Finding Dorothy

by Elizabeth Letts

  But tonight, as her limousine rolled up Hollywood Boulevard toward the ornate façade of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, she felt a flutter of excitement. The gaudy Chinese pagoda housing the movie palace stood out against the dark sky, its copper-topped turrets outlined with thousands of brightly colored lights. Adding to the spectacle, the powerful beams of searchlights crisscrossed the darkness, as if to warn the heavenly bodies to know their place—second to the stars that blazed here on earth.

  The chauffeur swung the door open and offered her a hand; she felt unsteady, momentarily blinded by the brilliant lights, an old lady among the young. The crowd pressed toward her, the fans’ excitement like a physical force, but no one recognized this woman, approaching the end of her eighth decade, with her gray hair pulled back sharply from her face, wearing sturdy walking shoes and a dated dress. Their eyes flitted toward her, then away, already greedy for the well-known personalities who would emerge from other cars.

  Maud didn’t care whether they recognized her. Chin aloft, back straight, she knew who she looked like now: like her mother, Matilda, when she’d stormed the dais at the nation’s centennial in Philadelphia. Oh, if only Mother could have witnessed this—if only Matilda and Frank could have stridden with her, arm in arm, to see how what once was only imagined could now be brought to life.

  Tonight Grauman’s famous forecourt, decorated with the handprints of movie stars, had been transformed into a cornfield. A nice touch. Frank would have liked that. A handler at her elbow ushered her forward to stand for a photo in front of a cornstalk. She smiled.

  Inside the grand movie palace, Maud scarcely noticed the elaborate adornment, the Chinese lanterns and hand-painted silk screens. The usher escorted her to her seat of honor. Settling into the red velvet cushioned theater seat, she closed her eyes, turning inward, summoning her mother and father, her dearest Frank, her sister, Julia. Without each one of them, this glorious moment in this grand cinema palace would never have occurred. And yet, here she was, alone.

  The lights flashed, then dimmed as people hurried to claim their seats. The chatter subsided.

  Maud folded her hands in her lap and sat, utterly still, as the curtains parted, the veil lifting between this world and another.

  A credit appeared on the screen in large white letters, floating over a backdrop of puffy cumulus clouds that blew across a gray sky.

  The words tumbled off the screen, and Maud saw a sepia-toned road stretching off toward the horizon, and a little girl and her dog, running away.

  Daughter of her heart. Forever young.

  AFTERWORD

  My own story about Dorothy began in 1965 when I was four years old, living in a suburb of Houston with my family. The owners of a local television store opened up after hours and invited the neighborhood folk to come watch the annual network screening of The Wizard of Oz on one of their brand-new color TVs. Like so many other people, I’ve never forgotten the first time I saw this legendary film. And as did so many others, I felt that the character of Dorothy belonged just to me. In the 1960s, sandwiched between two brothers, I knew that girls were not equal to boys—we couldn’t wear pants to school or play on sports teams. I figured out instinctively that Dorothy was the kind of little girl I wanted to be—one who could stare down a lion, melt a witch, tame a wizard. From that day forward, Dorothy became my imaginary friend.

  About six or seven years ago, I was reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud to my son when I found myself wondering about the author. Why was I so familiar with his creations yet knew nothing about the man who had created them? And then when I read about him, I suddenly felt as if I understood why this man, in particular, had created one of American literature’s most spunky and enduring female characters.

  Baum’s wife, Maud Gage Baum, was a tour de force, completely unlike most Victorian women. Not surprising: Maud was the daughter of one of the nineteenth century’s most outspoken advocates for the rights of women. In 1876, Maud’s mother, Matilda Joslyn Gage, helped to pen a Declaration of the Rights of Women and marched, uninvited, onto the dais of America’s centennial celebration to hand the document to a startled Senator John Ferry, then acting vice president, with her close friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at her side. Matilda fought for women’s access to higher education, helping to ensure her daughter Maud’s place as one of Cornell University’s first female undergraduates. And yet Maud chose to defy her formidable mother by running away with an itinerant theater man named L. Frank Baum, demonstrating the very independence of spirit that her mother had taught her. Maud never regretted her decision. Theirs was a great love. Frank and Maud remained devoted partners throughout the rest of their lives.

  But it was not until I stumbled across a 1939 photograph of Judy Garland and Maud Baum seated next to each other, reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, that I realized I had found a story to tell. Maud Gage was born in 1861, shortly before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, sparking the Civil War. When I learned that Maud, aged seventy-eight, had met Judy Garland, aged sixteen, on the set of The Wizard of Oz in 1939, I needed to know more. How had this meeting ever come to pass? What might they have talked about?

