Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1948)

Rear action for baby ballerina — Maggie off set of “The Unfinished Dance” YOU might as well know the truth about Margaret O’Brien: She’s fickle. She’s exactly ten years old (her birthday is January 15). She’s grown two inches in the past three months. But her heart is still a vagabond. She continues not only to fall in love with every new man she meets — promptly forgetting her former crushes — 'but currently she is in love with two men at once. This is not hearsay. It comes straight from Maggie, herself, during a chat in her tiny portable dressing room on the set of “The Unfinished Dance.” It’s a scrumptious dressing room for any ten-yearold. There’s a great mirror, with sparkling lights all around, a blue couch garlanded in pink roses, and a blue dressing table with scads of fascinating drawers, the handles of which are pink wooden butterflies, their backbones made of pink clothespins. Before this dressing table, Maggie’s chair is extra tall but it has a ruffled skirt in many tiers, all blue with squiggly pink edges and on the table top there are powders and hair curlers, fully as professional looking as Greer Garson’s. But there’s something on Maggie’s dressing table I’ll bet Garson hasn’t got. Mixed up in all the glamour guek, there’s a very beaten-up hard rubber ball ( Continued on page 125) . . . which has its points because she Lunch at the studio where she’s popular, but has her “I want to be alone” moments Playtime with the jacks and her stand-in, Mary Eleanor can be Lady Hamilton or Salome Donahue, in Maggie’s pink and blue dressing room and in love with two men at once BY RUTH WATERBURY 51