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

by Valerie Lawson

  If she agreed, the transaction would mean she had to grant full rights to the stories, other than the written word, which in turn meant that control of any possible theatrical, musical, TV or radio production would pass to the Disney organization on terms to be settled.

  Arnold Goodman, the ultimate fixer, suggested they meet to discuss the deal urgently.

  13

  The Americanization of Mary

  She called it “uneasy wedlock.” Walt Disney and Pamela Travers danced around each other—he the great convincer, she the reluctant bride—then, after the slow courtship, came the quick consummation and a lingering cool down. The result of their five years locked in this awkward embrace was Disney’s greatest film of the 1960s, a movie about American values and family reconciliation. Made in America in 1963, Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins was released the following year, when Lyndon Baines Johnson promised to heal a fractured nation with his concept of the “Great Society.”

  Created by Disney, a fervent anticommunist and family man who stood four square for the American way, the movie Mary Poppins was only loosely based on Pamela’s original books of Mary Poppins adventures. Disney seized upon the fantasy world of the books but eliminated their mystery. He made a film of no ambivalence, no depth, and very little sadness. But then his aim was not to mystify and challenge, but to show how peace was restored to a family in strife. His happy family and jolly songs helped cheer middle America.

  Few in the movie audiences knew the name P. L. Travers, which appeared in small type in the opening credits. And certainly no one knew or cared how Mary Poppins arose. Later, many interviewers quizzed this unknown P. L. Travers to try to discover what inspired the nanny. Only a few suspected that she was born from a need in Pamela, whose own childhood had been out of joint and whose own little family of two was now in disarray. While the film was in production, with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke prancing with penguins to “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary” at Disney’s Burbank studios, Pamela herself sat on a tatami mat in Kyoto and tried to meditate away her anxiety.

  The film’s great success, critical and financial, helped soothe the pain for the rest of her life. Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins cost $5 million to make, grossed more than $75 million, launched Julie Andrews on a movie career, earned her an Academy Award, and produced a handful of hit songs which remain lodged in the subconscious of three generations. Thirty-five years after the movie was first released at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, grandmothers and mothers sit with their children in front of the Mary Poppins video or DVD knowing, as if learned by rote in a dusty schoolroom, “Chim Chim Cheree,” “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” To those generations, Julie Andrews is Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins is Julie Andrews, an amalgam and culmination of all her successful roles from Eliza Dolittle to the singing nun, Maria, in The Sound of Music. Julie’s Mary Poppins was not the sharp, plain nanny created by Pamela and Mary Shepard but a sparkling, reed slim, sugar-sweet soubrette, with rounded vowels and a voice Time magazine described as “polished crystal.”

  Disney had lusted after the Poppins stories for almost twenty years, ever since the evening just before Christmas 1944 when he walked by the room of his daughter, Diane. He heard his eleven-year-old laughing out loud. What was so funny? She held up a book—Mary Poppins. The book had sat on her bedside table for most of her childhood. Her mother, Lilian, liked it too, often reading a chapter to her daughter before she fell asleep. For years, Lilian and Diane had both asked Walt if he would make the book into a movie. In 1945, when he heard that Miss P. L. Travers was in New York, Walt Disney sent his brother Roy to see her. Roy—dull, diligent, without the charismatic manner of his younger brother—could not convince her to sign over the rights.1

  Disney, a master of persistence, did not give up. He had survived the Depression years brilliantly with sweet Mickey Mouse and grouchy Donald Duck. In the decade to 1941, Disney had won thirteen Oscars, and, as America was getting ready to go to the war, could boast of three hugely popular movies: The Three Little Pigs, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Pinocchio. He was soon to release Dumbo, about a baby elephant who could fly, and was planning Bambi, the feel-good film about childhood. Disney had taken a gamble with Fantasia, a success with movie critics if not with the music world’s intelligentsia. By now, his manipulation of the American consumer market was unsurpassed. But although the turnover of Disney-branded goods had reached about $100 million a year, Disney wanted more. Throughout the 1940s, Disney searched for new properties and continued to make what Pamela called “forays into the jungle” for the rights to Mary Poppins. She consistently refused.2

