Writing about OZ—This Time, It’s Personal!

RUSHDIE

I wrote my first story in Bombay at the age of ten; its title was Over the Rainbow. It amounted to a dozen or so pages, dutifully typed up by my father's secretary on flimsy paper, and eventually it was lost somewhere on my family's own mazy journeyings between India, England and Pakistan. Shortly before his death in 1987 my father claimed to have found a copy mouldering in an old file, but in spite of my pleadings he never produced it, and nobody else ever laid eyes on the thing. I've often wondered about this incident. Maybe he never really found the story, in which case he had succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairytales he told me; or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine--his pot of nostalgic, parental gold.

I don't remember much about the story. It was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon a rainbow's beginning, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end-zone, and as rich in promises. The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and constructed like a grand staircase. The boy, naturally, begins to climb. I have forgotten almost everything about his adventures, except for an encounter with a talking pianola whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley and the ' playback singers' of the Hindi movies, many of which made The Wizard of Oz look like kitchen-sink realism. My bad memory -- what my mother would call a 'forgettery' – is probably just as well. I remember what matters. I remember that The Wizard of Oz (the film, not the book, which I didn't read as a child) was my very first literary influence. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of going to school in England was mentioned, it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond rainbows. It may be hard to believe, but England felt as wonderful a prospect as Oz.

FRIEDMAN

I was always stricken, as a child, at the moment when the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz cried, 'I’m mellllting!" The shocked anguish on her face, the way she crumpled to the floor-guilt overcame me. As much as I'd hated her before (and I had: she was cruel and she was voracious. She wanted everything for herself), suddenly, to my surprise, remorse washed over me, and painful sympathy: She was my own mother, dissolving!

Quick, she mustn't be let die! Prop her up! A terrible mistake must have been made! And the moment I had expected to feel thrilled triumph (as we would have if this were a boy's story: we're glad the knight slays the dragon) turned out to be in fact spiked with a baffling sense of betrayal.

But wasn't the girl supposed to win? Wasn't the wicked witch evil? And how had my mother snuck into it all?

DOTY

Like many of you reading this, I have a long and tangled history with The Wizard of Oz. For the past thirty-five years or so, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I Love Lucy, and Oz have been the popular culture touchstones for understanding my changing relationship to gender and sexuality. It all started in the 1960s with the annual televising of Oz. Watching as a kid, I loved Dorothy, loved Toto, was scared of, but fascinated by, the Wicked Witch, felt guilty for thinking good witch Glinda was nerve-gratingly fey and shrill, thought the Tin Man was attractive and the Scarecrow a big showoff. But I was really embarrassed by the Cowardly Lion. The supporting cast in Kansas was boring, with the exception of the sharp-featured spinster Almira (which I always heard as “Elvira”) Gulch. Only the cyclone could equal this grimly

determined bicyclist and dog-snatcher for sheer threatening power.

Looking back, it all makes sense. I was a boy who had a girlfriend who I liked to kiss and to play Barbies with, while also looking for chances to make physical contact with her older brother through horseplay in the pool. I was in love with and wanted to be Dorothy, thinking that the stark Kansas farmland she was trying to escape from was nothing compared to the West Texas desert our house was built upon. The Tin Man might stand in for my girlfriend’s older brother (and subsequent crushes on older boys): an emotionally and physically stolid male who needed to find a heart so he could romantically express himself to me. During my first phase with the film, I saw Dorothy’s three male companions (on the farm and in Oz) as being like friends or brothers. Well, maybe my heterosexual upbringing had me working to construct some sort of love interest between Dorothy and the showoff Scarecrow. But Dorothy and the Tin Man? Never. Hands off, girl, he’s mine!