Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  She had taken a chalet for a month in the village of Saanen, near Gstaad, where every summer the Jesus-like figure of Krishnamurti enthralled his disciples at mass meetings. They gathered under the shelter of a big tent, these hundreds, their sad or anxious faces raised to the guru on high. Among them that year were Pamela, accompanied by Jessmin Howarth and her daughter Dushka, and another Gurdjieff friend from New York, Dorothea Dorling. The women saw in his face and bearing a god, with more gravitas than the Beatles’ guru, the Maharishi, or the guru of the orange people, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—altogether the perfect avatar of both Buddha and Jesus Christ.

  With his fine, Roman nose, flowing aura of white hair, and his body wrapped in a red-bordered dhoti, Krishnamurti walked to his dais “surrounded by people but untouched by them.” Then, as he sat on the platform, his presence reached out and drew his listeners in close. He imparted simple yet memorable messages—“Life is so rich, yet we go to it with empty hearts,” “Life is strange, one needs infinite pliability,” “Be supple mentally,” “Be absolutely alert, make no effort.”5 For Pamela, Krishnamurti was a reincarnation of Gurdjieff. Each summer, she became part of his Saanen court.

  He was four years older than Pamela, born in 1895 in south India. In labor, his mother uttered the words, “Rama, Rama, Anjaneya”—Anjaneya being another word for Hanuman. He was inducted into the Theosophical Society while still a boy. One of the society’s leaders, the pederast Charles Webster Leadbetter, took a particular fancy to him, and began to investigate Krishnamurti’s former lives, publishing the work as The Lives of Alcyone, a variation on Halcyon, the brightest star in the Pleiades. By the time he was eighteen, Krishnamurti had developed his own following. Like von Dürckheim and Pamela, he practiced yoga, meditating on an image of the Buddha known as Maitreya. He lived partly in the Californian haven Ojai, and relied on patronage of wealthy Europeans. Like Gurdjieff, he attracted artistic women—including Frieda Lawrence, who thought “the things Krishnamurti says are much like [D. H.] Lawrence.”6 Most of all, he appealed to rich women, many of them widowed, single or divorced and looking for a purpose in life. Krishnamurti, they understood, was celibate, which made him all the more attractive.

  Krishnamurti showed no apparent signs of being a charlatan. Charming, gentle, courageous and compassionate, he gave all his attention to each disciple. He could be convincing publicly and privately that he wanted to help, to alleviate suffering, to heal. Yet, after he spoke at mass meetings, no one was quite clear about what he said. As the American writer Peter Washington wrote in Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, a book about gurus, this confusion could be a definition of charisma. Each person had used Krishnamurti as a mirror, to reflect his or her own inner state.

  His friends and adherents included some of the best known writers, musicians and actors of the time. Among those who came to sit at his knee were Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Luise Rainer, Anita Loos, Greta Garbo, Bertolt Brecht, Igor Stravinsky and Charlie Chaplin. His European patrons were Signora Vanda Scaravelli and his English representative, Miss Doris Pratt. From 1961, the year he first called the faithful to him at Saanen, until 1983, Krishnamurti stayed every July and part of August with Signora Scaravelli at her Chalet Tannegg in Gstaad. There, he was given a Mercedes, which he drove with skill around the mountainous roads. (He also loved to have his hair cut in Bond Street, and to wear custom-made suits from Huntsman at Savile Row.)

  Two of his closest associates were his business manager, Desikacharya Rajagopal, and Rajagopal’s American wife, Rosalind Williams. Rajagopal ran Krishnamurti Writings Inc., the organization responsible for the copyright, editing and publication of the guru’s work. He also oversaw Krishnamurti’s properties and doled out money, or withheld it, when Krishnamurti wanted land in Saanen and the United Kingdom. The relationship between these three represented a giant hypocrisy in Krishnamurti’s life. From 1932, he had conducted a secret affair with Rosalind. When this was revealed to Rajagopal, the fallout led to painful legal battles between the two men. Krishnamurti accused his old friend of mismanaging funds and the feud finally led to a public denunciation by Krishnamurti of Rajagopal in Saanen in 1968 and the establishment of a new organization, the Krishnamurti Foundation, based at Brockwood Park in England. After years of litigation and cross claims, the legal cases were eventually settled. Krishnamurti died in 1986, with his official biographers skating over the truth about his life. The daughter of the Rajagopals revealed the details of the love affair in her book Lives in the Shadow, published in 1991.

