Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (51 page)

Baum purists object to the Kansas bookend material in the film, saying that it undercuts the imaginative integrity of Oz as a real if bizarre realm and dilutes Baum’s resolve to move fairy tales beyond the gloomy, spook-laden moral fables of Europe into pure entertainment and invention. That analysis denies the actual experience of the movie: the audience registers Dorothy’s exploits with an immediacy and depth that don’t fade when Fleming reveals the dream nature of Oz. And the whole movie testifies to Hollywood ingenuity and high spirits at their peak.

Harburg, likewise, protested the film’s emphasis on Kansas as Dorothy’s true heartland—and
his
objection makes some sense. “Over the Rainbow” yearns for the antithesis of a bleak Midwestern landscape. Harburg and Arlen were intent, with their score, on parodying or at least toying with European music-theater notions of rural innocence and corrupted court sophistication.

But the Dorothy of Baum’s book does say, “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live [in Kansas] than any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” The movie’s power depends on an enveloping nostalgia whose source can’t be pinned down. After Dorothy proclaims the Scarecrow and Tin Man “the best friends anyone ever had,” she says, “I feel as if I’ve known you all the time—but I couldn’t have, could I?”
The
shiver she summons in even the most jaded viewer has something to do with the way her dream oscillates between fantasy and reality. It also comes from the movie’s eerie, comical grasp about how we create our own destinies wherever we go, often replicating what we think we’ve left behind. For us, and for Dorothy, Oz becomes the second home that makes us appreciate our first home all the more. Margaret Hamilton said that “home” as expressed in the film is “the place where we belong, where we are welcome, where there is love and understanding and acceptance waiting for us when we come. Home, where we can shed our cares and share our troubles and feel safe and protected.” The mesh of prayer and desire in “Over the Rainbow” expresses simultaneously Dorothy’s urge to escape and her need to get back to where she once belonged.

That song, along with the others, demanded a vocalist with chops. Although Temple had a perky way with a tune and Jane Withers could pack a musical-comedy wallop, neither could compete with Garland as a singer. Indeed, Freed’s musical mainstay, Roger Edens, declared Temple’s vocal limitations “insurmountable.” From the outset, Freed, a vaudeville-bred lyricist, thought of Garland. So did LeRoy. Freed wrote that Garland would be perfect for “an Orphan in Kansas who sings jazz”—a description that also makes clear how much irreverence and invention he expected from the score.

Freed contemplated hiring Jerome Kern and the lyricists Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields, but Kern was too weak from a recent heart attack. MGM also considered the teams of Mack Gordon and Harry Revel and then Al Dubin and Nacio Herb Brown; Freed made a critical hire when he signed Arlen and Harburg instead. Based partly on a musical structure set out by Edens, they aimed to salute three things: the potency of illusions, the liberation that comes with the power to see through them, and the force that positive illusions can retain even after a sound debunking. Their score lays down a satisfying through line. It’s riotous and upsetting when Toto pulls back a curtain and reveals the awe-inspiring Wizard to be a fraud. But when the Wizard, in a variation on Baum’s climax, gives the Scarecrow a diploma and a doctorate in Thinkology, the Tin Man a heart-shaped watch and a testimonial, and the Cowardly Lion “the Triple Cross Medal” and membership in the Legion of Courage, they embrace those symbols and feel transformed. Yes, the Wizard is a humbug, but in the end his rhetoric and prizes are authentic. He knows how to make Dorothy’s
pals
recognize their own virtues. Although Dorothy contains all their qualities, and the Wizard’s wisdom, too, she doesn’t require certification; all she needs is a pair of ruby slippers. She lucks into them when she inadvertently kills the Wicked Witch of the East; she earns them when she saves the Scarecrow from the Wicked Witch of the West.

