TRIBUTE
Tilly Syreeta Bancroft
(1920-2005)
The first time I met Tilly, it was all about the eyes. She had the biggest prettiest eyes in the world. They were like two flecks of sky, blue-marbled and cool. I was the third man back in the line of stunt doubles for Ray Bolger and she was a Munchkin Villager in Yellow Sun Dress. It was the morning they were shooting Dorothy’s arrival at the village.
Chuck Waller, who played the Munchkinland Mayor, was strutting around the set telling people where to go and how to get there, as usual, so I opted for a quieter spot around back. On Mr. Bolger’s recommendation, I’d spent the day before at the zoo’s gibbon exhibit, getting a feel for the awkward grace of those lopey buggers. No better teacher than nature, Mr. Bolger liked to say. So there I was in a deserted corner of the MGM lot, hooking the back of my overalls onto a jury-rigged cruciform, when the nail snapped and sent me tumbling to the ground. Very ungibbon-like.
Fade to black and all that. Next thing I knew, there in front of me was a vision of two patches of Nebraska sky trying to resolve themselves into the most tender pair of blue eyes I’d ever seen.
“Are you okay, Mr. Scarecrow?”
The voice was as delicate as a piece of thread. I was sure I’d died and was being escorted into the blue yonder by the holiest angel in God’s heaven. Her hair brushed my forehead like a tassel of golden corn silk and whisked me back to a time when all us kids would hide from each other in green hallways of corn. Tilly would agree that I bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Bolger, but I never could get her to admit that she’d mistaken me for the real Scarecrow.
After a day of shooting, Tilly and a group of Munchkin actors often unwound at a juke joint on Ventura. I started dropping by and that’s how we grew close. Oz intoxicated all of us. The whole cast—but especially those of us who hadn’t found much work until then—sensed that we were part of something bigger. She was from Ferndale, California, and I was from Red Cloud, Nebraska, a couple of small-town kids who just connected on the idea that anything seemed possible. Oz was the biggest score either of us had made since moving to la-la-land.
Sure there were blue moments. Aleister Blackwell, who played an uncredited Munchkin, would have a second vodkatini and start stroking his furry sideburns and bemoaning storm clouds over Europe, claiming that the world had passed some point-of-no-return and lost its way. We humored him for a while, then Tilly and I would slip off to spend time together.
We fell in love. But her family refused to bless our marriage plans. “It’s not right for two people of such different sizes to come together,” her mother wrote in a letter Tilly showed me. “You’ll just end up getting hurt when he tires of the novelty.”
I told Tilly that I would gladly chop off both my legs if it would help me win her parents’ blessing. It didn’t seem right that our God-given bodies should stand in the way of true love, but Tilly put a hold on the wedding plans.
Things kept at a standstill for a time until the war came and I got shipped to Europe. At the dock Tilly asked to be picked up, something I’d never before done in public. There we were, me in my sharp-pressed uniform and Tilly in a powder-blue dress that matched her eyes. People gawked but we didn’t care. We pressed our foreheads together. Her skin was as cool as fine china. We stepped out of time on the dock that day. I’ll never forget that embrace nor our whispered promises to be true.
We wrote every day but in the winter of 44, her letters stopped. In June came the “Dear John.” Two days later, with the 29th Infantry, I landed at Normandy. A German land mine mangled both my legs to the knees, where they were amputated. Fate had a good chuckle at that. As I rehabbed at Walter Reed, a single thought tormented and teased me—that my injury was actually a gift, that I’d been rendered Tilly’s height so that her parents would finally accept me. Sometimes I wrote four letters a day from that hospital bed.
No replies, though.
It was a long journey back to Red Cloud, but I finally made it and got through to Tilly on the telephone. She’d married Barry Bancroft, who played a Munchkin Tin Polisher and was four inches taller than her. She was pregnant with their first child. She cried and I could tell how hard it was for her, so after that I broke off contact.
She and Barry had a happy life. I saw her one last time, at the 60th Oz reunion. We spotted each other across the crowded banquet hall and immediately made our way past all those people we didn’t recognize anymore. She stood on my footrests and we embraced. It was like I’d had a house on my chest for fifty years. I finally took a full breath.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said. I simply couldn’t speak. People called out to each other, champagne corks popped, ice fell into glasses, and all I could do was look into those big blue eyes and feel like I was twenty years old again, lying on my back on the MGM lot, believing that dreams really do come true. To have woken up next to Tilly each morning would’ve made it all worthwhile. She’ll be missed.
(Bancroft died of kidney failure in Santa Barbara, Calif.)
