Mary Poppins is having a moment. The iconic kooky nanny brought to the big screen by Julie Andrews in 1964 has been revisited by Emily Blunt in a 2018 holiday charmer.
But it was a St. Louis gal who did it first, and she never quite got over the sting of her contribution being all but forgotten. In a 1949 live telecast, Mary Wickes was the first ever to play Mary Poppins, hauled across the stage’s airspace via pulley and meat hook.
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Wickes was a character actor with a long career. She often played crabby authority figures, which was in line with how she interpreted the Poppins character from the Pamela Lyndon Travers book series that began in 1934.
Bette Davis, Abbott and Costello, Doris Day, Lucille Ball, and Bing Crosby were just a few of her colleagues. In fact, she was close friends with Ball for many decades. She also served as the model for Cruella de Vil in the Disney movie 101 Dalmatians.
“She worked with everybody who was anybody,” says Steve Taravella, author of the 2013 biography Mary Wickes: I Know I’ve Seen That Face Before. “She was always so appealing, this wisecracking sarcastic sidekick—never the star.”
It’s fair to say that Wickes could be a bit prickly. She never married or had children, and had a reputation for being stern and unfiltered, for not suffering fools at all.
In the book, St. Louis gossip columnist Jerry Berger characterized her as a tough interview, with none of the elegant and graceful redirecting skills of a Carol Channing. “She was barking,” Berger says in the book.
“Maybe that’s why she played those kinds of roles with that kind of authenticity,” Taravella says. “She was at heart salty and crotchety.”
She perfected the wisecracking nun archetype (1966’s The Trouble with Angels and its 1968 sequel Where Angels Go Trouble Follows; 1992’s Sister Act and its 1993 sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit) and the put-upon housekeeper (1951’s On Moonlight Bay, 1953’s By the Light of the Silvery Moon, the 1954 Bing Crosby vehicle White Christmas).
But Mary Poppins was the role she was hung up on, according to Taravella. She felt overlooked for bringing the character to life, and always kept a framed photo of herself in her Poppins costume in her home.
“She always resented that she didn’t get the kind of attention she felt she deserved,” Taravella says. Wickes had high hopes for a scrapped CBS version in the 1950s and for Andrews’ role in the 1964 Disney film. “It’s not that she didn’t get the role. What bothered her most is there was no appreciation for her earlier role.”
It wasn’t all surly nuns and regret for glory passing her by, Taravella says.
“She was a very loving person—there are lots of stories about kindnesses she extended people, people who were really fond of her. She was really a good person, but her persona on film and television reflected her own personality, which was difficult.”
Taravella’s research for the book was exhaustive. He traveled the country looking up friends, colleagues, and other sources and completed nearly 300 interviews.
“She had a rich, wonderful, full life with lots of stories that highlight television and film history,” he says.
Taravella made more than a dozen trips to St. Louis during his research, tracking down her childhood home, schools, and classmates.
“St. Louis almost really is a character in the book,” Taravella says. “It was a character in her life. Mary adored St. Louis, was devoted to it. She performed at the Muny, she lectured at Wash U.”
Wickes’ papers are archived at her alma mater, Washington University, at the Olin Library.
“I started this book just after she died, as her collection started arriving at the university,” he says. “The archivists were kind enough to let me work one step behind them. It was really fun.”
As for a clip of the 1949 Westinghouse Studio One performance, it’s not possible to link to it. The only extant copies are kinescopes—recordings of the broadcast as it aired on TV—at the Paley Center for Media in New York and Los Angeles.
If you’re ever there, stop in and pay our girl a visit.
