August 27 - Mary Poppins

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On this day, in 1964, Mary Poppins had its world debut at a star-studded gala at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California. Walt Disney first became aware of the strict English nanny named Mary Poppins through his two daughters, Diane and Sharon. The girls, about five and three at the time, loved to hear the stories about the Banks children and their adventures with Mary. They even got their father to promise to make a movie about them. So, in 1938, Walt contacted the author of the series, Pamela Lyndon Travers, to buy the rights. Since Travers absolutely abhorred cartoons, and that was all Disney was known for at the time, she sent back an emphatic no. If she thought that would deter Walt from delivering on a promise he made to his daughters, she was thoroughly unprepared for the drama that played out over the next 26 years.

For most of the two decades that Walt tried to convince Travers to sell him the rights to Poppins, things remained pretty low key. He’d ask, she’d say no. He’d ask again, she’d say no again. But as the Disney studio moved into live action pictures and television production, it became increasingly important to Walt that he do a movie based on Travers’ books. It also became increasingly clear that getting Travers to agree to an arrangement was going to be very difficult. Walt was a persistent man when it came to getting what he wanted. Travers was a persistent woman in getting what she wanted. The rock met the hard place and it became a game to see who was going to be ground down first.

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Walt started a full court press on Travers as the Fifties came to an end. He was confident that he could win her over, but he also hedged his bets by developing a similar movie based on books by another English author, Mary Norton, which eventually became Bedknobs and Broomsticks. When he was in England overseeing studio projects being filmed there, he even went so far as to visit Travers at her London home to try to persuade her in person. If Travers hadn’t needed an influx of cash (it had been a while since the Poppins books had been widely popular), she might never have caved in to his requests. In 1961, when the rock could sense that the hard place was ready to crumble, Walt flew Travers to Los Angeles, first class, to sign the papers. She insisted that she have script approval rights. Since Walt, who was clearly more knowledgeable about how movies were made, knew that those rights didn’t amount to much (and that his contractual rights to final print approval trumped them), he agreed. If he’d known the headaches she would give him over the next few months, he might have changed his mind.

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As part of her script approval rights, Travers inserted herself into the pre-production process as intimately and as forcefully as she could. She objected to almost everything that had “been done” to her characters. Mary was too sweet. The colors of the set were all wrong. The Sherman Brothers songs with their nonsense words in them were dreadful. And don’t even get her started on the planned animated sequence or the fact that they’d hired that hack, Dick Van Dyke, in a starring role. There are actual recordings of the planning sessions that Travers was present for and you can clearly hear a woman with severe seller’s remorse in them. Walt may have been patronizingly indulgent of her complaints at the beginning, but by the time she was safely on a plane back to London, he didn’t care if he ever saw her again. He would not be able to make that dream come true.

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Once the script was finalized, actual production began in earnest on Mary Poppins. The stories surrounding that process are enough to fill a book or make an entirely different movie about. There’s the fact that Julie Andrews was only available to do the film because Warner Brother’s declined to cast her in a role she’d originated on Broadway, Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. When awards time rolled around, Julie beat that pictures star, Audrey Hepburn, for the Golden Globe and won the Oscar (which Audrey wasn’t even nominated for). Julie was also three months pregnant when she was offered Mary Poppins, but Walt was so sure of her casting he said production would wait till after the baby was born. Walt was also sure, in spite of Travers’ opinion, of casting Dick Van Dyke as Bert the Chimney Sweep. He was less than enthused about letting Dick play Mr. Dawes Sr., the eldest banker who laughs himself to death. Not only did Dick have to do extensive screen tests in order to secure that role, but he had to make a generous contribution to CalArts as well. His endearingly terrible cockney accent as Bert can only be partially blamed on him as no one bothered to critique it during filming. He has since formerly apologized to Britain and Britain said no worries, they found his accent to be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which I can’t quite figure out of that’s a compliment or not).

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All the special effects tricks the studio had learned up to that point were used in Mary Poppins and some new ones showed up as well. The Imagineers were hard at work developing Audio Animatronics for The Enchanted Tiki Room and the 1964 World’s Fair. They also devised the robin that sits on Mary’s finger during A Spoonful of Sugar, except that didn’t go quite as well as planned. There wasn’t enough insulation in the robin’s feet as Julie kept getting fairly painful shocks from the bird (which in turn caused the actress’s famously foul mouth to fire). Luckily that was a short scene that in the end was highly effective.

