

This piece was originally published in November 2013

In 1962, the author Pamela Travers – known to the public by the initials PL Travers – arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from London, her first-class ticket having been paid for by Walt Disney. Disney also put her up at the glitzy Beverly Hills Hotel, and gave her a chauffeur to ferry her every day to his studios in Burbank, to meet the team assigned to adapt her popular children’s novel, Mary Poppins, into what he knew would be an even more successful film.

The brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, who composed the music for the film, expected a few cosy meetings with the 62-year-old while they entertained her with songs they’d spent two years creating for the film, such as Feed the Birds and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

They were completely unprepared for “a rude, prickly, cantankerous” woman, as she has been described by Emma Thompson, who played Travers in 2013's Saving Mr Banks. Nor had they been warned that Travers, unwilling to have the abrasive nanny of her novel turned into a “cavorting and tinkling” cartoon character, had not yet even signed over the film rights.

“The real Richard Sherman was on the set of Saving Mr Banks all the time and I asked him ‘Was Travers tough?’,” says Tom Hanks, who played Walt Disney in the film. “He replied: ‘Oh Tom, she was a bitch.’ He had nothing nice to say about her.”