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December 29, 2005

"A bit of magic. It's easy. You think. You wink. You do a double blink. You close your eyes... And jump. "

This post got delayed on account of me accidentally quitting Safari and losing all the links it was going to include. Oops.

The investigation began about five years ago when a home was built above the cave, but it never appeared anyone lived there, Thompson said.

"The front of the cave used to be a hole that you'd crawl into, and it opened up into a pretty big room that was 20-feet high. They cut the side of the hill so you could just drive right into the cave," he said.

The cave, reached from the house via secret entrances, is said to be about two miles long, but the marijuana operation was located about 100 yards inside. Thompson said the other end of the cave had been blocked to keep trespassers out.

According to the prosecutor, the men told locals they were going to be mining statuary rock.

To harvest the illegal crop, Thompson said the men would hire a half-dozen Hispanic workers in Arizona and drive them to Tennessee. For part of the journey the windows on the van would be covered so the workers did not know where they were.

"They would drive right into the cave and let them out to begin working," Thompson said.
Travers was a woman who never married, wore trousers when she felt like it, had a transformative and emotionally charged relationship with an older married man, and entered into a long-term live-in relationship with another woman. As she approached forty, she decided that she wanted a child. After a bizarre incident in which she attempted to adopt the seventeen-year-old girl who cleaned her house, she travelled to Ireland and adopted an infant, one of a pair of twins, and raised him as a single mother.
One night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Margaret left Helen in charge of the two younger children, telling her that she was going to drown herself in a nearby creek. As an old woman, Travers wrote about the terrifying experience: “Large-eyed, the little ones looked at me—she and I called them the little ones, both of us aware that an eldest child, no matter how young, can never experience the heart’s ease that little ones enjoy.” Helen stirred the fire and then they all lay down on the hearth rug and she told them a story about a magical flying horse, with the small ones asking excited questions (“Could he carry us to the shiny land, all three on his back?”).
If it was possible to be a rebellious teen-ager in the girls’ schools of Sydney in the nineteen-tens, then Travers was one. She studied elocution and eventually joined a travelling Shakespeare company, playing the role of Lorenzo in “The Merchant of Venice.” She wrote for the Christchurch Sun, and for the literary magazine The Triad, where she was the author of a saucy column called “A Woman Hits Back” and often published her erotic ruminations. (Travers, inviting her readers to imagine her taking off her underwear: “The silky hush of intimate things, fragrant with my fragrance, steal softly down, so loth to rob me of my last dear concealment.”) She was loose-limbed and boyish—no beauty—but her phenomenal self-regard and quick, vicious wit drew attention. By 1924, she had decided that she had outgrown the antipodes, and bought a ticket on a passenger ship of the White Star Line bound for Southampton, hoping to make her fame and fortune as a writer in London.

Once there, Travers found work as a journalist, filing stories for the Sun and eventually writing theatre reviews. Fleet Street was a man’s world, and she was a man’s girl. Flirtatious, charming, smart, unmarried, and a welcome addition to the convivial pub scene, she had the bounder’s willingness to press her work on anyone who might help her, and when her submission of poems to the Irish Statesman was met with a promising letter from its editor, the poet George Russell—known as A.E.—she went to Dublin to see him. A.E., a married man of fifty-six, was a reckless encourager of young people. His literary connections extended from the house next door—the Dublin home of Yeats—to New York and the Continent, and he offered them all to Travers. A theosophist, he urged her to take up the study of mysticism, which became a lifelong preoccupation. They began a relationship that was filial, intellectual, and marked by romantic gestures. It lasted until his death, ten years later.

The most important of A.E.’s introductions, however, was not professional. He had a hunch that Travers would take a liking to another single girl living in London, Madge Burnand, the daughter of one of his friends, the former editor of Punch. The two women hit it off immediately. In 1931, they set up housekeeping in a cottage in Sussex. Madge did the cooking, while Pamela wrote poems for the Irish Statesman, and essays for the New English Weekly, where she later served on the board with T. S. Eliot.
At long last, Travers succumbed to a deal that gave her a hundred thousand dollars, a cut of the gross, and—unheard of at the Disney studios—script approval. She also demanded that the movie not be a cartoon, and Disney acquiesced; a 1941 strike against the studio by his animators had left him eager to explore other ways of making movies.

The story of “Mary Poppins” depended on the premise that it was normal for a middle-class family to employ a staff, including a servant to raise the children. But to a large segment of Disney’s intended audience this idea would be bewildering or, at least, cold and unpalatable. To solve this problem, he summoned Richard and Robert Sherman to a meeting in his large, corner office on the Disney lot in Burbank. The Sherman brothers were songwriters in their early thirties who had worked on several Disney movies and television shows and had recently written the Annette Funicello hit “Tall Paul.” They had impressed Disney with the way they “thought story” when they wrote songs. He asked the brothers a question that is now a part of the lore that surrounds the making of “Mary Poppins”: “Do you boys know what a nanny is?”

“Yeah,” Richard joked. “It’s a goat.”

Disney realized that translating the story for an American audience would require an explanation of the role of a nanny, as well as a plot that would reward Mr. and Mrs. Banks for choosing to bring up their children themselves.

“We had to come up with a need for Mary Poppins to come to the Banks family,” Richard Sherman told me recently. “We had to make her a necessary person.” Their first thought was to get rid of Mr. Banks. “We were going to set the thing during the Boer War and have his regiment called up,” he said. “Then you could have had a real happy ending, when he came home.” And then, Sherman said, they had an inspiration: “You could make the father emotionally absent.”

Mr. Banks’s journey would provide the narrative arc of the film. The mother would be a matron who had lost sight of her most important calling: raising her children. She, too, would be transformed into a good mother (of the kind recognizable to an American audience in the early nineteen-sixties) through the offices of Mary Poppins, who would leave, never to return, once her work with the parents had been completed. “We made it a story about a dysfunctional family,” Sherman said. “And in comes Mary Poppins—this necessary person—to heal them.”
The story meeting was punishing. It lasted more than a week, and consisted of the Sherman brothers trying to sell the Disney version, while Travers, whose youthful self-confidence had gathered over the years into an oppressive self-righteousness, interrupted, corrected, bullied, and shamed them. Like countless novelists in Hollywood, Travers sought to salvage every last detail from her original. The sessions were tape-recorded, and on the tapes you can hear Travers’s booming, imperious voice in terrifying counterpoint to the Sherman brothers’ chipper young voices. “But how is that arranged?” she asks of a sequence in which the principal characters jump into the world of a sidewalk chalk drawing. “Walt Disney magic!” one of the young men replies with touching excitement.
In the nineteen-eighties, she laid out her objections most pointedly to her young friend and devotee Brian Sibley. “What wand was waved to turn Mr. Banks from a bank clerk into a minor president, from an anxious, ever-loving father into a man who could cheerfully tear into pieces a poem that his children had written?” she wrote. “How could dear, demented Mrs. Banks, fussy, feminine and loving, become a suffragette? Why was Mary Poppins, already beloved for what she was—plain, vain and incorruptible—transmogrified into a soubrette?”
“Well,” she said loudly. “The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence.” Disney looked at her coolly. “Pamela,” he replied, “the ship has sailed.” And then he strode past her, toward a throng of well-wishers, and left her alone, an aging woman in a satin gown and evening gloves, who had travelled more than five thousand miles to attend a party where she was not wanted.

Posted by Jon Rubin at December 29, 2005 11:20 AM

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