The secret salacious world of the Munchkins

By GLENYS ROBERTS, Daily Mail
23:19pm 24th July 2006

To the millions of fans of one of the most celebrated films of all time, The Wizard Of Oz, it sounds like an extraordinary project. But the author of the cult book, Trainspotting, has written a new play about the Munchkins - the midgets who followed Judy Garland’s every step in the fictional land of Oz as she went on her adventures over the rainbow, meeting the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion.

Made in 1939, the movie was then the last word in special effects, make-up, set design and costumes, not to mention the highpoint of Garland’s career.

Her breasts strapped down to hide her burgeoning figure, the 17-year-old former child star plays the little Kansas girl Dorothy, who with her dog, Toto, is whisked away by a tornado to a fantasy land where she follows the Yellow Brick Road, kills the Wicked Witch and meets the powerful Wizard.

But Irvine Welsh’s new play, Babylon Heights, which premiered in San Francisco and is expected to open in London later this year, has already proved controversial because it has a bizarre twist.

The dwarves of the movie are being played by full-sized actors, who only appear small because the scenery is so huge - provoking protests from disability groups that the play is insulting and exploitative.

In the original film, of course, the Munchkins were played by genuine circus midgets, whose colourful contribution to Hollywood history has never been forgotten.

For although their antics on screen brought joy to generations of children, behind the scenes they astounded everyone with shocking episodes of drunkenness, depravity and wild sexual propositions from which no one was safe.

Even Garland herself was sufficiently curious to go on a date with one of the most randy, although since she was so young, her mother insisted on joining her.

"Fair enough, two broads for the price of one," the tiny lothario replied, undaunted. By the time filming was over, Garland had seen enough of the Munchkins’ unsavoury antics to go right off the idea of any intimate contact.

Like the rest of the cast, she was astounded to hear they were holding 'dwarf sex parties' in the famous Culver Hotel (subsequently owned by John Wayne) where they all lived during filming. There were rumours of wild evenings with rooms ransacked and drunken midgets swinging from the rafters. One horrified observer described them as "an unholy assembly of pimps, hookers and gamblers". Certainly, some of them seem to have resorted to boosting their earnings by pimping and whoring - and indeed begging. As many pointed out later, they were being paid far less than anyone else on the film - including Toto the dog. Many of them had vile tempers, too, so much so that one even tried to kill his wife.

These little actors might have been vertically challenged, but they were exceedingly tough. Most were old enough to have learned how to survive in New York or in Europe during the years of the Great Depression. And when they arrived in Hollywood in 1938, to be cast in one of the most prestigious films ever, it marked a distinct improvement in their fortunes.

Los Angeles was in the midst of its gilded heyday. Stars such as Jean Harlow and Katharine Hepburn had a huge following, while the love lives of the swashbuckling Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin were already legendary.

This was the height of Hollywood as Babylon, as the new play’s title reflects. Sex and glamour was the name of the game and the dwarves wanted their share. Naturally, as soon as they had money in their pockets, their behaviour did not improve. "You had to watch them all the time," observed Jack Dawn, the make-up artist on the film.

The women would proposition studio electricians, while one who called himself The Count was never sober. "Once, when he was due on set, he went missing. Then we heard a whining sound coming from the men’s room. He had got plastered during lunch, fallen in the toilet bowl and could not get out." It is hard to imagine that this sort of incident will have quite the same poignancy played by a normal-sized actor in the new play. Certainly, that is the opinion of a group representing people of restricted growth. According to Irvine Welsh, who co-authored the play with his screenwriting partner Dean Cavanagh, when the pressure group learned of their plans to replace their members with able-bodied actors, they were outraged.

But back in the Thirties, when the film was made, the outrage was in respect of the behaviour of the ‘little people’ (as they like to be called). It was shocking simply because it was so unexpected.

Because they were so small, it was easy for other members of the cast to make the mistake of treating them like children. Predictably, their reaction was to do everything they could to disabuse their colleagues of this notion.

"They were adults," recalled Jack Dawn firmly. "They did not like us touching them or lifting them into their make-up chairs. They insisted on climbing up by themselves." If the film-makers thought full-sized stars had attitude, they had seen nothing yet.

The task of assembling as many as 350 ‘little people’ to act in the movie fell to a man named Leo Singer. Born in Germany as Baron Leopold Van Singer, he had put together a troupe of touring midgets who took part in vaudeville shows all over Europe. He had bought some of them as children from their parents, who wanted to get rid of them.

