In 1964 the Disney film Mary Poppins was released to worldwide.

The film told of a

magical world where chimney sweeps are happier than bankers, where you can jump into
living pictures on the pavement (or should that be sidewalk). It made an international star
of Julie Andrews overnight and it changed forever our concept of what a nanny is or
should be, and the souls who can forget the songs.
But one person hated the film's cheery tone, the author of the Mary Poppins books: P.L
Travers. In contrast with the practically perfect world of the movie her own life was
complex and troubled. As a single woman, P.L Travers adopted a baby (who knew that
was allowed in the 1930s); but it all went horribly wrong, and she nearly tore her own
family apart.
Fifty years later the Disney corporation has made another movie about her. Would P.L
Travers of like this one? Will it set the record straight? Can her bumpy quirky controversial
life story be told on film at all, or is it too strange for Hollywood even now?
Everyone's heard of Mary Poppins, but far fewer can name its author; many have no idea
of the real origins of the world's most famous nanny. Mary Poppins began life as a book in
1934; this atmospheric cottage in Sussex was the rented home of P.L Travers who had
just turned 35. When she was younger, she'd wanted to be an actress, this is her playing
Titania in “Midsummer Night's dream”; but she'd moved on to become a well-established
poet and art critic. Now she was starting her first novel: at the time she was cohabiting with
a friend Marge Bernard; biographers have speculated they were romantically involved and
that P.L Travers had unconventional romances with men and women throughout her life,
but she never wrote or talked about this. In her writing P.L Travers created a more
conventional family: the Bank's family, she chose her subject one of the great English
preoccupations: nursery life and she located a relatively untapped seem: the relationship
between a nanny and her charges. Mary Poppins eyes were fixed upon him, and Michael
suddenly discovered that you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her; there was
something strange and extraordinary about her, something that was frightening and at the
same time most exciting. I like the cottages of this room; I went to goldeneye once where
Ian Fleming used to write. It was very glamorous, you could imagine that's where you
create stories of spies, drinking martinis and seducing beautiful women. This feels just the
place for stories about children creeping out of bed at night and having adventures, you
can see sort of fields and sky, so there's a sense of what lies out there beyond our little
world: it's quite “Poppinsy”. I like it, I'm glad it was written here.
Despite the book being quintessentially English, P.L Travers was not English at all: she
was Australian, born and brought up in this small town in Queensland at the turn of the last
century and her real name wasn't Pamela Travers. She was christened Helen Lyndon
Gough; her father worked in the town bank just like the father in Mary Poppins, but there
were key differences: unlike Mr. Banks in her story P.L Travers father failed as a banker,
and he struggled with drink. He died young in his early 40s, almost certainly of alcoholism:
P.L Travers was just seven years old. Her mother found it increasingly hard to cope and
shortly afterwards attempted suicide. P.L Travers always claimed her turbulent upbringing
had little influence on the book: ‘I don't know that it's based on my personal life, I think Mr.
Banks is a little bit like my father and Mrs. Banks in her most flustered is perhaps a little bit
like my mother, but really I don't think it's based on my childhood.’
