Finding Dorothy

by Elizabeth Letts

  Since her first day visiting the set, Maud had not heard the song about the rainbow again. So her ears perked up when Arlen struck a few chords that she recognized immediately. She waited to hear the girl launch into that beautiful song she remembered, but she soon realized that this time it was not quite the same. It was only a reprise, a short snippet of the longer song, which Maud presumed must come elsewhere in the film. In this scene, the reprise started just as Judy was reaching a fever pitch of despair. The Witch flipped over the giant hourglass filled with the blood-red sand, telling Dorothy that she had only that much time to live, and it was at this moment that the piano player started up with the chords. Each time the filming reached this point in the scene, take after take, the actress, usually so poised, appeared visibly shaken. Gone was the big voice, the confidence, the sheer joy of singing. In its place was the tremulous sound of a young girl, frightened, alone, trapped in a place where the woman looking after her was not a loving aunt but the terrifying, green-faced Wicked Witch. As she sang, the piano player, who’d been improvising an accompaniment to go with her uncertain tempo, suddenly fell silent, leaving nothing but the sound of Judy’s voice quavering, then cracking, until she was too choked up to continue.

  “I’m frightened, Auntie Em! I’m frightened!”

  The stage, the set, the room fell away, and Maud was kneeling on a barren plain, next to a violet-eyed girl with messy braids, dabbing tears from her smudged face with a clean white handkerchief.

  I’m frightened, Auntie Em! I’m frightened!

  “Judy?”

  Arthur Freed hurried over to the young actress, who was sobbing quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, rubbing her nose with her fist. “I’m so sorry. Let’s do it again. I’ll do better.”

  Maud sat rigidly, fearful that there might be a replay of the director’s heartless slap from the day before. But the director didn’t say anything, and Freed was all honey.

  “Let’s take a break, sweetie. You’ve worked hard enough for now.” He slipped his arm through Judy’s, and Maud watched warily as he led her away.

  Fleming held a hand up. “Okay, everyone. Let’s call it quits for now.”

  As people started to shuffle away, Harburg, who had been scribbling notes on his pad of paper, looked up and gave Maud a friendly smile. “Hello there,” he said, approaching her. “You’re Mrs. Baum, aren’t you? I’m wondering if you would be willing to let me ask you a few questions?” Harburg was holding a copy of the script, which he folded shut.

  “Certainly,” Maud said. “I’d be delighted.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is that the latest copy of the script?”

  “For now,” Harburg said. “It’s a—”

  “—work in progress, it changes every day. Yes, I know. I’d love to take a look at it,” Maud said.

  The fellow cocked his head. The stage lights reflected on his eyeglasses, hiding his expression.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Maybe we could get a bite to eat? You ever been to Musso & Frank’s?”

  “Of course,” Maud said. It was one of Hollywood’s most popular writers’ hangouts. “I live just around the corner.”

  “ ’Round five?” he said.

  “Five it is.”

  As Maud was leaving, she looked around for Judy, hoping to see that the girl had recovered from her harrowing day’s performance, but the alley outside the sound stage was empty.

  * * *

  —

  AS MAUD WAS CUTTING behind the Thalberg Building, on the way to the parking lot, a back door pushed open, and Judy all but tumbled out right in front of Maud. Her hair was mussed, and she was frantically trying to rebutton her blouse. She was crying. When she caught sight of Maud, her face flooded with relief.

  “Mrs. Baum?”

  “Judy?” Maud gasped. “What happened? Can I help you?”

  Judy reached into her handbag, took out a bottle full of pills, shook one out, and swallowed it without any water to wash it down. She sobbed, then balled up her fists in her eye sockets, as if forcing her tears into retreat.

  “He told me he was taking me to see Mr. Mayer,” Judy said. “But when we got there, Mr. Mayer wasn’t in…”

  “Who?” Maud asked.

  “Freed. Mr. Freed.” Now all the tears and the fluster were gone. Judy seemed kind of wooden.

  “Go on.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Do you see how old I am? There is nothing I haven’t heard before—or experienced myself.”

  Judy smoothed her skirt and straightened her blouse.

  “Mayer has his own elevator that goes out the back,” Judy said. “Freed said we’d go out that way. As soon as we got in and the door shut…” She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.

  Maud was furious.

  “Listen to me,” Maud said, placing her hand on the girl’s arm. “Don’t ever be alone with him again.”

  “I thought he was being nice to me.” Judy peered at Maud. “You probably think I encouraged him.”

  “I think no such thing! It’s not easy being a young woman. It wasn’t when I was young, and it isn’t now. But I have a solution for you.” She rummaged around in her purse until she found what she was looking for: the small sewing kit she carried everywhere. She extracted a long straight pin with a pearl on the end.

  “If a fellow gets too close and you don’t want him to, poke him with this pin. It’ll teach him.”

  “My mother told me to be nice to the studio men so that they’ll like me.”

  “Now, listen to me, Judy Garland. Being nice means saying ‘Good morning’ and ‘How do you do?’ But if a man tries to touch you and you don’t want him to, you say no, and if that doesn’t work, you step on his foot as hard as you can, and if that doesn’t work, you poke him with the pin. He’ll squeal—and that will give away his bad intentions.”

