Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers

by Valerie Lawson

  The procession rolled past fields with their new winter wheat, big white bullocks coming home from plowing. Pamela hoped she, too, would have a happy funeral. They arrived at Avon near Fontainebleau. The brightness of the day had faded, the sky was graying, it was very cold. Each mourner threw a little earth into the grave. Pamela saw Katherine Mansfield’s grave nearby, and inscribed on it: “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” She picked a little leaf from another grave and laid it on Mansfield’s stone. Somebody handed each mourner a spoonful of wheat cooked with honey and raisins. Pamela watched the faces, saw how they had changed in grief.

  Everyone stood so still by the grave, unwilling to go away, but night was coming. They drove back through the dusk to Gurdjieff’s apartment, so crowded they could hardly move their arms to pass the plates. She looked one last time at the room where they had sat to read, “seeing many things,” then said good-bye. She left Paris that night from the Gare du Nord, a cake and banana from the last supper tucked in her bag for Camillus.17

  • • •

  Camillus came home from school the next day, home to Smith Street. Pamela held him close. In grief and pain, she thought, a child offers the warmest comfort. From her bag, she pulled a picture of Gurdjieff on his bier. Camillus said little. They spent Guy Fawkes Day pottering about, playing Happy Families, making a face for the guy that they decided to call Sir Stafford Cripps. That night, with his friends, Camillus watched the guy’s head blow off with a bang. He’d put crackers inside him. Camillus told his mother he loved her. Solemnly he said there was no other house so sweet or a mother so kind.

  The next day, Pamela decided he must return to school by train. He cried and said if only the other boys liked him more he wouldn’t mind going back so much. Pamela invented a word game to distract him on the way to Waterloo station. He waved good-bye cheerfully enough. On the way home she thought how similar they really were, the adopted baby and the last-minute mother who was once a little girl whose parents were so kind, reasonable, so distant. He took things hard, as she did. His pride pushed people away. Still, he seemed so much happier this term than ever before at school. Yes, she was sure he was all right.18

  But she wasn’t sure at all. Camillus’s parting made an uneasy end to the year. What was left now? Both her guru and the New English Weekly had gone. There was comfort, though, in her Gurdjieff network of friends and, most of all, in the movement hall, the calming music of Rosemary Nott.

  In grief, sometimes, women clean up, sweep, dust, put away. Mrs. Ritchie helped Pamela attack a kind of chaos at Smith Street. They stored clothes, bits and pieces of mismatched furniture, Camillus’s baby things, books. Up they went, into the loft. Pamela had decided to rent out some rooms. England had not been the soft landing she had hoped. If only she had been Mrs. Banks, she could have hoped for the return of a comforting nanny. Mary Poppins would have helped her find peace in everyday things: cups and saucers, stars and rocking horses. She would have been someone to lean on, to pick up, tidy up.

  That pain in her gut and bowels came back again, worse than before.

  12

  Shadowplay

  After three books, Pamela planned to let her magic nanny fly into the sky and never return. She felt bound by her own creation, as if she would never produce another character as fascinating. Almost as soon as the first book was published in the 1930s, film and TV executives, including Walt Disney, had jostled for the rights to the stories. She refused to sell them; the offer was never exactly right. Pamela wanted to move on from children’s fiction, but she knew that Poppins was all that anyone wanted.

  In the early 1950s T. S. Eliot, then at Faber and Faber, asked Pamela if she would be interested in his publishing the books. She declined, remaining faithful to Eugene Reynal. Eliot’s approach followed another tempting offer; Reynal told Pamela that the American network CBS TV was interested in buying the rights for a TV production, possibly with a musical score. Reynal was keen to see the proposal succeed. At the same time, he reminded Pamela that their original contract stipulated up to four Mary Poppins books, all to be published in the United States. And although his old firm Reynal & Hitchcock had been taken over by Harcourt, Brace & World, he remained with the merged firm. Reynal wanted a fourth book, which he personally would carry through to publication.