But at the heart of the book was the character of Mary Poppins herself: the clipped, strict
but ultimately mysterious nanny who'd blown in on an east wind. It's hard to find a modern-
day book or article about hiring a nanny that doesn't mention Mary Poppins; at Norland
college in Bath, they train nannies in the art, or is it a science? It's certainly a mystery of
looking after babies and children. The seam is always away from the child; you need to
make sure there's so much room for tucking in mostly with a hat on no pillows for the baby,
it needs to be completely flat. And what about my granny's old rule no cats in the nursery
or the child will be hairy? They wouldn’t advise any pets in the nursery because it can
make people grow fur like a cat my grandma knew. Because it's 2013 they need extra
skills: taekwondo, kidnap defense, and how to escape paparazzi in a high-speed car
chase. Maybe if P.L. Travers were writing today, Mr. and Mrs. Banks would have to have
been Russian oligarchs. “And what do you think of Mary Poppins from the film then? Is
that an inspiring figure?” “Definitely, I like her bag; it fits everything in! It's a good bag”. In
the books, the nanny rules the nursery and Mary Poppins just says this is how it's going to
be, and you know the mum is terrified. Is that not the modern way? The old-fashioned
nanny is quite a stern sort of matronly type, I think that's how she's pictured in books and
films whereas we're not like that at all. Now the author of the books P.L. Travers, let me tell
you, would turn in her grave to hear that she never believed that things should be geared
around the children and certainly not that there should be sold. it's all about making it fun,
obviously keeping everybody safe and making sure what needs to be done is done, but
doing it in the funniest and most creative way possible. Is it recommended to put the
children to bed and then get them up and take them up on the roof for a dance? The
character of Mary Poppins was inspired at least partly by a relative, after her mother
attempted suicide the young P.L. Travers latched onto a maiden great aunt. She was
reliable, she brought order and discipline, she was also formidable, she was bossy and
stern. P.L. Travers had strong views about the appearance of Mary Poppins: she was no
beauty but rather plain like a doll that had belonged to the author as a girl. The newcomer
had shiny black hair rather like a wooden Dutch doll and she was thin, with large feet and
hands and small rather peering blue eyes… and mixed in with all this was her magic.
When I was a child, I loved the magical potential in these stories; like the Alice books and
the Narnia series there was a sense in Mary Poppins that always a parallel magic universe
was going on; that you could slip in and out of and there were no rules and no bedtime, but
like those other famous stories Travers books also had darkness in them, there was fear
and sadness and loss. There's magic, but there's no forever! I think children know there's
no forever, they know about old age, they know about loss. The greatest works of
children's literature always have dark shadows within them. P.L. Travers creativity all came
together in that book of 1934; a book that very nearly failed to see the light of day. It never
occurred to me that anybody would want to publish it I was writing it really for myself and
then a friend saw it half written and said:
“Well, I'll take this to a publisher, and I thought well a publisher won't want this, but
apparently he did”. The publishing house was in London, so P.L. Travers would motor to
Soho in her beaten-up old sports car. She was keen to take control of everything: the
artwork, the design of the cover, even the typeface! That autumn the book came out; the
initial print run sold out quickly, it was on the road to being a children's classic. Jenny
Koralek, an author herself, knew P.L. Travers well. She could be fun and funny and
bubbly, and a bit wacky! And in the books. “Was she an easy person to be friends with? I
get the sense she might have had a slightly mercurial temperament.” “Oh no she wasn't
easy! She was not at all easy, she kept parts of her life very private and none of us
realized she was Australian until she finally confessed that she was”. Her dark secret she
was a complicated profoundly unusual. Wound in the book Mary Poppins simply blown in
by the wind. P.L. Travers always maintained that the character had come into her mind in
a similar way. Mary Poppins was not her sitting down to concoct; she was very dramatic
and theatrical and whimsical and when you were with her and she said something like “she
just came to me” and that's how she talked this creature, sort of came up out of God as
she puts it God knows where young would nowhere. Mary Poppins was a nanny who slid
up banisters; even the author never knew what she might do next. “For me it was a shock
too when she wrote up the banisters, I didn't know she was going to do it. When I read
back over the books, I'm surprised and I think to myself “well, how did she think of that?”
P.L. Travers imagination was broader than we might presume in a children's author.
Rather surprisingly P.L. Travers also turned her hand to erotic writing, here she is in the
literary magazine the triad inviting readers to imagine her taking off her underwear. And
then, the silky hush of intimate things fragrant with my fragrance steel softly down so loath
to rob me of my last dear concealment saucy. In the end she went on to write six Mary
Poppins books although they were marketed towards children, she always saw them as
books for grown-ups too. Millions came to love her story of the magical nanny; it struck a
chord with readers all over the world. This overseas success was to change everything for
P.L. Travers. Over in Los Angeles, a young girl called Diane had become a big fan of Mary
Poppins. Diane was living an ordinary all-American life, but for one important difference
her father was Walt Disney.
Disney had created a powerful new studio in Hollywood and was always on the hunt for
source material. Thanks to his daughter's obvious enjoyment, he homed in on Mary
Poppins.
