will ever exchange. Pamela Travers is a long-time devotee of Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Yeats and Blake. For her, the Mary Poppins books were never just children’s stories, but intensely personal reflections of her Alphabetti Spaghetti blend of philosophy, mysticism, theosophy, Zen Buddhism, duality, and the oneness of everything. In the last year of her life, she will reveal to an interviewer that Mary Poppins is related to the mother of God. Disney’s own conception of the finger-clicking nanny is rather more straightforward.
Nothing about the film of Mary Poppins has been easy. The contract alone took sixteen years to negotiate: Travers finally accepts 5 per cent of gross profits, with a guarantee of $100,000. But this is to prove inadequate compensation: she soon begins to complain that Disney is ‘without subtlety and emasculates any character he touches, replacing truth with false sentimentality’.
Walt Disney’s attitude to Travers is one of damage limitation. He wants to keep her on board, but positioned as far as possible from the driver’s seat. This does not stop Travers making frequent lunges for the steering wheel, generally with a view to forcing the vehicle into reverse. She complains about everybody and everything, even stretching to the type of measuring tape Mary Poppins would use.*
She objects to all the Americanisms that seem to be creeping in – ‘outing’, ‘freshen up’, ‘on schedule’, ‘Let’s go fly a kite’ – and considers the servants much too common and vulgar. Furthermore, the Banks home is much too grand, and any suggestion of a romance between Mary Poppins and the cockney chimneysweep Bert is utterly distasteful. Finally, she objects to Mrs Banks being portrayed as a suffragette, and considers the Christian name they impose on her – Cynthia – ‘unlucky, cold and sexless’, her own preference being Winifred.
Travers even believes her responsibilities extend to the casting.* The day after Julie Andrews gives birth, she phones her in hospital. ‘P.L. Travers here. Speak to me. I want to hear your voice.’ When they finally meet, her first remark to the actress is, ‘Well, you’ve got the nose for it.’
Mary Poppins is a worldwide success. Costing $5.2 million to make, it grosses $50 million. But the more the money rolls in, the more Travers’ attitude to the film and its creator sours. She tells Ladies’ Home Journal that she hated parts of the film, like the animated horse and pig, and disapproved of Mary Poppins kicking up her gown and showing her underwear, and disliked the billboards saying ‘Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins’ when they should have said ‘P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins’.
She writes to a friend that Disney wishes her dead, and is furious with her for not obliging. ‘After all, until now, all his authors have been dead and out of copyright.’ But there is always the promise of a sequel, and yet more money. It is only when Disney dies in December 1966† that her objections become more concentrated and vocal. In 1967, she says that the film was ‘an emotional shock, which left me deeply disturbed’, and in 1968 that she ‘couldn’t bear’ it – ‘all that smiling’. In 1972, she declares in a lecture that ‘When I was doing the film with George Disney – that is his name, isn’t it – George? – he kept insisting on a love affair between Mary Poppins and Bert. I had a terrible time with him.’
Her invitation to the world premiere is, it later emerges, not achieved without a struggle. Failing to receive an invitation, she instructs her lawyer, agent and publisher to demand one on her behalf. When it is still not forthcoming, she sends a telegram to Disney himself, informing him she is in the States, and plans on attending the premiere: she is sure somebody will find a seat for her, and will he let her know the details? Her attendance is, she adds, essential ‘for the dignity of the books’.
Disney writes back saying that he has always been counting on her presence at the London premiere, but is now delighted to know she will also be able to come to the premiere in Los Angeles. And yes, they will happily hold a seat for her.
P.L. TRAVERS
WATCHES OVER
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
The American Hospital of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine
October 30th 1949
Any meeting between the living and the dead is inevitably one-sided. Do they know something we don’t know?
On October 30th 1949, P.L. Travers sits all night in a private room on the first floor of the American Hospital of Paris, gazing lovingly at the corpse of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
Pamela first encountered Gurdjieff thirteen years ago, in 1936, at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Fontainebleau. After spending much of her life pursuing poets and mystics, she found in Gurdjieff what she had long been looking for, and was particularly drawn to his unusual emphasis on finding truth through dance. Back in London, she was to teach these Gurdjieffian dances before progressing to teaching the teachers; she spread his beliefs for the rest of her life.
Gurdjieff was a guru with an opaque past. Half Armenian, half Greek, he cultivated obscurity about many things, not least his age.* He tried his hand at many trades, dealing, in different places and at different times, in a range of products including carpets, antiques, oil, fish, caviar, false eyelashes, sparrows and corsets.
But around 1912, he found his calling as a guru, his core belief being that ‘modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies’. Only by subscribing to Gurdjieff’s special training could modern man snap out of it, rise to a higher level of consciousness, and find God, or, as Gurdjieff preferred to call Him, ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endless’.
Among his many other beliefs was that the moon lives off the energy of dead human beings, known as Askokin, and controls all man’s actions. To guard against rebellion, the higher powers have implanted an organ at the base of man’s spine called the Kundabuffer, which stops him becoming too intelligent.* Only those who follow Gurdjieff’s path can break away from their fate as food for the moon, and thus attain immortality.
P.L. Travers’ most famous creation, the flying nanny Mary Poppins, might be seen as Gurdjieff in a long dress, shorn of his handlebar moustache and propelled by an umbrella: in some of the stories, Poppins guides her charges to the secrets of the universe, with the planets all indulging in a great cosmic dance. In the chapter ‘The New One’ in Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mr and Mrs Banks give birth to a new baby, Annabel, who, it emerges, is formed from the sea, sky, stars and sun. Mary Poppins is, to all intents and purposes, one of the enlightened, aware of worlds beyond.
As Pamela Travers sits beside the corpse of Gurdjieff, she believes that the real Gurdjieff is somewhere else, somewhere on another plain, reunited with the being he used to call the Most Most [sic] Holy Sun Absolute. Alive, he was the most earthy of men, enjoying huge three-course meals, washed down with Armagnac, while his followers made do with bowls of thin soup. Some non-believers found his personal habits unseemly. In his palatial flat at his institute in Paris, he often didn’t bother to visit the lavatory, preferring to defecate willy-nilly. ‘There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls,’ recalls one of the residents. He demanded unquestioning obedience from his wealthy followers, and enjoyed humiliating them; it was almost as though he relished the sight of grown men in tears. He was a stranger to celibacy, and loved to boast of all the babies he had fathered, peppering his pidgin English with the word ‘fuck’. But for his devotees this only added to his air of other-worldliness: surely a guru so un-gurulike could not possibly be a fraud?
The Second World War separated the guru from his protégée. Stuck in Paris, Gurdjieff refused to let the Nazi occupation hinder his lifestyle, feasting on delicacies from local suppliers attained with promises – bogus, as it turned out – of massive wealth owed to him from a Texan oilfield.
The moment the war was over, Pamela travelled to Paris on one of the first trains. She sat with Gurdjieff’s other disciples and imbibed his latest thoughts and aphorisms such as ‘Mathematic is useless. You cannot learn laws of world creation and world existence by mathematic,’ and ‘Useless study Freud or Jung.