This Day in Film History (Louis B. Mayer Loses MGM Showdown)

June 22, 1951—Loews Inc. announced the results of a long-rumored feud in its Hollywood subsidiary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): production chief Dore Schary would replace Louis B. Mayer (pictured) as head of the largest of Hollywood’s seven major studios.

The press release mentioned that Mayer was becoming an independent producer, but it was inconceivable to longtime employees—including many who came out the following day to bid him goodbye—that the mogul would voluntarily end his 27-year reign, including a stretch when he was the highest-paid man in America.

Those suspicions proved correct: Mayer had traveled from his Hollywood offices to the studio’s New York-based financial directorate to present an ultimatum to Loews President Nicholas Schenck: It’s either Schary or me. Instead, Schenck called his bluff and forced his resignation.

Forget about Schary: Mayer had also talked down his boss so much that it would have been a miracle for word of the backbiting not to reach Schenk eventually.

They spoke constantly—"two or three times a day in an age when coast-to-coast telephone calls were not so easily made as they are today,” according to David McClintick’s account of a later Tinseltown-New York power struggle, Indecent Exposure—but were seldom on each other’s wavelengths.  Mayer referred to him variously as “The General," "Nick Skunk," “the smiler and the killer," and “the big cheese.”

Ironically, Mayer had brought back to MGM the number-two he came to loathe. A former screenwriter, Schary was chafing as production chief at RKO after its acquisition by the increasingly eccentric Howard Hughes when he was invited back to the lot he had once known as his professional home.

Schary’s key demand for his return—that he bring along his pet project, Battleground—sparked conflict between himself and his new boss.

One of the most grittily realistic WWII dramas released in the early postwar period, it was anathema to Mayer, a mogul not just of old-fashioned tastes but even Victorian ones. If his movie factory could have churned out only musicals and Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series, he probably wouldn’t have minded very much. 

In contrast to Mayer’s conservative Republican sympathies, Schary—two decades younger—was an industrial-strength New Deal Democrat who wanted more socially conscious fare like Battleground that sent a message.

Battleground’s triumph with critics and, more important, the public (it was one of the top box-office hits of 1949) boosted Schary’s cachet with Schenck while undermining Mayer’s.

With television emerging as a rival medium, lost court cases weakening studio control over stars and movie houses, and international Communism threatening audience optimism across the country, Mayer no longer seemed in touch with public tastes. The question was, would Schary?

Mayer might have been wrong about the commercial prospects for Battleground, but turned out to be right about another war film on the bubble in his final days at MGM: John Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Even with an authentic war hero, Audie Murphy, as the lead, audiences stayed away, proving Mayer’s contention that they would find it too depressing.

In the long run, Schenck might have been correct that Mayer was too old and set in his ways to continue running MGM, but it did not mean that Schary was the right leader to steer the studio through its choppy new waters. 

A highly capable scriptwriter and playwright (as he would show in a few years with his biopic about polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt, Sunrise at Campobello), he proved less adept at managing talent or sensing what audiences wanted. Any positive impression generated by his geniality faded once his corporate mismanagement became apparent.

In contrast, even before he participated in the 1924 merger that established MGM, Mayer had been involved with the movie industry in multiple capacities, so he knew the business thoroughly.

While Schary soon frustrated the studio’s musical hands with his complete lack of interest in the genre, Mayer valued their contributions.

And, while Schary would in a few short years drive away stars like Clark Gable from their longtime home, Mayer, for all his paternalism, sincerely wanted to prove there was no hype in MGM’s longtime slogan, “More stars than there are in the heavens.”

There was no ultimate victor in the MGM showdown. In late 1955, Schenck would be kicked upstairs when Arthur Loew Sr. became president of his family company. Among Lowe Sr.’s most notable moves in his single year at MGM was firing Schary, who spent his remaining quarter-century of life doing what he probably was most cut out for to begin with: writing.

As for Mayer, he was able neither to make a go at independent producing nor in regaining control of MGM when the studio’s declining finances wore down investors’ patience. 

When he died in 1957, though some deplored his penny-pinching tendencies, others would have agreed with one of his stars, Katharine Hepburn, when she wrote in her autobiography, “L.B. Mayer was a shrewd man with enormous understanding of an artist. He was not stupid, not crude. He was a very sensible fellow, and extremely honest.”

Flashback, April 1924: Merger Sends MGM Roaring

A century ago this month, what became the most structured—and successful—studio in Hollywood’s Golden Age was formed with the merger of Metro Pictures Corp., Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions.

Though theater chain magnate Marcus Loew orchestrated the deal, the prime mover for the next 27 years in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—MGM for short—turned out to be a Ukrainian emigrant who not only celebrated American values onscreen, but even pushed his actual birthdate up to July 4 to coincide with that of his adopted country.

In his office in Culver City, studio head Louis B. Mayer may not have been the most hated movie mogul (that dishonor probably goes to Jack L. Warner), but he was the most paternalistic—an executive you wanted on your side and dreaded to cross.

Those in “L.B.”’s lair might find themselves subject to shouting (MGM president Nicholas Schenck, who, upon Loew’s death, dealt with the theater side of the business from New York), groping (young musical star Judy Garland, who, according to notes for an unpublished memoir, claimed she finally summoned the nerve to tell him to stop), and crying (matinee idol Robert Taylor, who, after having his boss cry on his shoulders, gave up his demand for more money).

Directors might fume at rushed production schedules, favorite scenes left on the cutting-room floor, or being replaced mid-production.

But all of these C-suite theatrics produced as many as 50 films a year, including Gone With the Wind, all-star vehicles like the Oscar-winning Grand Hotel, beloved musicals such as The Wizard of Oz —and, in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression, a princely yearly salary of $1.3 million for Mayer.

The roaring lion appearing at the start of its films may have been MGM’s most instantly recognizable branding element, but its most important asset was its stable of actors.

“More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” the studio’s advertising slogan went—a boast that held true from the silent era (e.g., Greta Garbo, Jack Gilbert, Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney) well into the coming of sound (Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, Gene Kelly).

The Culver City complex was a true movie factory—“scattered over six separate lots, cramped and shedded and separated from one another by public thoroughfares,” with Lot 1 given over to stages  dressing rooms, and offices, according to James Curtis’ 2011 biography of the studio’s most respected actor, Spencer Tracy.

Here, stars were manufactured virtually from whole cloth (Lana Turner, Ava Gardner), shrewdly redesigned when found to be imperfect elsewhere (Tracy, Wallace Beery, and Marie Dressler); or imported from Europe (Garbo and Hedy Lamarr).

It all stemmed from Mayer’s frequently expressed belief that the movies were the only business where the assets walked out the gate every night, and Thalberg’s understanding that “without stars, a company is in the position of starting over every year.”

And, long before Hollywood went endlessly to the well with the “Star Wars” and Marvel series, MGM milked the commercial value of multi-film franchises, including:

*The 12 Tarzan movies made by Johnny Weissmuller from 1932 to 1948;

*The six “Thin Man” movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy;

*The nine Doctor Kildare movies made by Lew Ayres;

* Mickey Rooney’s 15 “Andy Hardy” films from 1937 to 1946;

*The 10 “Maisie” comedies with Ann Sothern as a lovable Brooklyn showgirl; and

* The “aqua-musicals” of “America’s Mermaid,” Esther Williams.

Several Mayer lieutenants were crucial in churning out all this product:

* Irving Thalberg: Nicknamed the “Boy Wonder” by the press and “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (who fictionalized him as the title character of his posthumously published Hollywood novel), he served as production head of the new studio and a kind of surrogate son to Mayer, before dying of pneumonia, after a dozen years of overwork as the epitome of a Hollywood creative producer, at age 37.

* Eddie Mannix: Installed as a studio snitch by Nicholas Schenck, he soon went over to Mayer’s side, where, as general manager, he became LB’s indispensable “fixer”—soothing insecure stars, along with squelching innumerable scandals involving pregnancies, fatal auto accidents, abortions, a precursor of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment crimes—and, some have argued, the murder of “Three Stooges” director Ted Healy.

* Howard Strickling: Head of publicity, the studio exec in charge of communication was, ironically, afflicted with a communication handicap of his own—stuttering. But, 24/7, he controlled access to the industry’s greatest assembly of talent, rewarding reporters who played ball and punishing those who didn’t.

* Howard Dietz: Head of advertising and publicity at the studio for 30 years, he not only came up with its famous lion (an idea he borrowed from the mascot of his alma mater, Columbia University), but also pursued a simultaneous sideline as the lyricist partner of Arthur Schwartz.

