One of Mark Twain's great friends in the last years of his life was the young Broadway star Billie Burke, whose warm manner and trilling voice he adored. She would use both qualities to advantage many years later when she played Glinda, the "Good Witch," in the MGM production of The Wizard of Oz.
In the cast of that film, she was the oldest major actor--at fifty-four, she was five years older than Frank Morgan (the Wizard) and eighteen years older than Margaret Hamilton (the "Wicked Witch"), both of whom look ancient compared with the radiant Billie. Though her voice and face are now familiar to millions, her fame in middle age as a character actor has obscured the fact that she was once a great leading lady. When Twain knew her, she was a rising star in her twenties with luxuriant red hair.
Twain called her "Billie Burke, the young, the gifted, the beautiful, the charming."
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