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

by Valerie Lawson

  They smiled and asked her simple questions, apparently pandering to her superior knowledge. She chiseled away at them, tried to eliminate the worst of their Americanisms (“go fly a kite”) and succeeded in cutting a scene in which Mary Poppins took the children to Timbuctoo where animals played in an orchestra. That scene was defended by one of the writers as a sort of stylized Disney touch.

  The Shermans talked constantly of fantasy—a word, Pamela noted, much used around the studio. But to her, fantasy was unreality. They told her earnestly they understood the meaning of Mary Poppins. It was the miracle that lay behind everyday life. No, she replied crossly, she didn’t agree. There was no miracle behind everyday life. Everyday life was the miracle. The boys did not quite cotton on to the Gurdjieffian theory.

  By now, the Disney machine was too far down the track for any retreat. Pamela signed further agreements, including her approval of a long list of merchandising.12 She did try to influence casting and boasted that it was one of her conditions on signing the contract that the whole film be played by English actors. (In the end, Bert and Uncle Albert were played by Americans.) The two conditions on which she would not budge were that the film be set in the Edwardian period, and that there be no love affair between Mary and Bert, the pavement artist. But, as she said afterward, while Disney agreed in principle, ultimately Mary Poppins and Bert were too close for her liking, mainly because Disney was not sure Julie Andrews could carry the whole movie herself.13

  One night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Pamela wrote a nine-page letter to the writers, warning them against showing Mary Poppins as “a hoyden.” If she was nothing but a hoyden or a tomboy servant girl, then what would happen to the magic? It was Mary Poppins’s plainness of person, her absolute rightness without being pert, her calm and serene behavior in the middle of the most unlikely adventures, that made the fun in the story. She wanted them to understand that if Mary Poppins’s gravity was not maintained, the whole point would be lost. In their script, the nanny had become an impertinent person. Their luck would hold if they stayed close to the books. It would not do otherwise.

  On April 14, with Pamela safely back in New York, the Shermans wrote her a formal, old-fashioned thank-you letter. Its contents show that she feared she had gone too far with the Shermans. They thanked her for traveling so far and for giving them so much. She was an invaluable inspiration and guide to them all. She had referred to her “temperament” but they would like to interpret her behavior as “an ardent desire” for them to fully comprehend Mary Poppins. In that way, they might be faithful to her.14 And Disney himself sent Pamela a telegram. The Mary Poppins project was so important, he said, that he would go along with her two suggestions if that would make her happy.15 She had reiterated: no love affair and an Edwardian setting.

  • • •

  Pamela fell back easily and happily into the rhythm of New York, into the arms of the Welches’ group. She thought she had squared up to Disney and won. With the glow of victory about her, Pamela impressed one newcomer to the group as a woman at the height of her confidence and power, over sixty yet with elan, vibrant blue eyes, and bubbling with energy and enthusiasm. At last, Pamela felt she was back among intellectual equals. Away she went again, leading the group into circuitous spiritual journeys as she analyzed out loud fairy tales and obscure Persian tales.16

  Pamela was now brimming with ideas for three books to follow the publication of Mary Poppins from A to Z, a money-spinner for the gift market. They were Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane (a title not published for over twenty years) and an allegory about giving called The Fox at the Manger, plus a novel whose main character, Mallow, would share much with little Lyndon Goff of Queensland.

  Pamela needed Mary Shepard once more, first to illustrate Mary Poppins from A to Z, an alliterative picture-to-a-page book. This time, Shepard was not as amenable as before, especially when she heard of the Disney deal. Shepard wrote to Harcourt Brace & World: “I understand from Miss Travers that a film is to be made by the Walt Disney Co. of the Mary Poppins books. If this is so, I should like to know whether my drawings are to be used in any way and if so, I think I ought to be informed.”17 Furthermore, Shepard wrote to Pamela, she was not at all sure if she would agree to the new A to Z as she had so much to do.18

  Over the next few months, the two women corresponded in a tetchy, formal kind of way, Pamela from Mt. Kisco, where she was staying with an American friend, Vanessa Coward, and Shepard from her home at Hampstead. Both women complained of their illnesses. Pamela told Mary it was not an easy time for either of them. She had suffered four years of great anxiety with no end in sight.19 In fact, she was in such a bad state of health that she must do nothing but rest. It was not so much a serious illness as bad digestion and a queer kind of overtiredness. Pamela planned to take another cure, this time in France, then work in the autumn. There were so many new ideas for Mary Poppins, but she had no energy to write. She was, she told Shepard, in a state she defined as “between the acts.”