  If she had known that the messianic Krishnamurti hid an affair with his close friend’s wife while he preached goodness, honesty and simplicity, Pamela might not have cared. After all, she had glossed over the shallowness in Gurdjieff. She came to him for his blessings and promises of insight and peace. His philosophical unguents counted far more than any weakness of character.

  • • •

  No stranger who saw Pamela in her last public appearances knew anything other than a sharpish, domineering woman, utterly confident and sure of her place. Yet all through the 1970s, the righteous, bumptious, public P. L. Travers masked an uncertain private woman still searching for reassurance. Age did not temper the search, which became even more intense when her brief decade of Disney fame almost faded away.

  In 1970 she visited her friend Bettina Hurlimann in her country home at Uerikon in Switzerland, where she worked on a fourth draft of Friend Monkey. One night she pressed the manuscript into the hands of Hurlimann and went to bed at nine. Pamela was so desperate for approval, yet so self-involved, that she asked Hurlimann and her husband Martin to give their opinion next morning.7

  Late in 1969, she had sent out a one-page prospectus promoting herself as “the author of Mary Poppins etc.,” and a potential writer in residence at any university on the West Coast of America. Money was not an issue. She merely wanted to be comfortable on a campus where students could come and go and where she could work on her next book. Among those who received the prospectus was the administrator of the Blaisdell Institute for Advanced Study in World Cultures and Religions in Claremont, California, who passed it on to Scripps College, also in Claremont. (Scripps, a women’s university, was named after its founder, Ellen B. Scripps, the half sister of newspaper chain proprietor Edward Wyllis Scripps.)

  The president of Scripps, Mark Curtis, wrote to Pamela, offering her two months of the spring semester as writer in residence and lecturer in creative writing. He could also offer her the Clark lectureship, given each year to a distinguished woman, usually a writer. Pamela readily accepted, although she told Curtis her kind of writing could not be taught, as it had to “rise from the unconscious.” She would be happy to give the Clark lecture, but wanted an audience far beyond just the Scripps girls, suggesting young, old, male, female—a “melange.” In a letter to the college’s dean, Marjorie Downing, Pamela said she was thrilled to be coming to California. She had visited the state only twice, once to talk over her film script, and again for the first night of Mary Poppins, an occasion when “only a hero could refrain from weeping.” She had once been told by a “necromancer” that California was the luckiest place in the world for her.

  She arrived at Scripps on February 10, 1970, and two days later delivered a lecture called “In Search of the Hero—the continuing relevance of myth and fairy tale.” Pamela spoke to the Scripps students as little as she could, leaving few memories behind when she left in early April. She told the dean in a letter she had been happy at Claremont, walking among camellias and magnolias, “pregnant with a book, and time in which to write it.” The students, she assured Downing, would be good mothers and good women, not good women but good women. In the Scripps gardens she left cuttings of three roses: the Pamela Travers, the Sleeping Beauty and the Mary Poppins.8

  During her weeks at Scripps, Pamela had finished Friend Monkey. When it was published the following year she was astonished to find her beloved monkey god torn to pieces by the critics. The New York
Times sneered at Friend Monkey’s “tiresome stock characters, overdone writing, full of ‘would be poetic’ adjectives, and strained metaphors.”9 In February 1972, the Horn Book Review noted the “plethora of characters…of the flat comic variety” and the plot boiling over with incidents that were “ludicrous without being funny.” Pamela sighed in a letter she wrote a few years later that “it was not accepted, alas—everyone wanted another Mary Poppins.”10 In fact, she told interviewers, the book was hardly on the shelves before the retailers sent the unsold stock back to the publishers. Pamela never accepted the rejection. She absolutely knew it was her best book, so proud of her work that near the end of 1972 she sent a copy to the Queen.11

