Get Happy (17 page)

Initial thoughts had been to make a musical comedy, with either Ed Wynn or W. C. Fields, two of the top comics of the era, playing the Wizard, and either Fanny Brice or Beatrice Lillie, their female counterparts, playing Glinda, the Good Witch. All four dropped out, however, and those key roles went instead to two character actors, Frank Morgan and Billie Burke, both of whom specialized in what might be termed kindly befuddlement. It was despite Metro, then, that the film became not a broad slapstick comedy, which the studio appeared to want, but a drama with strong comic overtones. Then and later,
Oz
seemed to have a life, a will and a future of its own, beyond the control of anyone in Culver City.

As crucial as casting was the selection of the kind of music that would be sung and played in Oz, a choice that LeRoy left up to his associate producer, Arthur Freed. An accomplished songwriter—he had written the lyrics of such songs as “Singin’ in the Rain” and “You Were Meant for Me”—Freed had once hoped to produce
Oz
all by himself, consenting to the subordinate position only at the urging of his friend Louis B. Mayer. If he learned the producing ropes from the experienced LeRoy, Mayer had told him, Metro would then give him a picture of his own. With that inducement, Freed had dutifully agreed, and LeRoy, for his part, had entrusted him with responsibility for everything musical.

Opera, swing or popular ballads? That was still the basic question, and the choice was not as obvious in the early weeks of 1938 as it might seem now. Both Metro and Universal had enjoyed great success with their operatic musicals, Jeanette MacDonald singing the arias for M-G-M, Deanna Durbin for Universal. Perhaps, went one idea, Metro could combine opera and swing, much as it had done in
Every Sunday
.

Only after weeks of vacillation did Freed conclude that he wanted neither opera nor swing, nor any combination of the two, but more conventional, down-to-earth melodies—the kind he and his partners turned out. Many of his old friends were eager to write them, but Freed decided that Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, who had written
the songs for Broadway’s
Hooray for What?
, had precisely the quality of naïveté and sincerity he desired. When he signed them to a contract, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place, and the outline of the picture became clear:
Oz
was to be a musical drama rather than a musical comedy, and it was to have traditional songs in traditional styles.

Looking toward a Christmas release, Metro had hoped to begin shooting April 19, 1938. Such an optimistic schedule soon surrendered, however, to a sobering truth: if it were done right,
The Wizard of Oz
demanded long, careful preparation; it could not be rushed before the cameras. Even if all the outstanding questions about the script and music had been answered, several months would still have been required to create its fanciful world, which eventually was to occupy six soundstages, to design and make its extravagantly odd costumes, and to figure out how to create what were, in those days, spectacular special effects. How could monkeys, witches and even houses be sent flying through the air? How could a cyclone be reproduced on a soundstage? No one knew for sure. A challenge to the studio’s writers and producers,
Oz
was a still greater challenge to its technical experts.

To sharpen the distinction between fantasy and reality, the realistic Kansas scenes were to be filmed in black-and-white, and the scenes in Oz—four-fifths of the picture—were to be shot in Technicolor. The cyclone was to carry Dorothy not only from Kansas to Oz, but also from drab, dry actuality to a rich and colorful world of the imagination, a place that, in the words of the film’s theme song, was “somewhere over the rainbow.” The difficulty, for the technical staff anyway, was that Technicolor was a new and still primitive technology—
The Wizard of Oz
was to be one of just eight color features released in 1939—that capriciously favored some hues over others. It turned most yellows into green, for instance, forcing the art department to spend nearly a week searching for the right yellow for the Yellow Brick Road that was to lead Dorothy to the Wizard. Pushed back once, the starting date was pushed back again, and again after that.

Casting was not completed until the fall. Judy, of course, was Dorothy, Frank Morgan was the Wizard, and Billie Burke and Margaret
Hamilton were the Good and Wicked Witches. Joining Dorothy on her journey down the Yellow Brick Road were three old-timers from vaudeville: Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Buddy Ebsen as the Tin Man and Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. All were paid more, and sometimes many times more, than Judy, who got $500 a week. Only the Cairn terrier that played Dorothy’s dog, Toto, received less—a measly $125 a week.

On Thursday, October 13, 1938, Production No. 1060 finally got under way. “LeRoy Starts ‘Wizard,’” said the headline in
Daily Variety
, with what sounded like a note of relief. But LeRoy started only to stop, and scarcely a week had gone by before he abruptly called a halt. The aluminum powder used to give the Tin Man his metallic look had coated Ebsen’s lungs, causing him to suffer an almost lethal allergic reaction. As Ebsen rested in an oxygen tent, LeRoy had time to carefully scrutinize the footage that had already been shot. He did not like it, and on October 24 he fired the director, Richard Thorpe. Like most of Metro’s directors—“efficient traffic cops” is how one studio biography describes them—Thorpe was competent but uninspired. “He just didn’t quite understand the story,” the producer explained. “He just didn’t have … the warmth or the feeling. To make a fairy story, you have to think like a kid.”

While a new director was being sought, George Cukor stood in. One of the few Metro directors who was more than a traffic cop, Cukor had put his mark on some of the studio’s most distinguished pictures, including
Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield
and
Camille
. As dismayed by Thorpe’s work as LeRoy had been, Cukor instantly saw where Thorpe had gone wrong: his
Oz
was not believable. He had invested so much effort in making Judy look pretty, for example, that she looked not like a simple farm girl from Kansas, but like a Hollywood starlet masquerading as a simple farm girl, with heavy makeup and long blond hair. Even her acting seemed artificial to Cukor, as if she had been instructed to be cute, to act, as he described it, in “a fairy-tale way.”

