Robert Sherman (1925-2012) and his younger brother, Richard Morton Sherman (1928-2024), were American songwriters and collaborators who created more motion picture musical song scores than any other songwriting team in film history. Their work included poignant ballads, lilting lullabies, swaggering marches, peppy dance numbers, and stout vaudeville tunes, with many becoming instant standards that continue to withstand the test of time. Some of their best-known songs were incorporated into live action and animation musical films, including Mary Poppins, The Sword in the Stone, Charlotte’s Web, The Jungle Book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Aristocats, The Happiest Millionaire, Snoopy Come Home, The Parent Trap, The Slipper and the Rose, and Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. Their historic collaboration yielded over 200 songs for some 27 films and 24 television productions. In the course of their careers, the Sherman Brothers received twenty-four gold and platinum albums, which ran from the early days of rock and roll to television, Broadway, and Hollywood.
Their best-known works are arguably It’s a Small World After All – which Richard characterized as “a prayer for peace” and which, according to Time, may be the most publicly performed song of all time (at least until the digital era and streaming services) – and Chim Chim Cher-ee from Mary Poppins. According to a British BBC nationwide poll, four of the Sherman Brothers’ musicals ranked in the top ten of the “Top 10 Favorite Children’s Films of All Time,” with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the top of the list. (The others were The Jungle Book at #7, Mary Poppins at #8, and The Aristocats at #9.) The Sherman Brothers were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June 2005 and received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House on November 17, 2008 “for unforgettable songs and optimistic lyrics that have brought magic to the screen and stage.”
The Sherman Brothers were unique in that, unlike other songwriting teams such as Gilbert and Sullivan, Rogers and Hammerstein, and Ira and George Gershwin, where one partner wrote the music and the other the lyrics, Richard and Robert each contributed ideas, phrases, and bits of melody in a back-and-forth gestalt-like approach where the whole became greater than the sum of its parts.
The Sherman family musical story begins in a small Ukrainian shtetl where Samuel, the Sherman Brothers’ paternal grandfather, was appointed Concert Master of the Royal Court Orchestra by Emperor Franz Jacob. (Samuel would later come to America in 1909 with his wife, Lena, and, according to Robert, “no one in our family ever rose to his musical virtuosity.”) The Sherman Brothers were born in New York City to Rosa (nee Dancis), who was a Broadway actress and danced in silent films, and Al Sherman, who fled Jewish persecution in what was then the Russian Empire. Al became a successful popular Tin Pan Alley songwriter who worked alongside the likes of George Gershwin and wrote dozens of hits for Louis Armstrong, Al Jolson, Benny Goodman, and Frank Sinatra. (Richard often credited his success to his father’s advice to make the songs “singable, simple and sincere.”)
Al Sherman’s love of kites was likely the genesis of Let’s Go Fly a Kite from Mary Poppins and, in a delightful turn of serendipity, Robert’s son, Jeffrey, was indirectly responsible for another beloved song from that film. When the five-year-old Jeffrey told his father that he had received the polio vaccine at school and Robert asked if it was painful, Jeffrey explained that the Sabin vaccine had been painlessly administered to him on a lump of sugar; the result was that Robert, working on Mary Poppins at the time, broke through his temporary writer’s block and wrote Just A Spoonful of Sugar (Helps the Medicine Go Down).
As a child, Richard suffered from a chronic asthmatic condition which, at the time, was best treated by living in a more temperate climate than New York. As such, the Sherman family moved back and forth between New York and California for several years, as Al tried to balance Richard’s health needs with his own career goals, which could be achieved primarily in New York. After seven years of cross-country moves, however, the family finally settled in Beverly Hills in 1937, where Richard studied piano, flute, and piccolo, and Robert excelled in violin, piano, painting and poetry. At Beverly Hills High School, Robert wrote and produced acclaimed radio and stage programs and, at age 16, he wrote Armistice and Dedication Day, a stage play showing how American life was changed following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The play yielded thousands of dollars for war bonds and earned a special citation from the War Department.
Robert enlisted during World War II at age 17, served in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Germany, and was shot in the knee by a machine gun, earning him a Purple Heart and forcing him to walk with canes – one was a cane that had once belonged to Harry Houdini and another was a parrot-headed cane just like the famous Mary Poppins umbrella that had once been owned by Clark Gable – for the rest of his life. (At the height of the Sherman Brothers’ success in 1973, he needed knee replacement surgery to avoid having his leg amputated and then had to be treated for codeine addiction.)
The man who would later bring such joyful and beautiful songs into the world was among the first American soldiers to enter and liberate the Dachau concentration camp; he would later describes in detail in his autobiography, Moose, how he witnessed the open trench piled high with corpses, the inescapable pervasive stench, and the ovens filled with incompletely burned bodies. He chillingly writes that “In a half hour I saw enough to fill my nightmares for the rest of my life” and, upon returning home, he began painting “to get rid of the thoughts of Dachau. Beautiful things helped clean my soul of the horror, but the horror lasted a long time.” According to his son, Jeffrey, Robert was the only Jew in his squad and “that experience and all those he had from D-Day on made him feel that hope for humanity was in human kindness and tolerance.”
Speaking about his Jewish identity, Robert spoke about how Judaism was practiced in the home, although his wife Joyce Ruth (nee Sasner) was more religious, and he stopped believing that there could be a G-d after what he witnessed while liberating Dachau, although he continued to love the Jewish traditions and culture. After Ruth’s death in 2001, he asked that donations in her memory be made to the Jewish Federation to Assist Russian Families to make aliyah to Israel.
Richard was drafted into the U.S. Army; he was assigned to the Army Band and glee club, for both of which he served as musical conductor until his honorable discharge, and never saw action. As to Richard’s ties to Judaism, his son, Gregg, said that “While my dad was not particularly religious, he was profoundly spiritual. He believed doing what you love and loving what you do was his little secret to living long and well. And Dad had a spectacular life.”
Although there is substantive evidence that Walt Disney was an antisemite, Jeffrey said that his father and his uncle Richard never experienced antisemitism by Disney and that both were vociferous defenders of Disney against claims of anti-Jewish animus. According to Gregg, his father and uncle Robert did experience antisemitism, which was consistently a factor in many of their business dealings throughout their career, but a rare exception was Walt Disney, who is often falsely labeled as being antisemitic, but was not. My dad and uncle were the only staff songwriters in the 100+ year company history, and I can assure you, as he told me many times – Walt loved all people. His only criteria for his employees were creativity and positivity.
As a student at Bard College after the War, Richard majored in music, writing numerous sonatas and “art songs,” while Robert majored in English literature and painting and completed his first two novels. Few people know that Robert was also an accomplished artist who, working in oil painting and later acrylics, kept his work private most his life until he later decided to exhibit his work in England and the United States. Later, after moving to London in 2002, he donated two of his paintings depicting elderly Jewish men to the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in memory of his late wife, Joyce, who passed away a year earlier in a ceremony attended by British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and, on March 4, 2007, he donated limited edition prints of his Moses and Sacrifice to the Giffnock Synagogue in Glasgow, Scotland. As an adult, he also studied archaeology at UCLA and participated in many digs in the United States and other countries.
The musical careers of Richard, who was determined to make his mark in music, and Robert, who was an aspiring novelist and poet, began when their father challenged them to collaborate as songwriters, betting that “you guys couldn’t pool your talents and come up with a song that some kid would give up his lunch money to buy.” Within two years of his college graduation, Richard began writing songs with Robert, who founded the music publishing company, Music World Corporation. In 1951, Gene Autry, the “Singing Cowboy,” became the first singer to record a Sherman Brothers song, Gold Can Buy You Anything But Love, but their first Top Ten hit was Tall Paul, a song with a rock and roll rhythm that was performed by Annette Funicello and that attracted the attention of Walt Disney, who hired them as staff songwriters for Walt Disney Studios.
When Disney first envisioned the concept of a song for the 1964 World’s Fair featuring the world’s children, his original idea was to have all the children of the world singing their own national anthems in their own languages at the same time, but the result was such an ear-piercing cacophony that Disney enlisted the Sherman Brothers to write what became It’s a Small World. One of their most recognized and beloved compositions, the song and the Disney attraction for which it is named, which features dolls of children in national costumes, are still major draws at the Disney theme parks in Florida and California. (They also wrote There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow for the General Electric pavilion at the Fair, which later became a standard at the Carousel of Progress exhibit at Disney parks.) Disney was so certain of the song’s success that when the Sherman Brothers suggested that they should donate their royalties from the song to UNICEF, Disney told them “”You are not going to give away your birthright. This is going to send your kids through college!” He was correct, and It’s a Small World was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2022.
To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the song, the Disney Company asked Robert to write a third stanza, which he originally refused to do because he felt that any modification or addition would ruin what was already a perfect song. However, when he realized that Disney would simply go over his head and hire another lyricist if he didn’t accept the assignment, he quickly wrote a third stanza:
It’s a world of wonder,
a world of worth,
and in years to come,
we’ll know peace on earth.
We’ll open our eyes
and we’ll all realize,
it’s a small world after all.
In 1965, the Sherman brothers won two Academy Awards for Mary Poppins for Best Original Score and Best Original Score for Chim Chim Cher-ee (see exhibit). The brothers worked at Disney until Walt’s death in 1966, after which they worked as freelance songwriters on scores of motion pictures, television shows, theme park exhibits and stage musicals.
When Albert Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, approached Disney to co-produce a film based on Ian Fleming’s children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Disney declined, but he offered to release the Sherman Brothers from their contract to work on the film. The result was Richard and Robert’s first major non-Disney effort, for which they earned their third Academy Award Nomination in 1968.
In 1973, they made history by becoming the only Americans ever to win First Prize at the Moscow Film Festival (the Russian equivalent to the Oscar) for Tom Sawyer, for which they also wrote the screenplay. Queen Elizabeth attended their Royal Command Performance of The Slipper and the Rose, a retelling of the Cinderella story; in 1974, their Tony-nominated Over Here! was the largest-grossing original Broadway Musical of the year; and in 1976, they received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame directly across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Sherman Brothers have also written numerous top-selling songs, including You’re Sixteen, which holds the distinction of twice reaching Billboard’s Top Ten – first with Johnny Burnette (1960) and then by Ringo Starr (1974).
When the stage production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang premiered in London in 2002, it became the most successful stage show ever produced at the London Palladium and it ran for three-and-a-half years, the longest run in that century-old theatre’s history. In early 2005, a Chitty company premiered on Broadway at the Hilton Theatre, for which the Sherman Brothers wrote an additional six songs specifically for the new stage productions.
Sadly, although the brothers continued to collaborate even after Robert moved to London, they often had major disputes, including a feud between their wives, such that their families, who barely knew each other, would sit on opposite ends of the theatre while attending public premieres and held separate shivas when their father died. However, according to many commentators – and their children, Gregg and Jeffrey – personal tension and conflict were at the creative center of the Sherman Brothers, their differences and different characters played an important part in their prodigious quality output, they pushed each other to remain at their creative peak, and always loved each other.
The famously difficult P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, was deeply dissatisfied with Disney’s adaptation of her book and was particularly disdainful of the songs written by the Sherman Brothers. She refused to permit any of their songs in the film, preferring only standards from the Edwardian period in which the story is set, and she generally set various outrageous conditions before she would agree to authorize Disney to do the Poppins film. While her motivation may have been one of simple preference, it is worth noting that she wrote book reviews for The New Pioneer, a far-right pro-German and unabashedly antisemitic journal run by John Beckett, a leader of the British Union of Fascists and the National Socialist League (the British Nazi Party).
As Jack Malvern writes in How a Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Poppins Prejudice Go Down, Travers’s reviews were printed alongside articles by the likes of A. K. Chesterton, who went on to found the National Front, and John Warburton, a pro-Nazi commentator who wrote a review of Mein Kampf in the same magazine under the headline The Century’s Bestseller. Although her reviews do not specifically manifest fascist ideology, even a cursory review of any issue of the New Pioneer would have made abundantly clear that her work would be published alongside vehemently antisemitic articles about “the Jewish problem.” In the February 1939 edition, in which Travers’s reviews of The Yearling and The Squire, appeared – five years after the publication of Mary Poppins and twenty-five years before Disney’s film – Chesterton decried the “wholesale importation of emotional and mental slush” that the influx of “cheap human material” (i.e., the Jews) had brought to England.
Robert described Travers as “a witch” and he was not surprised to learn later that she had written for The New Pioneer. She spent two weeks arguing with the brothers, and, according to Richard, “Mrs. Travers was very difficult… I never had such trouble. (The film) was a joy to work on after we finally got the rights. It was a dream cast. But those two weeks I would hate to go through again… She didn’t care about our feelings, how she chopped us apart.”
Even to date, Travers’s politics remain an unsolved mystery but, if she was indeed a closet fascist and antisemite, she successfully kept her beliefs secret from the British authorities, who appointed her OBE in 1977 for services to literature. In any event, Walt Disney overruled Travers’s many demands, particularly her demand that the Sherman Brother’s songs not be used in the film, and the rest is musical history. The challenging relationship between Travers vs. Disney and the Sherman Brothers was chronicled in Saving Mr. Banks, the 2013 Disney film in which Jason Schwartzman played Richard and B.J. Novak portrayed Robert.