Film historian Brian Sibley has investigated the life of Walt Disney and in particular his
relationship with P.L. Travers. In the 1940s, Disney was at the peak of his current success:
he'd made Snow White and the seven dwarfs, the first feature-length cartoon film with
synchronized sound and colour and that film changed everything. More than 250 000
paintings like these were created by Walt Disney and his staff of artists to make the most
daring adventure in the history of motion pictures. Dwarfs’ names fit their personalities; this
pompous looking individual is Doc: the self-appointed leader of the group. It made it clear
to people that a film could carry much more than just the comic antics of a mouse and a
duck. It could carry a character and portray those things on the screen and that he could
play to an audience not of children but of a whole family audience. “An old sourpuss here
is grumpy the woman hater and ,last but not least, is Dopey, he's nice but sort of silly.” “He
had an extraordinary nose for a good story, I mean he really did he sustained a story in the
moment he read it and I think he instantly saw; this would make a perfect motion picture”.
“And what do you think appealed him? Was it just the principle of a magical nanny? what
did he want from the stories?” “The true strength of the pop in store is it's the character
herself, because she comes from nowhere, she's somebody whose magic is contained
within her, it's something special and separate and unfathomable in a way, and I think he
saw all those as very positive qualities that he could make a story from”. “What sort of
image of family life do you think Walt Disney wanted to put out there? What did he think
about families and what did he want to say about them?” “Well, the interesting thing about
Disney and families is that his own family as a child was one that was quite a stressful and
disturbing one in many ways. He had a father who was really quite brutal and very severe
and doctrinaire; he had a loving mother, but it was a difficult childhood and I think he
idealized the idea of the perfect family. When he told his daughter he was going to get the
rights to Mary Poppins? Do you think he anticipated any trouble with that?” “No, I don't
think he did, because up till then most of the stories that he had been working on, they
were stories that where the authors were not alive. He was already toying with “Alice in
Wonderland” and “Peter Pan”. His next film was Pinocchio, which all these authors were
dead and buried as far as he was concerned, I don't think he saw that it was going to be a
problem.” But convincing this particular live and kicking author, would come to be Disney's
biggest challenge: it was around this time that P.L. Travers attempted to create her own
family, a real family. By now after 10 years of living together she and Marge had gone their
separate ways and as she neared her 40th birthday, Pamela Travers decided to adopt a
child. Her friends tried to stop her, they thought she was crazy, they said she'd be an
unsuitable parent. I think this is rather amazing! A 40-something single woman, possibly a
gay 40-something single woman, setting out to adopt a child determined to create a
differently shaped family in the teeth of social disapproval. I think I thought that sort of
thing started in about 2005 and yet here it is happening in 1939. We could make a
documentary about her even if she hadn't written Mary Poppins, her first attempt to create
a family was completely bizarre; she tried to adopt the 16-year-old girl who cleaned her
cottage, despite her ingenious argument that the maid's parents had too many children as
it was, what's one kid give or take? The girl and her family refused. In a moment of peak,
Travers sacked the maid. Undeterred the adoption fantasy remained lodged in her mind, a
little while later she heard of a new opportunity in Dublin. P.L. Travers moved in Irish
literary circles where she met the writer and critic Joseph Mendelssohn, biographer of WB
yates. Home's son and daughter-in-law were struggling to look after their large family.
Twin boys Camillus and Anthony had just
been born. The family couldn't cope financially or emotionally and decided to have them
adopted. Quite naturally they were keen the twins remained together, but P.L. Travers
would only agree to take one of the babies. P.L. Travers believed in astrology and asked
her favorite astrologer to cast a horoscope for both the children. We've had a couple casts
to see how they would have looked. The astrologer’s conclusion was that the preferred
baby would be Camillus, saying all in all, it would be rare to find better cross race between
a child and its own mother. So, I would say, by all means adopt him. So P.L. Travers
chose Camillus and left his brother behind. But motherhood was far more demanding than
she'd assumed: Camillus cried most of the time and P.L. Travers even considered putting
him in a baby's home, but she persevered and when he was old enough, she sent him to a
boarding school. P.L. Travers made the fateful decision not to tell him that he was adopted
and had a twin brother. After her own difficult upbringing with an alcoholic father and
suicidal mother, it seems she was sowing the seeds for a crisis in her new family later on.
