How a foul-mouthed Julie Andrews, a combative Walt Disney and a ‘walking icicle’ author somehow made a children’s classic to warm the heart.
“She hated me, she hated Julie Andrews,” was Dick Van Dyke’s blunt assessment of PL Travers in the wake of Walt Disney’s triumphant 1964 adaptation of the author’s 1934 novel Mary Poppins. For all its cherished reputation as a jolly, saccharine musical classic, the Mary Poppins movie has a dark, troubled underside, one that continues to cause controversy 60 years on from its release.
In truth, there are numerous peculiar aspects to a deeply peculiar movie, including the foibles of a bizarre and secretive author, the problems on the set, the tragedies and misery that befell cast members and the lasting comic legacy of one of the worst accents in cinema history.
Let’s start with Van Dyke’s execrable accent as Bert, the London chimney sweep, one-man band and kite seller. Even the likeable Missouri-born actor himself admitted it was “most atrocious Cockney accent in the history of cinema”. To paraphrase Michael Caine, not a lot of people know that it was all the fault of an actor from Burnley called James Rudolph O’Malley, an Irish voice coach known as Pat.
“Disney sent an Irishman called Pat to my house to teach me an English accent,” Van Dyke recalled. “Pat’s Cockney wasn’t very good to start with … I was working with a cast of almost all Brits and no one ever said, ‘You know, you ought to work on that accent’. I sure took some kidding about it afterwards.”
Disney, who micromanaged many aspects of the film’s production, liked O’Malley – who had starred in Lassie films and done voice characters for his animated films – and personally gave him a talking role in the film, as the Pearly King drummer, in the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious musical number sequence. Try watching a clip and you can hear for yourself the awfulness of the voice coach’s own Cockney accent.
Van Dyke speaks warmly of his memories of the movie in general but admitted he had personal problems during production. Although the novel was based on Depression-era 1930s London, Disney set the film in Edwardian times and created a whole set at Burbank, California, for the Cherry Tree Lane residence in the English capital.
The movie was filmed during the era of his Dick Van Dyke television show on CBS and the Hollywood star would sometimes forget where exactly he should be going to work. “I found myself getting up in the morning and taking off on the freeway and forgetting where in the hell I was supposed to go, and a couple times I showed up at the wrong studio,” Van Dyke later told CNN.
The actor and dancer, who turns 99 in December, had bigger troubles than getting lost, though. He’d been a heavy smoker since his teenage years – and puffed through three packs a day on set – and was battling with alcohol addiction during the making of Mary Poppins. Van Dyke, who later went into rehab in Arizona to get sober, admitted that he was depressed and would turn up for filming suffering from the effects of drinking. “I would go to work with terrible hangovers, which if you’re dancing is really hard … I was in deep trouble, you get suicidal and think you just can’t go on. I had suicidal feelings, it was just terrible,” he confessed.
Despite his traumatic personal life, his fellow cast members loved Van Dyke’s companionship – and sense of fun. As well as playing Bert, he also portrayed the aged, decrepit banker Mr Dawes. One of his favourite pranks was to go out of the film lot during lunch breaks and shuffle in front of motor cars to make them suddenly stop. Once they had done this, he would sprint off down the road, much to the driver’s surprise.
Although Mary Poppins and Bert were on-screen friends, Travers insisted that there was no romance between the chimney sweep and the mysterious, magical nanny who literally drops from the sky to take charge of Jane and Michael, the children of financier George Banks (David Tomlinson) and his suffragette wife Winifred (Glynis Johns).
Dick Van Dyke with kites in a publicity still for Mary Poppins in 1964. Photo / Getty Images
Mary Martin had been widely touted to play Poppins but Disney insisted on hiring Andrews, whose daughter, Emma, was born six months before filming started. He also hired her then-husband, Tony Walton, to be a set and costume designer on the movie. Andrews had her first experience of Travers’ domineering nature when the author rang the actress in hospital the day after the birth to question her about her moral standing. Andrews ended the call by saying, “I just had a baby, I’m feeling a bit woozy right now.”
Andrews won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance – Mary Poppins also won for Film Editing, Music Score, Song (Chim Chim Cher-ee) and Special Visual Effects – and said the only time she got nervous in her film debut was when she was left dangling on a long wire while holding her iconic carved parrot-head handle umbrella. “I felt the wire leave and drop about six inches. I was nervous and very tired,” she later told Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “I plummeted to the stage and there was an awful silence for a minute. I did let fly with a few Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, I have to admit.”
Karen Dotrice, who was 8 when she played Jane, looked back with amusement as an adult on her experiences on set. “Julie’s got a bit of a naughty mouth on her … there was swearing. Julie was smoking on set. It was a very real 1960s set, I can tell you. They were polite around minors to begin with, but that soon ended.”
Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in a scene from the original Mary Poppins.
Andrews also showed her irreverent side after the film came out, when her friend Dan Sorkin, a San Francisco disc jockey, told her he was fed up with the cult of Mary Poppins and persuaded his station KSFO to print and give away 60,000 bumper stickers that said: “Mary Poppins Is A Junkie.” In 2015, Andrews told Idol Chatter magazine: “Yes. I used to ride around in my youth with a bumper sticker which said, ‘Mary Poppins is a Junkie.’ But in the 60s it seemed okay to do that kind of thing – I certainly wouldn’t do it now.”
It was Andrews who came to Dotrice’s rescue when the child had one of her toughest days on set, singing her solo on The Perfect Nanny. “My teacher was about 108 and taught me to warble like in an operetta, so when I first performed in the studio everyone was p***ing themselves laughing,” she later recalled. “Julie took me aside and retaught me and when it was time to record them with an orchestra she gave up her day off to support me.” Dotrice also confessed that life in the aftermath of film fame was not easy, especially returning to a small primary school in the Cotswolds. “I couldn’t wait to get back to normal life, but the teachers treated me terribly and most of the school seemed to hate me,” she said in 2018.
Although she didn’t get on with her “sibling” co-star Matthew Garber – “we were kids. And I couldn’t stand him and he couldn’t stand me. That’s the truth of it. I was raised to be prim and proper and he was a naughty boy” – she was deeply saddened to hear of his tragic death in 1977 at the age of 21. Garber, who had dropped out of the limelight, reportedly ate infected meat while travelling in India and contracted hepatitis. He died at the Royal Free Hospital in London of a bleeding pancreas. His death went unnoticed publicly at the time and even some years later the Walt Disney Archives told an inquisitive journalist that “we have been searching for an obituary or other information for years now”.
His on-screen father, Tomlinson, also experienced heartbreaking tragedy in his personal life. The former RAF pilot instructor was widowed at 26, when his American socialite wife Mary, depressed at not being able to bring her children to England, jumped out of a window on the 15th floor of the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York with her two sons, aged 8 and 6. All three died instantly. Comedian Miles Jupp, who later played Tomlinson in a one-man play, said: “Bits of his life were extremely sad. The death of his wife in very tragic circumstances had a great impact on him … his son, Henry, didn’t find out until he was a teenager that his father had been married before and his father’s first wife died in these circumstances.” Tomlinson admitted in his memoir, Luckier Than Most, that he “had never been able to bring myself to visit her grave”.
David Tomlinson, Glynis Johns, Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice go fly a kite in a scene from Mary Poppins. Photo / Getty Images
Tomlinson got on well with Disney, as did his on-screen children, who found the attention of the famous film mogul flattering. Dotrice said they called him “Uncle Walt” and she paid tribute to his “jolly” nature and “sparkly eyes”. His constant attendance on the set was partly to witness his beloved project come to life and partly to make sure it was his vision of the film that finally appeared and not Travers’s. Hair stylist La Rue Matheron remembered getting a telling-off from the studio boss because he had not followed Walt’s “specific instructions” about the exact style of Mary Poppins’ wig.
Disney had spent more than two decades trying to capture the film rights for Mary Poppins, which had been a favourite story of his 11-year-old daughter, Diane, but he and Travers fell out while making the film. Their fractious relationship was explored in the 2013 movie Saving Mr Banks, starring Emma Thompson as Travers and Tom Hanks as Disney.
Pamela Lyndon Travers was born on 9 August 1899 in Maryborough, Australia, (as Helen Lyndon Goff) and she moved to London in 1924, becoming a jobbing journalist, writing theatre and book reviews while trying to sell her poetry. She often blurred the truth about her past – dismissing biography as merely telling “what porridge you had for breakfast” – and berated journalists for asking “stupid questions” about her cryptic past life.
Ultimately, however, it was mining her family history that made her rich. Poppins’s mantra that “anything worth doing is worth doing well” came directly from her mother Margaret, while her Irish father Travers Goff was a bank manager. In the novel, though, the author glossed over their traumas, including her mother’s suicide attempt and the alcoholism that led to an early death for her father, when Travers was 7. Travers always seemed to want to escape from reality into fantasy.
Travers also liked to perpetuate the myth that, in her words, “the book was entirely spontaneous and not invented, not thought out”. She was dissembling. In November 1926 in New Zealand, she published a short story in the Christchurch newspaper The Sun, called Mary Poppins And the Match-Man. Her biographer Valerie Lawson in Mary Poppins, She Wrote, recorded that Travers believed in the idea but had come to regard that particular story as “false” and “weak”.
After moving to London she became friends with the poet George Russell, known as A E, and talked to him about her ideas for a novel. He suggested a story about a witch. She was struck by the idea of how to re-assemble Mary Poppins into a dramatic new novel, honing elements of a protagonist who can fly using an umbrella, slide up bannisters and unpack mountains of belongings from an empty carpetbag. Her original story had four children, which Disney cut to two.
