Table Of ContentMARY POPPINS
AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY
Dick Van Dyke as Bert and Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins in the film’s celebrated
“Jolly Holiday” sequence.
CONTENTS
PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY
A SCENE FROM THE NEW MOVIE musical Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel to
Disney’s classic 1964 film: From left to right, Jane (Emily Mortimer), John (Nathanael
Saleh), Annabel (Pixie Davies), Ellen (Julie Walters), Georgie (Joel Dawson), Jack
(Lin-Manuel Miranda), and Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt).
DISNEY’S GAMBLE
P.L. TRAVERS’S BATTLE
MARY POPPINS’S FILM DEBUT
THE NANNY’S COMEBACK
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
The wind has changed a thousand times since Mary Poppins first
materialized, and yet for anyone who has seen or read her story, she won’t
leave
BY KOSTYA KENNEDY
KEVIN M. WILSON
THE ENCHANTMENT OF MARY POPPINS BEGINS with the broad idea of such
a radiant, unbounded figure alighting into one’s life, and then swells with the
particulars: her bottomless carpetbag, the unmade beds that tidy themselves at her
snap, the slide up the banister, the red-breasted robin duet. She lives alongside
characters such as Willy Wonka and Cinderella’s wand-waving godmother as a triumph
of a child’s narrow if infinite imagination. Poppins, we realize from the get-go, can turn
the impossible into the actual in the most delightful ways.
Yet the imperishable allure of Mary Poppins—P.L. Travers’s 1934 book has been
translated into 20 languages; the 1964 film is entrenched among the greatest musical
films of all time—goes beyond the magic umbrella and the prancing penguins. “I
always thought Mary Poppins seemed a little sinister,” Stephen Colbert said not long
ago on The Late Show. He had as his guest Emily Blunt, who was set to star in 2018’s
Mary Poppins Returns. “She comes unannounced,” Colbert continued, “she takes over
the house, she supplants the father figure. And then—boom—she’s outta there.”
It’s funny because it’s true. (“Well, I think she’s creepy,” said Blunt by way of
agreement.) The most enduring fairy stories (and a fairy story is most definitely what
Mary Poppins is) all carry something a bit dangerous and foreboding about them, the
inevitable by-product, perhaps, of the supernatural. There’s nothing in Poppins as
horrifying as what goes down in many of the Grimm tales—the Banks children are
neither locked into an oven by a witch nor eaten alive by a wolf—yet there’s an
underlying suggestion that things might go awry. She creates a certain wariness, much
in the way of the tentpole legends we so eagerly pass down to our children. Wait . . .
Mommy? What do you mean some strange lady is going to come into my room while I am
sleeping and start rummaging around under my pillow for my lost tooth? A bit of unease,
we’re taught early, can be worth the payoff.
There is a death in Mary Poppins, of the old bank president done in by the effort of his
own runaway laughter. (You actually can die laughing, incidentally. Anthony Trollope
did.) Although the story’s edge comes almost entirely from the unsolved mystery of
Poppins herself (“I never explain anything,” she declares), along with the streak of
sternness she mixes into the frivolity (“Close your mouth Michael, we are not a
codfish!”). If, as Blunt says, she’s creepy, it’s because we can’t put our finger on her.
Poppins arrives, conquers, and departs by magic, and along the way imprints upon us
a wholly earthly lesson. We may not be able to jump through a sidewalk and cavort
with talking barn animals, but we certainly can take a spoonful of sugar with our cough
medicine. We can say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious for the pleasure of it, and we
can go fly a kite. Or whatever. The point is that even if life can be hard and discouraging
—all too sinister at times—everybody’s got, and this is straight from Poppins herself,
from chapter 2, a Fairyland of their own.
CHAPTER ONE
DISNEY’S GAMBLE
Having finally secured the rights to Mary Poppins (sort of), the producer
hired two brothers to start writing the songs . . . without knowing if the
movie could ever be made
GRANGER
WALT DISNEY IS SHOWN IN 1944, the year he released The Three Caballeros.
