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

by Valerie Lawson

  • • •

  For the remainder of the 1980s, the business and creative instincts of Pamela were in conflict, neither fully satisfied. Her last years and final deals were to fall into a jumble of frustrations. The Jules Fisher musical ran aground eventually, but took years to do so. The plan for Shawn to write the script fell through. Fisher proposed a treatment by Arthur Giron but Pamela insisted on Alan Jay Lerner. Fisher told her that finding a writer to adapt Poppins was a serious problem. Her own material was so clear that most established writers had turned the project down, unsure that they could add enough of themselves to make it worthwhile.5 Pamela asked him to go back and try Rice and Lerner once more. Both declined. She never gave up hope for a musical, even writing into a will her desire to have such a project taken to completion.

  Early in May 1987 Pamela’s remaining sister, Moya, died in Sydney, at the Edina Nursing Home in Waverley. Although Pamela had set up a trust to pay income from some of her shares to Biddy and Moya, when Moya made her will she left almost her entire estate to a friend, Agnes Williams. Pamela’s bequest was just ten thousand Australian dollars. She learned of the gift from Moya’s lawyer who described the small, sad huddle of people at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. He sent her the money in September, asking if she planned to make a claim under the Family Provision Act. But this was clearly out of the question. No judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court would take pity on the millionairess of Chelsea.

  Her sister’s death reinforced her determination to leave her life’s work to an institution. At the end of 1987, Pamela wrote again to her professor in Sweden. She hoped he wouldn’t be shocked into a heart attack, hearing from her again, after all these years. But could he please send her copies of her letters for her files? They would form part of her papers, which, she told him, were being recatalogued.6

  Bergsten was apprehensive about his correspondence ending up in a file. It sounded suspiciously like the secret service. Nevertheless, he took the risk.7 Early in 1988 he sent her a copy of each of her eleven letters to him. She bundled them up for Bernard Quaritch to add to her collection, which was finally sold in 1989 to the Mitchell Library in Sydney for £20,000. Pamela had wanted much more than that amount. She told Bergsten the papers had been sold to “some institute in New South Wales.”8

  Although Pamela had promised the journalist Michele Field in 1986 that she would never allow Disney to make a movie sequel,9 in January 1988 she agreed to Disney’s latest proposal. The studio had at last decided to go ahead with a second film, Mary Poppins Comes Back, and again Pamela was to receive 2.5 percent of the gross profits of the film. As an advance, there would be $100,000 for the rights, and a further $25,000 for a treatment, to be shared by Pamela and her collaborator, the English radio dramatist Brian Sibley.

  Why did she change her mind? It may have been a case of the old Disney charm at work again, or an illusion that even now, she needed more money. Walt was dead, but Walt Disney Productions’ vice-president in charge of production, Martin Kaplan, filled in as the flatterer, telling Pamela that her outline was both charming and extremely promising.10

  The plot revolved around the imminent collapse of Mr. Banks’s bank, a perfect theme for the year after a disastrous slide in stock markets all over the world. Just like the Queensland banks in the 1890s, Mr. Banks’s bank was in severe difficulties due to unwise investments. A rival firm wanted to take it over, but Mr. Banks hoped to stave off the deal. But once again, the movie proposal ended with nothing resolved, and eventually Disney abandoned the project as too costly.

  By now, Jules Fisher had spent at least $200,000 trying to make the musical happen. Each time he visited Shawfield Street he enjoyed the endless cups of tea and the Jack Daniels as he listened to Pamela tell him how Walt Disney personally “tricked” her over the movie. At last he seemed to have the right man for the script, Jules Feiffer, but Pamela was still not satisfied. By the end of 1988 Fisher’s collaborator, Graciela Daniele, suggested they abandon a conventional musical in favor of a formless show using a “new vocabulary of dance/theatre.” It would be a “world of images, a dance form with songs.” Fisher outlined the suggestion to Pamela but confessed “perhaps we may not be the right people for this project.” He was right. In the end, her demands overwhelmed him.11

  So it proved with everyone. Only one person, she thought, could translate Poppins for the stage—herself. She was wrong. As Jules Fisher told her, her stories were perfect to read to children at bedtime. The theatre demanded drama to make people come back after intermission.

