Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  In fact, the studio was clearly more interested in Mary Poppins than it was willing to let on. Roy had been casual in his note to Travers, but then he met with her in New York, and Walt wrote her that he would fly to Arizona to see her if she made the trip, and he added that “these stories would be ideal material for a combination of flesh and blood characters with cartoon.” Roy phoned her again in March, careful not to seem too eager, just to let her know that the studio was still considering working with her. Not until 1946, when the war was over, did the studio and Travers reach agreement on the rights for $10,000—or at least Roy thought they had reached agreement. The deal fell apart when Travers insisted on script approval, something Walt Disney was not about to grant anyone.

  This was, however, only a harbinger of things to come. Thirteen years, and the creation of Disneyland, would pass before the studio again contacted Travers, now sixty years old, about securing the rights. This time her agent wanted $750,000. Two months later, at a meeting with Walt in London, Travers herself upped the ante. She was now demanding 5 percent of the profits, which would have amounted to considerably more than $750,000, with a guarantee of $100,000 and an additional £1,000 to do the treatment. Upon meeting her back in the 1940s, Roy had described Travers, a delicate-looking woman with a dainty chin, thin arching brows, and wide-set eyes, as an “Amelia Earhardt [sic] type,” by which he presumably meant that, despite her appearance, she was, like the late aviator, tough-minded and not easily cowed. He had read her correctly. She was no fan of Walt Disney’s work, and she wasn’t about to let him intimidate her.

  But if she was strong-willed, she was also more than a little dotty. At the same time that she was disparaging Disney’s films, she had written her own Poppins treatment with a collaborator and submitted it to Walt, and she kept revising it, even though she refused to sign a contract with the studio. Walt attempted to appease her, inviting her to visit the studio so that, he said, she could get acquainted with his staff and so that they would have the “benefit of your reactions to our presentation.” When, after reading the Disney script, Travers protested that Mary should not subvert the authority of the parents of her charges in asking them to slide up the banister with her, and that she should not encourage the little boy to jump in puddles after his mother has told him not to, Walt was more than obliging, wiring her that the “Mary Poppins project is so important in the overall [scheme] if the two points raised in your letter will make you happy I shall be pleased to go along with your suggestions.” But even with this coddling, Travers kept the studio dangling; at one point she agreed to a contract that stipulated unconditional approval of the script, which Walt signed off on knowing full well he wouldn’t honor it, then a full year later she said she still “wanted to give it some thought.” Walt had been working on the film for nearly two years before Travers finally signed the contract.

  Even then she wasn’t happy. “When we sat down with Mrs. Travers to present our treatment,” recalled the Sherman brothers, who were writing a musical score for the picture and had helped block out the story, “she hated everything we had done. Disliked it with a passion! For every chapter we developed, she had a definite feeling we had selected the worst one. She started naming the chapters she felt we should adapt—and they were the ones we thought were absolutely unusable.” Even on the eve of production, after a full year of delays, Travers was writing extensive criticisms of the script, and Walt was writing to thank her and assure her that “we will make use of it whenever we can.”

  She was no more forgiving when it came to the casting of the film. In March 1961, just before Travers arrived in California, Walt and Lillian had seen Mary Martin in New York in the stage musical The Sound of Music, and Walt had wired to ask her to consider the role of Poppins. Walt also suggested that Travers see the play on her way out to the studio, and she did, even requesting a meeting with the actress. Travers, however, had decided that Julie Harris should play the role, even though the film was to be a musical and Harris had demonstrated no talent in that area. Harris, no doubt at Travers’s urging, had written Walt to express her interest, forcing him to decline her services.

