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

by Valerie Lawson

  In February 1963, Disney sent Pamela the latest script and told her his casting plans. She sent back a fourteen-page letter, her longest and most detailed yet. She was very happy with progress, she said, and felt that his film would be a great success, for it was, she thought, “a tremendous box of tricks and adventure and merriment.” Yes, it was a long way from the books, but she did see that the inspiration came from them. Most of all, she was happy that Mary Poppins retained her own unknowable integrity, no matter what happened. Bert, too, was now in the right relationship to her, and so was Mr. Banks. There was no love affair, and nothing too cruel. (In handwriting she wrote on a carbon copy of this letter that it turned out not to be right in the finished film.)

  But after the praise came the warnings. Pamela was horrified that her gentle Mrs. Banks had been transformed into a suffragette. However, she could see that by his choice of Glynis Johns, who was a great favorite of hers, Disney intended that Mrs. Banks was the most flustered, feminine and inadequate suffragette ever. Just why Mrs. Banks had to be a suffragette is not clear, but she was clearly a feminist in name only, and one who deferred on all matters to her husband—as did Lilian Disney. The portrayal of Mrs. Banks as a dippy dame carrying a Votes for Women banner could be seen as a sly adult joke against the new American feminists stirred by Betty Friedan’s early 1960s book, The Feminine Mystique. This, however, did not concern Pamela, a woman born in the late nineteenth century who got her own way with men by flirting or bullying. Her understanding of feminism was so narrow that she told Disney in this letter that a silly suffragette such as the movie version of Mrs. Banks would always vote for the most handsome candidate. Indeed, Pamela added, so would she. Her main concern was that the feminism joke would be lost on children who would not even know what Votes For Women meant.

  Then there was the problem of a new adventure written into the script, when the Banks children visit their father’s bank which we take to be the Bank of England. Michael Banks inadvertently starts a run on the bank by demanding his twopence back from the chairman, Mr. Dawes. The customers overhear his demand and rush the tellers. (If Pamela saw the irony in this scene, invented by Walsh and Da Gradi, she did not tell Disney. It was the Bank of England that, in 1891, had precipitated a crisis with the Queensland National Bank, whose directors included Pamela’s Uncle Boyd.) This banking scene remains one of the funniest in the movie, with the final credits revealing that Dick Van Dyke also plays the chairman who eventually dies laughing at one of Uncle Albert’s gags. Pamela had told Walt the death was too gross a joke and suggested that he merely retired, then spent the rest of his days laughing.

  She was worried, too, about the opulence of the Banks family home, which she had described in her books as “rather dilapidated.” Nor did she think the scriptwriters understood where the Banks family stood in the social scale. Servants in England were not rough cockneys. In this script, she said, Mrs. Brill the housekeeper and Ellen were too common and vulgar for English servants for that or any period. An h dropped occasionally, a lively phrase, were fine, but these were people who thought of themselves as respectable and would never use phrases such as “old sow.” Even Bert was far too much of a cockney. She remembered that the cockneys in Disney’s 1961 film, A Hundred and One Dalmations, were very difficult for her to understand. The whole essence of cockney speech was its clarity and directness.

  Page after close-typed page, she objected to each detail. Mary Poppins had been described in the script as an attractive young woman. This was more cause for concern. Poppins should not be pretty but must keep her Dutch doll appearance: black hair, turned-up nose. She begged Disney to give Mrs. Banks a more sympathetic and Edwardian name than Cynthia, which she hated. Somehow she felt the name was unlucky, cold and sexless. Why not Arabella, Victoria, Caroline, Julia, Gwendolyn, Araminta, Lavinia, Lydia, Alexandra, Olivia or Winifred? In the end, Disney chose Winifred.

  Once again Pamela scoured the script for American figures of speech, objecting to “on schedule,” “six-oh-one,” and “outing.” The last, she said, meant “a general gathering, like a Sunday school picnic, or the Elks going to Atlantic City.” The British would say “going out.” Nor would Mary say “larking about.” She never used slang. “Freshen up” was a contemporary phrase, and would have been repugnant to an Edwardian. The writers must remember it should be “let’s go and fly a kite.” Still, she realized this was only a first draft. (It proved not to be, to her consternation.)

