\n<\/p>\n
Rumor also had it\u2014thanks to the stars of the movie, no less\u2014that the little people cast as the residents of Munchkinland ran amok in their free time.<\/p>\n
“They were little drunks,” Garland said in a 1967 interview<\/a> with Jack Paar<\/strong>.\u00a0“They got smashed every night and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets.”<\/p>\n Jerry Maren<\/strong>, who played the green plaid-wearing member of the Lollipop Guild and was the last surviving Wizard of Oz <\/em>Munchkin when he died at 98 in 2018, pushed back at the characterization of him and his costars.<\/p>\n “Judy was telling it according to her pills and booze that day,” Maren wrote in his 2006 memoir (with Stephen Cox<\/strong>) Short and Sweet: The Life and Times of the Lollipop Munchkin. <\/em>“She left behind a legacy of untruths about us.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Margaret Pellegrini<\/strong>, 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<\/a>. “It took eight weeks to make the Munchkinland scenes, after which I stayed in Hollywood for a month to sightsee.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n