Clara Blandick spent most of her life on the edges of celebrity. Her face was among the most familiar in American films. Born Clara Blanchard Dickey on June 4, 1876, she had a long, career-obsessed life as a stage, film, and character actress, the kind of performer Hollywood needed and little acknowledged. She is, for generations, Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz, stern but loving Kansas aunt whose quiet presence grounds Dorothy’s homesickness. Clara Blandick’s actual story – particularly its end – was far from Technicolor comfort.

They sold Faith Bacon the way show business sells every beautiful miracle it can’t quite explain—like a new light bulb for the national imagination. “America’s Most Beautiful Dancer,” the billboards promised, and for a while the country believed it, because it wanted to. She was born Frances Yvonne Bacon in Los Angeles on July 19, 1910, a city that specialized in making legends out of runaways, ingenues, and nervous hope. But Faith didn’t rise through the tidy Hollywood ladder of bit parts and studio grooming; she rose through the hotter, rougher air of burlesque, where applause could turn to police whistles in the same breath and “art” was whatever survived the next raid.