Meet Maggie McNamara
The dining car steward slipped a menu under the. nose of the pint-sized girl and said, “Miss O’Brien, I wonder if you’d autograph this—after you order, of course. You’ve been my favorite movie actress since you were a little girl that high! My,” he beamed, “you’re getting to be quite a grown-up young lady now, aren’t you?”
The dainty Irish face rewarded him with a sweet smile and the hazel eyes fluttered innocently. “Yes indeed,” the girl agreed. “I certainly am!” Calmly and carefully she wrote, “Gratefully yours—Maggie.”
Then she winked at the man seated across the table, living evidence that she was indeed quite a grown-up young lady. She was his bride, and they were on their first trip together to Chicago where she’d star on the stage in The Moon Is Blue.
This was her first autograph request from a movie fan and Maggie McNamara saw no good reason to disillusion her admirer by explaining that she wasn’t Margaret O’Brien. The situation appealed to her Irish sense of ‘humor, and luckily the name was almost the same. Maggie isn’t one to explain much anyway and by then—after all that had happened to her—she wasn’t too surprised at anything.
That was only three years ago, and now Maggie McNamara is a celebrity in her own right. That Chicago play was such a hit that it ran for thirteen months, sent Maggie on to Broadway, and then to Hollywood, where the movie version caused quite a stir with the censors and won an Academy nomination for Maggie. This year Three Coins In The Fountain is making golden box-office noises second only to The Robe at Twentieth Century-Fox. And McNamara will go so far as to do Shakespeare in the one she’s making now, Prince Of Players.
Maggie McNamara’s appearance is still deceiving. She still looks as though she just stepped out of Seventeen, on whose pages she used to appear as a model. She still wears the same kind of clothes. She weighs just ninety-six pounds soaking wet and stands five feet, one, in flat shoes. The rest of the McNamara chassis, while artistically and provocatively arranged, could slip through a transom with ease any time Maggie should get locked out of her room.
The girlishly-innocent face is crowned with a mop of raven hair cropped to an Italian bob, furthering the illusion that twenty-six-year-old Maggie is a fugitive from the truant officer. When she was working on Three Coins In The Fountain, Maggie showed up one morning wearing black-rimmed glasses and packing a script under her arm. Gibby, the guard, informed her kindly that U.C.L.A. was just over the hill. She had to wait in the reception room until her statement that she was Miss McNamara, the actress, was verified.
Maggie McNamara’s cute, little-girl appearance has been her fortune. Without it, chances are she’d never have hit the Hollywood gold mine. Maggie didn’t know beans with the bag open about dramatics and cared even less until her fresh, fascinating face showed up on the cover of Life Magazine some six years ago and, to her amazement, started Hollywood studios bidding. She started acting lessons and appeared in a four-day flop on Broadway. But Maggie blossomed because she found a lucky part custom-tailored to her deceptive facade. As Patty, the naively-wise little pick-up in The Moon Is Blue, Maggie provided the kick by looking as dumb as a doorknob while she made fools of sophisticated men-about-town William Holden and David Niven. In Three Coins it was the same—a ga-ga little secretary romped off to the altar with worldly-wise prince Louis Jourdan through some clever footwork behind her gaucherie. Maggie surprised her audience along with her prey.
In person, if you don’t watch out, you’re likely to fall for the same charming trap—the round, innocent eyes, the hesitant speech, the frail little figure. Added to a sincere shyness and reluctance to talk about herself or show her face in public places, Maggie is already a minor sort of mystery girl in Hollywood. Although she has camped there a respectable spell three separate times, she has yet to go to a nightclub or anywhere that a guy can get a good look. Most of the time she’s been without her husband, who writes TV shows back in New York, so she spends her spare time studying. The minute she gets off a movie hook, Maggie kites right back to New York believing, like Fred Allen, that California is great—if you’re an orange.
Maggie signed to make pictures for Darryl Zanuck, but she was loaned out to Producer Otto Preminger for her first. Then her home studio called on Maggie to make King Of The Khyber Rifles. Maggie read the script and said, “No, thanks.” Her bosses as firmly said, “Yes.” She still said, “No.” They spanked her with a suspension.
But Maggie McNamara has no regrets. When she was called back from the coat closet and offered Three Coins In The Fountain, Maggie promptly said yes, had a dream trip to Rome and—well—look what happened.
This ability to emerge from any doubtful situation glowing like a rose may trace back to the luck of the Irish. Her father, Timothy McNamara, emigrated to America from County Cork; and the Flemings, her mother’s tribe, came from Galway by way of England.
Marguerite Ann Mary McNamara, as they tagged her, was the third daughter. Older sisters Helen and Cathleen and younger brother Robert made a pretty big family for Tim McNamara to support in the Great Depression on a chauffeur’s pay—just when the rich were frantically divesting themselves of such luxuries. When Maggie was nine the financial strain and other things split the family. Her mother, Helen, found a job as a beauty operator and made a home for the kids.
Maggie didn’t get far from home base all during her girlhood, which she remembers as being ‘on the solitary side.’ All around her Manhattan was busting with excitement, drama and adventure, but Marguerite stayed rooted like the dainty posy she’s named after right in Washington Heights. She roller skated sedately on the crowded sidewalks, her long, blonde tresses (they turned black later on) flying and no wildly adventurous ideas beneath them—least of all the gaudy vision of becoming an actress. Maggie got all her romance and escape from books. She’d raid he public library for a stack almost as tall as she was and find a place by herself where she could get lost in fairy tales and legends, her favorite being the bloody, dragon-baiting saga of Beowulf. The only time Maggie showed a girlhood flash of show business ambition was after a performance of the Ballet de Monte Carlo. That excited her so visibly that a friend, close enough to be called aunt, staked her to dancing lessons and for a while Maggie’s shyness was lost in dreams of a ballerina’s career. Trouble was, each time she toe-danced before the Ballet Arts School pupils, she’d giggle with embarrassment and that would bring her right down flatfooted. If you’d have predicted that self-conscious Miss Marguerite McNarmara would someday lead the spotlighted life of an actress, you would have been credited with a hole in the head.
Maggie kept right on being the shy one at school. Soon after her operation, she memorized every word of Rip Van Winkle and the whole book of The Man Without A Country, a feat she’s still pretty proud of. Her grades zoomed and at thirteen she was ready to enter the Starbenuller Textile School to study commercial art and fashion.
The career of Maggie, the Beautiful Cloak Model, started while she was still in the Textile School and again not because of Maggie’s ego but through another one of those family friends. This one, an amateur photographer, draped Maggie in a Chinese costume one Sunday afternoon and took a picture. “It wasn’t a very good picture,’ says Maggie. “I looked like Paddy’s Irish Lotus Blossom,” but everyone said it was artistic and that she posed just like a fashion model.
So armed with the homemade glamour shot, Maggie slipped into her most chic outfit, a green-and-white checked summer suit, rolled her hair on top of her head and, accompanied by her mother, invaded John Robert Powers’ famous glamour hive. The receptionist looked at the Lotus Blossom study and shuddered but took another look at Maggie and gasped. Instead of enrolling her in the Powers finishing school—as Maggie had rashly hoped—she buzzed Powers himself and said she had just what he’d been looking for. Right about then young fashions were sweeping the nation and Maggie got a job that day. She modeled white knit snow mittens although it was ninety in the shade.
Pretty soon Maggie was all over the style catalogues and fashion magazines—and she swung her Brewster hat box—badge of the Powers girl—up Madison Avenue with a sassy swagger. She got her fee upped to $20 an hour. With her ageless face and figure it looked as if she’d go bobby-soxing along in fashion poses until she got arthritis. But another girl named Maggie changed that when our Maggie was nineteen.
