Father and Mother Were Movie Stars: Leatrice Gilbert Fountain Remembers

Just over a year ago, as Turner Classic Movies prepared to honor silent screen legend John Gilbert with a day of his own for the first time during “Summer under the Stars” 2010, I interviewed Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, daughter of the actor and his second wife, silent screen star Leatrice Joy. Leatrice Fountain and I had become acquainted several months earlier and it seemed a perfect idea to publish a discussion of her father’s career on the same day TCM fêted him.

Leatrice and I have stayed in touch ever since, and over this 4^th of July weekend we spent more time talking about her memories…

Leatrice’s story has its origins in 1918, when John Gilbert and Leatrice Joy met on a Peralta Studio picture called One Dollar Bid. He was kind to the nervous actress who hadn’t worked for a while and was preparing for a scene. He was also taken with her - and she thought he was the most attractive man she’d ever seen.  Their romance began when they met by chance months later.

Leatrice Joy

From their early days together and throughout their marriage, Joy had the bigger career and salary. In 1922, the year she married Gilbert, she signed with Paramount to be groomed for stardom by Cecil B. DeMille. She had been working for Goldwyn and when that contract ended, her brother Billy, then her agent, got in touch with DeMille knowing C.B. had lost his great star Gloria Swanson and was looking for a replacement.

John Gilbert was on his way up, but during his time with Joy he hadn’t yet made the films that firmly established his stardom. The couple’s relationship was always tempestuous, and they were apart as often as they were together. For his part, DeMille would have liked the pair to part permanently. Their daughter recounted this story:

“Father had drinking problems, the two would quarrel, and sometimes mother would show up at the studio looking sleepless and unhappy. DeMille finally told her that she must move out of her home until the picture was finished and stay with her mother who lived nearby. This of course infuriated Jack and they fought bitterly. A few days later she was driving on Hollywood Blvd. and saw him ahead of her. He stopped, parked, and walked into a barber shop. She parked behind him, walked into the shop and got into the chair next to his. Neither spoke. When the barber asked her what she wanted she said, I want a haircut just like his (in those days women did not enter the sacred masculine environs of the barber's). It did not cross her mind that this might interfere with the film she was shooting with her long flowing curls. Poor DeMille...”

Some have called Joy a forerunner to Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell because her leading roles were often as emancipated women (and she became famed for her boyish, close-cropped haircut). She was one of Paramount’s top stars and the best known of her films is DeMille’s first version of The Ten Commandments (1923) in which she had one of the featured roles.

Young Leatrice was born in September, 1924, just as her parents were divorcing. Her uncle Billy tried hard to keep Gilbert away from mother and daughter, and her father played virtually no part in the girl’s life for many years; she remembers that she called Billy Joy “Uncle Daddy.”

John Gilbert

Baby Leatrice arrived as John Gilbert’s career was about to skyrocket. He had co-starred in the newly formed MGM’s first production, He Who Gets Slapped (1924), with Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer. But it was in 1925, the year his divorce from Joy was finalized, that Gilbert achieved the heights. He starred in MGM’s production of Erich von Stroheim’s opulent The Merry Widow and also starred in the film that established MGM’s reputation, King Vidor’s smash hit The Big Parade. Just over a year later, not long after the demise of Rudolph Valentino, Gilbert and Greta Garbo co-starred for the first time - in Clarence Brown’s sensual Flesh and the Devil (1926), a runaway success. John Gilbert was now Hollywood’s top romantic lead, adored by millions and in the midst of a great romance with Garbo.

Cecil B. DeMille

At just that time, Leatrice Joy’s career began its decline. In 1925, DeMille departed Paramount, Hollywood’s reigning studio, to create his own production company. When he left, his agreement with Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky allowed him to take his stars with him - if they were agreeable. Joy was one of those he took. According to Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, this was at a critical stage of her mother’s career, “she hadn’t yet reached ‘name above the title’ status, but she was being built up.” Joy didn’t want to leave the studio, DeMille’s new company hadn’t yet worked out a distribution deal, and she had been happy at Paramount but, she said later, she was under the impression Zukor and Lasky didn’t want her because they agreed to let DeMille have her. When she realized this wasn’t true, she reacted, according to her daughter, “childishly.” She begged DeMille to release her, but he refused. After that she would not speak to him, “even when they were walking together.”  Joy’s success was modest with the DeMille company; she was assigned to program pictures and DeMille never directed her again. Her daughter mused, “She was a subtle actress who deserved more.”

Leatrice Joy on "To Tell the Truth"

At one point, Joy was off the screen entirely for about 18 months. During that time she toured the country on the vaudeville circuit, performing scenes and singing with an accompanist (her daughter recalled that she was awarded a gold medal as the most popular entertainer on the tour).

Joy’s partnership with DeMille ended unhappily in 1928 and he reportedly held a grudge for years. She signed with MGM and made the last of her silent films for that studio.  The coming of sound effectively ended the film careers of both Leatrice Joy and John Gilbert. Her strong southern accent was considered a detriment, and his voice was called unsuitable.  Joy freelanced for a couple of years for lesser studios and then left movies for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, John Gilbert struggled to revive his waning career until he died suddenly in 1936.

