THE SHERMANS’ MARCH THROUGH DISNEY
In 1961 Walt Disney did something he’d never done before: he hired a couple of staff songwriters.
Walt had always employed staff composers, talented people such as Carl Stalling, Bert Lewis, Frank Churchill, Paul J. Smith, Oliver Wallace, Ed Plumb and George Bruns, to write and arrange the scores for his cartoons and features, but he’d never had anyone on staff whose sole job was to write songs. Whenever he needed a tune, he either turned to outside composers, such as Tin Pan Alley veterans and freelance songwriters Sammy Fain and Sammy Cahn, or he gave the assignment to his staff composers, who although exceedingly proficient at the melodies, inevitably turned to anyone they could at the Studio for the words (as was the case with the songs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which featured music by Churchill and lyrics by Larry Morey, whose “day” job was a sequence director for the film).
But in 1961 Walt hired a couple of songwriting brothers by the names of Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman. It turned out to be a good move. Over the years, the Shermans have written over 200 songs for Disney films, television shows, theme parks and records, many of which have become timeless classics.
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Prior to joining Disney, Richard and Robert Sherman wrote songs for Annette Funicello, which brought them to the attention of Walt Disney. “Walt needed a song for this picture starring Annette,” recalls Richard. “‘Who are those guys who write rock and roll songs? Bring them in here to do this song.’” So the Shermans wrote “Strummin’ Song” for The Horsemasters, a two-part drama scheduled to air on “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” in 1961. But that’s not the end of the story. The two brothers showed up in Disney’s office one day to play the song for him. “But he started telling us about an entirely different picture,” says Robert, “about these two girls who meet at summer camp and are twins.” Even after they were able to play “Strummin’ Song” for him, Disney could not get his mind off the other movie. So he handed the Shermans a script and told them to take a crack at the title song. At that time, the movie was called “We Belong Together.” So the brothers wrote a catchy pop song called “Let’s Get Together.” Disney liked it, but there was one problem: the title of the movie had changed. So the Shermans wrote another song, “For Now, for Always.” Disney liked that song, too, only there was still another problem. The title of the movie had changed again. By the time Disney finally settled upon “The Parent Trap” as the title for the movie, the Sherman brothers had written four songs in four completely different styles. Fortunately, their work was not for naught. All of the songs ended up in the movie, including the final title tune, “The Parent Trap” (sung, by the way, by Tommy Sands and Annette).
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But then, it seemed only natural that the Shermans would end up working for Disney. “Our first impression of Hollywood when we arrived as youngsters in 1937 had been the street in front of the Carthay Circle Theater,” recalled Robert Sherman. “It was resplendent with Disney characters from the premiere of Snow White. What a way to see Hollywood for the first time.”
Walt was well acquainted with the brothers before he made them part of his staff. They’d composed music for the Zorro television series as freelance writers and, more significantly, had written several songs for Annette Funicello, including the pop hits “Tall Paul” and “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy,” which she’d recorded on Disneyland Records. (In all, the Shermans wrote 36 songs for Annette, including “Strummin’ Song” and “Mister Piano Man.”)
The first animated feature the Shermans worked on was The Sword in the Stone (1963), to which they contributed six songs, including “Higitus Figitus,” a nonsense song in the “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” vein.
The film was the Shermans’ first real test at writing songs for an entire film. Up to that point, their talents had been used primarily to write isolated songs for such Disney live-action pictures as Moon Pilot, Bon Voyage and Son of Flubber.
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Walt Disney had a unique way of showing his enthusiasm for songs his music department had written. “‘That’ll work,’” Robert Sherman recalls Disney saying about many a song. “It was the nicest thing he could say about what you’d done.” “That little comment,” adds Robert’s brother Richard, “meant that he was willing to put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a sequence or attraction that would feature your song.” One example of Disney’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for one of their songs came when they wrote “Strummin’ Song” for The Horsemasters. “He got us into his office where the piano was and we sang the song for him,” says Robert. “‘Yeah, that’ll work’ was all he said. We were dismayed. No enthusiasm, no big deal. We didn’t know that [record executive] Jimmy Johnson thought Walt was going to fly through the window he was so happy.” Adds Richard, “We learned that ‘That’ll work’ was one of the warmest, most exciting and nicest compliments he could make.”
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Apparently Walt was pleased with their efforts on The Sword in the Stone because one of their next assignments was to write the songs for the movie that would become the crowning achievement of his long career: Mary Poppins.
The Shermans became involved in the project in 1960 when Walt gave them a series of short stories by P.L. Travers built around a magical English nanny.
As Richard Sherman recalled, “We really fell in love with the stories. When we next met with Walt, we showed him the seven stories we selected as our choices for the film. He reached over and got his copy of the book, and we discovered we had picked the same seven chapters that he had already decided to use in the film.”
The Shermans began working with screenwriter Don DaGradi on a story treatment while at the same time roughing out a few songs.
“From the very beginning, we saw this in musical terms,” said Richard Sherman. “We wanted to do a full-blown musical fantasy of the first magnitude. To achieve this, we set the story back in time to Edwardian London. We were able to convince Walt that this was the way to proceed. It also gave us the chance to write music and lyrics with an English ‘folk’ and ‘music hall’ flavor.”
But there was one hitch to all these grand plans. Walt couldn’t get the rights to the stories, though he’d been trying for close to 20 years. Travers simply refused to sell them because she felt no one could do justice to her stories or her characters.
Finally, in 1962, with the help of DaGradi’s story outline and several songs the Shermans had written, Walt was able to persuade Travers to sell him the rights to Mary Poppins. It was full speed ahead.
“Writing songs for Mary Poppins was a songwriter’s dream,” said Robert Sherman. “Each song we did had a purpose, a reason for being.”
One of the first the pair wrote for the movie (written before Walt had secured the rights to the stories) was “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” a tuned inspired by a childhood experience of the Shermans.
“When we were little boys in summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains in the mid-1930s,” explained Richard Sherman, “we heard this word. Not the exact word, but a word very similar to ‘supercal.’ It was a word that was longer than ‘antidisestablishmentarianism,’ and it gave us kids a word that no adult had. It was our own special word, and we wanted the Banks children to have that same feeling.”
Actress Julie Andrews, who played Mary Poppins (and won an Academy Award for her performance), contributed to the creation of another tune in the film. “We needed a song early in the film that would establish a theme for Mary Poppins,” said Richard. “At first, we came up with a syrupy ballad. But when Julie heard it, she asked that we do something with more bounce to it.”
The result was “A Spoonful of Sugar,” the song Mary Poppins sings to get the Banks children to clean their room. The melody line for the tune also became the leitmotif the film’s musical arranger Irwin Kostal subtly uses to herald the appearance of Mary Poppins in scenes throughout the movie.
One song the Shermans struggled with was a theme song for the chimney sweep, Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke. “One day Bob [Sherman] came up with a line ‘One chimney, two chimney, three chimney sweep,’” said Richard Sherman. “I left the room, the words running through my head, when suddenly I heard a melody line in my head that fit the words. I rushed back to Bob and played it on the piano. That was the birth of ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee.’”
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On the screen, Mary Poppins seemed to be the most British of movies. The setting, the story, the cast, all were British except for one very important exception. For the character of Bert the chimney sweep, Walt Disney chose American actor Dick Van Dyke. “I really don’t know why,” says Van Dyke, “but I’m glad he did. Making that movie was one of the greatest experiences I’ve had. I knew from the moment I read the script and heard the songs that it was going to be a classic.” Van Dyke surmises that Disney knew about him from his work in the Broadway and Hollywood versions of Bye Bye Birdie and his successful television series, “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” But that still doesn’t explain why an American actor would get the role of a British chimney sweep. “I never even had to do a screen test,” says Van Dyke. “I guess Walt was just convinced that I was the right one for the part.” However, garnering the part of the old banker in the movie wasn’t as easy. “Walt made me make a contribution to his art school [California Institute of the Arts] before he’d give me that role,” says Van Dyke.
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In all, 14 songs written by the Sherman brothers are featured in Mary Poppins. Their effort paid off handsomely. Their music earned the Shermans an Oscar for Best Original Music Score while “Chim Chim Cher-ee” brought them another for Best Song. In addition, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” became a pop hit, entering the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1965.
The music wasn’t the only successful aspect of Mary Poppins, however. The film itself was a critical and commercial hit, garnering 13 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. All told, the movie won five Academy Awards.
Meanwhile, back at the Studio, the Sherman brothers were writing more songs for more Disney projects.
During the filming of Mary Poppins, they were asked to come up with a song for a short feature based on A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories. Although the two brothers enjoyed reading the tales, they just couldn’t seem to come up with anything that truly caught the spirit of the lovable English bear.
Then one day they sat down with the costume designer for Mary Poppins, Englishman Tony Walton (who was then married to Julie Andrews).
“Since he was raised in England, we thought he might have some insights,” said Richard Sherman. They were right. Walton spent two full hours talking about Winnie the Pooh, enthusiastically explaining how important the Milne stories were to him while he was growing up.
“It was like a door opening up,” said Richard. “All of a sudden we understood how to read the stories, and we re-read them and got this kind of joyous abandon. We could go into that hundred acre wood and be those characters… and then the songs just started flowing out of us. It was delightful.”
The result was “Winnie the Pooh,” which is heard in the three Pooh featurettes, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (which won the Oscar for Best Cartoon Short Subject in 1968) and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too (1974).
The next animated feature the Sherman brothers worked on was The Jungle Book (1967), but by the time they became involved the film was already well into development. In fact, one key song had already been written for the movie.
“It’s quite a good song,” Walt Disney told them, “but it [the picture] needs a whole bunch of new songs, and they’ve got to be fun songs.”
The Shermans ended up writing five of the six tunes for The Jungle Book, including “I Wan’na Be Like You,” a free-wheeling scat song sung in the movie by King Louie, who was voiced by the King of Scat himself, Louis Prima.
By the way, the one song in the film not written by the Shermans (the “quite” good one) is “The Bare Necessities,” penned by Terry Gilkyson and performed by Phil Harris as Baloo the Bear. The song proved good enough to earn an Academy Award nomination.
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Phil Harris was performing at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Hollywood when he got a call from the Disney Studio asking him to read for a part in an animated feature. “I couldn’t do it,” he says. “There are all these people in the world with tremendous voices like opera singers, radio announcers and actors and Walt wanted me. I couldn’t figure it out.” Three times Harris was asked to do the part and three times he turned it down until one day, out of sheer exasperation, he said, “Listen, I can’t read the part the way it’s written. Let me do it my way and see what you think.” So Harris interpreted the lines in his easy-going Southern drawl and the character of Baloo the Bear went from being a small character in a cameo role to the star of The Jungle Book. Harris ended up having so much fun doing The Jungle Book, he returned for two more Disney animated features, providing the voice of Thomas O’Malley the alley cat in The Aristocats and Little John in Robin Hood.
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By now you must have the feeling that the Sherman brothers have played a fairly large and important role in the Disney musical legacy and you’re right. But we’re not done yet. And neither were the Shermans.
For the 1970 animated feature The Aristocats, the Sherman brothers contributed three more songs, including the title tune, sung by Maurice Chevalier.
The fact that Chevalier even agreed to sing “The Aristocats” was something of a surprise. The French crooner had retired a few years earlier at the age of 80, but Walt Disney himself had already talked Chevalier into making a comeback once, for Monkeys, Go Home! (1967).
Chevalier later wrote of his agreeing to record “The Aristocats”: “I would not have done it for anybody else and for any kind of money, except the honor of showing my love and admiration for the one and only Walt.”
Ironically, Chevalier’s singing of the song was a posthumous tribute to Walt Disney, who died December 15, 1966, several months before the release of The Jungle Book and before The Aristocats was even put into production. It just shows the respect people had for him that his influence lived on long after he passed on.
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The relationship between Maurice Chevalier and the Sherman family goes all the way back. In the 1930 film, The Big Pond, with Claudette Colbert, Chevalier sang “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight,” written by Al Sherman. In 1962’s In Search of the Castaways with Haley Mills, Chevalier sang “Enjoy It,” a song written by Al Sherman’s sons Richard and Robert. “Walt knew about the connection,” says Robert Sherman, “so he set up a reunion at the Studio. He invited our mom, our dad and Maurice, and we had lunch together. It was a beautiful thing.” In addition to working with Chevalier on Monkeys, Go Home! and The Aristocats, the Sherman brothers also unwittingly provided the French crooner with two songs for his next album. “While he was here in the States making Monkeys, Go Home!” says Richard, “he went to Disneyland and saw It’s a Small World and Carousel of Progress… He didn’t know we’d written the songs for them. He said, ‘I love those songs. I want to record them.’ So in his next album, he recorded them, plus ‘Joie de Vivre’ [from Monkeys, Go Home!].” “Not only that,” adds Robert, “for the last two or three years of his life, he opened his shows with ‘It’s a Small World’ and closed them with ‘There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.’ We were very honored by that.”
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Another song in The Aristocats, “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat,” was written by Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker with Louis Armstrong in mind. But when the jazz trumpeter was unable to take the role of Scat Cat, Scatman Crothers took over. The song also features vocals by Phil Harris, among others.
The last movie the Sherman brothers worked on as staff writers for the Disney Studio was Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the 1971 fantasy picture that, like Mary Poppins, was based on an English story, this one by Mary Norton.
Walt actually acquired the rights to Bedknobs and Broomsticks first and at one point became so exasperated over the negotiations with P.L. Travers for Mary Poppins that he considered going ahead with Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
“I remember that just before everything got going on Poppins, we were having some trouble getting okays from P.L. Travers on the songs we had written for it,” recalled Robert Sherman. “One day Walt came to us and said, ‘Don’t worry, boys, I’ve bought us another story that deals with magic. If we can’t work things out with Travers, we’ll be able to use your stuff in the other picture.’”
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in Bedknobs and Broomsticks? Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, years later, when the movie finally was made, the Shermans wrote a whole new batch of tunes, including “The Age of Not Believing,” sung by Angela Lansbury. Both the song and the song score were nominated for Oscars.
Another tune the Shermans wrote for Bedknobs and Broomsticks, “Nobody’s Problems,” was also sung by Lansbury, but it was cut from the final version of the film.
Beginning in the 1970s, the Disney Studio went back to bringing in outside writers whenever a song was needed for a film.
In 1973, it was “King of the Road’s” Roger Miller, who wrote and sang two ballads for Robin Hood, one of which is “Oo-De-Lally,” an ode to Robin Hood’s favorite expression.
In 1977, it was Sammy Fain, returning to the Studio for the first time since writing songs for Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty, and recent Oscar-winning songwriters Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn.
Teaming with lyricists Carol Connors and Ayn Robbins, (who also wrote the other three songs in the movie), Fain (an Oscar-winner himself, though not for any of his work for Disney) penned “Someone’s Waiting for You” for The Rescuers.
Hirschhorn and Kasha, who won Academy Awards for “Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and “We May Never Love Like This Again” from The Towering Inferno (1974), wrote the songs for Pete’s Dragon (1977), a film combining live action and animation that was based on a 13-page story synopsis Walt had approved before his death. One of the songs the duo wrote was “Candle on the Water,” sung by Helen Reddy in the movie.
Both “Someone’s Waiting for You” and “Candle on the Water” were nominated for Academy Awards (along with “The Slipper and the Rose Waltz” written by Richard and Robert Sherman, who were now writing for other studios).
In 1981, songwriters Stan Fidel and Richard Johnston were brought in to write a song for The Fox and the Hound and they came up with “Best of Friends,” which featured Pearl Bailey on vocals.
And in 1988, Barry Manilow joined with lyricists Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman (of “Copacabana” fame), to write “Perfect Isn’t Easy” for Oliver & Company. The song features vocals by Bette Midler (as the character of Georgette, a spoiled, pampered poodle) and was something of a reunion for Midler and Manilow (Manilow had been Midler’s arranger and accompanist early in her career).