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studio still, but it took my breath away; for it, too, was both mesmerizing and sad. It felt like a perfect metaphor for the doubleness of my own responses.
    There they stand, Nathanael West’s locusts, the ultimate wanna-bes. Garland’s shadow, Bobbie Koshay, with her hands clasped behind her back and a white bow in her hair, is doing her brave best to smile, but she knows she’s a counterfeit, all right; there are no ruby slippers on her feet. The mock-Scarecrow looks glum, too, even though he has avoided the full-scale burlap-sack makeup that was Bolger’s daily fate. If it weren’t for the clump of straw poking out of his right sleeve, you’d think he was some kind of hobo. Between them, in full metallic drag, stands the Tin Man’s tinnier echo, looking miserable. Stand-ins know their fate: they know we don’t want to admit their existence. Even when reason tells us that in this or that difficult shot—when the Witch flies, or the Cowardly Lion dives through a glass window—we aren’t really watching the stars, still the part of us that has suspended disbelief insists on seeing the stars and not their doubles. Thus the stand-ins become invisible even when they are in full view. They remain off-camera even when they are on-screen.
    This is not the only reason for the curious fascination of the stand-ins’ photograph. It’s so haunting because, in the case of a beloved film,
we are all the stars’ doubles.
Imagination puts us in the Lion’s skin, places the sparkling slippers on our feet, sends us cackling through the air on a broomstick. To look at this photograph is to look into a mirror. In it we see ourselves. The world of
The Wizard of Oz
has possessed us. We have become the stand-ins.
    A pair of ruby slippers, found in a bin in the MGM basement, was sold at auction in May 1970 for the amazing sum of $15,000. The purchaser was, and has remained, anonymous. Who was it who wished so profoundly to possess, perhaps even to wear, Dorothy’s magic shoes? Was it, dear reader, you? Was it I?
    At the same auction the second highest price was paid for the Cowardly Lion’s costume ($2,400). This was twice as much as the third largest bid, $1,200 for Clark Gable’s trench coat. The high prices commanded by
Wizard of Oz
memorabilia testify to the power of the film over its admirers—to our desire, quite literally, to clothe ourselves in its raiment. (It turned out, incidentally, that the $15,000 slippers were too large to have fitted Judy Garland’s feet. They had in all probability been made for her double, Bobbie Koshay, whose feet were two sizes larger. Is it not fitting that the shoes made for the stand-in to stand in should have passed into the possession of another kind of surrogate: a film fan?)
    If asked to pick a single defining image of
The Wizard of Oz,
most of us would, I suspect, come up with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy s-skipping down the Yellow Brick Road (actually, the skip grows more pronounced during the journey, becoming an exaggerated h-hop). How strange that the most famous passage of this very filmic film, a film packed with technical wizardry and effects, should be the least cinematic, the most “stagy” part of the whole! Or perhaps not so strange, for this is primarily a passage of surreal comedy, and we recall that the equally inspired clowning of the Marx Brothers was no less stagily filmed. The zany mayhem of the playing rendered all but the simplest camera techniques unusable.
    “Where is Vaudeville?” Somewhere on the way to the Wizard, apparently. The Scarecrow and the Tin Man are both pure products of the burlesque theater, specializing in pantomime exaggerations of voice and movements, pratfalls (the Scarecrow descending from his post), improbable leanings beyond the center of gravity (the Tin Man during his little dance) and, of course, the smart-ass backchat of the cross-talk act:
    TIN MAN,
rusted solid:
(Squawks)
    DOROTHY: He said “oil