“Never mind, Frank,” she said, squeezing his arm. “We’ll have a wonderful Christmas anyway.”
Then, when Christmas was only a week away, Frank came in, holding one hand behind his back. Maud knew that look on his face. He was bringing her a surprise, a peace offering. She put down her iron and looked up into his eyes.
“Frank, what is that behind your back?”
“I asked for that advance, like you said, Maudie dear,” Frank replied. A wide grin split his face from ear to ear.
“Oh, Frank, thank goodness! It’s the last Christmas of the century, and I know we’ve had lean ones, but I was just hoping to have a little bit of extra money. Now that the boys are growing, they want more things.”
With a flourish, Frank drew his hand from behind his back and laid a bank check on the ironing board.
Maud peered over to look at it, hoping against hope that the amount would be at least fifty dollars.
She read the words aloud: “ ‘Three thousand four hundred and eighty-two dollars?’ ” Her voice shook.
“Three thousand four hundred and eighty-two dollars!” Frank said.
He flung his arms around her and didn’t let go until the scent of the scorching iron got their attention. For the first time in her life, Maud had burned a hole in a perfectly good shirt.
* * *
—
ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1899, Frank pulled out all the stops. Instead of the customary fir, he had set up four trees, one for each boy, in each corner of the parlor. The children opened their abundant presents with a joy that Maud had not seen since that first Christmas in Aberdeen—and she rested easy, because this time, she knew that those presents were not bought on credit but fully paid for, in cash, with plenty of cushion left in the bank.
At the very end of the evening, after the boys were upstairs and Maud and Frank were sipping eggnog and comparing notes on the evening’s festivities, Frank reached deep into his pocket and produced a small box.
“This is for you, Maud, for all that you’ve endured with me.”
The lid was embossed with the seal of a downtown jewelry shop.
Inside was a sparkling green emerald ring.
“This one’s not made of paste,” he said. “This one will last. And one more thing.” Frank handed Maud a brand-new copy of the book. It was bound in green cloth and stamped with a brilliant design of a red-maned lion and the words The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Maud opened the flyleaf and read:
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY GOOD FRIEND AND COMRADE. MY WIFE.
L.F.B.
CHAPTER
26
HOLLYWOOD
1939
Perhaps, Maud thought, in order to make a truly great story, you’ve got to put an entire life into it—all the heartbreak, all the glory.
Originally, Frank had never intended to write more than one book about the Land of Oz, but words came easily to him, and readers had clamored for more. From Tik-Tok to the Patchwork Girl, Princess Ozma to the Quadlings, the Land of Oz had taken on a life of its own, as Frank penned fourteen sequels, including one that had been taken from a safe-deposit box and published after his death. Frank had tried to end the series after the sixth book. Even as an author, he had the heart of a wanderer. He wanted to write about new and different magical lands. He adopted pen names and wrote more books about other characters and places, but none equaled the stories about Oz or had the staying power. This beautiful, beloved place he had invented had grown to entrap him. At times it had been painful for Maud to watch Frank realize, time and again, that no matter what else he wrote, children still clamored for more Oz! More Oz!
Maud was no writer, but she had always understood one thing: the reason the first book was so beloved was that it started out in an ordinary place and happened to an ordinary girl, and that unlike Frank Baum, most people wanted to visit the strange, the wonderful and beautiful, but for them a visit was enough, and after that, they were content to return home. Even if that place was gray and drab, it was still home.
It had been almost six months since The Wizard of Oz had started filming. Maud had seen so many different things that they blurred in her mind. Her son Robert had telephoned from his citrus farm in Claremont to ask her how the movie was turning out, and she hadn’t known exactly what to say. She had seen the Haunted Forest and the Deadly Poppy Field; she’d seen the Yellow Brick Road and the Emerald City. She had seen the actors playing the different roles in their costumes and out of them. Even her frantic quest to read the script hadn’t told her what she wanted to know. What would the finished picture be like? Would it have that ineffable, magical, whimsical, serious quality of her dear husband’s book? She hoped, she prayed, but she still didn’t know.
Today, when she entered the sound stage, Maud saw the front side of a wooden house. A chalkboard, propped up against it, identified it as “Uncle Henry and Auntie Em’s Farm.” In the scruffy yard outside, an animal handler was squatting by a large box, feeding corn to a couple of chickens from the palm of his hand. The dog trainer was sitting on a hay bale, holding Toto on his lap. After all this time, Maud was back in “Kansas.” For technical reasons, they were filming the very first scene last.
A loud squawk sent one of the chickens hopping over the side of the cardboard box, almost landing at her feet, as the startled handler jumped up, saying, “Oh, sorry, ma’am!”
Maud burst out laughing. “Never mind. My late husband always said that a chicken can recognize a friend! He made a hobby of breeding fancy chickens. We used to keep a whole flock in our backyard.” She reached down, picked up the errant fowl, and calmly handed it back to the fellow, who beamed in appreciation and surprise. “Welcome to Kansas,” he said.
