Amid the fresh bout of Wicked fever we’re experiencing right now, fans are rediscovering exactly how queer-coded Elphaba and Glinda really are — and the film’s stars agree.
But even longtime Wicked stans and “Gelphie” shippers may not know that Glinda’s sapphic history stretches all the way back to The Wizard of Oz book series itself, as well as the actress who originated “the Good Witch” for the silver screen adaptation, Billie Burke who reportedly had a relationship with trailblazing lesbian director.
Already a lauded Broadway star by her early 20s, Burke married producer Florenz Ziegfeld in 1914, and made her silent film debut in 1916 as the title character in the comedy Peggy. Although she soon became one of the highest-paid female actors in Hollywood, her marriage to the frequently-unfaithful Ziegfeld was perpetually on the rocks.
As the New York Times later noted in Burke’s obituary, things worsened when Ziegfeld fell victim to the “Black Monday” stock market crash of 1929 that launched the Great Depression. Burke had previously contemplated retirement, but the crash — and Ziegfeld’s debts passed to her after he died of pleurisy in 1932 — pushed her to continue performing in film, theater, and radio.
No longer attached to Ziegfeld, Burke was free to seek other romantic opportunities, and although she never remarried, she was intimately linked to the legendary Dorothy Arzner. Referred to as the “mother goddess of women’s film-making” by the British Film Institute, Arzner’s accolades are countless: she was the first woman to direct a sound film with the early “talkie” The Wild Party, pioneering the first ever “boom mic” during production by attaching a microphone to a fishing pole.
She is also credited with launching Katharine Hepburn’s film career, and was the first woman to become a member of the Director’s Guild of America, among myriad other accomplishments.
Arzner — whose films frequently explored the repression of women through heterosexual marriage — was also in a long-term relationship with a woman somewhat openly, at a time when doing so was very uncommon. She remained in a relationship with choreographer and screenwriter Marion Morgan for more than 40 years, until Morgan’s death in 1971.
Though the two were deeply committed, historian William J. Mann noted in his book Behind the Screen, “that didn’t mean [their relationship] couldn’t be flexible,” with Morgan frequently traveling for work; over the years, Arzner was rumored to have had affairs with several women including Joan Crawford, Hepburne, and Burke, who was reportedly one of her favorite actors.
In 1936, several years after she directed Hepburne and Burke together in Christopher Strong, Arzner was reported to be staying with Burke while her house was being “remodeled.” The relationship between the two was never confirmed by either party, but it is historically considered an open secret in Hollywood (Burke’s profile on Turner Classic Movies lists Arzner as a “companion”). A few years later, in 1939, Burke would go down in cinema history for her best-known role: Glinda the Good Witch.
Even before Burke brought Glinda to movie theaters, though, L. Frank Baum’s original novels already portrayed Glinda with a (pink) glimmer of sapphism. The books — which, lest we forget, gave LGBTQ+ communities the enduring euphemism “friends of Dorothy” and U.S. history’s funniest witch hunt — end with the posthumously published Glinda of Oz, in which we learn in the first line that Glinda lives in a palace “surrounded by her maids of honor — a hundred of the most beautiful girls of the Fairyland of Oz.”