A single mother, an adopted child, separated twins, this was all about as far removed as it
could be from the traditional nuclear family of P.L. travers books. But those books don't
necessarily show us a happy family. They're full of coldness and distance, the lonely
bank's children look to their nanny for love, but although she gives them magic and she
gives them order. She never gives them tenderness. To please the apple pie Disney
contingent in America, it might need jollying up for the screen. Walt Disney was bubbling
with ideas for making Mary Poppins Julia, but his plans were way too premature. He hadn't
yet secured the film rights and P.L. Travers was not exactly his greatest fan. Earlier she'd
written a scathing film review of Snow White.
“Oh, he's clever”. The very pith of his secret is the enlargement of the animal world and a
corresponding deflation of all human values. There is a profound cynicism at the root of his
as of all sentimentality. Walt Disney's relationship with P.L. Travers was less of a walk over
more of a relentless trudge. In 1959 he'd already spent over 15 years trying to persuade
her to sell him the film rights to Mary Poppins, but she kept saying no. By now she'd
moved into London and was living in lovely smith street in Chelsea, not unlike the cherry
tree lane of the book. P.L. Travers suspected that the sentimental Disney would lighten up
the darkness of her Poppins world. For example, there's the story of bad Wednesday:
Jane Banks has been a bit naughty, so Mary Poppins goes out and leaves her alone in the
house, and she's drawn by magic into an old royal Dalton bowl. In the bowl there's a big
dark house with a strange old man cackling and saying to Jane:” you're very pretty, why
don't you live here with me?” And Jane says:” I don't want to live here, I'm scared, I want to
go home”. And the old man says: “Oh you've gone into the past, there's no home. Your
family is not even born, you're going to be here with me forever!” And Jane screams and
screams and screams and Mary Poppins comes to get her, that's her punishment for
having a tantrum. How dark is that? It chilled my blood when I was a child, and the truth is
it still does now. “Bad Wednesday” would surely never make it into a Disney film. Walt
Disney was not the only showman who tried to adapt Travers books into a different art
form. The world's most successful producer of stage musicals, Cameron Mcintosh, was
keen to put on Mary Poppins. “The actual feel of the cherry tree lane in the stage show,
was taken from the street that we're in”. Just as Walt Disney had tried many years before.
“It was about 1993, I finally went over to cherry tree lane where Pamela lived (or Mrs.
Travers), she was quite frail at that point, but sharp, absolutely sharp and I soon found
myself sort of like going back to school as she sort of rigidly, sort of asked me questions
and what you which means she's very suspicious that actually all I wanted was the title,
and I made it very clear to her: that my interests were actually because of her books. She
created a language for her characters, which is unlike any other author. She would never
tell me when I kept saying about the characters, I was trying to find the back story to Mrs.
banks, and if she didn't want to talk about something she said it just came to me and that's
it! There's nothing, no other explanation she wouldn't give me any backstory.” “How do you
see the character of Mary
Poppins? Who do you think that person is?” “I think Mary Poppins was a mixture of herself,
Pamela, and her aunt that she brought up. Who was the one who had the great parrot
umbrella? She went sort from pillar to post because her father did drink a lot and
did die young and her mother she didn't really have much time for. I mean, she was a very
strange person because she wrote about an idealized kind of family life in a way,
that they never either had or knew about.” “Did you feel any kinship with Walt Disney in his
struggle with you?” “Yes, I did in a way, and he pursued it for all those years and
and I think somebody like that needed to do it, she would never have volunteered it, and in
fact when it nearly all crashed, it was her lawyer who said:” Pamela, you must do this and I
don't care, I'm going to force you to sign this contract”. In 1959, with the help of P.L.
