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

by Valerie Lawson

  Pamela kept the pressure on herself. Her only relief seemed to come from the support of younger members in her group, and the love she felt for her granddaughters. (Frances and Camillus had another baby in November 1979. She was given the Christian names of girls in the Goff and Morehead families, Cicely Jane.)

  At Christmas 1980, her Gurdjieff group gathered to pray, and to sing the old English songs she remembered from her childhood: “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Greensleeves,” “A Frog He Would a Wooing Go,” “Green Grow the Rushes, oh.” Shawfield Street rang with their true, solemn voices, as they ended with the Twenty-third Psalm, followed by “God Be in My Head” and “Lord of the Dance.”

  I am the lord of the dance said he,

  Dance, then, wherever you may be.

  That year, Pamela rested at Chandenon, in Switzerland. She could not let go of the idea that Mary Poppins must come back, one more time.

  16

  Fear No More the Heat of the Sun

  A Swedish television crew called on Shawfield Street in 1991. Amazed to find Pamela Travers was still alive, the documentary team was excited by the possibility that she might reveal the origins of Mary Poppins. The reporter suggested Mary was, well, an ordinary name. “Ordinary, yes,” said Pamela. Then she glanced upward, indicating heaven. But the name “Mary” could mean…And there was a pause. Pamela almost sighed, “It could mean…higher matters.”

  She spoke with great difficulty, as if through clenched teeth. Her nose drooped sadly down, her tongue restlessly explored her lips and mouth. But her eyes remained intensely alive as she suggested her perfect nanny was related to the mother of God. Pamela assured the interviewer that “all the men fall in love” with Mary Poppins. “But she doesn’t love them?” “Oh no!”

  Even at ninety-one, Pamela maintained the facade of a mysterious yet playful woman. In truth, her cronedom represented a permanent state of nervous anxiety about her health, her publishers, her money, and her son. Her only daily company was a succession of housekeepers. Less often, she saw her Gurdjieff group and her grandchildren.

  In her early eighties Pamela’s energy had seemed undiminished, but a decade later her spirit and physical strength were all but extinguished. On a good day she could walk the distance of three lampposts in Shawfield Street, on a bad day, none. Occasionally she made it as far as the Kings Road, where she liked to talk to the punks, unafraid of their costumed aggression. Her watery blue eyes took in their hair, jelled into spikes of lime and raspberry, their chained necks, their safety-pinned noses. Pamela wondered why they dressed in that outlandish way. Perhaps their lives were so limited they had to do something desperate to make it all matter. They looked “lovely,” she told them. That would bring them down a peg, take the sting out of their rebellion. The punks ignored her, or sneered “Ya wot?” But this old lady knew more than they could ever imagine. She even knew the words of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” much cleverer than one of their subversive anthems. Not only that, but the crumpled shopper in the Kings Road was a multimillionaire whose agents and lawyers constantly reassured her of her wealth. She had over £1 million invested and another half million in current accounts. But the money was of no comfort to Pamela. She even worried about whether she had enough to pay the wages of her carers, professional women who were paid to nanny old women.

  In her old age, Pamela wrote two more Mary Poppins books. Not only did they reflect her own isolation, but they both conveyed a sense of separation from a homeland. Pamela never returned to Australia, but she did go back in spirit, almost against her will, when her literary and personal papers were sold to Sydney’s Mitchell Library.

  Their long journey home had resumed in 1980, when she asked her literary agents, David Higham Associates, to send her a copy of the catalogue of her papers, which had been prepared a decade earlier. She was determined to get the summary of her life’s work into a library this time. She also asked her New York law firm to see if Harvard had any interest in the papers. The lawyers thought not, suggesting Boston University or the University of Texas. Bruce Hunter at David Higham had not been very encouraging at all, telling her the market had gone rather flat for literary archives. The firm had already offered the collection to the antiquarian booksellers, the Toronto Public Library, Toronto University Library, McMaster Library, the University of Texas and Anthony Rota, with no success.

