Step Across This Line (4 page)

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.

“Where is Vaudeville?” Somewhere on the way to the Wizard, apparently. The Scarecrow and the Tin Man are both pure products of the burlesque theater, specializing in pantomime exaggerations of voice and movements, pratfalls (the Scarecrow descending from his post), improbable leanings beyond the center of gravity (the Tin Man during his little dance) and, of course, the smart-ass backchat of the cross-talk act:

TIN MAN,
rusted solid:
(Squawks)

DOROTHY: He said “oil can”!

SCARECROW: Oil can what?

At the pinnacle of all this clowning is that comic masterpiece, Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, all elongated vowel sounds (
Put ’em uuuuuuup
), ridiculous rhymes (
rhinoceros / imposserous
), transparent bravado, and operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror. All three, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, are, in Eliot’s phrase, hollow men. The Scarecrow actually does have a “headpiece filled with straw, alas”; but the Tin Man is no less empty—he even bangs on his chest to prove that his innards are missing, because “the Tinsmith,” his shadowy maker, forgot to provide a heart. The Lion lacks the most leonine of qualities, lamenting:

What makes the Hottentot so hot,

What puts the ape in apricot,

What have they got that I ain’t got?

Courage!

Perhaps it’s because they are hollow that our imaginations can occupy them so easily. That is to say, it is their anti-heroism, their apparent lack of Great Qualities, that makes them our size, or even smaller, so that we can stand among them as equals, like Dorothy among the Munchkins. Gradually, however, we discover that along with their “straight man,” Dorothy (who plays, in this part of the film, the part of the unfunny Marx Brother, the one who could sing and look hunky and do little else), they embody one of the film’s “messages”—that we already possess what we seek most fervently. The Scarecrow regularly comes up with bright ideas, which he offers with self-deprecating disclaimers. The Tin Man can weep with grief long before the Wizard gives him a heart. And Dorothy’s capture by the Witch brings out the Lion’s courage, though he pleads with his friends to “talk me out of it.”

For this message to have its full impact, however, we must learn the futility of looking for solutions outside ourselves. We must learn about one more hollow man: the Wizard of Oz himself. Just as the Tinsmith was a flawed maker of Tin Men—just as, in this secular movie, the Tin Man’s god is dead—so too must our belief in Wizards perish, so that we may believe in ourselves. We must survive the Deadly Poppy Field, helped by a mysterious snowfall (why
does
snow overcome the poppies’ poison?), and so arrive, accompanied by heavenly choirs, at the city gates.

Here the film changes convention once again. Now it’s about hicks from the sticks arriving at the metropolis, one of the classic themes of American cinema, with echoes in
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
or even in Clark Kent from Smallville’s arrival at the
Daily Planet
in
Superman.
Dorothy is a country bumpkin, “Dorothy the small and meek”; her companions are backwoods buffoons. Yet—this too is a familiar Hollywood trope—it is the out-of-towners, the country mice, who will save the day.

There never was a metropolis quite like the Emerald City. It looks from the outside like a fairy tale of New York, a thicket of skyscraping green towers. Inside its walls, though, it’s the very essence of quaintness. It is startling that the citizens—many of them played by Frank Morgan, who adds the parts of the gatekeeper, the driver of the horse-drawn buggy, and the palace guard to those of Professor Marvel and the Wizard—speak with English accents that rival Dick Van Dyke’s immortal cockney in
Mary Poppins. Tyke yer anyplace in the city, we does,
says the coachman, adding,
I’ll tyke yer to a place where you can tidy up a bit, what?
Other members of the citizenry are dressed like Grand Hotel bellhops and glitzy nuns, and they say, or rather sing, things like
Jolly good fun!
Dorothy catches on quickly. At the Wash and Brush Up, a tribute to urban technological genius that has none of the dark doubts of a
Modern Times
or
City Lights,
our heroine even gets a little English herself:

DOROTHY (
sings
): Can you even dye my
eyes to match my gown?

ATTENDANTS (
in unison
): Uh-huh!

DOROTHY: Jolly old town!

Most of the citizens are cheerful and friendly, and those that appear not to be—the gatekeeper, the palace guard—are quickly won over. (In this respect, once again, they are untypical city folk.) Our four friends gain entry to the Wizard’s palace because Dorothy’s tears of frustration un-dam a quite alarming reservoir of liquid in the guard, whose face is soon sodden with tears, and as you watch this Niagara you are struck by the number of occasions on which people cry in this film. Apart from Dorothy and the guard, there is the Cowardly Lion, who cries when Dorothy bops him on the nose; the Tin Man, who almost rusts up again from weeping; and Dorothy again, captured by the Witch. (If the Witch had been closer at hand on one of these occasions and gotten herself wet, the movie might have been much shorter.)

So: into the palace we go, down an arched corridor that looks like an elongated version of the Looney Tunes logo, and at last we confront a Wizard whose illusions—giant heads, flashes of fire—conceal, but only for a while, his essential kinship with Dorothy. He, too, is an immigrant in Oz; indeed, as he will later reveal, he is a Kansas man himself. (In the novel, he came from Omaha.) These two immigrants, Dorothy and the Wizard, have adopted opposite strategies of survival in the new, strange land. Dorothy has been unfailingly polite, careful, courteously “small and meek,” whereas the Wizard has been fire and smoke, bravado and bombast, and has hustled his way to the top—floated there, so to speak, on a current of his own hot air. But Dorothy learns that meekness isn’t enough, and the Wizard—as his balloon gets the better of him for a second time—that his command of hot air isn’t all it should be. It’s hard for a migrant like myself not to see in these shifting destinies a parable of the migrant condition.