Travers
astute lawyer, transatlantic negotiations were reopened in earnest. Disney hoped his
perseverance might finally pay off. Disney made P.L. Travers his best offer yet! A hundred
thousand dollars in cash, five percent of the profits! And script approval, he rue the day he
offered that after a 15-year standoff. Travers agreed. While Walt Disney was busy
planning his cheerful version of the Bank's family, P.L. Travers owned small family of two
was in full-blown crisis. It all kicked off in 1956: her adopted son Camillus, by then a
handsome young man of 17, went for a drink in the king's road. Waiting in this pot was a
man who's trapped Camillus down and has arranged to accidentally bump into him.
His name was Anthony Hohm. The two have a lot in common: they're the same age. They
look strangely similar; Anthony knows he was adopted ;he knows he had siblings and
possibly a twin. They keep talking, keep drinking and it all dawns on Camillus at once.
He's adopted; Pamela Travers is not his biological mother, and this is his twin. It was a
terrible shock for Camillus, and he had furious rows with his mother. Seventeen was a
disastrous age to find out his life had been based on a lie. Kitty Travers is the daughter of
Camillus and granddaughter of P.L. Travers. ”Do you think that's something he came to
terms with?” “I well, it made him go completely bananas to have been lied to like that by
somebody you trust, he was absolutely devastated when he found out that he was actually
part of this huge Irish family of literary and artistic giants and to have been booted out of a
family, that would be full.” “I felt betrayed. Cheated!” Camillus died in 2011. Nine years
before his death he took part in an Australian documentary. “The thing about my mother
was, she was very hard to know because she kept a great deal concealed, even from her
son, her only son. I couldn't believe somebody that I had loved and trusted for so long
could have been lying to me at the same time for so long.” “Once he found out he'd been
adopted, that was the excuse for the kind of floodgates to open and to go at it, no holds
barred, and he never got over that and he always used it as an excuse for the rest of his
life for all his bad behavior”. “And how was her relationship with Camillus? Do you think
she could see that he was still struggling with that finding out? Do you think she felt
guilty?” “I certainly don't think she would have ever accepted any guilt. I really don't think
so, I certainly never heard her express any guilt ever.” “So, what did she think that he
should count himself lucky to have been adopted?” “That it was written in the stars that he
was meant for her”. Camillus hit the bottle hard, in early 1960 he was caught drunk driving
and lost his license.
But that didn't stop him; a few months later he was driving down a
Middlesex road drunk again: the police pulled him over and he was arrested. Camilla Scott
six months in a jolly prison. Mary Poppins jolly holiday was in sharp contrast to the life of
the author's son. His 21st birthday was spent in Stafford maximum security prison.
Yet another brutal shock for Camillus and his mother. The timing was horribly ironic, this
was all happening while P.L. Travers was finalizing the deal with Disney on the film about
how best to bring up children. Walt Disney was besotted with his new movie project; he
filled rooms with drawings of Mary Poppins. He was particularly excited by his plans to mix
live action with animation; but before filming could begin, he was contractually obliged to
give P.L. Travers editorial input. In March 1961, she arrived in sunny California, a world
away from dreary London. This was Disney's world where he controlled everything around
him,
but she was undaunted and ready to fight her corner. “These two characters had a lot
more in common than you might suppose, because they both had difficult backgrounds
had come from hard childhoods. They were both used to getting their own way by the time
that they finally met and clashed. They were both people who were not used to people
telling them what they could and couldn't do and you've also got inevitably with that; the
fact that they are going to have head-on collision”. It's the ensuing tussle of wills as
Travers fought for the Mary Poppins of her book against Walt Disney's version: that forms
the plot of the new Disney film saving Mr. banks.
Emma Thompson, something of an expert in the business of creating nannies, plays P.L.
