Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1938)

reservations with what amounted to excitement. The turbulent spirit, long dormant, had revived. She was ready, again, for anything. If there were nothing, she would create something. Let Hollywood, and the world, look out. It has been too long, too long — Director william wyler, his eyes red with fury, flicked the sweat from his forehead and planted himself in front of his star, arms folded. He said, with menacing calm, "Now you listen to me. You've disrupted this company, you've made this picture — don't interrupt! — last twelve weeks when the shooting schedule was seven and you've all but demoralized me . . . now this is the end. You're going to enter left, stand on that chalk mark, twist that vicious pan into the semblance of a human face and drench this scene in pathos. You're not going to underplay or suffer silently by gritting your teeth You're going to cry — get it? Bawl. And like it." Maggie Sullavan heard him out in silence, her chin an insult. Then, without a word, she turned on her heel and left the set of "The Good Fairy" for the twenty-second time since shooting began. Half an hour later, while she sat in her dressing room and shook with rage, there was a knock, the door opened, and Willie Wyler came in. "Now then, Sullavan," he said. She bit her tongue to keep from screeching. With the utmost venom she told him simply, "Wyler, I hate your— " "But you respect me," he interrupted "Don't you?" Her mouth opened for retort, then closed, since there was none. The lump of her anger dissolved. She grinned weakly. "Yes." "I'm going to take you to dinner," he said then. "Get ready. You're smart enough to know I'm only doing this in the hope of talking you out of being difficult, so I can finish the picture." A gleam of grudging admiration appeared in her eyes. She reached for a jar of cream, dipped out a blob with her fingers and began removing grease paint .... In his car she settled comfortably and looked coldly out of the window, refusing to help. She heard his voice: "Where would you like to eat?" "I don't care." She looked at her nails. "I'm restless — let's go somewhere silly, do something without any sense to it." He turned the car toward Santa Monica. They dined on the terrace of a cafe overlooking the beach; and with the crab flakes he talked smoothly of new novels and art, with the clam broth of the stage and contemporary acting, with the lobster of personalities and Hollywood as a social phenomenon. His voice was calm, assured, reassuring. While she heard it Maggie could not remember clearly the source of her hatred, nor of her fury, nor of her blasting temper that afternoon. She felt suddenly that she was losing to this man a fight which she herself had started; and so, jerking herself from the mood of relaxation his words made, she pushed back her plate and her chair. "I'm tired of fish. Shore dinners always sound better than they taste. Let's do something to digest — if it's possible." He paid the check, grinning. "Do you like roller coasters?" She shrugged. A few minutes later, waiting on the platform for the little string of cars to come roaring in, she had a momentary qualm. The trestle loomed so high, like a giant's mad plaything; the distant screams of those already riding seemed such authentic fright . . . Then she was in the front seat, with Willie impassive beside her, and they were climbing jerkily up the first steep incline, toward black starlit doom. In the screeching downward rush, the next moment, her stomach constricted warningly and she felt a momentary blankness, familiar to roller coasters. As she came out of it she heard Willie's voice in her ear, yelling above the scrape and whine of the wheels. "I've loved you from the first time 1 saw — " and then the pitch over and down again drowned the sentence. It was a lesser dip. Going up once more she allowed herself to think, to hear his next shout: "Will — y o u — m a r r y — mee-e-e . . . ?" The wind spaced the words. Shock was short-lived. She had the sensation that there was no time, no opportunity ever again for clear consideration— or for sanity. Her mind raced, blinding her with quick impressions, attuned suddenly to the speed and lurch and swoop of this ride. Her life seemed to her in that clear instant to be like this fantastic apparatus, now up, now down, now turning with sickening speed; beside her, his arm holding her against the seat safely, strongly, was the only reality in the voice and person of Willie. He could hold her in check, lend his strength to her weakness, make living a straightforward, solid thing. He could slow its pace for her, or he could hold tightly to keep her from being thrown out .... She put her mouth close to his ear and screamed. "Yes!" Over the sound of wind and wheels and the hysterical laughter of two young girls in a seat behind, she shouted. "Yes! As soon as we can — '' Then the car shot one last time down, under an arch, turned, slid braking slowly onto the platform where the crowd waited, and stopped. Maggie, blinking, her hair a tangle, sat quietly, realizing what she had done. I HEY were married the next week in Yuma, to the extreme consternation of Hollywood. It took them six hours, there and back, by air, and they had breakfast on the set next morning, hurriedly, with flurried press photographers and amazed grip boys surrounding them with bedlam; and there was that. There were the next few months, during which she did not think but lay back in the warm flood of relaxed dependence being married to Willie meant. She could concentrate on career, now, and did, making "So Red the Rose" that year and "Next Time We Live," which was an emotional gem and caused the studios, as well as theater audiences, to be Jimmy Stewart conscious. Maggie was glad of that. Besides her sincere fondness for the lanky boy, she recognized in him a link with the earlier years — Silver Beach, Falmouth, the great beginnings .... Jimmy had come ambling into town along with Hank. She saw them both, of course. There was no drama: she was not a remarried divorcee meeting her ex-husband with too much poise and too much artificial gaiety. They had written to each other, they were friends. She did what she could for Hank, introduced him, gave him advice. Sometimes, late from the studio, she would wander vaguely into the mad household he had set up wiih Jimmy and John Swope, and ask for dinner. Hank. shaving to go out. would yell instructions to the cook; Jimmy would fold himself behind the miniature bar to concoct merriment for them all. There was a pleasant understanding here, a careless insanity that made work and play and existence as a whole a carefree, rather exciting thing. It reminded Maggie, increasingly often, of the years — the inestimably good yearsshe had spent in this manner, living this way. WHO'S MARRIED TO WHOM? Here are the answers to the roto spread found on pages 42 and 43 I and 42: Madeleine Carroll and Captain Philip Astley 3 and 32: Maureen O'Sullivan and John Farrow 5 and 22: Ginger Rogers and Lew Ayres 7 and 28: Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fonda 9 and 34: Anne Shirley and John Payne I I and 46: Mr. and Mrs. Robert Montgomery 13 and 36: Irene Dunne and Dr. Francis Griffin 15 and 18: Mr. and Mrs. Bob Burns 17 and 30: Claudette Colbert and Dr. Joel Pressman 19 and 26: Virginia Bruce and J. Walter Ruben 21 and 8: Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tracy 23 and 2: Mary Astor and Manuel Del Campo 25 and 20: Bette Davis and Harmon Nelson 27 and 6: Mr. and Mrs. Joe E. Brown 29 and 14: Jean Arthur and Frank Ross 31 and 40: Claire Trevor and Clark Andrews 33 and 16: Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Howard 35 and 10: Danielle Darrieux and Henri Decoin 39 and 38: Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward 37 and 44: Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Bellamy 43 and 12: Mr. and Mrs. Fernand Gravet 45 and 24: Pat Paterson and Charles Boyer 41 and 4: Mr. and Mrs. Fred MacMurray Until at last she came to view her marriage to Willie with a mild astonishment. It had been built on a maladjustment, on a foundation of personal complexes But they were gone, now She was happy, she was sure again. There were these things, and there was her separation from Willie as a matter of course; and following that came 1936. and "The Moon's Our Home" made with Hank as co-star, and the press reports that they would marry again, and their delighted chuckles over that, and their pleasurably sad nostalgia over that too; and there was her divorce from Willie— (/ will not think about this now, this second jailure) — and the resultant publicity; and there was the autumn, and the broken arm that kept her out of "Imperial Hotel." and New York at last for a role in "Stage Door." There was, finally, wonderfully, Leland Hayward, God-sent. OHE had had love, unthinking, selfish, furious — a love of rages and reconciliations, of heights and depths, of glamour and reality — all mingled, forming an exciting and an unbearable muddle. She had had love, careful, constructive, unimaginative — a love restraining and blunting her high stormy spirit. The rebel Maggie Sullavan had married Hank Fonda, for romance, for glamour. The well-bred conventional Margaret Sullavan had married Willie Wyler foi safety, for reassurance, for sanity. But Leland Hayward was the impossible. He was neither and both. He was her indefatigable Luck, reappearing after too many knockout blows. He was brilliant and charming and possessed of her same exhaustless vitality and he was love, once more; yet he was not alone these things. His culture was congenital, socially basic; he could laugh with her and he could calm her exuberance when her laughter was too loud or too long. He wanted a home and children but he wanted to work and be amused as well. He was the man she had always dreamed of and yet never dreamed existed, and she accepted her good fortune slowly, suspiciously, finding it and him hard to believe. "I want to wait a while," she told him that day in his skyscraper office, standing at the window to watch the rain sift in wavering lines to the street far below "I know I'm in love with you. We can make it a real engagement. But I have to check with myself first." She looked at him for courage. "1 botched the others." "Much as I hate stooping to truisms," he said without expression, "I hate to remind you of that third-time gag. The charm you know." "We'll see," she said. A nagging voice whispered. Now . . . She added, "I'll let you know." But it was a year before she did. They were married in the winter of 1936 and she had his baby, a girl named Brooke, the next year. That was before she signed the long-term contract at Metro -GoldwynMayer, before they bought a Colonial house in Hollywood and remodeled it: she could bear Hollywood now. She could even like it. From the Studio Biographical Questionnaire returned by Margaret Sullavan: Closest friends are: The birds and the bees and the flowers. What living person do you most admire? Leland Hayward. Hobbies: Looking at houses. Favorite Scent: Brooke Hayward. Greatest Ambition: To be an actress on screen, a person off. Occupation: Housewife. . . . 72 PHOTOPLAY