I’ve liked her ever since I found out that she was very angry that the slippers in The Wizard of Oz were ruby. She’d read the book; she knew they were supposed to be silver. So okay, yeah, ruby looked better in the eye-bleeding days of early Technicolor. She and I knew how it was supposed to go, and we were sticking to our guns on that. Oh, sure, it’s the least of her problems from the set of that movie, but since I had a college English teacher correct a poem that reference “silver slippers,” she’s definitely got my sword.
Apparently, children in general were afraid of her. Recently, as we know, the “lost episode” of Sesame Street that she appeared on has resurfaced; it was buried because parents complained that their children were afraid. She was indeed playing a witch on it. Conversely, she appeared on several episodes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood playing herself, an actress who happened to have played a witch in a movie. Those episodes were from right around the year of my birth; her role as a witch was from before my mother was born, and my mother was not young when she had kids. The history just lasted that long—probably kids today are scared of her, and their grandparents and maybe even great-grandparents hadn’t been born yet.
Maybe what would have helped would have been showing the kids, you know, other things she’d done in her career. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of options there—oh, she did other things, but good luck finding them. And she wasn’t often in them for more than a few minutes if you can find them. She went from struggling to keep herself and her son fed to completely typecast in a single movie. If you’re showing your kids roles not based on the Witch that are relatively accessible, good luck. What are you going to do, show them The Ox-Bow Incident?
She’d been a lifelong fan of the book. In fact, she’d also been a kindergarten teacher. She seems to have genuinely loved children, and not in a “for lunch” kind of way. Someone who knew her late in life, when they both lived in Gramercy Park, said her nephew didn’t want to meet his aunt’s famous friend. He understood, the woman says, that Hamilton was an actress—but what if she was really like that anyway? Even teenagers, Hamilton herself said, seemed to be at least a little afraid of the witch they’d feared in childhood.
Still, there was a life to her beyond it. She took over the role of Madame Armfeldt for the original touring company of A Little Night Music. Her version of “Liaisons” isn’t the most melodic thing out there, but to be fair, it’s not really supposed to be. That’s for “Send in the Clowns.” She did, after all, do The Ox-Bow Incident and Lux Video Theatre and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. She supported children and animals and stayed friends with Ray Bolger. And, okay, maybe she supported Eisenhower, but overall, she seems to have been a nice lady who deserved better than to frighten children for decades after her death.