  • • •

  In the middle of 1963, Julie Andrews, Tony Walton and their baby settled into a rented house in Studio City in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. When shooting began, it became clear to Andrews that she was Pamela’s only contact with the progress of the movie. She received long letters from Pamela in England with innumerable suggestions about how things should be done.32 Andrews tried to reassure the nice old lady in Chelsea.

  After filming the “Jolly Holiday” and “Uncle Albert” scenes, Andrews wrote to Pamela that they were all working like fiends. She assured her that Ed Wynn was “delightful” as Uncle Albert and that Dick Van Dyke was “good” as Bert. His cockney was really not too bad. He would be an “individual” cockney instead of a “regular type” cockney. The children looked adorable, although the little boy who played Michael hated heights and there had been tears once or twice. The planned “Chimpanzoo” scene had been eliminated but her lullaby scene was back in. Pamela’s letter had done the trick. Andrews urged her, “Please don’t worry about anything.”

  Andrews was a little more forthcoming about the problems of filming the movie in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor; she explained that Matthew Garber did not like to fly on wires and for a long time could not be persuaded. Then someone offered him a dime if he would. After that, “he made a fortune.” He was “an intelligent monster of a boy, a born charmer, a businessman in the making.” For Andrews, flying was not much fun either. With wires attached at her hip level, she could rise up into the air easily enough but had a tendency to remain upright, whereas Mary Poppins had to fly on an angle. “This meant that the pull was all on my back.”33

  • • •

  With the filming over, and Disney working toward a 1964 release, Pamela felt a sense of relief. She decided to spend some of her advance money. Through her Gurdjieff friends, she had learned more, and wanted to know more, of Zen. Perhaps meditation would help her gut, and those waves of vague anxiety that came so often in the night. These were before the days of irritable bowel syndrome, and her doctor must have thought that the constant churning and feeling of urgency in her bowels was psychosomatic. She had been told already that her Poppins adventures were “full of Zen,”34 an idea that intrigued her more than any other theory.

  Pamela had been haunted for years by a picture of a ninth century statue of Buddha in the Koryu-ji Temple in Kyoto and now, with a financial safety net beneath her, was the time for a spiritual journey to Japan. She decided on a quick side trip first, to see her sisters. Pamela flew to Bangkok late in July, then down to Sydney, to find Biddy and Moya living like a couple of maiden aunts in the comfortable middle-class Sydney suburb of Mosman. It was Pamela’s first visit back to the city she had abandoned at the age of twenty-four. And her last. She stayed just two weeks. Ever since Boyd Moriarty had died in World War II his widow Biddy had lived with Moya, who had never married. Pamela refused to give their names to a reporter from the Australian Women’s Weekly, as “they wouldn’t care for publicity.”

  Her Australian publishers, Collins, had organized a modest publicity campaign for the famed children’s author and in the course of one day she did her interview duty, wearing a plain tweed suit and white embroidered blouse, and, incongruously, eight Navajo silver-and-turquoise bracelets on each wrist. The press photos showed she had been to the hairdresser, her copper hair sprayed tight into a curly bubble, but the glossy coating could not hide the signs of deep fatigue around her eyes.

  For the Sydney reporters, Pamela
trotted out the usual tales of how she liked to be known as Anon yet cautioned the Sun-Herald reporter that she had recently passed a note to an American TV journalist, ending an interview on the spot because he had not even heard of Mary Poppins. The reporters did not ask, “And how do you like Australia, Mrs. Travers?” but if they had, she might have answered, as she did a couple of years later, with a pat answer: “I found I loved Australia—not that I want to go back there, because I don’t think that’s my place.”35

  • • •

  In the long summer months in Kyoto, Pamela studied Zen with Ruth Sasaki, an American married to a Japanese, whom she met through her friends the Gardiners, fellow Gurdjieffians. Pamela said Sasaki was the only American woman ever to become a Zen abbess. In Kyoto, Sasaki had her own zendo, a place for meditation.36

  Pamela studied the statues in the lecture hall and treasure house of the 622 A.D. Koryu-ji Temple, one of the oldest temples in Kyoto,37 and read R. H. Bly’s Zen in English Literature, “the most marvelous book.” She meditated in a stone garden, was handed a rake by a monk and tentatively combed wavy lines around the pebbles. She read haiku. Pamela liked the “gnomic quality” of all haiku. As she sat on a tatami mat, her life seemed to make more sense than before. She knew of a Zen koan (a problem or riddle with no solution, used in meditation) which said “not created but summoned.” This, she thought, must refer to Mary Poppins. The nanny must have been summoned by some need in Pamela.

  Yet for all her new insights, Pamela never relinquished a need to control. In February, when she returned to London, she began again to manipulate Mary Shepard, telling her that a Japanese publisher was to produce a big colored edition of the first two Mary Poppins books. The publishers had suggested an illustrator’s fee of £10 but, luckily for Mary, she had managed to get this doubled. With the London release of the Disney movie planned for late 1964, Collins wanted new jackets for the first books, and had asked her to approach Shepard. On the other hand, a German firm soon to publish Mary Poppins from A to Z did not want Shepard, planning to use their own illustrator. At long last, she said, France had decided to translate the books but the publisher, Hachette, also planned to use its own illustrator. This was a great disappointment but, alas, Pamela had “no power of veto.”38

  Pamela’s thoughts now were fixed on the Hollywood premiere of the Disney movie. She was pitifully eager to attend, while Disney himself seemed just as keen that the irascible P. L. Travers did not. The big night was set for August 27, 1964, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. In a precursor to the Disney merchandising frenzy of The Lion King, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, the Disney marketing department had signed agreements for forty-six Mary Poppins products, including girls’ dresses, dolls, jewelry, and books labeled “Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins.” In these, the story was “adapted” by various writers and artists. (One version was written with so little care that the nanny blew in on a west wind.) Pamela’s American publisher, Harcourt Brace & World, produced a new combined edition of Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back, but Disney versions outsold hers by five to one. The biggest of the Poppins promotions was the “A Spoonful of Sugar” campaign by the National Sugar Company.

  Like a forgotten lover whose heart jumps at every ring of the phone, Pamela waited for an invitation from Walt Disney to attend the premiere. When none came, her lawyer, agent Diarmuid Russell, and her American publisher all asked and protested, to no avail.39 One morning she woke knowing what had to be done. She sent a telegram to Disney. He might like to know she was in the United States (staying again in Mt. Kisco), and that she was coming to Hollywood for the premiere anyway. She was sure somebody would find a seat for her. Would he let her know details, time and place? The whole embarrassing episode was essential, she told her English publisher, for the dignity of the books and for her relationship with Disney.40

  Disney’s story editor, Bill Dover, responded quickly to tell her that Walt was sending an invitation. He offered to escort her to the premiere. Disney wrote too, wriggling out of a tight spot by telling Pamela he was counting on her presence at the London premiere of Mary Poppins but was happy to know she was able to attend the Los Angeles world premiere. They would, of course, hold a seat for her.41 Harcourt Brace & World paid for her to fly to Los Angeles on August 26 and stay for three days at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Harcourt executives told her they were shocked by the Disney books of the film, agreeing with Pamela’s assessment—“ghastly.”42

  Walt Disney was too busy to spend much time with Pamela at the premiere. Oh, he posed with her for a couple of pictures, but there was Julie Andrews to attend to, not to mention the photo opportunities when the miniature train rolled down the boulevard accompanied by the Three Little Pigs, the Big Bad Wolf, Pluto, Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, a skunk and four dancing penguins. The actors in costumes danced around Disney, ten thousand balloons were released from the train. A band in pearl-buttoned costumes played songs from the movie. From 1 P.M., more than three thousand fans had gathered to see the stars arrive for the eight thirty start. Disneyland girl guides walked guests to the doors; Disneyland staff were dressed as English bobbies. Ushers in Edwardian costumes escorted Disney executives (the men resplendent in white dinner jackets) to their seats.

  The opening titles appeared as the camera panned over a luscious view of London at dawn: Big Ben, St. Paul’s, the Thames, the sleepy houses of Chelsea and Kensington. Mary Poppins could be seen sitting on a cloud, powdering her nose, waiting to fly down to the Banks with her umbrella aloft. From the heavens and the city, the scene narrowed to Cherry Tree Lane with Bert, the one-man band, talking to the camera. Bert says he will take the audience on a tour of the lane (where Admiral Boom’s fanlight doorway is identical to the one at Pamela’s old home at 50 Smith Street).