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It’s impossible to talk about Mary Poppins without mentioning the music. Some of the best work the Sherman Brothers ever did is immortalized in the film, along with tales of several songs that could have been. Richard and Robert wrote a ballad for Mary that they were extremely proud of, The Eyes of Love, that Julie felt wasn’t quite right. Walt agreed and the prized song was cut. The brothers struggled to come up with another song until one of their sons described getting his polio vaccine via a sugar cube and the fantastic A Spoonful of Sugar was born. They wrote a solid version of Let’s Go Fly a Kite that Walt said was great to end a Broadway musical but would never end his movie. Rewritten as a waltz, Kite has become another classic tune. Several songs that were written for Poppins but not used found new life in other Disney projects. West Wind popped up in Big Red, The Right Side became an anthem in the Disney Channel series The House on Pooh Corner and The Beautiful Briny enlivened Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

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And then there’s the song that reportedly became one of Walt’s favorites for the remainder of his life, Feed the Birds. Used to frame the serious moments in the film, Birds became the central theme of Mary Poppins: the fact that Mary comes to teach the children, and through them their father, the lessons of charity and kindness and how it doesn’t take much to render either. Quite often, at the end of a work week, Walt would invite Richard and Robert to his office, ask them how the various projects they were working on were fairing and then drift to the window and quietly say “Play it.” The brothers knew what he wanted and would play Feed the Birds while Walt stared out on a landscape that only he could see. Reportedly, when Richard played Birds as the last song during his mini concert at the dedication of the Partners statue in Disneyland, a single bird dropped from seemingly nowhere, circled the piano and flew back into the clouds. You can’t prove either way whether that was Walt saying hello to his old friend or not, but Richard isn’t the only one who believes.

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As production on Mary Poppins wrapped up and the gala premiere loomed, there was one very conspicuous invitation to it that seemed to have been lost in the mail. The story goes that Walt felt it was fine to invite PL Travers to the London debut, but that she didn’t need to fly all the way to Hollywood for the extravaganza at Grauman’s. Travers disagreed and, much to Walt’s consternation, guilted someone at the studio into letting her come. Thankfully someone warned him of her arrival well before hand and he was able to grit his teeth and smile for the cameras as he escorted her into the theater.

All the Hollywood elite were there for the inaugural screening and everyone loved it. Mary Poppins was almost immediately declared to be Walt’s magnum opus. It enjoyed universal critical acclaim and became the most profitable movie of the year, grossing over $31 million on a $4.4 million budget. The buckets of money reaped from Poppins wouldn’t stay in the studio’s bank account for long, however. A large chunk of it went towards buying a bunch of swamp land in central Florida. When Oscar time rolled around, Poppins not only snapped up Best Actress, but nabbed two statues for its music and two more for visual effects and editing. It was nominated for Best Picture but lost, somewhat ironically, to My Fair Lady.

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In the decades since its release Mary Poppins has enchanted legions of new fans and shows no signs of shedding any of its appeal. Although it isn’t quite truthful to say that everyone initially loved it. At the party after the premiere, PL Travers marched up to Walt and demanded that the animated sequence be removed. Walt stared at her for a beat, said “Pamela, the ship has sailed” and walked away. Travers never authorized another film version of her nanny but by 1977 had apparently come to terms with the wild popularity of the Disney take on it. In an interview that year she admitted she’d seen it a couple of times and while it wasn’t anything like her books, it was a good, maybe even a glamorous, film in its own right. I think the word she was looking for was “great” but I otherwise couldn’t agree with her more.

August 4 - Don DaGradi

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On this day, in 1991, Don DaGradi passed away in Friday Harbor, Washington. Born on March 1, 1911, on the East Coast in New York City, Don actually spent most of his childhood growing up on the West Coast in San Francisco, California. After graduating from high school, he took his artistic talents south to Los Angeles and the Chouinard Art Institute. He honed his skills for a few years before joining the Walt Disney Studio in the mid-Thirties, at the height of the Great Depression, as a background painter. He was quickly bumped up to the Story Department, where he contributed gags and minor plot points to many of the studio’s shorts produced at the time.

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As the studio grew, Don's responsibilities grew as well. By 1940, he was the production designer on Dumbo. Throughout World War II, he was put in charge of layouts for in the Shorts Department (really the only thing the studio was producing in those lean years). His work can be seen in classic films including Der Fuehrer’s Face and Victory Through Air Power. Following the war, Don added features to his plate as the layout artist for The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music and Fun and Fancy Free.  At the end of the Forties, he started designing the color schemes and the overall feel of features. He sharpened the look of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

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As successful as all of Don’s endeavors were up to this point, he didn’t really start hitting his stride until he became a senior member of the story department in the mid-Fifties. He has a full story credit on Lady and the Tramp and contributed additional story elements to Sleeping Beauty (as well as being part of that production’s design team). Then, in 1959, he made the leap into live action movies and blossomed like never before.