There is no doubt Travers was an unusual character. She lived with the Navajos in the American West, studied Zen Buddhism and was interested in astrology, crop circles and reincarnation. One of her books was 1971′s Friend Monkey, a tale based on an Indian monkey god. “The Mary Poppins books were in essence Zen stories,” she once revealed.
The success of her first Poppins book also owed much to Madge Burnand, the daughter of the editor of Punch, who sent the manuscript to London publisher Gerald Howe. Burnand lived with Travers in an ancient thatched cottage in Mayfield, West Sussex, where the novel was completed while she was recuperating from illness. Burnand was widely believed to be a lover of Travers.
Her personal life was complicated and, frankly, somewhat barmy. In 1939, after the success of her original novel (there were seven further sequels, including Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1944) and, lastly, Mary Poppins and the House Next Door (1988)), she became interested in adopting a child. Her first idea was to adopt her teenage maid, offering to build her a bedroom beside her own writer’s study. The girl’s family refused. Then she adopted an Irish baby called Camillus, choosing him over his twin brother on the advice of a Californian astrologist she consulted.
Camillus grew up believing that “Daddy had had some kind of an accident and died in the tropics.” When he was 17, in a true quirk of fate, he ran into his twin brother in a pub in London and discovered the truth of his origins. Camillus became an alcoholic as an adult. Joseph Hone, who stayed with Travers and Camillus in the 1950s, told the Irish Examiner that “despite her airy-fairy fantasies, in her books and with her many mystic gurus, there was a steely, self-centred, very controlling woman.”
Travers’s fiction also reflected the backward views of her era – an aspect that has trapped Mary Poppins in controversy for more than half a century. In a 1974 interview, Travers insisted: “I have no racism in me. I wasn’t born with it. I was brought up by large-minded people who never had any sense of racism at all.” The issue rumbled on, however, and her novels were banned in 1981 by the San Francisco Library because of references to a “pickaninny”, racial stereotypes, her fictional warnings about the dangers of “black heathens”, use of minstrel dialect and jokes about “blacking up”. She rewrote passages for a revised edition that year, declaring: “I have done so not as an apology for anything I have written. The reason is much more simple: I do not wish to see Mary Poppins tucked away in a closet.”
Her detractors also note that she was happy to write book reviews for The New Pioneer, a virulently anti-Semitic British magazine of the far right in the 1930s, which was run by Labour MP John Beckett, founder of the fascist British People’s Party.
The issue of racism resurfaced in February 2024 when the 1964 film was reclassified from a U to a PG by the British Board of Film Classification, because of the frequent use of “Hottentot”, an archaic Dutch slur for the Khoekhoe, indigenous inhabitants of South Africa. The term parodied the language of the Khoikhoi, implying it was unintelligible gibberish. In the movie, an eccentric Admiral Boom sees coal-smeared chimney sweeps dancing on the rooftops and shouts, “we’re being attacked by Hottentots”.
The slur is used during one of the film’s memorable musical moments and two people who had the most antagonistic relations with Travers were brothers Richard M Sherman and Robert B Sherman, the film’s composer-lyricists. They had concerns over the original novel, which Richard outlined in a 2013 interview. “The story had no plot. It teemed with wonderful characters but there was no purpose to them. We knew there had to be a reason for Mary Poppins to arrive and leave, so we came up with the idea of a dysfunctional household that needed to be taught about caring for each other. We didn’t know whether the book’s author was a man or woman, alive or dead. It turned out she was a walking icicle.
“She didn’t like anything we did. Showing her our ideas was like walking out of a hot shower and having cold water thrown all over you. Her opening line was that she didn’t see why she should meet us since she didn’t want music in the film. In the two weeks we spent with her, she managed to destroy all the dreams, hopes and love we had built up.”
He later told the Jewish Chronicle that Travers insisted on taping every conversation the three of them had – “more than 40 hours of tape” – and he remembered her booming voice crying out, “I don’t want any of your songs. I only want Greensleeves.” She also derided the idea of Mary, Bert and the children leaping into a different world through a chalk drawing on the pavement, snorting when told it was “Disney magic”. She also complained about screenwriters Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi, saying they had “missed the point” of her novel. DaGradi remembered her carping about all the “prancing and dancing” in the script.
Julie Andrews in a scene from Mary Poppins.
Travers was proved wrong about the Shermans, of course, because their compositions – including A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Jolly Holiday, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Feed the Birds and Let’s Go Fly a Kite – became enduring musical classics. The song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious came from a Sherman brothers memory of going to summer camp where there was a contest to find a word longer than antidisestablishmentarianism. They came across Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. A Disney librarian later found the word “supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus” in a newspaper clipping from 1931. The idea for Spoonful of Sugar, incidentally, came from Robert’s son Jeff telling his father that the polio vaccine at school had been more palatable with a sugar cube.