The landmark 1948 Supreme Court case United States v. Paramount effectively ended the quarter century of studio dominance by outlawing the block-booking system of selling multiple films to a theater as a unit and by recommending the breakup of studio-theater monopolies.

Three years later, Nicholas Schenck finally resolved his multi-decade clash with Mayer by persuading the studio’s board of directors to replace the mogul with writer-producer Dore Schary, who would suffer the same fate as his predecessor five years later.  

By the 1960s, MGM’s onetime ability to achieve profit margins even with handsomely mounted productions had devolved into boom-or-bust blockbusters that left it vulnerable to takeovers. It’s now a subsidiary of Amazon. 

This Day in Film History (Garland Weds Director Vincente Minnelli)

June 15, 1945—With love having bloomed on the set of their first collaboration, the hit musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland married director Vincente Minnelli, who had not only guided her towards mature roles but used his camera to make the insecure young star experience something she had never felt since signing with MGM: the sense of her own beauty.

It was the most unlikely of professional and personal partnerships. Minnelli was nearly twice the age of his star and wife, visually rather than orally inclined, painfully shy where she was often explosively funny, and self-disciplined where she was chronically late in showing up on the set.

The age difference between the two—and Minnelli’s genuine thoughtfulness and concern for her—may have reminded Garland of her own beloved father, a vaudevillian and theater owner who had died when she was only 13. But Minnelli resembled Frank Gumm in another important respect: homosexual liaisons that shadowed and complicated his marriage.

At this time, though, the two were as happy as they ever would be. Each had had their entire careers riding on the success of Meet Me in St. Louis, and each had achieved a principal objective: for Garland, an adult role and a performance so incandescent that it enabled MGM to overlook her increasing tardiness in arriving on set; and for Minnelli, his greatest opportunity to that point in a high-profile project. 

Their professional relationship did not start out well during the early days of shooting Meet Me in St. Louis. Already addicted for several years to a studio-compelled pill regimen to clamp down on her weight, Garland continued to annoy studio executives and fellow cast and crew members with tardiness that drove up the costs of filming. Moreover, Minnelli couldn’t communicate how he wanted her to act.

But as time went on, Garland realized what the rest of the crew understood: that Minnelli, a former costumer, set designer and art director who had apprenticed for a year at the studio, had knowledge of virtually every department at MGM, a painter’s eye for color and atmosphere—and more important, a keen sense of how makeup could provide Garland with grown-up sophistication. 

Moreover, this homeliest of men understood how the camera could minimize the flaws and enhance the advantages (notably, highly expressive eyes) of this sensitive young star who had resented studio bosses’ disparagement of her looks.

For his part, as indicated in this YouTube clip of an interview with the director in later years, Minnelli saw a little-noticed asset of Garland’s: a photographic memory that enabled her to absorb direction despite inevitable on-set distractions. Altogether, he believed her potential was so great that she could have been “as great as Duse, or Bernhardt, or Garbo.” 

His sense of her possibilities—and her eager responsiveness—transformed Meet Me in St. Louis from a problematic, plot-free property into a masterpiece of rich visual textures and charm to go with a rich score.

In Hollywood, it has never been unusual for male directors to sleep with female stars. But the growing, open affection between Garland and Minnelli was greeted with astonishment by cast and crew. 

Minnelli’s use of more mascara, eye shadow, lipstick, and a covering base than MGM’s actresses wore would have been enough to spark talk about his sexual preferences. But rumors of his intimate relationships with several men only fanned the gossip.

Besotted with the director who had awakened her sense of her attractiveness, Garland dismissed these rumors as “just his artistic flair!” It would be two more years before, during production of The Pirate, she happened on her husband with another man. 

According to Gerald Clarke’s biography of Garland, Get Happy, her furious description of this encounter quickly spread until it reached the ears of would-be actress Jacqueline Susann, who incorporated the incident into her 1960s bestselling potboiler, Valley of the Dolls. 

(Ironically enough, Garland was set to play a character modeled on Broadway star Ethel Merman in the film version of the roman a clef, until Garland's problems with pills led to her termination early in the project.)

