When asked about Judy Garland, he’d say, “I thought she was going to be a toughie, but she wasn’t.” His tales of filming “Oz” were shopworn but full of humanizing little details: between takes, the eighteen-year-old Maren played with a small hunk of clay (modelling was his hobby at the time) while M-G-M technicians mopped up the water that was perpetually leaking from the Munchkinland pond onto the Yellow Brick Road. I had come to my bunker to pray, and Maren was “a piece of the true cross,” as the original C-3PO, Anthony Daniels, once called himself. The documentary “Memories of Oz” was in heavy rotation then, and it offered a thin soup of secondhand testimonials from John Waters and the spawn of the original stars-until, finally, cathartically, Maren appeared, warbling the Yip Harburg lyrics that were his birthright and gnawing on a cigar as though he were worried he wouldn’t absorb all the nutrients. My teen-age summers were usually spent jobless and alone, watching Turner Classic Movies in my basement, as if it were a bunker for laying low until it was 1932 again. “You know, after everybody else died, they said, ‘Who’s left?’ ”Īs the central member of the Lollipop Guild, Maren’s claim to Munchkinhood was the strongest, and he became a familiar screen presence for me. “We finally got recognized,” Maren explained, in 1989.
We have always relied on mortals to attest to the acts of the gods, and the ex-Munchkins cottoned to their role as a sort of ever-dwindling Greek chorus, riding on parade floats and pontificating about the meaning of “Oz” on television. A hundred and twenty-four little people were employed in the making of “Oz,” and the survival of a few dozen of them long after the deaths of the movie’s gaudier alumni-Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, Margaret Hamilton-sometimes felt cosmically deliberate, a masterstroke of mythic structure. “People come and go so quickly here” is the camp one-liner from the movie, but Munchkinland was one place where people could be relied upon to live forever. When the last lingering Munchkin from “The Wizard of Oz,” Jerry Maren, died in May, at the age of ninety-eight, I took the news harder than I had thought possible.
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