Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings by Craig Brown

visual complement as I do not wish to criticise unresisting imbecility .’
    Whose memory are we to trust? There may be a temptation to favour the highbrow over the lowbrow, the intellectual over the populist; but self-delusion rains on all, high and low. Many artists who took money from Hollywood felt able to absolve themselves by seeking a divorce from the finished product. For them, the prevailing myth of the philistine Hollywood producer offered a welcome escape hatch.
    By and large, the evidence favours Disney. Less than a year after their supposed contretemps, Stravinsky cheerfully sells Disney two more options – one on the musical folk tale Renard , the other on The Firebird . 27 And his artistic halo always has a certain rubbery quality about it: he composes some hunting music for Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre , and after contractual negotiations break down, uses the very same piece for a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, transforming it into an ode to the memory of the wife of Serge Koussevitzky. On another occasion, he lifts the incidental music he has been commissioned to write for a film about the Nazi occupation of Norway, Commandos Strike at Dawn , straight from a collection of Norwegian folk tunes his wife has stumbled upon in a second-hand bookstore in Los Angeles. When this deal falls through, he further rejigs it into a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, solemnly retitling it ‘Four Norwegian Moods’.

WALT DISNEY
    RESISTS
P.L. TRAVERS
    Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles
    August 27th 1964
    It is all smiles as Walt Disney and his most recent collaborator, P.L. Travers, pose with Julie Andrews at the world premiere of Mary Poppins . This, he tells reporters, is the movie he has been dreaming of making ever since 1944, when he first heard his wife and children laughing at a book and asked them what it was. At his side, Travers, aged sixty-five, appears equally thrilled. ‘It’s a splendid film and very well cast!’ she enthuses.
    The premiere is a lavish affair. A miniature train rolls down Hollywood Boulevard with Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, the Three Little Pigs, the Big Bad Wolf, Pluto, a skunk and four dancing penguins on board. At the cinema, the Disneyland staff are dressed as English bobbies; at the party afterwards, grinning chimneysweeps frolic to music from a band of Pearly Kings and Queens.
    The next day, Travers is over the moon, wiring her congratulations to ‘Dear Walt’. The film is, she says, ‘a splendid spectacle ... true to the spirit of Mary Poppins ’. Disney’s response is a little more guarded. He is happy to have her reactions, he says, and appreciates her taking the time, but what a pity that ‘the hectic activities before, during and after the premiere’ prevented them from seeing more of each other.
    Travers writes back, thanking Disney for thanking her for thanking him. The film is, she says, ‘splendid, gay, generous and wonderfully pretty’ – even if, for her, the real Mary Poppins remains within the covers of her books. On her copy, she adds a note saying that it is a letter ‘with much between the lines’. The same month, she complains to her London publisher that the film is ‘simply sad’.
    Those smiles at the premiere are, in fact, the first and the last they will ever exchange. Pamela Travers is a long-time devotee of Gurdjieff,Krishnamurti, Yeats and Blake. For her, the Mary Poppins books were never just children’s stories, but intensely personal reflections of her Alphabetti Spaghetti blend of philosophy, mysticism, theosophy, Zen Buddhism, duality, and the oneness of everything. In the last year of her life, she will reveal to an interviewer that Mary Poppins is related to the mother of God. Disney’s own conception of the finger-clicking nanny is rather more straightforward.
    Nothing about the film of Mary Poppins has been easy. The contract alone took sixteen years to negotiate: