John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars

Chapter Six

88 Chapter Six Sequence after sequence was good. . . . No love has ever enthralled me as did the making of this picture [The Big Parade]. —John Gilbert, 1928 While Jack may have been a prickly perfectionist, he was also social and likable, able to draw many friends into his circle. He was an enthusiastic partygoer and host, and he spent much time with directors: King Vidor, Clarence Brown, Jack Conway, Victor Fleming, Edmund Goulding. Jack’s daughter Leatrice Fountain felt that he and King Vidor were what would today be termed “frenemies.” Jack treated women like “queens and ladies,” she said (though his four ex-wives may have disagreed, and divorce charges include some very ungentlemanly conduct). Vidor, said Fountain, “used them, was ruthless and went on to the next. He was jealous of John Gilbert and the way women went after him. I guess those two were sexual rivals.” He was also drawn to screenwriters: Douglas Doty, Frank Dazey, Carey Wilson, and a number of female writers, Anita Loos, Agnes Christine Johnston, Bess Meredyth—even Elinor Glyn became a friend. He was particularly close to actors Richard Barthelmess and Ronald Colman (who was a regular tennis partner) and the couples Cedric Gibbons (MGM’s star scenic designer) and his wife, actress Dolores Del Rio, as well as the married stars Edmund Lowe and Lilyan Tashman. Among his other friends were MGM’s head of publicity, Howard Strickling, well known for sweet-talking the press and smoothing over Chapter Six 89 scandals; and Edwin Schallert, movie critic for the Los Angeles Times for more than forty years (he was sympathetic and fair to Jack, but never coddled him or let him get away with a bad performance). He was also friendly with Gladys Hall, a writer just a few years older than Jack, who had been covering the movie industry since 1910. She wrote for numerous fan magazines through the years and had a column in the 1920s, “The Diary of a Professional Movie Fan.” Jack had Hall’s home phone number, and on more than one occasion called her up to invite her over for a scoop—usually to complain about his latest project or his bosses. One of his closest female friends—to hear her tell it, anyway—was Adela Rogers St. Johns, the very model of the fan-mag sob sister. With prose as purple as a three-day bruise, St. Johns spent her very long life (she died in 1988, aged ninety-four) extolling her love/hate relationship with Hollywood. The daughter of notorious criminal-defense attorney Earl Rogers, she wrote for the San Francisco Examiner, Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, and—most influentially—Photoplay. She also wrote a number of novels and several highly imaginative “nonfiction” works, and contributed to several screenplays (though none of Jack’s). In countless interviews, St. Johns showed that she was a fascinating conversationalist who never let the truth get in the way of a good rousing story. She loved and hated hard, and fortunately for Jack, she loved him. Jack, Paul Bern, Irving Thalberg, and Jack Conway also drew writer John Colton into their boys’ club, which spoke volumes about them and about 1920s Hollywood—the scenarist (for Jack’s Man, Woman and Sin and The Cossacks as well as the Broadway hits Rain and The Shanghai Gesture), Colton regaled his curious heterosexual friends with tales of gay nightclubs. Often, Jack and Irving Thalberg would join Paul Bern and screenwriter Carey Wilson for boisterous Boys’ Nights. Adela Rogers St. Johns—whose word should never be taken as gospel—Wilson’s nextdoor neighbor, claimed that “they played records all night. I had three children and two shepherd dogs and no one of us could sleep.” Poor Paul Bern was always falling for one actress or another—Joan Crawford, Barbara La Marr, Mabel Normand. Lovely, sexual girls who looked up to him as a father or older brother, but who had no interest in him romantically . Understandably, Bern was often in despair. “He has a Magdelene complex,” a sympathetic Jack—who rarely had a woman say no 90 The Peak to him—told Irving Thalberg. “Paul does crazy things for whores.” One of St. Johns’s most notorious tales was of Paul Bern’s suicide attempt, purportedly over Barbara La Marr. According to St. Johns, Bern had begged La Marr to marry him. Turned down, “Paul had put his head...