Jerry Maren

Actor

Born: January 24, 1920 Died: May 24, 2018

JERRY MAREN, who has died aged 98, was the last surviving member of the cast of The Wizard Of Oz (1939) with a speaking or singing role, and the last of the adult Munchkins who greeted Dorothy on her arrival in Oz.

Maren played the leader of the Lollipop Guild. Clad in a green plaid shirt and tattered shorts, he tapdanced towards Judy Garland and assured her in song that “we wish to welcome you to Munchkin Land”, then presented her with a large lollipop. Though in every sense a small part (Maren, 18 when the scene was filmed, was 3ft 4ins), it proved one of the many memorable moments in the film.

The studio, MGM, had been determined to cast dwarfs and midgets, rather than children. Many of them were assembled by Baron Leopold Van Singer, a German-born agent who specialised in vaudeville acts (the eugenics policies of the Nazis led to many dwarfs leaving Germany in the 1930s).

There were later lurid accounts of the behaviour of the Munchkin actors that portrayed many of them as sex-crazed drunks; there were allegations of orgies at their hotel, with the producer Mervyn Le Roy claiming police had to be posted on every floor.

Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, later remembered Munchkins brandishing knives, while Judy Garland maintained in one interview that “They got smashed every night, and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets”.

Maren took exception to this, claiming in his memoir Short And Sweet: The Life And Times Of The Lollipop Munchkin (2006) that Garland’s own difficulties with alcohol and drugs meant she “left behind a legacy of untruths about us”.

Unlike the majority of the Munchkins, who had no theatre or circus background, Maren secured a prominent role because of his experience as a singer and dancer. He had been dancing professionally since the age of 13, as part of an act called Three Steps And A Half, and later enjoyed a steady film career, featuring in films such a The Marx Brothers At The Circus and Planet Of The Apes, and appearing on TV with a long-standing role on The Gong Show. In the 1950s, he worked in ad campaigns for the Oscar Mayer company, and commercials for Mcdonald’s. He also had parts in The Odd Couple and Seinfeld.

Gerard Marenghi was born into a large Italian-american family in Boston, where his father Emilio worked in a shoe factory. After his pituitary dwarfism was diagnosed in his early teens, he began to consider show business as a career. The success of his dance act led to the approach from MGM, and he got the bus to Los Angeles.

Like the other Munchkins, he was paid $100 a week for the duration of the filming (Dorothy’s dog Toto got $125). But the film’s enormous success led, in later life, to regular appearances at conventions and festivals. In 2007 he and three other surviving Munchkins unveiled a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2013 he turned out for a handprint outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

Maren was the co-founder of Little People Of America, which campaigned for the interests of those affected by dwarfism. His own height eventually increased to 4ft 6ns after he began to receive hormonal growth treatments in adulthood.

He married, in 1975, Elizabeth Barrington, also a dwarf; she died in 2011. In 2016, it was wrongly announced he had died of pancreatic cancer (from which he did not suffer). He died at a nursing home in La Jolla, California.