Stepping into the home of Adele Morris — the owner of Britain’s largest collection of Wizard of Oz memorabilia — is an ever so slight disappointment. What you want is that sudden transition from dreary Kansas (or in this case, Kilburn, North London) monochrome into dazzling, super-saturated Technicolor. Instead, the 72-year-old Morris leads you through a dim hallway and into a living room that, at first glance, seems a seat of grandmotherly respectability.
Then everything slips slowly into focus. What you took for a huge framed floral print, for instance, is in fact a picture of Judy Garland asleep in the field of magical poppies. Busts of scarecrows and cowardly lions double as biscuit jars. Rows of books make up an extensive Oz bibliography, including a complete vintage set of L. Frank Baum’s Oz canon in Russian (Morris cannot read them, but still had to have them).
Then, en route to the conservatory, there are the display cases packed with dolls, dioramas and original promotional material that blur into a patchwork of Wicked Witch greens, Tin Man silvers and Brick Road yellows, flecked with the occasional ruby red. Morris started collecting in the late Sixties, but began to take it seriously “once the internet started”. She has spent more than £40,000 — and it is worth considerably more than she paid.
“Prices have probably quadrupled over the past ten years for the older stuff,” she says. “It’s getting scarcer and scarcer, it’s just not on the market any more. And if it is, it’s probably fake.”
Morris, who worked as a model during the 1950s, collects only old or uncommon items, keeping in regular contact with dealers in America, where almost all the Oz memorabilia action is. She corresponds with one Oz-obsessed Hollywood film producer, swapping old cinema programmes and information about for-sale items they know of. That such a market still exists, in which original promo posters can go for more than £3,000 or original ruby slippers go for mor than £400,000 at auction, says something about the enduring appeal of a film that celebrated its 70th birthday this year.
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“I’ve never stopped watching it,” Morris says. “I’ll watch it 20, 30 times a year, or whenever my grandchildren are round.”
It is probably worth stressing that Morris is not batty. I have met people who collect obsessively as a means of cocooning themselves from reality, or of papering over emotional cracks. She, at the risk of stating the obvious, just really, really likes The Wizard of Oz. Her mother took her to see it when she was 4 then, perhaps fatefully, bought her a small Dorothy doll.
“I still have nightmares about the witch, I tell you,” she sighs, showing off a limited edition Royal Doulton ceramic scene featuring the Wicked Witch of the West. I tell her the flying monkeys worried me the most. “Really? Oh. They didn’t bother me. But that cackle ... ‘I’ll get you, my pretty!’ ” She screeches convincingly.
She delves into a pile of photographs and pulls out one signed by Margaret Hamilton, who played the Witch. “Never talk back to witches” is scrawled on it in green pen. There is also a signed picture of Meinhardt Raabe, the Munchkin coroner who pronounced the Wicked Witch of the East dead. “That’s not worth a lot because he’s still alive,” Morris sniffs. “He’s signed so much stuff. If you put your hand out to shake his, he’d probably sign that too.”
She even met Garland a few times, too, in the Fifties. “We’d go to the first nights at the Palladium, a group of us, with Lionel Blair and all that crowd,” she remembers. “We’d go backstage and talk to people. She was a lovely, lovely person. We went to her last concert at the Palladium and we all came out crying. She was terrible, forgot all the words, doped up to the eyeballs.”
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Even though her collection has never been open to the public, word of it has gradually spread around the area. “Sometimes if I meet someone they’ll say: ‘You’re the one with the Wizard of Oz collection’. I never mention it myself. I’ll sometimes get a knock at the door and it will be someone with a little girl asking if they can possibly have a look.” She always ushers them in.
She wanders round the last of the display cases, pointing out 1950s Oz playing cards, eerie handcrafted metal figurines and a pair of ruby slippers made from the original MGM costume department plans. Do they fit her? “They fit,” she beams.
She has at least twice as much as is on display stored away in the cellar. “The film, you see, has never aged. It’s moralistic. It’s sentimental. It’s joyous. It always cheers me up. Anything to do with Oz is part of my psyche. It’s a sort of obsession, collecting, but it gives me a lift. If I almost have a set of dolls and find the missing one, it’s a thrill to know I’ve got the whole set.
“Why do people collect? It’s a weird thing,” she sighs, then smiles contentedly, “when you really think about it.”
The 70th anniversary singalong edition of The Wizard of Oz is available on Blu-ray and DVD