Why the creator Mary Poppins was loved much less than her heroine, and she herself hated Disney

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The authors of popular children's books seem to be special people. Thin, sympathetic, child-loving and wonderful, impeccable parents. This is not always the case. Mary Poppins' creator Pamela Travers was a rather … complex person.

Three sisters

Together with the future Pamela, the Goff family had, like in a fairy tale, three daughters. Why "future"? Because Pamela was called by the metric then rather boring: Helen. There was nothing more fabulous. His father, a bank clerk, suffered from a stereotypical Irish ailment - he drank a lot.

Once he, an Irish boy from a not the best area of London, managed to make a wonderful career, even if he had to move to Australia for this. He rose to the rank of bank manager. But due to drunkenness, he performed his duties all the worse. He was demoted, and then he died altogether. The official cause was an epileptic fit, but the family was convinced that Mr. Goff had just gotten drunk. Maybe before the seizure.

Mrs. Goff, with her three daughters in her arms, did not have much to go to. It was 1907, and one could only dream of kindergartens and quarries in most places on earth. She asked to live with her aunt Christine, especially since she was a wealthy woman - she owned a sugar plantation.

Among the three sisters, Helen was, of course, the ringleader. She loved to play theater, invent fairy tales. She also loved simpler games: she appointed herself as a neighbor, and sisters as chickens, and “cared for” them all day. When she was sent to a girls' boarding school at the age of fourteen, Helen felt it was a betrayal. She defied teachers, quarreled with students and seemed to either become a school outcast, or achieve exclusion by spitting on money.

Maybe in England they tried to break her with a series of punishments, but the morals in Australia were much more liberal. The headmistress of the school found out that Helen Lyndon Goff loves to write stories and act out scenes from them, and invited her to participate in the school theater. Goff agreed half reluctantly - she felt that she was being bribed, but in the end, of course, she got involved and became one of the favorites of the school inhabitants.

Pamela's Appearance and Mary's Birth

No one doubted that Helen Goff had a glorious future. Although she had to quit her studies at the age of sixteen and go to work as a journalist so as not to hang on the neck of the family, it was clear that the girl would not disappear. Her still girlish poems were published by a literary magazine, her articles could not be praised by the editor, and at the age of seventeen she easily entered the service in the theater in Sydney. It was then that Pamela Travers appeared. Helen Goff sounded too dry, and the girl was asked to come up with a pseudonym. She took her father's name with her last name, and picked up the name just more beautiful and sonorous.

Being a second-tier actress is not very profitable, unless you start to succumb to the suggestions of fans of young second-tier actresses, and Travers found herself a second job - writing for a newspaper in Sydney. So, in the morning she wrote, rehearsed during the day, played in the evening, slept without hind legs at night - normal youth.

At the same time, Pamela did not stop writing magical stories, just for herself. In one of the magical stories, the heroine was Mary Poppins, a stern woman with short black hair and blue eyes, in general, a typical Irish servant. She suddenly fell in love with her creator, and after finishing the story, Pamela often returned to Mary's thoughts.

In 1934, when Pamela was thirty-five, she finally made a full-fledged book out of her stories about Mary and, as they say, woke up famous. Mary Poppins in the English world fell in love right away - for the recognizable type and such unexpected magic behind him, for childhood, in which they talk to children, and do not resemble the rule "children should be seen but not heard." For well-aimed jokes. For, after all, very urgent problems.

Travers later published several books about Mary. Of course, they did not surpass the popularity of the very first, but they all parted very well. P. L. Travers became J. K. Rowling of her time and also so famous that she could no longer hide that the author of fairy tales was a woman. And she, of course, had to hide. She even signed articles with initials, and not with a name - the publishers insisted that otherwise no one would read them.

Moscow excursion

In 1932, Travers traveled to the distant and mysterious Soviet Union. Her journey was frankly disappointing: foreigners were shown factories, kindergartens illuminated by electricity and other achievements of industrialization, but children in kindergartens and industrialization around the world are about the same. Does a traveler want to see them?

Returning from a trip, Travers wrote a book that gave her a good income. She described Soviet Moscow with great irony, so, of course, the Soviet authorities did not like the book. Admittedly, this was not the first time Travers had monetized her travel experiences. Back in 1925, she moved from Sydney to London and landed on the English coast with rather miserable luggage and ten pounds in her pocket, five of which she immediately lost. But they managed to immediately add notes about the journey across two oceans, so Travers did not reach a desperate situation.

In the book about the USSR, which Pamela called "Moscow excursion", there were many moments that the modern reader would rather find witty.

“We said goodbye to the director on the steps of the House of Culture, but he shouted statistical data after us for a long time.” "Every second person in Russia is a director of something," "his English was rather closer to Russian." "We become infected with the habit that we notice in every Russian we meet: to live half-heartedly, saving precious energy, and we learn to endure, endure, endure."

