Modern Screen (Dec 1953 - Nov 1954)

moved earth and stone to secure a divorce from his first wife. They had been separated a number of years, an arrangement she found satisfactory. Their youthful marriage had been a civil ceremony, so there were not even religious bars to a divorce. Only perversity — but Virginia and Mike aren't the sort to talk about things like that. It's easier more pleasant, if Mike says in his elaborately casual way, "Wanted to give Virginia a chance to back out — " '"Phey have that in common. Virginia is so pleasantly undemonstrative that one Hollywood writer admits, "I've worked with her off and on for ten years, and I still don't know whether she likes me or not." And so with the O'Shea, voluble as he is. If people don't take the trouble to look below the surface, he isn't about to reveal the inner man for their idle inspection. When the aforesaid former wife elected, some years after the marriage of Virginia and Mike, to claim an imposing amount of back alimony on the grounds that Virginia's salary was community property, it became a test case in court. Everything Virginia has she gladly gives to Mike, but she thought the claim unfair and fought it. Unfortunately, she lost — which meant that a sum estimated at $25,000 went out of the family coffers. The whole town knew that Mike wasn't making such money, that it would have to come out of Virginia's earnings, and the O'Sheas let them have their day of speculation and gossip. Mike had sold a dear piece of property at a loss to put that money back. But only a handful took the trouble to find that out. This is Carole's snapshot of Scott. SNAP-HAPPY While at the Cheyenne Rodeo in Wyoming 1 saw Scott Brady making some action shots for Bronco Buster. After the Rodeo 1 was thrilled when he agreed to pose for a picture, but 1 thought 1 was out of luck when the lock on my camera jammed. You can imagine how amazed I was when he walked over, took the camera out of my nervous hands, unlocked it for me and. then posed for the picture. Carole Hayes Evansville, Indiana Similarly, there was considerable talk to the effect that Virginia was bringing home the bacon while Mike stayed home and laid the eggs. One of the town's best writers, incidentally a friend of O'Shea, finally took courage in hand and approached him with the idea of doing a story on the subject. "Sure," said Michael — and the result was Modern Screen's story, "Somebody Has To Stay Home." In it Mike made no mealy-mouthed attempts to justify his position. He pointed out that since Virginia was nearing the peak of her career and there was no large demand for his type at the moment, it would be pretty silly for her to stay home while he went out to work for less. These are the things Mike O'Shea will tell you if it makes a good story. He doesn't mention, however, the run-of-the-play contract he was offered to do Guys And Dolls on Broadway. You'd think he was crazy not to have taken it. Maybe so, but it's part of the O'Shea love story that being separated is insupportable to them, and Mike's going into a sure-fire musical could have meant nothing else. They talked it over, and the answer came out no. There would be another opportunity. C^OR the amount of time and the consideration Mike gives to the career of his wife, he might seem careless of his own. He is not a careless man, but on occasion he has been exceedingly tactless. "I got a reputation for being very tough to work with, and I deserved it," he admits. "When a director tells you how to play a scene, you don't endear yourself to people in the business by telling him he couldn't direct traffic on a street corner. Even if you know right down to your bones that he's wrong." "Mike doesn't do that when he works with a director he respects," interpolates Virginia. "It's just that he knows quite a lot about acting." This talk was going on out on the patio of their home in Van Nuys. The O'Shea had prowled restively from a chair under the umbrella to a lounge to a seat in the sun, and now he disappeared entirely. "Really, the stage is where he belongs." Virginia, wearing shorts, was stretched out lithe and relaxed as a cat. "Mike has that magnetism, vitality, stage presence — whatever you want to call it — that an actor in the legitimate theatre has to have. In Hollywood they can shoot the same scene over and over or dummy what they want, but on the stage you only have the one chance to walk out there and command your audience. It takes something special that Michael has." The man himself ambled back from the corral, where he had been in animated conversation with his quarter-horse stallion. "Know what I want to do?" he inquired. "What I've been wanting to do since I came to Hollywood? Make a western. Not one of those razzle-dazzle shoot-em-ups, because that isn't the way the old west was. They were wonderful people, real people, those old pioneers. I read every book about them that I can get my hands on, and I'd like to do a picture about their kind of life. Know what they tell me in Hollywood? I'm not the type for a western. Me, that speiu ten years on the rodeo circuit!" When it became known that Miss Mary Catherine O'Shea was on the way, her pop said, "Baby coming, guess the old man better go out and start working." And work he did. Maybe he set the right people back on their heels with the verbal persuasion of which he's capable, maybe he even accepted less money than he's worth — but all of a sudden the ball was rolling. O'Shea made a picture, 7t Should Happen To You for Columbia. Television discovered him; he's done a couple of dramas, made guest appearances and filmed the pilot of a thirty-nine-week series. And when he has ten times this amount of work, the O'Shea will be completely happy. Oh, sure, he'll tell you that somebody's gotta stay home, that they wouldn't starve on Virginia's salary alone, because he has that island unto-himself Irish pride. But it's a curious thing that the sinus trouble and the stomach trouble with which Mike O'Shea is plagued disappears completely when he's working. Another so-called "big problem," the religious one, has been conspicuous by its absence in the seven years that Virginia and Michael have been married. Virginia had eight hours of instruction in the Catholic faith from Mike's good friend, Bishop Fulton Sheen, but whether she'll become a convert, she does not yet know. 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