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Ever since Mary Poppins first appeared, without music, in book form in the 1930s, she has done much to shape the image of the quintessential English nanny. Yet her progenitor, Pamela Lyndon Travers, was born in Queensland.
Most people know Poppins from the 1964 Walt Disney film adaptation Mary Poppins but the author was never very happy with this Mary, nor with the music that planted it so firmly in peoples’ memories.
Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough in 1899. She was raised and educated in Bowral and Sydney. She contributed her first writings to publications including The Bulletin when she was a teenager, often writing under the pseudonym P.L. Travers. Pamela Travers became her adopted name during her brief acting career.
In 1924 she went to Ireland, where she met writers such as George William Russell and William Butler Yeats who encouraged her writing. She wrote for various newspapers before publishing her first book, Mary Poppins, in 1934, about the mysterious, severe, yet magical nanny. The book’s success enabled her to concentrate on her writing full-time. She would write seven more Poppins books, among a handful of other works, but Poppins was her best-known creation.
Disney had expressed an interest in turning Travers’ work into a film as early as 1939. In 1944, Disney’s brother Roy approached her to talk about an adaptation.
Travers finally relented in 1961, insisting on script approval and an English star. She was notoriously difficult during production, often simply scribbling the word “No” on the script and suggesting changes to bring the film more into line with her vision of Mary.
She particularly disliked the songs, directing scorn at composers Richard and Robert Sherman, who were helping develop the film. These prolific song-writing brothers went on to create a huge body of work for Disney, including music for The Jungle Book in 1967, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1968). They also wrote It’s A Small World After All for the 1964 World Fair in New York, now often cited as the most played song in the world.
Mary Poppins won the Shermans two Academy Awards — one for ‘Feed The Birds’, Walt Disney’s favourite song, and the other for ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’. The pair wrote 39 songs for the movie; 14 ended up in the film and nine have been kept in the new stage musical which opens in Melbourne tonight.
“You do a lot of writing because you don’t know what will work,” Richard Sherman said in an interview this week.
“Some of them went into Bedknobs And Broomsticks.”
Disney may have liked them but Travers objected so much to the Shermans’ music that when producer Cameron Mackintosh proposed staging a new Poppins musical, Travers insisted that it happen only if the Shermans would write no new songs for it. She put this into her will.
One of the new songs in the stage show is ‘Practically Perfect’. It was the first new song written for the show by Britain’s George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. They felt the phrase — Poppins’s description of herself when measuring the children’s personalities with a tape measure — was a promising title for a song.
The Shermans, it turns out, also spotted the phrase’s potential and had written a song for the same scene. But it was rejected in favour of a new tune and the melody was adapted by the Shermans to become Sister Suffragette. “We thought [‘Practically Perfect’] was a wonderful song title and decided: ‘Great, we’ll write it’ and this was 40 years before [Stiles and Drewe wrote a new version],” says Sherman. “Then we came up with ‘A Spoonful Of Sugar’ and we thought that’s what we’ll use in the scene where they’re cleaning up the nursery.”
The Oscar-winning song ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, or ‘Supercal’ as the brothers call it, came from their childhood habit of making up words. They coined this long-winded expression intending it to sound obnoxious.
Travis would have agreed that it was obnoxious. She died in 1996, never reconciled to the film she disliked nor the fame it brought her.
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