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

by Valerie Lawson

  After the film’s release, it took about a decade for Pamela to return to the state of “Anon” from which she had sprung. She stayed on in New York for the premiere at Radio City Music Hall in September, gave interviews to build up book sales and, by night, read Yeats’s “Reveries” on his childhood, recognizing something of her own family reflected in it.

  • • •

  Disney was aware that his competitor for awards and box office, My Fair Lady, was to open one month later than Mary Poppins. His publicity campaign took advantage of the head start. One of his press ads featured an open letter from Samuel Goldwyn. Dated September 11, 1964 and written to “Dear Walt,” the letter gushed:

  Once in a lifetime and only once, a picture comes along which cannot be compared to any other and to which no other can be compared. A picture which writes a new page in motion picture history. A picture which has such universal appeal that it is a pure delight to father, mother, children…you have made it MARY POPPINS. You have made a great many pictures, Walt, that have touched the hearts of the world…but you have never made one so wonderful, so magical, so joyous, so completely the fulfilment of everything a great motion picture should be as MARY POPPINS. I hope everyone in the world will see it—that is the nicest thing I can possibly wish them.

  Sincerely, Sam (Samuel Goldwyn)

  On September 25, the first important review appeared in The New York Times. The critic, Bosley Crowther, who put Pamela’s name in the first paragraph, called the movie “sparkling…a beautiful production” with some “deliciously animated sequences…a spinning musical score, the nicest entertainment that has opened at the Music Hall this year. This is the genuine Mary Poppins that comes sailing in on the East Wind…a most wonderful, cheering movie.” Crowther pointed out similarities in the score and look of the film with My Fair Lady, and Judith Crist in the Herald Tribune described Andrews in Mary Poppins as “the fairest lady of them all. She is superb, only the grouches and nit pickers should stay at home.”

  The ads ran the rave lines from the reviews: “It glows and it gladdens,” Archer Winsten in the New York Post; “Walt Disney has bestowed an eye popping family package,” Cue magazine; “A delight, wonderfully imaginative, entrancing,” William Peper, World Telegram and Sun. A critic bylined “JWL” at The New Yorker, though, grumbled “Why Mr. Disney has chosen to mingle two utterly dissimilar mediums [sic] is his secret. Miss Andrews and Mr. Van Dyke wisely make no effort to out act the talking pigs, laughing horses, and urbane turtles…Miss Andrews as Miss Poppins is less acerbic than the original and the wistful air with which she finally packs her magical bottomless carpetbag and abandons her little charges would seem to hint at a not too distant reunion.”

  The sharpest slap came from Francis Clarke Sayers, once the director of children’s services for the New York Public Library, whose letter to the Los Angeles Times sparked follow-up interviews. Sayers said in her letter that “the acerbity of Mary Poppins, unpredictable, full of wonder and mystery, becomes, with Mr. Disney’s treatment, one great marshmallow-covered cream puff.”

  Pamela yearned to speak out about her own, real, Mary Poppins but she was too frightened of Disney and too cautious about a possible sequel to do so. She told an interviewer that “there is provision for a sequel but on terms to be agreed.” A Mary Poppins Comes Back was unlikely, however, as Disney was “against sequels on principle” and Julie Andrews didn’t appear interested. She read that Andrews, who had gone on to make the movie The Americanization of Emily, and would soon star in The Sound of Music, now demanded $1 million or more for a picture. Pamela was so keen for a sequel that she was going to speak to Julie and “if he [Disney] wants her, she must be generous… He gave her her first chance. If he wants to do a sequel I’m on his side.”48

  In 1965 two magazines asked her for articles about the making of the film, and she hoped, when the publicity died down, she might do this honestly. The only problem was a potential sequel. Pamela knew she must remain silent, not wanting to work with “a prickly porcupine.” Disney, she knew, could be ferocious. Once, when she made a disparaging remark, he turned on her with anger. Why had she spoken against the film? He gave her bread and she had paid him back with a stone. Pamela wrote to a friend that she had tried to maintain a harmonious relationship with Disney but it always amounted to “uneasy wedlock.” She thought Disney wished her dead; after all, until now, all his authors were dead and out of copyright.49 He was cross, she said, that she hadn’t obliged him.50

