Still following the yellow brick road
It’s 120 years since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published, so why does it feel so modern? Juliet Rieden heads back to the Emerald City to explore the enduring appeal of Dorothy and her band of misfits.
There’s something impressively contemporary about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Following the yellow brick road, the path to a better life through troubled times, could be a metaphor for coping with the coronavirus pandemic; while the concept of overcoming issues of self-worth via an anxiety-ridden cowardly lion, a tin woodman who can’t feel, and a mindless scarecrow, goes to the heart of mental health issues crippling our youth. Add to this the ethos of celebrating difference, not to mention a climate-rocking tornado and it all feels very now!
So, it came as quite a shock to me to discover that the original book that conjured up that gaudy yellow brick road of unquenchable optimism celebrates its 120th birthday this year. And that those famous Oz quotes including “I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” and “Ding Dong!
The Wicked Witch is dead” are still well-worn epithets for satirists, writers, even politicians, despite the fact that they were coined more than a century ago … that’s some accomplishment.
It was in fact May 1900, the turn of the century – with Queen Victoria in the final throes of her reign, US President William McKinley just 18 months away from assassination and Australia a year off its first ever Prime Minister – when farm girl Dorothy was sucked into a spinning vortex that shook up her life. Flying through the clouds together with her pooch Toto, Dorothy was transported from gentle, familiar Kansas to the magical Land of Oz.
The sublime illustrated children’s novel that continues to delight sold every copy of its first print run of 10,000 within the shake of a witch’s wand. By January 1901, 90,000 copies had been sold and by 1956, when the copyright expired, sales were in excess of four million. Author Lyman Frank Baum had created a legend. He went on to write 13 more Oz adventures with Dorothy ageing – she started at around six years old – as the tales progressed.
Baum had ached to succeed as a writer and could barely believe he had finally created a hit. He had been a shy child raised on the family property called Rose Lawn, a 15-acre residential farm in upstate New York. He was mostly home-schooled, except for two years at a military academy, and as a young lad was reportedly fascinated by chickens and reading. His adult life was punctuated by a series of failures. “He was no good at business and he tried many,” says Katharine M. Rogers, who wrote the only biography of Baum. “He went west to South Dakota to establish a store which failed, he took over a newspaper which failed, he tried
to get a reporting job and couldn’t get one, he sold china, which he really didn’t like … he edited a magazine on shop advertising. Finally, his mother-in-law said ‘Frank you’re always telling wonderful stories to children, why don’t you write them down?’. And he wrote down several and teamed with William Wallace Denslow the illustrator and they produced The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an unexpected and wonderful success.”
Baum was 43 when he wrote the book, which he originally called
The Emerald City and then changed to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for publication. It was a bedtime story for his four sons intended as an antidote to old-fashioned fairytales.
“The time has come for a series of newer ‘wonder tales’ in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale,” surmises Baum in his preface.
“Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernised fairytale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”
But while an exuberant leap of imagination certainly characterises Baum’s tale, childish fears also hover around every bend of the yellow brick road. Dorothy is lost in a faraway land and separated from her family. And many of the characters our plucky heroine meets harbour decidedly evil intentions. Perhaps Baum was being ironic; certainly there is a pleasing dramatic irony to the men Dorothy meets on her journey. “The seductive theme of The Wizard of Oz lies in the powerful Wizard who turns out to be powerless, a good man who is a bad wizard, and in Baum’s other deception – the clever
Scarecrow, the kind Woodman and the brave Lion, who [all] search diligently for things they already possess,” notes Aljean Harmetz in her book The Making of The Wizard of Oz.
Many critics have also suggested a feminist perspective in Baum’s tale. “In the book the first thing you see is a little girl hero, who helps three incomplete males to become complete men [albeit in the form of a lion, a tin woodman and a scarecrow]. They only become fine people because Dorothy helps them,” comments Rogers. What’s more, all the powerful people in Oz are women – some good, some evil. “The Wizard – the male authority figure – is a humbug,” Rogers adds.