  Pamela agreed, although she warned him the nanny would eventually have to stay away for good. In a preface to the new book, Mary Poppins in the Park, she wrote that the nanny could not keep arriving and departing forever. The author wanted to make it clear that the six adventures in this book, published in 1952, could have taken place during any of the three visits of Mary to the Banks family.

  The new stories came quickly and effortlessly, appearing on her typewriter as if by magic. Mary Poppins was now much more than a servant with a secret life. Pamela invested her with all manner of insights and powers, telling Reynal she “saw further” into Mary Poppins. She realized that George Banks had an instinctive understanding of the nanny and that Poppins had a reason for coming to the Bankses—to find something for herself. Once she found it, she was free to leave. Mary Poppins was happy in her role as a conduit. Through her, people found balance and a sense of their true worth.1

  Pamela, now fifty-one, had absorbed all the theories of the pundits on what Mary Poppins actually meant. She began to mix Gurdjieffian ideas into Poppins’s adventures and personality; the nanny was more than ever a guru, or seer, and seeker of spiritual truths. Pamela thought Mary Poppins in the Park gave “certain clues” that the other books did not. It was her favorite in the Poppins series as the book carried certain ideas she loved. Among them is the nature of identity, our real selves, and other selves. Pamela was fixated on shadows, doppelgangers and duality, partly because of her own complex identity but also because the truth about her son and his twin was locked stubbornly in her mind. Mary Poppins in the Park is peppered with references to twins, triplets and shadows, and other selves of every kind.

  Pamela herself appears throughout the stories. Like little Lyndon Goff, Jane Banks in this book wishes on a star and makes miniature parks for poor people who never quarrel. Mrs. Lark, the Banks’s neighbor, is now more dreamily nostalgic than before, recalling her girlish days when she wore a pinafore and button boots, when her curls were blond, when she played imaginary games with fairy-tale creatures and never dared step on an ant. That was the little girl who “meant to marry a king.” Mrs. Lark is Pamela in her fifties.

  The book begins with the story “Every Goose a Swan,” in which Jane Banks says she is only Jane on the outside, but somebody quite different on the inside. “Every Goose a Swan” is threaded with people yearning to be someone else, among them a goose girl who says she is really a princess in disguise. Jane herself pretends to be the daughter of an Indian chief. A wise man disguised as a tramp warns that every alternative life that looks so tempting is disappointing and difficult in reality. The moral is so simple it’s a cliché: be yourself. Pamela told an interviewer later that everyone’s inner self is not so much hidden as lost. Adults lost their inner self when they were children. Each person longs for his inner self for the rest of his life.2

  In the second story, “The Faithful Friends,” a policeman tells the Banks children he is a triplet. His brothers left him to go to a distant land. One brother came back but met with an accident. The other wrote a note, reassuring his brothers they were not to worry about him. They never heard from him again. Pamela struggled with this story, explaining how she first thought the policeman should be a twin, but after taking a walk in her favorite thinking place, Battersea Park, across the river from Chelsea, said out loud to herself, “Of course, the policeman is not twins but triplets!”3

  In another adventure, “The Children in the Story,” Pamela again asked who is real, who is fictional: three princes in a fairy book or the Banks children themselves. Both the princes and the Bankses have read of each other in books, and each group of siblings is excited to m
eet the others in the flesh. They have in common their flighty nanny, Mary Poppins, who is likely to leave the princes—Florimund (Beauty), Veritain (truth) and Amor (Love)—at any time, just as she flies away from Jane and Michael Banks.

  In the fifth adventure, “The Park in the Park,” Jane wants to know if everything in the world is not quite what it seems. She visualizes an endless chain of worlds within worlds, where one park, for example, is inside another, inside another. Jane realizes she herself can be in two places at once. In this story, an illustration by Mary Shepard shows Mrs. Hickory, the mother of twins, holding her two baby boys, Dickory and Dock. Mrs. Hickory’s face is Pamela’s.