  But Disney was about to move from the pure slapstick of his earlier short cartoons into a new, more ambitious phase. In the 1950s, he began to adapt the best-loved fairy tales and classics of children’s literature into full-length animated features. The shift in emphasis from Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse probably changed Pamela’s mind about Disney and her distaste for what she called “the vulgar art” of moviemaking. In 1950, Disney released the charming and top-grossing feature Cinderella, with its catchy song “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo.” This was followed by Alice in Wonderland in 1951, Peter Pan in 1953, The Lady and the Tramp in 1955, and The Sleeping Beauty, with music adapted from Tchaikovsky’s ballet score, in 1959.

  Early in 1959, Disney had made the fresh offer for Mary Poppins through Pamela’s New York law firm, then sent his emissaries, Dover and Swan, with a precise offer to Goodman Derrick in London. This time she succumbed, telling her friends it was such a generous contract that it would not be right to refuse any longer, despite her view that Disney was without subtlety and emasculated any character he touched, replacing truth with false sentimentality.3 But Goodman was right. It would have been foolish to refuse $100,000 and a possible income for life at a time when sales of her four Mary Poppins books were languishing and she had no steady income except from her lodgers’ weekly rent.

  Disney was so determined now that he had already asked Bill Walsh, one of his most trusted writers, to prepare a story outline. Walsh had been an all-around organization man for Disney for a couple of decades but in the last few years had teamed up with the screenwriter Don Da Gradi, director Robert Stevenson and songwriters Robert B. Sherman and Richard R. Sherman to produce many hit Disney films. Walsh knew what an audience wanted and he knew how to gut a book. For his outline, he went to Pamela’s first book of 1934, visualizing the nanny’s arrival out of and departure into the clouds.4

  In the face of the seductive insistence of Disney’s two outriders in London, Pamela stood her ground. Yes, she would agree, but she made sure the movie would not be an animated cartoon and insisted that she should have final script approval. Walt Disney Productions and Pamela’s company, John Lyndon Ltd., signed a preliminary agreement in April 1960. Then, on June 3, they signed a “service agreement” that was to last six years. Under its terms, Pamela remained entitled to the copyright in any material she wrote before the agreement and was also entitled to the copyright in material she would write while she was employed by John Lyndon Ltd. The agreement was vague about any subsequent live stage rights for Mary Poppins, but Disney did insist on his right to impose a freeze on any radio and television productions.

  Despite Goodman’s reassurance that a treatment would be simple to prepare, Pamela recruited the TV scriptwriter Donald Bull to help. Disney had given Pamela just sixty days to come up with a treatment. She made the deadline, though the words came slowly.

  • • •

  All through the negotiations, Pamela had something far more pressing on her mind. Early in 1960, she had asked for help from one of her Gurdjieff friends, the Harley Street surgeon Kenneth Walker. The problem was urgent: how to deal with Camillus’s drinking problem and increasingly odd behavior. During 1960, he had lost his driver’s license but continued to drive and one night, on a Middlesex road, was stopped by the police for driving drunk and without a license. He was sen
tenced to six months in Stafford Prison, a maximum security jail, where he spent his twenty-first birthday in August 1960.

  Pamela longed for a piece of good news. Disney had not responded to her script. Maybe he had dumped the whole project? On December 20, a Western Union telegram broke the drought with the news from Disney that enthusiasm was still high for Mary Poppins. He would set a date for presentation early in the new year. But no further word arrived until February 13, when Disney reassured her that the completed treatment was close. The more he thought about it though, the more he thought she should come to Los Angeles to spend at least a week at the studio, meeting everyone who would carry the picture through to completion. They would show her storyboards to indicate the nature of the visual presentation…“particularly with regard to the trick photography we want to incorporate to make the story properly come across on the screen.”