  Eventually there was no more room at David Higham for the stacks of papers, which were then dispatched from the firm’s upstairs offices in Golden Square, Soho, to the downstairs storerooms of Bernard Quaritch. The antiquarian bookseller eventually prepared them for sale. A typed letter offering the collection carried the asking price of seventy-five thousand Australian dollars. It is uncertain whether the promotional letter was actually sent, but it did indicate the plan of attack. Either Pamela or her agents now had Australia in mind.

  “To the scholar of twentieth-century literature, the letters from AE to Miss Travers are a valuable and exciting find…there are over 160 letters here, many illustrated with his delightful drawings,” the letter read. It also boasted of her childhood letters, early photos, and the recollections of Aunt Ellie, and suggested the papers on offer were the only ones Pamela had kept. (In fact, her studio at home was stacked with letters, fragments of diaries, photographs and audiotapes.) As “the archive of an author of international fame, this collection would be of interest and value to many institutions in the world. To Australia, it is something more, the sum of the past of her best-known author, one whose life and work belong fairly and squarely in the history of Australia, a significant part of the country’s heritage.”

  In 1980, at the time Pamela felt such a sense of urgency about selling her papers, she began work on a new Mary Poppins adventure. This fifth Poppins book, meant as a coda to her own life, turned out to be her favorite. She wrote an early draft of Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane in the mountainous Valais district of Switzerland, at Chandolin, where she had begun to spend each summer as a guest of Bettina Hurlimann.

  The idea behind the story, she once wrote, was the premise that “all that’s lost is somewhere.” This phrase first came to her as a song, and, like a catchy melody, she could not banish it from her mind. Everyone in Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane is searching for something—everyone except Mary Poppins. The book has the air of a midsummer night’s dream, in which all manner of herbs make a guest appearance as agents of witchcraft and healing. The time is midsummer’s eve. The setting is a supper picnic in the herb garden of the park. All the familiar friends are there, the Park Keeper, Miss Lark, the Banks children, Mrs. Corry, Ellen and of course Mr. Banks.

  The sun is reluctant to set, a common theme in Pamela’s life, and, as the twilight lingers on, couples enter the park, two by two. Miss Lark is there, waiting for her love, who turns out to be a professor. She thinks he might have lost his way, but he meets her at last, just as Professor Bergsten had entered the life of Pamela. Next the Park Keeper seeks his own true love. He meets Ellen, spouting the wisdom of grandmothers. She tells him that if he walks backward, he might find his beloved. He does so, and stumbles into the herb garden where Mary Poppins and the Banks children are now partying with stars, including the constellations known as the Bear, Fox and Hare. Orion is there too, that giant hunter in the skies always chasing the Pleiades, and the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux.

  Handsome, half-naked Orion in his lion skin makes the central speech of the book when he tells the earthlings that they have no room to spread their wings down here. On earth, everything was too close to something else. Houses leant against each other. Trees and bushes crowded together. Pennies and halfpennies clinked in pockets. Friends and neighbors were always at hand. Orion says, with a sense of regret, that on earth, there was always someone to talk to, someone to listen. He preferred silence, or perhaps the noise of the stars singing in the sky.

  Mr. Banks arrives at the party, searching for a lost half crown. He looks in vain. The piece of silver
has been taken back to the sky with Orion. Back in the heavens, Orion places it on his belt, to make a fourth star. Mr. Banks looks up to the sky, thrilled to discover that Orion’s belt now has four stars instead of three. The scene was directly inspired by Pamela’s life in Allora, but then Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane contains a whole galaxy of memories from Allora and Bowral, from the sweet shop to her fear of the sun going down. Pamela told Staffan Bergsten in 1989 that she loved her new Mary Poppins book, in which everything came two by two like the earth and sky, or a man beside a woman.

  Mary Shepard, now living alone in St. Johns Wood, used her own reflection in the mirror as a model for Mary Poppins, but this time the finished artwork showed a younger, rounder nanny, not the stern and bony Mary of the 1930s. It had been so long since Pamela and Shepard had settled on the Dutch doll look as they strolled in the London park. As well as her own image, Shepard consulted cartoons in the leather-bound volumes of her late husband’s Punch magazine to remind her of the world of the 1930s.1

  Pamela wrote to tell her U.S. publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, that it was her best ever Mary Poppins. Furthermore, her agents in both England and the United States were not only delighted with the book, but illuminated by it.2 They may have been delighted, but Collins paid her an advance of only £1,500 before the book was published in Britain in 1982.