  When a reader is enjoying a historical novel, she is likely to wonder how much of the story is drawn from real life. In the case of Finding Dorothy, I have altered some dates and names for clarity and plot development, but most of my story is based on known historical fact. Before writing a single word, I turned to biographies and diaries, letters and photographs to help me reconstruct the Baums’ lives. I found that Frank Baum’s inspirations for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz have been well documented. You find in Baum’s book the witches his mother-in-law wrote about in her well-regarded though radical tome Woman, Church and State. You find in the novel the scarecrow that haunted Maud’s childhood, and shadows of the Tin Man in Frank’s years selling axle grease for a firm called Baum’s Castorine Company. If you are interested in reading more about L. Frank Baum’s life, there are several excellent biographies, including Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story, by Evan I. Schwartz; The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum, by Rebecca Loncraine; L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz, by Katharine M. Rogers; and Baum’s Road to Oz, edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal.

  But when it comes to the inspiration for the character of Dorothy, no clear consensus emerged. The Baums had no daughters. Some have speculated that Frank named the character after one of Maud’s nieces, T.C.’s daughter, Dorothy Gage, who died in infancy in 1898, but I found this theory less compelling when I discovered that Frank used the name Dorothy in a story called “Little Bun Rabbit,” which was published in 1897, before Maud’s niece Dorothy was born. In that story, the character Dorothy is described as a gentle little girl living on a farm who was so kindhearted that she was able to talk to animals. So, perhaps Maud’s little niece, who lived only five months, was named after Baum’s character, not the other way around.

  But there has long been a consensus among Oz scholars that Baum’s vision of Kansas was modeled on the prairie town of Aberdeen, then part of the Dakota Territory where Maud and Frank arrived just as a farming boom was turning to bust. In particular, Baum seems to have drawn inspiration from the hardscrabble life of Maud’s older sister Julia and her husband, who staked a claim in LaMoure County, Dakota (later North Dakota) in 1884. The Carpenters lived on a harsh and unforgiving homestead just as the drought was making it almost impossible to eke out a living from a government claim. Julia’s handwritten diary, which I located in the collection of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, provided me with many details of her life, including her struggles with her health, with the harsh environment on the Dakota claim, and with the death of her son Jamie when he was an infant. Her husband was nearly ten years her junior, an alcoholic, a harsh man, and a poor farmer. Julia carefully recorded lists of her Christmas gifts, her children’s teething and illnesses
, the unrelenting burden of her work, and her dreadful loneliness in an isolated shanty with none but the wolves and the distant stars for company. But much was left unsaid—such as a haunting entry from one bleak midwinter day in 1888, when she wrote simply, “What a terrible night!” Within those margins, I’ve fleshed out her story.

  After losing their farm, the Carpenter family was able to relocate, first to the small town of Edgeley, where Magdalena got a chance to attend school, and later to Fargo, North Dakota, where Frank set up his brother-in-law in the insurance business. Their material life improved considerably, but James Carpenter remained an unhappy man, eventually committing suicide at the age of sixty. Julia Carpenter suffered from health problems throughout her life, although she remained dedicated to the Christian Science faith, which forbade her from taking medicine. But her mental health also remained precarious, and she died in a sanatorium. Magdalena graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1909. Her daughter Jocelyn Burdick, Matilda Joslyn Gage’s great-granddaughter, was the first woman to serve as a United States senator from North Dakota.

  Maud’s own life—the unconventional childhood with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as frequent visitors in her home, the hazing she suffered at Cornell, her near-fatal bout with childbed fever, her work as a seamstress to support their family, and her close relationships with her mother, sister, and husband—is based on historical fact. Maud had four boys, and she did at one time ask her sister if she could adopt Magdalena, an offer her sister declined. She certainly pined for a daughter in many of her letters. The Baum family did visit Chicago’s famous White City on more than one occasion, and many researchers believe that it served as an inspiration for the Emerald City. The dedication to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reads: “This book is dedicated to my good friend and comrade. My Wife.” Frank Baum died in 1919 at the age of sixty-two of complications from gallbladder surgery. A bankruptcy in 1910, after Frank’s early foray into the nascent film industry, had led to Maud consigning the rights of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to their creditors. Yet Maud still had the money to build Ozcot, the Baums’ first permanent home, thanks to her inheritance from her mother. After Maud’s death, Ozcot was razed to make way for a nondescript apartment building, but the Baums’ home in Aberdeen, South Dakota, still stands.

  Finding Dorothy streamlines Maud and Frank’s life stories, skipping over some events in their long life together. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was Frank’s first full-length book, and the one that brought lasting prosperity to his family, but he published two other books of nonsense poetry before its publication. In the interest of simplicity, I left out several close family members. In addition to T.C. and Julia, Maud had another older sibling, Helen. In addition to Magdalena and Jamie, Julia had another son named Harry. T.C. had another daughter, Matilda Jewell, as well as two daughters who died in infancy.

  If you would like to learn more about the creation of the classic film The Wizard of Oz, I would recommend The Making of the Wizard of Oz, by Aljean Harmetz. “Over the Rainbow” was almost cut from the film after a sneak preview. Many of the people associated with the film later took credit for saving the song. Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics for “Over the Rainbow,” later wrote the songs for a successful Broadway play, Bloomer Girl, whose story was inspired by women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer, a contemporary of Matilda Gage’s. Harburg was blacklisted in the 1950s after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Did Frank’s jacket really appear on the set of The Wizard of Oz? The unit publicist never backed away from her story that the jacket worn by Frank Morgan during the Kansas scenes was purchased in a secondhand shop by someone in the wardrobe department and was later authenticated by both Maud Baum and the Chicago tailor as having belonged to L. Frank Baum.