  The last and most lyrical story in the book concerns Halloween, when the Banks children are invited to a party in the park. Only their shadows attend, to mingle with the shadows of the other guests—fairy-tale shadows, nursery-tale shadows, and shadows of Mary Poppins’s friends, among them two crones, Mrs. Corry and the Bird Woman. All the lonely people in the park are searching for their own shadow. The Bird Woman remarks that our shadows are the other part of us, the outside of our inside. The Park Keeper is astonished that a star, and the light in the Banks nursery, are so alike, he can hardly tell the difference. At this, the Bird Woman explains that one is a shadow of the other. At midnight, the shadows reclaim their owners. The story anticipated what Pamela must have known: that one day her own son would find his other half.

  • • •

  Camillus spent his high school years as a boarder at Bryanstan, a public school in Dorset. During the school terms, Pamela moved between her home in Smith Street and New York, where she rented an apartment and spent much of her time with Dr. Bill Welch and his wife Louise, who ran a Gurdjieff group in Manhattan. In September 1956 she took Camillus for a spring holiday to Trinidad. It was to be their last few weeks together before he discovered the truth about his adoption. Back at boarding school for his final few months, he wrote home to his “dearest Mama” that he had failed French but was optimistic about his English exams to come. After graduation, he planned to spend a few months studying in France, at the University d’Aix in Marseilles.

  Camillus waited for the academic year to begin at home in Smith Street. Pamela gave him an allowance of £2 10s a week, some of which was spent at the bars of the Kings Road pubs nearby. One day in one of the pubs Camillus, now seventeen, began drinking with a young Irishman. His name was Anthony Marlowe Hone. The two young men looked similar, but were not identical. Anthony was shorter, darker. Like the shadows in Halloween, Anthony had been looking for somebody else. He knew he was one of at least three siblings, but there had been talk of more, perhaps even a twin. Anthony wanted to know why his parents, Nat and Bridget, had abandoned their babies all those years ago. One drink led to another, and another, and eventually to the truth. The two young men discovered the sequence of events.

  When Pamela took Camillus from his bed at grandfather Hone’s Irish home in 1939, his twin was sent by their natural mother, Bridget, to her own mother in Piltown, County Kilkenny. This grandmother, called, confusingly, Mrs. Anthony, raised him as an Irishman and Catholic. He always knew who his parents were, and his sense of family and identity was enhanced by the generosity of rich relatives. His grandfather’s sister, Olive Symes, paid for his secondary schooling at Blackrock College in Dublin.4

  Seventeen was the very worst time to find out the truth. Pamela was even more devastated than Camillus when he told her he knew. For months after, she could hardly work in the face of Camillus’s anger—which was unbound. In the spring of 1958, Pamela wrote to Mary Shepard that she could work only when she felt well and when “domestic tribulations” smoothed themselves over. Camillus went up to Oxford early in October and then, at last, she would be able to concentrate. When he was at home, the house rattled. Camillus was a great time waster, but so were all teenagers.5

  After two terms, Camillus and New College, Oxford, parted company. The temptations of driving down to London in fast cars had been too great. By March 1959 he was back at Smith Street, and Pamela asked her solicitor if he could find him a job. If anyone could find a job for Camillus it would be Arnold Abraham Goodman, one of the best-connected men in the City. Known as “the universal fixer,” the unmarried Goodman was at the center of an extensive network of contacts in politics, publishing and the arts, and was to become Lord Goodman in the early 1960s. Tall, bulky, with black hooded eyes under untamed eyebrows, Goodman had worked with Rubinstein Nash, a law firm known for its defamation practice, before he set up his own firm, Goodman Derrick, in the 1930s. A Times profile once described him as “the most influential man in England who…probably knows more secrets of the great than anyone else in the country.” The Goodman contact came good, but not immediately. While he waited, Camillus took a job in a furniture workshop. Pamela had hoped for much more.

  Women, she thought, absorbed tension into their colon and stomach, and this time her own pain was so persistent she booked herself into the Salvadore Mundi Hospital in Rome for a cure. The Salvadore Mundi was one of the best and most expensive hospitals in Europe, staffed by American and other international doctors. Pamela probably heard of its treatments from her American doctor friend, Bill Welch. The hospital offered a solution to her problems in the form of an all-potato diet developed by a Dr. Simeon in India as a cure for spastic colon and dysentery. While Pamela was in Rome absorbing potatoes, Madge Burnand, now a widow, wrote her sweet, resigned letters from another hospital, in Chichester, where she was dying. The hospital fees and her doctors’ bills had been paid by Pamela.