This Maggie’s last name was Swope, and she was a fashion editor of Life Magazine. Cooking up a spread on basketweave handbags she had Sharland, the famous woman photographer, build it around this cute McNamara kid. The day the proofs came in she called Maggie and informed her excitedly, “Don’t hold your breath—but it looks like you might be on the cover!” That’s a top break for any young model.
“Ha!” said Maggie, knowing a thing or two about life by then—and about Life Magazine, too. She would be lucky if she showed up on page 109 by the time the bright young men shuffled things around.
So instead of holding her breath, Maggie went up to Highland Falls that weekend for some fresh air and got so giddy she fell off a bicycle, blacking both eyes, puffing her lip up like a toadstool and scratching a waffle design across her nose. When she limped into her house her mother told her, “A Mr. David Selznick called.”
“Who?” asked Maggie wearily. The man who made Gone With The Wind meant nothing to her.
“—and Dick Avedon.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Maggie. Avedon is a top fashion photographer and he never had given her a tumble before. It dawned that she must have made the Life cover after all and a dash to the corner drugstore confirmed it.
John Powers straightened out Maggie on who David Selznick was and went with her to see him at Hampshire House, where, despite the fact that she looked like something Kid Gavilan had just worked over, he talked about a Hollywood contract and sent her to a drama teacher to prepare for a test. The test wasn’t made but she was offered a stock contract. and turned it down on John Powers’ advice to learn something about acting before she gave up modeling. Her Irish luck was riding high. Six months later Selznick stopped producing pictures.
Maggie’s dramatic debut was in The King Of Friday’s Men, an Trish fantasy that the Abbey Players had done, and she got the job because of her leprechaun look. Again her shamrock delivered, because she was all set to take off for New Orleans to visit her roommate’s folks when the producers offered her the spot. She’s never been sorry she canceled her reservations, because while the arty stage job lasted just four days at the Playhouse it drew critical cheers for Maggie McNamara and led to her real break in The Moon Is Blue. A month later, indirectly, it got Maggie a husband.
David Swift is a big guy from Minnesota who grew up in Laguna Beach, California. After doodling Donald Ducks and such at Walt Disney’s Studios, he progressed to radio writing. By now he’s a top TV writer, who originated Mr. Peepers and owns a hunk of the show. The Morris agency which handled Maggie’s career, handled Swift’s business, and that’s how he spied this picture of Maggie. Dave Swift looked and swore right out loud, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry!”
This involved a brassy phone all, a blind date, a stand-up on Maggie’s part, another try, a proposal after a nine-day courtship, and a marriage before the month was out. There wasn’t time for a honeymoon because Dave was sweating out a TV script and Maggie was loaded—rehearsals for The Moon Is Blue by day and an Equity Library Theatre performance of You Can’t Take It With You at night. In fact, Maggie remembers disgustedly that the day after their wedding she had to show up for rehearsals at the grim hour of ten A.M.
After Mag’s sensational run in Chicago and a two-month Broadway triumph subbing for Barbara Bel Geddes, the Swifts had a breather and flew off on their delayed honeymoon to the Virgin Islands. There Dave, who had gone for a skindiving rig, complete with underwater cartridge spear, exploded the thing on the first day’s dive and it sank out of sight. Most of his honeymoon was spent plunging vainly to recover the expensive equipment.
Maggie had read the map wrong, routed them to a British Island instead of a French one, or vice versa, fouled up their passports and landed herself in all kinds of international complications. But their misadventures made the honeymoon a howling success for the Swifts. As Dave’s best friend, Bob Sweeney, swears: “Dave and Maggie are a couple of strictly offbeat characters with Charles Addams senses of humor.”
Although they are separated pretty often by their two careers, the Swifts are a self-sufficient corporation, close as two peas in a pod and steady long distance customers of A. T. & T. Home is a Manhattan apartment but they seem to be always crossing the country by plane, train or in their Ford convertible, which Maggie still can’t drive. She’s not the athletic type. Sometimes under pressure she’ll tap out a miniature golf game, coast downhill on a bike or push a bowling ball listlessly down an alley, although there’s always the danger that the ball will take Maggie along, too. But usually she won’t walk across the room if she can get a ride.