  • • •

  New York remained her spiritual home. She decided to rent an apartment in a towering, anonymous block overlooking the East River at 1385 York Avenue. Here, in New York, the Welches once more enfolded her within their Gurdjieff group. Now enshrined as a crone who had once sat at the feet of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, she lectured on the meaning of myth to men and women who had never met the two masters. Late in the spring of 1972, Pamela decided to donate some mementoes to the children’s room of the New York Public Library. She collected all the little treasures—a Doulton plate, a toy horse, a doll, a hen—and a handful of other modest trinkets that had inspired chapters in the Mary Poppins books. The library, keen for publicity, announced that Pamela herself would be handing over the trinkets and speaking publicly at the ceremony. The media were invited. Feenie Ziner, writer and teacher, described the scene for The New York Times under the headline “Mary Poppins as a Zen Monk.”

  Pamela was “sixtyish and square, with a quantity of silver bracelets and a beautiful necklace of jade.” No one approached. Ziner herself made a tentative opening gambit. “One of my students,” she said, “has written a paper in which she describes Mary Poppins as a Zen monk. Would you care to comment?” “The gray head reared, the eyes narrowed. ‘That is a very interesting idea. I should very much like to read the paper. Of course I shall not comment upon it or return it. Would you send it care of my publisher.’ ” Ziner was dismissed. The donation ceremony began. With formidable detachment, Pamela spoke of how, when she was dead, this humble collection would remain for children at the great library.

  She looked down at the treasures of her lifetime, a plastic Pegasus, a jointed wooden doll, quite without clothing, a flowered ceramic cat, a setting hen of translucent blue glass, and a Staffordshire lion. She glared at the librarian: “You had him listed as a dog!” The audience settled in when she spoke of her father, “whose prerogative it had been to bestow a name to each of her dolls.” Later, she remembered how “when I was doing the film with George Disney—that is his name isn’t it, George?—he kept insisting on a love affair between Mary Poppins and Bert. I had a terrible time with him.” Once again, she explained that Mr. Banks was Mary’s real opposite number. Pamela picked up a small glass paperweight enclosing the words “Home Sweet Home.” “Some day,” she said, “I might write a story about this paperweight because nowadays there are so few people—so few—who have that sense of home, a safe place, eternal, hidden in their hearts.” She gazed deeply into the glass, “long enough for people to begin to wonder if she had come to the end of her speech, standing in front of the room, she was sinking out of sight. Could she not go on? Was she about to cry?” She seemed poised “on that tenth of an inch difference by which heaven and earth are set apart. Then slowly, her face lifted toward the light, as if an arrow had been released from deep within her. Transfigured with joy, she said, ‘Maybe I’m writing it right now.’ ”12 The actress in Pamela had emerged once again, the timing she knew so well, the thrill of holding the audience just one moment more.

  Back in Switzerland in July, this time at the Hotel Olden Gstaad, the words of Krishnamurti were balm enough for her mind but her body was still in its same old knotted state. Her London doctor, Bernard Courtenay Mayers, said he would try to help, prescribing a mixture of phenobarbitone, bismuth subsitrate, kaolin and oil of peppermint.

  All these years, the checks from Disney’s Burbank studios kept rolling in, not just for the film but for spinoffs such as Disney arena productions in which Mary Poppins characters appeared. In 1970, Pamela and her lawyers had established the Cherry Tree Trust, a foundation that gave grants to children, using some of the profits from the movie. But the trust funds represented just a slice of the Disney money; the more the money flowed, the greater the tax burden became. Pamela’s advisers knew that in Ireland writers lived virtually tax free, and suggested she might take up residence there. It seemed a brilliant idea, to maintain the apartment in New York but to live for a large part of the year in the country she had loved as a young woman. Pamela bought a house at 69 Upper Leeson Street, Dublin. But the promised land of her twenties—the city where she had fallen in love with AE and Yeats almost fifty years earlier—had vanished. It was a disaster, according to her friend Jenny Koralek, “because of course Ireland had changed. She used to ring me and say ‘Find me some interesting people here or I’ll die.’ ”13

  In September 1972, she escaped to Brockwood Park, the Krishnamurti Foundation’s center near Alresford in England, where she could talk to others in the same need of help or simply meditate in her own room. She tried to focus her mind, to “narrow down” her wishes and desires to one of two things. This, she told an interviewer, made “the channel deeper and gives more strength to it.” All her writing effort, though, was placed in About the Sleeping Beauty, still unwritten, though brooding in her since Radcliffe College. In 1975, when the book was finally published by McGraw-Hill, Pamela began writing to the last of her Mr. Banks figures, a professor in Sweden.

