Born Gayle Peck in Santa Rosa on September 26, 1926, JULIE LONDON was a California girl. Her parents,
Josephine and Jack Peck, had been vaudeville performers; JULIE made her professional debut on their San Bernardino radio show when she was just three years old, singing
I'm Falling In Love Again. A photography business the family later opened fell victim to the depression; they moved to Los Angeles when JULIE was fourteen.
JULIE was not particularly happy at Arrowview Junior High School. Thanks to her parents' radio program, she was used to a world of adults, musicians mostly, and she felt more at home with adults than with her fellow students.
She recalled, "A doctor decided I was allergic, literally allergic, to school, and I stopped going."
JULIE, more mature than her peers, found that the other kids "thought I was a real idiot because I didn't talk their language, and I thought they were childish, so we didn't mix too well.
I was sort of old for my age and didn't fit. A lot of people thought my silence was indifference."
JULIE liked music and read lots of books. She would remain a voracious reader throughout her life, reportedly reading as many as three books a day.
When she was fifteen, JULIE met Jack Webb, six years her senior and one of her first dates.
The two dated for about a year, until Jack went into the Army. JULIE left school and took a job running an elevator in Roos Brothers Store.
[Later she would return to Hollywood Professional High School to complete her education, graduating in 1944.]
It was while running the department store elevator that agent Sue Carol [actor Alan Ladd's wife] discovered her.
Her acting career as JULIE LONDON [JULIE because she said she looked more like a 'Julie' than a
'Gayle;' LONDON because it was a name she felt stood for courage, for something to live up to] began with a B movie called
NABONGA. In later years, JULIE would fervently wish that no one would ever know she had appeared in this film, but her work in the film [which, like most B films of the day, was shot in five days] was both credible and believable.
JULIE worked as a radio actress, most notably on THAT BREWSTER BOY, an audience comedy show that aired over KHJ in Los Angeles for the Mutual Network.
In 1943, Henry Waxman photographed JULIE as a World War II pinup for
Esquire magazine. Jack, then stationed at Laughlin Army Air
Field in Texas, saw her picture posted on the barracks wall and boasted of personally knowing her, a claim not particularly believed by his fellow soldiers.
So he wrote her a letter and she wrote back. And when Jack was discharged from the Army, the two resumed dating . . . . . . . . until Jack headed off to San Francisco to work on a radio program.
The pair saw each other occasionally while Jack was in San Francisco; when he returned to Hollywood, they resumed steady dating and, on July 19, 1947, the two were married in Las Vegas.