Evidently Baum was enthralled by his influential mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, who was a leading suffragette and free thinker imbibing her daughter, Baum’s wife Maud, with her views. And with all this in mind Baum had indeed created a new type of fairytale which, in 1902, was adapted into a musical. Baum was asked to write the script but his initial work was rejected and a more commercial adult version written under the shortened title of The Wizard of Oz. Even though his work was degraded, Baum loved being part of musical theatre. He became obsessed with the medium, financing elaborate ventures including a film which nearly bankrupted him. Baum died after suffering a stroke in 1919 and his last Oz book, Glinda of Oz, was published posthumously.
Over the rainbow
Of course, the modern legend of Oz is based on the 1939 film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy. This technicolour MGM musical has been called “the greatest movie of all time” and holds a hallowed place in US cultural history. The plot comes straight from Baum’s books but is amped up considerably. “Added is the classic fairy-tale witch, that sleek, malevolent
“The Wizard – the authority figure – is a humbug.”
force who had so much to do with the success of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs two years earlier,” explains author Harmetz. “Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West, desperately afraid of water and the dark, is wholly contained within two chapters of the book. Stronger and more terrible, she pervades the movie … constantly a threat.”
Another change was the colour of the magic slippers given to Dorothy by Glinda the Good Witch. In Baum’s book they were silver, but studio head Louis B. Mayer wanted to highlight his fabulous technicolour effects, so changed them to a sparkly ruby red.
Several actors, including Shirley Temple, were considered for the role of Dorothy, but ultimately the heart-stopping power of Judy Garland’s singing voice won out. At 16 going on 17 she was of course too old for the role of Dorothy, who was an11-year-old girl with plaits. Every day “her grown-up breasts were bound and corseted, all in an effort to make her look like a young girl rather than the blossoming teenager she was,” writes Gerald Clarke in his Garland biography Get Happy. Judy was also put on a starvation diet (she had to lose 12 pounds and have her teeth capped) and encouraged to take “pep pills” to help her with the punishing filming schedule, with the result that she became addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines.
The child star was already used to uppers and downers fed to her by her mother to help her sleep and keep her slim. It was a habit which ultimately led to her early death at 47.
Judy Garland wasn’t the only one who suffered in the making of Oz.
Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr, who played the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion, had to be on set before dawn for their elaborate make-up and costumes. The face prosthetics for the Scarecrow were so extreme that they left a lined imprint on Bolger’s face which only faded a year after filming ceased. Meanwhile, the green facepaint worn by actress Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, was so toxic she had to eat through a straw and her face remained green for weeks after shooting stopped.
Actually, Margaret Hamilton nearly didn’t make it in the role. Early in the film the Wicked Witch vanishes “in a burst of smoke and fire and a clap of thunder” after threatening Dorothy and Toto. “That impressive disappearing act was achieved with the help of a hidden elevator, which pulled Hamilton below the stage before [real] flames actually shot up where she had been standing,” explains Gerald Clarke. “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.”
The final budget for the film was a jaw-dropping $2.7 million, so stakes were high for MGM. The first previews were decidedly lukewarm. At two hours the film was considered too long and the Wicked Witch deemed too scary. At one point the MGM chiefs nearly deleted the now iconic song, Over the Rainbow. But on its release audience numbers were huge and the film was considered a smash hit. Since a third of the audience were children who paid less than half the adult tickets, financially MGM lost money, not turning a profit until it was re-released in the late 1940s.
There have been many spin-offs capitalising on the Oz success. The two most notable are The Wiz, the 1978 movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson and an all-black cast, and the stage play, Wicked. Opening on Broadway in 2003, this musical, which retells the story from the point of view of the witches, continues to tour and pull in sell-out crowds all over the world.
What would Baum have thought of these daring interpretations? I suspect that he would have been thrilled to see his creation living on and he certainly would have revelled in its iconic status.
Happy 120th birthday,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz! AWW