The Editors of LIFE - LIFE Mary Poppins: The Magic, the Adventure, the Love

MARY POPPINS

AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY

Dick Van Dyke as Bert and Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins in the films celebrated Jolly Holiday sequence.

Mary Poppins

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eISBN: 978-1-54784-716-7

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Vol. 18, No. 26 December 7, 2018

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FRONT COVER: Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews, 1964. AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY

BACK COVER: WALT DISNEY PICTURES, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

INSIDE BACK COVER: PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

CONTENTS

PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY

A SCENE FROM THE NEW MOVIE musical Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel to Disneys classic 1964 film: From left to right, Jane (Emily Mortimer), John (Nathanael Saleh), Annabel (Pixie Davies), Ellen (Julie Walters), Georgie (Joel Dawson), Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), and Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt).

CHAPTER ONE

DISNEYS GAMBLE

Having finally secured the rights to Mary Poppins (sort of), the producer hired two brothers to start writing the songs... without knowing if the movie could ever be made

GRANGER

WALT DISNEY IS SHOWN IN 1944, the year he released The Three Caballeros. The film was a low-budget offering from an era of wartime austerity, Stephen Cavalier, author of The World History of Animation, tells LIFE. Yet it was interesting and fresh visually, due to some experimental special effects supervised by Ub Iwerks. Nearly two decades later, these effects would come to full fruition in Mary Poppins.

In 1944, Walt Disney was suffering from what he called the D.D.s disillusionment and discouragement. The man who had revolutionized cinema with 1937s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, had been demoralized by a studio strike in 1941 and was now cheerlessly churning out war propaganda. His enthusiasm for film had dimmed considerably, but some of the old magic returned that December when he found his 11-year-old daughter, Diane, laughing over Mary Poppins, the 1934 book by P.L. Travers. In fact, Diane loved the books about the magical British nanny so much (there were three at the time) that she made her father promise to turn them into a movie. He agreed, though he had no way of knowing what he was up against.

For starters, TraversPamela Lyndon Travers, that isflatly rejected Disneys first offer. Mary Poppins was not for sale, she said. Indeed, she had already rebuffed many other suitorsthe producer Samuel Goldwyn, the director Vincente Minnelli, and fledgling composer Stephen Sondheim among them. But Disney never gave up. Over the next 20 years, he repeatedly approached the writer with transatlantic phone calls and flattering letters. Dismissing these as forays into the jungle, Travers kept saying nountil 1959, when Disney offered her $100,000 and 5 percent of the films gross. This was a veritable fortune for a woman whose book sales had been steadily declining and who was chiefly surviving on the money that she made by renting out rooms in her London home. Not surprisingly, Travers accepted, though she later claimed that Disney had hoodwinked her. It was as if he were dangling a watch, hypnotically, before the eyes of a child, she said.

Even in signing on with Disney, Travers was hardly a pushover. In addition to the money, she received script approval, which was almost unheard of in a Disney productionand something she would shortly use against him. But for now, the filmmaker was free to develop his long-delayed pet project. The heart of the story that had captivated millions of readers was in hand. What Disney needed next was the musicthe songs that could help shape the narrative as it moved off the page and onto the big screen.

Disney began the making of Mary Poppins by summoning to his office his go-to songwriting team: Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, thirty-something brothers who had been writing songs for the studio. Do you boys know what a nanny is? Disney asked.

Yeah, Richard said. Its a goat.

The Shermans could hardly have been expected to be familiar with British domestic traditions. Born in New York City in 1925 and 1928 respectively, Robert and Richard were the sons of Al (a Tin Pan Alley songwriter) and Rose (a silent-film actress). As the silent-film era came to an end in the late 1920s, New Yorkbased songwriters were suddenly in demand in HollywoodAl among them. Having been offered a job by a film executive, he drove his family west in an old Chevy. It was a long, tedious trip out to California, Richard said in 2009s The Boys: The Sherman Brothers Story, the definitive documentary about the duo. I remember that we had no air conditioning at the time, so it was blistering hot.