“The film was a low-budget offering from an era of wartime austerity,” Stephen
Cavalier, author of The World History of Animation, tells LIFE. “Yet it was interesting
and fresh visually, due to some experimental special effects supervised by Ub Iwerks.”
Nearly two decades later, these effects would come to full fruition in Mary Poppins.
In 1944, Walt Disney was suffering from what he called “the D.D.s— disillusionment
and discouragement.” The man who had revolutionized cinema with 1937’s Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, had been demoralized by
a studio strike in 1941 and was now cheerlessly churning out war propaganda. His
enthusiasm for film had dimmed considerably, but some of the old magic returned that
December when he found his 11-year-old daughter, Diane, laughing over Mary
Poppins, the 1934 book by P.L. Travers. In fact, Diane loved the books about the
magical British nanny so much (there were three at the time) that she made her father
promise to turn them into a movie. He agreed, though he had no way of knowing what
he was up against.
For starters, Travers—Pamela Lyndon Travers, that is—flatly rejected Disney’s first
offer. Mary Poppins was not for sale, she said. Indeed, she had already rebuffed many
other suitors—the producer Samuel Goldwyn, the director Vincente Minnelli, and
fledgling composer Stephen Sondheim among them. But Disney never gave up. Over
the next 20 years, he repeatedly approached the writer with transatlantic phone calls
and flattering letters. Dismissing these as “forays into the jungle,” Travers kept saying
no—until 1959, when Disney offered her $100,000 and 5 percent of the film’s gross.
This was a veritable fortune for a woman whose book sales had been steadily declining
and who was chiefly surviving on the money that she made by renting out rooms in her
London home. Not surprisingly, Travers accepted, though she later claimed that
Disney had hoodwinked her. “It was as if he were dangling a watch, hypnotically,
before the eyes of a child,” she said.
Even in signing on with Disney, Travers was hardly a pushover. In addition to the
money, she received script approval, which was almost unheard of in a Disney
production—and something she would shortly use against him. But for now, the
filmmaker was free to develop his long-delayed pet project. The heart of the story that
had captivated millions of readers was in hand. What Disney needed next was the
music—the songs that could help shape the narrative as it moved off the page and onto
the big screen.
Disney began the making of Mary Poppins by summoning to his office his go-to
songwriting team: Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, thirty-something brothers who
had been writing songs for the studio. “Do you boys know what a nanny is?” Disney
asked.
“Yeah,” Richard said. “It’s a goat.”
The Shermans could hardly have been expected to be familiar with British domestic
traditions. Born in New York City in 1925 and 1928 respectively, Robert and Richard
were the sons of Al (a Tin Pan Alley songwriter) and Rose (a silent-film actress). As the
silent-film era came to an end in the late 1920s, New York–based songwriters were
suddenly in demand in Hollywood—Al among them. Having been offered a job by a
film executive, he drove his family west in an old Chevy. “It was a long, tedious trip out
to California,” Richard said in 2009’s The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, the
definitive documentary about the duo. “I remember that we had no air conditioning at
the time, so it was blistering hot.”
The day that Al arrived in California, the executive who’d hired him died. “Here he
was with his children and his wife and no job,” Richard said. Since Al wasn’t receiving a
regular paycheck, the Sherman family moved a lot. “I had to change friends, go to
different schools,” Robert said. “Terrible thing.” Nevertheless, the brothers had
inherited their parents’ artistic bents. Until the early 1950s, Richard pursued a dream of
writing symphonies, while Robert attempted to write the great American novel. Since
they weren’t making much money, they shared an apartment over a cleaning store.
“One day our dad came up to our little apartment,” Richard later said. “He said ‘I’ll bet
you two guys couldn’t pool your talents and come up with a song that some kid would
give up his lunch money to buy.’”