  Through the next two hours, the first-night audience enjoyed a blend of Pamela’s magic with Disney’s magic. His overrode hers. Yet for all its loud, vaudevillian, “aw shucks,” pseudo-cockney humor, for all its whizzbang special effects, the film retained some part of the irony and subtlety in Pamela’s characterization of Mary Poppins and George Banks. The Sherman brothers had produced fourteen original songs, some derivative but many unique, from “Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to the anthemlike “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.” The audience loved the complex “Jolly Holiday” animation sequence with its merry-go-round horses galloping free, its dancing, kissing penguins and a barnyard of animals. The Disney studios had pulled out all its most expensive special effects (children flying up the chimney, toys putting themselves away), then mixed in delicate costumes, rich settings, and strong choreography in the style of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

  Yet while the movie looked like a fin de siècle bonbon, the tone was small-town, God-fearing, in support of nuclear family values. The lasting qualities in the film proved to be brilliant performances by Andrews and Tomlinson, good dancing in the loose-limbed Ray Bolger manner from Van Dyke, very catchy songs, many spoken like those of Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, and the surrealistic, stylized bank scene, which retained its impact through the film’s reissues. The film story is resolved when Mr. Banks is fired from the bank, then reconnects with his family. Mary Poppins is no longer needed. The final scene, when Mary talks to her parrot-headed umbrella and flies off into the clouds, remains true to the tone of the books, bittersweet rather than cloyingly sentimental.

  During the premiere, Pamela cried, to the embarrassment of Disney and his staff. It was such a shock, that name on the screen, Mary Poppins. So sudden.43 It hardly mattered, then, that her name was in such small type, listed as a “consultant” at first, then in the line “Based on the stories by P. L. Travers.” (Her name was even smaller in the press ads.) Afterward, Technicolor Corporation hosted a champagne party held in an English garden setting. Chimney-sweep dancers swirled guests to the music of the pearly band. Pamela, in a long white gown, felt reg
al, and tried to make it clear to whoever would stop for a minute that her books were still alive and would remain so, along with the film version. One woman rushed up to her and began commiserating in front of Disney. Pamela swept through the faux pas by announcing it was “a splendid film and very well cast.”44

  On the morning after, she wired “Dear Walt” her congratulations. His confection was beautifully cast and acted, lovely to look at, and true to the spirit of Mary Poppins. She carefully kept a copy of the telegram, noting on the bottom that Disney “needed praising,” that there was much she couldn’t say at the time. He replied formally. Disney was happy to have her reactions and appreciated her taking the time before she left town. Such a pity that “the hectic activities before, during and after the premiere” meant they saw little of each other. Bill Dover had told him she enjoyed the festivities.45

  From Mt. Kisco the next day she wrote “THANK YOU” again and explained to Disney that she had gone to the premiere to prove to all that author and filmmaker were in harmony. His picture was “splendid, gay, generous and wonderfully pretty.” The premiere was also wonderful. But, she felt she must say the real Mary Poppins remained within the covers of the books. Naturally, she hoped the movie would turn a new public toward them. And another thing. She wanted to let him know the picture fell into two halves. The scenes in the Banks home retained some contact with the books while the musical numbers were pure Disney. David Tomlinson, as Mr. Banks, held both halves together. He was absolutely right. Julie Andrews’s performance was also beautifully understated.

  Again, for posterity, she kept a copy of the letter and wrote on the end that it was a letter with much between the lines.46 Pamela told her London publisher that although the film received a rave reaction, it contained little of the essence of her books. The film was “Disney through and through, spectacular, colourful, gorgeous but all wrapped around mediocrity of thought, poor glimmerings of understanding,” and over-simplification. In short, it was truly a Hollywood movie that would make a fortune. Although it was the best thing Disney had ever done, for her, the finished product was simply sad. Still, she had made peace with Disney by going to Hollywood, remained friends with the writers, and was glad to have a fattened bank balance. Underneath all her bluster, she told her publisher the truth: that in a certain sense she enjoyed the fame and attention but she knew that her life had turned a sharp corner.47