  By 1966, all thoughts of a sequel were abandoned. In a message to stockholders in his company’s annual report, Walt Disney said he was not going to make a sequel to Mary Poppins. By then he was near to death from lung cancer, and died a few months later, on December 15, 1966.51

  Gradually, timidly at first, Pamela spoke against the movie, in both letters and articles that she kept, copied and labeled for her files. The first was a letter to a student at Illinois State University. In this, she explained how much she minded seeing the words “Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins” on billboards everywhere. Filmmakers should be humble enough to say “P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, screened by Walt Disney.”52

  Next, she told a contributor to The New York Times that the movie went against the grain of the books, that it was merely a colorful extravaganza, as far from true magic as it was possible to be. The introduction of Bert as a “co-magician” with Mary Poppins ruined the film and made nonsense of the character of Mary. But no, she told the journalist, she could not quote her in the Times.53

  Even before Disney died, Pamela confided in Janet Graham, writing for the Ladies’ Home Journal, that she hated some parts of the movie, including the animated horse and pig. What’s more, it was all quite shocking when Mary kicked up her Edwardian gown and showed her underwear. (Nevertheless she had to admit that children loved the film, which led them in great numbers to the books. Since the movie, sales had tripled.54) By the time Roy Newquist quoted her in his book, Conversations, in 1967, Pamela inflated the impact of the movie to an emotional shock that left her deeply disturbed. It was all so externalized, so oversimplified, so generalized. Not vulgarized really: “The movie hasn’t simplicity, it has simplification.” By 1968, she “couldn’t bear” the movie. “All that smiling, just like Iago. And it was so untrue—all fantasy and no magic.”55 Definitely, she did not want to be remembered for the movie.56

  In October 1964, when Pamela returned from New York to London, the press was full of “this unknown Englishwoman” who had inspired the hit movie. Collins brought out its new edition of the first Mary Poppins, wrapped in a pink-and-white candy-striped jacket with a picture of Julie Andrews on the back.

  “Now,” said Trade News reporter Ruth Martin, “people are asking, “who is P. L. Travers?” She is, in fact, a bright eyed, slim and lively woman of middle years with a bubble cut hairdo and a determination to remain as anonymous as possible in the present circumstances.” Martin interviewed Pamela at 29 Shawfield Street, her “charming, newly done over Regency house in Chelsea with its white painted exterior and dove gray, elegantly fanlighted door, spanking new decor, gleaming modern kitchen, little patio garden where she grows spinach and has barbecue suppers, white-walled top floor studio, with its picture windows and tiny balcony.” Pamela told Ruth she wasn’t too happy about the line “Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins”: “It is Mary Poppins arranged for the screen by Walt Disney, just as it is J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, cartooned by Walt Disney—that would seem to me the proper way of describing it.”57

  The “Royal European” premiere of Mary Poppins was held at the Leicester Square Theatre on December 17, 1964. Inside the Walnut Lounge, above the foyer, Pamela curtsied deeply as she was presented to Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. She stood with Julie Andrews, David Tomlinson and Hermione Baddeley. Walt Disney didn’t make it. He sent along a couple of directors of the company instead. (The next week, Collins’s public relations department dutifully sent the Mary Poppins books to Princess Margaret, for he
r children.)

  The reviews confirmed Pamela’s fears. London was not as addicted to sugar as middle America. This was swinging London, the city of Pete and Dud, Carnaby Street in full psychedelic flower, and the Kinks in pink jackets and black silk stockings singing “You Really Got Me.” Dilys Powell, London’s senior critic, was disappointed by the flat, cartoonish tone of Disney’s Mary Poppins. Powell had done her homework by rereading the original book—“created by an Englishwoman”—and found “I haven’t liked a children’s story as much since I was introduced to The Borrowers. The success of the book seems to me to lie in its fusion of magic and the everyday. But in the movie, the talented Dick Van Dyke has been persuaded to portray Miss Travers’s pavement artist as the American cinema’s idea of a cockney card, all smirk and bounce.” And as for the magic adventures, “instead of being an imaginative extension of the everyday—instead of coming from within—the characters are nearly always piled on from the outside.” Another critic, David Robinson of the Financial Times, sniffed at Mary Poppins’s “lurching unevenness,” and “rather dated and common flashiness.”

