Maud burst out laughing. “Never mind. My late husband always said that a chicken can recognize a friend! He made a hobby of breeding fancy chickens. We used to keep a whole flock in our backyard.” She reached down, picked up the errant fowl, and calmly handed it back to the fellow, who beamed in appreciation and surprise. “Welcome to Kansas,” he said.
Maud immediately noticed that Victor Fleming was no longer directing—he’d left to work on another picture, Gone with the Wind, which the trades were touting as the biggest movie of 1939. Maud was piqued that the director could be changed at such an important moment in the film—and why? Did Fleming truly believe that Gone with the Wind was more important? Maud sized up the new fellow, King Vidor, a slight man with light blue eyes and a round face who spoke with a soft Texan drawl. Maud thought there was a kindness to his expression. But she had no idea if he knew how important these Kansas scenes were. This last-minute substitution was disconcerting.
Maud saw Yip Harburg leaning up against the piano. The sourpuss pianist, Harold Arlen, was sitting on the piano bench.
Judy caught sight of Maud and waved. “We’re singing the rainbow song today.”
Maud closed her eyes, and suddenly, Frank’s face appeared before her. Not Frank as he’d been in his last years, but young Frank, with his shiny brown hair and full moustache. Chicago Frank. His eyes were twinkling, and as if he were speaking aloud, Maud heard the words It’s all in there, everything.
At that moment, Maud desperately wished she could cross over whatever it was that separated them and be with him. She wished that the world was as Mother and her theosophy had once imagined it—with nothing between them but a flimsy veil, so that with enough presence of mind, she could simply push that veil aside. But it was no use. Even now, the vivid image of her husband was fading. The piano player was running through some chords, and the director was blocking the shot for Judy, explaining where he wanted her to move as she sang.
Maud watched anxiously. She knew, she had always known, that for the film to contain the same essence that was captured in the book, the quality that had given the book its staying power, the audience would need to believe the girl—to understand that she was trapped, and genuinely miserable, but that somehow she looked beyond, harnessed her imagination, tapped into a deep wellspring of hope, and kept going.
* * *
—
MAUD WONDERED WHAT HER MOTHER would think of Judy Garland. For one thing, the girl had more liberties than her mother could have imagined. She could earn her keep with her acting and singing—a job that would have been impossible for a respectable young woman of Matilda’s time. Yet in some ways she was enchained—afraid to push off the older men who surrounded her and tried to control her every move. The life of any girl was complicated—then as now.
Twenty-two years had passed between Matilda’s death and the day when women at long last won the right to vote. August 18, 1920. Maud had thought of Matilda all that day, and each year after as she cast her ballot. Matilda had fought her entire life for something that had not come to pass until after she was gone. And Frank, too—Frank had grasped the promise of moving pictures long before sound, color, and technical wizardry could truly bring an imaginary world to life. Maud’s job was to be present now, and to hope that somewhere out there, they understood.
When Maud heard the first chords of the rainbow song, she felt once again that strange notion that she already knew this song, that she had always known it, that in it there were notes of prairie sagebrush and yucca flowers, as well as city soot and torpid Chicago afternoons. She watched, her hands clutched tightly in her lap. Would the girl reach deep and give the song the rendition it deserved?
Judy spoke a few lines, then turned her eyes heavenward and leaned against a haystack. She opened her mouth, and out poured the slow, poignant notes, starting low and then sweeping upward. As Maud listened, eyes closed, she felt as if she were swept up out of her seat, out of the sound stage, up into the heavens where the stars danced, to the place where a rainbow would carry you. And suddenly, Frank, eyes twinkling, hands warm in hers, was twirling her around and around and they were waltzing through heavens as dazzling as a Dakota sky, as magical as the White City from atop the Ferris Wheel, as endless as the glittering lights of Los Angeles seen from the Hollywood Hills.