To be convincing, Judy could not be cute. The film would work, Cukor realized, only if she were transparently sincere. Her eyes had to be the eyes of the audience. She had to be like a tourist in an exotic country, aware that the inhabitants of Oz were a little unusual—by
Kansas standards, anyway—but just as real as the folks walking down the street in Wichita, Topeka or Garden City. There could be no hints, by her or anyone else, that the cyclone had set her down in a fantasy land. If she did not unhesitatingly accept the strange creatures she was to meet—a scarecrow that dances, a lumberjack made of tin, and a lion that talks—neither would the audience.

Although Cukor’s involvement lasted no more than a week, his contribution was key: he put the picture on the right track. At his command, most of Judy’s makeup was washed off. Off, too, came her elaborate blond wig, to be replaced by girlish pigtails in her natural reddish brown. When Cukor was through with her, Judy not only looked but acted the part. Taking to heart his advice not to be “fancy-schmancy,” she thereafter played Dorothy naturally, without a trace of artifice.

No one had to tell Victor Fleming, the director who followed Cukor, to avoid the fancy-schmancy. Rough, tough and gruff—and sometimes sadistic, particularly toward women—Fleming was a he-man’s he-man. He could, and did, use his fists, pilot a plane, ride a motorcycle and shoot a gun. Still slim and handsome at fifty-five, he was adored by women as much as he was imitated by men. Some, in fact, thought that Clark Gable modeled his virile screen persona on Fleming, who was both his friend and the director of several of his pictures. “There was more of Fleming in Gable at the end than there was Gable in Gable,” said director Henry Hathaway, who knew them both.

At first glance, such an eccentric tough guy, best known for directing adventure stories like
Treasure Island
and steamy romances like
Red Dust
, was a peculiar choice for a fantasy like
Oz
. Hidden behind that fearsome façade, however, lay the sensibility of an artist. Like Cukor, Fleming stood apart from Metro’s house directors. He was, in any case, precisely what
Oz
needed after so many months of indecision and second-guessing—a disciplinarian, a general with a heart. On a Fleming set there was never a moment of hesitation: he knew exactly what he wanted. On November 4, after a new Tin Man, Jack Haley, had been hired to take the place of the ailing Ebsen, Fleming ordered the cameras to roll again.

“Obstacles make for a better picture!” Fleming liked to say, and if he was right,
The Wizard of Oz
was many times blessed. Some of the difficulties were expected, the result of Metro’s decision to use real people in its fantasy rather than animation—as Walt Disney had done so successfully in
Snow White
. Animated characters could do their own stunts; they never got tired or sick; they never fell victim to faulty makeup, as Buddy Ebsen had done; and they never suffered accidents, as several of the actors in
Oz
were to do. Real people, Metro discovered, meant real problems.

Every morning, Bolger, Haley and Lahr—the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion—had to get up before dawn, for instance, to undergo two unhappy hours in the makeup department. The rest of the day they spent encased in costumes so heavy and hot—Technicolor required lights of blazing intensity—that they sometimes felt as if they were suffocating. Even Judy, burdened with nothing but her simple gingham dress, was in some discomfort: beneath her blouse her grownup breasts were tightly bound and corseted, all in an effort to make her look like a young girl rather than the blossoming teenager she was.

In the middle of November came a major complication, or, to be precise, more than 120 small complications. Converging on Culver City from all over the country was an army of Lilliputians, the midgets who were to play the little people—the Munchkins—who greet Dorothy on her arrival in Oz. Stories of miniature orgies and giant binges soon began to circulate on the set. To collect all the little people for shooting, Judy later joked, the studio had to send security guards out with butterfly nets. After one of the male midgets fell into a toilet bowl, Metro assigned big people the delicate task of helping the tiny folk perform their natural functions. “We had a hell of a time with those little guys,” recalled LeRoy.

Far more serious disasters befell some of the full-sized performers. The first, Ebsen’s aluminum poisoning, had knocked him out of the picture altogether. The second nearly did the same to Margaret Hamilton. After threatening Dorothy and Toto—“I’ll get you, my pretty, and
your little dog, too!”—the Wicked Witch was supposed to vanish in what the script described as a “burst of smoke and fire and a clap of thunder.” That impressive disappearing act was achieved with the help of a hidden elevator, which pulled Hamilton below the stage before flames actually shot up where she had been standing. All went well on the first several takes, but on the sixth or seventh, the flames erupted too soon, setting fire to Hamilton’s huge hat and witch’s broom. In agony because of serious burns to her face and right hand, she could not work for six weeks. When Hamilton adamantly refused to do any more scenes with fire, her stunt double rode the Wicked Witch’s smoky broomstick, until, on the third take, it exploded, putting the double, too, out of commission. Also a casualty was the terrier that played Toto, whose paw was squashed by one of the Wicked Witch’s heavy-footed guards. Until the injured paw healed, Dorothy had to make do with a look-alike pooch.

Although she had more scenes than anybody else, Judy escaped the catastrophes around her, receiving only a minor injury to her pride at the hands—or hand—of the new director. Her seemingly uncontrollable attacks of the giggles had ruined take after take of
Listen, Darling
, her previous picture. “There goes Judy!” people around her had shouted, resigning themselves to a long wait while she recovered her composure. Those disruptive giggles followed her onto the set of
Oz
, where, instead of angrily boxing the nose of the Cowardly Lion, as the script demanded, she did just the opposite, loudly laughing at his antics.