The chapters on the childhood of Frances Gumm and the life of her mother, Ethel Milne, owe a great debt to Young Judy by David Dahl and Barry Kehoe.
I must acknowledge a great debt, too, to The Making of the Wizard ofOz by Aljean Harmetz. It is extremely difficult to retrieve the amount of in-depth detail that this author managed to find.
The real film was made in a slightly different way to mine. For example, Judy Garland's makeup would have been done by a man. Millie Haugaard did not exist. At first I called her Millie Shroeder; I then found that by coincidence Millie Shroeder was the name of Bert Lahr's wife.
I couldn't find out where MGM staff parked their cars, so I have Millie take the bus. There were many things I could not find out about MGM during my short stays in Los Angeles. Most of what is available is old publicity material. A lot of the MGM archives were used as landfill under the freeway system. In one hundred years' time we will know more about Manhattan, Kansas, in the 1870s (the high-school newspaper is preserved) than we will about the working lives of MGM staff. But we will still have the films.
There was a Corndale, Ontario, Canada, under another name. There was a very similar house to Jonathan's, long ago, in Was.
The chapter set in Manhattan High School owes an enormous debt to an unpublished manuscript entitled "A Teacher Learns" by Major John Hawkins. He is in part a model for the character of Baum as portrayed in this chapter, and the particular incidents described in it are drawn from his experiences as a teacher. Dorothy's singing death is also inspired by a Hawkins family story. Thanks also to John Clute for reinforcing the idea of Jonathan's disappearance. Johanna Firbank has been a continual inspiration in long discussions on such subjects as childhood conditioning and the nature of literature.
My greatest debt is to L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Books make authors, not the other way around. Books come out of their own accord, authors just write them. Books can be written without authors. They can come, like epic poetry, out of many different mouths.
Oz was first visited upon a kindly man who wanted to set children free from fear. Oz grew out of Alice in Wonderland, and out of Kansas and the people who settled there, and Baum's own life.
It also kept on growing. It grew out of improved Technicolor cameras and out of the MGM studio system, which meant the first footage directed by Richard Thorpe could be thrown out. It grew out of Herman Mankiewicz and Ogden Nash and Noel Langley; Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, and Ben Hecht's secretary, John Lee Mahin. Can a script with this many writers be said to have an author? Oz grew out of Arlen and Harburg, who wrote the songs. It grew out of the singers, who knew how to sing them. It kept on growing, because of television; it kept on gaining meaning with each repeat. Oz came swimming to us out of history, because we needed it, because it needed to be. A book, a film, a television ritual, a thousand icons scattered through advertising, journalism, political cartoons, music, poetry. Had Oz been blocked, it would have taken another form in the world. It could have come as a cyclone.
That doesn't make it true.
I fell in love with realism because it deflates the myths, the unexamined ideas of fantasy. It confronts them with forgotten facts. It uses past truth-history.
I love fantasy because it reminds us how far short our lives fall from their full potential. Fantasy reminds us how wonderful the world is. In fantasy, we can imagine a better life, a better future. In fantasy, we can free ourselves from history and outworn realism.
Oz is, after all, only a place with flowers and birds and rivers and hills. Everything is alive there, as it is here if we care to see it. Tomorrow, we could all decide to live in a place not much different from Oz. We don't. We continue to make the world an ugly, even murderous place, for reasons we do not understand.
Those reasons lie in both fantasy and history. Where we are gripped by history-our own personal history, our country's history. Where we are deluded by fantasy-our own fantasy, our country's fantasy. It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible.
And then use them against each other.