Sound of Music heiress does an encore

But eventually, her desire for the world to know the truth behind The Sound of Music took over. She agreed to let her doctor’s husband help get her memoir published. Next thing she knew, she had a multi-state book tour.

In the movie that dominated the 1965 Academy Awards and broke box-office records, the eldest von Trapp daughter comes out of her shell at 16 going on 17. In real life, it’s happening now. She is 90, going on 91.

‘‘It’s very strange for me,’’ said von Trapp recently at her Brooklandville, Maryland, condominium. ‘‘I’ve been living a very quiet life. All of a sudden, these people want to see me.’’

The Sound of Music tells the story of Captain Georg von Trapp, a widowed Austrian aristocrat who falls in love with Maria, a nun-turned-governess for his seven children. The family then escapes the Nazi occupation.

Agathe von Trapp cried when she saw the show at its Broadway opening in 1959. She would have been just as enchanted as the rest of the audience had the characters’ last name been Miller. But this was her family’s name, and it was not her family’s story.

In real life, Agathe von Trapp had an older brother, but in the musical the eldest child was a girl, Liesl. As the oldest daughter, Agathe von Trapp assumed that was her.

But as a teenager she never had a boyfriend, much less a telegram-delivering Nazi. ‘‘In those days, people didn’t date like they do here, and teenage boys didn’t deliver telegrams,’’ she explained.

The nun who became her step-mother was not a governess. She was a tutor for one of von Trapp’s sisters, who was too weak from scarlet fever to make a 45-minute trek to school. And the children were quite well-versed in music by the time they met Maria, who went by the nickname Gustl.

Further, the von Trapps did not cross the Alps to escape Austria. They crossed the street and boarded a train.

Agathe von Trapp could have lived with all of that, had it not been for the musical’s portrayal of her father as cold and distant. She insists he was nothing of the sort.

That’s why, sometime in the 1980s, she put pencil to paper so her nieces and nephews could have an accurate family history. But weakened by a muscle disease, she stopped writing for a long while. Once recovered, she went twice to Europe to dig through archives for the genealogy completed in 2000.

At some point, she began to think of writing for a broader audience. But she wasn’t sure she could write well enough. English isn’t her first language, and she is dyslexic.

But von Trapp liked that she would have control over a self-published book. In 1956, her family lost their ability to monitor the content of the musical — and collect royalties — when Gustl von Trapp sold the rights to her autobiography to a German film company for $ 9,000.

Dozens of Agathe von Trapp’s hand-drawn maps, portraits and other illustrations from the past half-century are interspersed throughout Agathe von Trapp: Memories Before and After The Sound of Music. It chronicles the Trapp Family Singers, who toured for 20 years.

In time, von Trapp writes in her memoir, ‘‘something happened that reconciled me with my ‘enemy’, the play. The shift in my feelings actually came from those who saw The Sound of Music, loved it, and connected it with our name and family.’’

When von Trapp decided to go public with her story, she didn’t realise doing signings was part of the package. But in the past few months, she has found that she actually likes talking to people. At least the people who buy her book.

The book describes fond memories of eating karlsbader oblaten, sugary wafers that von Trapp’s grandmother used to bring home from a spa in southern Germany where she went to lose weight. A reader found the wafers at a speciality grocery store and brought a box to von Trapp at a Vermont signing! (LAT-WP)