Picture-Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1927)

20 She Wasn't Allowed to Be Herself Photo by Hesser It didn't take Margaret long to assume the reckless, daring, 1-don't-care personality that she found was expected of her. Five years ago, a young innocent in curls, she came timidly to Hollywood. Men took one look at her red hair and laughed. "Must be a little devil !" they said. Her ingenuousness they regarded with smiling admiration, complimenting her on her "ga-ga line." tainly a girl with such hair couldn't be really so sweet and innocent. "I saw," she says, "that I was expected to match my hair, that I must establish a jazz personality, so I lit out like a streak. I'd be the merry-go-round girl all right ! I loathed it really." There was a man. He saw only the joy girl, and was amused. Margaret cared a little for him, so one evening, shyly, she let him see the sweet, feminine side of herself. He laughed uproariously. Alone in a garden, under the faint rays of the moon, her pent-up misery was released. The tension broke, as a string snaps. She cried out her heart, and then shut it against the stabbing hurt. Hollywood didn't see ; only the moon saw. White-faced, she streaked her lipstick across her lips, threw her head back, and flung herself again into the jazzy party. She'd never again wear her heart on her sleeve ! These first disillusionments are so tragic to youth, and they cast influences like lingering shadows after they have passed. After that, it wasn't so easy to hurt Margaret. She did some hurting herself, vindictively. "Couldn't convince anybody I wasn't the I-don'tcare girl. When I tried to dq something good, people were amused." Her sensitive nostrils quivered, her full lips curled into a crooked smile of derision. "Force yourself to fight back, was my motto. "Because they thought I was that kind of girl, they cast me in roles like that. Had to steel myself to go through with it, day after day. I can't act. I don't know beans about technique. I only feel something and show it. Trying to make myself feel things that I didn't, turned me into a nervous dynamo. "I carved the villain, scratched the wife's eyes out, sneered at the baby !" Jumping up, her quick, lithe figure burlesqued one of her roles. "I want to love and be loved; I want to be kind, and to be treated kindly. I want what's worth while, and solid, and fine. "And I want to play roles that I know are real. Never again, if I have to starve, will I play a well-kept lady lying on a chaise longue caressing a pet poodle. In one picture I, the vamp, was confronted by the wife. I was supposed to tear up a telegram and throw it in her face. I said to the director, 'Listen, if I were a real vamp, and the wife came in, I'd crawl under the bed.' " She dragged out a sheaf of photographs which revealed, step by step, the course of her life. "That," she pointed to a stiffly starched cherub of four, "was taken when I lived with my nice old Swedish grandmother. She believed in feeding a child lots of milk and keeping her warm. I used to follow her around with a cup." Then there was a picture of Margaret in frilly organdie, with her red curls brushed so neatly that not a strand escaped — a would-be Mary Pickford, just arrived in Hollywood. Then the first "undressed" photograph— Margaret embarrassed at displaying her chubby limbs, her rounded knees, one finger curled in a beckoning gesture, eyes trying so veiy hard to entice. We howled over this and other pictures of "alluring" ladies. Each said, "I will vamp or bust!" In those days she was like a picture that cannot be placed. One's heart ached for the girl who had been neither the one thing nor the other, but eager to "fit in." Gradually, in this succession of photographs, the provocative eyes grew bolder, until they became oblique, crafty slits, and the poses grew more devil-maycare. Oh, Margaret was learning ! "Hollywood, you made me Starting with her very earliest comedies, she was called upon to do the vamp — the burlesque vamp, at first.