  Judy’s life, her difficulties as a child actor, and the story of her father, whose experiences living as a closeted gay man in the early twentieth century caused her family to be run out of their small-town homes on several occasions, are all drawn from historical fact. The ruthless treatment she received at the hands of studio executives, the studio doctors who plied her with pills, her pushy stage mother, her father’s death in a hospital while she sang on national radio, and instances of sexual harassment at the studio all come from documented sources. Arthur Freed may or may not have molested Judy, but he did expose himself to Shirley Temple when she was only eleven years old. “Over the Rainbow” was Judy’s signature song, the touchstone she returned to again and again—but, tragically, Judy Garland never did manage to find that peace for herself. In her own words, “I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I couldn’t.” And yet, it was her role as Dorothy and her rendition of “Over the Rainbow” that cemented her place in immortality.

  The Wizard of Oz debuted in 1939 to generally positive reviews and moderate box office success, but it was not the top-grossing film of that year. After its debut on television in 1956, however, it was screened yearly on network television until 1980, and viewing the film became a beloved holiday tradition for an entire generation, making The Wizard of Oz one of the most-viewed films of all time. “Over the Rainbow” was voted the No. 1 song of the twentieth century by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  For

  Susanna Porter

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It often feels as if an author gets to play the wizard while an army of hardworking people behind the scenes whisper, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” This is my place to thank the many, many people without whom this book, and none of my books, would be possible. It is an understatement to say that I’m grateful that with their help I’m able to spend my time doing the thing I love the most in the world—making up stories.

  I think the greatest joy for an author is to be given the opportunity to publish several books with the same people, especially when those people are as awesome as the team at Ballantine. Thank you so much to Ballantine Bantam Dell publisher Kara Welsh, deputy publisher Kim Hovey, and editor in chief and associate publisher Jennifer Hershey for their unflagging support. For their painstaking attention to detail and sagacious suggestions, thank you to production editor Steve Messina and copy editor Bonnie Thompson. For the book’s beautiful jacket and interior design, I’m grateful to Lynn Andreozzi and Barbara Bachman. As always, I am so grateful to Cindy Murray, deputy director of publicity, and Quinne Rogers, director of marketing, for their cheerful, creative, and ingenious strategies for figuring out how to connect a book with its audience. I am greatly indebted to the entire team in sales, who have shown me time and again that they truly do care about every single book and author.

  It is difficult for me to adequately express my gratitude to my wonderful editor, Susanna Porter. Not only does she have keen editorial skills, but she puts in a huge amount of work helping to hone each manuscript. Her perceptive understanding of character helped me to deepen my story and stay true to the strong women I was writing about. I also owe thanks to Emily Hartley, whose helpful and insightful input on an early draft reminded me of the importance of love.

  As always, I’m indebted to my agent, Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management, who encouraged me to write fiction again, and whose unflagging and contagious enthusiasm for this story buoyed me through the writing process. I’m also very grateful to Jamie Chambliss at Folio, whose astute editorial feedback early on helped point me toward the emotional heart of the story.

  There were many people who read early drafts of the manuscript and whose feedback provided key insights to me. In particular, my children aided me in so many ways—Nora, who helped me to figure out who Dorothy was; Hannah, who came up with the wonderful title; and Willis, who led me to discover Frank and Maud’s story in the first place through his enthusiasm for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Thanks to my mother, Ginger Letts, who patiently listens and
rarely criticizes.

  For assistance with the L. Frank Baum Collection, thank you to Shirley Arment at the K. O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library, and thanks also to Michael Swanson at the State Historical Society of North Dakota for providing me with a copy of the Julia Gage Carpenter diary.

  Writing can be a solitary profession, and I could not survive it without my dear writing friends who celebrate every success and mourn every missing comma with me: Tasha Alexander and Andrew Grant, Jon Clinch, Karen Dionne, Renée Rosen, Danielle Younge-Ullman, Jessica Keener, Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Melanie Benjamin, Sachin Waikar, Keith Cronin, and Darcie Chan.

  For every reader who passes along book recommendations, writes reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, or takes a chance on an unfamiliar author, I’m eternally grateful. For every librarian and bookseller, I consider you my heroes. For all the book club members, you are part of the big extended family of book lovers. Without readers, there are no writers.

  To every member of my family, I am eternally grateful for your love and support.

  And last, I’d like to honor the memory of Matilda Joslyn Gage, who fought so hard for women’s right to vote so that future generations could benefit from her efforts; L. Frank Baum, whose story and characters have endured more than a century and inspired countless other artists; Judy Garland, whose great talent has continued to spark joy for so many; and Maud herself—the woman behind the curtain!

  BY ELIZABETH LETTS

  Fiction

  Finding Dorothy

  Family Planning

  Quality of Care

  Nonfiction

  The Perfect Horse