book “The Conscious Catwoman Explains Life on Earth.”

It’s a 75-page wonder you think you’ll be able to plow through in an hour but it’s sneaky that way — I found myself spending an hour on each page, pondering the pearls of wisdom she shares. It’s also liberally peppered with eye-popping images of Newmar throughout her career as well as a playful series of mime-inspired photos that show the 78-year-old actress’s playful side.

Newmar says she’s always been a fan of how-to books and decided she’d lived enough life to share some tips. Most are hers but others she includes are from everything from the Bible to Voltaire to Carl Jung.

“I think after the age of 50 you start wondering why you became what you did and you start thinking about your life, what worked, what’s different,” she says. “I’ve always been in love with these how to books since I was in my teens. How to look better, how to not be frightened speaking in public or whatever … I’d had the idea for awhile but it takes time to do it the right way, so I took my time with it.”

Among her insights:

  • Don’t try to be like others; you’ll not only be sorry, you’ll soon be out of fashion and the shallowness, the telltale marks of your insecurity, will show.
  • You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt (Newmar is an avid gardener)
  • Life works once you get to be more in a state of gratitude than supplication or neediness.
  • The important thing is to ask the right question — never mind the answer, it will drop in your lap.
  • I hide my annoyance when people tell me, “But you can wear anything.” Anything is what I don’t wear.
  • Every professions has its scullery duty.

“I love one liners,” she says. “Something you can peel off and put on the fridge or in the car. If you’re wanting to do better in life, you sort of collect these things over time and they stay with you. I think you cull your own garden in the sense there’s this assimilation of wisdom that takes place and can be very healing … you have to learn to love yourself as your maker does.”

Newmar happily answers any question I throw at her.

She says she “never ever” has felt frustrated by being so widely known as Catwoman, a recurring role she played in 12 episodes during the series’ first two seasons in 1966 and ’67. The famous body-hugging Lurex costume — reportedly made by Newmar herself — is now on display at the Smithsonian.

“It’s the first part of your house,” she says. “I’m lucky, fortunate and totally lucky to have something in my house that people know. Then you can invite them in and share the rest. I always look at the work as beneficial.”

And what of stars who reject their trademark roles or feel limited or typecast by them?

“It’s sad,” Newmar says. “It should always be seen as an opportunity. Strong people know how to take the negative and make it work for them, like making lemonade. I always like to look at things that way.”

Newmar attributes the character’s longevity to her bevy of traits.

“She’s very bright, savvy, smart. She wears high, daunting heels. She looks good from the front and back. She’s got a cute ass. She’s fun to play with. Naughty.”

The actress didn’t grow up with cats. Her mother had a wire-haired Terrier named William Powell (named after the “Thin Man” actor) but during the time she played the part, Newmar adopted two cats from actress June Havoc and observed their behavior.

“I’d wander over and watch them eat and play and frolic around. You do your homework.”

Newmar in her Catwoman days. (Photo courtesy Julie Newmar via Harlan Boll)

And how intentional was the camp quotient at the time? Were the actors encouraged to ham it up?

“It doesn’t matter what it looks or sounds like, whether it’s camp, straight or this, that or the other,” she says. “You still have to find the truth in it. You play the truth, then the rhythm seeps in and you go with it.”

Newmar, who introduced the part, had other projects brewing at the time so she didn’t feel especially connected to the role until later. Former Miss America winner Lee Meriwether played Catwoman in a 1966 film version that starred most of the TV series cast, but then Newmar was back in the role for the show’s second season. And in a performance perhaps as indelible as Newmar’s, the late Eartha Kitt played the character in the third and final season. Newmar, who was photographed for USA Today with Meriwether and Kitt in 2004 around the time the Halle Berry movie came out, says she “loved” Kitt in the part and owned several of Kitt’s albums at the time. She says Michelle Pfeiffer had the best Catwoman costume, but says the Berry film “didn’t quite come together.” She’s “100 percent” supportive of Anne Hathaway in the latest version, “The Dark Knight Rises,” slated for a July release.

Newmar as one of nine 'Legendary Ladies of Stage & Screen' during a Smithsonian presentation of her famous catsuit in 2008. (Photo courtesy Harlan Boll)

“I think our show worked because, well, color was pretty new on TV at the time and it just seemed to sit really well within the confines of a television screen. The excesses of it, the booms and bams, it just fit so very well and you could just imagine the little kids sitting there on the floor with their eyes wide open. The color really popped. I really think that was a big part of it — they made extraordinary use of the color. I’d just done ‘My Living Doll,’ but that was in black and white. This became far more popular.”

Newmar is a bit taken aback when I ask if her hair being longer in the second season — it went from a flip to a much longer, past-the-shoulders look in the later episodes — is intentional. She says no significant thought was put into it —  just a reflection of the changing styles. The initial look, sort of vaguely Jackie inspired, was a sign of the times. Longer hair was more popular in the late ’60s. Newmar remembers doing her own makeup — “nothing terrifically trend setting,” she notes — on the show. “Nobody ever asked me that before,” she says.

