Get Happy (19 page)

“Oz should find a ready-made audience practically everywhere,”
Film Bulletin
had predicted, and so it did. The winding queues in New York were repeated all over the country: big cities and small, East and West, nearly everybody loved
The Wizard of Oz
. popularity does not always translate into profits, however, particularly in the motion-picture business,
and
Oz
was not the financial bonanza it appeared to be. This was due, in part, to the youthful makeup of the audience. Since children, who constituted at least a third of those standing outside the theaters, were charged much less than adults—an average of ten cents a ticket, compared with twenty-five cents for adults—a full house did not necessarily mean full receipts.

The picture would have been a solid moneymaker, nonetheless, had it not been for the big production budget Schenck had complained about. To the $2.777 million cost of making the movie, Metro had to add almost a million dollars for distribution, advertising and promotion. Real costs, money the studio actually spent, thus approached $4 million dollars. That meant that although the picture’s box-office gross ($3.017 million) was among the year’s highest, M-G-M still lost something like $750,000. Not until it was released a second time in the late forties did
Oz
begin to turn a profit; only after it was shown on television—in 1956, and nearly every year thereafter—did it start to reap large sums on its investment.

Judged by its reception rather than its financial returns, the film was a smash, however, recognized by most reviewers as something out of the ordinary. “Just sit and look back in wide-mouthed astonishment and admiration,” advised Clark Rodenbach in the
Chicago Daily News
. “You can see it again and again and never tire of its marvels,” declared Harrison Carroll in the
Los Angeles Herald-Express
. Similar comments could be read in most other publications as well, the picture’s few pans coming almost entirely from supposedly highbrow magazine critics. With the untiring aptitude intellectuals sometimes display for seeing everything but the point, the
New Yorker’s
Russel Maloney, for example, dismissed it as “a stinkeroo.”

Like Fords out of Willow Run, the movies rolled off the California assembly lines in 1939, 365 in all, an average of one a day. As in any other year, most were forgotten the minute their names left the marquees. Who today recalls
King of the Turf, Undercover Doctor
or
The Kid from Kokomo? Those Glamour Girls, Boy Slaves
or
Beasts of Berlin?
But perhaps two dozen of the 365 are not only remembered, but enjoyed, talked
about and studied still:
Stagecoach. Wuthering Heights. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Love Affair. The Roaring Twenties. Dark Victory. Young Mr. Lincoln. Juarez. Gunga Din. Jesse James. Only Angels Have Wings. Union Pacific. Of Mice and Men. The Rains Came. The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. Idiot’s Delight. Ninotchka. Intermezzo. The Women. Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Destry Rides Again. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Drums Along the Mohawk. Gone With the Wind
. Those were some of the titles of what is now regarded as the greatest single year in film history, a prolonged and precious moment in which the Hollywood studio system, whose sole purpose was to make money, produced an astonishing and unexpected harvest—popular art of high and lasting merit.

The result, on Oscar night, February 29, 1940, was a parade of excellence such as Hollywood had never seen before. To most of the public, however, as well as to most of those who picked the winners, one picture, David O. Selznick’s
Gone With the Wind
, stood out even in that stellar grouping. Other movies,
Oz
among them, had struck bright sparks;
Gone With the Wind
—the longest, most expensive and most eagerly awaited picture of the decade—had shot giant bolts of lightning. When the victors were announced at a gala dinner at the Cocoanut Grove, the outcome thus seemed foreordained. “What a wonderful thing, this benefit for David Selznick,” quipped Bob Hope, the master of ceremonies. The second time Selznick was called to the podium to pick up an award, Hope added the obvious: “David, you should have brought roller skates.”

When the night was over,
Gone With the Wind
had appropriated ten of the seventeen major awards, including one for Victor Fleming’s direction. Judy herself received a minor honor. For everything she had done in 1939, which meant
Babes in Arms
as well as
The Wizard of Oz
, she was named the best juvenile performer. Her old pal Mickey, who had shared the award with Deanna Durbin the year before, presented her with a miniature version of the Oscar statuette—“the Munchkin Award,” she was jokingly to call it.

Surrounded by so many other more glamorous pictures,
The Wizard of Oz
seemed to shrink into shy invisibility, winning only two fairly predictable awards, one for the best original music score, another for the best song. “Over the Rainbow,” the song that almost wasn’t, at least
not in
The Wizard of Oz
, had received the ultimate vindication. By the usual measurements,
Oz
had probably been justly rewarded. Almost any of the year’s other major movies had far greater star power, for instance. Among the many sitting in the Cocoanut Grove, who could have imagined that of all the memorable films of 1939, that grand and glorious assembly, the one that eventually would have the widest and most enduring appeal—that would be seen, indeed, by more people than any other movie ever made—would be Metro’s gentle children’s fantasy?

