Margaret Hamilton came near to losing her career-defining role—not to
mention her life—when her costume as the Wicked Witch of the West went up in
flames during this month 75 years ago, sidelining her from The Wizard of Oz for six weeks before she could resume filming.
Victor Fleming suffered a nervous breakdown while filming Gone With the Wind, but the issues he
contended with on The Wizard of Oz,
by themselves, would have been enough to endanger the director’s health. Ms.
Hamilton’s mishap just before Christmas wasn’t the only problem on the set of
the musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s fantasy classic. In fact, it was, as
a 2009 article in the U.K. newspaper The Express indicates, “a casualty
ward.”
Buddy Ebsen’s health turned out to be even more of a
problem than Ms. Hamilton’s. His reluctant agreement to exchange with initial "Tin Man" Ray Bolger his role as
the Scarecrow became one he rued even more so when he
suffered an allergy to aluminum dust in his makeup, forcing his replacement by
Jack Haley. (Ebsen complained for the rest of his life about the health ills he
incurred as a result of the film—and Haley himself developed a severe eye
infection from his makeup as the new Tin Man.)
Hamilton had gotten her role to begin with when Gale Sondergaard, one of the great character actors in Hollywood (and the first
recipient of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar), grew so unhappy about the
change that transformed the Wicked Witch from glamorous to ugly that she asked
out of the part.
I was relieved to know that Hamilton—a gentle,
former Midwestern schoolteacher who had loved the Baum works as a girl—was
nothing like her terrifying screen crone. It would have terrified me no end if she
had been even one-hundredth as bad as
her character.
I wouldn’t, at the tender age when I began to watch the film, have felt the slightest
bit of sympathy at the thought that her grass-green pallor—courtesy of an
all-out studio effort to spend untold hours and expense on makeup—almost led to
Hamilton’s death.
On December 23, 1938, a bit more than two months
after she began shooting, Hamilton was in the midst of the second filming of
the witch’s departure from Munchkinland in a burst of flame. The stage trap
door did not open quickly enough, causing her to be caught in the pit and her
costume to be lit aflame. She was saved from death in the pit by someone on set
(accounts differ as to whether it was her makeup artist or an alert “Munchkin”).
But her green makeup caught fire, leaving her severely burned on the face and right hand and sending her to the local hospital.
Rather than pressing for worker’s compensation,
which would have left her persona non grata with not only MGM but all the other
studios, Hamilton agreed not to sue, but only on one condition: that she no
longer have anything to do with any more fire once she returned. That turned out to
be a wise condition, as her double and stunt stand-in was herself involved in
another accident that left her legs permanently scarred—and forced her off the
set for the remainder of filming.
With the help of that makeup, plus her talent, Hamilton
made herself over so completely that, in effect, she was too good in the role. She appeared so frightening that MGM studio
execs trimmed some of her best scenes and deleted others completely, leaving
her with a grand total of only 10 minutes onscreen—only increasing her chagrin
about a role that not only put her at risk, but was hardly even mentioned by
critics upon its release in 1939.(The film, not a box-office smash when it opened, only assumed iconic status when it began to be shown annually on CBS, then NBC, beginning in 1959.)
I gloried when Dorothy and her quartet of searching,
incomplete new friends skipped and sang down the yellow brick road to those
infectious Yip Hamburg-Harold Arlen songs, but I gulped and shivered when I
caught sight of that female in black with the wart-encrusted face. The witch’s
evil cackle sent me scampering for safety behind the big chair in our living
room, waiting for the coast to clear. It was the least I could do. If she could
threaten a nice girl like Dorothy with “I'll get you, my pretty--and your little dog, too!” what would
she do with the likes of me?
I wasn’t the only TV-raised baby boom child
transfixed by Ms. Hamilton’s all-too-convincing thespian witchery. In fact, a
couple of my relatives (who shall remain nameless) saw a figure in their own
lives who, in certain ways, was not unlike the Wicked Witch of the West.
The woman, a nun in our elementary school, St.
Cecilia’s of Englewood, NJ, possessed a unique physiogomy—including
thin, dark face, irregular nose and scowl of supernatural animation that, when
displeased, bore in on you. The nun’s nickname, “Shotgun Rosie,” was a bit like
the force that lifted the Wicked Witch aloft on her broomstick: Its derivation
mattered less than that its possession now left observers dumbstruck.
“Shotgun Rosie” was also given to devising
punishments that probably never occurred to her screen counterpart. My female
relative was forced to kneel in front of a shrine on the side of the classroom for an
entire afternoon—especially bewildering, I think, as this relative was, if not
the best-behaved girl in her class, very close to it. By comparison, my male
relative escaped lightly, having only to stand in a trash can in the corner in
the front of the room for an hour.
The legend of this terror of St. Cecilia grew until
one Friday afternoon in November 1963, when the nun was called from class into
the hallway to meet with the principal, who looked gravely concerned. When “Shotgun
Rosie” emerged a short while later, her tearful eyes caused more consternation
among her confused students than her disciplinary methods.
“Class, President Kennedy’s been shot,” she was finally
able to get out in a choked voice.
And at that point, just as a waking Dorothy realized
that the people of Oz bore more than a passing resemblance to the Kansas she
called home (even the Wicked Witch was just poor Miss Almira Gulch), so the
fifth graders at St. Cecilia understood that the woman with the dour mien was
just as human as anyone else they knew.
