Margaret Sullavan — Peg runs away! (1934) 🇺🇸
Margaret Sullavan despises with all the intensity of her warm young nature that spotlight of publicity continually searching — searching. It is a fierce dragon's eye to Margaret. Already it has ferreted out her "secret" marriage with Henry Fonda and clamped on it as a juicy titbit. Even though that was a romantic misadventure long since ended.
by Jerry Lane
So Margaret Sullavan ran away! The screen's latest skyrocketing sensation wanted to escape.
At the air terminal I collided with her just as she was hurrying toward an east-bound 'plane. Her hair was flying. She wore what has become a regulation costume with her — those faded corduroy pants, an old suede jacket and tennis shoes. There was not a single trace of make-up on her shiny clean little face.
"I've got to go, Jerry," she gasped. "Got to, y'understand? I saw three interviewers in a row — and all they wanted to know was about that marriage. I told 'em no, no, No, I wasn't married!... I'm running away. I love California. But I hate Hollywood. G'bye!" If things had been different in Chicago it's hard to tell what Peg Sullavan would have done next. As it was — she sat three hours in the waiting room after they landed! Because tennis shoes are not the best things to wade through slush, and the skies were gray and the wind roared along Lake Michigan. She had forgotten to wire her friends that she was coming, so they were out when she telephoned.
It was a subdued Sullavan who curled up on the bench and remembered the feel of warm sunshine. She looked in her purse. Ten dollars left. You couldn't get very far on that. The pilot was gone who could have identified her. How was she going to get a check cashed? The ticket seller hadn't the faintest idea.
"I'm Margaret Sullavan of the Universal studios. In motion pictures in Hollywood, you know..."
No, he didn't know. And looking at her un-rouged lips and at those pants he smiled skeptically. "Got anything to prove who you are?"
Margaret thought a moment. Then she noticed the movie magazines at a nearby stand.
"That's me, the girl in the ermine coat there," she explained, opening one of them and pointing to an article about herself.
The ticket seller scratched his head.
"Well, you do look a bit alike. But no girl who could afford an ermine coat would go around looking like you do. You're no movie star!"
And he wondered why Peg collapsed on a chair, helpless with laughter.
It was a grand pay-off for a girl who had run away from the tinsel of Hollywood!
But the next day she reported back to the studio. An official of the airplane company had identified her and she'd taken the next transport ship headed west. Thirty-eight hours of almost continual flying just to rid herself of that nameless fear.
"I’ll probably have to escape rather frequently to keep my perspective in this place —" Peg's feet landed on top a desk and she settled back on the divan. "Everything is so darn out of proportion here. You feel you're living in a world where nothing is quite real."
And realism is the outstanding quality in this Margaret Sullavan. There isn't an ounce of "show" in her. She was so anxious not to have her friends think that she'd suddenly become elegant from all the "dressed-up" pictures of her being published that she did what no star has ever done before. She ordered a hundred un-retouched photos of herself —fluttering trousers, tousled hair and all — sent them. "Can't let them believe Peg Sullavan has let Hollywood change her!" she informed me.
No, but the Peg Sullavans and the Katharine Hepburns and the Margaret Lindsays are bidding fair to change Hollywood!
It's a fact. They've broken every precedent of the film famous. Imagine any beauty a short time ago daring to dash around in dungarees, completely innocent of lipstick!
But these girls — and all three have had good family background and careful schooling — go around looking like young rebels from the backwoods. They have rebelled— against the false glitter, the former showy brilliance of movie town. They've deliberately plunged to the other extreme — the casual indifference towards dress of a twelve-year-old tomboy.
I remember standing on the set one day during the beginning of production on Only Yesterday. Fashionably gowned extras moved about. Gentlemen with faultless English accents.
"Who," asked one of them, "is that little scamp climbing up the scaffold? She's been here every day watching things from up on the rafters or on top the sound booth... Not the script girl, is she?"
"No," I assured him. "She's not the script girl. That is the new leading woman of this play, Margaret Sullavan!"
He looked aghast. "That little brat in the dirty pants?"
Margaret shrieked when we told her. She adores jokes on herself, this "five foot, two inch daughter of old Virginia who dared to make a way for herself on the stage — and wound up in Hollywood.
For days before she was needed in front of the camera she was on the set studying screen technique from every angle. Once I heard John Stahl, the director, tell her: "You'll be a star when this picture is released!" And John isn't given to idle prophecies or flattery.
Which is why, when the clamor and Sullavan craze rose to a white heat, I went to him.
"How did you know this would happen?" I asked.
"Because that part was a perfect blend with her personality. Someone essentially honest," he said thoughtfully. "To be quite frank, I wanted a girl who was un-glamorous. The kind of girl who might remind the audience of their nextdoor neighbor. I wanted her real. It wasn't possible to use a well known movie actress in the role and I had seen Margaret in the New York production of Chrysalis.
"Later I saw a test of her out here... I don't think she knows one trick of the theatre. She doesn't need to. She acts exactly what she feels. And I can tell you this — that after working with her for fourteen weeks it is her sincerity and sweetness that stand out. The same qualities that made Janet Gaynor one of the top-notchers. It will be very interesting to see what happens next. Her second picture will be the real test..."
So right now Margaret Sullavan stands under suspended sentence in Hollywood!
Her Film Fate has yet to be decided — and she may have to serve a thirtyday stretch in the local jail! That came about rather strangely.
On her first day off from making "Only Yesterday Margaret" went driving over the shaded roads of Laurel Canyon. She drives like she thinks — fast. A motorcycle cop took objection to her speed. As he was writing out the little pink ticket, Margaret threw away her cigarette. After the forest fires that have raged around these hills that is one of the worst crimes you can commit in California. But she didn't know.
I'm willing to wager that the next hour was not precisely pleasant for the cop until he hauled her into court. They put Peg behind the bars and it wasn't fifteen minutes before she'd learned the love life of a very ebony-colored lady. When harried studio officials found her, her "free" day was over and she was sitting contentedly in her cell listening to a shoplifter discuss the traits of canary birds.
The judge let her out under suspended sentence. But one wrong turn and Peg will serve for a month. "It's like walking a tight rope when I drive now. Every stop sign makes me shudder!" Her old Ford coupe seems to know about it — because it shudders too.
A Ford Coupé — for a girl who gets more a year than the President of the United States. It's a tremendous thing and unbalancing for anyone who's been getting $150 to jump suddenly to $2,000 a week. And Peg is fighting with all her might to retain a sane grasp of things. She refuses to be impressed by salaries, studios or star-shine.
She didn't even wait for the preview of her first picture before rushing home to Norfolk. She was gone three months — and when she returned it was to find herself Hollywood's newest flash. Almost immediately she ran away.
"I'm going every time I feel myself being pushed to the wall," says Peg.
In the meantime she faces the crisis of her career in her second picture. So much depends on it. Lowell Sherman will direct. The man who directed two brilliant stars last year — Katharine Hepburn and Mae West. Under his guidance they "rose and shone." Katy in Morning Glory and Mae in that classic of the age, She Done Him Wrong. What will he do with Peg Sullavan in Elizabeth and Mary? Bring out another Peg even more finely polished and with greater finesse?
Collection: Hollywood Magazine, April 1934