  The four months from Hollywood to Leicester Square amounted to both more, and less, than Pamela hoped. Who would really understand what she had been trying to say with her magical nanny? Her heroine had been hijacked. Who was left to tell? Not Frances, not Monsieur Bon Bon, not Madge, not AE. All dead. The media, hungry for a new celebrity to boost for a minute, had clattered around her, distracting her for a while, but by midwinter it was all over. Pamela took refuge in a bad bout of pneumonia. She planned to recuperate at Todtmoos-Rutte, in the Black Forest. Almost missing a deadline, she mailed a commissioned piece for the spring book review on children’s books to Belle Rosenbaum, an editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who sympathized, “Pneumonia is a nasty business and I hope it has disappeared for keeps. The clear piney Schwarzwald [Black Forest] air should be a cure.”58

  Pamela told Rosenbaum to return her original manuscript as “my papers have been asked for by a university.” They hadn’t, but she hoped she might sell them. After all, her name remained newsworthy in the United States. She had left for Germany with the news that Mary Poppins had won five Oscars: best actress, best editing, best song (“Chim Chim Cheree”), best original musical score and best sound. But in the end, it was to be My Fair Lady’s night out. That musical won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, in competition with Becket, Dr. Strangelove, Zorba the Greek and Mary Poppins.

  The more the awards, the higher the gross, but for Pamela, the better news came in a letter from Dr. Dennison Morey, a Californian rose grower. He had read in the magazine Saturday Review that her favorite flower was the rose, that the heroine in “Sleeping Beauty” was sometimes called Rose, and that she was working on a new book, About the Sleeping Beauty. He eventually bred three new roses: Pamela Travers, Mary Poppins and Sleeping Beauty. Pamela told Morey she “could hardly believe such an honor.” To her, the rose was “the flower of all flowers.” Furled, curled, it never gave anything away. A rose was to be envied, obviously, for its secretive nature.59

  • • •

  Like Mary Poppins, and her favorite Buddha, Pamela was now an expert at not explaining. No one but her closest Gurdjieffian friends knew what she was really doing in Todtmoos. The piney air was not the reason she went to the Black Forest. The real attraction was the latest Mr. Banks in her life: the psychoanalyst Professor Karlfried von Dürckheim, a former German professor of psychiatry whose so-called initiation therapy combined Christianity with Zen Buddhism. Von Dürckheim had lived in Japan for eight years, until after the war, when he returned to Germany and, in 1948, established his Existential Psychological Training and Encounter Institute in Todtmoos. He wrote as much as he practiced psychiatry, and from 1950 began to publish books: Japan and the Culture of Silence, then Hara: the Vital Center of Man and Everyday Therapy. Von Dürckheim promised Pamela peace of mind if she practiced meditation and breathing exercises. He did not offer a complete physical cure to his patients suffering from acute physical problems, but told them his therapy would lead them to insights into themselves.

  For Pamela, insight came slowly, despite the daily breathing exercises and long discussions with von Dürckheim about her life.

  In her mid-sixties she was still a fractured woman, frazzled but still flirtatious, jittery, yet reveling in the limelight, as fascinated by herself as a lonely woman can be. Eventually these pieces coalesced into an eccentric whole as she adopted the role of a grand and wise old lady. The flirt in Pamela, all her playful instincts, were never to resurface. They had gone out for one great public farewell late in 1964.

  That winter, when she was trying to sell more books in New York, she had given an interview to Haskel Frankel of the Saturday Review. He confided he had no interest in meeting P. L. Travers but found himself, the night before the interview, reading Mary Poppins in bed and scrunching up, with that sensation of digging deeper under the covers. Every time he straightened, he caught himself digging down again into a deeper scrunch. By dawn he was “hopelessly in love” with Pamela. Frankel found her the next day “in a darkish corner of a restaurant sipping something mild.” At one stage in the interview he took out a sketchpad, noting her blue eyes, curly hair. Reddish brown, was it? She answered, “If you can imagine a blond mouse or perhaps a mousy blonde, I think you will have it.” What was he doing? Nothing much. Just a sketch. Suddenly she said, “I wish you could see my feet. I’m very vain about my feet, but I don’t suppose I can put those on the table for you?”

