[Editor’s note: Jon M. Chu’s Wicked, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, finally hits theaters this weekend. To celebrate this already critically lauded—and theater-kid approved—adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical, we are clicking our heels to travel in time and revisit the moment when Vogue cast Keira Knightley as a high-fashion Dorothy. Knightley brings the fashion credits to Oz in frocks by Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Prada, and more for the December 2005 issue of the magazine. Styled by Grace Coddington and photographed by Annie Leibovitz.]
For those who grew up before DVDs made it possible for excitable six-year-olds to watch Rugrats in Paris whenever they feel like it, the annual network broadcast of The Wizard of Oz was one of childhood s Stations of the Cross. Year after year, there it appeared, inviting us to enter its dreamlike and disorienting, yet oddly familiar world. Sure, the 1939 MGM extravaganza is a product of Hollywood s Golden Age, filled with Technicolor magic, a splendid Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg score, and indelible performances. But beyond that it speaks to a deep, archetypal longing: to explore the unknown and return home safely. The Wizard of Oz is a truly American fairy tale.
Oz’s creator, L. Frank Baum, a quintessentially American character himself, saw it that way, too. An itinerant actor, playwright, salesman, shopkeeper, and newspaperman from upstate New York, Baum published his third children s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in 1900. He imagined it as the first in a series of “newer ‘wonder tales,’” shorn of stereotypes and the “blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.” The story may not include parables of beastly children who get their hands chopped off for picking their noses, but neither Oz, with its wicked witches and flying monkeys, nor Kansas, with its gray, monotonous prairies, is a land of unalloyed delight.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s enduring mix of fantasy and realism was first captured, in charming color plates and line drawings, by the illustrator W. W. Denslow. Here are the familiar moments in their earliest form: Dorothy and her companions being carried off by the flying monkeys; the man behind the curtain admitting, “Exactly so, I am a humbug.” But Denslow and Baum soon parted ways—each felt that his contribution was the reason for the book s success—and John R. Neill took up the mantle of the Royal Illustrator of Oz. With their long, graceful lines and meticulously rendered details, Neill’s drawings recall the work of Maxfield Parrish, with whom Baum, as it turns out, had collaborated on his first children s book, the oddly conceived Mother Goose in Prose.
Baum managed to write fourteen Oz books before his death, in 1919. (Other writers continued the series.) He also oversaw several money-losing silent-film versions of his stories and a 1902 Broadway musical, which included such unforgettable Baum-penned numbers as “The Different Ways of Making Love,” “The Traveler and the Pie,” and “Just a Simple Girl from the Prairie.” Oz went on to greater glory on the New York boards, with the 1975 R&B update The Wiz (“Follow the Yellow Brick Road” became “Ease On Down the Road”). And now Wicked, a treacly power-pop deconstruction of the Oz legend, based on Gregory Maguire s wonderfully subversive novel, has become one of Broadway s biggest hits.
Still, the 1939 film remains the Wizard of Oz that inhabits our dream life, and it served as the main inspiration for Annie Leibovitz’s shoot for this month’s Vogue. The young actress Keira Knightley was chosen to step into Judy Garland’s ruby slippers—not to mention a variety of top designers’ takes on her gingham frock. Knightley may hail from across the ocean and lack the barely hidden sadness that made Garland s performance so heartbreaking, but her smile is as wide open as the Midwest.
To give The Wizard of Oz’s iconic characters fresh life and new meaning, Vogue assembled an A-team of contemporary artists, whose images have become part of our collective visual consciousness. Jasper Johns, whose boldly painted maps, targets, and flags helped lead his contemporaries away from Abstract Expressionism and pointed ahead to Pop Art and Minimalism, appears here in good humor as the Cowardly Lion. And John Currin, who famously keeps an ironic distance from his subjects in paintings widely hailed for their technical virtuosity, is the Tin Man, following the Yellow Brick Road in search of a heart.
Some artists and their characters fit together hand-in-glove. “One of my childhood fantasies was to own a monkey,” says winged monkey Jeff Koons, the man behind the gilded 1988 porcelain statue Michael Jackson and Bubbles. “They’re kind of your size, they’re cute, they’re playful, and they’re a little rebellious.”
Kiki Smith, who has turned the human body’s viscera into the stuff of art, grew up identifying more with the Wicked Witch of the West than with Dorothy. “If they had asked me to play any other part, I would have said no,” she insists. “I just liked the image of her riding around on her bicycle, or on her broomstick, kind of cackling at the world.”
When Chuck Close was asked to take on the role of the Wizard of Oz himself, his first thought, he recalls, was, “Does that mean I m seen as a fake and a fraud?” In fact, Close’s frank and remorseless 1967–68 Big Self-Portrait is as far from the Wizard s self-aggrandizing as one can get.
Close has always felt an affinity for the movie—“The fact that it goes from black-and-white to color has special meaning for me,” he says—and remains in awe of its staying power. “So many things get dated and go out of favor, and we start to see them as kitsch,” Close says. “I don’t think that will ever really happen to this film. I would think that even kids today, who are used to seeing incredible special effects, would still find it magical. It achieves what all of us, as artists, hope for: It’s an expression of its creators and of its time, but it also partakes of something timeless. Not bad.”