  Meanwhile that August, Walt saw the musical Camelot in New York and came away so impressed by the twenty-seven-year-old English actress Julie Andrews, who played Queen Guinevere, that he promptly concluded she, not Mary Martin, should be Poppins. Though Andrews was relatively unknown at the time—she had starred in the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady—Walt assiduously courted her for nearly a year, inviting her to fly out to the studio. “We can play the songs, lay out the story line and I am sure after seeing this sort of presentation you will be able to make your decision,” Walt wrote her. Accepting the offer to come to the studio, Andrews, now pregnant, and her husband, the costume-and-set designer Tony Walton, spent a weekend with Walt in June 1962, though even then Walt wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He offered Walton a job consulting on the film’s design, and he later arranged to have a handicapped patient of Walton’s father, a doctor, come to America for a special operation. Like Travers, Andrews was hesitant to commit herself to a Disney film, her first film, with all that the Disney name now connoted, but Walt was helped considerably by the fact that Warner Bros. head Jack Warner had recently bypassed her in favor of Audrey Hepburn for the role that Andrews had coveted—Eliza Doolittle in the screen version of My Fair Lady—because, Warner said, nobody had heard of her. Poppins was a consolation prize. (Travers, obtuse to the ways of Hollywood, suggested Audrey Hepburn as a possible backup for the Poppins role.) The negotiations for Andrews’s services began that October.

  As for the role of Mary Poppins’s confederate, Bert the chimney sweep, Walt had Cary Grant in mind and decided to expand the part to make it equal to Mary’s to lure Grant, who told Walt that he was receptive. Travers was not happy. She argued that while Grant would be fine as the father of the family to which Mary ministers, to build up the role of Bert for him would be “mutilating the story” and throwing it out of balance. Grant did not agree in any case, and Walt sounded out Laurence Harvey and Anthony Newley before settling on the loose-limbed television situation comedy star Dick Van Dyke. “Walt had rooms of storyboards that he showed me,” Van Dyke later recalled, “and his enthusiasm for the film grew as he spoke. He was like a kid, getting so excited about it that by the time I left him I was excited about it too. He had me sold. I wanted to be a part of that movie so much.”

  As Van Dyke observed, Walt was energized. Despite the fact that the Mary Poppins screenplay was written by the old studio hands Bill Walsh (who had authored The Absent Minded Professor and Son of Flubber) and Don DaGradi (who had co-written Lady and the Tramp and collaborated with Walsh on Son of Flubber) and was directed by another old studio hand, Robert Stevenson (who was coming off Son of Flubber), the film had an aura, if only because it had been worked on for so long and if only because it was the most elaborate and expensive live-action feature at the studio since 20,000 Leagues. “There wasn’t a sad face around the entire studio,” Walt said, and admitted he became concerned when, as the budget swelled, not even Roy attempted to interfere or request that he show the “dailies” to the bankers. It had been years since Walt was so personally invested in a film. On just about every picture now, no matter how much he might labor over the script or the casting, he would fix, approve, and then disappear. On Mary Poppins, which was shot entirely on the Burbank lot, he visited the set almost every day with the objective—in the words of Karen Dotrice, who played the little girl under Poppins’s authority—of “making sure that everybody was happy. That was the thing—he wanted everybody to enjoy the experience.” Later Dotrice, echoing Van Dyke, said he was “like a big kid.”

  Though he didn’t—couldn’t, given his other responsibilities at the time—work on the script line by line, he obviously connected with the film in ways that he had not connected with most of the studio’s recent pictures. Despite their emphasis on childhood release, Disney’s best movies ha
d only secondarily been concerned with liberation; his chief concern had always been maturation and the power that accompanied it. Even Pinocchio’s transformation from a puppet to a boy, and Dumbo’s from a put-upon little elephant to a circus star, were effected by accepting responsibility, demonstrating empathy, testing courage, and, finally, expressing love—hallmarks of adulthood. Mary Poppins was a kind of reversion to childhood before responsibility or, rather, a reaction to it. In a household that encouraged them to suppress their antic spirits and behave like adults, Poppins taught the children joy—how to fight bureaucracy, convention, and complacency, which were the drawbacks of adulthood. If his earlier films had spoken to young Walt Disney’s need for empowerment, Poppins spoke to the older Walt Disney’s predicament as a corporate captain burdened with duties, and he could certainly identify both with Mr. Banks, the stodgy banker who has a child lurking within him, and with Mary Poppins, the magical nanny who manages to emancipate that child. The film embodied his new vicarious dream of shirking responsibilities he knew he really couldn’t shirk, of being the child that reporters often said he was but that he couldn’t really be.