Of her dozens of television guest appearances, she says her famous “Twilight Zone” episode (she played the devil in the season four episode “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”) is especially memorable. She met creator/writer/host Rod Serling during the filming and remembers his trademark cigarette smoking and “oh, that brilliant mind — that marvelous, marvelous man. Aren’t we grateful that we have this and that they kept these films? I remember shooting in this small little theater on 44th Street under the New York Times. It was all about story on that show.”

She also remembers her “Batman” costars fondly — she calls Adam West (Batman) “darling, a doll,” and says Burt Ward (Robin) was “perfect. He wasn’t an actor at all. He was 19 at the time and they found him in a gym.”

Newmar next plans a book about celebrity crushes. She’s widely credited — anecdotally at least — with having awoken the hormones of practically a whole generation of American straight boys on “Batman.” She considers it a paradoxical wonder that her gay appeal — they wanted to have her, we wanted to be her — is perhaps equally as strong.

And, of course, we can’t let Miss Newmar go without asking her about her eponymous drag film “To Wong Foo.” She chuckles at the memory.

Foo, it seems, was the owner of a Chinese restaurant in New York that’s no longer in business. It was near Sardi’s on 44th Street. Legend has it screenwriter Douglas Beane saw an autographed photo of Newmar there and the sheer wackiness of its inscription jumped out at him.

“He probably made it up,” Newmar says with a laugh. “I don’t remember doing it. I think he just thought if he gave it an innocuous little title it wouldn’t make it out of the stack on some producer’s desk so he gave it this crazy title. And sure enough, it did make it out of the stack.”

And one more “Batman” question — of either her show or the characters in general, is there a homoerotic subtext between Batman and Robin?

“I don’t think so,” Newmar, whose brother is gay, says first, then backpedals. “Well maybe. I think anytime something is too straight, we want to throw a snowball at it. We crave some alternate. Thank God we can have both gay and straight.”

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Movies

The queer appeal of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’

Tying the feminist and LGBTQ rights movements together on screen

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1 hour ago

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May 2, 2026

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Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2.’
(Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios)

“Would we have fashion without gay people? Forgive me, would we have anything?”

Those words, spoken by Miranda Priestley herself (actually by Meryl Streep, the 76-year-old acting icon who played her), may well sum up why “The Devil Wears Prada” has been a touchstone for queer audiences for two decades now.

Streep, who returns to big screens this weekend in the sequel to director David Frankel’s beloved 2006 classic (succinctly titled “The Devil Wears Prada 2”), expressed this nugget of allyship in a recent interview with Out magazine, promoting the new film’s upcoming release. It would be hard, as a member of the queer community, to disagree with her assessment. The world of fashion has always been inextricably linked with queer culture, and the whims of taste that drive it are so frequently shaped by queer men – and women, too – who have adopted it as a means of expressing their sense of identity from the very first time they thumbed through a copy of Vogue.

At the same time, the notion that “Prada” has been claimed by the community as “canon” simply because of the stereotypical idea that “gay people love fashion” feels like a lazy generalization. After all, fashion is about discernment – about knowing, if you will, whether a sweater is simply blue or if it is cerulean, and, importantly, understanding why it matters – and just because something ticks off a few basic boxes, that doesn’t mean it qualifies as “haute couture.”

So yes, the setting of the “Devil Wears Prada” universe in what might be called “ground zero” of the fashion industry plays a part in piquing queer interest, but to assume our obsession with it is explained as simply as that is, frankly, insulting. The fashion angle catches our interest, but it’s the story – and, more to the point, the central characters (all of which return in the sequel) – that reels us in.

First, there’s the ostensible heroine, Anne Hathaway’s Andrea (or rather, Andy) Sachs, who falls into the world of fashion almost by accident. She’s a recent college grad who wants to be a journalist, to write for a publication that operates on a less-superficial level than Runway magazine, but fate (for lack of a better word) places her in the job that “a million girls” would kill to have – assistant to Streep’s Miranda Priestly (based on Vogue editor Anna Wintour), who can determine an entire season’s fashion trends merely by pursing her lips. She’s idealistic, and dismissive of fashion in the overall scheme of human existence; she’s also stuck with a truly terrible boyfriend (Nate, played by Adrian Grenier) and trying to live up to the self-imposed expectations and ideals that have been foisted upon her since birth.

It’s clear from the start that none of this “fits” her particularly well. More significantly, the natural grace with which she blossoms, from “sad girl” fashion-victim to the epitome of effortless style, tells us that she was meant to be exactly where she is, all along.

Then, of course, there is Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the ever-loyal art director and “Gay Best Friend” that’s always there to provide just the right saving touch for both Miranda and Andy, helping to boost the former while gifting the latter with his own insight, “tough love,” and impeccable taste. Never mind that he’s a queer character played by a straight actor – Tucci avoids stereotype and performative flamboyance by simply playing it with pure, universally relatable authenticity – or that he ends up, at the end of the original film, betrayed by his goddess yet deferring his own dream to double down on his commitment to hers. Anyone who has ever been a gay man in the orbit of a remarkable woman knows exactly how he feels. Of course, they also probably know the precarious life of being a queer person in the workplace – something that carries its own set of compromises, disappointments, and determinations to go above-and-beyond just to make oneself invaluable to the powers that be.

