Rumor also had it—thanks to the stars of the movie, no less—that the little people cast as the residents of Munchkinland ran amok in their free time.
“They were little drunks,” Garland said in a 1967 interview with Jack Paar. “They got smashed every night and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets.”
Jerry Maren, who played the green plaid-wearing member of the Lollipop Guild and was the last surviving Wizard of Oz Munchkin when he died at 98 in 2018, pushed back at the characterization of him and his costars.
“Judy was telling it according to her pills and booze that day,” Maren wrote in his 2006 memoir (with Stephen Cox) Short and Sweet: The Life and Times of the Lollipop Munchkin. “She left behind a legacy of untruths about us.”
And among the 120 or so little people in the film, “There were a couple of kids from Germany who liked to drink beer,” he wrote. “They drank beer morning, noon and night, and got in a little trouble. They wanted to meet the girls, but they were the only ones.”
Margaret Pellegrini, who played a Munchkin villager, had fond memories of the experience. “My father worked in a hotel and earned about $5 a week. I got paid $50 a week,” she recalled. “It took eight weeks to make the Munchkinland scenes, after which I stayed in Hollywood for a month to sightsee.”