Hollywood (Jan - Mar 1943)

out op Use internal protection — the Meds way — and forget your fears. Meds "safetywell" absorbs so much more so much faster you feel a new self-confidence. /%&■ %*cy 'Meek 4tt40tv&l This photograph — actual size — shows the Meds insorber — tiny, easy-to-use. Individual applicator places it quickly, correctly. Dipped in water, the expanding insorber shows why Meds' exclusive "safety-well" gives quick deep-well absorption — extra protection and comfort. Here is the Meds insorber after absorbing 300% of its own weight in moisture! Its soft cotton expands into a protective cone-shape which adapts itself instantly to individual needs. Meds BOX OF 10 25c Each with its own applicator Meds are accepted for advertising by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Michael O'Shea's success story confirms all the best copy book maxims about hard work, faith and ambition paying off. His reward is the lead in G-String Murders ■ The pretty boys on the screen almost kept Michael O'Shea out of Hollywood for keeps. When the curtain came down on the opening performance of Eve of St. Mark, there was a new star on Broadway. Picture producers with commendable promptness immediately marked Michael O'Shea for their own. To all their offers he had one answer, "Look, I don't want to be in pictures— I wouldn't be any good. I ain't a bit pretty and those guys that I see on the screen — they're something to look at." It was Hunt Stromberg who sent for an ace cameraman and convinced Mike, christened Edward Frances Michael Joseph O'Shea, that there was something wrong with his judgment. Not in years has there been so much excitement about a newcomer as there is currently about this O'Shea lad who is playing opposite Barbara Stanwyck in his first picture, The G-String Murders. It is being freely predicted that he'll be a great star in no time at all. For twenty-two years Michael O'Shea built up to his hit on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson's play. They were tough years. He tells of those years colorfully and not one tinge of self-pity or resentment creeps into his accounts of the rough going. From the time he was a youngster he had a passion for music. He couldn't read a note — he had no lessons — but if he got near enough to a musical instrument his hands would go out automatically to stroke it like other boys pet a dog or kitten. by LEE BENNETT "I guess that sounds corny from a jerk like me," he says, "but I have always been crazy about music — any kind of music." When he was ten years old he was sent to the Connecticut farm of his grandparents who had twelve children, all living there and all in various stages of maturity. Michael learned a lot of things fast. There were enough grown-ups around for him to learn horse-sense, and from the small fry, he says today, he learned what the expression, "every man for himself," means. It was the sort of concentrated existence which prepared him for the procession of clips on the chin which the next couple of decades held for him. There was never a doubt in his mind that eventually he would be on the stage. "Maybe," he says, "it was the show-off in me, but I knew right from the start that I had to be giving out with something for people to see." At fourteen, he got himself a job as a drummer with a dance hall orchestra. He did all right and graduated from orchestra to orchestra, until he had one of his own composed of five ambitious kids — all dreaming of "big time." Michael had learned the mechanics of conducting when he had taken over for a tongue-tied master of ceremonies. Now he was the boss of the outfit and — let him tell it from here on. "Nights we'd be playing around — a night here and a night there, and for lunch every day we went to a restaurant where a guy gave out with a violin. For fifty cents we got ^ lunch and a music lesson. We learned 42