As a film reviewer, a young British woman named P.L. Travers, writing about the movie “Snow White” in 1937, pronounced Walt Disney a shameless purveyor of cheeseball crap: “There is a profound cynicism,” she wrote, “at the root of his, as of all, sentimentality.”
Travers would go on to experience that personally: She is the author of the “Mary Poppins” series, and the subject of the forthcoming Disney movie, “Saving Mr. Banks,” about the studio’s — and Walt’s — struggles to wrest the magical tale from the grasping talons of the tiresome spinster who penned it.
Or that’s the story Disney is selling, with the ultra-likable Tom Hanks in the role of Walt and Emma Thompson playing Travers, a woman the actress referred to in an interview as “so awful and so irritating.” Another recent story, in Variety, called her “a pill no spoonful of sugar could sweeten.”
Can’t a feisty literary legend catch a break?
Travers is one of the only authors who ever stood up to the Disney juggernaut, demanding a level of involvement and approval that most in her position were denied. She did it in an era, and an industry, where women were few and far between and faced an uphill struggle just to be heard at all. Most of all, she invented the beloved character, a mysterious nanny who’s blown into the Banks family’s lives by the east wind, iconic umbrella held aloft. If not for Travers’ wild imagination, there would be no Mary, no movie.
“I don’t think Disney had the faintest idea of what to expect when she turned up [on the ‘Poppins’ set],” says Brian Sibley, a British writer who worked with Travers in the 1980s on a never-realized sequel to the film. “She was an immensely complex person. Amazingly independent and strong, very determined, very strong-willed.”
As strong-willed, it turned out, as Disney — a man used to getting his own way. “Disney brought her to Hollywood and decided he would charm her into making this film,” says Marc Eliot, author of “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince.”
“But she wasn’t very charm-able. She was a tough woman — not quirky or cute. She didn’t like American movies, and she hated animation more than anything else.”
Travers demanded there be no cartoon elements in the movie (a battle she ultimately lost). She thought the songs, like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” were stupid. And she resented the romantic relationship that was ginned up between Mary (Julie Andrews) and chimney sweep Bert (Dick Van Dyke).
The self-assured Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goff in 1899, had a history of going against the grain, a fact Disney almost certainly was not aware of. She never married, in a time when an unwed woman was profoundly stigmatized. She dated both men and women, ran with a crowd of A-list British poets and had a deep and formative interest in mysticism, myth and fairy tales. She was an adventurer who grew up in the Australian Outback; as an adult, she changed her name, moved to London and worked as an actress, a dancer, an erotica writer and a journalist. She spent two summers living on an American Indian reservation, studying the culture.
She did not suffer fools gladly, and she was never happy with the cheery and sanitized movie Disney ultimately made out of her book.
Unlike the tidy conclusion of “Saving Mr. Banks” — a happy ending, as this is a Disney film, too — Travers was never won over by the man, his studio employees or the film. She wept through the premiere of 1964’s “Mary Poppins,” an event she was initially not even invited to. Contrary to “Mr. Banks,” they were not tears of joy but of profound frustration. She spent the rest of her life maligning what she saw as the maudlin mess her Mary Poppins had become on the big screen.
Travers died in 1996, at the age of 96, irascible until the end. She had once said she looked forward to knowing all the answers in old age, but when asked about that at the age of 94, she barked at a reporter: “Here I am, sitting in my chair, and I don’t think I’m going to know all the answers. I’m human!”
Now, Disney is coming back to soften and romanticize the sharp-tongued, endlessly creative woman herself — as well as its shoddy treatment of her opinions.
“Disney had no creative respect for this woman,” says Eliot. “He wanted a property, and once he got it he completely ignored her input and all the restrictions she had agreed to. And that’s how the film got made.
“That revisionist history — that’s part of the myth of Walt Disney.”