I could play many types of characters on camera, but all were, in some way, going to be variations of me, and I was conscious of who I was. I wasn’t a prude or a goody two-shoes, but I was, in many ways, still the boy my mother praised for being good, and though older and more complex, I was content with remaining that good boy.
I wanted to be able to talk about my work at the dinner table and hold my head up on Sundays when my wife and I led our children into the Brentwood Presbyterian Church, where I was an elder. I did have a wild side, and I showed it every time I walked through the front door and my littlest child, Carrie Beth, made me dance to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s hit song “Tijuana Sauerkraut.” But you were not going to see me acting up at Hollywood parties. For the most part, you weren’t going to see me at any Hollywood parties. I stayed home. That kind of family-oriented, value-driven ethos earned the admiration of another Midwesterner, the Chicago-born Walt Disney.
The visionary studio owner and entrepreneur who had created Mickey Mouse, won an Oscar for Snow White, overseen classics and favorites from Pinocchio and Fantasia to The Absent-Minded Professor and The Parent Trap, as well as opened Disneyland, had read an interview in which I stated my intention to stick to family movies. He liked that. He thought it made me perfect for his type of Disney movies—and specifically for the one he was about to start working on, Mary Poppins.
As a result of the interest he took in me, I was offered the role of Bert the chimney sweep, opposite Julie Andrews, who had been cast as the practically perfect nanny Mary Poppins. It was my dream to be in a Disney picture, and I knew from the outset that this project, based on the beloved P. L. Travers books, was no ordinary one.
There have only been two times in my career when I have known that I had a chance to be involved in something special. The first was The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the second was when I read the script for Poppins. I will never forget putting it down, turning to Margie, and telling her that it was sensational.
It got even better after I signed my contract and met Walt at his studio in Burbank. He impressed me as a nice man, really an old shoe. I later heard that he was a tough taskmaster, but I only saw his easygoing side, the side that led others to refer to him as Uncle Walt.
We talked in his office, and I learned that he had pursued the rights to making this book into a film for nearly twenty-five years. He took me down the hall and into room after room, where he showed me storyboards for the movie. Gorgeous renderings, they hung on the walls like paintings in a museum. He went over each one, pointing out details, talking about the sets that were being built, mentioning that work on the songs and script had been going on for two years, and savoring the picture he already saw in his head.
“What do you think?” he asked at one point.
“I’m speechless,” I said.
“I have more to show you,” he said, smiling.
He introduced me to several of the animators, all of whom were of varying ages but with one thing in common: No matter their age, they were all kids. None had ever lost the child inside him. I related easily to them. And admired their talent. Next, Walt took me to meet a wonderful guy who managed all of the sound effects for the studio. He had a huge room with a number of different machines, many, if not all of them, he had invented. Finally, Walt took me to meet the Sherman brothers. That was the icing on an already delicious cake.
In their mid-thirties, Richard and Robert Sherman were staff writers at Disney who had been hired personally by Walt. They shook my hand warmly and chatted with Walt about work, before Walt asked them to play me some songs. Richard, the more outgoing of the two, sat at the piano while Robert took a seat across the room, after which he shot a quick glance at his brother.
“Walt, should I play your favorite?” Richard asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “Save it for last.”
“All right,” said Richard, who, with a puckish smile, dove into the instantly fun and contagious “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and then followed that with “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” and several songs intended for Julie, including “A Spoonful of Sugar.” He might have been finished at that point, except that Walt gave him a nod, which Richard knew meant that the boss wanted to hear his favorite, “Feed the Birds.”
When he finally looked up, finished with his bravura performance for this privileged audience of two, Walt and myself, I clapped. I wanted to say something along the lines of “That was spectacular,” but the music had left me speechless. Imagine hearing those songs, now such an established part of the movie musical lexicon, for the first time. It was a stunning experience.
With some, I tried to sing along. Others put a smile on my face, as they did on Walt’s, and also filled me with excitement and anticipation of performing them. Those songs didn’t just get under my skin, they became a part of me then and there, and thinking about it now, they’ve never left.
Later at home, Margie asked how it had gone at the studio.
“It was pretty special,” I said. “I think we’ve got a real movie here.”
Dance rehearsals were the hardest part of Poppins. We practiced on Disney’s back lot for six weeks if not longer during a heat wave that would have made the Mojave feel cool. Before we started, Walt asked if I knew any good choreographers. I was surprised he did not know any himself. I recommended Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood, a young couple with whom I had worked on an Andy Williams special. As I told Walt, they had impressed me as very inventive—and he hired them.
They did a heck of a job on the picture. And for me, they were perfect. That may have been Walt’s genius in asking me. Who knows. But Marc and Dee Dee made me stretch and do things I hadn’t done before. Nearly forty, I worked with dancers at least ten years younger than I was, but I stayed with them and they were all fun and supportive. One of the most challenging yet purely fun numbers for me was the dance with the penguins. It was all mime and dance, which I loved to do, but it was done against a green screen on an empty set, and we did take after take because every move I made had to be perfect since the penguins and backdrop were painted in later.