Marilyn Monroe

Joy’s final film was Love Nest (1951), one of Marilyn Monroe’s early films. She told her daughter that Monroe had an effect similar to Jean Harlow’s. She wasn’t talking about her onscreen persona so much as her stunning impact on men - who stopped in their tracks and stared the moment they caught sight of her.

Leatrice Gilbert Fountain remembers Jean Harlow. Her family was linked to the ‘platinum blonde’ on both sides. Members of her mother's family were Christian Scientists, as was Harlow, “…my family was very fond of her. My grandmother was Jean's Christian Science Practitioner (like a healer). She was a really lovely person who always paid attention to a scruffy little girl hanging around [Leatrice].” She remembers the young actress as “a warm, friendly, easy-going girl. She didn’t push herself, others pushed her.” Leatrice’s ‘Uncle Daddy,’ Billy Joy, was Harlow’s first agent and arranged for her initial screen test – for which she wore a dress lent to her by Leatrice Joy. At that time Harlow was under contract to Howard Hughes, an agreement she discussed at length with the more experienced Joy.

John Gilbert (right) at Jean Harlow's wedding

On the other side of the family, John Gilbert was the best man at Harlow’s wedding to her second husband, Paul Bern, in 1932. Bern was a writer, director and producer at MGM, and a close friend of Irving Thalberg. Bern had at once shared a bachelor pad with John Gilbert and Carey Wilson, an MGM screenwriter Oscar-nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Leatrice chuckled as she recalled that many years later silent screen star Colleen Moore referred to the place, a house above Sunset Blvd., as “a circus” for all that went on there.

Leatrice Gilbert's first film

Leatrice remembers getting to know the children of other stars, Harold Lloyd’s daughters went to school with her at the Westlake School for Girls; she knew Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, also born in 1924. Riva, who had a brief career as an actress and appeared on TV in the early ‘50s, seemed to Leatrice a “quiet, withdrawn child” very unlike her illustrious mother.

Leatrice also got to know child actors like Freddie Bartholomew and Judy Garland once she made her own foray into ‘the family business.’

At 12, she portrayed Ann Rutherford (‘Annie Hawks’) as a child in Of Human Hearts (1938), starring Walter Huston, James Stewart and Beulah Bondi (Oscar-nominated for her supporting performance). Around the same time she made a screen test for Hunt Stromberg and was cast as the lead in MGM’s upcoming production of National Velvet. The test, she told me, was a scene set the day before the Grand National, in which Velvet and Mi have a talk. Stromberg was planning to shoot the picture in England, but the advent of World War II in Europe and other issues at MGM put the picture on hold for years…

Ava Gardner

As an MGM contract player in the early ‘40s, Leatrice appeared in several films, including Random Harvest (1942), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Kismet (1944) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). During this time she knew all the other young hopefuls on the MGM lot, liked many and became friends with some, including future star Ava Gardner. She recalls of Ava that she was “beautiful, down-to-earth and warm when so many were distant and aloof…she was so personable.”  Leatrice thought back to an evening when she, Ava and another friend went out on the town to one of Old Hollywood’s great night spots, the Mocambo. She remembered that all eyes in the room followed Ava...and Ava took it in stride, paying little attention to her devastating effect on others.

In 1944 Leatrice joined the war effort by becoming a WAC. She was a clerk-typist for just a year when the war ended.  Out of the Army, she went to New York and for two years attended the school of Tamara Daykarhanova, formerly of the Moscow Art Theatre, source of “the method” approach to acting. Daykarhanova had been with Maria Oupenskaya’s New York acting school before Ouspenskaya relocated. At the studio Leatrice met her first husband, a fellow student.

Many years later, Leatrice became interested in the life and career of her father and eventually wrote his definitive biography, Dark Star (St. Martin's Press, 1985). Her exhaustive research on his life put her in touch with many luminaries of Hollywood’s ‘golden age.’  She interviewed the likes of Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Colleen Moore, Lillian Gish, Marlene Dietrich, John Ford, Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Clarence Brown and many others. She came to know and was assisted in her journey to learn more by esteemed film historian/filmmaker Kevin Brownlow (winner of an Oscar in 2010, the Governor’s Award). Along with taking part in silent film festivals world-wide in her continuing effort to restore her father's professional reputation, Leatrice became an oft-quoted source for books and documentaries about Hollywood icons as well as Hollywood itself. In the last few months I’ve come across her comments in biographies of Jean Harlow, Louis B. Mayer and Cecil B. DeMille. Charlotte Chandler’s 2011 biography of Marlene Dietrich quotes Leatrice at length so I asked Leatrice about Chandler, the somewhat enigmatic author of several Hollywood bios…

Leatrice Gilbert Fountain

“...I knew her and ran into her continually at MOMA in the heyday of the film department (there was nothing like it anywhere except for Langlois in Paris). And she seemed to know everyone. How she has kept herself a mystery is one in itself.”

