The Grief Behind The Real Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins is one of the most beloved films ever made — the glittering, magical, spoonful-of-sugar Disney musical of 1964, with Julie Andrews as the practically-perfect flying nanny who descends from the sky to heal a broken family. It is the very definition of cheerful, wholesome entertainment. And the true story of the woman who created Mary Poppins — and of what really lay behind that sunny fantasy — is one of grief, trauma, bitterness, and a genuinely dark family secret. Because the real Mary Poppins was not born of joy. She was born of a little girl’s pain — and her creator hated the happy film the world adores.

To understand it, you have to meet Pamela Lyndon Travers — P.L. Travers, as she styled herself. She was not, as many assume, an English lady; she was born Helen Lyndon Goff in 1899 in Australia, and her childhood was the hidden root of everything. Because the cheerful world of Mary Poppins, with its loving banker father Mr Banks, grew directly out of a real and painful one. Travers adored her own father, a charming, storytelling man named Travers Goff — and he was the model for Mr Banks. But where the film gives Mr Banks a happy ending, redeemed and flying kites with his children, the real man had no such redemption. Travers Goff was a bank clerk whose career was failing, and he was an alcoholic. He drank heavily, and when Pamela was just seven years old, he died — the official cause given as a seizure, but which his daughter always believed was really the result of his sustained, heavy drinking. The little girl who would one day invent the world’s most comforting nanny had her beloved father taken from her by drink before she was eight. And the trauma did not end there: in the aftermath, her devastated, widowed mother, overwhelmed by grief and poverty, one stormy night told her children she was going to drown herself, and left the house — leaving young Pamela to comfort her frightened siblings, terrified her mother would not return. She did return. But the wound never healed.

The Horror

Out of that grief and longing, years later, Pamela Travers — who had moved to England and reinvented herself as a mystical, difficult, fiercely private writer — created Mary Poppins, first published in 1934. But the Mary Poppins of her books is not the warm Julie Andrews of the film. The literary Mary Poppins is a strange, sharp, vain, often severe and unsettling figure — tart, mysterious, and sometimes almost frightening — a far cry from the sugary Disney nanny. Travers herself grew into a similarly prickly and troubled woman: intensely private, spiky, difficult, drawn to mysticism and gurus, and, by many accounts, not an easy or a happy person.

And it is in her own attempt at motherhood that the darkest chapter of her life lies — a real story, involving real people, that is genuinely painful. In 1939, the unmarried Travers, then around forty, decided to adopt a baby. She travelled to Ireland, to the family of her friend, whose grandchildren included a pair of newborn twin boys, Anthony and Camillus. And Travers did something extraordinary and cruel: she chose to take only one of the twins. She adopted the baby she named Camillus — and left his identical twin brother, Anthony, behind, deliberately separating the two infant brothers, reportedly on the advice of an astrologer. She raised Camillus as her own son in England, and she built his whole childhood on a lie: she never told him he was adopted, never told him he had a twin, and invented a false story about his origins, telling him his father had been a wealthy sugar magnate who had died in the colonies. Camillus grew up believing a fiction. And the truth detonated in the cruellest possible way. When the boys were seventeen, Anthony — the abandoned twin, who had grown up in Ireland and had learned of his lost brother — turned up, unannounced, on Pamela Travers’s London doorstep, wanting to meet the sibling he had never known. Camillus opened the door to a stranger who was his own identical face, and learned, in a single shattering moment, that everything he had been told about himself was a lie — that he was adopted, that he had a twin, that his whole history was invented. It devastated him. The revelation created a lasting rift between Camillus and the mother who had deceived him, and Camillus, damaged by it, descended into alcoholism — the very affliction that had killed the grandfather he was named to replace. He would go to his grave, decades later, saying that Pamela Travers had robbed him of his real family.

The Modern Relic

It was into this life — a woman shaped by a dead alcoholic father, a suicidal mother’s threat, and her own troubled, deceptive motherhood — that Walt Disney came, seeking the rights to Mary Poppins. For twenty years, Travers refused him. When she finally, reluctantly agreed, desperate for the money to maintain her lifestyle, she fought Disney bitterly over every detail, appalled by the animated dancing penguins, the songs, and the sugary sweetness with which he was coating her strange, serious creation. And when Mary Poppins premiered in 1964 — the film that would make her wealthy for life — Pamela Travers sat in the cinema and cried. Not tears of joy. Tears of grief and fury. She felt Disney had utterly betrayed and distorted her work, turning her mysterious, spiky Mary Poppins into a cheerful cartoon. “Tears ran down my cheeks,” she said, “because it was all so distorted.” She was so wounded by the film that she resolved never to let Disney touch her creation again, and her will explicitly forbade any sequel from ever being made by an American — which is why, for decades, there never was one. She loved the money the film brought her. She never forgave what it had done to her story.

The relic of Mary Poppins is that vast gap between the golden fantasy and the grief beneath it — a story now told, itself, on film. In 2013, Disney made a movie about the very making of Mary Poppins, called “Saving Mr Banks,” with Emma Thompson as the tormented Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney — a film that revealed to millions, for the first time, that the cheerful nanny had been born from a little girl’s love for a dying, alcoholic father, and that “Mr Banks” was Travers’s grieving tribute to the flawed father she had lost. Pamela Travers herself died in 1996, wealthy and world-famous, but, by the account of her own family, essentially alone — her grandchildren reportedly saying that she “died unloved, and loving no one.” The world remembers Mary Poppins as the very picture of warmth, magic, and the perfect, healing parent — a spoonful of sugar, a happy ending, a family made whole. The truth is that she was created by a haunted woman who could not heal her own family; who tore apart a pair of twin brothers and lied to a child for seventeen years; who was grieving, all her life, a father drink had taken from her when she was seven; and who wept, not with happiness but with heartbreak, at the sight of the joyful film the rest of the world would come to love. The real story of Mary Poppins was never practically perfect. It was, underneath the sugar, one of the saddest stories in the history of children’s books.

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