The adorable Munchkins assist Dorothy in following the yellow brick path to her home in The Wizard of Oz. But, like Oz himself, it turns out that not all of the Munchkins were what they seemed.

Judy Garland’s experiences on the set of Victor Fleming’s picture are allegedly worse than previously documented, according to a new book. Garland was routinely touched and assaulted by the performers portraying the Munchkins, according to her late husband Sid Luft, whose memoirs “Judy and I: My Life with Judy Garland” is now published posthumously.

“They thought they could get away with anything because they were so small,” he wrote. “They would make Judy’s life miserable on set by putting their hands under her dress. The men were 40 or more years old.” Luft died in 2005. He was married to Garland from 1952 until 1965 and fathered two of her children.

Before her death in 1969, Garland recounted the actor’s actions. Judy Garland said in a 1967 interview with Jack Paar, “They were little drunks … They got smashed every night, and they picked them up in butterfly nets.”

Garland said of the actors: “They were drunks” ( Image: Rex Features)

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There had been lots of earlier rumors regarding the Munchkin performers’ conduct, including accusations of inebriated and vulgar behavior, before this recent discovery. In 1939, “Oz” producer Mervyn LeRoy stated, “They had sex orgies in the hotel, and we had to have police on just about every floor.”

The main cast of the film. Bert Lahr, sho played the Cowardly Lion, said some of the dwarf actors ‘brandished knives’ ( Image: Reuters)

Jack Dawn, the film’s make-up artist, subsequently described how one German dwarf known as The Count had to be saved from a toilet bowl.

He said: “You had to watch them all the time. Once when he was due on set, he went missing. Then we heard a whining from the men’s room.

“He had got plastered during lunch, fallen in the toilet and could not get out.”

Garland married five times before passing away at the age of 47 from a drug overdose.

Garland had a long-running addiction to prescription drugs ( Image: Rex Features)

Julie Lugo Cerra, whose father worked near the Wizard of Oz studio in Culver City, CA at the time, told NPR that the 120 Munchkin performers “had a really good time” on set becauseit was their first time meeting with other small people.

“They were having a very good time and they celebrated a lot,” Cerra continued. Her father told her that the Munchkin actors “were all over the place” … “and they would pile them into cars, and they would be even under the dashboards because you could get so many in.” “I’m sure that they had a very good time, and I’m sure that most of them remembered it for the rest of their lives,” Cerra remarked, denying many of the rumors.

“Judy and I: My Life with Judy Garland” is presently available on Amazon.