  Made with a kind of joyful abandon that the studio hadn’t felt for years, Poppins concluded its principal photography uneventfully at the end of the summer of 1963, with Walt writing his sister Ruth, “I think it’s going to be one of our best.” But even with the photography completed, the picture was far from over. It had taken a long time to prepare the film—to choose the scenes from the book, to write the dialogue, to compose a score, to find the cast, to parry Travers. It would take a long time, another full year, to finish it. The problem was that even though Walt had always intended the film to be a combination of live action and animation and had authorized Ub Iwerks to spend $250,000 to purchase the rights to a special traveling matte process that would better combine the live actors with the cartoons—“chickenfeed,” he called the money—the live footage had not always been planned to accommodate the animation.* One reason was that Walt would often spring new ideas on the staff. For the song “Jolly Holiday,” the Sherman brothers had decided that one of the choruses would be sung by waiters harmonizing as a barbershop quartet. Walt mused that waiters had always reminded him of penguins and suggested that the waiters should be animated penguins, which necessitated a wholesale revision. As Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote, “The animator would fuss and complain and call a few names, but in the end he would become more inventive and more entertaining than he would have been if everything had been made easy for him. No animator ever would back away from such a challenge,” and, they said, “Walt knew that, too.”

  Moreover, everyone seemed to know that the film was special. Even at a rough screening at the studio for the sales force before the score or animation had been added, Walt reported to Bill Anderson that the reaction was “terrific,” though Walt was still so afraid that he might be deluding himself that he asked a longtime exhibitor to see it. The exhibitor confirmed Walt’s enthusiasm. At the premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in August 1964, a benefit for CalArts, the audience stood and cheered. “You have made a great many pictures, Walt, that have touched the hearts of the world,” producer Sam Goldwyn, who had discussed a Poppins collaboration with Walt in the early 1950s, wrote him after seeing the film, “but you have never made one so wonderful, so magical, so joyous, so completely the fulfillment of everything a great motion picture should be as MARY POPPINS.” Goldwyn’s was the general sentiment: Mary Poppins ranked with Walt Disney’s very best films. Even Pamela Travers, who had caused Walt so much grief, came to Los Angeles to see the film and pronounced herself happy. “The whole picture is a splendid spectacle,” she wrote Walt, “and I admire you for perceiving in Julie Andrews an actress who could play the part,” praising Andrews’s “understated” performance. She closed, “Yours, with a bouquet of flowers.” (Still, for years Travers would express her disappointment in the film, apparently to those who disliked Walt Disney.)

  The public was no less enchanted. Though the film cost $5.2 million, more than Disney had ever spent on live action, it would gross nearly $50 million worldwide, $30 million in the United States alone, boosting the company’s gross that year to better than $100 million where, ten years earlier, it had never exceeded $10 million. When it was shown in Moscow, the government had to convert the Sports Palace into a theater and welcomed eight thousand viewers at each of two screenings. The film was nominated for thirteen Oscars, including Best Picture, and it won five—for Best Special Visual Effects, Best Score, Best Song (“Chim Chim Cher-ee”), Best Editing, and Best Actress, which was a vindication for Julie Andrews since Audrey Hepburn had not even been nominated for My Fair Lady. “That lovely statue—which I will find hard to believe in my possession—would not be there at all if it hadn’t been for your help,” Andrews wrote Walt after the ceremony. “I just wish with all my heart that we had bagged an Oscar for ‘best film’ too! It so deserved it.” Walt, however, seemed resigned to the fact that, not being a member of the Hollywood establishment, he couldn’t win that award. (My Fair Lady did.) “Knowing Hollywood, I never had any hope that the picture would get it,” he replied to Andrews with a touch of self-pity. “As a matter of fact, Disney has never actually been part of Hollywood, you know. I think they refer to us as being in that cornfield in Burbank.”