  Disney suggested she travel to the West Coast early in April. Naturally he would pay for the airfare and hotel. His letter ended with a slight warning. While Disney was “very respectful” of Pamela’s wishes, there were certain things that would be best discussed at first hand. Late in March, she checked into the luxurious hacienda-style Beverly Hills Hotel. At the studios in South Buena Vista Street she met Walt Disney, then sixty, surrounded in his office by more than twenty-five Oscars, and riding high on the success of his recent Pollyanna and The Absent-Minded Professor. By the late 1950s, Disney knew what the American public most wanted to see—a happy family. Now, once again, he had got just the right property to do so with Mary Poppins. He saw Mary, as he called her, as assertive but still sexy, cool yet hot, as pretty as the shapely dreamgirls Cinderella and Tinker Bell that his animators had drawn. This new angel would rid the Banks home of chaos, just as his Parent Trap of 1961 transformed a dysfunctional, divorced family into a happy home.5

  Pamela, middle-aged, a touch frumpish yet sharp, and Walt Disney, dapper, pencil-thin-mustached, were alike in some surprising ways. Both were driven to the point of physical exhaustion, both were burdened by the same work ethic, the same conservative values. Pamela, two years older than Disney, was a small-town girl at heart, though she liked to hide it, while he boasted of his small-town childhood in the midwest, wearing his Main Street origins like a cartoon costume. They both avoided talk of sex, claiming to be shocked by any obvious salaciousness in print or in art, and, oddly enough, both spent a lot of time worrying about defecation. Pamela was obsessed with her problem bowels while Disney joked often and loudly of turds.6

  Disney had been married for decades. He and Lilian lived comfortably and reclusively in Holmby Hills in Los Angeles, spending their weekends at their thousand-acre Smoke Tree Ranch near Palm Springs. He loved trains and built a model railway around his Holmby Hills property. But apart from his comfortable marriage, there was one big difference between Disney and Pamela. Disney’s purpose in life was entertaining people…bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others rather than being concerned with expressing himself or “obscure creative impressions.” Pamela specialized in obscure creative impressions.7

  Walt Disney was “the great convincer” in the words of his marketing director, Card Walker. He liked to exercise his famous eye-lock technique in which he caught his victim’s gaze and held it tight. If he or she turned away, Disney would say “What’s the matter, aren’t you interested?”8 Still, Pamela was his match. She called him “Mr. Disney” (almost everyone called him “Walt”) and did not turn away during their long talks in Burbank that April. She often talked later of one particular exchange: Disney had said to her “I think you’re very vain!” She replied “Oh, am I?” “Yes,” he went on, “you think you know more about Mary Poppins than I do.” “Well, vain or not,” she smiled, “I think that I do know more than you.” Disney trumped, “No you don’t!”

  Pamela had scribbled all over the script written by Bill Walsh and Don Da Gradi. It certainly wasn’t the one she and Bull had prepared so painstakingly in London. For a start, she had planned to use at least seventeen episodes from three of her books: “East Wind,” “Mrs Corry,” “Laughing Gas,” “John and Barbara’s Story” and “West Wind” from the first book; “Miss Andrew’s Lark,” “The New One,” “The Kite,” “Balloons and Balloons” and “Bad Wednesday,” “The Evening Out” and “Merry Go Round” from the second book; and “The Marble Boy,” “Mr. Twigley’s Wishes,” “The Cat That Looked at a King,” “High Tide” and “Happy Ever After” from the third book.

  Walsh and Da Gradi, though, had created completely new adventures for Mary Poppins, and had adapted just three stories of Pamela’s—“East Wind,” “The Day Out” and “Laughing Gas,” while incorporating a few details from “The Bird Woman,” “John and Barbara’s Story,” “The Kite” and “West Wind.”

  Each day for ten days, Pamela went into the production studios. Line by line, she scoured the treatment prepared by Da Gradi and the Shermans. The Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, were more than musicians. As staff writers for Disney, they had written the songs for The Parent Trap and Summer Magic, and were to play a major part in developing the script of Mary Poppins.

  On day one, the Sherman boys began at the beginning, reading from the script: “Autumn in 1910, London. 17 Cherry Tree Lane, the Banks household is in an uproar.”