Maud immediately noticed that Victor Fleming was no longer directing—he’d left to work on another picture, Gone with the Wind, which the trades were touting as the biggest movie of 1939. Maud was piqued that the director could be changed at such an important moment in the film—and why? Did Fleming truly believe that Gone with the Wind was more important? Maud sized up the new fellow, King Vidor, a slight man with light blue eyes and a round face who spoke with a soft Texan drawl. Maud thought there was a kindness to his expression. But she had no idea if he knew how important these Kansas scenes were. This last-minute substitution was disconcerting.
Maud saw Yip Harburg leaning up against the piano. The sourpuss pianist, Harold Arlen, was sitting on the piano bench.
Judy caught sight of Maud and waved. “We’re singing the rainbow song today.”
Maud closed her eyes, and suddenly, Frank’s face appeared before her. Not Frank as he’d been in his last years, but young Frank, with his shiny brown hair and full moustache. Chicago Frank. His eyes were twinkling, and as if he were speaking aloud, Maud heard the words It’s all in there, everything.
At that moment, Maud desperately wished she could cross over whatever it was that separated them and be with him. She wished that the world was as Mother and her theosophy had once imagined it—with nothing between them but a flimsy veil, so that with enough presence of mind, she could simply push that veil aside. But it was no use. Even now, the vivid image of her husband was fading. The piano player was running through some chords, and the director was blocking the shot for Judy, explaining where he wanted her to move as she sang.
Maud watched anxiously. She knew, she had always known, that for the film to contain the same essence that was captured in the book, the quality that had given the book its staying power, the audience would need to believe the girl—to understand that she was trapped, and genuinely miserable, but that somehow she looked beyond, harnessed her imagination, tapped into a deep wellspring of hope, and kept going.
* * *
—
MAUD WONDERED WHAT HER MOTHER would think of Judy Garland. For one thing, the girl had more liberties than he
r mother could have imagined. She could earn her keep with her acting and singing—a job that would have been impossible for a respectable young woman of Matilda’s time. Yet in some ways she was enchained—afraid to push off the older men who surrounded her and tried to control her every move. The life of any girl was complicated—then as now.
Twenty-two years had passed between Matilda’s death and the day when women at long last won the right to vote. August 18, 1920. Maud had thought of Matilda all that day, and each year after as she cast her ballot. Matilda had fought her entire life for something that had not come to pass until after she was gone. And Frank, too—Frank had grasped the promise of moving pictures long before sound, color, and technical wizardry could truly bring an imaginary world to life. Maud’s job was to be present now, and to hope that somewhere out there, they understood.
When Maud heard the first chords of the rainbow song, she felt once again that strange notion that she already knew this song, that she had always known it, that in it there were notes of prairie sagebrush and yucca flowers, as well as city soot and torpid Chicago afternoons. She watched, her hands clutched tightly in her lap. Would the girl reach deep and give the song the rendition it deserved?
Judy spoke a few lines, then turned her eyes heavenward and leaned against a haystack. She opened her mouth, and out poured the slow, poignant notes, starting low and then sweeping upward. As Maud listened, eyes closed, she felt as if she were swept up out of her seat, out of the sound stage, up into the heavens where the stars danced, to the place where a rainbow would carry you. And suddenly, Frank, eyes twinkling, hands warm in hers, was twirling her around and around and they were waltzing through heavens as dazzling as a Dakota sky, as magical as the White City from atop the Ferris Wheel, as endless as the glittering lights of Los Angeles seen from the Hollywood Hills.
The song ended. Maud opened her eyes. Tears were running down her cheeks. She was back in the sound studio, and chickens were clucking, the dog handler was feeding treats to Toto, the director was standing nearby with his clipboard. At first, no one said anything, but then Harburg started clapping, and Arlen joined in, then the director and the chicken handler, and the dog trainer, the actors playing Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, even the Wizard, wearing his Professor Marvel costume—everyone surrounded the girl, applauding her virtuoso performance.
Maud knew, right then, that Judy had done it. She had captured the magic Frank had put into his story, sucked it from the air and breathed it back out through her vocal cords. Maud felt in her heart that Frank must have been listening.
“Take a bow, my dear,” the piano player said as the applause died down. “That was a knockout. You should have saved that for when we record it in the sound studio.”
Judy looked bewildered. “I can do it again,” she said. “As many times as you want.”
Maud felt a pang of sympathy for the girl—maybe all true artists were like that deep down, filled up with a gift so intrinsic that they didn’t even know where it came from.
“What do you think, Mrs. Baum?” Yip Harburg asked. “Did she put enough wanting into it?”
Maud pictured the stormy Dakota sky, the rainbow breaking through the clouds, her beloved Frank, the small stoic figure of Magdalena growing smaller, receding, as their wagon pulled away. “You know what I heard?” Maud said. “An anthem worthy of my husband’s book.”
CHAPTER
27
HOLLYWOOD
1939
Then suddenly, it seemed as if the world was awash in Oz. Every magazine Maud picked up, every newspaper, the radio, everywhere she looked there was publicity. There were Wizard of Oz cereal boxes and Wizard of Oz Jell-O. She saw the interior of Dorothy’s house in Kansas as a “décor suggestion” in House Beautiful magazine. She heard interviews with all of the actors and snippets of the music on the radio, and even saw her own photograph: she was sitting with Judy on a sofa, the two of them looking at the book together.
