Brighter than celestial bodies, the giant letters of the marquee lit up the sky above Hollywood Boulevard, casting stripes of gold across the faces of the crowd. Four deep, they lined the street, crowding the velvet ropes. In the sultry August night air, the scents of Tabu perfume, sweat, and floral-scented powder twined together, the essence of hope and yearning.
Black Packards glided up, uniformed chauffeurs whisked open polished car doors, and the crowd sucked forward, pulled as if by planetary force. As elegantly clad men and women stepped out onto the red carpet, an explosion of photographers’ lights flashed and popped, as if each star were followed by a comet’s blazing trail.
* * *
—
MAUD COULD HAVE WALKED the five blocks from Ozcot; nonetheless, the studio had insisted that she arrive at the theater in a chauffeur-driven limousine. In 1910, Maud had finally used her inheritance to build their family home in Hollywood. When they had arrived here, it had been just a sleepy town, and look what it had become—a modern land of enchantment, the most glamorous place on earth. Folding her gloved hands in her lap, Maud reminded herself that she was not picking up the tab for any of this. She had never stopped counting pennies, tallying up expenses. Force of habit. She was too old to change.
Such a crowd had gathered at home to see her off—the boys, their wives, the grandchildren. She pictured Kenneth, her baby, grown so like his father, with his erect bearing and twinkling eyes, fussing over her, helping her to the limousine, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek, and whispering in her ear, “Father is certainly loving all this fol-dee-rol.” But Maud was traveling to the premiere unaccompanied—only a single ticket had been allotted for her, the other seats given away to Hollywood luminaries and the press. Just as well, she thought. This was something she needed to do alone.
Maud had seen the marquee before, in the light of ordinary day, the giant letters spelling out M-G-M’S AMAZING “THE WIZARD OF OZ.” She passed it on her way to the market and the pharmacy. Over the past few days, she had watched as workers assembled rows of bleachers on the street, backed by an additional neon sign on a large scaffolding that loomed over the boulevard. Even now, with the electric lights transforming the night sky, Maud perceived the artifice that lay behind all this—the scaffolding where the neon was affixed, the false-fronted opulence of the grand cinema palace. To see the ordinary, to avoid being bedazzled by spectacle—this was her gift. Each time she passed, she hoped to find Frank’s name spelled out in lights. Each time, as she noted its absence, she felt a whisper of disappointment.
But tonight, as her limousine rolled up Hollywood Boulevard toward the ornate fa?ade 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?