“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