Remembering Pamela Travers: Creator of Mary Poppins

Valerie Lawson is one of Australia’s leading journalists, and the author of the critically acclaimed The Allens Affair. Her Mary Poppins, She Wrote – The Life of P  L Travers, the life story of the author of the classic Mary Poppins books, was first released in 1999, published in 2005 in the UK and USA, and re-released in Australia in 2010, and was. short listed for the Kibble Awards. On Tuesday 6 July 2010, Valerie Lawson addressed The Sydney Institute giving an insight into the crowded and colourful life of this enigmatic (Australian) author.

REMEMBERING PAMELA TRAVERS: CREATOR OF MARY POPPINS

VALERIE LAWSON

Many of you are likely to watch The Gruen Transfer, the ABC TV program about the hidden and persuasive ways of the advertising industry. Every week in this program, a couple of advertising agencies are given the task of making a TV commercial to sell something that’s odd, or unlovable or a tremendous challenge. For instance, saving a species that’s not naturally lovable like pandas but more like a warthog or porcupine.

Why is so little known of this woman? And why does no one seem to know that she is an Australian?

I’ve often thought of how one could market Pamela Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, not because she wasn’t lovable – she was, as a young woman – but because she was such a secretive person who did everything she could to hide her personal life. Sometimes, she even claimed that she would like to be called Anon. In direct contrast, she created a character that is so well known her name is almost a product or slogan, Mary Poppins. Trouble with the children? Send for Mary Poppins. Stockmarket falling again, life getting on top of you? Call for Mary Poppins. Yesterday, the business commentator Alan Kohler even depicted the Prime Minister as Mary Poppins, when he wrote “Julia Gillard really is a prime minister who ‘Gets Things Done’ – the Mary Poppins of tax policy”.

One centre of Poppins as a product is Maryborough, the Queensland city where Pamela Travers was born in 1899. This week, the city is celebrating its eleventh annual Mary Poppins Week and the local paper, the Fraser Coast Chronicle, reported last weekend that “the Mary Poppins brand is in global demand right now”. The report goes on to mention the Mary Poppins stage musical about to open in Melbourne and the plans for Bowral to have its own Mary Poppins celebration, as Pamela lived there as a teenager. The mayor of Maryborough said he was not upset by competition from Bowral, as there was “enough of Mary Poppins to be shared with everyone”. The local council in Maryborough was promising “new Mary Poppins products and experiences, including murals and a Magical Mary interactive tour”.

Pamela Travers lived in four places before she left Australia forever: Maryborough; Allora, a small town in Queensland; Bowral; and the Sydney suburb of Ashfield. There are statues of Mary Poppins in three of them, with Bowral launching a competition to have one too. But for most of Australia, Pamela Travers, or P. L. Travers, as she liked to be called, was and is a total mystery.

When I’ve been interviewed about her, the two questions most often asked of me are:  Why is so little known of this woman? And why does no one seem to know that she is an Australian?

Travers seemed to enjoy creating a maze of misleading information especially about her early life in Australia, even claiming to be brought up on a sugar plantation

To start with her name – Pamela Travers – was entirely manufactured. Her real name was Helen Lyndon Goff but she was known to her family and friends as Lyndon, a name she shared with the president of the United States, LBJ. Through a series of transformations she became Pamela Travers, then P L Travers, and finally Dr Travers when she accepted an honorary doctorate from a rather obscure American college. The “Pamela” part came about because respectable young women in the early twentieth century did not always use their real names when they went on stage and one of Pamela’s earliest occupations was in the theatre, as an actress and dancer. She took the name Pamela, a fashionable name at the time, and added the name Travers as her surname, in honour of her father, Travers Goff, whom she dearly loved.

In her next career move, as an author, she eliminated the Pamela and became P L Travers. The initials hid her gender, which was partly her intention. P L could be a man’s initials and although she was a feminist in some ways, she also thought she would be would be taken more seriously if she was a man. Incidentally, she also insisted she didn’t write for children, as I think being a children’s writer was not as important in her mind as being a writer for adults. Of course, in her use of initials, she has a famous contemporary in J K Rowling, but Pamela’s initials were also much more common in her day than they are now. She may have modelled herself on J M Barrie and A A Milne, but she also moved in the same circles as T S Eliot, W B Yeats, G B Shaw, and D H Lawrence and she loved to quote E M Forster. But the most important initial man in her life was the Irish editor and writer, George William Russell who was known by the initials A E.

Pamela’s mother told her children she was going to commit suicide and ran away to throw herself in a river like Ophelia.

So there’s one disguise, the pseudonym and initials. But what else made Pamela so secretive that she followed in the path of Mary Poppins herself, the nanny who boasted that she “never told anybody anything”? If she was not being secretive, she liked to invent her past, for Travers seemed to enjoy creating a maze of misleading information especially about her early life in Australia, even claiming to be brought up on a sugar plantation in Queensland as the daughter of a plantation manager when in fact her father was a bank manager and she was brought up in houses attached to the bank where her father worked.