“But women push harder and harder in trams. They are better suited for this. In Russia, there is a rule that any passenger, even if he only takes one stop, must enter the tram from behind and then wade through the crowded carriage in order (if he remains alive) to get out from the other end. The women clear their way, desperately pushing their hips, and the sea, by some miracle, parting."

When children in the USSR, as in many other countries, fell in love with books about Mary Poppins, Soviet publishing houses in the author's biographies never indicated that she had a book about Leningrad and Moscow in the thirties (which, by the way, contains many photographs). Otherwise, maybe someone would have started looking for this book!

Pamela Travers and the insidious Disney

During World War II, Pamela lived in New York (which, perhaps, does not do her the honor, since the women of London worked in hospitals between the bombings or replaced in other jobs for men who had gone to the front; even the future Queen Elizabeth was a nurse and driver of a slung truck). Upon learning of this, Walt Disney decided to please his little daughter and negotiate with Travers about the adaptation of books about Mary Poppins.

Travers took Disney with hostility. She did not like the idea of using animation in the movie about Mary, which Disney would have - she felt it - put and she did not like how he changed other fairy tales, such as "The Ugly Duckling" and "Pinocchio" during the film adaptation. She didn't want her book to be twisted.

Nevertheless, Disney did not lose hope and many years later, in the late fifties, managed to convince Travers to sign a contract. One of the conditions was the ability of the writer to influence what was happening on the set. Disney had no idea that this would turn into a war. There were fierce debates about literally every scene, and the musical inserts simply infuriated the writer.

Announcing that the filming was over and there was only editing ahead, Disney waited for Travers to leave and reshoot everything in his own way. Naturally, he did not invite the writer to the premiere. She came herself and sobbed in the hall. Sobbed with humiliation.

She wrote a book about a family that suffered from the economic crisis of the thirties. A needy family. About the nanny who represents all Irish nannies and governesses in the world: a real, strict, but kind-hearted lady, ugly, with a large foot, but at the same time she knows how to be infinitely elegant. How, in this world of impending poverty, a nanny saves the childhood of children. About how parents remain tender, despite all the troubles.

On the screen, a pretty little lady in frills sang and danced, Mrs. Banks turned out to be a hypocrite who makes speeches for women's rights outside the house and spreads herself in front of her husband in the house, and Mr. Banks - rich and hard-hearted, capable of tearing up poems written for him by children. And, of course, there was no crisis of the thirties, there were prosperous pre-war times. It was a radically different story! Several coincidences do not make the story the same if the main thing is lost.

Travers intercepted Disney as he walked out of the theater, enjoying his triumph. “You can still fix it,” she told him sternly. "First, remove the animation." “It's already over,” Disney replied indifferently and left. Travers did not forgive him, and although he then offered her a contract for the continuation with even more favorable conditions, she answered with a firm refusal.

Miss Travers' Big Oddities

However, Pamela was considered an eccentric person long before the Disney story. Firstly, because of her passion for mysticism and esotericism. Even after moving to London, she, of course, entered the circle of Irish fellow tribesmen. These were poets with mystical hobbies. So she became infected with beliefs strange for Catholics.

Before the war, she met the famous guru of esoteric lovers in the west, Gurdjieff, and became his disciple. Didn't do anything important without consulting my astrologer. And even on the advice of an astrologer, when I wanted to adopt little twin boys, grandchildren of one writer, I took only one of them. True, in those days it was even considered progressive: doctors and teachers everywhere recommended separating twins, insisting that this would make their development faster.

All her life, Pamela was very reluctant to answer questions about her biography. Probably, many things in her life seemed too ugly to her. And the alcoholic father, and the provincial childhood at the end of the world, and the train of rumors that usually follow the young actresses of the second echelon. But Travers was so intoxicated with her work that she told everyone that the psychologist, during one of the episodes of depression, recommended that she re-read her own books about Mary Poppins. And Travers reread it, and was delighted, and healed!

Travers has had many romances, but she has never been married. Perhaps the fact is that in marriage she would have to abandon that part of nature that was drawn to women: half of her novels were lesbian. Or perhaps the nervous, full of strange ideas and stubborn Travers was generally of little use for family life.

To the adopted boy Camille, Pamela lied that he was her own son, and his father, they say, had died. When, much later, at seventeen, Camille met his brother, who knew perfectly well that he had a twin, he was shocked by the lies of his adoptive mother. - True, after a long conversation, I made up with her.

In her will, however, Travers left almost all the money not to him, but to her grandchildren. True, not out of a desire to punish something: Camille became addicted to alcohol as a student. Pamela was simply afraid to trust money to a person suffering from alcoholism. She remembered very well how her father behaved.

When one of the most famous children's writers died in 1996, the world press almost ignored this fact. She did not live to her centenary, only three years. Before her death, she was surrounded by admirers - not readers, but disciples for whom she was a mystical guru. They say she was happy.

As annoying as it was for Travers, the directors continued to shoot in their own way. Mary Poppins in the Movie: Which Actress Became the Real Lady of Perfection.

Text: Lilith Mazikina.