I had the perfect partner in Julie Andrews. She had her baby daughter, Emma, with her when we met, so my first impressions were of her warmth and tenderness as a mother. As time went on, her prodigious talent unfolded along with a delightful personality. I saw why she had been cast in the role of the “practically perfect” nanny.
She was a lady first and foremost, but she also had a great, whimsical sense of humor. I never once saw her get angry about anything or utter a single complaint. Before agreeing to do the film, she had balked at the romantic ballad, “The Eyes of Love,” asking Walt to replace it with something else, and the Sherman brothers came back with “A Spoonful of Sugar,” perhaps one of the all-time great fixes. Only one thing surpassed Julie’s spot-on instincts, and that was her voice.
We were still in the early stages of production when we recorded the score, and it scared me to death because Julie’s voice could have been used to tune a piano. She was pitch perfect—and I never was. I was enjoyably close. As such, recording with her was a challenge.
But even the hard stuff felt right. The Sherman brothers were in the studio with us, and always pleasant. Walt was a frequent visitor on the set, but he wasn’t one of those executives who was really a frustrated director and came around only to inject his whims and ideas, even with this project, which had been such a longtime passion of his. He seemed pleased with what he saw.
Director Robert Stevenson had, in many respects, the easiest job. He was fairly mechanical and didn’t do much directing other than to say, “Perfect. Let’s do another one just like that.” In my opinion, the movie’s unsung hero was the online producer and co-writer, Bill Walsh, a heavyset man with the most wonderful sense of humor.
As with any great film, there’s always someone responsible for the spirit the audience experiences, and as far as I’m concerned, Bill created the lighthearted at
mosphere that let all of us forget that we were working and instead feel like we were floating a few feet off the ground through a Hollywood playground, as if we had embarked on a jolly holiday.
Speaking of such, the charming song “Jolly Holiday” was more demanding than Mary and Bert’s little stroll through the countryside appears. It was shot against a green screen (the lush background was painted in later), but every minute spent staring into that bright yellow sulfur light was worth it because I still smile when I think of Bert floating gently above the ground (as he sings, “I feel like I could fly”) and Mary, after gently pulling him back to Earth, scolding, “Now, Bert, none of your larking about.”
Such fun!
Ironically, the song “I Love to Laugh,” which I do, was even harder than any of us expected. It’s the scene where Bert summons Mary to help with her uncle Albert, played by the great Ed Wynn, who has a case of the laughs, which causes him to soar high above the ground. Mary arrives with the Banks children, Jane and Michael, and soon everyone catches not spots but the giggles and ends up having tea up by the ceiling.
Again, this was a gloriously fun number to perform, and built around a clever idea, but my diaphragm ached from laughing all day. I wondered if it was even possible to hurt your diaphragm from too much laughing. I guessed so. There was also a lot of hanging around in the air on high wires as lights were adjusted, cameras changed, and retakes done while we were supposed to be floating high above the floor.
A couple times we broke for lunch and the crew started to leave, forgetting Julie, the kids, Ed, and I were all strapped into wires and hanging thirty feet above the ground. I yelled, “Guys, don’t forget about us!”
Poor Ed, who was in the high eighties and not well, was absolutely wonderful and worth the price of admission just to see him going through various acrobatics while suffering belly laughs that all of us caught. There were no such dangers when we performed “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” Bert’s moody ode to the lucky life of a chimney sweep, a remarkable number on many levels for what it conveys.
Then it goes into that mesmerizing dance across the roofs of London, which was and remains great fun to watch, but oh boy, it was strenuous to do. We shot numerous takes. I went home those days and just dropped. The song “Step in Time,” inspired by an old English bar song called “Knees up Mother Brown,” was similarly exhausting.
Julie and I both loved performing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” How could you feel otherwise? The Sherman brothers said that extraordinary word stemmed from their plays with double-talk. It also had the catchy bounce of an old English musical number. It made the kid in me smile the first time I heard it, and it has continued to make kids everywhere smile.
Oddly, I don’t have anything to do with my favorite song in the movie, “The Perfect Nanny,” which is the advertisement that the two Banks children, Jane (Karen Dotrice) and Michael (Matthew Garber), have composed and then sing to their mother and father, who are looking for a new nanny after the old one has taken flight. Something about their high-pitched English voices hit me every time, probably the same way that Walt got emotional every time he heard “Feed the Birds.”
The music—as good music always does—opened the door in our souls to something deep and lasting. For Walt, it was sentimentalism. For me, it was childhood innocence.
We had been rehearsing the dance numbers for several weeks when I asked Walt if I could take on a second role, that of the elderly banker Mr. Dawes. I loved portraying old men, and since first reading the script, I had been secretly eyeing that part, which included the song “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.” I saw a lot of potential for extracurricular amusement.
So one day early in production I asked Walt for a moment of his time and made my pitch. I even offered to do the extra work for free.