The song ended. Maud opened her eyes. Tears were running down her cheeks. She was back in the sound studio, and chickens were clucking, the dog handler was feeding treats to Toto, the director was standing nearby with his clipboard. At first, no one said anything, but then Harburg started clapping, and Arlen joined in, then the director and the chicken handler, and the dog trainer, the actors playing Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, even the Wizard, wearing his Professor Marvel costume—everyone surrounded the girl, applauding her virtuoso performance.
Maud knew, right then, that Judy had done it. She had captured the magic Frank had put into his story, sucked it from the air and breathed it back out through her vocal cords. Maud felt in her heart that Frank must have been listening.
“Take a bow, my dear,” the piano player said as the applause died down. “That was a knockout. You should have saved that for when we record it in the sound studio.”
Judy looked bewildered. “I can do it again,” she said. “As many times as you want.”
Maud felt a pang of sympathy for the girl—maybe all true artists were like that deep down, filled up with a gift so intrinsic that they didn’t even know where it came from.
“What do you think, Mrs. Baum?” Yip Harburg asked. “Did she put enough wanting into it?”
Maud pictured the stormy Dakota sky, the rainbow breaking through the clouds, her beloved Frank, the small stoic figure of Magdalena growing smaller, receding, as their wagon pulled away. “You know what I heard?” Maud said. “An anthem worthy of my husband’s book.”
CHAPTER
27
HOLLYWOOD
1939
Then suddenly, it seemed as if the world was awash in Oz. Every magazine Maud picked up, every newspaper, the radio, everywhere she looked there was publicity. There were Wizard of Oz cereal boxes and Wizard of Oz Jell-O. She saw the interior of Dorothy’s house in Kansas as a “décor suggestion” in House Beautiful magazine. She heard interviews with all of the actors and snippets of the music on the radio, and even saw her own photograph: she was sitting with Judy on a sofa, the two of them looking at the book together.
The only thing left that Maud had never seen was the entire movie. She had begged and cajoled, but it was under complete embargo. The first sneak previews were scheduled for August 1939, a couple of weeks from now, and no one would be allowed to view the finished film until then. Just today, out doing some errands along Hollywood Boulevard, Maud had seen the lettering going up on the marquee of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. When she arrived home at Ozcot, the phone was ringing.
“Hello, Mrs. Baum? It’s Yip, Yip Harburg.”
Maud put on her hat and coat and hurried the two blocks to Musso & Frank’s. Inside, as her eyes got adjusted to the dark, she caught sight of Harburg and was surprised to see that he was accompanied by Noel Langley and Mervyn LeRoy.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Maud said, somewhat taken aback.
“Mrs. Baum, we’ve run into a bit of a sticky wicket,” Langley said. “We thought you might be able to help.”
“Harburg told me on the phone. There’s a problem with the rainbow song?”
“The first sneak preview of the picture ran yesterday in San Bernardino,” LeRoy said.
“Top secret. Nobody there except a few studio folk, and some of the Loew’s people from New York.”
“Loew’s people?”
“Distributors,” LeRoy said. “Money people.”
“They think the film’s running time is too long,” Langley said. “They want to cut the rainbow song.”
“We’ve all talked to Mayer. He won’t listen to any of us. We thought he might listen to you.”
“To me? Why would he listen to me? I haven’t seen him in months. He wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
“He’ll listen to you,” LeRoy said.
“Why?”
“Because,” Harburg said, “he believes in magic.”
“Magic?” Maud said. “I know that’s what you told me on the phone, but I’m afraid I’ve no talent in that direction.”
“But Mayer doesn’t know that,” LeRoy said.
“It’s the jacket,” Langley said. “When your late husband’s jacket showed up on the set, he was sure it was a sign. I mean, really, what are the chances?”
“It was strange,” Maud admitted. “But truthfully, I’m not even sure it was his.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Langley said. “Mayer believed in it.”
“Can you go to him?” LeRoy asked.
“Remember when you told me that your husband used to talk about the rainbow, but it wasn’t in the book anywhere, and then the idea for the song lyrics came to me, just like that…?” Harburg said.
Maud nodded.