  His soup arrived—Italian spinach. She looked suspicious. He made her take a spoonful and she asked whether he liked women. He did. She smiled. “I knew it! Many men say they like women but what they really mean is that they like one woman. You can always tell men who really like women: they always want to share things from their plate.” He looked at her. She asked, “Please don’t make me an éminence grise. I’m really quite a lunatic, that’s what saves me from being carted off.”

  She tried, then, to get him back on the narrow path of questioning she expected from interviewers. Why hadn’t he asked her why she wrote for children? But Frankel wouldn’t play, telling her he had hardly needed to ask her anything. She did so nicely by herself. Undeterred, Pamela sniffed, “Well I don’t write for children.” Then he came up with the standard line, why did she call herself P. L.? Because she did not want to have this label of sentimentality put on her, so “I signed by my initials, hoping people wouldn’t bother to wonder if the books were written by a man, woman or kangaroo.” She looked up at him: “Won’t you ask me something different?” He thought. She looked hopeful. “You do,” she drawled, “come from that nice, intelligent magazine. Do ask me something that others don’t.” “Okay,” he said, “what are you doing on Saturday night?”

  Pamela shrieked, clapped hands, hit the table. “Oh, put that in, that’s different, do put that in.” Then she turned coy again, confiding that her greatest joy would be to have a rose named after her. The daisy was a child’s favorite flower. It was open. But the rose was never open, not until the last moment. Frankel saw her arms come up about her and somehow turn into petals as she whispered, “It’s the folded rose, the secret rose…aahhhh.”

  This “secret rose,” which, he suspected, “was more P. L. Travers than even Mary Poppins, folded herself into a sensible tan raincoat.” She departed, gurulike and enigmatic. “Intimate life is the only life I can bear. I’m not interested in the passing scene because it passes.” Then, “a smile, a wave, and P. L. Travers, world famous and happily unknown, slipped away into a gray New York day. On very pretty feet, may I add.”60

  Pamela later told an interviewer that Frankel’s piece was “charming.” She just wanted to correct one point. She had written to Frankel to say “I never, ever wore a tan raincoat. It would be beyond me to wear a sensible tan raincoat. It was pale blue and French silk.”

  With that, the flirt seemed to fold herself back into a bud. That month, she comp
lained in a press report that she had recently been rather dismayed by the American attitude toward grandmothers: “The object of many women’s lives is to be a grandmother and looked to as the storyteller, the wise woman, the funny woman.”61

  The French silk flirt was going to subsume now, into the wise woman and storyteller. In the summer of 1965, at Shawfield Street, she submitted to a long interview with a writer, Janet Graham, in which she said, “I think the whole purpose of a woman’s life is to become a grandmother. I’ve said this again and again and again, nymph, mother, we have to become wise old crones, carrying the traditions we’ve learned. You see that should be our aim, to gather it all up at the end of our life.” This was the role of women, of the “triple Goddess”—which reminded her that AE had called Mary Poppins a goddess.62

  But behind the new persona of crone, Pamela seemed to be trying to stamp out all traces of the sad child within her. The transcript of the interview, which she kept, is a summation of her life at the age of sixty-five. She spoke of her mother and sisters, and how she spoke comfortingly at times to her dead father. When the article eventually appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, it carried the headline “The Cup of Sorrow in Every Woman’s Life.” Much of the interview had revolved around the way women return to an almost basic state of sorrow. To Pamela, sorrow was the opposite side of the joy she found in Blake and Mozart. It was how she felt, still, at sunset. That was always “terrible sorrow.” She told Graham that the “cup of sorrow” was always full. This was a big theme of hers. That afternoon, Graham talked of the sorrow of unrequited love which could be “a kind of secret joy.” At that, Pamela took fright: “Ah well, that I’m not going to put my opinion upon.” She did make veiled references to Camillus, but never once said the words “my son.”