The Mickey Carroll Centennial

Born 100 years ago, short-statured actor Mickey Carroll (Michael Finocchiaro, 1919 – 2009).

Hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, Carroll was best known for playing the Town Crier Munchkin the the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. The stories about how he found his way from St. Louis to that role have me somewhat incredulous. Carroll had taken dance lessons at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis from the age of seven. Jack Haley is said to have seen him there and taken him to Hollywood. He is also said to have attended school on the MGM backlot with Judy Garland, and that it was Garland who got him his job in The Wizard of Oz, and that he stayed with her. It all has the ring of lore, maybe his, maybe theirs. I mean, it’s not like he required the agency of those cast members. He was a LITTLE PERSON! There was an intrinsic demand! I found the true story in his Variety obit. He went from performing at local theatres to nightclubs in Chicago and then playing Orpheum time in vaudeville.

Carroll wasn’t in the business long, and most of the professional credits I’ve encountered for him are hearsay and some even dubious, that he was in Our Gang shorts (he’s not credited on IMDB), that he was on the radio with George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, and Al Jolson and did live radio ads for Philip Morris (one of the paging bellhops). What’s the point of a little person on the radio? The audience can’t see how small they are! It has also been claimed that he was “in shows with Mae West“. That seemed fishy to me as well. Mae wasn’t really performing live between 1932 and 1943, just making movies. The answer to that one will make you howl! It turns out that he wasn’t in shows WITH Mae West, he was in shows AS Mae West!

One of his specialties on the vaudeville stage was a Mae West impression! This too made me curious, because there was a famous female impersonator named Albert Carroll, but several reliable sources ID this as Mickey Carroll. Here we go a-caroling!

Other than The Wizard of Oz the only screen credits I see that seem pretty reliable as a turn in Gold Diggers on 1938, and a very early TV project from 1946 directed by Fred Coe called The Home Life of a Buffalo with Percy Helton, Enid Markey, et al.

In the mid ’40s he decided to quit the biz, and luckily he had a trade, so he was able to. He was born into a family business — monument making. Stone carving is a big thing in Italy; America benefitted mightily when some of them immigrated here. Mickey, by all accounts, was a big hearted guy. He gave to a lot of charities, and when he heard L. Frank Baum’s niece was buried without a tombstone, he donated one, gratis. And naturally, he came out to meet Wizard of Oz fans in later decades. That grew increasingly special as time went on, as he was one of the last cast members to pass on.

For more related reading,please see my books No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous and Rose’s Royal Midgets and Other Little People in Vaudeville.