  • • •

  All the failed plans to adapt her books led her back to Mary for one last adventure. The hero of this slender book was the house next door to the Banks’s home. Number 18 Cherry Tree Lane was a house of dreams, vacant for many years, boarded up, ripe for fantasy. Mr. Banks thought an astronomer lived there, a wise old man with a telescope in the attic, making sense of the universe. Michael Banks hoped a clown lived at number 18, while Jane Banks imagined the Sleeping Beauty inside, her finger still bloody from the prick of the spindle.

  Mary Poppins and the House Next Door opened with the return of a crone, Mr. Banks’s old governess, Euphemia Andrew, who this time brings with her a Jesus-like figure, Luti, a young boy with an angelic manner from the South Seas. His name means “Son of the Sun,” and the greeting he smiled at all was, “Peace and blessings.” Like Mary Poppins he is a servant, attending to Miss Andrew’s querulous demands. He makes friends with the Banks children, never complaining of his lot, until he hears a voice calling him back to the South Pacific. It might be his grandmother, Keria, who likes to cast spells at her clay oven. With the help of Mary Poppins he visits the Man in the Moon then leaves for his journey home, using the clouds as stepping stones, clad only in a pink sarong made from Mary’s scarf.

  Mary Poppins is a more shadowy figure than before. The emphasis is on reconciliation, on objects and relationships broken and mended, on wise women, and the moon and the stars. Luti’s homeland, a Pacific island, was close to Australia. With Mary Poppins and the House Next Door, Pamela had come full circle, to her own home in the Southern Hemisphere. Luti was a reincarnation of herself, the Little Black Boy of Blake’s poem, who was born in the southern wild, just like Lyndon Goff, but who had been called away to London.

  Pamela told Staffan Bergsten that she imagined Luti was born in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu). Her inspiration for Luti had come from the books of Arthur Grimble, the former administrator of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, a colony administered by Britain. The islands, a string of low-lying coral atolls to the northeast of Australia, were dependent on Burns, Philp and Co. steamers from Australia for their supplies. One of Grimble’s books, A Pattern of Islands, published in 1952, sold an astounding quarter of a million copies. It had sat on Pamela’s bookshelves for decades. She remembered how Grimble explained that the islanders said “blessings and peace” and told Bergsten she turned the phrase around. Like Grimble’s islanders, Luti had thought of the sun as his ancestor. Even Keria, the wise woman, had her basis in the women of A Pattern of Islands who conjured up spells by their clay ovens.

  Pamela dedicated this last Mary Poppins book to Bruno, her only grandson, Bruno Henry Travers, born in 1985. The advance from Collins was only £4,000, barely enough to cover the wages she paid all her helpers, but again, America paid more. When the book was published in the United States, Delacorte Press paid her an advance of $24,000.

  • • •

  To each correspondent now, Pamela explained that the arthritis in her hands hurt too much for her to write or even to type. Her feet ached even more. She tried reflexology and faradic baths, and acupressure, all without much success. She shuffled about the house, hardly daring to walk down Shawfield Street. Was it rheumatoid arthritis? Courtenay Mayers assured her the pain was only a mild form of arthritis in her spine as well as her hands.

  Pamela shut off the world. No more newspapers (she had liked the Guardian), no mor
e walks to the Kings Road. She sat in her chair by the window. On the wall beside her was a wooden angel. In the hallway, the rocking horse still sat riderless. Mervyn, she called him, after Mervyn Peake, the author of Gormenghast. Her only writing now was for Parabola. A collection of those Parabola pieces was published as What the Bee Knows. It was her last book, published in March 1989 by Aquarian Press. All her old fans as well as all the new seekers for information about her life were urged to read What the Bee Knows, which she saw as a guide to her life’s journey. The problem was, the book was written for insiders, a tight circle who had studied myth or followed the Work. To outsiders, everything about it was obscure, from the title which came from the old English adage, “Ask the wild bee what the Druids knew,” to the cover illustration of a bee. This was no ordinary bumblebee, but, as she explained, a hieroglyphic bee which was the sign of the king of Lower Egypt, from the coffin of Mykerinos, 3633 B.C.