By 1938, he had gathered a stable of 100 tiny performers and was based in America. MGM drew up a contract to provide as many as were needed to film L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, in which he described the Munchkins only as shorter than usual in stature and clad from top to toe in blue.

The studio was determined to have real dwarves. It did not want small adults or children. In its search, MGM advertised all over the country, auditioned tiny choirs - the midgets had to sing - visited circuses and sent out talent scouts.

As soon as word got out, every little person in the country arrived in Hollywood by bus and train looking for a part. Singer was put in charge of them all - looking after their lodging, food and attendance on set. But no one had any affection for him.

One of the midgets, Meinhardt Raabe, recently recalled why. With a background as a salesman and fairground barker, Raabe was cast as one of the more prominent Munchkins, with a speaking part.

His character, the Coroner, is the one who squeaks that the Wicked Witch of the East is "not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead." Despite his starring role, he said Singer stole a big percentage of his wages. Of course, managing the midgets was never easy. Many did not speak English and sang in thick German accents.

Some of those who knew most about performing were from Germany, but had been forced to flee the country by the Nazis’ doctrine of ‘social hygiene’, which demanded the elimination of handicapped people.

About 170 came from New York and had very little professional experience of showbusiness. Some had never been away from home before and were keener to let their hair down than work. Their only qualification was their height - in some cases they stood no taller than three feet. One of the most famous was Tiny Schneider, the youngest of seven children, of whom four were dwarves even though their parents were not. The four little children were highly talented and the two eldest, Gracie and Harry, had left Germany for America during World War I to make their fortune.

They joined the touring Buffalo Bill show as ‘Hansel and Gretel, the smallest dancing couple in the world’. They were followed later by their sisters Tiny and Daisy, who, in the era of peroxide glamour was known as the ‘Midget Mae West’. By now the family had changed their surname to ‘Doll’, exploiting audience insults such as: "Look at them - they are just like dollies!" The Dolls appeared with the Barnum and Bailey Circus but nurtured dreams of Hollywood.

Tiny got her first film role as a baby in a silent film and then played opposite Laurel and Hardy in the short film Sailors Beware. Then, in 1932, all four Dolls were cast in Freaks, a shocking film made by Dracula director Tod Browning. A Gothic horror set in a circus replete with midgets, a bearded lady and even a hermaphrodite, the movie was considered so grotesque it was savaged in America and rarely shown without drastic cuts. In Britain, it was banned until 1963.

It both titillated and terrorised audiences with salacious love scenes between a highly sexed love-sick midget and a beautiful trapeze artiste called Cleopatra.

In fact, the movie was before its time in appreciating the normal sexual, romantic and emotional drives of people of whatever size. Tiny and her family became stars thanks to their performances - and they seem to have taken the film’s message to heart.

Certainly, the normal urges of many of the assembled midgets emerged during the shooting of The Wizard Of Oz. "They got into sex orgies at the hotel and we had to have police on every floor," producer Mervyn Le Roy remembered afterwards. Meanwhile, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, noted that "assistants were ordered to watch the midgets who brandished knives and conceived passions for normal-sized members of the cast".

When their sexual overtures were rejected or they became bored after hours cooped up in their hotel, they drowned their sorrows. "They were drunks," Judy Garland said later. "They got smashed every night, and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets."

Whether that can be reproduced on stage remains to be seen. Tiny Doll and her family always claimed they never took part in such lurid events. With their now considerable fortune, they retired to Florida after The Wizard Of Oz and went back to circus work. The four never married, but lived together in a large house in the sun where the last of them died two years ago, taking the secret of any Californian orgies to their grave.

They had given up performing, blaming the political correctness that came during the Sixties. Dwarves were termed ‘people of restricted growth’ and it was no longer considered seemly to look upon them for entertainment.

And now, new treatments with growth hormones mean it might now be impossible to recast The Wizard of Oz with modern versions of the Munchkins. Perhaps that is the real reason for the new play’s full-sized cast.

But whatever size they are, will they be able to conjure up the rumbustious high-jinks and unabashed love of life that defined the golden age of Hollywood?

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The dwarves of the movie are being played by full-sized actors, who only appear small because the scenery is so huge - provoking protests from disability groups that the play is insulting and exploitative.