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.