  Just then, Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s secretary, out of breath, rounded the corner of the building. Her glasses, hanging on a beaded chain, were banging against her ample chest.

  “Oh!” she said, slowing to a walk when she saw them. “There you are…”

  “Ida!” Judy said, running over to the stern-looking matron and giving her a big hug.

  “I didn’t realize that you were with Mrs. Baum,” she said, still huffing a little bit. “I saw you go in with Mr. Freed, and when you didn’t come out, I thought…”

  “That he had used the back elevator?” Maud said.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Ida said. “I watch this one every day. I’m not blind. I know what goes on.”

  “Don’t get on an elevator alone with a man!” Maud and Ida said in unison, then looked at each other in surprise.

  “It’s not easy for these girls,” Ida said.

  “It’s not easy for any girls,” Maud replied.

  Judy held up the hatpin Maud had handed her.

  “Good!” Ida said. “And don’t be afraid to use it.”

  * * *

  —

  MAUD SLIPPED INTO A booth in the clubby, wood-paneled interior of Musso & Frank’s at five minutes before five. A moment later, she saw Harburg coming through the door. He sat down and placed the script on the table between them.

  “Not sure how much it’s going to help you—it’s very much a work in progress. Langley wrote it up one way, then Ryerson and Woolf changed it all around, Langley came back and tried to put it right, and now it’s my job to try to stitch the whole thing together.”

  “But aren’t you the lyricist?”

  “Lyricist, wordsmith, jack-of-all-trades. Lots of writers arguing with each other, but the songs are going to drive the story.” A red-coated waiter materialized next to the table. “Pastrami on rye,” Harburg said. “And for the lady?”

  “Just a bowl of tomato soup,” she said.


  “So, Mrs. Baum, you don’t mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Of course not,” Maud said.

  “It was something you said the first day I met you,” Harburg said. “About the rainbow song.”

  At the mention of the song, Maud became alert.

  “You said there wasn’t enough wanting in it….I’ve spent a long time thinking that over. I’m trying to get it just right.”

  “It’s quite extraordinary,” Maud said, “that of all of the ideas, that’s the one you would choose—the rainbow, I mean. After all, there is no mention of rainbows in the book.”

  “Why so extraordinary?” Harburg asked.

  Maud fell silent. The story of the rainbow was one she had never told anyone. The bleak prairie, the wooden wagon jouncing along on a road baked by relentless sun, the worst day of Maud’s life—even with Frank at her side.

  “It’s just an extraordinary coincidence—and Frank was a great believer in signs.”

  “The song is the bit that holds the whole thing together, in my opinion,” Harburg said. “If we can just manage to get it exactly right.”

  “May I?” she asked, nodding at the closed script that lay between them. Her heart was racing. She could hear a roaring sound in her ears, but she tried to appear calm.

  Harburg nodded. “Don’t see why not.”

  “Don’t see why not? Let me tell you something: you’re the first person who hasn’t objected. Everyone else is keeping it as locked down as Fort Knox.”

  Harburg tipped his head back and laughed, so that she could see several gold crowns on his teeth.

  “Capitalists.”

  “Capitalists?”

  “They’re just worried it’s not good enough yet. Word leaks out that M-G-M’s big new fantasy has a rotten script. That would be a killer for the studio. You know how much money they’re pouring into the project? A lot more than they should. L.B. has got a soft spot for the picture, thinks it’s ‘magical.’ It’s going to be big trouble if it turns into a flop.”

  “L.B.?”

  “Louis B. Mayer—that’s what everyone calls him.”

  “Well, then L.B. is right. Oz is magical. And it will most certainly not be a flop,” Maud said. “Not if you do your job properly.”

  “The script’s okay—better than most, but they’re just afraid to let any rumors get started. Always worrying about the bottom line.”

  Maud shivered as she turned back the first page and began to read. She looked up at Harburg, blinking in alarm. “But who are all these characters? Hickory? Hunk? Zeke?”

  “Oh that’s Haley, Bolger, and Lahr.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know: Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion.”

  “But then why do they have different names?”

  “Because that’s in Kansas,” he said. “That’s the conceit. Dorothy already knows all these guys. And then they show up again as characters in the Land of Oz. Like it’s a mirror of Kansas. Clever, isn’t it?”

  “But that can’t be!” Maud said, louder than she expected. Blood was rushing through her ears. “Absolutely not! That’s not how the story works. There is no one in Kansas but Uncle Henry and Aunt Em.” Maud’s voice quavered. “Oz isn’t just a mirror. It’s a real place. My husband was absolutely adamant about that. It was a place you could visit, and then return from. It’s here right now—or at least Frank would say it was—it’s just that we can’t push aside the curtain to see it.”

  “But of course it’s a real place, way I see it,” Harburg said. “I’m familiar with that place—a place where fat cats don’t take all the money but share it with the poor, a place where women get treated with the equal rights that they deserve—”

  “You take an interest in the rights of women?” Maud asked.