After Meet Me in St. Louis, Garland and Minnelli worked together on two full-length features, The Clock (1945) and The Pirate (1948), and one segment of another, Ziegfeld Follies (1945).  They also had an off-screen production: a daughter, the future singer-actress Liza Minnelli. (Her proud father let her sit in his laps even while he was directing the lavish musicals that became his trademark.)

But four years after their wedding, their marriage was coming under relentless pressure, with the couple unable to cope with the daily stress of studio  suspensions, Garland’s indebtedness, her intensifying pill addiction—and the couple’s growing physical estrangement and mutual resentments (Garland identified Minnelli with the MGM regime, while he, worn down by her constant storms, saw the last straw as her constant lying to her psychiatrists). Though the marriage officially ended in divorce in 1951, it was, for all intents and purposes, over two years earlier.

Fired by MGM in 1950, Garland appeared onscreen only occasionally in the last two decades of her life (though one of those was her Oscar-nominated performance in A Star is Born). In contrast, Minnelli continued to work frequently and well for the studio throughout much of the rest of the 1950s in musicals, comedies and melodramas that demonstrated his great versatility, even lasting at the studio for 26 years--the longest-lasting director of anyone at MGM.

Of all the movies Minnelli made in this period, I think that, oddly enough, his Vincent Van Gogh biopic, Lust for Life, might have best reflected his relationship with Garland. While one artist worked with paint and another with popular song, each was bursting with expressive feeling that few others could match—and, sadly, exhibited an emotional instability that those closest to them, like Minnelli, felt powerless to control in the end.

Quote of the Day (Irving Thalberg, on Credit)

“Credit you give yourself is not worth having.”—MGM production head Irving Thalberg, explaining why he refused to allow his name to appear on the credits of films with which he was associated, quoted in Julie Lugo Cerra, Culver City: The Heart of Screenland (2004)

Irving Thalberg (pictured left, with movie-star wife Norma Shearer) inspired the creation of Monroe Stahr in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. He only let his name be put on one of his films: The Good Earth.

Nevertheless, Hollywood remembers this driven, sickly creative force at Oscar time with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”

This Day in Film History (Botched Sound Ruins Silent Star Gilbert)

September 28, 1929—The transition from silents to talkies claimed its most prominent victim when preview audiences for His Glorious Night howled at the unexpectedly off-putting voice of John Gilbert, successor to Rudolph Valentino as the great male lover of the big screen.

What none of the fans understood that night was that Gilbert’s image had been sabotaged because of a quarrel with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer.

And what did that quarrel involve? Well, the same thing that 99% of guy quarrels revolve around: a woman, of course.

Only this wasn’t just any woman. This was Greta Garbo, the epitome of wistful foreign allure, now as much as then—Mayer’s employee and Gilbert’s lover.

Eleven years ago, at the John Harms Center for the Arts in my hometown, Englewood, N.J., I attended a screening of the most famous Gilbert-Garbo collaboration, The Flesh and the Devil. I had seen the film 25 years before on public television, but this screening was special. Gilbert’s daughter, Laeticia Gilbert Fountain, introduced the movie and spoke about her dad.

Moreover, instead of a clunky piano accompanying out-of-kilter movements, I was watching something closer to the experience of 1920s audiences, with the 95-member New Jersey Youth Symphony Orchestra providing full-bodied accompaniment.

Most of all, that big screen projected images of Garbo and Gilbert that radiated a palpable erotic charge. Silent-film audiences sensed the two weren’t faking their love scenes, and the film became a roaring success.

With Love (an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, only with a happy ending) and A Woman of Affairs, the two became possibly the greatest romantic team of the entire silent era.

Gilbert wanted them to marry—he liked matrimony so much that he went through with the ceremony four times in his 36 years on this planet—but his skittish Scandinavian lover stood him up at the altar. As Gilbert groaned, sulked, and sank deep in his cups, Mayer made a raunchy suggestion about what the actor could do with his runaway bride. Gilbert took extreme offense and had it out with his boss.

That’s how the legend has the prelude to Gilbert’s fall, anyway. Is it true? I’m not sure there’s a smoking gun, but the circumstantial evidence is so suggestive that I don’t see any reason to doubt it.

Let’s pick up on our story, then:

Mayer waited awhile—after all, revenge is a dish best served cold, as they say. His opportunity came with the arrival of sound.