Don’s Legendary co-workers, the Sherman Brothers, once said that he wrote scripts with a sketch pad and pencil, meaning that Don’s pictures were worth more than a thousand words. He could draw a quick picture of what a scene looked like in his head and everyone else could see it too. Pages of words could flow from each drawing, most of the time with very little effort. Don’s first effort in the live action arena was at Walt’s personal request. He designed and wrote the underground cavern scenes in Darby O’Gill and the Little People. He followed that up by developing sequences in The Absent-Minded Professor, Pollyanna, Kidnapped and The Parent Trap. For the sequel to Professor, Son of Flubber, Don teamed up with the Legendary Bill Walsh, completely writing that film’s script between the two of them. It was a professional match made in heaven that would last until Don’s retirement nearly a decade later.

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After Flubber, Don and Bill created the script for what is arguably the Walt Disney Studio’s magnum opus, as far as live action films go. Mary Poppins turned out to be as whimsically delightful as it is because of the two men wrote it. Don is credited with creating the visions of everything from people popping out of chimneys and flying through the air to how a tea party on the ceiling might look. His sense of wonder paid off. Audiences have adored the film since its debut and it was honored with five Academy Awards. Don and Bill’s script had also been nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Beckett.

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The overwhelming success of Mary Poppins basically gave Don and Bill carte blanche as screenwriters. While they would never reach those same heights again, they add several more classic Disney films to their resumes. Over the next seven years, the duo wrote Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., Blackbeard’s Ghost, The Love Bug, Scandalous John and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

During his career, Don was also tapped to occasionally do some moonlighting over in Imagineering. He designed costumes for Disneyland cast members including the outfits the resident marching band wore. He also designed the look of the exteriors of attractions, like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, keeping them in line with the looks he helped create for the animated features they were based on. And then, in 1970, after 34 years of making magic on and off the silver screen, the man who often described himself as a misplaced cartoonist retired from Disney.

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Don and his wife of many years, Betty, moved north to the state of Washington, enjoying their post-work life away from the hubbub of Hollywood for the next two decades. When Don passed away in August 1991, it was just a few months before his old company would honor him, and his writing partner Bill, as official Disney Legends. He might have been 80 years old at his death, but in his heart he still saw magic everywhere he looked.

August 1 - Chuck Keehne

On this day, in 1914, Charles Keehne was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Chuck was the middle child of five children born to a telegraph operator for a railroad. He spent most of his formative years in southwest Missouri, graduating from high school in 1932. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Southern California to try his luck at the movie business. He found steady work as a carpenter building movie sets for various studios. At some point he was hired by the Western Costume Company as a costumer. He made it his business to become an expert in historically accurate costumes and by 1940 had left Western to strike out on his own. He found freelancing success on pictures like Knute Rockne, All American, with Ronald Reagan, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, with James Cagney.

World War II brought an interruption to Chuck's costuming career. He joined the Army Air Corps and became a combat cameraman in the Pacific. When the war was over, he remained stationed in Japan until receiving an honorable discharge in 1946. He returned to Hollywood, resumed working as a costumer and married his childhood sweetheart. Over the next several years, Chuck created the clothing for classic films like Fort Apache with John Wayne and A Bullet for Joey with Edward G. Robinson. Then, in early 1955, he stopped being a freelancer and created one of the most iconic wardrobe pieces in television history.

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The Walt Disney Studio found itself with a problem in the mid Fifties. They had done several live action films by that point and were poised to get heavily into television, but they lacked something that all the other studios already had: a wardrobe department. Animated characters didn't require a costumer but real people needed something to wear. Bill Anderson, the studio's production manager, needed to hire someone on full time to fix this dilemma. When Bill interviewed Chuck in April 1955, one of Chuck's first questions was Where is the Wardrobe Department? Bill's answer was Wherever you build it. Luckily for Disney, Chuck not only didn't shy away from the challenge of creating Costuming for a major studio, he was able to bring along two highly capable people to help him. He put Ted Tooey in charge of Men's Wardrobe, Gertie Casey in charge of Women's and took over part of the building that housed the Shorts Department (which would be closing down soon anyways, although most people weren't aware of that).