  In August 1961, Pamela wrote again to Shepard to tell her she had made a start on Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, although every good day was followed by a bad day. On the bad, she could not even think let alone write.20 At the end of September, she flew home to London. Shepard, who really was ill and needed an operation, was not mollified by Pamela’s advice to take things calmly. Pamela advised Shepard to go peacefully to her operation. She had tried to do this herself but had not always succeeded. But, in the process, Pamela had seen glimpses of the meaning of life. “Such rare glimpses meant I would not not have had my burden for anything,” she wrote to Shepard.

  In February 1962, Shepard told Pamela she had hired an agent, a Mr. Knight, who wanted everything in writing. The whole relationship must be set out in a formal arrangement. This sent Pamela into a frenzy of letter writing. She hoped no agent would come between them, spoiling what had been a loving and appreciative friendship. Why, she had always maintained a “punctilious duty” toward her “dear illustrator.”

  Next month, she wrote Shepard the letter of a woman betrayed. Pamela had the feeling that she was being pressed into the role of a wicked giant whereas she saw herself as a goose who had laid five valuable eggs for them both. Did Shepard not realize that a spoken word was binding to her? She could not understand Mr. Knight’s distinction between formal and informal agreements. After all, an IOU was the same, whether it was written on embossed notepaper or an old envelope. She assured Shepard that she would always be able to market her own original drawings (to which Shepard held copyright). Furthermore, she was paying her a fair fee for translations, and in any case, there would be no translation of A to Z. (This turned out to be a lie.)

  As to the film, she had spoken to her lawyer who said there was no question of any arrangement with the artist. Disney was using the books in live action, not animation. Pamela told Shepard not to bother to reply unless there were points she had not taken up.21 But Shepard persisted and responded within the week that she needed more money for A to Z than the previous books because it required more work and effort from her than from Pamela herself.22 In autobiographical notes she wrote for her family, Shepard later said that “for the film, my drawings were not needed and my agent won me something for compensation.”

  • • •

  Now that Disney funds had started to flow to Pamela, she decided to sell her Smith Street house. The rental money was superfluous and the three-story Georgian house seemed far too empty without Camillus, now out of prison and living in a flat. She put her books in storage and in the summer of 1962 rented a place nearby, in Cheyne Row, while she waited for her new house at 29 Shawfield Street to be renovated. Again, it was in a street running off the Kings Road, but the Regency house was smaller and narrower than Smith Street, only two stories, with room on top for a study.

  It was true, Pamela knew, that nobody wanted anything from her but Mary Poppins,23 but W. W. Norton in the United States had agreed to publish (in November 1962) the
new Christmas book, The Fox at the Manger. All her Christmas stories had been autobiographical and here was another: her memory of Camillus as an innocent child in 1945 when she had taken him with two of his friends to the carol service at St. Pauls, home of the Bird Woman. Each of the children in the congregation was to donate a toy to the poor. But her three little boys were unable to part with theirs: a lion whose beady eye hung by a thread, a toy bus whose paint had chipped, and a rubber mouse. “X, Y and Z,” she called the three friends, as anonymous as the initials PLT.

  She wished the manger held one of her favorite black sheep. She told X, Y and Z a legend about Christmas night, when a donkey, a cow, a sheep and a dove came to the Christ child in the crib with presents. The animals are given the power of speech. The child, X, asked if there were any wild animals at the crib and Pamela says yes, a fox who gives his gift of cunning to Christ. Pamela later explained to an interviewer: “I’ve always loved the fox, because he had a bad time at the hands of Aesop and la Fontaine and mankind generally. He’s the untameable creature, that’s why man dislikes him.”24

  Years later, that Christmas of 1962, she couldn’t help but think of the fate of X—Camillus—whom she once described as Romulus, the twin reared by a wild wolf. The dedication in The Fox at the Manger read: “For C. to remind him of X.”