Anyone who’s seen Singing in the Rain or the first wildly funny play written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Once in a Lifetime, is likely to chuckle over these depictions of the coming of sound, then dismiss it all as somewhat exaggerated satiric fun. Well…not quite.

The fact is that, when everyone in Hollywood had the rules figured out, The Jazz Singer changed the game. English-challenged European actors, for instance, used to emoting through their gestures, wondered—with reason—if they’d be employable in the new Hollywood.

But even American and Anglo actors grew concerned. Actors began frantically training with voice coaches, lest their careers go the way of Vilma Banky, Clara Bow, and the Talmadge sisters. Even the normally sensible William Powell—perfectly cast as suave, self-possessed private eye Nick Charles of the “Thin Man” series—ran from the room when he heard his voice for the first time.

Was Gilbert scared by all this? From what I’ve read, he didn’t have to be. In the first MGM film featuring sound, Hollywood Revue of 1929, there were no problems with his voice. In all but one film he made afterward, there was likewise no issue with it.

The exception was His Glorious Night, a misnomer if there ever was one. I hope Drew Barrymore achieves more success with her directing debut, Whip It, than granduncle Lionel did in this case.

Lionel Barrymore may have been more even creatively versatile than his marvelous siblings Ethel and John. An accomplished painter, he had enough of a visual eye that he’d already directed some silent films. His Glorious Night would also mark his debut as both a producer and composer, for heaven’s sake.

Maybe all that activity made it harder to keep track of everything. Maybe the family penchant for substance abuse began to rear its ugly head. Maybe he was just flummoxed by that darn microphone, which was bedeviling everyone in those days as they tried to focus on what was happening through the camera lens without having some stupid noise spoil everything. Or maybe he simply threw up his hands at the ridiculous dialogue he had to turn into gold.

Was Lionel paying attention? Because something big was happening beneath his nose: the destruction of a major star. Here’s the story, as related by E.J. Fleming in The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling, and the MGM Publicity Machine: Mayer had ordered that all bass be removed in recording Gilbert’s lines.

The results at the preview were everything he could have wished for. He must have especially loved it when a viewer yelled out, “Gilbert, your slip is showing.”

By 1952, when Singing in the Rain appeared, Mayer, ousted the year before at MGM by Dore Schary, was a grumpy old man. But he must have perked up an awful lot when he saw the scene in the great musical from his old studio when Gene Kelly’s character, Don Lockwood, improvises by endlessly repeating to voice-challenged Jean Hagen, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” This was the part that made the audience for His Glorious Night howl.

But was it as bad as all that? A post on the blog "Trouble in Paradise" made me wonder. It has a clip from His Glorious Night that shows what all the fuss was about. I don’t share that blogger’s belief that there was nothing wrong with Gilbert’s delivery—audiences were right to detect something odd and artificial in that voice—but he’s right that it’s not as bad as has been made out. Maybe Singing in the Rain has colored modern perceptions of the scene.

Whatever the case may be, you can trace Gilbert’s decline pretty clearly from this point on. The roles came less steadily now (though Garbo managed to push aside a young Laurence Olivier and replace him with her old lover in Queen Christina), and he drank more heavily. He died in 1936.

I don’t think silent-film audiences saw anything fake in his allure, though. Consider this: In his short lifetime, he not only married four times but had two of the world’s most bewitching women: Garbo and, even at the time of his drink-besotted death, Marlene Dietrich.

Whatever Gilbert had, I’m sure a lot of men wished it could have been bottled and sold.

This Day in Film History (Judy & Mickey Put on a Show at “Wizard of Oz” NYC Premiere)

August 17, 1939—For a day, Hollywood’s moviemaking factory turned into a movie promotional factory. With its musical extravaganza of the season, The Wizard of Oz, having already exceeded its $2 million budget by 50%, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the studio that trumpeted in its motto that it had “more stars than there are in Heaven”—decided to use two of its younger ones to pump up sales.

The Wizard of Oz already had its “unofficial premiere” at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisc., on August 12, and its “world” premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood three days later. Now, MGM had flown Mickey Rooney, the star of its popular “Andy Hardy” series, and Judy Garland, the 17-year-old ingénue with the amazing voice, playing Dorothy on film, to plug The Wizard of Oz in the Big Apple.