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Chuck's first task was outfitting the cast of Disney's new television show, The Mickey Mouse Club. Creating the look of the costumes the Mousketeers would be wearing was a piece of cake compared to actually keeping the cast in properly fitting clothes. Over the course of the shows three seasons, it would seem like every single cast member had several growth spurts. And then there was their headgear. Everyone agreed that some kind of mouse ears was definitely the way to go, but turning that great idea into a practical reality was a daunting task that fell to the newly hired costumer, Chuck. Working closely with Roy Williams, who had the original idea, several prototypes were designed and discarded. Some just looked too big, others were too heavy and ones that did actually look good wouldn't stay on the kids heads when they danced (or even just moved around).

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Chuck and Roy finally devised small hand crafted ears, tailor fitted to each individual Mousketeer, complete with rubber band chin straps to keep them from falling off all the time. The problem with the ears was the price: it cost $25 a piece to make them (about $240 each in today's money). Multiply that times dozens of cast members, add in the fact that the kids kept losing or crushing sets of them, and you begin to see Chuck's headache. Because mouse ears were actually just a small part of the wardrobe required for The Mickey Mouse Club. Distinct costumes were created for each of the individual days of the week (you couldn't possible wear the same thing for Talent Round-Up Day that you did for Anything Can Happen Day, right?) plus everything needed for the various shows-within-the-show like Spin and Marty and Annette. It really was like doing several separate shows all at once. Good thing Chuck and his crew were not only up to the task but created television history at the same time.

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After getting The Mickey Mouse Club up and running, the next two and a half decades must have seemed like something of an extended vacation, even as Chuck would oversee wardrobe for every single live action production the Walt Disney Studio did whether it was on the big screen or the small. He costumed Zorro and all the Wonderful World of Disney shows. He created Mrs. Banks' suffragette look in Mary Poppins, Haley Mills' California chicness in The Parent Trap and clothed Jodie Foster's teenage angst in Freaky Friday. Chuck was also Walt's personal dresser for all of his television introductions and public appearances. When he retired in 1979, he was personally responsible for the look of over 70 feature films and hundreds of television episodes. He then lived quietly with his wife, enjoying his two daughters and his grandchildren until his death on February 24, 2001 in Los Angeles, California. He was 86.

July 27 - Bill Sullivan

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On this day, in 1955, William Sullivan began his new job as ticket taker at the Jungle Cruise in Adventureland of Disneyland. Born in 1936, Sully, as most people called him, was studying architecture and working his first job in the aircraft industry when a television show changed his life. Like many people on July 17, 1955, Sully was glued to his television set watching the opening ceremonies of a new kind of entertainment in Anaheim, Disneyland. Unlike most people watching, he was inspired to completely change the course of his life by what he saw. The following Saturday he went down to the park to apply for a job. He was hired on the spot, quit his job at Northrop Aircraft on Monday and two days later was happily taking people’s tickets for the Jungle Cruise.

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A quick detour into the world of tickets at the beginning of Disneyland. For the first three months of operation, it cost guests $1 to get into the park, which included three attractions, and then between 10 and 35 cents more for each additional attraction. In October 1955, ticket books were introduced with A, B and C tickets in them. The best rides, like the Jungle Cruise, required a C ticket while something like the Carousel would be an A ticket ride. In 1957, as more attractions were added to Disneyland, a D ticket was introduced and the ticket tiers were expanded once more in 1959 to include E tickets. Some attractions, like the Matterhorn Bobsleds, debuted at E ticket status while older attractions, like the Jungle Cruise, were promoted to E ticket status, or whatever level was appropriate. The phrase “that’s an E ticket ride” has sort of become synonymous with exciting thrill rides but all it really meant was you were riding one of the best rides. Yes, the Bobsleds were E ticket, but so was the Disneyland Railroad. We now return to you to our regularly scheduled post.

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It didn’t take Sully long to get promoted from Jungle Cruise ticket taker to wisecracking Jungle Cruise skipper. After 2.5 years exclusively in that madcap bubble, Sully got to train on other attractions and move around the park more. He was then promoted to what he called a Yo-Yo Supervisor. Disneyland couldn’t afford to make him a full supervisor just yet, so at high attendance times he’d be wearing a suit and tie and managing things, then when attendance dropped again, he’d be back in costume running an attraction, sometimes going back and forth between the two roles on a day by day basis. In 1959, when the park enjoyed its first expansion with the addition of the Matterhorn Bobsleds and the Nature’s Wonderland section of Frontierland, Sully was made a full supervisor.