  Harburg had a crooked smile that revealed just a few of his teeth. His eyes were twinkling. “I should say I do,” Harburg said. “Along with the rights of workers, and support of unions, and…I know your mother was a great supporter of those things as well.”

  Maud flushed with pleasure. “You are familiar with Matilda Joslyn Gage?”

  “Of course I am,” Harburg said. “I’ve got a show I’ve been working on called Bloomer Girl, about an abolitionist who dons Amelia Bloomer’s daring pantaloons. Hoping we’ll get it up on Broadway one of these days.”

  “Well, then,” Maud said, “I consider you an ally.”

  “No sides here,” Harburg said. “We’re all on the same team. We want to make a great picture—something memorable.”

  “You know, my husband never wanted his stories to be frightening. He said he wrote fairy tales with the sad parts left out. It was hard to watch those scenes today. I worry about Judy…”

  Harburg removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “A studio lot is not an easy place to grow up,” he said. “But that girl was born for the stage—and she knows it. She’ll do all right.”

  “She should be more than just ‘all right,’ ” Maud murmured. She returned her attention to the script. The pages were riddled with pencil marks.

  Harburg tapped the page she was reading. “Keep in mind, this could all change before the picture’s in the can—sometimes you’ve got to switch things around. What makes sense in a book doesn’t always make sense in the picture. What you’re trying to capture is its essence. Think of it like the melody, if you will.”

  Harburg returned his attention to his sandwich, allowing Maud to focus on the script. There were so many corrections and scribbled notes that it was hard for her to tell what she was reading, and she felt no closer to understanding how the film would come out than the first day she’d arrived on the set.

  She flipped to the last page, scanning the text until she came to the final line. Without realizing it, she shook her head vehemently, mouthing the word No.

  Harburg looked at her quizzically. “What is it? You don’t like the ending? It’s just like the book.” He reached out and spun the script around so that it was facing him.

  “ ‘She claps her heels together three times. “Take me home to Aunt Em,” ’ ” he read aloud. “What’s wrong with that? It’s straight from the book.”

  “Oh no,” Maud said. “You must change this line.”

  “Change it? But why?”

  “Just don’t let Dorothy say she wants to go back to Aunt Em. Please! Can you just have her say that she wants to go home?”

  “I suppose that would work well enough, but why?”

  Maud could picture the faded gingham, the sunburnt face, the eyes, with their thick, dark lashes, squeezed tightly shut, and the girl murmuring under her breath.

  “No reason,” Maud said.

  “No reason?” Harburg said. “Are you sure about that?”

  Maud thought about telling him everything, pouring it out, right there at the table with this kindly man. But she couldn’t. She pursed her lips firmly. She was not going to confide more than she intended. She had held on to the story’s secrets for all these years. She was not going to change that now.

  “Do I have your word, Mr. Harburg? You’ll change the line?”

  Harburg ran his hand over his slicked-back hair, leaned in, and opened his mouth, as if to persist, but Maud’s fierce expression dissuaded him.

  “All right, Mrs. Baum. I don’t see that it makes any difference. Let me ask you something else, if you don’t mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I never asked you my question. I’m working on the rainbow song, trying to get it just right. Have you ever been to Kansas?” Harburg asked. “I wondered if there was some reason why the story starts out there.”

  Maud traced her finger along a ridge in the dark wooden table. In fact, the Baum Theatre Company had briefly passed through Kansas once, just a few months after her wedding. She
remembered almost nothing about it except that she had received a heavy black-edged envelope; it had contained a note in her mother’s hand letting her know that her father was at last in peace. When she pictured Kansas, all she could see was that letter, and her tears, and the way Frank had comforted her. Nothing else remained.

  She realized that Harburg was waiting for an answer. “Frank and I went through Kansas once, not long after we were married. It was a long time ago.”

  “Must have made quite an impression on Mr. Baum?”

  “Oh, Kansas isn’t the state of Kansas,” Maud said. “Kansas is just the place you’re stuck in, wherever that might be.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  ABERDEEN, DAKOTA TERRITORY

  1888

  In September 1888, Frank, Maud, and the two boys arrived in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. The tracks had arrived in Aberdeen just five years earlier, sparking the fast growth of the town. In this flat land, set upon a plain that had once been a prehistoric lake, the horizon was a distant line and the earth seemed swallowed by the sky. When the railroad first arrived, Aberdeen had fewer than one hundred residents. But Maud peered out the window at a town that had grown to a population of three thousand settlers and an economy that had burgeoned with the business the railroad brought, and several years of bumper wheat crops.

  It was a fine sunny day with wispy white clouds floating far overhead as they climbed into T.C.’s rig. He settled their traps in back, and soon they were passing along a crowded street.

  “That’s the Northwestern National Bank,” T.C. said, pointing out a large brick structure still under construction. “When it’s finished, it will be the tallest building west of St. Paul.”

  Frank nodded approvingly.

  “And as you can see, there are several empty storefronts along Main Street for rent,” T.C. went on. “I’m sure you’ll find a good spot to locate your dry-goods store.”

  “Bazaar,” Frank said.

  “I beg your pardon?” T.C. looked puzzled.