Travers. “I think that she didn't understand film, I think she was very snobby about it: I
mean there was a time when film was considered a lesser art form that's long gone now,
but she felt that Walt Disney was shallow a money-making mogul. I think that Travers
really was frightened that it would all
be taken away, it would be destroyed. What she didn't know about Mary Poppins was that
she would survive. She would survive the clash of cults; she would survive being put into a
different culture and interpret it in a wholly new way”. “But how would you summarize the
main changes from book to film of the Mary Poppins character?” –“Well, she wasn't pretty,
she was based on this little Dutch doll with a square stubbed nose and it's just not Julie
Andrews. It's a plain person and Julie was so beautiful in it”. “I remember as a child, I
remember seeing the Disney film and really noticing it wasn't as dark as the books;
thinking it was wonderful in its own way but being sort of disappointed!” -“Even as a small
person I thought well that's not the book, but that's okay
because there were great songs”. “The German brothers created a score that's quite
extraordinary. There are some songs that seem to resonate with something in a collective
psyche, like “Let's go fly a kite”: is one of those songs that can't help but lift you up. It's not
an annoying song ever; we had to do it so many times! I thought I was going to want to kill
ourselves at the end of the day, but no! We were still going out there”. The composers, the
Sherman brothers, the scriptwriter, and the author began discussions that lasted 10 days.
The Disney team had been adapting the episodic chapters of the books into a neat
Hollywood narrative. P.L. Travers insisted that her conversations at Disney be taped, so
we can hear exactly what went on: as the Sherman brothers valiantly tried to sell the
Disney vision, when insight into P.L. Travers character. “Now we come to my notes here,
my typewritten move, it is integral to the book and to the story in whatever form is
presented that Mary Poppins should never be impolite to anybody. We get the comedy out
of this gray,
quiet, polite person through which all the strange magic happens. He asks her a few things
,you see, because you say later on, he thought at the beginning there was something.”
“Obviously she sounds like a bit of a nightmare in a way, but I'm quite sympathetic; she
cared what she'd written, you know, she cared what they were doing with it. I think it was
brave of her to speak up for herself.”
“But we have to be very precise about words and particularly in them in the script. We
must make the words mean exactly what they say and no more and no less!”
At times you can hear the discussion become quite strained: “Just a little something in the
script, I'll help you with it later.”
P.L. Travers certainly seems to know her own mind: “My idea isn't probably; you'll agree
with me.”
The Sherman brothers frequently tried to sweet talk her: “We'll leave it that way please,
because, truly, I think the other full, this is an excellent improvement”
The core of the disagreement was about sentimentality; sprinkling sugar on everything,
solving everything with magic, making everything too sweet. But within the film, one scene
stands out as haunting and melancholy. It's a poignant glimpse that's close to the spirit of
the books, of a marginalized life that can't be improved or resolved by magic. It's the “feed
the bird song” at Saint Paul's cathedral. The Sherman brothers discussed the song in an
audio interview: “It seems to have encapsulated what we were trying to do in Mary
Poppins, that is to say, to give that extra love and toughness signifies little, hardly
anything, and feeding the bird means giving to the people that need. And in this particular
case it was the bank's children; they needed their father and mother's attention, their love.
Walt loved this sentiment and he felt it so deeply, and he'd look over the dick and he'd say:
“Play it”. And I knew what he wanted and, sometimes he wouldn't even say anything,
you just look out the window and get a little misty eyed and we'd play it.
It's interesting that Walt Disney was obsessed with this song, it seemed so full of sadness
and loneliness; when the children have gone, the old bird lady will still be there on her own
in the cold, pleading for tuppences. It has the dark shadows that the film otherwise lacked,
maybe that's why P.L. Travers liked the song, but that was the exception. By now Walt
Disney was largely ignoring her, although billed as a consultant, she was no longer being
consulted. Disney was far more interested in using his special effects to make Mary
Poppins fly. Along with revolutionary animatronic techniques: “this is a little problem that
we had in Mary Poppins, and this little bird sang a duet with Julie Andrews, maybe we can
get a little response from it.”
After 20 years of struggle in the making, the film was finally completed in 1964. It was now
officially walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, and the original author hadn't even seen it yet. On
august the 27th, a grand premiere was held in Hollywood.
“Here is Julie Andrews: Mary Poppins.”