Which brings us to Emily (Emily Blunt), the cutthroat “first assistant” who does her level best to keep Andy in her place, who goes to extremes (“I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight”) to be the “favorite” no matter how much cruelty she has to unleash on those who threaten her status. Some see her as merely an obstacle in the way of Andy’s rise to success, an antagonist whose efforts to embody the “no mercy” persona of an ascendent girl boss only expose her own mediocrity. But for many, she’s just another victim doomed to fail and fall while watching others rise to the top. Queer, straight, or in-between, who among us hasn’t been there?

Finally, of course, there is Streep’s Miranda Priestley, the presumed “devil” of the title and the epitome of mercilessly autocratic authority, who has earned her status and her power by embracing the toxic modus operandiof a misogynistic hierarchy in order to conquer it. Yes, she’s more than just a little horrible, a strict gatekeeper who hones in on perceived weaknesses with all the vicious premeditation of a hawk with its eyes on a luckless rabbit, and it would be easy to despise her if she weren’t so damn fabulous. But thanks to the incomparable Oscar-nominated performance from Streep – along with the glimpses we are afforded into her “real” life along the way – she is not just aspirational, but iconic. Stoic, imperturbable, always three steps ahead and never affording an inch of slack for any perceived shortcoming, there’s an undeniable excellence about her that inspires us to see beyond the obvious dysfunction of the “work ethic” she represents; and sure, there’s enough emotionally detached enthusiasm in her torment/training of Andy to fuel countless volumes of erotic lesbian fan-fiction (Google “MirAndy,” if you dare), but when we eventually recognize that she might just be the ultimate “fashion victim” of them all, it doesn’t just cut us to the core – it strikes a chord that should be universally recognizable to anyone who has had to make their own “deal with the devil” in order to claim agency in their own lives. In this way, “The Devil Wears Prada” comes closer than probably any mainstream film to tying the feminist and queer rights movements together in common cause.

In any case, each character, in their way, can easily be tied to a facet of queer identity – and indeed, to the identity of anyone who must work twice (or more) as hard as a straight white Christian male to succeed. We can see ourselves reflected in all of them – and whether we aspire to be Miranda (I mean, who wouldn’t?), identify with Andy, recognize our worst traits in Emily, or empathize with Nigel and his deferential suffering, there’s something in “The Devil Wears Prada” that resonates with everyone.

Now let’s see if the sequel can say the same.

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Out & About

Lesbifriends Travel to host queer night out

DC Power FC game to be held at Audi Field

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2 hours ago

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May 2, 2026

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(Photo by Inked Pixels/Bigstock)

Lesbifriends Travel will host “Queer Night Out: DC Power FC Game” on Wednesday May 6 at 7 p.m. at Audi Field. 

This will be a fun night out as DC Power FC takes the field at Audi Field, kicking off with a happy hour meetup in Navy Yard before the group walks to the stadium together. Lesbifriends and Travel group will be seated together in the stands, making it easy to connect, cheer, and enjoy the game with people who just feel like your people.

More details are available on Eventbrite. 

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Calendar

Calendar: May 1-7

LGBTQ events in the days to come

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1 day ago

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May 1, 2026

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Friday, May 1

Go Gay DC will host “First Friday LGBTQ+ Community Social” at 7 p.m. at Silver Diner Ballston. This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite. 

“Illusions The Drag Queen Show Washington, D.C.” will be at 7 p.m. at 2323 18th St., N.W. Come see this amazing D.C. drag show and laugh all night long while being amazed by the stellar performances in tribute to some of your old-time favorite classics as well as the latest pop favorites. Come see the likes of Madonna, Cher, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, Beyoncé, Pink, and many more. Tickets are $12.97 and are available on Eventbrite. 

Saturday, May 2

Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11:00a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation.  Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.

Drag Queen Sip and Paint Washington DC will be at 4 p.m. at Town Tavern DC. This event combines the joy of painting with the lively energy of a drag queen, offering an hour and a half of fun, creativity, and entertainment. Participants paint a canvas while enjoying cocktails, all under the guidance of a glamorous drag queen host. Tickets are $47.19 and are available on Eventbrite. 

Monday, May 4

“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).

Tuesday, May 5

Universal Pride Meeting will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This group seeks to support, educate, empower, and create change for people with disabilities. For more details, email [email protected].   

Wednesday, May 6

Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.

Center Aging Women’s Social and Discussion Group will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom. This group is a place where older LGBTQ+ women can meet and socialize with one another. There will be discussion, activities, and a chance for guests to share what they want future events to include. For more information, email [email protected]. 

Thursday, May 7

The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245. 

Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.  

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