  It had been a very good year, and Walt was having to deny rumors that he might finally sell the studio and the theme park to CBS and retire, telling columnist Hedda Hopper, “With the business ‘Mary Poppins’ is doing, Disney might make an offer to buy CBS.” Still, Walt confessed to another journalist that, far from reducing the pressure on him, Mary Poppins had actually increased it. “I’m on the spot,” he said, sounding very much the way he had after Snow White. “I have to keep trying to keep up to that same level. And the way to do it is not to worry, not to get tense, not to think, ‘I got to beat Mary Poppins, I got to beat Mary Poppins.’…The way to do it is just to go off and get interested in some little thing, some little idea that interests me, some little idea that looks like fun”—which was exactly what he did.

  When the second season of the world’s fair started the following April, after the release of Mary Poppins, Walt, much more relaxed, was ferrying employees from California to the fair as a reward. When he arrived with Marc Davis near the fair’s closing to see how his attractions had held up, he became something of an attraction himself. Everywhere he went he was mobbed by well-wishers—“He touched me!” one woman squealed—except at the Ford pavilion, where he decided to wait in line with the other visitors, all of whom respected his privacy and none of whom approached him. But, said Davis, “[w]hen we got in the car [that took guests through the exhibit] the whole crowd applauded. And they had left him alone all this time. It was an amazing experience. And he was very touched.”

  By the time the fair closed in October 1965, after two seasons, 51 million visitors had attended and nearly 47 million of them, or 91 percent, had seen one of Disney’s four exhibits, making Walt Disney clearly one of the main successes there. But not everyone was enamored of Walt’s contributions. Writing in Life shortly after the opening, the architect and architectural educator Vincent Scully wailed, “If This Is Architecture, God Help Us.” Fastening on the idea that Disney was now creating facsimiles of experiences that paled in comparison to the real thing and yet substituted for the real thing, Scully accused him of being a man who “so vulgarizes everything he touches that facts lose all force, living things their stature, and the ‘history of the world’ its meaning. Disney caters to the kind of phony reality—most horribly exemplified by the moving and talking figure of Lincoln elsewhere in the Fair—that we all too readily accept in place of the true. Mr. Disney, I’m afraid, has our number.” It was a charge that would increasingly be leveled at Walt Disney: he had not only taken the edge and danger out of his art; he had found a way to take them out of life generally.

  But Walt seemed immune to the criticism. The fair had
n’t been about pleasing intellectuals. It had been a rehearsal. The Carousel of Progress was shipped back to Disneyland, where it was installed without the Skydome Spectacular and the nuclear fission demonstration but with a diorama of a futuristic city. It’s a Small World was also shipped back to California and opened at Disneyland under the sponsorship of the Bank of America. Even before the fair ended, the new and improved Abraham Lincoln debuted at Disneyland as part of the park’s tenth-anniversary celebration. Only Ford, despite Walt’s enticements, decided not to transfer its exhibit to Disneyland, though Walt did take the dinosaurs and later set them up at the park as part of Disneyland’s Primeval World along the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad. Meanwhile, Walt was inundated with offers from around the world to do similar projects. Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum even asked him to do an Audio-Animatronic Winston Churchill. Though Walt declined these invitations, he had always intended to use the exhibits to lure other corporations to sponsor attractions at Disneyland, and as the fair was winding down, Jack Sayers was meeting with IBM, Johnson’s Wax, Hertz, Clairol, and the House of Formica to gauge their interest.