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Almost as soon as Sully became full time management, he also became a specials man. When Walt was chosen to be a part of the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, Sully was on the company’s security team. He was part of the team that ran the premier of Mary Poppins at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Sully was then chosen to go to the 1964 World’s Fair as an assistant manager to help facilitate and troubleshoot the four attractions the company built for it. He moved his family to Queens, NY for a year and his daughter even started kindergarten there. When he returned to California in late 1965, he was promoted to manager of all of Fantasyland. And that’s when things got busy.

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While in New York, Sully had heard rumors of something Walt was cooking up called Project X that was going to take place on the East Coast, but no one knew what, when or exactly where. Shortly after becoming the head of Fantasyland, Sully was let in on the secret: another theme park was being planned for Central Florida. It then became Sully’s job, along with the Legendary Rolly Krump, to design the layout of Fantasyland for the new park. When they’d done all they could with that project, Sully was promoted to Senior Staff Assistant to the Vice President of the Florida Project, which basically meant he was now a high priced jack-of-all-trades.

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It might almost be easier to list the things Sully didn’t do in those years just before Walt Disney World opened. He helped design the entrance to the Magic Kingdom and Main Street USA (they made it twelve feet wider than Disneyland’s in order to accommodate bigger parades). He set up a post office to facilitate communication between Burbank and the construction companies. He helped get the Preview Center up and running. He was in charge of most of the promotional materials that were being made available to locals. He ran a legislator’s weekend so Jack Lindquist could convince the Florida state senators and representatives that creating a special economic zone for Disney was a great idea. He helped set up and staff the Preview Center. He was part of the Security and Fire Prevention team and was in charge of hiring the first 75 Security Cast Members for the Florida property. In short, Sully was the grease that kept the whole of Walt Disney World moving forward.

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Sully was also an integral part of the team that was planning and building EPCOT Center. Officially he was the director of PICO, the Project Installation and Coordination Office. Basically what that meant is that, while he didn’t have the authority to approve or disapprove of projects, all of them came through him and his office. With all of his operational experience, Sully could (and did) make improvement suggestions and rework the design of anything he felt needed tweaking. He spent four years perfecting the park and then was in charge of actually running the place for the first two years it was open. During the same period, Sully help train hundreds of cast members for the opening of Disney’s first international park, Tokyo Disneyland.

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In 1987, Sully was promoted to Vice President in charge of the Magic Kingdom, the world he had done so much to help create. He spent several years there until one of his old co-workers, Jim Cora, who was now in charge of all international Disney parks, sweet talked him into coming over to Europe to help get Disneyland Paris ready for its opening. So Sully spent the first few months of 1992 opening another Disney theme park. He returned to Florida where he resumed his duties as top man at the Magic Kingdom until his retirement in 1993.

Sully has the distinction of being one of the few people who have their names on not one but two windows on Main Street USA, both in the Magic Kingdom. The first one he received was as part of a group of guys who were instrumental in getting Walt Disney World off the ground. It reads “Windemere Fraternal Hall – Lodge Meetings Every Friday – Charter Members - Bob Allen - Pete Crimmings, Dick Evans, Bill Hoelscher, Bob Mathieson, Bill Sullivan” and can be found on Center Street above Crystal Arts. Sully received his second one for his retirement and it’s a solo act above the ice cream parlor. That one reads “Sully's Safaris & Guide Service - Chief Guide Bill Sullivan.” As impressive as having two windows is, Sully was absolutely floored the day he got his letter inviting him to a ceremony in 2005 where he was officially declared a Disney Legend.

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Sully still resides in Central Florida although he says he doesn’t go to the Disney parks much anymore. He admits that it’s mostly because he’d get too upset about all the changes that have been made since they were “his” parks. They aren’t his anymore but he’s okay with that. For 38 magical years he carried on the Disney tradition and now it is someone else’s turn. When asked about his favorite memory from his career, he gets a twinkle in his eye and mentions meeting the cute blonde who worked across from the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland and has been his wife for over 50 years. I know just how he feels (although my twinkle is brunette).

May 7 - David Tomlinson

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On this day, in 1917, David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson was born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. David’s early life gave no indication of path he was eventually going to forge for himself. He went to boarding school at the venerable Tonbridge School in Kent, became a part of the British Army as a Grenadier Guard for 16 months and took a job his father, a respected lawyer, procured for him as a clerk in the London headquarters of Shell Oil. All very proper and aboveboard, as the English might say. It didn’t take long, however, for that Edwardian sense of propriety to start slipping.


