Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers
by Valerie Lawson
Summary
The story of Mary Poppins, the quintessentially English and utterly magical children’s nanny, is remarkable…
But the story of Mary Poppins’s creator, as this first biography reveals, is just as unexpected and remarkable. The fabulous English nanny was conceived by an Australian, Pamela Lyndon Travers, who in 1924 came to London from Sydney as a journalist.
Travers was as tart and opinionated as Julie Andrews’s big-screen Mary Poppins was cheery and porcelain beautiful. The clipped, strict and ultimately mysterious nanny was the conception of someone who remained thoroughly inscrutable and enigmatic to the end of her ninety-six years.
“Who is P. L. Travers?” the American press inquired. Valerie Lawson’s illuminating biography provides the first and only glimpse into the mind of a writer who fervently believed that “Everyday life is the miracle.”
Excerpt
Chapter 13
The Americanization of Mary
She called it “uneasy wedlock.” Walt Disney and Pamela Travers danced around each other—he the great convincer, she the reluctant bride—then, after the slow courtship, came the quick consummation and a lingering cool down. The result of their five years locked in this awkward embrace was Disney’s greatest film of the 1960s, a movie about American values and family reconciliation. Made in America in 1963, Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins was released the following year, when Lyndon Baines Johnson promised to heal a fractured nation with his concept of the “Great Society.”
Created by Disney, a fervent anticommunist and family man who stood four square for the American way, the movie Mary Poppins was only loosely based on Pamela’s original books of Mary Poppins adventures. Disney seized upon the fantasy world of the books but eliminated their mystery. He made a film of no ambivalence, no depth, and very little sadness. But then his aim was not to mystify and challenge, but to show how peace was restored to a family in strife. His happy family and jolly songs helped cheer middle America.
Few in the movie audiences knew the name P. L. Travers, which appeared in small type in the opening credits. And certainly no one knew or cared how Mary Poppins arose. Later, many interviewers quizzed this unknown P. L. Travers to try to discover what inspired the nanny. Only a few suspected that she was born from a need in Pamela, whose own childhood had been out of joint and whose own little family of two was now in disarray. While the film was in production, with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke prancing with penguins to “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary” at Disney’s Burbank studios, Pamela herself sat on a tatami mat in Kyoto and tried to meditate away her anxiety.
The film’s great success, critical and financial, helped soothe the pain for the rest of her life. Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins cost $5 million to make, grossed more than $75 million, launched Julie Andrews on a movie career, earned her an Academy Award, and produced a handful of hit songs which remain lodged in the subconscious of three generations. Thirty-five years after the movie was first released at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, grandmothers and mothers sit with their children in front of the Mary Poppins video or DVD knowing, as if learned by rote in a dusty schoolroom, “Chim Chim Cheree,” “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” To those generations, Julie Andrews is Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins is Julie Andrews, an amalgam and culmination of all her successful roles from Eliza Dolittle to the singing nun, Maria, in The Sound of Music. Julie’s Mary Poppins was not the sharp, plain nanny created by Pamela and Mary Shepard but a sparkling, reed slim, sugar-sweet soubrette, with rounded vowels and a voice Time magazine described as “polished crystal.”
Disney had lusted after the Poppins stories for almost twenty years, ever since the evening just before Christmas 1944 when he walked by the room of his daughter, Diane. He heard his eleven-year-old laughing out loud. What was so funny? She held up a book—Mary Poppins.
Copyright © 2006 by Valerie Lawson. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster Inc.
Reviews
“[A] bittersweet biography of the supernanny’s elusive creator”—Publishers Weekly
“[A]mbitious...meticulously researched”—Booklist
Author's Biography
Valerie Lawson is a feature writer for The Sydney Morning Herald. Her previous books are Connie Sweetheart and The Allens Affair. She lives in Sydney and London.