The score makes the characters farcically or ruefully self-conscious about feeling that they’re acting out roles. Dorothy’s first number in the Land of Oz is giddy and self-satirizing. Carried on waves of adoration, she helps the Munchkins inflate her accidental killing of the Wicked Witch of the East. Similarly, in the middle segment of the “If I Only Had a Brain/Heart/Nerve” song cycle, the Tin Man, pining for a genuine ticker, muses, in the bridge, “Picture me . . . a balcony . . . above a voice sings low,” and a female voice sings out, “Wherefore are thou, Romeo?” The use of Adriana Caselotti as the voice of “Juliet” embellished the joke for contemporary audiences. She had previously been the lead voice of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Fleming and his creative accomplices stumbled onto the realization that youngsters experience life with greater-than-adult intensity. Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg (the lyricist’s son), in their biography of Harburg,
Who Put the Rainbow in
“
The Wizard of Oz
”
?
(1993), note that Arlen conceived “Over the Rainbow” as a blend of mature and childish feeling: “It is a song for Nelson Eddy as well as for little Dorothy. The octave leap with which Arlen begins the front phrase, and the other graceful leaps of the first sixteen bars situate this song of yearning in emotional overdrive from the start. The challenge facing Harold and Yip was to balance the power of that emotion against the poignancy and delicacy of its childish context.” Thirty years later, his close friend Irving Berlin, working on a Friars Club tribute to Barbra Streisand, sent parody lyrics of “Over the Rainbow” to Arlen, who may have written some of his own—Berlin included a note, “This is better—at least my lawyer thinks so.” Berlin’s version, never performed, contains the line “If Miss B will sing my song—who needs people?” By then, this song may have been too resonant and revered to parody in public.

Balancing the score’s potent longings with Dorothy’s youthful quest for identity was a challenge facing Fleming and Mahin, too. But they attack (and conquer) it head-on. The first question Dorothy hears in Oz is, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” She replies, “Why, I’m not a witch at all. I’m Dorothy Gale of Kansas.” She finds herself as she seeks her way home. The movie is about multiple quests—the Tin Man
to
see himself as a feeling creature, the Scarecrow as a thinking one, the Cowardly Lion as the brave King of the Forest. Even the Wizard hopes to see himself as “a very good man” if “a very bad wizard.”

The consequences of the diverse comedy and drama is a film of unusually elastic allure, earning the allegiance of artists as different as John Waters and Salman Rushdie. This long-lived milestone of family entertainment has an enormous gay following—and not just because the Wicked Witch calls Dorothy “my little pretty” or because the Cowardly Lion embodies an archetypal “sissy,” a tender fellow in a half-fey, half-butch package. (Frank S. Nugent of
The New York Times
knowingly and admiringly referred to his “artistically curled mane.”)

Dorothy’s wondering statement, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” has become one motto of San Francisco’s Castro district. That’s because Oz is a place where all the characters become what they want to be, including Dorothy. The paradox is that she wants to be a loving, appreciative niece to Auntie Em.
The Wizard of Oz
is the movies’ most enduring transformation fantasy because it speaks at once to wanderlust and to the nesting instinct, to a yen for license and make-believe and to a hankering for roots. It’s become the center of sing-along screenings for families as well as camp cultists and a homing signal for American service members abroad.

“I viewed the replacement of Richard Thorpe by Victor Fleming with great trepidation,” noted Wally Worsley, a script supervisor who aptly book-ended his career with Fleming on
Oz
by acting as Steven Spielberg’s production manager on
E.T.
“Fleming had a reputation for being irascible, quick-tempered, and, some said, sadistic. By the time he took over the picture he must have mellowed considerably, for I saw very little of those characteristics.”

From his first day, November 4, to his last the following February 17, Fleming maintained good-humored control. If he “saw a workman sawing or nailing a board in a way he thought was inept, he would go to the man, take the tool, and do it himself. None resented this, and all found it amusing,” Worsley wrote. After working with Thorpe, he felt Fleming’s attitude “was the difference between night and day.” The makeup man William Tuttle (“So many people were involved, I couldn’t take credit for the creative part”) found the director “very gentlemanly. He didn’t put up with foolishness; he was not the most patient person. If you knew what you were doing, he respected you . . . but he would never say, ‘That’s good enough.’ ”

Worsley
thought the crew “seemed to be in our own world on this picture, far removed from the real one. Five soundstages were reserved to us at all times, with sets being built, shot or struck. The crew was large and our hours comparatively short.” Starting at 8:00 a.m., they “were nearly always through between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.” He remembered the production as a hotbed for gambling on horses, with Bolger a prime player. There was plenty of time for it. Filming often halted so Garland could be tutored for a total of three hours out of an eight-hour workday, as required by state law. (MGM kept her busy after hours with offstage preparation and rehearsals.) In addition, because of the intense carbon-arc lamps required to light three-strip Technicolor, Fleming had to stop shooting every hour or two for an hour, to open up the soundstage and ventilate the set—air-conditioning wasn’t sufficient.