  With superhuman effort, Pamela could still climb to the top of the house, up to her typewriter. Her papers were a jumble now, the desktop covered with dust and old rubber bands and carbon paper. On good days, she could type a little. In June 1989 she wrote a letter to Camillus. The tone was modest. If it was not too much trouble, she would like to let him know how to conduct her funeral. Pamela wanted to be buried in the courtyard at St. Luke’s Church in Bovington, near Hemel Hempstead at Hertfordshire, where she gave the eulogy for Rosemary Nott. Here, after the funeral for Rosemary, she had bought a grave. They could take her there in her coffin the day after her funeral service at Christ Church, where she had been a regular parishioner and where her three grandchildren were christened.

  He should let all the Gurdjieff people know of her death. It was the custom for the people in the Work to come and sit with the dead person for a while. They could do so in her bedroom, where she would be laid out on her bed, or perhaps in the sitting room. For the service, she wanted John Bunyan’s hymn “He Who Would Valiant Be.” The service could end with “God Be in My Head.” Above all, she wanted her funeral to be festive, not dreary. Pamela had remembered that day in Paris so clearly, the sunny day when Gurdjieff died. She wanted music from the Gurdjieff years as well, music she had heard in the movement halls of London and Paris. If anyone felt moved to speak, well and good, otherwise someone might recite “Fear no more the heat of the sun” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

  The Times would have to be told, but the death notice should not reveal any personal data, just “Pamela Lyndon Travers, eldest daughter of the late Robert and Margaret Goff.” Camillus was not to reveal her age, nothing. She reminded him how much she valued anonymity. The more information was released, the more he could expect reporters buzzing around. In any case, the obituaries were bound to be full of nonsense.

  Early in 1991, Pamela signed a will leaving specific bequests to the Gurdjieff Society, to Jessmin Howarth’s daughter, Dushka, to her grandchildren, and to Camillus. Her trustees were to administer two funds for Camillus and Frances. She wished her death to be verified by the opening of a vein by Bernard Courtenay Mayers and her burial to be postponed for some time after her death so people could come and sit and watch with her. This time, she had left suggestions for her funeral with Adam Nott, making a special request that any obituary written about her should be as modest and reticent as possible.

  Death felt close. Most days, Pamela thought she might be physically ill, and none of her old medicines helped. She had consulted a neurologist, two orthopedic surgeons, and a specialist at the foot hospital, but nothing could reassure her. From head to foot, Pamela was a walking compendium of worry. One doctor removed the warts from her face while another assured her that her feet were not really shrinking at all.

  In 1992, she moved into a nursing home in Pimlico but returned after a few weeks to Shawfield Street, where the only option seemed to be to install a stair lift. As well, she ordered special orthopedic chairs and a series of noisy bells that would call the maids and housekeepers to her side. The bells might clang and brrring at any hour of the day or night, even at three in the morning.

  Her caregivers were a succession of maids—Maria and Kay and Sheryl and Marli—but her main support was Patricia Feltham, a Gurdjieff friend who managed her business and personal affairs, even dealing with her lawyers.

  In 1994, a reporter from The New York Times reminded her how much she had looked forward to her rocking chair and to knowing all the answers. Pamela almost shouted back, “But here I am sitting in my chair and I don’t think I’m going to know all the answers. I’m human.” The next year, a journalist from the Observer, Nicci Gerrard, found Pamela talking in gulps, her crumpled body sitting by the window, her tongue rolling over swollen lips, her hands held carefully in her lap. She answered, “I have no gift for numbers” to Gerrard’s questions “How long have you lived here?” “How old are you?” and “I hear you have many grandchildren, how many?” Again and again came the mantra, “My dear, you are asking the wrong questions, I have no gift for numbers.”