  • • •

  Walt Disney was besotted with his grand new movie. He slept at the studio, filled rooms with drawings of how Mary Poppins would look, stayed in the office after the animators had left, emptied their trash cans and next morning waved discarded roughs in their faces, urging them to “go back to this.” Mary Poppins, the musical, was to be nothing less than revolutionary stuff. In one scene, he planned to mix live action with animation when Mary, Bert, Jane and Michael would pop into one of Bert’s pavement pictures. There, within a painting of one bucolic scene, they would dance with cartoon penguins, turtles, a pig, horses, and a farmyard of Disney pets, all trilling “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary.”

  Disney knew the casting of Mary Poppins herself was the real key to the success of the film. In the spring of 1962, he saw Julie Andrews as Queen Guinevere in a Broadway production of Camelot. When she sang “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” Disney knew he had his Mary. She could even whistle! He raced back to her dressing room after the show, lavished praise on her performance, and next day offered her the part. There was something so perfectly natural about Andrews, a beguiling candor, which belied a toughness bred into her from years on the road as a child prodigy. From the age of five, she had sung and danced in an English vaudeville team with her mother and stepfather, astounding audiences with her strong adult voice. In the 1950s, Andrews made her New York debut in the musical The Boyfriend, in which she played a sweet young thing—without affectation and with great success. But the greatest of all her roles was the cockney flowergirl Eliza Dolittle in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. Although Andrews was a faultless Eliza, she was rejected for the film version of My Fair Lady by the director Jack Warner in favor of Audrey Hepburn, who looked gorgeous but could not sing at all.

  Andrews had been hurt, but the rebuff must have put doubt in her mind. She did not say yes to Disney’s offer right away. There were reasons to reject a movie career right now. She was still young—just twenty-six—and expecting her first child with her husband, the set designer Tony Walton, who had recently enjoyed his own more modest Broadway success with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But Disney, the great convincer, offered him a job, too, as Mary Poppins’s design consultant. He suggested they both visit his West Coast masterpiece, Disneyland. Disney planned to escort them around Disneyland in person. Once there, Andrews and Walton felt as if they were in the presence of a god. “See that tree?” he asked Andrews. “There are three million leaves on it and four million flowers.” Then he paused and added, “They said only God could make a tree.”25

  He played her the Shermans’ songs. That was it, the deciding factor. She heard in them a slight flavor of vaudeville, and knew she could sing those songs. Andrews signed a contract for $150,000.26 There was just one potential problem: Pamela. Disney knew that a middle-aged Poppins would be a disaster. He thought perhaps that Pamela envisaged the nanny as her own age, maybe a bit younger, and nervously asked her, just how old is Poppins? When Pamela said, precisely, “twenty-four to twenty-seven,” Disney knew he was home free.27

  Still, Pamela was desperate to see this Julie Andrews. On November 27, 1962, Andrews gave birth to Emma Kate. The next day, Pamela rang Andrews in hospital. “P. L. Travers here,” she said. “Speak to me, I want to hear your voice.” Andrews, still weak, told her she wanted to recover first.28 Pamela invited Andrews and Walton to lunch. When they met, the first thing she said to Andrews was, “Well, you’ve got the nose for it.” In any case, Andrews adored her: “She was so honest and direct.”29

  Pamela, too, was charmed at first sight. She told many interviewers she was completely won over. “I hadn’t spoken to her for five minutes before I realized she had the inner integrity for the part.” Andrews had confided, “I haven’t read these books, I don’t know anything about them and I’ve never been brought up on them. Tell me how to play Mary Poppins? Should I have an accent?” Pamela replied, “I won’t tell you anything, you just play her as you truthfully think. Don’t play it any way but yourself.”30

  At Christmas, Pamela’s publishers sent her author’s copies of her latest books; in a mood of exuberance, Pamela asked her publishers to send a gift set, the Mary Poppins Library, to President Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline. Her social secretary, Letitia Baldridge, replied that the president’s daughter, Caroline, was charmed with the Mary Poppins Library. She knew that within a few years John Jr. would also love the books.31

  Next, Pamela bundled up a copy of Mary Poppins A to Z for Walt Disney and mailed it in December with a letter, explaining that the book was for his grandchildren. She wanted him to know she had talked to Julie Andrews and found her, even in the first flush of motherhood, “very alert and intelligent.” Although she had not seen Andrews act, Pamela thought she had the inner honesty and dependability necessary for Mary Poppins. Nor had she seen the actor Dick Van Dyke, who she heard was to play Bert. She hoped, in vain as it turned out, that he was English and could speak cockney. Pamela told Disney that Mary Poppins definitely did not speak cockney but had a most demure unaccented voice.