  Their long and intimate correspondence represented a kind of love affair—on paper alone. For three years, Pamela told her secrets to this Mr. Banks, as if dropping one veil after another. He was Staffan Bergsten, from the University of Uppsala, who, like many supplicants before him, begged Pamela for information on the meaning of Mary Poppins. He planned to write a thesis about “Poppins and myth.” She was entranced. Bergsten had thought much more deeply than any other man on the nanny and all her meanings. He had seen all the associations with Zen, Blake, Yeats and AE, as if he had read her mind. It was all immensely flattering, reassuring too. Pamela wrote to him first in February 1975. The aerograms that flew between Sweden and London over three years included ten long letters from her, followed by two final letters in the 1980s. In these, she asked Bergsten if he would send her copies of the original letters—not for her to destroy, but to form part of a collection of her personal papers that she sold eventually to the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia. The inclusion of these letters in the collection—freely available to any member of the public to read—appears to be irrefutable proof that she wanted her personal life revealed, despite many protestations that she was Anon personified and wanted to remain so.

  In the first letter, she adopted her usual flattering tone, telling Bergsten that men and boys always asked her the best questions. She started with some standard responses, that she had not thought of Poppins as part of the Christian tradition but was always thinking of what children know and later forget. Bergsten’s next move was to send her his book on the Swedish poet Osten Sjostrand. Pamela told him she would send him Friend Monkey, a book “very dear to my heart.” But as much as she clung to Hanuman, her opus Sleeping Beauty was to be her ultimate statement, as she explained to the professor. Although she knew McGraw-Hill was keen on the manuscript, Pamela also modestly explained it away as a very small book which would cause not much of a stir.

  The most revealing letters from Pamela followed the publication of About the Sleeping Beauty in 1975. The whole of the previous year had been spent in perfecting this book about the sleeper, her court and her fate. Nobody knew, not Bergsten certainly, or any reviewer, just how many ways the Sleeping Beauty appealed to her, how she had thought for years of this woman who waits to be remembered. Repe
ating the lessons she had taken to heart from Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, she speculated on the drive in men and women to shake off their waking sleep, to see a higher reality, and to gain esoteric knowledge. What was it, she wanted to know, that at a certain moment fell asleep in everyone? Who lay hidden deep within us? Who would come at last to wake us—what aspect of ourselves?

  Her book told five versions of the Sleeping Beauty story, including Grimms’ and Perrault’s, as well as her own version of the tale and an afterword. Pamela’s tale, set in the court of a sultan, was heavy with symbolism, or what one academic later called “Jungian blather.” When the prince stared at the princess, he knew himself to be at the center of the world and that in him, all men stood there, gazing at their heart’s desire, or perhaps their innermost selves. The kiss was an earth-moving experience when the lovers “plumbed all height, all depth, and rose up strongly to the surface, back to the shores of time.”14 Yes, she told Bergsten in March 1976, “The Sleeping Beauty” was certainly erotic, like many of the fairy tales. That’s why she placed in her version of the story a dove and a cat, the most strongly sexed bird and animal, and a lizard, which was a phallic symbol, like the spindle.

  In her afterword to the book, she linked the sleeping princess with other famous sleepers in literature: Snow White, Brynhild, Charlemagne, King Arthur, Holga the Dane, Oisin of Ireland and a Hindu king. The sleep of the princess was a symbolic death of her entire court. When she woke, everyone else woke too, which reminded Pamela of the Grail Legend, where the whole court is out of sorts when the Fisher King is ill. (This prompted Bergsten to tell her that a book about the Grail Legend formed the kernel of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.)