Modern Screen (Dec 1954 - Dec 1955)

special Academy Award and earned $5000 a week. But there was one important thing she sadly lacked — social contact with her own generation. Because all this time, while Margaret's public world was wide, her private one was painfully narrow. She grew up, but she didn't "wise up," as the kids around her would put it. Until the night, this past June, when she donned a white cap and gown to officially graduate from University High in West Los Angeles, she had never been inside a school, public or private. She had only tutors — women tutors. The only club she ever belonged to was the Brownies — and that was an "honorary" membership. She never shared thrilling secrets with girl chums or had boys frisk around to tease her. Kids outside her buffered world loomed as menaces, who mobbed her in public and tried to cut off her pigtails for souvenirs. Once her mother snatched away a pair of scissors on the brink of that desecration. She never had a sweetheart. All Margaret's girlhood crushes were movie stars — Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier — idols as unreal as she was. "I was always somebody else instead of myself," Margaret recalls wistfully, and that was too true. She could be somebody else so realistically that often she confused herself. Once she informed an examining county health officer that she'd had scarlet fever, thoroughly believing it. She hadn't — but Beth, the character she'd played in Little Women, did. And sometimes when she did try to be just Maggie, well, that was against the rules. T oving horses and inheriting a talent for riding, Margaret wheedled affable Wally Beery into letting her ride his spirited horse once on location in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The horse bolted off across the prairies and it took four cowboys to catch him and snatch Maggie to safety. But after that the taboo went out — no more horseback riding. Only recently has she dared take it up again. Margaret sublimated her craving for friendship by harboring all sorts of less formidable companions — mice, parakeets, kittens, pups and colonies of dolls. But actually her two best friends were MGM and Mother. Of the two Mama was the closest. Until right now Gladys O'Brien has been protector, playmate, mentor, slave, right arm and very often her daughter's brain. Mother prepped Margaret for her next day's scenes every night, then hovered near her on the set. Wherever Margaret traveled Mrs. O'Brien was necessarily, but eternally, at her side. She prepared her food, picked up her clothes where she dropped them (she still does that) woke her in the morning, tucked her into bed at night. When she couldn't, Margaret's Aunt Marissa did, so often for one stretch that rumors flew around that she was Maggie's true parent. The trio lived together until Marissa Bogue left for Paris a few weeks ago, with her husband and eight-year-old daughter, named after Margaret. 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