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How Walt Disney picked his Mary Poppins
🐟 Vengeful valets | 🇹🇷 Turkey's return | 🏡 Party barn
Film
Practically perfect in every way: Julie Andrew as Mary Poppins
“You are far too pretty, but you have got the nose”
Walt Disney initially struggled to decide who to cast as Mary Poppins, says Todd James Pierce in Air Mail. The breakthrough came after songwriters Bob and Dick Sherman both happened to watch Julie Andrews promoting her Broadway show Camelot on The Ed Sullivan Show. The brothers wanted to tell Disney she was the one, but the studio boss’s secretary recommended a different approach. “Let him discover it,” he told them. “He doesn’t like to be told.” They arranged for Disney to see Camelot, and sure enough, after the performance he walked into her dressing room and asked if she’d be interested in playing Poppins. Andrews demurred, telling him she was pregnant so the production would be delayed by several months. “That’s OK,” Disney replied. “We’ll wait.”
Once on board, Andrews loved all the songs apart from a ballad she felt was dreary and lacked nuance. The Shermans thought it was one of the standouts – “our magnum opus,” as Dick put it – but resolved to come up with an alternative. Again, they struggled. But inspiration struck when Bob’s five-year-old son told him he had been given the polio vaccine on a lump of sugar. The next day, Bob told Dick he knew the title for their song: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” The final hurdle was getting approval for Andrews’s casting from PL Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books. When Travers phoned the actress, Andrews told her she’d had a baby the previous day. “Well,” Travers replied, unabashed, “you are going to be doing Mary Poppins, right?” Andrews said she was. “Of course, you are far too pretty,” Travers continued, “but you have got the nose for it.”
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Property
THE THATCHED COTTAGE Perched on the fringes of Dartmoor in Devon, this Grade II-listed home is set in 30 acres of grounds, says The Times. On the ground floor are the kitchen, featuring a green Aga, a pantry, a dining room, a sitting room, a cinema room, a sun room and a laundry. Upstairs are the five bedrooms, four of which are en-suite, and a shower room. The property also comes with two separate cottages, a party barn with a mezzanine gallery and a catering kitchen, and stables. The market town of Moretonhampstead is a 13-minute drive. £2.95m. Click on the image to see the listing.
Global update
L-R: Starmer, Macron and Erdoğan last month. Suzanne Plunkett/Pool/AFP/Getty
Turkey’s quiet return to “great power status”
The world is becoming a more complicated place, says Sumantra Maitra in Engelsberg Ideas, and Turkey is taking the opportunity to return to its Ottoman roots and regain “great power status”. While the rest of the world has been preoccupied with the war in Ukraine and the growing tensions between the US and China, Turkey has stabilised its north African flank; militarily subdued the Kurdish insurgency abroad, while offering an olive branch to the Kurds at home; and helped the Azerbaijanis take back land from Armenia by supplying them with drones. It was Ankara that tilted the balance towards the Assad regime’s collapse in Syria – it has now “carved up spheres of influence” in the ravaged country with Israel – and is on the verge of “garrisoning Gaza”. In a multipolar world, Turkey is emerging as a major middle power.
Europe has taken note. Britain, in one of its more “far-sighted moves”, has made an £8bn deal to sell Turkey 20 Eurofighter Typhoons; German chancellor Friedrich Merz went to Ankara to persuade the government to join the €150bn Security Action for Europe programme; and Emmanuel Macron, despite years of fractious relations between Turkey and France, recently met its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to propose resetting their relationship. This Western realignment with Turkey is a “logical reaction” to the threat of a revanchist Russia, and the declining power of Europe. Clearly, the continent is waking up to how influential Ankara has become, and realising Turkey may be needed as a “buffer in the European balance”. Turkey is a remarkable case: a “rare resurgence for an erstwhile empire”. And it goes to show – “the days of small nations are over”.
Life
Parking at the Dorchester in 1967. Getty
Valets at London’s top hotels regularly find themselves behind the wheels of multimillion-pound supercars, says Iain Macauley in Times Luxury. “But things don’t always go smoothly”. One had to fess up to an owner after he bashed the wing-mirror of a £1.3m Porsche Carrera GT on a spiral car park ramp; another crashed a Ferrari into a bollard after going to put the car into reverse and seeing a pair of sky-blue knickers stuffed down the side of the seat. And some delight in deploying discreet retribution on pompous guests. Favourites include hiding a piece of fish somewhere inside the vehicle; slipping a small pebble behind a hub cap to cause an “annoying rhythmic rattle”; and releasing moths under the seat, which duly fly towards light at night, setting off the car’s movement-sensitive alarms.
Quoted
“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?’”
American humourist Don Marquis
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