  Madge had asked the doctor whether she was about to die. He replied: “That is in God’s hands.” She smiled and said she knew what that meant and could they send for her lawyer so that she could write her will? Camillus attended the funeral, posting Pamela a handful of tiny flowers from the graveyard of the church. He told his mother the furniture place didn’t pay a fortune but it kept him out of trouble and out of debt. Goodman still had no news of any job, but she was not to worry about that or about her accumulating bills, which he was sending on to Rome.

  Goodman found Camillus a position in the city with a stockbroker, but it was not enough to distract him. Pamela thought someone his own age and gender might help calm him down. She asked Peggy Butler if Joe Hone, then twenty-two, might travel from Ireland and introduce himself to Camillus. Perhaps he could even stay at Smith Street? In the late summer of 1959, Joe moved into her Chelsea house, sleeping in Pamela’s little studio in the garden. It was all so awkward, extremely awkward. Camillus worked in the city in the afternoon, gambled at private parties in the evening and slept all morning.

  In the late afternoon, Joe and Pamela sat in the drawing room overlooking Smith Street. On the landing nearby, she took from the drinks cabinet one red and one white Martini bottle, and mixed her favorite cocktail. They sipped a single cocktail each, talked politely, waited. Camillus remained steadfastly not at home.6

  Late that year Camillus’s father, Nat Hone, died in Dublin, his poor diseased lungs unable to carry him one more day. He had made his peace with a Catholic God. In a last gasp conversion, Hone had embraced the Catholic Church, becoming close to Dr. John MacQuaid, the Archbishop of Ireland.

  • • •

  The deaths of Nat and Madge, and the nagging problem of Camillus, might have meant that 1959 was the blackest year of Pamela’s life but for one quite marvelous piece of news. It came in a long letter from the offices of Goodman Derrick in Bouverie Street in the City, on July 3. For months, Pamela’s New York lawyers had been negotiating the possible sale of Mary Poppins to the Walt Disney organization. Arnold Goodman had seen William B. Dover, their executive story editor, and his sidekick, a Mr. Swan, who had made what he believed was a firm offer to turn Mary Poppins into a movie. This was the moment that would transform Pamela’s life. The offer propelled her into a decade of fame and wrapped her in financial security which even in her old age amounted to millions of pounds. Disney did not just buy the M
ary Poppins story but swallowed it whole, as a shark takes a minnow. It became, officially, “Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins.” P. L. Travers became merely a consultant, with most of her requests to Disney charmingly but firmly turned away. She fell into Walt’s embrace like a lovesick fool, but the fortune he gave her almost made up for the betrayal.

  The July letter to Pamela from Goodman was a well-drafted, concise document from a tidy legal mind. He covered three parts of the Disney offer. First, Pamela was to prepare a story outline or “treatment” for submission to Disney as soon as possible. The Disney lieutenants had told Goodman this did not prevent the boss from enlisting the services of other writers to put a fresh slant on the work. Disney would then give Pamela the completed treatment for her approval. She would be asked to give her blessing to this. It had to be understood that such a treatment was not a shooting script. There would be reasonable latitude to depart from it as the film went on.

  Secondly, she would be consulted (Goodman’s emphasis) on casting and other artistic questions as far as possible. Finally came the matter of money. There would be a $100,000 down payment against the percentage she would receive from the receipts of the film—that was, 5 percent of the producer’s gross (the distribution receipts after the cost of prints, distributors’ costs and advertising). They would not pay for the treatment, since the whole deal was conditional on it being used, but would pay for the time it took—say, £1000. Goodman thought this a fair fee for very little work. He told her this was not to be any form of script but merely a succinct statement of her conception of how different Mary Poppins stories could be used.

  Goodman advised Pamela she should think not only about the $100,000 but about the 5 percent. As she knew, Disney films were timeless, with little “contemporary aspect,” which meant they were released over and over again. This meant, for her, a form of income for life. On the other hand, of course, she might only be left with the $100,000.