  The bulk of Pamela’s income had always come from the United States, but, almost two decades after the Disney movie, that looked like it was changing, too. Pamela had reached a critical point in her relationship with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. First, she feared that the editor-in-chief of children’s books had no interest in her work, but, more important, she believed that the whole company was running down its children’s book department. When Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane was sent to Harcourt early in 1981, the publisher rejected the book on the grounds that it was too obscure and too full of herbal and mythological references. Pamela was outraged. The whole American publishing edifice looked like it was tumbling down. Already, she claimed, another U.S. publisher, Viking, had made a botch of publishing one of her short stories which had first appeared in Parabola. She thought the presentation of the book—called Two Pairs of Shoes and published in 1980—was vulgar and its illustrations “atrocious.”3

  Even before the Harcourt rejection, Pamela had told her New York literary agents, Harold Ober Associates, that she dreaded the thought of giving her new Mary Poppins to the editor-in-chief of children’s books, urging them to find someone else to deal with at Harcourt Brace. Perhaps they could convince another publisher to take over her entire output, or what she labeled her “oeuvre.” Would they send her a list of all Harcourt’s juvenile writers as she certainly did not want to be among a list of “has beens.”

  In January 1982 Harold Ober Associates sent the new book to Delacorte/Dell, hoping the publisher would bring all the Mary Poppins titles together under one imprint through its Dell paperback list. Earnings were going nowhere, as it was. By the end of 1982, the accountants had established that Pamela had earned only $7,000 that year in royalties from Harcourt’s Voyager editions of the Mary Poppins books. Maybe a mass market reprinter, preferably Dell, could take over the titles, under license, and really get behind them.

  Harcourt, which had sold at least 1.5 million copies of Mary Poppins books in hardback over the years, had always resisted publishing the books in mass market paperback editions. All along, the publisher had received 5 percent of the U.S. and Canadian earnings from the Disney movie, while Pamela’s share ended up as 2.5 percent of worldwide earnings. So Harcourt had good reason to retain the hardcover rights, although the film had now run its course. But, at the time, Harcourt rejected Dell’s offer of $100,000 for paperback rights, suggesting it might launch a major new marketing drive behind the Mary Poppins titles.

  The underlying cause of tension between Pamela and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich went back to 1980, when the Los Angeles Times revealed that Mary Poppins had been removed from the San Francisco Library because of racist references in “Bad Tuesday,” one of the adventures in the first Mary Poppins book. The library’s director of children’s services, politically correct, and no doubt with an eye to publicity, decided “the book treats minorities in ways that are derogatory, it’s written from the old English view of the ‘white man’s burden.’ ” In the story, Mary Poppins and the children travel around the world with the aid of a magic compass. In the north, they encounter an Eskimo who rubs noses with them. His wife offers them hot whale blubber soup. On a South Seas island, a tiny, black, naked “piccaninny” sits on the knee of “a Negro lady” who speaks in an embarrassing approximation of a black American accent.

  The chapter had already been changed in the 1960s when a friend of Pamela’s, Dr. Francelia Butler, pointed out how embarrassed she had been by the passage when she read it aloud to black students in 1962. At that time, Pamela transformed the Negro lady into a “dark lady” while the piccaninny became a “tiny plum baby.” The book was reprinted in 1971, but now Pamela felt cornered into changing the chapter entirely, not because she believed any minority was offended, but because if this book was refused to children, the whole series might be. She told friends she had her “bread and butter to think of.” In 1981, Pamela rewrote “Bad Tuesday” to take the children to visit a polar bear (in the north), a hyacinth macaw (south), a panda bear (east) and dolphin (west.)

  She had learned of all the fuss through friends, not from Harcourt. In her eyes, that meant the publisher had not defended her loudly enough. Harcourt reprinted the book, asking her to take a lower royalty on an edition of only five thousand copies. She agreed, provided the cover was printed in a different color and carried the words “revised edition.”

  In all Pamela’s business dealings, her peremptory tone did not show any signs of her real weaknesses—her advanced age, bad health and the tensions which sparked these outbursts. Her strengths, combined with her vulnerability, were seen clearly at the time by Nancy Mills of the Herald Tribune who visited Shawfield Street in 1981 to talk about “Bad Tuesday.”

  Mills watched Pamela “slowly climbing the stairs to get to her studio…out of breath, settling her stout frame onto a sofa.” Even so, Pamela seemed formidable. “She speaks slowly…her watery blue eyes looking firmly at the intruder.” Pamela barked, “Who is a writer anyway? I just scribble.” She refused to pose for a photo. Mills took note of a poster on the studio wall admonishing, “The Greatest of Sins is Wandering Thoughts. Watch!”

  When her thoughts did wander, as they so often did, her mind returned to Camillus, to her own loneliness, and to her never-ending problems with her helpers. She thought often of the words of Walter de la Mare’s, “look thy last on all things lovely every hour.” In 1981, Camillus’s marriage was about to fall apart. Frances had taken divorce proceedings against him, no longer able to bear his drinking. Pamela cared deeply about him still, and especially about her granddaughters, who hugged her with arms of iron. She didn’t see them often; they lived so far away now, at Twickenham.

  Alberta was now her housekeeper, forty-two years old, single. She read German philosophy and couldn’t cook an egg. The house was meticulous, though, not a single speck of dust was allowed to blow into the front hall. Pamela had no energy to cook herself, but food was not her main problem anyway. What she needed so desperately, she thought, was someone to cherish her while she wrote, because when she was at work, Pamela felt her only surges of energy.

  Frances told her late in 1981 that she had now decided against a divorce. Camillus had always swung from charming to impossible but always came back to charming again. Pamela was afraid to say too much.

  Each summer, whether at Bettina Hurlimann’s or the Hotel Plampras in Chandolin, she remained in constant touch with her agents, lawyers, friends, accountants. In the summer of 1981, Pamela asked David Higham to investigate Jules Fisher, a Broadway producer who wanted to stage a Mary Poppins musical. Fisher, who had produced the successful Broadway mus
ical Dancin’, as well as Lenny (about Lenny Bruce) and Beatlemania, met Pamela in London in January 1982. They talked of possible writers for the book of the musical, perhaps Richard Wilbur, who had adapted Tartuffe, or Jay Presson Allen, who wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In February, Fisher spoke to Stephen Sondheim. Fisher told Pamela Sondheim had always adored the books, and as an exercise, when he was beginning in the theatre, had attempted to write a musical version of Mary Poppins. The bad news was, Sondheim now wanted to produce something very American, contemporary and hard-edged. Mary Poppins was not it.

  Again, the letters worried over the question of who owned what, how much they should all get, and which writers would be subtle but not obscure. The original Disney contract with Pamela was ambiguous, but it seemed she retained the rights to any live musical. She wanted Lord Goodman to write to Disney to assert that right. Fisher suggested more possible writers: Tim Rice, Peter Schaffer, David Storey, Tom Stoppard, Frederick Raphael, Jonathan Miller and Arthur Laurents. She in turn proposed Wally Shawn, who had written My Dinner With Andre, Alan Jay Lerner (she loved My Fair Lady), and Paul McCartney. “Now Paul can write a lyric, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ ” she told Fisher. She wasn’t sure about his orchestration. But if he liked the books she could fire him with enthusiasm. Pamela hoped Vanessa Redgrave or Maggie Smith might play Mary Poppins.4 By the summer of 1983, the Disney company advised it had no objections to the musical while Fisher was on the brink of offering Wally Shawn the job of writing the script.

  At the same time, another Poppins proposition had come from Walt Disney Television, which wanted to produce thirteen episodes of a TV series. Pamela stalled; the musical should come first. But Disney, as usual, did not give up. Early in 1984, the company offered her $86,000 for an initial six one-hour TV episodes. If Disney went ahead and made thirteen episodes, as planned, her share for the rights and consulting fees would be close to $200,000. In February Ed Self, from Walt Disney Television in the United States, called on Pamela. She agreed and they celebrated with a couple of Jack Daniels. Next month, he told her that he wanted her to collaborate on the TV series with Max Shulman, a novelist and screenwriter who wrote Rally Round the Flag Boys, The Tender Trap, House Calls and the Dobie Gillis TV series.