It was a glittering evening, throngs of screaming people were greeted by Mickey Mouse
goofy, Snow White and her small entourage. There were dancing penguins and pearly
kings. All I can tell you is the genius of Julie Andrews and the genius of Walt Disney have
made probably one of the all-time great motion pictures that we've ever made in this crazy
town of Hollywood. But so much tension remained between Disney and the genius author
that he hadn't even invited her, though she wrangled a ticket anyway. P.L. Travers got
rather lost in the crowd, but despite the presence of Walt Disney, Julie Andrews and Dick
Van Dyke, the host of the evening, still managed a brief interview with her.
“This is P.L. Travers! I would like you to tell the people out there, how all of this came
about?” -“Now you're asking for my secrets, and you know, one of the first things about
Mary Poppins is that she never explains. I'm looking forward to seeing what he has done
tonight very much”.
-“Well, I won't hold you any longer, thank you so much for coming to our microphone. The
author of Mary Poppins!”
P.L. Travers did not enjoy the film. She still resented many of the songs and there are 16
of them, she especially loathed the animation sequences. There's a fascinating letter that
P.L. Travers sent to her lawyer after the premiere. She says: “as chalk is to cheese so is
the filth to the book, tears ran down my cheeks because it was all so distorted. I was so
shocked, I felt that I would never write let alone smiles. Her failure to understand the movie
business helps explain why she thought she could still change the completed film. She
went to the party after the show and she went up to Walt Disney, said: “Well, you know, it's
all right I suppose, the cartoons will have to go. And Walt said: “Pam, the ship has sailed”
and that was it; because he was a ruthless old sort as well.
I remember in the film, when I was a child and being disappointed, I loved the book so
much and the in the film something was missing. It was too trivial, too easy and happy.
There was certainly no “Bad Wednesday”. On the other hand, it had cartoon penguins! It
had Dick Van Dyke dancing it! It had chimney sweeps on the rooftops of London, it was
brilliant! So, I was conflicted. Was P.L. Travers also conflicted? Privately she said it was all
bad, that she was in tears because she hated the film so much,
but was she at all moved watching this film about a happy united family flying a kite? Did
she think at all about her own complicated attempts to be a mother and her troubled son?
Were some of the tears because of that? She never said, but then she wouldn't have
done. No sentimentality, remember. Despite P.L. Travers misgivings the film was a critical
and audience hit worldwide, it won five Oscars including one for Julie Andrews in her first
film role, as well as a golden globe. Mary Poppins eventually earned the Disney
corporation, well over a hundred million dollars and P.L. Travers was on a juicy five
percent cut. She wrote to a friend that life would never be the same again. She'll be
wealthy forever, a charity is set up: the cherry tree trust for disadvantaged children and
with her own share of the fortune, P.L. Travers sets up investments. In the film there's an
underlying theme that money is not all important and charity begins at home. A message
warmly received by the family audience.
“The great thing about the Disney film is that it made Mary Poppins universally
known throughout the world, the sad thing about it is that it made Mary Poppins into “Walt
Disney's Mary Poppins” rather than “P.L. Travers Mary Poppins”, and I think she was
constantly seeking an opportunity to say “how can I remind people that she's mine. I'm
here! It's over here! Hear to me! I really did it!”
And so, she went on to write two more successful sequels to Mary Poppins, helped by
publicity from the hit movie. She wrote other children's books too, but they largely sank
without trace. In 1977, P.L. Travers featured on desert island discs, it was one of her rare
interviews and tellingly, she chose no music, only poetry. The film was mentioned just
once. “Mary Poppins became, in 1964 I think it was in the hands of Walt Disney, a very
successful film; did you approve of the cast?”
- “Oh yes, I approved awfully of the chief character, Julie Andrews.”
“Well, it's still being shown all over the world”
- “Yes, so they tell me. I've seen it once or twice and I've learned to live with it. It's
glamorous and it's a good film on its own level, but I don't think it's very like my
books”.
Despite her reluctance to discuss the film, P.L. Travers life would always be
overshadowed by “Disney’s Mary Poppins”, as would the lives of those around her.
Although rocky at times, her relationship with her adopted son Camillus gradually
improved. I'm not sure if the knowledge of a healthy inheritance motivated this
reconciliation, but I don't think it would have hindered it. Camillus brought up three children
with his wife Francis: it wasn't an easy life. He struggled with alcoholism and his attempts
at rehab were largely unsuccessful, but he did have ongoing relationship with P.L. Travers.