It started with the revelation that David’s father was leading a double life, having sired another, separate family. A letter mailed to the wrong wife began unravelling the lies but when one of David’s brothers, from the upper level of a double decker bus, chanced to look into an apartment window and see their father lying in a strange bed casually reading the paper (he was supposed to be visiting his club), the duplicity had no choice but to be revealed. His father was wholly unapologetic, causing a rift between father and son that never healed. As an escape, David began acting in local amateur plays, soon discovering that he had a knack for that sort of thing. By 1940, he’d landed his first (uncredited naturally) film role in Garrison Follies. The following year brought him not one but three named roles and a starring role in the British war movie Name Rank and Number. Then World War II, as it did to so many people, fully interrupted his life, in more ways than he ever bargained for.

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David joined the Royal Air Force as a Flight Lieutenant. He was sent to Canada where he became a flight instructor, seemingly far away from the tragedies of war. While in North America, he met Mary Lindsay Hiddingh, the daughter of the vice president of the New York Like Insurance Company and already a war widow. Her first husband had been killed in action in 1941, leaving her two young sons fatherless. David and Mary hit it off, became romantically involved and married in September 1943. Two months later, he was reassigned to a position in London. Because of wartime restrictions on immigration, Mary and the boys weren’t allowed to travel with him. Apparently terrified that she would lose another husband to battle, Mary’s mental state quickly deteriorated. On December 2, 1943, she jumped from the 13^th floor of the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York City, with her two sons, killing all three of them. The blow was devastating to David. It would be another decade before he fell in love again and even years later he admitted he was still too distraught to ever visit Mary’s grave.

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Not that anyone was able to guess at David’s personal woes from his (usually) bright, cheery screen persona (I mean, there’s a reason it’s called acting, but even today, a whole lot of people can’t quite grasp that). Over the next eighteen years, he would star in 34 British films, mostly comedies with titles like Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? and Warning to Wantons. In 1963, David was part of the cast of the hugely successful comedy Tom Jones, playing the rare villainous role. All the sunny, yet sometimes stuffy characters David played over the years brought him to the attention of the producers at a studio in Burbank, California who were poised to give him everlasting, international fame.



A large chunk of the cast of Mary Poppins was relatively unknown in America (with the obvious exception of Dick Van Dyke). The Banks’ children, Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice, had already appeared together in The Three Lives of Thomasina, but that was nothing compared to the fame that was coming. David, Glynis Johns and even Julie Andrews were not household names until August 27, 1964 when Mary Poppins exploded onto the big screen. David, already popular in Britain, would now be recognizable throughout most of the known world. Not only did he play the venerable George Banks, who wakes up to the fact that his children need their father to actually be present for their childhoods, but he also provides several other voices for the film, including Mary Poppins’ umbrella and a overdub for Admiral Boom’s first mate.

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David would return to the Walt Disney Studio twice more in his career, both times playing iconic characters (albeit not quite on the scale of Mr. Banks). In 1968, he played the bumbling villain, Peter Thorndyke, in The Love Bug. Three years later, in what was conceived as a reteaming with Julie Andrews (she turned down the part), he starred with Angela Lansbury in the big screen adaptation of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. This time around he plays a smooth talking con man who struggles with the fact that he may have actually taught someone real magic.

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Post Disney, David appeared in a handful of films throughout the Seventies and made a rare television appearance on an episode of Hawaii Five-O in 1976. His final film (which also happened to be Peter Sellers final film) was the unfortunate The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1980. I’ve never seen it, but apparently it is just awful. Maybe David wouldn’t have retired from acting before its release if he’d known how bad it would be, but he probably still would have. He’d already done pretty much everything he’d ever wanted and was ready to concentrate on enjoying his family.



In 1953, David had married a second time, to an actress, Audrey Freeman. They had four sons together and enjoyed 47 years of relatively happy marriage. I say relatively, because one of their sons, Willie, was autistic. Being the parent of an autistic child today is no walk in the park, but it was far worse in the Sixties. In his memoir, David writes with bitter frustration about living through a time when doctors barely recognized autism as a condition, forget being able to get a diagnosis for it. He also recounted the stark lack of sympathy he and his wife got from friends and family, calling most people’s reactions to his son downright inhuman. His (bad) relationship with his father may have gotten him into acting, but he got out of it determined to have a good one with his son.



David quietly lived out the last two decades of his life, doting on his children and grandchildren, occasionally reliving his marvelous career in an interview. Then, on June 23, 2000 he suffered a massive stroke and was rushed to King Edward VII’s Hospital in Westminster. Early in the morning of June 24, he passed away without regaining consciousness. Two years later, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend for portraying not one but three titans of Disneyana and living forever in our hearts.