  Then there was the matter of casting. She suggested Margaret Rutherford as the Bird Woman and Karen Dotrice as Jane. The children should be dressed in clothes similar to those she had marked in pages torn from Punch and the Illustrated London News. She was sure the Edwardian atmosphere would give an air of magic and fairy tale to the film. No taxis and cars, but hansom cabs, street cries and penny farthing bicycles. Disney would disappoint his audience if he did not include the Banks twins in the film, and she cautioned him that Mary Poppins was not referred to as Mary in the books except by her odd relatives. The Banks should refer to her by her full name, as if it was a title.

  By now Pamela knew that Disney’s writers had built up the role of Bert far beyond anything in the books. Disney’s Bert was to be a one-man band, a chimney sweep and an artist who knows all about the magic of Mary Poppins and is clearly her equal in magic. Pamela wanted Disney to know that Bert must never appear as Mary’s lover, but could only appreciate her from a distance. Shy, humble and loving, he would never hope that his love was reciprocated. She reminded Walt that she had never agreed to a planned love song for the two characters in the “Day Out” animated sequence and hoped he, too, had come to this conclusion. However, she did see Bert singing a song with no emotional overtones . . . something “jingling yet sincere,” perhaps a melody like “Lily of Laguna.”

  Disney appears to have accepted her next idea that Bert should sing and dance soft shoe, while Mary looks on smiling, tapping her foot, looking prim and ladylike. Pamela also suggested Bert should seize the parrot umbrella and dance with that, telling the umbrella about M
ary Poppins, then, at the end, shyly putting out a hand to Mary. The two would dance at arm’s length, no words of love spoken. She reminded Walt Disney, the great sentimentalist, that if you keep things light, deep feelings can seep through.

  Although Pamela was unmusical, she advised Disney on the score, suggesting that all the musical numbers should have the rhythms of Edwardian songs. In this way, old melodies would filter through the new ones, like ghosts, hints and reminders. “Lily of Laguna” could counterpoint Bert’s song. “Ta ra ra boom de ay” could peep through a song sung by Admiral Boom, and “Brahms’ Lullaby” could be heard through “Feed the Birds.” The old songs, she reminded Walt, were not only wonderful, but back in fashion.

  At this time, the film was still not cast and Disney was considering Stanley Holloway, a hit in My Fair Lady as Eliza Dolittle’s father, for Admiral Boom. In the end, the Admiral was played by Reginald Owen and the role enlarged and broadened. (His habit of firing a gun at 8 A.M. and 6 P.M. became a running gag so simple and broad, it appealed only to children.)

  Disney honored his promise to use mainly English actors with his best piece of casting: the partnership of Glynis Johns and David Tomlinson as Mrs. and Mr. Banks. He chose Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber as Jane and Michael Banks (they were both in his previous film, The Three Lives of Thomasina). Three talented English character actors appeared as the maid Ellen (Hermione Baddeley), the Banks’s former nanny, Katie Nanna (Elsa Lanchester), and Constable Jones (Arthur Treacher). One of John Ford’s character actors, Jane Darwell (who had played Ma Joad in Grapes of Wrath) was the Bird Woman, and Ed Wynn played himself in the guise of Uncle Albert, who couldn’t stop laughing and floated up to the ceiling on a steady diet of “boom boom” music hall jokes.

  To direct the array of English talent, Disney recruited another Englishman, Robert Stevenson, who had directed The Absent-Minded Professor in 1961. The Shermans, Bill Walsh and Don Da Gradi had also worked on that successful Disney film, which had starred Fred MacMurray with a flying Model T.