Frank Leonetti, a lighting technician in Munchkinland, still marvels at the crew’s ingenuity at swinging around the already-cumbersome camera in its unwieldy sound shielding, called a blimp. “It used to take six to eight men to put the cameras into the sound blimps and then put them on a dolly or a crane,” he says. Leonetti was part of a small army of lamp operators. “The lamps were a lot larger than the ones you have today,” he said in 2004, “and not as efficient. For a carbon-arc lamp, you had to put the two [carbon elements] together, trim and feed them, and they had to be changed every half hour. Today we use high-intensity arcs that don’t require igniting. One man can produce the light that ten men did in 1939; back then, you needed one man for every two arcs, and I couldn’t tell you how many we had.” Hal Rosson, once again Fleming’s cinematographer, said the production used enough arcs “to light 550 five-room homes.”

When Fleming replaced Thorpe, Haley replaced Buddy Ebsen as the Tin Man after an early version of the makeup put Ebsen in the hospital with an allergic reaction. (Makeup artists had sprayed Ebsen with aluminum dust that got into his lungs; for Haley, they substituted aluminum paste. Haley was still laid up with an infection for a week, because the paste got into his eyes.)

In the rush to get a new Tin Man on the set, someone forgot that the character had rusted solid during a rainstorm and been immobilized in the forest for a year. “I worked in a shiny suit of tin with a sparkling tin nose, a bright tin strap around my chin, a glistening tin pot on my head and a coat of brilliant tin paint on my face. I glittered
no
end—for three days,” Haley said. The mistake brought three days of reshoots—$20,000 a day was the well-publicized cost—so Haley would look as if he’d been corroding in the woods.

After settling the makeup and costume matters, Fleming “sort of threw” Haley (the actor wrote) by asking him, “Well, how do you see the part?” According to Haley, “I then told Vic how I had a storytelling voice I used whenever I opened the Oz volumes. It was a soft and sort of wonder-filled voice. Of course, this voice had developed over time, reading the books to my kids, trying to lull them to sleep. But I thought this same soothing quality should typify our dialogue delivery when we were characters in Oz and that we should deliver our lines in a very straight voice when we were real people back in Kansas.” Fleming then called a meeting with Garland, Bolger, and Lahr. “We would all be storytellers in the Land of Oz, each with our own unique story to tell, and each to their own idea of the child listener.” The singsong of Haley’s delivery contrasts beautifully with Lahr’s guttural buffoonery and Bolger’s airiness. “I tried to get a sound in my voice,” said Bolger, “that was complete wonderment, because I was new, so newly made.”

All four actors came out of vaudeville, Garland in a singing act with her sisters. For the men, Lahr adopted a popular brand name of the time and turned it into the trio’s battle cry: “Smith’s Premium Ham!” In a TV interview with Jack Paar in the early 1960s, Garland said the three of them tried to elbow her off the Yellow Brick Road as they skipped along until Fleming, on the camera boom, called out, “Hold it! You three dirty hams let that little girl in there!” He simply could have tired of the “Smith’s Premium Ham!” crack.

Lahr told his son John, for John’s biography of his dad,
Notes on a Cowardly Lion
(1969), “Vic Fleming had never experienced guys like us. Some legitimate directors can’t imagine anybody thinking about anything else, and when he yells ‘Shoot’ just going in and playing. We’d kid around up to the last minute and go on. You could see he got mad and red in the face.” He also could get physical; Edward Hartman noticed Fleming once grabbing Lahr by the arm to make a point.

But Fleming had been working with “guys like us”—including Kathleen Clifford—and blending their acting with outlandish stunts and backdrops throughout his career. The director of Douglas Fairbanks understood outsized theatrical performance as well as any of his stars. Lahr was onto Fleming, though; he knew the director wanted to make sure the movie maintained “a certain mood.” Fleming kept the
film’s
emotions true and tangy while acknowledging to the audience that these were top vaudevillians acting out bizarre fantasy characters. With this authentic, flexible base, he could easily insert flashes of black comedy (they’re not in the book)—such as the Winged Monkeys scattering the Scarecrow’s straw and the Tin Man commenting, “Well, that’s you all over.”