Guided by what Al called “the Three S’s” (keep your song singable, simple, and
sincere), the brothers worked for months before coming up with “Gold Can Buy
Anything (but Love).” Their father liked the song and explained that the next step was
to play it for music publishers. It was eventually sold to Gene Autry, then one of the
world’s most popular singers, but it was swiftly eclipsed by Autry’s hit “Old Soldiers
Never Die.” The boys were disappointed, but once again Al gave them advice: “If you
can’t learn to take a curve in this business,” he said, “get out of it.”
Determined to strike out on his own, Robert established his own publishing company,
Music World Corporation, in a one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, where he began
collaborating with a handful of songwriters. Crucially, Richard was not among them. “I
didn’t want to write with him,” Robert said, though he did invite his brother to “come
up if you ever have a good song . . . maybe I can do something with it.”
One day, Richard was driving down Santa Monica Boulevard when he passed a sign
reading “The Tall Girls’ Shop.” He thought, That’s a good word: “tall.” Stopping off at
his brother’s, he found Robert working with collaborator Bob Roberts on a song that
they were calling “Chalk on the Sidewalk, Writing on the Wall.” Of course, “wall”
rhymes with “tall,” the word that had just struck Richard, and before long the three
men had written “Tall Paul,” which begins: “Chalk on the sidewalk writing on the wall
Everybody knows it I love Paul Tall Paul.”
At the time, Walt Disney was looking for a song for Annette Funicello, who had
become a breakout star on The Mickey Mouse Club after it premiered in 1955. She
proved so popular that she became the focus of a serial, Annette, which was broadcast
during the show’s third season. In one episode, Funicello’s performance of the song
“How Will I Know My Love?” drew so much fan mail that Disney decided to turn her
into a pop star, which is what led him to buy “Tall Paul.”
Released in 1959, the song became a Top 10 hit. Soon the Shermans were writing
more songs with Roberts, though he clearly resented Richard. “At one point, there was
a big fight,” said Robert. “[Bob] Roberts said, ‘I think I should add more bass,’ and Dick
said no.” Roberts threw a pair of scissors at Richard, causing Robert to kick Roberts
out. “From then on,” he said, “Dick and I wrote together.”
Like many other songwriting teams, the Shermans were a complementary mix of
opposites: Friendly, joking, emotional Richard was sometimes called “Mr. Sunshine,”
though he had a notorious temper, while Robert was reserved, intellectual, and
haunted by his experiences as an army soldier in World War II, which had included the
liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. “Bob is a little more ‘Feed the Birds,’ I
think, and Dick is a little more ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’” said Walt Disney’s
nephew Roy in The Boys. Though these differences eventually led to a rift between the
Shermans, they also fueled their work.
Soon the Shermans were enjoying some success (including the classic “You’re
Sixteen,” a 1960 hit for Johnny Burnette, as well as singles for Tab Hunter and Doris
Day), but their families were expanding and songwriting was, as their father had
proven, a notoriously unreliable profession. “We started writing more songs for
Annette, about 15 of them,” Robert said. They were all modest hits, which didn’t go
unnoticed by Disney. One day in 1960, Jimmy Johnson, the head of Disney music,
called Robert to say that the studio had cast Annette in a made-for-TV movie called
The Horsemasters. They needed a song for the film. “Would you guys like to take a shot
at writing it?” he asked.
“You’re kidding!” Robert said. “Really?”
“Yes, but they need it right away.”
Determined to impress Disney, the Shermans worked overtime trying to craft the
perfect song. There was a lot at stake: For one thing, they needed money. When they
arrived at the studio for their meeting, they only had about 35 cents between them.
Worried that they would have to pay to park in the Disney lot, they parked on the street
and walked to the studio, where they were met by Johnson. “Walt wants to hear it,” he
said.
“Walt Disney?” Robert said.
Terrified, the brothers walked into Walt’s office, where Disney promptly started
talking about a movie involving twin sisters who, having been separated as infants, are
unaware of their connection when they meet at summer camp. The film eventually
became the 1961 hit The Parent Trap, but it wasn’t the movie the brothers had written
their song for. “Mr. Disney, we came here to play you a song for The Horsemasters,”
Description:The editors of LIFE Magazine present Mary Poppins Returns.
