Mayer was smiling and nodding his head in agreement.
“But there’s more to making magic than that,” she said. “There’s a giant beating heart at the center of this story. That heart is real, and that heart sounds through this picture, through these songs, and then when Frank’s jacket turned up on the set—I knew he was with us.”
Mayer was looking at her, really looking now, and listening. “When your husband’s jacket showed up on the set, I knew. I just knew,” he said, sounding excited. “We try to make magic every single time. Sometimes we hit, and sometimes we miss. But that jacket. I knew it was an omen. I pressed and pressed and pressed to get more money from New York—do you know we spent almost three million dollars on this project? It has got to be a success.”
“So you do understand.”
“Of course I understand,” he said. “The picture is great. The song’s gone. It was too long.” He gestured a dismissal. “Have a nice day, Mrs. Baum.”
As if on cue, Ida Koverman swung the door open.
“You have a visitor, Mr. Mayer.”
Judy Garland walked through the door.
“Well,” Mayer said, lighting up. “If it isn’t my little hunchback.”
Behind her came the piano player.
“Do you mind?” Arlen crossed to the white grand piano at the other end of the office. “Did you know that this melody came to me when I was outside Schwab’s drugstore?”
“I did not,” Mayer said, leaning forward in his chair, intrigued.
“That was the last trolley stop,” Maud said. “Back in 1910. The exact spot where Mr. L. Frank Baum first stepped onto the soil of Hollywood.”
“You don’t say.” Mayer stood up, came out from behind his desk, and crossed toward the piano, where Arlen was settling himself on the bench, placing his right foot on the sustain pedal.
“Let us just do it one more time for you—you’ll see, it stands alone,” Arlen said. “You don’t need the backdrop, or the orchestra. Just listen.”
Judy’s face, without the heavy stage makeup, looked younger; her hair was pulled back in a plain headband, and she wore a navy blue sailor dress, bobby socks, and scuffed loafers. It was as if the movie starlet had been replaced by an ordinary teenage girl who could pass you on the street without attracting notice. The piano player trilled through the opening chords, and then Judy, softly and simply, began to sing, her hands clasped in front of her. But as her voice soared and filled the room with its clear, strong notes, a glow developed around her, until the light appeared to shimmer. Her arms spread out in front of her, as if the song could not be contained in her small body so she gestured wide to give it room. With everything else stripped away—the lights, the makeup, the cameras—her voice became the simple, deep, plaintive, unadulterated sound of longing.
Soon tears glistened in Mayer’s eyes. He crossed the room, fully under her spell.
When the song ended, he started to slip his hand over the girl’s shoulder, but she deftly moved away, positioning herself close to Ida Koverman.
“You see,” Maud said. “We think the song is a message from the author himself. It might be bad luck to cut it.”
Mayer pulled a hankie from his breast pocket and blew his nose. He looked at each of them, one by one: first Arlen, then Judy, then Ida, then, at last, resting his eyes on Maud.
“It’s not that I’m superstitious, but what with the jacket, what with all of the money we’ve put into this thing, I don’t want to bring us bad luck….And besides, that song—it’s goddamned beautiful. You know, I don’t tell this to everyone, but I quit school at age twelve. Had to. Needed to earn a hard living the hard way. See these hands? They were covered with calluses. Was colder than you can imagine up in New Brunswick, Canada. I’d get up long before the sun came up. So cold, so deathly still, and I was always hungry, and I was always thinking that there had to be a better place somewhere,” Mayer said.
He contemplated the group for a few minutes. Then he crossed to his desk, picked up the telephone.
“Get me the editing room,” he said. He waited a moment. “This is Mayer. Production 1060. Put the rainbow song back in.”
* * *
—
ON THE WAY OUT, Maud grabbed Judy’s arm and pulled her into the ladies’ room.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again,” Maud said. “You are going to be a big star. So famous that you won’t even remember my name—and that’s all right. But there is something I want to tell you, and I don’t want you to ever forget it.”
“Okay,” Judy said, her voice serious.
“You were born with a gift. A gift so giant that it scarcely fits in your body. You don’t know why you have it, and neither do I, but you have it. I lived with someone like that. It was my husband, Frank. He didn’t even call himself an author—he said he was the Royal Historian of Oz, just writing stuff down. But I want to tell you something right now: it’s not magic. It’s you. It’s your hard work, it’s your gift and what you put into it. You have the power to move hearts, and that is not magic at all.”
“But…” Judy’s lower lip was quivering. “There is magic. I saw it. What about the jacket?”
Maud laid her hand upon the girl’s arm. “That wasn’t magic, my dear. That was nothing more than a publicity stunt. Do you know how many old jackets there must be kicking around like that? Sure, it looked like it could have belonged to Frank, and it was made by a Chicago tailor he used to use. It was similar in cut and style, but there was no way for me to know if it was really his. The name tag was illegible—only wishful thinking made it look like Frank’s name.”
“So you lied, Mrs. Baum?” Judy said, her voice shaking. “You let everyone believe it was magic when it wasn’t?”
“Oh, but it was magic—just not the way you’re thinking of it. Magic isn’t things materializing out of nowhere. Magic is when a lot of people all believe in the same thing at the same time, and somehow we all escape ourselves a little bit and we meet up somewhere, and just for a moment, we taste the sublime.”
“Well, that’s just rotten,” Judy said, now in tears. “I thought you could help me contact my father. I believed, and now you are telling me that it’s not true.”
Judy wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She stuck her hand into the pocket of her dress and seemed to be fishing around for something. She pulled it out and held it up on the palm of her hand.
“So then how do you explain this?”
Judy was holding a yellowed, crumpled piece of paper. Maud’s mouth went dry.
“What is it?” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
Judy smoothed out the scrap of paper. She read aloud:
“The Rainbow King’s daughter sprang from her seat and leaped on the arched bow that awaited her. Dorothy could no longer see her but blew kisses toward her with one hand and fanned goodbye with the other. Suddenly, the end of the bow slowly lifted from the earth and its colors ascended, fading into the clouds, and she, along with the bow, were gone.”
“Let me see that!” Maud said.
Judy dropped the brittle scrap of paper into Maud’s palm. Maud’s knees were shaking. She recognized her husband’s distinctive back-slanted hand.
“Where did you get this?”
“In the pocket.”
“The pocket?”
“Of the jacket. Remember when you found me in the wardrobe room, wearing the jacket? I stuck my hand in the pocket, and there was a hole in it. I reached down inside the lining, and I felt this little wad of paper. And when I read it, I knew it was her.”
“Who?” Maud asked, her voice trembling.
“A girl from the other side of the rainbow. That’s how I knew how to sing the song. When I sing it, I can bring my daddy close to me—he’s looking down at me. He’s just on the other side of the rainbow.”
Maud gazed at Judy with wonder. She reached out and drew her into an embrace, then held her at arm’s length and regarded her anew.
“I think that somewhere,” she told Judy, “there is a little boy or a little girl who is feeling sad and hopeless right now, and when they hear you sing, they are going to dream of a better world. And that—that is magic.”
* * *
—
BACK IN THE LOT, Maud found her car parked aslant. She looked around for the security guards, but they appeared to have given up the search. As she was driving home, it started to rain. Approaching her house, she was so startled that she almost crashed her car. All of a sudden, a giant rainbow had appeared in the sky. It seemed to end in the garden behind Ozcot. She blinked and it was gone. But it didn’t matter. Frank, at last, had sent her a sign.
CHAPTER
28
HOLLYWOOD
August 15, 1939