That Time the Author of Mary Poppins Cried at the Film Premiere

Heyo! Happy Monday! It's been a minute and I apologize, but I am TRYING! I hope you find this week's subject interesting, even if it's old news. I've wanted to write about it since starting this series.

Pamela Lyndon Travers

If you know me, you know I LOVE Disney films. A Disney film near and dear to my heart is Mary Poppins. The film came out 33 years before I was born and I didn't watch it for the first time til I was thirteen when my best friend at the time gave me a copy because it was her favorite childhood movie and she was surprised I'd never seen it. The film soundtrack is one of my most listened-to Disney soundtracks. So it was no surprise in 2013 when Saving Mr. Banks was released and I watched as soon as I could. Being a history nerd, I was not going to miss a movie about how one of my favorite movies was made.

Saving Mr. Banks is about the production of the 1964 Mary Poppins film. It stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P.L Travers. If you are unfamiliar with the name, Pamela Lyndon Travers is the author of the Mary Poppins books that inspired Disney to create the film. When I watch a biopic or documentary, I bury myself in everything I can read and learn about the topic. So of course I started by reading P.L. Travers's Wikipedia page and continued my research from there.

Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

At the end of Saving Mr. Banks, Travers is seen crying at the film premiere of Mary Poppins. It is portrayed as a moment of catharsis as she is getting closure for her father's death, which happened when she was seven years old. While Travers DID cry at the premiere, it was not tears of joy or catharsis. It was tears of embarrassment and disappointment. But let's start at the beginning to explain why.

Walt Disney has spent two decades trying to get the rights to the Mary Poppins books. His daughter had read the books and loved them. So he wanted to make a film adaption. Why did it take twenty years for Travers to finally give him the rights? She was down on her luck money-wise. I don't think she'd ever have agreed to it if she didn't need the money.

P.L Travers

Travers is credited as a consultant on the film, but she was not a fan of what they were doing to her story and her character. She believed that the Disney version of Mary Poppins was diluted and made to be nicer than she is portrayed in the books. She despised the animated and did not like the musical theme of the film. Richard Sherman, who composed the music for the film with his brother, Robert, explained that there wasn't much that she did agree with while they were creating the film.

I don't want to say anyone had specifically said she was difficult to work with, but they didn't have to. As a writer myself, I don't see her being "difficult" while consulting as a negative thing. When it comes to writing, the story and the characters are a part of you. So of course you'd want justice to be done for your work. However, that is probably why she wasn't invited to the premiere.

And I bet you're wondering how was she not invited to the premiere if she cried at it? Travers did eventually get an invitation after she strong-armed a Disney executive. As she should. The fact t hat she didn't receive an invitation initially is beyond disrespectful. But Disney is the same studio that made a film nearly half a decade later and painted themselves in the most positive light while rewriting history.

(L to R) Julie Andrews, Walt Disney, and P.L. Travers at the Mary Poppins premiere

Valerie Lawson wrote a biography about Travers titled Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers. In the biography, Lawson states:

"During the premiere, Pamela cried, to the embarrassment of Disney and his staff. It was such a shock, the name on the screen, Mary Poppins. So sudden. It hardly mattered, then, that her name was in such small type, listed as 'consultant' at first, then in the line 'Based on the stories of P.L. Travers'."

Travers became very upset at the animated sequences in the film. Specifically, she resented that the penguins were animated instead of live-action. An article from The New Yorker takes a story from Richard Sherman about when Travers tracked down Walt Disney at the premiere after-party.

"Well," she said loudly, "The first thing that has to go is the animated sequence." Disney looked at her cooly. "Pamela," he replied, "the ship has sailed."

Travers despised the Disney film adaption to the point that she banned any future film adaptions. When Cameron Mackintosh came to her asking to make a stage adaption that would become the Mary Poppins stage musical, she allowed it on the condition that absolutely no one involved in the 1964 film would work on it. That excluded the Sherman Brothers from writing additional songs for the musical, though she did allow the use of songs from the film.

Despite everything, in 1977, Travers stated "I've seen it once or twice, and I've learned to live with it. It's glamourous and it's a good film on its own level, but I don't think it is very like my books". So she did eventually make peace with it. Some say she even made peace with Walt Disney before their deaths. I'll admit I've never read the Mary Poppins books, but I love the Disney films and the stage musical.

P.L. Travers

If you enjoyed learning about this weird time in history, please check out my other That Time... posts! And if you have any other weird moments in history that interest you, drop them in the comments! I'm always looking for new things to learn and write about. Have a great week!