“ We grew up having to come and visit her every weekend from the suburbs where we
lived: she wasn't the kind of grandmother who bakes you cakes, and you sit on her knee.
And it made a big impression on us to have somebody who leads this mysterious life, and
you don't know why she hasn't got a husband, and you don't know why she's sitting there
wearing all this extraordinary silver jewelry and these long flowing robes and stuff.”
“That's quite weird, don't you think that she wrote books about a nanny bringing up
children in a practically perfect way, all full of ideas about what children needed, and then
in real life it was sort of hazy and distant?”
-“ She wasn't interested in helping us in any kind of practical way: when I was a baby, my
mum was pushing me in her pushchair she stopped on route and asked if she could come
and change my nappy and warm up my bottle, so she stood in the doorway and said :“I'm
having my lunch, it's not convenient”. And that was it. So, that's quite extraordinary! She
wrote us these poems on our birthdays, and we've still got them and claimed that we were
her best in all the world and that she loved us very much, which is very sweet, but it wasn't
much help to my mum at the time.”
The contradictions are very interesting; it's obvious with Walt Disney, she was very
controlling, we know from the tapes she tried to run everything, and I quite admire that. I
think that's a sign of an artist really caring about their work, it really mattered to her, and
unusual for a woman at that time. So, I admire that controlling instinct and yet, Kitty
Travers told us that she didn't feel guilty about any of the stuff with Camillus, because she
thought it was just meant to be, it was decided by the stars, it was down to fate not her,
and I think that's fascinating; that at
one level she wanted to run everything. At another level she wanted to believe that
everything was decided by cycles of nature, beyond her control. P.L. Travers lived a long
life and the world that she'd written about was disappearing if it had ever existed. But her
character “Mary Poppins” is immortal.
“She comes out of a world that is timeless I think, and perhaps that's all one can say about
it.”
Her son Camillus had come to accept his mother's nature: “I could see that in a funny sort
of way, my mother was trying to be like Mary Poppins with me, so she was trying to be
kind nurturing and strict, but at the same time I wouldn't end up hating her, which indeed
turned out to be the case. I ended up loving.”
Camillus visited her the day before she died. She was too ill to speak. He sang her a
lullaby, the one she used to sing to him as a boy.
Her ashes were scattered here, at Saint Mary’s Church in Twickenham, but there's no
memorial plaque. It's as though even in death. P.L. Travers is resistant to being identified.
After she died the Disney corporation put adverts in the trade press, showing Mickey
Mouse in tears. What would P.L. Travers have made of that? And what would she make of
the new Disney film “Saving Mr. Banks” ? This time about Pamela Travers herself.
Well, they've done it again, they've done it to her again, they've tidied it all up, they've
smoothed off the rough edges, they've given it a happy ending they've given it structure
and redemption. They've completely cleaned up the messy story of Camillus, he simply
doesn't appear. But here's the thing: it really gets you! That's what's ridiculous, is that it's
incredibly moving the way that they sort everything out and they give everything
redemption. It is very powerful, and it knows it's doing it, that's what's infuriating! It knows
it's doing it. There's a moment just near the end where Walt Disney says: “That's what
storytellers do; they restore order with imagination.”
Life is messy, difficult, dark and complex. Feuds can be made up, but never completely
solved. Books can try to reflect this sadness and lack of resolution, as P.L. Travers books
did, even for children. But Hollywood films take a different approach: in a way it's like
Hollywood itself is a Mary Poppins. It's tidying up the nursery, it's finding a way through the
chaos. We want to believe as much now, as we did in 1964, that redemption's possible,
and that is both the lie and the miracle of Hollywood films, that it can all be neat and tidy at
the end. At some deep human level, it's that order, we crave. One last thing: P.L. Travers
specifically told Walt Disney before filming started that the line “let's go fly a kite” was
grammatically incorrect. It should be “let's go and fly a kite”. Walt decided to keep it the
way it was, but I'm with her! I think the wind's finally blowing west!