Returning to the Scene : Irvine Woman Whose Role in ‘Harvey Girls’ Was Cut on Small Screen Reappears Via Restoration

Virginia McGhee worked for 11 weeks on the set of the 1946 MGM musical “The Harvey Girls,” but when she would watch the movie on TV in subsequent years, she’d see herself in fewer scenes than she remembered working.

“Hey! I did more than that,” McGhee said she would tell herself while watching the film.

The mystery was solved for her a few weeks ago when McGhee, now a real estate broker in Irvine, went to Los Angeles to view a newly restored version of the film on the big screen. There she was, in all the scenes she remembered--but sometimes standing near the sides, where she was cut out when the wide-screen film was cut down for television.

Fans of Hollywood musicals will be able to see the film, its Technicolor brilliance revived, Sunday at 2 p.m. on cable network TNT. The $70,000 restoration was undertaken by Turner Entertainment Co., owners of TNT (Turner Network Television).

Back on the small screen, some of McGhee will again be lost to the format change, but she’s still there in some of the movie’s major set-pieces, including an elaborate waltz sequence and an all-woman barroom brawl.

The movie, starring Judy Garland and Angela Lansbury, put a Hollywood spin on the saga of the Harvey restaurants, which dotted towns along the rails heading out West in the 1800s. In the film, the starched and homespun Harvey Girls, the “winsome waitresses” of America’s first restaurant chain (as the film’s prologue describes them), are cast as a civilizing influence in the rough-and-tumble territories, fighting the bad saloon girls for the hearts of the town’s men.

A big hit on its release, the film stands as a naive but nonetheless entertaining throwback. It gave the world “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” but McGhee, alas, wasn’t on hand for the song’s film-opening eight-minute production number.

She appears for most of the second half of the film as part of a new team of Harvey Girls, replacements for a few who were scared off (in the film) by the antics of some of the town’s nastier element.

“I worked 11 weeks, which in those days we called a career,” McGhee said.

“It was a wonderful experience. We were on the (MGM) back lot, and I hate to think it’s gone now.”

As it turned out, “The Harvey Girls” was McGhee’s last Hollywood role. In 1943, the former Virginia Davis had married a “very dashing” Marine Corps pilot named Robert A. McGhee, and after he returned from the war they moved together to Florida, and later to New Jersey and Connecticut. They came to Irvine in 1976.

Although she was only 26 when she left Hollywood, McGhee already had more than two decades of filmmaking under her belt. Her film career started when a struggling but ambitious young animator named Walt Disney saw young Virginia’s face projected in a movie house in Kansas City, Mo., in an advertisement for Warneker’s Bread.

Disney had the idea for a series of silent shorts, in which a live young girl would interact with a cast of animated characters (more than 60 years before “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”).

“He saw me and my long curls and got in touch with my mother,” McGhee recalled.

Disney saw young Virginia, with her heart-shaped face and head full of blond curls, as the ideal heroine for his planned series of “Alice” comedies and shot the pilot for it in the Davises’ Kansas City home.

He had to find a financial backer for the series (“Walt was very long on creativity and short on cash (at the time),” McGhee said), and M.J. Winkler offered to produce if the girl in the pilot would continue as the star. The Davis family moved West, and Virginia Davis was the main attraction in the first 14 of the “Alice” comedies.

McGhee was 4 years old when the first of the films was shot in November of 1923. Budgets were tight--McGhee remembers pantomiming her scenes against a white tarpaulin thrown over a billboard at Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. She eventually left the series but continued in Hollywood.

“I grew up in the picture business,” McGhee said, appearing in such films as “Three on a Match” with Joan Blondell, and starring on stage at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, then a showcase theater. She also became an accomplished dancer.

As she moved into her teen years and on into her 20s, the bigger roles dried up, but she continued working.

“I was never the star I had been, but that was all right,” McGhee said. “I was fine with my dancing and my bit parts.”

In fact, she danced in many of Hollywood’s classic musicals, including most of Fred Astaire’s pictures, in which she worked with famed choreographer Hermes Pan.

“There was a certain nucleus of people who could do every sort of dancing,” McGhee said, and those people could count on a steady stream of work.

She was working elsewhere when the first call went out for “The Harvey Girls” but came aboard during the second round of casting. The film, she said, was big on authenticity, and the women had to wear real bone corsets and petticoats.

“We sort of went back an age,” McGhee said.

Some of the work was highly physical, such as the brawl scene.

“We wrestled around quite a bit,” she said, laughing. “It was quite a fight.”

Lansbury, she said, “was wonderful,” and Garland “was always very nice on the set.” But despite McGhee’s fond memories of “The Harvey Girls,” she had already grown somewhat disenchanted with the changing Hollywood scene and had no regrets when she moved East.

She did do a bit of acting in early television when she moved to New Jersey, appearing on commercials and in such shows as “Your Hit Parade” and the NBC soap opera “One Man’s Family.” But the auditions became too big a hassle and she decided to abandon show business once and for all.

McGhee studied interior design, eventually becoming editor of a design magazine. Later, after taking time out to raise two daughters, she began working in real estate in Connecticut and continued in the profession when she and her husband moved to Irvine.

Now 74, McGhee continues to work as a broker for Grubb & Ellis in Irvine, selling residential real estate. As for her days in show business, “I don’t think about it much, until I look at something and say, ‘I could do that.’ ”

Her Disney past was rediscovered a few years ago, and she has started making some public appearances, including a festival in Italy in 1992. She admitted she takes some some satisfaction in the newfound recognition.

“I guess, somewhere along the line, I’m still remembered.”

* “The Harvey Girls” will air Sunday at 2 p.m. on cable station TNT. Check local cable listings for channel.