There were 124 of us, and about a dozen children. We had children because we didn’t have enough little people. They used everybody, oh yeah. They made them townspeople or something like that. As long as you could walk, you got the job.

During the whole filming it was rainy and windy and stormy outside every day. I’ll never forget that because it was my first time in California. Many’s the time we didn’t get out of there until 8 at night. And we had to get there around 6:30 or 7 a.m. because the makeup and the wardrobe took so long. Fifty lousy dollars a week, six days a week. Toto the dog made $125. That was awful when we found that out. We loved the dog but, I mean…

We stayed at the Culver City Hotel. There weren’t any drunken orgies. And nobody hung themselves on this set, either. There was a rumor going around that one of the Munchkins hanged himself. You know, there’s 250 people on the set. How are they going to let somebody hang themselves? First of all, if you’re making $50 a week, you don’t have much money for booze, No. 1. You’re working late; we all got tired, you know. So I never saw anybody drunk. Oh, there was one or two guys got drunk, the Kelley brothers, you know. They’d be drunk if they were in Afghanistan. They’d get drunk anywhere.

Those are not the Munchkins’ actual voices in the movie. It was all dubbed in. Because a lot of them had thick German accents. They used singers in the studio and speeded up the sound track. It was all pre-recorded, so we could sing whatever we wanted. You know, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead”? We used to dance around, going, “Ding, dong, the bitch is dead/Ding, dong, the lousy bitch is dead.”

Judy Garland was all googly-eyed the first time she saw us. She didn’t say nothing, but you could see her eyes, you know. Then when we would come up with the lollipop, her eyes were all popping up. Oh, she got a bigger kick out of us than we did out of her. That’s the truth.

We never saw Judy again after the movie. We see [Judy’s daughter] Lorna [Luft] a lot, practically every year at the Judy Garland festival. She’s really sweet.

I wish I had kept the lollipop. They sold my wardrobe for $25,000. Imagine how much the lollipop would be worth today.