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They were the residents of the surreal world of Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz, but behind the scenes the adult dwarf actors were hard-drinking, sex-mad hellraisers.
The revelation that 16-year-old Judy Garland was constantly groped by some of the Munchkins will come as no surprise to those who witnessed their wild antics.
Yesterday, the Mirror revealed that her ex-husband Sid Luft wrote in an unfinished memoir: “They’d make Judy’s life miserable by putting their hands under her dress.”
But the Hollywood legend appears to have taken their advances in her stride, even when they were at their most brazen.
One of the 124 actors hired by MGM as Munchkins for the 1939 movie tried to get the teenage starlet out on a date.
Judy said: “One of them, a gentleman of about 40, asked me for dinner. He was about two inches high, and I didn’t want to say, ‘I can’t, because you’re a midget’.
“So I just said, ‘No, my mother wouldn’t like it’. And he said, ‘C’mon, bring yer ma, too. Two broads for the price of one’.”
The actress, who died aged 47 from an accidental drugs overdose in 1969, added: “There were hundreds of them, they put them all in one hotel. They got smashed every night and the police would pick them up in butterfly nets. The poor things.”
That was the Culver Hotel in Hollywood, and it became the epicentre of the dwarves’ drunken debauchery for the eight weeks they stayed there during filming.
The police were regularly called and, as well as butterfly nets, they had to find new ways of apprehending the revellers.
Pink Panther star David Niven happened to walk past the hotel during one furore.
Chris Price and Joe Harland write in their book Live Fast Die Young: “He asked one of the attending officers as to the nature of the incident, to be told several Munchkins had been drunk and disorderly and were currently resisting arrest.
“With hands too small for cuffs and no restraints of a suitable size, the hotel laundry had been called on to help. Niven watched as nine policemen emerged from the foyer, each holding a wriggling, writhing and rather heavy pillowcase.”
And the partying didn’t stop for work. One Munchkin, known as The Count, was nearly fired for his antics during filming.
One crew member recalled: “Once, when he was due on set, he went missing. Then we heard a whining sound coming from the men’s room.
“He had got plastered during lunch, fallen in the toilet bowl and could not get out.” The good times weren’t restricted to boozing either.
The Culver was transformed into “an unholy assembly of pimps, hookers and gamblers”, according to one observer.
Though it hosted celebrities, the hotel had never seen anything like it and had to install police on every floor.
Already sleeping three in a bed, the dwarves had orgies every night – not only hiring prostitutes but also acting as pimps for them. Some female Munchkins were said to have tried selling themselves to male crew members during the filming.
The movie’s screenwriter Noel Langley remembered how the Munchkins would often go in search of women on set.
“They’d raid the studio lot,” he said. “The showgirls had to be escorted in bunches with armed guards.” The roughest dwarves were said to be prone to violence, carrying knives. One allegedly came on set armed with two loaded pistols to threaten a fellow Munchkin for making eyes at his wife.
Wizard of Oz make-up artist Jack Dawn said: “You had to watch them all the time.”
The Munchkins riotous hotel antics were even portrayed in 1981 comedy Under the Rainbow, about Wizard of Oz auditions.
But although they performed upbeat numbers such as Follow the Yellow Brick Road and Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!, many had experienced real hardship. Those from the US had only just survived the Grea vaud freak inclu Nazi
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