Saving Mr. Banks Monologues

Author P.L. Travers reflects on her childhood after reluctantly meeting with Walt Disney, who seeks to adapt her Mary Poppins books for the big screen.

Young man, if it is your ambition to handle ladies' garments, may I suggest you take employment in a launderette?

I cannot begin to tell you how uninterested - no, positively sickened I am at the thought of visiting your dollar-printing machine.

Disappointments are to the soul what the thunderstorm is to the air.

I know what he's going to do to her. She'll be cavorting, and twinkling, careening towards a happy ending like a kamikaze.

Penguins! Penguins have very much upset me, Mr. Disney; ANIMATED, DANCING penguins! Now, you have seduced me with the music, Mr Disney, yes, you have. Those Sherman boys have quite turned my head but I shall NOT be moved on the matter of cartoons, Sir; not one inch!

You promised me... You PROMISED me that this film would not be an animation!

It is blasphemy to drink tea from a paper cup.

Because these books simply do not lend themselves to chirping and prancing. No, it's certainly not a musical. Now, where is Mr. Disney? I should so much like to get this started and finished as briskly as is humanly possible.

Why did you have to make him so cruel? He was not a monster!

You all have children, yes? And do those children make letters for you? Do they write letters? Do they make you drawings? And would you tear up those gifts in front of them? It's a dreadful thing to do. I don't understand. Why must Father tear up the advertisement his children have made and throw it in the fireplace? Why won't he mend their kite? Why have you made him so unspeakably awful? "In glorious Technicolor"? "For all the world to see"? If you claim to make them live, why can't he... they live well? I can't bear it. Please don't. Please don't. I feel like I let him down again.

I will not have her called Cynthia, absolutely not. It feels unlucky. It should be something warm, a bit sexy. How about Mavis?

Hold it. Now, I see that Cherry Tree Lane as not too townified on one side of the park. And we'll get you a photograph of 50 Smith Street, in order to see that the house is really quite like that. But it has more of a garden than my house had. But it might be useful and amusing to put it in as my house. You see?

Now, go on. "At the end of the chorus…" There ought perhaps to have been people in this countryside, you see? Are you making note of it? And they would be the Pearly people. They'd be arriving and they'd come nearer and they'd see, "Ah. Hmm." They know they are not grand enough to eat at this table. Have you got this on tape? Because I think it's important. I'm not going to do this film unless I'm available for it.

Yes, yes. Well, anyway, it brings about whatever it is. Mr. Banks, um, is able. He has a tender, good heart, not a change of heart, because he's always been sweet, but worried with the cares of life.

Gotcha, indeed! Mr. Disney, if you have "dangled", it is at the end of a rope you have fashioned for yourself. I was perfectly clear when you approached me 20 years ago that she wasn't for sale and I was clear again when you approached me the following year and clear again when you approached me every annum for the subsequent 18 years and quite honestly, I feel corralled!

My point is that, unlike yourself, Mary Poppins is the very enemy of whimsy and sentiment. She's truthful. She doesn't sugarcoat the darkness in the world that these children will eventually, inevitably come to know. She prepares them for it. She deals in honesty. One must clean one's room, it won't magically do it by itself! This entire script is flim-flam! Where is its heart? Where is its reality? Where… is the gravitas?

Being a mother is a job. It's a very difficult job and one not everyone is up to, not one everyone should have taken on in the first place.

George Banks and all he stands for will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

It's all right, Mrs. Travers. It's alright. Mr. Banks is going to be all right. I promise.

It's not the children she comes to save. It's their father. It's YOUR father, Travers Goff.

I've fought this battle from her side. Pat Powers, he wanted the mouse and I didn't have a bean back then. He was this big terrifying New York producer and I was just a kid from Missouri with a sketch of Mickey, but it would've killed me to give him up. Honest to God, killed me. That mouse, he's family.

Have you ever been to Kansas City, Mrs. Travers? Do you know Missouri at all?

Well, it's mighty cold there in the winters. Bitter cold. And my dad, Elias Disney, he owned a newspaper delivery route there. A thousand papers, twice daily; a morning and an evening edition. And dad was a tough businessman. He was a "save a penny any way you can" type of fella, so he wouldn't employ delivery boys. No, no, no... he used me and my big brother Roy. I was eight back then, just eight years old. And, like I said, winters are harsh, and Old Elias, he didn't believe in new shoes until the old ones were worn through. And honestly, Mrs. Travers, the snowdrifts, sometimes they were up over my head and we'd push through that snow like it was molasses. The cold and wet seeping through our clothes and our shoes. Skin peeling from our faces. Sometimes I'd find myself sunk down in the snow, just waking up because I must have passed out or something, I don't know. And then it was time for school and I was too cold and wet to figure out equations and things. And then it was back out in the snow again to get home just before dark. Mother would feed us dinner and then it was time to go right back out and do it again for the evening edition. "You'd best be quick there, Walt. You'd better get those newspapers up on that porch and under that storm door. Poppa's gonna lose his temper again and show you the buckle end of his belt, boy."

I don't tell you this to make you sad, Mrs. Travers. I don't. I love my life, I think it's a miracle. And I loved my dad. He was a wonderful man. But rare is the day when I don't think about that eight-year-old boy delivering newspapers in the snow and old Elias Disney with that strap in his fist. And I am just so tired, Mrs. Travers. I'm tired of remembering it *that* way. Aren't you tired, too, Mrs. Travers? Now we all have our sad tales, buy don't you want to finish the story? Let it all go and have a life that isn't dictated by the past? It's not the children she comes to save. It's their father. It's *your* father... Travers Goff.

You must have loved and admired him a lot to take his name. It's him this is all about, isn't it? All of it, everything. Forgiveness, Mrs. Travers, it's what I learned from your books.

You look at me and you see some kind of Hollywood King Midas. You think I've built an empire and I want your Mary Poppins as just another brick in my kingdom.

Now, if that's all it was, would I have suckered up to a stubborn, cranky dame like you for twenty years? No, I'd have saved myself an ulcer.

I think life disappoints you, Ms. Travers. I think it's done that a lot. And maybe Mary Poppins is the only person in your life who hasn't.

That's not true. She was as real as can be to my daughters, and to thousands of other children - adults too. She's been a nighttime comfort to a heck of a lot of people.

We can't make the picture without the color red. The film is set in London, for Pete's sake!

Well, there's buses and mailboxes and guard's uniforms and things - Heck, the English flag!

Is this a test, Pamela? Are you requiring proof as to how much I want to make you happy so we can create this beautiful thing together?

Pam, a man cannot break a promise he's made to his kids, no matter how long it takes for him to make it come true. Now, you kept me dangling all this time. But now, I gotcha.

Don't you want to finish the story?