  All she could tell Gerrard, really, was how “I’ve been looking for an idea all my life. I know what it is and sometimes I come near to it, and that’s all I will say.” Did Gerrard know that there was something deeper than happiness? Happiness was like the weather. Yes, sometimes she was scared of death. After the interview, Pamela spoke to Gerrard on the phone. There was just once thing she wanted to add: happiness was not the same as being happy-go-lucky. “I have not said this before, but I have suffered a lot in my life. I will only share my suffering with my pillow.”12

  The reason for the interview was a last glimmer of hope for a Mary Poppins musical. In 1995, her agents had optioned the rights to the producers David Pugh and Cameron Mackintosh. There was, as yet, no script but plenty of hope; after all, Mackintosh was an impresario with some serious money behind him. Word had spread that Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson or Fiona Shaw might play Mary Poppins this time.

  • • •

  Pamela spent the last year of her life as a recluse in Shawfield Street. Sometimes she wrote a few lines to Camillus or her friends in a thin and wavery hand. Like the last letter of Aunt Ellie, her words seemed to run off the page in a cobwebby shiver. In the summer of 1995 she wrote to “Darling Camillus,” asking him to come and see her. She needed to talk to him; after all, she would be ninety-six in August.

  Of all the little aches and pains in her fingers, joints, spine and stomach, it was her heels that hurt the most. Courtenay Mayers suggested sheepskin booties. She called the offices of Goodman Derrick. It was time to sign a new will. Her three trustees were all to be lawyers from Goodman Derrick. The three were to administer a discretionary trust of which Camillus and his children were the main beneficiaries. The Cherry Tree Foundation would be the other beneficiary of the trust. Pamela left £2000 to Bernard, $5,000 to Dushka Howarth, and her books and two paintings by AE to Camillus. Some of her silver jewelry was willed to Patricia Feltham while other friends would receive specific amounts from income from any future commercial production of Mary Poppins. One such beneficiary was AE’s granddaughter, Pamela Jessup. The will was witnessed on February 9 by Pamela’s housekeeper, Kay Ercolano, and a Danish woman from a nursing care agency, Pernille Boldt.

  The will was oddly similar to Aunt Ellie’s, almost as careful, almost as detailed, her life’s treasures allocated like so many coffee spoons. Nothing for Mary Shepard, now in a nursing home. Nothing to come home to Australia. But then there was no one left there for her to remember.

  Pamela died in April. The “cruellest month,” T. S. Eliot called it, “mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” In winter she had been cushioned inside, like her aching feet in the sheepskin booties, but now, with the first glimmer of spring, her body refused to go on. Two days before she died her friend Ben Haggarty saw her in what seemed a deep sleep. Her face, he thought, looked profoundly Celtic.

  Camillus came to Shawfield Street on April 22, the day before she died. Pamela couldn’t speak.
He sat beside her and began to sing a lullaby, one which she had sung to him. “Do you want the moon to play with, and the stars to run away with?”

  Patricia Feltham had her official Times obituary ready. She was first into print, her tribute closely following the biographical entry in the catalogue to Pamela’s papers in the Mitchell Library. The others followed days later: a former publisher, Adrian House, in the Guardian, Susha Guppy in the Independent, Margalit Fox in The New York Times (who said Pamela’s father was a sugar planter). The Disney organization placed ads in trade magazines. They showed Mickey Mouse in tears.

  Her funeral was held on May Day, at Christ Church, as she had wanted. In one bloc sat the accountants and lawyers, black-suited, enigmatic. In another sat the Gurdjieffians. They had said their farewells already, sitting with Pamela’s body as she had sat with Gurdjieff in the American Hospital in Paris. In their hands, they all held the order of service, its pale yellow cover printed with a picture of Mary Poppins flying up to the sky, her umbrella opened in her right hand, her carpetbag packed and ready for the heavens in her left hand.

  It all happened as she had hoped, beginning with the hymn of St. Patrick, “I Bind unto Myself Today.” Camillus spoke. He had chosen words that he loved from the Wisdom of Solomon, a book in the Apocrypha, which refers to the cosmic god Aeon. The reading began, “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.” He ended with the lines that conjured up a hazy golden light, like the burning horizons of a Turner painting: