Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 Read online

  Dorothy, stepping into color, framed by exotic foliage with a cluster of dwarfy cottages behind her and looking like a blue-smocked Snow White, no princess but a good demotic American gal, is clearly struck by the absence of her familiar homey gray. Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. That camp classic of a line has detached itself from the movie to become a great American catchphrase, endlessly recycled, even turning up as an epigraph to Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth paranoid fantasy of World War II, Gravity’s Rainbow, whose characters’ destiny lies not “behind the moon, beyond the rain” but “beyond the zero” of consciousness, where lies a land at least as odd as Oz.

  Dorothy has done more than step out of grayness into Technicolor. She has been unhoused, and her homelessness is underlined by the fact that, after all the door-play of the transitional sequence, she will not enter any interior at all until she reaches the Emerald City. From tornado to Oz, Dorothy never has a roof over her head.

  Out there amid the giant hollyhocks, whose blooms look like old His-Master’s-Voice gramophone trumpets; out there in the vulnerability of open space, albeit open space that isn’t at all like the prairie, Dorothy is about to outdo Snow White by a factor of nearly fifty. You can almost hear the MGM studio chiefs plotting to put the Disney hit in the shade, not just by providing in live action almost as many miraculous effects as the Disney cartoonists created, but also in the matter of little people. If Snow White had seven dwarfs, then Dorothy Gale, from the star called Kansas, would have three hundred and fifty. There’s some disagreement about how this many Munchkins were brought to Hollywood and signed up. The official version is that they were provided by an impresario named Leo Singer. John Lahr’s biography of his father, Bert, tells a different tale, which I prefer for reasons Roger Rabbit would understand—i.e., because it is funny. Lahr quotes the film’s casting director, Bill Grady:

  Leo [Singer] could only give me 150. I went to a midget monologist called Major Doyle. . . . I said I had 150 from Singer. “I’ll not give you one if you do business with that son-of-a-bitch.” “What am I gonna do?” I said. “I’ll get you the 350.” . . . So I called up Leo and explained the situation. . . . When I told the Major that I’d called off Singer, he danced a jig right on the street in front of Dinty Moore’s.

  The Major gets these midgets for me. . . . I bring them out West in buses. . . . Major Doyle took the [first three] buses and arrived at Singer’s house. The Major went to the doorman. “Phone upstairs and tell Leo Singer to look out the window.” It took about ten minutes. Then Singer looked from his fifth-floor window. And there were all those midgets in those buses in front of his house with their bare behinds sticking out the window.

  This incident became known as Major Doyle’s Revenge. *3

  What began with a strip continued cartoonishly. The Munchkins were made up and costumed exactly like 3-D cartoon figures. The Mayor of Munchkinland is quite implausibly rotund, the Coroner (and she’s not only merely dead / She’s really most sincerely dead) reads the Witch of the East’s death notice from a scroll while wearing a hat with an absurdly scroll-like brim; *4 the quiffs of the Lollipop Kids, who appear to have arrived in Oz by way of Bash Street and Dead End, stand up more stiffly than Tintin’s. But what might have been a grotesque and unappetizing sequence—it is, after all, a celebration of death—instead becomes the scene in which The Wizard of Oz captures its audience once and for all, allying the natural charm of the story to brilliant MGM choreography, which punctuates large-scale routines with neat little set-pieces like the dance of the Lullaby League, or the Sleepy Heads awaking mobcapped and benightied out of cracked blue eggshells set in a giant nest. And of course there’s also the infectious gaiety of Arlen and Harburg’s exceptionally witty ensemble number, “Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead.”

  Arlen was a little contemptuous of this song and the equally memorable “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” calling them his “lemon-drop songs”—perhaps because in both cases the real inventiveness lies in Harburg’s lyrics. In Dorothy’s intro to “Ding, Dong,” Harburg embarks on a pyrotechnic display of A-A-A rhyming (the wind began to switch / the house to pitch; until at length we meet the witch, to satisfy an itch / Went flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch; and what happened then was rich . . .). As with a vaudeville barker’s alliterations, we cheer each new rhyme as a sort of gymnastic triumph. Verbal play continues to characterize both songs. In “Ding, Dong,” Harburg invents punning word-concertinas:

  Ding, Dong, the witch is dead!

  —Whicholwitch?

  —The wicked witch!

  This technique found much fuller expression in “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” becoming the real “hook” of the song:

  We’re off to see the Wizard,

  The wonderful Wizzardavoz,

  We hear he is a Whizzavawiz,

  If ever a whizztherwoz.

  If everoever a whizztherwoz

  The Wizzardavoz is one because . . .

  Is it too fanciful to suggest that Harburg’s use throughout the film of internal rhymes and assonances is a conscious echo of the “rhyming” of the plot itself, the paralleling of characters in Kansas with those in Oz, the echoes of themes bouncing back and forth between the monochrome and Technicolor worlds?

  Few of the Munchkins could actually sing their lines, as they mostly didn’t speak English. They weren’t required to do much in the movie, but they made up for this by their activities off-camera. Some film historians try to play down the stories of sexual shenanigans, knife-play, and general mayhem, but the legend of the Munchkin hordes cutting a swathe through Hollywood is not easily dispelled. In Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children there is an account of a fictitious version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that owes much to the Munchkins’ antics and, indeed, to Munchkinland:

  The concept of this wood was scaled to the size of fairy folk, so all was twice as large as life. Larger. Daisies big as your head and white as spooks, foxgloves as tall as the tower of Pisa that chimed like bells if shook. . . . Even the wee folk were real; the studio scoured the country for dwarfs. Soon, true or not, wild tales began to circulate—how one poor chap fell into the toilet and splashed around for half an hour before someone dashed in for a piss and fished him out of the bowl; another one got offered a high chair in the Brown Derby when he went out for a hamburger.

  Amidst all this Munchkining we are given two very different portraits of grown-ups. The Good Witch Glinda is pretty in pink (well, prettyish, even if Dorothy is moved to call her “beautiful”). She has a high, cooing voice, and a smile that seems to have jammed. She has one excellent gag-line. After Dorothy disclaims witchy status, Glinda inquires, pointing at Toto: Well, then, is that the witch? This joke apart, she spends the scene simpering and looking vaguely benevolent and loving and rather too heavily powdered. It is interesting that though she is the Good Witch, the goodness of Oz does not inhere in her. The people of Oz are naturally good, unless they are under the power of the Wicked Witch (as is shown by the improved behavior of her soldiers after she melts). In the moral universe of the film, only evil is external, dwelling solely in the dual devil-figure of Miss Gulch / Wicked Witch.

  (A parenthetical worry about Munchkinland: is it not altogether too pretty, too kempt, too sweetly sweet for a place that was, until Dorothy’s arrival, under the absolute power of the Wicked Witch of the East? How is it that this squashed Witch had no castle? How could her despotism have left so little mark upon the land? Why are the Munchkins so relatively unafraid, hiding only briefly before they emerge, and giggling while they hide? The heretical thought occurs: maybe the Witch of the East wasn’t as bad as all that—she certainly kept the streets clean, the houses painted and in good repair, and, no doubt, such trains as there might have been running on time. Moreover, and again unlike her sister, she seems to have ruled without the aid of soldiers, policemen, or other regiments of oppression. Why, then, was she so hated? I only ask.)

  Glinda and the Witch of the
West are the only two symbols of power in a film which is largely about the powerless, and it’s instructive to “unpack” them. They are both women, and a striking aspect of The Wizard of Oz is its lack of a male hero—because for all their brains, heart, and courage, it’s impossible to see the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion as classic Hollywood leading men. The power center of the film is a triangle at whose corners are Dorothy, Glinda, and the Witch. The fourth point, at which the Wizard is thought for most of the film to stand, turns out to be an illusion. The power of men is illusory, the film suggests. The power of women is real.

  Of the two witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda? The actress who played her, Billie Burke, the ex-wife of Flo Ziegfeld, sounds every bit as wimpy as her role (she was prone to react to criticism with a trembling lip and a faltering cry of “Oh, you’re browbeating me!”). By contrast, Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West seizes hold of the movie from her very first green-faced snarl. Of course Glinda is “good” and the Wicked Witch “bad,” but Glinda is a trilling pain in the neck, while the Wicked Witch is lean and mean. Check out their clothes: frilly pink versus slimline black. No contest. Consider their attitudes to their fellow-women: Glinda simpers upon being called beautiful, and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters; whereas the Wicked Witch is in a rage because of her sister’s death, demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity. We may hiss at her, and she may terrify us as children, but at least she doesn’t embarrass us the way Glinda does. True, Glinda exudes a sort of raddled motherly safeness, while the Witch of the West looks, in this scene anyhow, curiously frail and impotent, obliged to mouth empty-sounding threats—I’ll bide my time. But you just try and keep out of my way—but just as feminism has sought to rehabilitate old pejorative words such as “hag,” “crone,” “witch,” so the Wicked Witch of the West could be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here.

  Glinda and the Witch clash most fiercely over the ruby slippers, which Glinda magics off the feet of the late Witch of the East and onto Dorothy’s feet, and which the Wicked Witch of the West is apparently unable to remove. But Glinda’s instructions to Dorothy are oddly enigmatic, even contradictory. She tells Dorothy (1) “Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” and, later, (2) “Never let those ruby slippers off your feet for a moment or you will be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch of the West.” Statement One implies that Glinda is unclear about the nature of the ruby slippers’ capabilities, whereas Statement Two suggests that she knows all about their protective powers. Nor does either statement hint at the slippers’ later role in helping to get Dorothy back to Kansas. It seems probable that these confusions are hangovers from the long, dissension-riddled scripting process, during which the function of the slippers was the subject of considerable disagreement. But one can also see Glinda’s obliqueness as proof that a good fairy or witch, when she sets out to be of assistance, never gives you everything. Glinda is not so unlike her own description of the Wizard of Oz: oh, he’s very good, but very mysterious.

  Just follow the Yellow Brick Road, says Glinda, and bubbles off into the blue hills in the distance, and Dorothy, geometrically influenced, as who would not be after a childhood among triangles, circles, and squares, begins her journey at the very point from which the Road spirals outward. And as she and the Munchkins echo Glinda’s instructions in tones both raucously high and gutturally low, something begins to happen to Dorothy’s feet. Their motion acquires a syncopation, which in beautifully slow stages grows more noticeable. By the time the ensemble breaks into the film’s theme song—You’re off to see the Wizard—we see, fully developed, the clever, shuffling little skip that will be the journey’s leitmotiv:

  You’re off to see the Wizard

  (s-skip)

  The wonderful Wizzardavoz

  (s-skip)

  In this way, s-skipping along, Dorothy Gale, already a National Hero of Munchkinland, already (as the Munchkins have assured her) History, a girl destined to be a Bust in the Hall of Fame, steps out along the road of destiny and heads, as Americans must, into the West.

  Off-camera anecdotes about a film’s production can be simultaneously delicious and disappointing. On the one hand there’s an undeniable Trivial Pursuit–ish pleasure to be had: did you know that Buddy Ebsen, later the patriarch of the Beverly Hillbillies, was the original Scarecrow, then switched roles with Ray Bolger, who didn’t want to play the Tin Man? And did you know that Ebsen had to leave the film after his “tin” costume gave him aluminum poisoning? And did you know that Margaret Hamilton’s hand was badly burned during the filming of the scene in which the Witch writes SURRENDER DOROTHY in smoke in the sky over Emerald City, and that her stunt double Betty Danko was even more badly burned during the scene’s reshoot? Did you know that Jack Haley (the third and final choice for the Tin Man) couldn’t sit down in his costume and could only rest against a specially devised “leaning board”? Or that the three leading men weren’t allowed to eat their meals in the MGM refectory because their makeup was thought too revolting? Or that Margaret Hamilton was given a coarse tent instead of a proper dressing-room, as if she really was a witch? Or that Toto was a female and her name was Terry? Above all, did you know that the frock coat worn by Frank Morgan, playing Professor Marvel / the Wizard of Oz, was bought from a secondhand store, and had L. Frank Baum’s name stitched inside? It turned out that the coat had indeed been made for the author; thus, in the movie, the Wizard actually wears his creator’s clothes.

