Why Miss Gulch Returned
Judy Garland died on June 22, 1969, and I don't know
what shocked this ten-year-old more – that Dorothy had surrendered, or that the
N. Y. Times front-page photo showed a 47-year-old woman in sequins.
Dorothy – are you in there? It dawned on me for the first time that
while my two-dimensional celluloid friends cavorted annually in the merry old
land of my black-and-white television set, their real, three-dimensional human
counterparts had been trapped in the real world, set adrift in a hot-air
balloon without knowing how it works.
Several weeks later, my prescient grandmother took me on
a trip to see my future – in the form of Richard Rodgers' Lincoln Center
revival of Oklahoma! Live actors! And not just any live
actors. The curtain rises on an old woman sitting before a 1900 Plains
farmhouse; and from the second row, this ten-year-old's mind reeled once more
as I realized that six feet from me sat the Wicked Witch of the West, exactly
thirty years after her previous engagement as a Plains farm woman – when her
little party was just beginning.
That summer, Margaret Hamilton lavished me with
postcards, Oz photos, and best wishes, as was her meticulous custom with
enraptured ten-year-olds who wrote her fan letters; she carelessly invited me
to visit her backstage someday. At sixteen, I slipped past the doorman to
her Boston dressing room after A Little Night Music (I marched up to
that door and bid it open, hoping she would find it kind of me to visit her in
her loneliness). I gave her no trouble, I can assure you.
Recognizing me as part-fan, part-future-theatrical, she generously and
graciously regaled me with tales of how to melt and throw fire.
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Fred Barton as The Wicked Witch of the West (Theatre-By-The-Sea, RI, 1979) |
At 20, I came to appreciate her advice, on my first
professional stage in The Wizard of Oz. The actress hired to play
the Wicked Witch was liquidated, and – times being what they were – I accepted
the job. But to play the Witch and simultaneously serve as Musical
Director? These things must be done delicately: a piano was placed
directly offstage, so that seconds after playing "Over The Rainbow"
for the little girl, I could jump on the bike and live the dream. It was
at this fateful moment when Gulch History was made. The Munchkins and
Monkeys would gather around to howl at the sight of offstage Miss Gulch, in
full regalia, playing "Over The Rainbow" for her onstage nemesis;
lightbulbs and lightning bolts!
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| You'd never know I had just played "Over The Rainbow" for the girl. (Theatre-By-The-Sea, RI, 1979) |
Like
all good stock theatres, Theatre-by-the-Sea in Matunuck, R.I. had a late-night
cabaret where cast members would let their considerable hair down after the
show. In this cauldron of improvised insanity, Miss Gulch Returned for
the first time. I donned the costume in front of the audience, and sang a
single song I had written months before, for a Harvard burlesque: "I'm
A Bitch." The five-minute turn became a nightly sensation – then an
annual one as I returned to the theatre each summer. But when I was 22,
off-Broadway called, and I packed up my songs and my wig forever. Lightly.
In 1983 I saw Margaret Hamilton for the last time.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences sponsored the last
great Convocation of Oz Alumni, hosted by the MGM Oz historian
Aljean Harmetz. From Ray Bolger to producer Mervyn LeRoy to the last of
the Munchkins, each veteran's entrance sent the huge audience into hysteria.
But nothing could match the fifteen minutes of pandemonium when the
Wicked Witch of the West walked down the aisle to the podium.
Recovering from a stroke, Ms. Hamilton barely moved a
muscle while she spoke – and neither did anyone else. In a tiny but
ever-recognizable voice, she delivered thirty of the funniest, most devastating
minutes anyone present is likely to experience.
How curious, I thought, that the villainess of Oz
should be the longest-lived, the most humorous, the most wise, the most
philosophical, the most humanistic, and the most articulate in holding an
audience in her thrall; and that she should generously dispense warm, practical
advice to the young people in her presence, much as she had done for an
adolescent Judy Garland backstage on the Oz set thirty-five years
before.
I had spent the afternoon in Mel Brooks' office at Fox,
helping a friend who was auditioning his song for an upcoming movie. I
secretly fumed, like a true showbiz pal, that I hadn't magically attracted the
assignment myself – having written not a note or a word in years. Late
that night, in the dreary Hollywood motel where Janis Joplin died, the dam
broke –I feverishly wrote the song I would have written if I were a functioning
writer. They wanted a double-entendre song for a Twenties moll in a men's
bar; but was I a clever enough wizard to manage it?
Next morning, I found a mysterious manuscript on my
desk, with the words "Pour Me A Man" scrawled in mid-page, in
handwriting closely resembling mine (Janis, is that you? Couldn't have been –
not her type of thing). Similar feverish episodes followed as I moved
back to New York, and within two weeks I had a sheaf of new songs.
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| A Star Is Born had just been re-released with restored footage; I did take-offs on their publicity. |
A friend, a gender-illusionist par excellence, asked for
"Pour Me A Man" to sing at a La Cage Aux Folles party.
What an unexpected pleasure: lightbulbs – lightning bolts! A
man singing "Pour Me A Man?" La Cage Aux Folles?
The Wicked Witch outlives the kid – shatters her own stereotype –
and dispenses passionate advice to the disenfranchised?
Alone in a Hollywood motel, ignored by the studio moguls? In a
flash I realized that every song I had just written was in fact a gender
metaphor, a snapshot of a state of mind, and that the performance metaphor had
been with me all along, biding her time. I'd always had the power to go
back to Kansas. My old Gulch dress and hat came flying out of the
lightly-packed box faster than you can say "menace to the community."
Miss Gulch Lives! opened at Palsson's Supper Club in November
1983.
In 1985, I changed the title, and posters for Miss
Gulch Returns! went up all over town – hours before the N. Y. Times
reported Margaret Hamilton's death. What a world, what a world! She
had heard about the show from friends, and reportedly chuckled over the printed
program – and it only took fifteen years between those two Oz obituaries
for this ten-year-old to rediscover the three-dimensional message hidden behind
our two-dimensional sepia-toned friends. But maybe I never really lost it
to begin with.
– Fred Barton, November 1999
– Fred Barton, November 1999