She once told a group of students, “You’re trying to find out my secrets. A secret is something that must not be told.” She told journalists, “I don’t wear my private life on my sleeve” and “I have suffered a lot in my life. I will only share my suffering with my pillow.”

She decided to adopt a boy, one of the grandchildren of Yeats’ first biographer, Joseph Hone.

Certainly, her secrecy was to do with the common idea of the early twentieth century that one’s private life was private and it was slightly vulgar to talk of it in public. But I think it was her suffering that caused her secrecy, for she had much to cover up. First there was the shame, due to alcoholism, not her own but her father’s. He drank to excess and died of alcohol related illness in his 40s when Pamela was seven. The family then had to rely on charity and things were so bad at one stage that Pamela’s mother told her children she was going to commit suicide and ran away to throw herself in a river like Ophelia. Through a very unfortunate chain of events she also ended up with a son who became an alcoholic. This came about because Pamela, after a brief and exciting career in Sydney, as an actor, dancer and then journalist and poet, sailed for England aged 24. In London she contacted the editor of the Irish Statesman, George William Russell who befriended her and published her poems and brought her into the circle of such men as Yeats, Lady Gregory, Bernard Shaw and Francis MacNamara with whom she fell in love. He did not love her, was a womaniser, and left her with a broken heart.

You can see why she wrote in an addendum to her will: “Although I have no objection to anyone writing about my work, I do not want any personal material recorded.

In her late 30s,  Travers decided she wanted to adopt a child and approached her maid and cleaner, Doris, a girl of 14, who lived close to Pamela’s home of the time, in Mayfield, a village in Sussex. When Doris and her parents turned Pamela down, she decided to adopt a boy, one of the grandchildren of Yeats’ first biographer, Joseph Hone. These grandchildren, in turn, were being offered for adoption from their home in Dublin, as their own father was an alcoholic and they could not be cared for at home.

Among the children up for adoption were twins, Camillus and Anthony, whom Pamela first saw on two single beds in the family home in Dublin. Anthony was gurgling and cheerful and Camillus was crying. She chose the crying baby, Camillus, who did not discover he was adopted until he was in his late teens, and then only by accidentally meeting his twin brother in London. Camillus claims this trauma led him to the bottle, and he became a chronic alcoholic. So, Pamela had no husband, her one son was an alcoholic, and she had also had two rather ambiguous but probably lesbian associations with women. One was Madge Burnand, the daughter of the editor of Punch, with whom she lived in Mayfield, the place where she wrote the first volume of Mary Poppins’ stories in 1934.

Why was it that she did not like to be known as Australian and why do most people not even know she is Australian?

All those circumstances and sadnesses added up to the most painful of human emotions, shame. So you can see why she wrote in an addendum to her will: “Although I have no objection to anyone writing about my work, I do not want any personal material recorded. Therefore I do not wish any biography of myself to be written nor are my letters to be published at any time”.  Of course no one can control what happens after they die and the problem for Pamela was that she sold what amounts to 28 cartons of private material to the State Library of NSW in 1989, before her death in 1996. So, much of the private information is laid out for any reader to read. Her son also gave me access to her papers, those not in any library, after her death. Some of her friends refused to be interviewed for my biography, upholding Pamela’s wishes, but those who were most indignant wrote their own tribute to her in a book published a few months after the first edition of my book in 1999.

As for the strange way that Pamela Travers hid her nationality, why was it that she did not like to be known as Australian and why do most people not even know she is Australian?

Her father claimed to be Irish and told her she belonged in the land of Yeats, and all the other literary heroes of the early twentieth century.

Firstly, it was geographical. She lived most of her life, from 1924 to 1996 either in Europe or the US, and returned to Australia only once for a brief visit in 1960s. She told an interviewer, “I don’t mean to denigrate Australia in any way. When I made that trip, we landed in Perth at night and I stood outside and saw the stars, stars I hadn’t seen for all those years. I thought to myself, ‘Well, if fate puts me down here I can bear it’”.

It looks like a very bad case of cultural cringe to do as she did, and to call oneself a citizen of the British Empire and to adopt a plummy British accent, as she did, but then, in the 1920s and even up to the 1960s, that is what many Australians did. Australian girls went to Britain, which was “Home”, to explore who they were, to see the land which their parents always called Home. In Pamela’s case, she had another incentive. Her father claimed to be Irish and told her she belonged in the land of Yeats, and all the other literary heroes of the early twentieth century.

Travers was an Australian woman of her times who genuinely believed that she belonged in Britain – that Maryborough, Allora, Sydney, Bowral, were all part of a foreign world – despite the fact that Britain, in the first half of the twentieth century, sniffed its nose at ambitious “colonials” such as Pamela. For me, that makes it even more delightful that she eventually created the nanny who remains, through all her reincarnations including the movie and now the new stage show, as practically, perfectly, British in every way.