April 20 - Betty Lou Gerson

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On this day, in 1914, Betty Lou Gerson was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Betty’s family spent most of her formative years in Birmingham, Alabama, where her father was a steel company executive. When she was sixteen, the Gerson clan moved to Chicago, Illinois and she got her first taste of performing on a radio show called The First Nighter Program. What made First Nighter different from other serials of the day is that it technically wasn’t a serial. It was the first anthology program meaning a new, complete story was presented each week. If you missed last week’s episode because your cousin was in town and wanted to see the sights, you won’t be confused as to what is happening in this week’s episode, a concept we’re used to but was novel in 1930. Romantic comedies were the usual fare on First Nighter and for the two years she spent with the show, Betty was frequently paired with a young Don Ameche.

Betty’s career didn’t really take off until she was 21 and living in New York City. For the latter half of the Thirties, she became a staple in several radio soap operas. She played the title role in Arthur Grimm’s Daughter, lead the cast as Julia in Midstream, was one of the main Lonely Women and appeared on the radio version of Guiding Light. It wasn’t all melodrama for Betty though, as she continued being the resident romantically comic lead (although some weeks she was comically romantic for a change of pace) on anthologies like Curtain Time and Grand Hotel.

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In the mid Forties, Betty changed locations by moving to Los Angeles but continued working in the medium of radio. She reestablished herself on the airwaves in dramas like The Whistler, Crime Classics, Mr. President and Johnny Modero, Pier 23. She also had several roles on Lux Radio Theater including a turn as Glinda the Good Witch in a 1950 production of The Wizard of Oz.

1950 was also the year Betty first became part of the Disney family, when she was cast as the narrator of Cinderella. Her most enduring contribution didn’t come until eleven years later when her voice burst into our eardrums as the deliciously over-the-top Cruella de Vil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. She also played Mrs. Birdwell, a contestant on the show-within-a-movie, What’s My Crime, that Horace and Jasper watch while the Dalmatians escape from de Vil Manor. Her final Disney role was a rare live action one when she did a cameo in Mary Poppins as an old Crone.

Image copyright 20th Century Fox

Betty was seen on the big screen only a handful of times in her career. For instance, she played Nurse Anderson in the 1958 version of The Fly, Yvonne Kraus in the 1949 anti-communist propaganda film The Red Menace, Kate Peacock in 1959’s The Miracle on the Hills and a half dozen small, mostly uncredited roles in mostly B-Movie film noirs. She did about the same number of live action roles for television, appearing on Perry Mason three times and once each on The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hazel, Wanted Dead or Alive and The Rifleman. In 1966, she retired from acting but not from working. When she married her second husband (her first husband had died the year before), she supported him at his telephone answering service.

In 1996, Betty was made an official Disney Legend not only for trying to skin puppies in the name of fashion but for making us love her as she did it. She came out of retirement just once, in 1997, to provide the voice of Frances the Fish in Cat’s Don’t Dance, the only animated feature ever produced by Turner Feature Animation. Just over a year later, Betty suffered a fatal stroke on January 12, 1999 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 84.

March 31 - Robert Stevenson

On this day, in 1905, Robert Edward Stevenson was born in Buxton, Derbyshire, England. Robert attended St. Johns College, part of Cambridge, on a scholarship. While there he won an award for aeronautics and graduated in 1927 with a degree in engineering. At that point, his parents gave him six weeks to find employment, so, of course, he became an assistant to Michael Balcon, who was one of the most famous British film producers of the time.

Robert's first real task under Michael was to write scripts (not as hard as it might seem as movies were still silent at this point). The first film he received story credit on was the 1928 war picture Balaclava. But even as movies became talkies, it was evident that Robert had a real talent for story crafting. Over the next few years, he would write musicals (1930's Greek Street), mysteries (1931's Night in Montmartre), dramas (1931's The Calendar) and comedies (1932's Lord Babs).

In 1932, Robert was given his first shot at directing a movie, a musical called Happily Ever After. Throughout the rest of the Thirties, he continued cutting a path through the British film industry, sometimes writing, sometimes directing and often doing both. He did several films with Jack Hulbert, another writer/director/actor type, and worked with the likes of Paul Robeson and Boris Karloff. By 1940, Robert had gained the attention of American producer David O. Selznick, who invited him to hop the pond and ply his craft in Hollywood.

