Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

/ I « Even today this willful offspring of the Sullavan clan remains an enigma and, what was still worse, a stage actress; and after that there was little excuse for the highheld heads of the Family Sullavan. Before these things, however, during the years before she was capable of really important activity, Margaret did her best. She was a Trial. Dusty shroudwrapped Calvins and Councills and Chownings and Fleets and cousins of Lee and a round halfdozen Honorable Killed in Action were turning rhythmically in their tombs at her escapades, by the time she was six. She was a thin, undersized, pale little kid then. "Peaked," certain of her aunts were wont to call her, with secret pleasure; at least she had not committed the vulgarity of being too robust for her select blood. But Cornelius Hancock worried over her. On her dressing table and in the pockets of her blouses he put round boxes of pills, with impressive instructions as to the hour and method of taking them. He never understood why they made no difference. This is no libel on the pills, because she never took them. "Sissy stuff!" she told the imaginary company with whom she talked when alone; at each prescribed time she extracted a pill, spat contemptuously through a missing tooth, and flicked the pellet at the nearest target. oHE did other outrageous things. Professionally Southern families had then, as many do now, a list of people one knew, and of children one's children played with. Others were spoken of with soft supercilious mutterings; and it was this that interested small Maggie in the outcasts. Southern by birth — Rebel by heritage, Maggie was kicking over the traces even in her bassinet clays They sounded definitely much more exciting. Thus, at evening one day when she was nine, she sneaked through the kitchen, snaffling a pocketful of cookies on the way, dodged in haste from brush to shrub through the garden, climbed the wall and set forth in search of the untouchables. It was a quest easily fulfilled; she ran smack into a cops and robbers game three blocks from home — or rather it, in the person of two ten-year-old ragamuffins, ran into her as she came around a corner. The cookies went flying. Maggie, from her sprawling position, glared with venom at the two tittering tots. Then she arose in wrath and began her vengeance. They held their own, the two boys, for a time. They must have that credit. But they emerged from the fray black-and-blue and bleeding, and Maggie had another gap in her teeth to spit through and she was triumphant. Children are unexplainably honest. The vanquished, after sidling about at a respectful distance for a time, approached her warily and offered friendship born of admiration. \ • 7, "' "Here," one of them said, and she took from his hand one of her own cookies, much battered She ate is thoughtfully, regarding the boy. "You wanna be a constable or a robber?" he asked. "You c'n run, I bet." "Yes," said Maggie. She didn't hesitate. "Robber, of course." That was the beginning. She arrived home late, to find Garland in the vapours and Cor nelius ready with righteous rage; and she took both lecture and punishment stoically, retiring afterward with the light of battle in her eyes Thenceforth she would be a rebel, ready with clever machinations to evade the conventional law, ready with open defiance if subtlety failed. That was the night, too, when she disowned her parents for a time. They were nice people she felt, but they couldn't be hers — she was so different from them in every possible way. Be fore she went to bed she packed a little bag with certain essentials: a toy cannon, a slingshot no one but she had ever seen, a pencil and, as an afterthought, a dress and a change of half-socks. This she secreted in the corner of a dark, unused closet so that one day when her real father and mother (surely Royalty) came to retrieve her from those who had stolen her in infancy, she would be ready. She would be ready. . . . MEANWHILE they put her in school. The schools had lovely titles. The Walter Herron Taylor School, St. George's Private, Miss Turnbull's Norfolk Tutoring School for Girls — in, these places she studied art, by command, learned greedily the extracurricular knowledge garnered from under dormitory mattresses, and labored hard to be a problem child. There was no real' point, except that it was something to do — something to occupy her restless nervous energy and her quick intelligence which made short work of routine. She had not many close friends, as such. But to Maggie Sullavan, still thin and still too small for her age, a number of sycophants flocked, intrigued by her industrious hell-making and a trifle awed at her daring. She made one friend, whom she could trust and whom — of more importance — she could respect. It happened because of her habit of climbing down, in the middle of an occasional night, the lattice from her room and going for long walks in the moonlight. She did this partly because she couldn't sleep, partly because it was a highly punishable infraction of discipline, partly because the damp strong-smelling fields and the stark silhouettes of trees against a pale Southern sky satisfied some fierce need within her that any amount of books and gussy teachers with their rock-bound ideas was powerless to gratify. And one night as she swung quickly along a narrow road somewhat farther from school than usual, she saw a slight figure dodge off into the shadows at the side. She stopped, panic in her throat. A kidnapper — a tramp — a highwayman. . . But then it had 20