But she’ll stay up all night—and often does—playing charades, murder, Scrabble or some such wit-teasing game. Most of this takes place at Bob and Bev Sweeney’s house. Bob, a TV actor, was Dave’s best man at their wedding and they’re the only close friends Maggie has in Hollywood. The way she’s going she’s not likely to collect a crowd.
The nearest Maggie has come to a Hollywood whirl was the gala Egyptian premiére, but at the last moment she begged off because she was starting Prince Of Players the next morning. Even when she was up for an Academy Award in New York last year, McNamara passed the event which could possibly have Oscared her over nationwide television. She didn’t pack an evening gown for this Hollywood trip and never wears makeup, on screen or off. The only jewelry she wears is her plain gold wedding band and some earrings she picked up in Rome. But she confesses a weakness for pearls, if and when she can afford them. Before that, however, Maggie wants a house in the country out from New York and some more trips abroad, preferably to Scandanavia, a hangover urge from Beowulf. And then there’s the family she wants, boy first, then a girl and her son’s name is already picked out—David, naturally. Maggie thinks that’s the most beautiful of all handles and when old friends call her husband by his nickname, “Bud,” her Irish flares. “How can you disgrace such a beautiful name?” Mrs. Swift rages.
Maggie’s chances of realizing most of these private dreams seem fairly remote at present. Producers are standing in line, in Hollywood and on Broadway, too. As Bob Sweeney observes, “She’s one of those dedicated actresses, all out and wrapped up. Maggie would rather create something good for a $30,000 B picture than walk through a $3,000,000 epic. Money isn’t her object—she’s out for the top.”
There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that. And while Irish luck may have shoved her into the dizzy galaxy of show business, Maggie is not counting on those shamrocks to yank her up to the stars. The perfectionism which has made her almost a Hollywood recluse carries on wherever she goes and when she’s on a job conventional holidays mean nothing. In love as they are, the Swifts have never even celebrated a wedding anniversary. In New York Maggie still studies dramatics with coach Herbert Ratner and sometimes dancing with Martha Graham.
Eva LeGallienne coached her for the Shakespeare in Prince Of Players wherein Maggie is tackling big league stuff like the balcony scene from Romeo And Juliet with expert Richard Burton. “When I put on a few pounds I’ll do Lady Macbeth,” she promises. “I’m mean enough for the part.”
Nobody who knows Maggie McNamara believes that for a minute. The consensus is that the diminutive Maggie packs a heart as big as a watermelon and just as soft. “Maggie carries a torch for the rights of man,” says her chum Norma Crane, who was with her in that ill-fated first Broadway play and is visiting with her in Hollywood right now. “The only thing that really makes her mad is disloyalty or injustice.” And her agent calls Maggie “the worst business woman in the world, because,” he explains, “she can’t stand to hurt anybody.”
So the prospect of Maggie McNamara ever coming across convincingly as a murderess is a workout for the imagination of her friends, as is the prospect of extra pounds. They know how she forgets to eat when she’s working, nibbling nothings all day long and settling for a steak late at night after a spot of sherry. Maggie practically lives on steaks and salads, both non-fattening, and milk gags her—so the chances of there ever being much more of Maggie McNamara to spread around seem pretty slim.
But so far Maggie’s ninety-six have been all the weight that’s needed to send out a solid beat. When she hit the stage in The Moon Is Blue one critic looked, listened and wrote: “Tonight Maggie McNamara was the irresistible force that made all of us in the theatre immovable objects.”
The effect has been essentially the same out of Hollywood. Or, as witty Clifton Webb mused, thoughtfully watching Maggie spark up scenes for Three Coins In The Fountain with the McNamara charm, “She’s a tiny thing, isn’t she? But then, so is the atom.”
THE END
—BY KIRTLEY BASKETTE
It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1954
