It’s truly wicked what became of “Ozcot,” the Hollywood home of L. Frank Baum.
In 1910, The Wizard of Oz author and his wife Maud moved from Chicago to the frostless belt, seeking year-round sunshine and improved health “in my declining years,” the 54-year-old told the press.
They were also deep in debt due to Baum’s failed foray into motion picture production. But with money Maud had inherited from her mother Matilda Joslyn Gage (a prominent suffragette), the couple purchased a lot in the popular Hollywood Ocean View Tract and built a two-story frame house that he dubbed “Ozcot” (“cot” is short for cottage).
Indeed, it was a magical place straight from the pages of his best-selling children’s books. Located at the southwest corner of Magnolia and Rose streets (now Cherokee and Yucca, respectively), Ozcot was a merry old land thanks to Baum, a dedicated horticulturist who won at least twenty top prizes at annual Hollywood flower shows.
In the backyard, he landscaped a maze of flowers (chrysanthemums, dahlias, roses), shrubs, and trees. There was an aviary twelve feet in diameter, pond stocked with goldfish and waterlilies, archery range, and chicken yard where Baum kept a flock of Rhode Island Reds.
On one end of the garden, Baum built himself a small open-air cottage, where he’d spend endless hours writing and editing. The most notable work completed here is The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, a play billed as a companion piece to the 1902 musical extravaganza “The Wizard of Oz” that ran on Broadway for 293 performances.
In the front yard, a pomegranate tree bore plenty of fruit for Maud to make jelly. Greenery dangled down from a second-story flower box. A pair of potted plants flanked the four steps up to the front door of 149 South Magnolia Street (in 1912, the address changed to 1749 Cherokee).
Inside, the 18x32 living room spanned the entire front of the home. The cozy space was walled in mahogany woodwork, with several area rugs protecting the oak floor and a pair of brass chandeliers hanging from the cream-colored ceiling.
A closer inspection of the decor hints at The Wizard of Oz: a sketch of a lion leans against the brick fireplace and on the far right of the mantle is a figurine appearing to be the Tin Man, and perhaps also Scarecrow to the left of the porcelain urn.
“The coziest room in the house” was the adjoining sun parlor, finished in forest green and with a cement floor to regulate the Southern California temperatures.
There was a definite nod to The Wizard of Oz in the dining room, where Baum crafted five copper light fixtures (one in each of the four corners and a center chandelier) backed with green glass so when illuminated, the room was cast in an emerald glow that complemented the blue-and-gold floral wallpaper.
Baum’s youngest son Kenneth fashioned the overhead copper lamp in the library, which was wall-to-wall with books lining mahogany shelves. In June 1914, the 23-year-old married Dorothy Hilda Duce at Ozcot, in an intimate ceremony held in the living room’s large bay window, under a canopy of asparagus plumosus and Shasta daisies. On their second anniversary, the couple welcomed daughter Frances Ozma.
Four bedrooms comprised the second story: one for Kenneth, one for guests, one that doubled as the author’s study, and one for Mr. and Mrs. Baum who slept separately in twin beds. An enclosed porch spanned the entire rear of Ozcot’s top floor, overlooking the garden, and wrapped around to the north corner for a view of the glorious San Fernando Mountains.
There was no place like Hollywood for Baum, who called his new home “The City of Enchantment” (also the title of a manuscript he penned and donated to the Hollywood Publicity Association for a 1912 national campaign).
Hollywood was just as delighted to have the famous fairytale man as a resident. Baum regularly read to local children and even hosted the 1912 opening of the new juvenile rooms at the Hollywood Library, a place so special it inspired him to write a gushing ode for the Los Angeles Citizen News that concluded: “And so—next to the Hollywood Hills—I love the Hollywood Library.”
In January 1913, the author gave a lecture on “A History of All the Fairies, Ancient and Modern” to a packed house at Wilcox Hall on Prospect Avenue. Did fairies really exist, wondered the captive audience of wishful-thinkers both big and small. Absolutely, insisted Baum. “For what would the children do without them?”
But it was Baum who was considered the greatest friend of children, thanks to the fourteen Oz books he gifted young minds around the world. And they were collectively heartbroken when he died on May 6, 1919, nine days shy of his 63rd birthday. Baum had been seriously ill with heart trouble since February 1918 and spent the remaining year of his life bedridden at Ozcot, yet still writing (he completed The Tin Woodman of Oz and The Magic of Oz).
“All the Hollywood people who were privileged to meet Mr. Baum knew him as a kindly, lovable man with a sparkling wit and high ideals,” read his obituary published on the front page of the Hollywood Citizen News on May 9, 1919.
Maud, who married Baum in 1882, was devastated. “It is all so sad, and I am so forlorn and alone,” she wrote in a letter to family. “For nearly thirty-seven years we had been everything to each other, we were happy, and now I am alone, to face the world alone.”
Baum’s dying wish was for Maud to stay at Ozcot, and she did, although it was never the same. The widow turned the home into a duplex, converting the second floor into a rented apartment. Downstairs, the sun parlor that was once her husband’s favorite spot in the house became her bedroom.
Over the years, as the surrounding area developed exponentially, there was pressure to sell her prime piece of real estate one block north of bustling Hollywood Boulevard, Maud acknowledged in a 1939 interview coinciding with the release of The Wizard of Oz, MGM’s technicolor adaptation of her husband’s popular book series (for which the Baum family received $40,000).
It was the same story in 1951 when the Los Angeles Times visited the 90-year-old at Ozcot. The frame house, once nestled in a citrus grove when the Baums moved to Hollywood four decades earlier, was now “surrounded by tall apartment buildings,” noted the newspaper. Inside, not much had changed, as Maud sat in her wood-paneled living room, a faithful Cocker Spaniel at her feet.
That holiday season, she invited neighborhood children to the home to meet Santa Claus in “the real Land of Oz.”
On March 6, 1953, Maud Baum, 91, died at Ozcot, thirty-four years after her husband.
The historic property was sold and, as expected, demolished the following year for a twenty-unit apartment building, ironically named Yucca Gardens. If it only had the heart of Baum’s magical garden…
All historical photos were acquired by the California State Library Foundation from Justin Schiller, a founding member of the International Wizard of Oz Club.