The only thing left that Maud had never seen was the entire movie. She had begged and cajoled, but it was under complete embargo. The first sneak previews were scheduled for August 1939, a couple of weeks from now, and no one would be allowed to view the finished film until then. Just today, out doing some errands along Hollywood Boulevard, Maud had seen the lettering going up on the marquee of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. When she arrived home at Ozcot, the phone was ringing.
“Hello, Mrs. Baum? It’s Yip, Yip Harburg.”
Maud put on her hat and coat and hurried the two blocks to Musso & Frank’s. Inside, as her eyes got adjusted to the dark, she caught sight of Harburg and was surprised to see that he was accompanied by Noel Langley and Mervyn LeRoy.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Maud said, somewhat taken aback.
“Mrs. Baum, we’ve run into a bit of a sticky wicket,” Langley said. “We thought you might be able to help.”
“Harburg told me on the phone. There’s a problem with the rainbow song?”
“The first sneak preview of the picture ran yesterday in San Bernardino,” LeRoy said.
“Top secret. Nobody there except a few studio folk, and some of the Loew’s people from New York.”
“Loew’s people?”
“Distributors,” LeRoy said. “Money people.”
“They think the film’s running time is too long,” Langley said. “They want to cut the rainbow song.”
“We’ve all talked to Mayer. He won’t listen to any of us. We thought he might listen to you.”
“To me? Why would he listen to me? I haven’t seen him in months. He wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
“He’ll listen to you,” LeRoy said.
“Why?”
“Because,” Harburg said, “he believes in magic.”
“Magic?” Maud said. “I know that’s what you told me on the phone, but I’m afraid I’ve no talent in that direction.”
“But Mayer doesn’t know that,” LeRoy said.
“It’s the jacket,” Langley said. “When your late husband’s jacket showed up on the set, he was sure it was a sign. I mean, really, what are the chances?”
“It was strange,” Maud admitted. “But truthfully, I’m not even sure it was his.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Langley said. “Mayer believed in it.”
“Can you go to him?” LeRoy asked.
“Remember when you told me that your husband used to talk about the rainbow, but it wasn’t in the book anywhere, and then the idea for the song lyrics came to me, just like that…?” Harburg said.
Maud nodded.
“We think that song makes the picture,” LeRoy said. “I remember walking across San Francisco, right after the earthquake. It never seemed that the world would ever be made right.”
“And when I was a kid,” Harburg said, “some days, my pop came home without enough to feed our family, and the view from our tenement window was just more tenements, as far as the eye could see.”
“My father was a headmaster at a school for boys in South Africa,” Langley added. “The only thing the mates cared about was rugby. They were cruel. I was always getting beat up by the older boys, and my father hated me for being weak. How can you escape from a prison that is made by your own father? And somehow you hear all that when Judy sings…”
“All of it,” Harburg said.
“Every bit,” LeRoy said.
“It’s all in there,” Maud said.
“So, can you go to Mayer and ask him? We’ve been screaming at him and slamming doors—but it’s not getting through to him.”
* * *
—
BACK HOME, MAUD CALLED the studio and said that she needed an appointment to see Louis B. Mayer—and, as usual, she got nowhere. So she climbed into her Ford and drove to Culver City. But when she got to the front gate, a new guard was on duty, a
nd he didn’t recognize her.
“Name and business at the studio?” he asked in an officious tone.
“Mrs. Maud Baum.”
He spent a long time perusing the paper in front of him.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. You’re not on the list.”
“Baum. B-A-U-M,” Maud said impatiently.
“Ma’am,” he said louder and more slowly, “I can’t find your name on the list.”
“What do you mean, you can’t find my name? I’ve been coming here for months!” Maud said.
“On what business?” the guard asked, his tone making it clear that he could not imagine on what business this old woman could have been coming.
“Production 1060, The Wizard of Oz.”
He leafed through his log, then smirked.
“That one’s already in the can,” he said. “Better luck next time. You need to get in line with the rest of them,” he added, jerking his head toward the line of people that snaked down Washington Boulevard.
“I have a one o’clock with Mr. Louis B. Mayer.” She might as well lie, she figured. She had nothing to lose.
“Nope,” he said. “You’re not coming in today, lady, not unless you get in line.”
Maud wanted to cry. She had only twenty-four hours to fix this problem. The men had told her that the final cut of the movie was going to be on its way to theaters the next morning.
“I’m sorry, I misspoke. I have an appointment with Ida Koverman at one o’clock.”
“Nope. You’re not on her list. You need to leave or I’m gonna call over those fellas and tell them to make you leave.” He jerked his head toward a couple of uniformed guards.
“Tell Mrs. Koverman I need to speak to her urgently about Miss Judy Garland.”
Horns sounded up from cars behind Maud in line.
“You’re blocking traffic,” the guard said. “You need to move out of the way.”
Finding Dorothy Page 34
