Hollywood Studio Magazine (December 1972)

15505 ROSCOE BLVD. at San Diego Freeway • SEPULVEDA Call 787-3800 got the “little mother” tender treatment. When she plopped into a swimming pool, fully dressed, with McCrea, a double did the splash. Sturges asked Ronnie to ease her way into the water gently for close-ups. She caused some neat heart attacks by diving in. That was Veronica, pure and simple. The tomboy! Looking back on those years with Veronica, I realize that much of her success for publicists (and herseif no doubt) lay in the fact that she was eternally and constantly living in the world of childish fantasy. She would say anything that came into her head and it always sounded for real. Because of the honesty of that angelic face, perhaps. But she made it all sound genuine. I have heard her talk knowledgeably about flying, fiction, the military, music, archery or whatnot, adding that she was expert in the subject. Once she enthralled a man for an hour describing with utter reality her personal oil painting. She never knew that he taught art in a local College. It wouldn’t have mattered. Only one pretense ever rebounded. When the correspondent for a Montreal newspaper interviewed her for a big feature on her life there, where she had gone to boarding school, she sighed and related that she almost had become the great goal of her life - a noted surgeon - through McGill University in Montreal. She described two years as a pre-med Student there and related that the dean of the school, a real person whom she named correctly, had taken her fingers in his and said, “These are the hands of a great surgeon, my dear.” So the movies had robbed the medical world of a genius. It made good reading. When the university, however, sought to do something to honor this young frustrated surgeon, it was discovered that she never had attended the school under any name. She convinced some angry pedants that she merely was venting unfulfilled dreams. She flew to Montreal and made personal appearances and charmed everyone and was forgiven. It wasn’t until recently when I remembered that she had confided in me that she had been only sixteen at the time she started “I Wanted Wings.” If that were true, as I believed, she’d have had to be barely twelve when she enrolled in medical school. Was that so fantastic? I wonder if Captain Midnight would believe that he used to carry a medical prodigy piggyback through the streets of Beverly Hills? It really doesn’t matter today. *** GEORGE BAGNALL - A GIFT FROM THE IRISH By Leo Taub t The gift of the Irish has been great to America but no greater contribution has ever been made by the Gaellic country, than in the form of George L. Bagnall, recently re-elected President of the Motion Picture and Television fund. After his graduation from Exeter College in Ireland, he moved to Calgary, Canada. Then since the early thirties he has served on the Executive Committee of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. In 1942 he became treasurer of the Fund; in 1957 he was elected President and has been enthusiastically re-elected ever since. But everything which Bagnall has received does not speak for the type of man that accolades sometimes hide. The Jean Hersholt-Humanitarian Award given to him in 1966 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is just one of many that he has received. The deeds of the man say a lot, however. He served in various capacities for the University Religious Conference, Claremont Men’s College and the Hollywood Canteen Organization. Both of his sons are deeply involved in business (Michael is a vice-president at Walt Disney Productions and George Jr. in the stock market at E. F. Hutton and Company. Mr. & Mrs. Bagnall are now approaching their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Anything which Bagnall does, he puts his whole heart into it. Maybe that is what has spelled his success and devotion of his co-workers in the motion picture world. Enthusiasm, is his life blood, which not only keep him flowing through life, but through the hearts of those who know him. *** New Leading Lady for Paul Newman Hollywood — Dominique Sanda, the sensational new French actress considered to be the most exciting newcomer to hit the international screen for the past decade, has been signed to star opposite Paul Newman in “The Mackintosh Man,” the Newman-Foreman Production for Warner Bros. 10