While under contract to Selznick, Robert was loaned out to RKO Pictures for hits like 1942's Joan of Paris and to Universal for 1941's Back Street, which garnered an Oscar nomination for Music. In 1943, he wrote and directed an well received adaptation of Jane Eyre starring Orson Welles. When his contract with Selznick ran out, Robert signed a new one with RKO in 1949 and produced a string of films that consistently lost money even though they had stars like Robert Mitchum, Joseph Cotton and Jane Russell. This led to a period of television directing in the early Fifties for everything from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Gunsmoke. Many of the gigs he got during this period came from old friends in the industry (Robert and Hitchcock had worked closely together in 1940 for instance) and Robert's career could have fizzled into obscurity at this point, but a change of studio did wonders for his legacy.

In 1956, Robert was hired by the Walt Disney Studio to direct some of the live action movies they were starting to get more heavily into. His first project was Johnny Tremain. Set during the American Revolution, Tremain was filmed as part of the Disneyland television show but released to theaters before appearing on the small screen. Tremain was quickly followed up with one of the all time Disney classics, Old Yeller, the success of which cemented Robert's position with the studio.

Most of the rest of the nineteen films that Robert would direct for Disney over the next two decades are recognizable to the vast majority of people (and the few that aren't really are little gems just waiting to be discovered). His well known titles include Kidnapped, The Absent-Minded Professor and its sequel Son of Flubber, In Search of the Castaways, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and its sequel The Monkey's Uncle, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, That Darn Cat!, The Love Bug and its sequel Herbie Rides Again, and The Shaggy D.A. His lesser known films are Darby O'Gill and the Little People, The Gnome-Mobile, Blackbeard's Ghost, The Island at the Top of the World and One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing.

Eagle eyed readers may have noticed that I've only listed eighteen movies so far. That's because the nineteenth film on the list (although in the middle of the pack chronologically) is the biggest one by far, for both Robert and the company. He was the man in charge of bringing Walt's magnum opus to life: Mary Poppins. Not only did Poppins become a run away hit, it gave Robert the only Oscar nomination for Best Director that Walt Disney Pictures had ever received (or would receive for years to come). Yes, he lost to My Fair Lady (which probably was extra galling because of the whole Julie Andrews 'controversy'), but that's still quite an accomplishment.

In a list published at the end of 1976, Robert was declared the most commercially successful director in the history of films. He had 16 films on the list of top grossing movies, all of them Disney pictures. The number two man (and of course it was a man, this was only the Seventies) only had 12. Robert's final picture, The Shaggy D.A., would join the list and push his supremacy even higher. It was estimated that he had worldwide grosses of over $750 million. I don't know if any of that was adjusted for the 20 year time frame the films spanned, but that's over $3.3 Billion in today's terms. Not to shabby for an engineer.

Robert spent the final decade of his life relaxing in his home in Santa Barbara, California with his fourth (and final) wife of 23 years, Ursula. He passed away on April 30, 1986 at the age of 81. He was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend as part of the class of 2002 as part of the opening of Disneyland Paris.

March 25 - Matthew Garber

On this day, in 1956, Matthew Adam Garber was born in Stepney, London, England. Matthew's parents were stage actors, the kind that work steadily but never become famous, so it was natural that when one of their friends, a Shakespearian actor of the time named Roy Dotrice, came scouting for child actors, Matthew caught his eye. Roy let his boss, the Walt Disney Company, know about the precocious young man. At the ripe old age of seven, Michael was cast in his first film, The Three Lives of Thomasina. He played opposite a young lady named Karen Dotrice, who happened to be Roy's daughter (he apparently didn't feel the need to look very far for his prospects).

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The mild success of Thomasina, led to Michael and Karen being cast as the Banks children in Walt's magnum opus, Mary Poppins, the very next year. Poppins became an international sensation and catapulted its two young stars to fame. Which neither of them were quite sure how to respond to. Michael and Karen would team up a third time three years later for The Gnome-Mobile as Walter Brennan's grandchildren. Gnome would mark the last film both kids ever did as adolescents. Karen would star in one more movie in the late Seventies, The Thirty Nine Steps, and several television productions before retiring from acting in 1984 to raise a family (she does make a cameo in Mary Poppins Returns). Michael never got that chance.

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Following the release of Gnome, Michael, already a bit uneasy with stardom, would take a break from acting to finish his schooling. He graduated from Highgate School in North London in 1972. We'll never know if he ever intended to return to acting. He took a trip to India in 1976 and contracted hepatitis. By the time he could make it back to England, and better health care, it was too late. The virus had attacked his pancreas. On June 13, 1977, Matthew passed away in Hampstead, London from haemorrhagic necrotising pancreatitis. He was cremated and lays at rest in St. Marylebone Crematorium in East Finchley. In 2004, Michael was posthumously made an official Disney Legend for his short but highly acclaimed career. He was only 21 when he died.