The answer is no one, because no one was able, at such close range, to see
The Wizard of Oz
for what it really is. And what it really is is not just a movie, but a Technicolor retelling of a story more ancient than antiquity. M-G-M, which liked to think of itself as the world’s chief purveyor of slick, commercial, escapist entertainment, had produced a movie that touched emotions deep and true, unwittingly creating the first myth for the age of moving pictures. Dorothy is not merely walking down that Yellow Brick Road; she is treading in the footsteps of heroes, of Odysseus fighting the hostility of gods and men to return home to Ithaca, of Galahad venturing into dark and sunless forests in search of the Holy Grail, and of many another figure of legend and literature who has braved injury or death in some lonely quest.

In mythology, such quests through field and forest were metaphors for psychological journeys, and every monster that lay waiting in the fog had its counterpart in the murky depths of the subconscious. Like those heroes of old, young Dorothy is on a journey of self-discovery: she is making a spiritual passage from adolescence to adulthood, immaturity to maturity. Dependent on her aunt and uncle, on the Wizard and the Good Witch—even on her ruby slippers—she must find herself; she must establish her own identity. Her pilgrimage ends when the movie ends, when she realizes that she does not need protection: she can take care of herself. Her destiny is hers to determine—no one else can do it for her. That is what she means when she says: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.”

Caught up in the suspense, children—and adults, too, for that matter—who see
The Wizard of Oz
do not think about meanings, any
more than did those who sat around Attic fires, eager to learn the fate of Odysseus. They do not need to; if they did, the movie would be a failure.
Oz
speaks to their feelings, not their intellects, and they instinctively understand its message. That message, which they find both comforting and inspiring, is that if a poor little girl from Kansas can walk down a perilous path, slay wicked witches and stand up to mighty wizards, so, too, can they confront the threats, real and imagined, to their own emerging futures. If Dorothy can survive the hazards of growing up, in other words, so can they. In former times, it took centuries for a story to acquire the potency of myth, to lodge itself so firmly in mind and memory that the mention of a familiar line could be an open sesame to a vault of buried emotions. Thanks to television,
The Wizard of Oz
needed mere decades to be granted such incantatory powers. Embraced with natural and spontaneous affection by each succeeding generation, it is now a universal reference point, beyond language and national identity.

Without Judy, it seems safe to say,
The Wizard of Oz
would have had no such echoes or reverberations. If Nick Schenck had got his wish and Shirley Temple had played Dorothy,
Oz
might still have been a good movie. But with Temple in the part, or with any actress other than Judy, it almost certainly would have been just a movie, not the call to the heart and soul that Judy makes it. It is she who gives it its special poignancy. It is she who, through an act of conjuration, persuades the audience to look at all the fantastic goings-on through her wide and trusting eyes. She makes the unbelievable believable, the unreal real. Writers can write words and directors can describe how they want them spoken; thereafter, they belong to the actors, who, if they have any talent, bring them to life in original and sometimes surprising ways. That is what Judy does with Dorothy. She makes her the quiet center about which the movie turns; she puts her imprint not only on her own role, but on everyone else’s as well.

She has help, of course, most notably from the soulful sounds of “Over the Rainbow,” which, like the soft and suggestive words of a hypnotist, assist her in building a mood of wonder and trust. “Our
sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” wrote Shelley, and Judy’s sweetest songs, the ones that she sang with the most feeling and effect, were always tinged, as “Over the Rainbow” is, with a tender, companionable melancholy. In their bittersweet ballad of frustrated hopes and inexhaustible yearnings Arlen and Harburg had found the perfect musical expression of her own turbulent emotions.

Rarely have song and singer been so ideally matched. Many other singers have had a signature song, but none has been so closely identified with a single number as Judy was to be with “Over the Rainbow.” In the decades to come she was to joke about almost everything and everybody. But she never joked, nor allowed anyone around her to joke, about “Over the Rainbow.” That was her anthem, her sacred text, and it was safe from even
her
humor. “‘Rainbow’ has always been my song,” she was to say. “I get emotional—one way or the other—about every song I sing. But maybe I get more emotional about ‘Rainbow.’ I never shed any phoney tears about it. Everybody has songs that make them cry. That’s my sad song.”

About the making of
The Wizard of Oz
she would tell funny stories. But
Oz
, too, she regarded with an almost religious reverence. When she began filming it in the fall of 1938, she had a bright but still uncertain future. A year later, because of
Oz
, she was a bankable, certifiable star. If anyone had any doubts, Metro, which never acted hastily in such matters, made her rank official by placing her name on its glittering roster of stars. There she resided, right next to Gable and Garbo, the grandest, most regal figures on the lot.
Oz
had given her a kind of rebirth, she said, and “the people at M-G-M stopped referring to me as the kid they were stuck with when they’d let Deanna Durbin go.”

Oz
had done more than make her a star, however: it had touched her with its own peculiar but potent magic. Whether Judy liked it or not, the girl who had traveled that Yellow Brick Road had become her doppelgänger, a companion she could never shake. To audiences around the world, little Dorothy was not just a character in a movie, and the girl who had played her was not just an actress repeating lines from a script. One and the same, actress and character, Judy and Dorothy, they were a symbol of grit and pluck, a personification of faith and fortitude
in the face of adversity. When audiences clutched Dorothy to their hearts, they grasped Judy along with her.