I hadn’t realized just how huge an event this premiere was till I read Horatia Harrod’s piece in Britain’s Daily Telegraph nearly two weeks ago. I’ve always thought that the line I stood on for Star Wars when it came out was the most interminable I ever encountered, but that pales next to the details that Harrod unearthed about the one at Loew’s Capitol Theatre in New York for The Wizard of Oz:

* Lines were already forming at 5:30 a.m. outside the theater.

* On the sidewalk outside the 5,230-seat theater, 15,000 people were waiting for the box office to open at 8:30 am.

* Sixty cops exercised crowd control outside MGM’s flagship theater throughout the day.

* By the last performance that evening, 37,000 people had witnessed the movie in that one spot.

MGM wasn’t taking any chances with a movie that, during production, looked snake-bitten (Margaret Hamilton had been sidelined for six weeks because of severe burns from an onset accident, and Buddy Ebsen suffered such a severe reaction to his Tin Man makeup that he’d been forced to withdraw from the role). The double-teaming of Garland and Rooney highlighted two of the studio’s most winning (though not to directors) stars.

With Babes in Arms, the third (out of eight) collaboration between Garland and Rooney, set for release in several weeks, you could almost see the wheels spin in studio honcho Louis B. Mayer’s head: Why not, in effect, beat the publicity drum for two flicks?

A great idea—on the surface. Problem was, the studio was about to demonstrate that the title of a prior Garland-Rooney film, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, was mistaken.

Maybe the most famous exchange from Babes in Arms came when Rooney’s singer-musician character had a brainstorm: “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!”

“We can use my Dad’s barn!” Judy says, matching him every step of the way.

On the set was a bit different.

Rooney wasn’t the problem. The man, then as now, was a force of nature.

But Garland needed special handling—precisely what she wasn’t getting. Keeping up with Rooney during the Babes in Arms shooting had severely taxed her physical resources. Only starting the second year of her career, she was already receiving strong hints from the studio brass that she try diet pills to maintain weight consistency throughout production.

Garland did as she was told, as she now did when MGM wanted her and Rooney to introduce each screening—and perform energetic song-and-dance routines—before each one. The Lowe’s audiences ate it up.

Garland’s run was extended for a third week. It proved too much for the star, who at one point collapsed from exhaustion.

Think this taught MGM a lesson? Think again.

If you want graphic visual evidence of how the studio ran its most valuable female musical-comedy star into the ground, then rent the DVD of Annie Get Your Gun, made a decade later. Betty Hutton was handed the role of Annie Oakley when Garland’s diet-pills-and-amphetamines regimen led to a physical collapse and her withdrawal from the Irving Berlin musical.

Special features of the DVD include Garland’s three outtakes (she’d recorded the vocals in their entirety for the soundtrack already). They’re painful to watch. Time and again, the star attempted another take, but she looked utterly wan, spent and bewildered.

By 1950, five studio doctors were plying her with pills. But Garland’s body could no longer take the stress.

Her refusal to film Royal Wedding led the studio to suspend her for unreliability. The next day, she attempted suicide. Within 24 hours, with the exquisite tact it had shown throughout her tenure at the studio, MGM cited her suicide attempt as a violation of the “morals clause” in her contract and severed the relationship permanently.

Garland would complete only three more films before her death, from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, in 1969.

Babes in Arms, on a budget of $600,000, made its money back and then some, grossing $2 million domestically. The Wizard of Oz did so, too—a decade later. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, it took TV to make the film a permanent part of the American cultural experience.

Like other youngsters in the Sixties and Seventies, I sat transfixed in front of my family’s color TV set for the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz. Much of the time, I peeked through my fingers whenever the Wicked Witch of the West terrified poor Dorothy and Toto. (In real life, Margaret Hamilton was a former kindergarten teacher who adored kids and pets.)

I haven’t seen the film all the way through in at least 35 years. I suspect if I were to do so now, my dominant emotion would not be horror at the Wicked Witch but a sweet-sad feeling of nostalgia over Dorothy’s lost Kansas.

From the first, audiences welcomed “Over the Rainbow” rapturously, along with the line that, in effect, echoes it: “There’s no place like home.”

Years after Judy and Mickey put on their show, the original fans of the movie (and their children, such as myself) grew up to learn that “home” is not only a point in space but a point in time, when the people we have loved were not just here but physically and emotionally whole—and, for that reason, the concept exists now only as a gulp in the throat.