  Pamela immediately cut in: “Hold it!”

  In the first of her objections, interruptions and interjections, she took alarm at the possible look of Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane. Pamela promised to give them a photograph of 50 Smith Street so they could see the Banks house was quite like hers, except with more to the garden.

  “The father comes home to find the children misbehaving. Mr. Banks talks of his wife’s job.”

  “Just a minute. That’s, that’s, not job, ah, ah…”

  “Domain?”

  “Er, yes.”

  “Responsibility?”

  “Well, we can’t have job. Let’s leave it for the moment.”

  “Sphere of influence?”

  “Oh no no no no no. She just lived. That’s far too, you know…”

  In the archives of Disney and in the records Pamela kept of her encounter with Disney are transcripts of six audio tapes made during the ten days of conferences. The tone of the writers is deferential, the tone of Pamela is both anxious and dictatorial. She wanted to make one thing very clear to them. It was integral to the book and to the story in whatever form that Mary Poppins should never be impolite to anybody, and particularly not to Mr. or Mrs. Banks. The comedy came from this grave, quiet person through which magic happened.

  As the days dragged on, it became clear that Pamela wanted signposts to her own family story scattered throughout the film. For a scene in which Poppins measures Jane and Michael Banks she urged the writers to use the kind of long, roll-up tape measure her mother had when she was a little girl. Later, she issued instructions that Mr. Banks must be in pajamas. She remembered her father in pajamas. And again, the children must tell Mary Poppins not to put tapioca on the shopping list. Pamela said she hated tapioca when she was a child, so she wanted this put on record. One of the writers remarked that Mr. Banks was not always tender with his wife. This reminded Pamela of her own parents. Mr. Banks was “only untender” in the way that “any husband was in the daily misses of life.” In the manner of her own father in Allora, he was not even indifferent, but merely unable to express his love.

  Pamela’s efforts to explain that Poppins was on a private search of her own fell on uncomprehending ears. They wanted, she thought, “magic for magic’s sake.”9 But the biggest gap between Pamela’s ideas and those of the writers revolved around the critical relationship between Mary Poppins and Mr. Banks, one which reflected her own idealized relationship with her father. In the movie, Mr. Banks is a disturbed and unhappy man until he is propelled into almost hysterical glee after being fired by his employer, the ancient chairman of the bank. In the books, George Banks is more grumpy than disturbed, more out of sorts and vague
than he is a depressed curmudgeon.

  The writers were frank with Pamela. Before they could establish a comprehensive and cohesive story, they wanted to interpret her Poppins books in one sentence: what did Mary do and why. They decided that Mary Poppins saw an unhappy family, arrived, then, through her presence, showed the family how to understand one another. When she succeeded, she left. Pamela smelled the odor of psychoanalysis. Yes, that was right in a way, but it was not so much an unhappy family as a worried one. Pamela thought any family would be upset when a nanny had left and they couldn’t find another. After all, she had been in this predicament herself. She remembered when one maid was leaving and she had not been able to find another. The Banks family was only at odds with life, not with each other. She wouldn’t like anything to creep into the script of “a psychological quirk” or any hint of “Freudian unhappiness.” The Banks family was just—at odds.

  But just at odds did not make for a dramatic script. Nor did her gentle short stories, with their Victorian ambience, amount to a cohesive story with a beginning, climax and denouement. The writers needed a storyline of black-and-white sentiments within a brilliantly colored setting, which is one reason why Mr. Banks in the movie was, outwardly, tough and chilly. She fought them on that, Pamela told interviewers later. In fact, she said, “I could hardly bear it…I’ve always loved Mr Banks. I did ask in Hollywood why Mr. Banks had to be such a monster.”10

  Why, she demanded, must they have Mr. Banks tear up an advertisement his children had written, setting out their needs for a new nanny? Not only that, he threw it in the fireplace. She asked the writers if they had children. Yes, they had. And did they write letters and make pictures? Yes, of course. And would they tear up their pictures? Certainly not. Then why, she asked, do you do it in a film for the children of the world to see, why be untruthful?11