  Many of these behind-the-scenes tales show us, sadly, that a film that has made so many audiences so happy was not a happy film to make. It is almost certainly untrue that Haley, Bolger, and Lahr were unkind to Judy Garland, as some have said, but Margaret Hamilton definitely felt excluded by the boys. She was lonely on set, her studio days barely coinciding with those of the one actor she already knew, Frank Morgan, and she couldn’t even take a leak without assistance. In fact, hardly anyone—certainly not Lahr, Haley, and Bolger in their elaborate makeup, which they dreaded putting on every day—seems to have had any fun making one of the most enjoyable pictures in movie history. We do not really want to know this; and yet, so fatally willing are we to do what may destroy our illusions that we also do want to know, we do, we do.

  As I delved into the secrets of the Wizard of Oz’s drinking problem, and learned that Morgan was only third choice for the part, behind W. C. Fields and Ed Wynn, and as I wondered what contemptuous wildness Fields might have brought to the role, and how it might have been if his female opposite number, the Witch, had been played by the first choice, Gale Sondergaard, not only a great beauty but also another Gale to set alongside Dorothy and the tornado, I found myself staring at an old color photograph of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and Dorothy posing in a forest set, surrounded by autumn leaves; and realized that I was looking not at the stars at all but at their stunt doubles, their stand-ins. It was an unremarkable studio still, but it took my breath away; for it, too, was both mesmerizing and sad. It felt like a perfect metaphor for the doubleness of my own responses.

  There they stand, Nathanael West’s locusts, the ultimate wanna-bes. Garland’s shadow, Bobbie Koshay, with her hands clasped behind her back and a white bow in her hair, is doing her brave best to smile, but she knows she’s a counterfeit, all right; there are no ruby slippers on her feet. The mock-Scarecrow looks glum, too, even though he has avoided the full-scale burlap-sack makeup that was Bolger’s daily fate. If it weren’t for the clump of straw poking out of his right sleeve, you’d think he was some kind of hobo. Between them, in full metallic drag, stands the Tin Man’s tinnier echo, looking miserable. Stand-ins know their fate: they know we don’t want to admit their existence. Even when reason tells us that in this or that difficult shot—when the Witch flies, or the Cowardly Lion dives through a glass window—we aren’t really watching the stars, still the part of
us that has suspended disbelief insists on seeing the stars and not their doubles. Thus the stand-ins become invisible even when they are in full view. They remain off-camera even when they are on-screen.

  This is not the only reason for the curious fascination of the stand-ins’ photograph. It’s so haunting because, in the case of a beloved film, we are all the stars’ doubles. Imagination puts us in the Lion’s skin, places the sparkling slippers on our feet, sends us cackling through the air on a broomstick. To look at this photograph is to look into a mirror. In it we see ourselves. The world of The Wizard of Oz has possessed us. We have become the stand-ins.

  A pair of ruby slippers, found in a bin in the MGM basement, was sold at auction in May 1970 for the amazing sum of $15,000. The purchaser was, and has remained, anonymous. Who was it who wished so profoundly to possess, perhaps even to wear, Dorothy’s magic shoes? Was it, dear reader, you? Was it I?

  At the same auction the second highest price was paid for the Cowardly Lion’s costume ($2,400). This was twice as much as the third largest bid, $1,200 for Clark Gable’s trench coat. The high prices commanded by Wizard of Oz memorabilia testify to the power of the film over its admirers—to our desire, quite literally, to clothe ourselves in its raiment. (It turned out, incidentally, that the $15,000 slippers were too large to have fitted Judy Garland’s feet. They had in all probability been made for her double, Bobbie Koshay, whose feet were two sizes larger. Is it not fitting that the shoes made for the stand-in to stand in should have passed into the possession of another kind of surrogate: a film fan?)

  If asked to pick a single defining image of The Wizard of Oz, most of us would, I suspect, come up with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy s-skipping down the Yellow Brick Road (actually, the skip grows more pronounced during the journey, becoming an exaggerated h-hop). How strange that the most famous passage of this very filmic film, a film packed with technical wizardry and effects, should be the least cinematic, the most “stagy” part of the whole! Or perhaps not so strange, for this is primarily a passage of surreal comedy, and we recall that the equally inspired clowning of the Marx Brothers was no less stagily filmed. The zany mayhem of the playing rendered all but the simplest camera techniques unusable.