He studied me with an expression that conveyed uncertainty—not what I expected.
“You’ll have to test,” he said finally.
Even though I had hoped to hear a different response, I was no less enthusiastic about the opportunity to have some additional fun. Just getting made up for the test as a balding old man in his nineties made my day, and by the time the last wisps of white hair and beard were added to my face I was stooped over, talking like the very senior banker, and having a blast amusing both the crew and myself. For the test itself, I stood in front of the Bankses’ house and ad-libbed a few lines, excusing myself every few minutes to pee in the bushes.
“I’m a weak old man because of a hernia,” I explained in a wheezy voice, and while uttering those words, I teetered on the edge of the curb as if it were a perilous drop down the face of a cliff. The crew ate it up.
So did Walt.
Not only did he agree to let me play the old banker, but he also found my teetering so amusing he ordered a six-inch-high step built inside the bank’s door to let me reprise my gimmick. But Walt, on top of all his other attributes, was a shrewd horse trader, and he refused to simply indulge my desire to play this little part without getting a little something out of it.
He made it contingent on me donating four thousand dollars to the three-year-old art school he had founded, California Institute of the Arts. In other words, I ended up paying him a not insignificant amount of money to play a part I had offered to do for free. I still scratch my head at that one.
But it was worth every dollar. I would have, in fact, paid even more.
While we were in production, I knew the movie was special. All of us did. It was apparent from the start and more so through numerous test screenings. The movie finally opened at the end of August 1964 with a star-studded premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. At the end, there was a standing ovation that filled the enormous theater, and later the New York Times would call it a “most wonderful, cheering movie” and “irresistible.”
Certainly those at the premiere felt that way. At the after-party, silent-film star Francis X. Bushman took hold of my hand and said, “Sir, you are a national treasure.” Maurice Chevalier introduced himself and said he wanted me to play him in a movie. Julie was similarly overwhelmed with praise. All of us were. As far as I recall, only one person had a contrary opinion, and that was the book’s author, P. L. Travers. Apparently she approached Walt and said all of the animation should be removed. Walt was unfazed.
“Sorry,” he said. “But the ship has already sailed.”
Indeed, what a fine voyage, too.
14
FAMILY VALUES
Let’s just say I was warned. I was guest starring on the Danny Kaye special as a way of promoting the third season of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and on the first day of rehearsal the director warned me that Danny had quit smoking five weeks earlier in preparation of working with me. I responded with a look that was easily read as “Really?”
“Yeah, he figured he better have his wind,” the director said.
I smiled. Only later did it dawn on me that Danny might have felt challenged if not a little threatened by going toe to toe with me on his own show. The two of us had a big production number together, a musical sketch set in a courtroom where I played a disheveled old Clarence Darrow–type lawyer and Danny was a dapper hotshot attorney. But on day two of rehearsals, I returned to the studio and found out that our parts had been switched. No explanation was given until the later part of the afternoon when a producer took me aside and said that I’d gotten too many laughs as the old man.
Later, when I had my own specials, I approached them as opportunities to have fun with performers whom I admired. It was playtime for me, and hopefully the viewers at home would enjoy it as much as I did. But I understood what was going on with Danny. I didn’t say anything. Then again, I didn’t have to.
I responded in the only way I could, the only way that made sense. I became Nijinsky. I danced off the walls, leapt over tables and chairs, and afterward, when Danny shook my hand and said he’d enjoyed having me on the show, I offered an easygoing smile and said the feeling was mutual.
&
nbsp; With The Dick Van Dyke Show an audience favorite and according to some critics carving out a niche in TV history, I was too consumed with our inspired brand of fun to let those kinds of situations bother me. I was also too busy. That season, Carl expanded the team with veteran comedy writers Bill Persky and Sam Denoff. Carl gave them the lowdown on the show’s ethos and they contributed brilliantly on and off the page.
Sam was a character who spent the Friday run-through for the writers leaning back in his chair, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, listening to us; then every once in a while, he would stop us in our tracks with a foghorn-like bellow, “Boring!” Bill was also an original, a smart man with a steady hand who could get a laugh just by raising his big, thick eyebrows but who kept the atmosphere light and interesting with jokes, impressions, and a wry take on just about every topic imaginable.
The best writers were philosophers who wrapped their commentary about life in laughter. Carl’s other hires included Garry Marshall, the future creator of Happy Days, and Jerry Belson, both of whom went on to magnificent careers. Jerry Paris also began to direct. The show became its own little world, with its internal rhythm and high standards, and also a playground for talented performers on their way up, including Don Rickles, Jamie Farr, Greg Morris, Joan Shawlee, Herbie Faye, and Allan Melvin.
Being part of such a talented ensemble was my idea of heaven. We were so successful creating a feeling of family that many people thought Mary and I were really husband and wife, including some of those at the Emmy Awards the previous May, where, even though the attendees were from the industry, Mary and I were consoled as a married couple when we failed to win in our respective categories. Rosie also lost that year, while Carl, John Rich, and the show itself captured trophies.
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