Pamela like to say that the great aunt “stalked with her silent feet” through the pages of Poppins.

There is often a third question always asked of me and of Pamela herself, and that was how and why she created Mary Poppins. In her more elusive moments, Pamela waved her hands, raised her eyebrows and claimed that the nanny just drifted into her life. In franker moments, she said that every Mary Poppins story contained something from her own life.

When her family still had some money, they employed a maid who carried a parrot headed umbrella and on her days off, this maid, named Bertha, never told anybody where she was going. The grumpy yet warm hearted persona of Poppins herself is based on Pamela’s great aunt, Helen Morehead, a spinster of independent means who lived in Woollahra in Sydney and who supplied the charity when needed by Pamela, her sisters and their mother. Pamela like to say that the great aunt “stalked with her silent feet” through the pages of Poppins.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Mary Poppins employer, Mr Banks, is modelled on Pamela’s father. When Mary Poppins disappears, Mr Banks tells his children that she has flown to the heavens to become a new star. In Allora, Pamela used to study the night sky with her father and when he died, she liked to imagine him as a star. She needed comfort as a child was often ignored or brushed away. She was alone, yet intelligent and imaginative, so it’s natural she invented the perfect companion for children like the Banks children who were also isolated from their preoccupied parents.

Mary Poppins as a product

Mary Poppins as a product had many lives. Between 1934 and 1988 there were eight books of Mary Poppins adventures, but she only became truly famous in the 1960s when Walt Disney made his movie with Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke. Pamela had little input into the movie, though Disney told her she would always be consulted. At first, she was careful in her response to the film, but as time went on, she became much franker and said it contained little of the essence of her books, that it was “Disney through and through”, that it was oversimplified and generalised, and “as far from true magic as it was possible to be”.

The irony is that Pamela Travers always needed a nanny herself. She lived by a phrase borrowed from the novelist, E. M Forster – “only connect”.

At the time the movie was released there was Mary Poppins merchandise, but over time Pamela became more careful on how the character of Poppins could be exploited. In a letter to her trustees just before she died, Pamela wrote:

I long ago turned down an enormous contract with Samuel Goldwyn junior because he wished to buy the character and invent an endless series of weekly televisions shows around it. I cannot possibly agree to this at any time.

The irony is that Pamela Travers always needed a nanny herself. She lived by a phrase borrowed from the novelist, E. M Forster – “only connect”. She spent her long life searching for connections, looking for love, travelling the world, and seeking comfort from gurus, medics and mystics. In old age, she became a guru herself, but she never really recovered from the death of her father when she was seven. So perhaps it’s not surprising that she created a fictional nanny whose sole purpose was to make connections between disconnected people. Mary Poppins flies down from the heavens to connect parents with their children, and only leaves when she has made an unhappy family happy again.

The director of the stage musical version of Mary Poppins, Richard Eyre, says that in writing Mary Poppins, Pamela created the childhood she always wished she had. I feel sorry that she suffered so much in her life and despite her gruffness I have never felt anything but admiration for Pamela Travers as a brave woman who fashioned her own life, who sailed alone to the UK with 10 pounds and no return ticket, who travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, who lived with the Navajo people for two summers in New Mexico, who adopted a child and who lived her long life without the support of any long term partner. That is why she found solace and help in following various gurus, none more important to her than the Russian mystic, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, better known for some of his acolytes than by his own life. Among those who followed in his path were Katherine Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Timothy Leary, Peter Brook, Kate Bush, and Lincoln Kirstein, the financial supporter of the choreographer, George Balanchine.

It took nearly a decade for the show to reach the stage, partly because the Disney organisation did not want to be part of the deal.

Pamela became a teacher of the Gurdjieff way, and hosted groups at her home which drove Camillus crazy. There’s one final element to the Pamela story and that is the meeting she had with the English producer, Sir Cameron Mackintosh in 1995. Mackintosh charmed the stage rights to Mary Poppins from Pamela who even agreed that he could use some of the songs from the movie for the musical he wanted to make.

It took nearly a decade for the show to reach the stage, partly because the Disney organisation did not want to be part of the deal. They eventually agreed, allowing the most annoying well-known songs like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to be used. As joint producers, Mackintosh and Disney have had a huge hit, with the show having a long UK run and now playing in its fourth year on Broadway. It’s now on in Amsterdam and in Melbourne, from the end of this month, and there are plans for further productions in Sweden, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Korea, Canada and Japan. By late June, it had grossed more than $US392 million worldwide. Pamela’s estate continues to benefit from royalty payments, and therefore it’s been a marvellous outcome for her son, and her three grandchildren.

I don’t think the Pamela Travers’ pantechnicon, as I call it, has finished its journey. There is at least one plan for a movie on Pamela’s life, in a joint English-Australian production. If they could only persuade Helen Mirren to play the role of Pamela Travers, there would be no need for a Gruen Transfer marketing campaign. Her fame would then be complete. How she would claim to hate the idea but secretly love it.