One of the great things about the admittedly minor research I do for columns like this is discovering tangential things that delight me. There are things I knew about Billie Burke; there are things I didn’t. I knew she was married to Flo Ziegfeld; I didn’t know she was not allowed to play herself in the movie because MGM thought she was too old, even though she was under contract there. I knew she went back to acting because she and her husband lost their money in the Crash; I didn’t know her father had been a famous clown. And what I didn’t know that makes me happiest to learn was that craters on Mercury are named after artists, and one of them is named after Billie Burke. There isn’t one named after Flo Ziegfeld.

For the vast majority of people, Billie Burke is Glinda the Good Witch. She is large and pink and wafting; that’s how we know her. She manages to seem both young and grandmotherly at the same time, which is a neat trick if you can manage it. She gives Dorothy some garbage advice and then tells her at the end that she shouldn’t have followed it, basically. (Having two Glindas is weird, in the book, but it does make that bit make more sense—one knows about the shoes and the other doesn’t.) She turned down Aunt Pittypat in Gone With the Wind that same year, who was then immediately told to be played as a “Billie Burke type.”

But Glinda isn’t a Billie Burke type, and Pittypat is. Because how I’ve come to remember Billie Burke is as the scatterbrained Clara Topper. She’s a much more entertaining character. I have limited patience for scatterbrains, but she’s the kind I like—better in the third movie than the first, honestly. And it’s been so long since I’ve seen the second that I don’t remember her very well in it. But she’s more genial in the third one, less grasping and controlling. She’s got a certain silliness that I like; Lucille Watson as Mrs. Charles in The Thin Man Goes Home has shades of Mrs. Topper as well.

She insisted that her husband didn’t chase women; I don’t know enough about Flo Ziegfeld to say one way or another if that’s true or if that’s a widow defending her husband’s reputation. He seems to have had at least one long-term affair that lasted even during his marriage to Burke. But I don’t know him even well enough to know how he and Burke met. They’d in theory saved enough to never work again, but they hadn’t taken allowances for the Crash.

One of these days, I’ll get back to writing about people of whose work I’ve seen more than a smattering. This, alas, is not one of those days. I don’t think I’ve seen more than a half-dozen of her movies and none of the silent ones. I’ve only seen The Great Ziegfeld once, and as established, she isn’t even in that. She’s an icon of film, but I suspect I’ve seen more of her movies than most people at that.

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