Modern Screen (Dec 1954 - Dec 1955)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

BE YOUR OWN MUSIC TEACHER Send for Free Book Telling How Easily J> You Can Learn Piano, Guitar, Accordion, ANY Instrument This EASY A-B-C Way [OW IT'S EASY to learn music at home. No tiresome "exercises." No teacher, just START RIGHT OUT playing simple pieces. Thousands now play who never thought they could. Our pictured lessons make it easy as A-B-C to learn to play popular music, hymns, classical and any other music. Only a few cents a lesson. Over 900,000 students! (Our 57th successful year.) FREE ROOK. Find out why our method can teach you quickly, easily, inexpensively. Write for our 36page, illustrated Free /\ Book. No obligation. •U ^ * a Mention your favorite ini,,*' strument. Just mail coupon below today! U.S.SCHOOL OF MUSIC Studio A1610 Port Washington, N. Y. FREE BOOK I U. S. SCHOOL OF MUSIC ■ Studio A1610, Port Washington. N. Y. ' Please send me Free 36-page, illustrated Book. I I would like to play (Name Instrument). Have you ■ Instrument Instrument? Name. » Address. (Please Print) 3 Life is worth living in a RICHARDSON Over 40,000 persons are now living i n Richardson Mobile Homes. These thousands .have found the Richardson way of living a Phappy, carefree, low cost way of owning their own home. When they purchased their Richardson Mobile Home — regardless of size — they purchased a completely furnished. livable home — ready to move into. All of this at an extremely low cost. We invite you to write for literature. RICHARDSON HOMES CORPORATION Dept. D, Elkhart, Indiana Here's how to earn money I Simply show Iriends brand new SUM-SHAPED Christmas Cards. _ Also personal cards, notes and wrappings, gills over 1 items. They sell on sight. .. you make big profits. Send no money-but WRITE TODAY for assortments on approval/ and get FREE pen with key chain for prompt action.'-' CHAS. C. SCHWER CO., 214 Elm St., Westfield, Mass. 76 w w w w w Want to Get Rid of dark or Discolored Skin, *k Freckles, Skin Spots?] Famous Mercolized Wax Cream 7 NIGHT PLAN Lightens, Beautifies Skin While You Sleep Just follow the amazing Mercolized Wax Cream 7 NIGHT PLAN to a whiter, softer, lovelier skin. Smooth rich, luxurious Mercolized Wax Cream on your face or arms just before retiring each night for one week. You'll begin to see results almost at once . . . lightens dark skin, blotches, spots, freckles as if by magic! This is not a cover up cosmetic; Mercolized Wax Cream works UNDER the skin surface. Beautiful women have used this time -tested plan for over 40 years — you'll love it's fast, sure, longer lasting results! Mercolized Wax Cream is sold on 100% guarantee or money back. Start using it now! MERCOLIZED WAX CREAM At All Drug and Cosmetic Counters Lightens dark skin and ugly spots almost overn ight. ,tMerco!iif to do something about it. "I wanted to leave Hollywood," she has said. "I wanted to take Margaret to New York and put her in school. I felt she needed it; she was too dependent on me. She needed relationships with girls and boys her own age. Besides, I believed we had had all that Hollywood could give Margaret. In New York she could have studied the theatre and by now been a fine young actress. But Margaret wouldn't leave Hollywood. She couldn't believe she wouldn't go on there somehow as she always had. Sometimes I wish there had been a man to tell her what to do and make her do it. Our house needed a man." "Dut when Gladys found a man, Margaret acted up pretty outrageously. If you remember the headlined episode, back in 1949, he was a handsome bandleader named Don Sylvio — and on the record it seems he got a pretty frustrating deal out of the brief alliance. Apparently he couldn't get past Margaret's pouts to get acquainted with his new wife. At the wedding in Miami, Florida, Margaret stained her white taffeta dress with tears, and when reporters asked her if they were tears of happiness or sadness she cried, "Oh, I don't know — I don't know!" When photographers asked her to kiss her new stepfather she whirled away in flat refusal. Next morning the bride rode off on a trip to Boston — not with her husband — but with her daughter. Four months later Mrs. Sylvio asked an annulment stating that the marriage had never been consummated, a claim which Mr. Sylvio vigorously denied, adding, "I don't know what this is all about but I'm not going to let Margaret or her mother make a sucker out of me!" In the subsequent welter of charges and counter charges, Don Sylvio laid the rift squarely to Margaret's unwarranted jealousy. "Whenever Gladie and I wanted to go out, Margaret was hurt and sulked," he said. At night, he revealed, Margaret climbed into her mother's bed. In September of 1950 Gladys O'Brien won a divorce, charging that Sylvio had demanded $200 a week for himself, a new car, a grand piano, a house for his mother and had declared, "I'm going to handle Margaret's affairs from now on." "Dut whoever did this or said that, Margaret O'Brien came out of the mixup for the first time in her life with an unpleasant portrait — that of an ungrateful daughter who had wrecked her devoted mother's chance for happiness. Mail swamped her, some taking her side, but a lot calling her brat. In Chicago, one man stamped up to her on the street and hurled, "You bad girl! You ruined your mother's marriage!" Margaret gasped and ran. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before and the effect was shattering. About that time Margaret was supposed to be the voice of Alice in Walt Disney's Alice In Wonderland but the job was called off. Her mother said, "All this publicity has cost Margaret thousands of dollars in contracts." Around this time, coincidentaliy, Margaret was up for her first bad girl role in a stage production The Intruder. She played a stepchild scheming to destroy her parent's second marriage. When the parallel to what had happened in real life was pointed up by critics, Mrs. O'Brien was not pleased. But, "I've done more to hurt her than she has ever done to hurt me," she stated loyally. Actually, few psychologists, in the light of Margaret O'Brien's life up until then, would have expected her to act any differently. She had only her child acting career — and her mother. One had started to tumble. A rival appeared threatening the other. Unreasoned panic at an age when security is all-important seized her; a mature outlook was impossible. Mrs. O'Brien's tug between loyalty to her talented daughter and the desire for a life of her own is not hard to comprehend either. But the most significant revelation from it all was this: That while Margaret leaned on her mother and her mother depended on her as much, both were already subconsciously resentful and rebelling. '"There were other signs of conflict. Mrs. -1 O'Brien bought the Beverly Hills duplex where they still live. But Margaret was unhappy that her mother owned it. So Gladys O'Brien sold it to her daughter, although she says she could have gotten $18,000 more on an open bid. Gladys wanted to move to New York; Margaret refused. Dresses, hairdos, lipstick, apartment decoration, career plans, etc., etc. became controversial issues. Margaret stayed in her room more and became "harder to reach." Mrs. O'Brien, it was noted, was often indisposed with headaches, particularly after her upset marriage. And there was the constant tension about Margaret's money. Margaret left MGM with a fortune of around $200,000 in government bonds. But under California's "Coogan Law" (enacted after Jackie Coogan's parents notoriously dissipated his fortune) it was administered by the courts. Each year she came up for an accounting (and will until she is twenty-one, unless she marries first). Periodically, judges noted that Margaret's fortune was dwindling too fast. Only last year for instance, one observed sternly that the principal had dwindled $34,623 in the previous two years. Particularly he singled out items to question like frequent trips to New York, where each time expenses had exceeded her earnings. "And what," he demanded, "is that item of $46 for lunch at Romanoff's?" At the end he ordered Margaret and her mother to cut expenditures drastically. The uneasy implication was that Gladys O'Brien was being too free with Margaret's money. Actually, this was never quite so. Mrs. O'Brien got paid well all during Margaret's MGM contract for being a movie mama and she saved most of it. Today she has her own money and some comfortable annuities. Yet in the closest of family setups money matters are a not so subtle disturbance. Mrs. O'Brien explained that it was necessary to spend money to keep Margaret before the public and added, "Margaret wants nothing out of life other than to be a great actress." At that point, and for too long before, that seems to have been only too true. A t an age when most girls discover the wonders of themselves, Margaret kept on striving to be somebody else. At a time when most girls dream, explore the opposite sex, the world around them, rebel and fashion brave new patterns, Margaret wanted most of all to do the same old thing. At the period when most teenagers are impatient to cast their childhood into limbo, Margaret clung to her golden years. When Hollywood forgot her — after a teenage Columbia effort called Her First Romance which didn't set box-offices afire — she toured the East and Middle West in stock companies. Gladys O'Brien went right along, as ever, and so did a tutor. Demure and dainty, Maggie played juvenile roles in road show standbys like Peg O' My Heart, Smiling Through, Gigi and Kiss And Tell. She was as good a young actress as ever. In fact, after opening in Clare Boothe Luce's play, Child Of The Morning, one critic called her, "a young Helen Hayes." The story was the same on radio and TV — in Studio One, Climax,