Travers had got used to having substantial editorial control over her books – she chose the illustrator, the colour of the dust jackets and the typeface – so found it hard when she had to battle Disney over the direction of the movie adaptation. Armed with a contract that said she had total script approval, she sent him a nine-page letter – written on pink stationary – complaining about “unconscionable deviations” in the screenplay. Travers said that Disney’s courtship of her had been “as if he were dangling a watch, hypnotically, before the eyes of a child”. At the end of the day, though, she was happy to take the Disney dollar.
Relations had become so strained by the time of the world première of Mary Poppins – held at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on August 27, 1964, at which star guests such as Angie Dickinson and Maureen O’Hara were greeted by Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Snow White and the dwarfs – that (according to The New Yorker) she did not initially receive an invitation and had to embarrass a Disney executive into extending one.
She reportedly wept while watching the film and chased down Disney at the after-party, crying out loudly in front of guests that “the first thing that has to go is the animation sequence”. Disney, who knew he had made her rich – fixed her with a cold stare and said, “Pamela, the ship has sailed.” Disney strode off, leaving the crestfallen author to stand alone in her satin gown and white gloves.
Dick Van Dyke, Julie Andrews and friends in Mary Poppins. Photo / Getty Images
Her gripes with a film she believed to be “trivial and cloying” continued long after the première. “I was disturbed at seeing it so externalised, so oversimplified, so generalised,” she said in a 1967 interview. “I think that Mary Poppins needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.”
Travers was 96 when she died on April 23, 1996, at her home in Chelsea. She is buried at St Mary’s in Twickenham. One of her last complaints was to screenwriter Brian Sibley, who said, “since she died, Pamela’s been painted as an old dragon but it’s not true.” In the 1980s, she elaborated on her objections to the movie, writing to him to say: “What wand was waved to turn Mr Banks from an anxious, ever-loving father into a man who could cheerfully tear into pieces a poem that his children had written. How could dear, demented Mrs Banks, fussy, feminine and loving, become a suffragette? Why was Mary Poppins, already beloved for what she was – plain, vain and incorruptible – transmogrified into a soubrette?”
I’m not sure Mary Poppins is particularly saucy but she remains the central figure of the movie. Even so, the actors playing the minor characters had interesting back stories, too. For example, Brighton-born actor Arthur Treacher, who played the policeman, capitalised on his fame in America and put his name to a chain of restaurants called Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. At the peak of its popularity in the late 1970s, there were 826 branches across the US. Treacher claimed he brought the recipes from England and would sometimes arrive for visits to the restaurants in a red double-decker bus. Another fine member of the supporting cast was Hermione Baddeley, who played the cook Ellen. She was one of playwright Tennessee Williams’s favourite stage actresses and came from a distinguished acting family: her sister Angela Baddeley played the cook Mrs Bridges in Upstairs, Downstairs.
The film also marked the last screen appearance of Jane Darwell, who had won an Oscar for her portrayal of Ma Joad in John Ford’s acclaimed 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Disney was so keen to have Darwell play the Bird Woman who feeds the London pigeons that he called the 83-year-old at her retirement home and persuaded her to film one last role, even though she had heart problems.
Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews star in Mary Poppins.
Disney sent a limo to pick her up and had the production team design a special seat on the ersatz set of Saint Paul’s Cathedral to hide a pillow, making it more comfortable for the frail star. Disney’s favourite song in the film was Feed the Birds, which he believed was a “metaphor for the whole film”. His persistence helped create a truly magical moment.
Disney was excited to show the rough cut to the cast and was slightly taken back by Tomlinson’s reaction. “I thought it was the worst film I had ever seen, the most sentimental rubbish,” he later recalled. “And I practically said to dear darling Walt: ‘Well, you can’t win them all, Walt, can you?’’ I’m not always right, though!” He couldn’t have been more wrong.
By the time of the film’s UK première – at London’s Odeon Leicester Square, on December 17, 1964 – it was already a smash hit, grossing more than US$100 million. “It was really glam. I got to sit next to Princess Margaret and on the other side of me was Queen Elizabeth,” recalled Dotrice. “So I wasn’t watching the movie, I was looking sideways at royalty! Every little girl’s fantasy is to be a princess and sitting next to them was much more interesting than the film.”
Despite its many anachronisms, including special effects that look about as realistic as the opening sequence of Bagpuss, Mary Poppins retains, for millions of viewers, real charm, fun and warmth. Perhaps it also offers the appeal of wallowing in a bygone era of Englishness, when a banker like George Banks could boast with a straight face that “the British pound is the admiration of the world”.
