Modern Screen (Jan - Nov 1940)

MICH OUT FOR FIREUIOKKS ! THAT RED HAIR SHOULD GIVE YOU FAIR WARNING! MAUREEN O'HARA'S 113 POUNDS OF TNT, SO DON'T MENTION BROGUES OR DIETS TO HER, UNLESS YOU'RE DYNAMITE-PROOF By Kirtley IT'S A little early for war babies — but Hollywood already has one. Her name is Maureen O'Hara, who has hair as red as a cannon flash, spirit like a battle flag and a mind as direct as a rifle bullet. The wake of the first World War ushered Maureen into this vale of tears in Dublin, Ireland, and the second war made her a star in Hollywood, California, where the impact of her powdery personality has burst with the detonation of a bomb. Little fragments of the O'Hara bombshell are still whizzing around the place, I might add — little independent, fiery fragments. And if you would get in the way of any such devastating missiles, all you have to do is call Maureen Charles Laughton's "protege," mention a Hollywood reducing diet, talk in a theatrical Irish brogue or tell her she's pretty. In any of the above cases, "Little Mary," which is what "Maureen" means, will bend her amber eyes on you and you will think you are being poked by twin bayonets. Her five foot, seven and a half inch frame will rise and rattle menacingly, and you will have to retire to your own personal Maginot Line. That's no way, I know, to introduce a new foreign glamour girl whom RKO has starred in her second picture and hopes now to build into box-office bait. But, as Maureen set me straight once, "I'm no glamour girl; I'm a backyard girl!" I'm afraid it's the sad truth. In fact, if RKO had done a little undercover investigating into Maureen's past, they would have discovered just what a spunky package they had on their hands. They'd have found, for instance, that Maureen never wanted to be a girl in the first place, and kept snipping off her long coppery hair all through childhood hoping it would work the sex-transformation magic. That her confessed earliest ambition was "to rob an orchard." That when she was only three years old she sassed a squad of tough British soldiers hunting down Sinn Feins in Dublin, and got her family's house thoroughly ransacked for her cockiness. That all through adolescence she banged and bruised herself around with the neighboring bucks in the Irish games of sporting mayhem called "camogue" and "hurley." That she can still rattle off the goal percentages of her favorite big league soccer team in Erin, the Shamrock Rovers. All of that tomboy stuff is no sign, of course, that Little Mary has short-changed herself in feminine charm. Anyone who has seen O'Hara in "Jamaica Inn," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" or "Bill of Divorcement" knows she packs a punch in pulchritude that's a heavenly haymaker. I will swear willingly, further, that in person, Maureen has even more than the camera reveals, including a flawless peach blossom skin, tumbling titian tresses and a figure that even a Hollywood diet hasn't completely wrecked. Although, as Maureen complained, "If they want me any thinner, there's nothing left to do but get a saw and go to work on my bones!" The diet is just one way, incidentally, in which Hollywood has complicated fife for Little Mary O'Hara. She likes food, "any kind of food," she sighed wistfully. On the boat coming over she tripped up the gangplank wearing a size twelve dress; when she ambled down she took a fourteen. RKO executives took one look, a couple of Baskette screen tests, gasped, frowned and laid down the law. As a result Maureen has lost thirteen pounds and some of her good disposition. Maybe that's why she is quick these days with snappy comebacks on pet peeve subjects. One of those is the mushy Irish aura which theatrical Hollywood insists on casting, around her red head. The old "Sure, and Begorra," "Irish Eyes Are Smiling" stuff gives her an acute case of the pip. Call her a "colleen" and you're taking your life in your hands. I know. I mentioned innocently enough that it was odd she didn't speak with a brogue. "What do you expect me to do," retorted O'Hara, "go around with a potato in my hand?" The O'Hara potatoless bones were draped with shaggy Irish tweeds the day I saw her, in the small cottage up the hill from the Trocadero, where Maureen is camping with her young and beautiful "Mommy." It wasn't a particularly auspicious occasion. Maureen had just come in from a walk, swinging her square-set, athletic body, with a scrappy little Irish terrier, one "Sionn McCuail" frisking about her low heels. Maureen's yellow eyes were flashing. IT SEEMS she'd been hiking through the Hollywood hills on an afternoon constitutional when a car-load of cops rolled up and stopped her. Who was she, they wanted to know. And why was she walking alone? She'd hardly got through explaining when another police car came up. They gave her the third degree too. And a little farther On a third radio patrol honked her to a halt. This time Maureen let loose on them, inferring she had thought this was a free country. "This is a favorite lovers' parking spot, lady," explained the cops. "And there are lots of mashers. We're only trying to protect you." "Protect me!" exploded Maureen. "And after I studied jiu-jitsu for two years!" This non-protective, self-reliant complex is the major reason why Maureen O'Hara will bristle when you call her Charles Laughton's protege. Laughton has, unquestionably, helped in handing her some breaks, in England and in Hollywood too. All the connection amounts to, though, is that he thinks O'Hara has talent. He's no Svengali to her Trilby, as the world believes. And the word "protege" infers Maureen is under his wing. Being under anyone's wing, to an O'Hara, is a fate worse than death. Maureen's life has been one twenty-year-long declaration of independence. I certainly wouldn't advise that attitude for everyone — but in Maureen's case I've a hunch it had a Jot to do with getting her where she is today. It started literally when she was born. The doctors prophesied Maureen would arrive on April eighteenth, back in 1920. At ten minutes to midnight, April seventeenth, Maureen made her grand entrance. Her Irish nurse glanced at the clock and sighed, "I guess she just couldn't wait and be obliging about it!" Since then, Little Mary has gazed at life with a level, independent eye. She has faced her breaks with steady blood pressure. She has had temper instead of temperament. And she has done very well, thank you. Of course, the luck of the Irish is traditional. But the 40