I could’ve asked Leatrice to reminisce for days, but her two visiting sons returned from a fishing expedition and it was time for us both to return to the 4^th of July weekend and our daily lives. We agreed to talk again soon…

Click here to view my original interview with Leatrice. Click here for my piece on the fabled history of her father's house in Hollywood.

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Platinum Blonde and Beyond

It was her trademark, her calling card and, in 1931, the name of a film for which she received third billing. Platinum Blonde had originally been intended as a vehicle for top-billed star Loretta Young but, by the time it was released, the film's title had changed and changed again until it was an outright reference to pale-haired co-star Jean Harlow. It was not Harlow's breakout picture, that had come with Hell's Angels (1930), nor is it generally cited as one of her great classics, but Platinum Blonde was pivotal - it proclaimed her stardom.



The Public Enemy (1931)

In 1931, the 20-year-old starlet was still under an oppressive five-year contract with Howard Hughes, producer/director of Hell's Angels. She had proven her appeal in the film, but Hughes had no projects in the works for her and most Hollywood insiders believed he was mismanaging her career. Harlow's then-friend/future husband Paul Bern arranged for her loan to MGM for The Secret Six (1931) an underworld drama with Wallace Beery and not-yet-famous Clark Gable. Immediately after, she was loaned out to Universal for an unsympathetic role in The Iron Man (1931), a boxing drama with Lew Ayres. While still on that project, she went back to MGM for retakes on The Secret Six and began work on her next film, this time on loan to Warner Brothers for the gangster classic The Public Enemy (1931), with James Cagney. Her fourth film in five months was for Fox, Goldie (1931), a comedy with Spencer Tracy. Of these films only The Public Enemy was an unqualified hit, and it was a blockbuster, but it was Cagney who became the overnight star...Harlow's allure was noted, but her performance was widely panned.

With an assist from New Jersey mobster Abner Zwillman who was involved with Harlow, a two-picture deal with Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures was secured. Zwillman made sure the actress earned quite a bit more than what she eked out from Howard Hughes. Harlow's first film for Columbia was to be called "Gallagher" and was one of several films of the emerging "newspaper" genre. It was a romantic comedy about an everyman reporter who falls for a high living socialite and is blind to the love of his best friend and fellow reporter, a gal pal named Gallagher.

Loretta Young

Contracted to star as Gallagher was luminous Loretta Young, already a movie veteran at only 18. She'd started in pictures at age four with an uncredited bit part as a "Fairy" in The Primrose Ring (1917) starring Mae Murray. At eight she'd appeared as an "Arab Child" in Valentino's The Shiek (1921) and at 15 co-starred with silent screen legend Lon Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928). In 1929 she, along with her sister Sally Blane, Jean Arthur and others, was named one of Hollywood's "WAMPAS Baby Stars." By the time she came to "Gallagher" Young had already appeared in more than 30 films.

"Gallagher" had begun as an assignment for director Edward Buzzell (At the Circus, Go West, Song of the Thin Man, Neptune's Daughter) and development of the project was nearly complete by the time Frank Capra, then a promising director at Columbia, took over.

Harry Cohn and Frank Capra

Capra was on his way up in 1931, but still a few years away from the Oscar nominations and wins that would characterize his career. He had been scheduled to make Forbidden with Barbara Stanwyck but that project was shelved for the time being and he moved on to "Gallagher." Comparing the filmographies of Buzzell and Capra, this was fortuitous.

On loan to Columbia from RKO-Pathé to co-star in Forbidden was recent Broadway-to-Hollywood transplant Robert Williams. With that film on the shelf, Williams was cast as the male lead, a down to earth newspaperman and charmer named Stew Smith, in "Gallagher."


Harlow and Williams

 Williams had been on the New York stage for nearly ten years when Hollywood beckoned. He'd starred in a great hit of the era, "Abie's Irish Rose," the longest running play in Broadway history up to that time. In 1930 he was cast in Donald Ogden Stewart's "Rebound," which was just a moderate success. But sound had  permanently arrived, and Hollywood was desperate for stage plays, actors and writers. When RKO-Pathé bought the film rights to the play, Williams repeated his role in Rebound (1931) opposite Ina Claire. He was quickly cast in two more productions, The Common Law (1931) with Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea and Devotion (1931) with Ann Harding and Leslie Howard, and was considered "a new comedy sensation" when tapped for "Gallagher."
 
Another noteworthy contributor on the film was screenwriter Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take it With You, Lost Horizon) who, though credited only with the dialogue, reportedly penned the script that had captured Capra's attention early on. The combination of an appealing cast, an up-and-coming director along with well honed writing, delivered a box office hit - and a film that has been called Capra's most underrated.

By the time the picture was screened for its final preview audience, it had been retitled "The Gilded Cage," referring to protagonist Stew Smith's predicament and shifting focus from the Gallagher character. At the same time, a PR-fueled craze for peroxide-blonde hair swept the country and further heightened interest in bombshell Jean Harlow, recently tagged "the platinum blonde." Within a week of the last preview, the film had a new and lasting title, Platinum Blonde, though the plot had nothing to do with haircolor...

With Platinum Blonde Harlow became a star. A few months later The Beast of the City (1932) brought her first consistently good reviews and in April 1932, aided by the maneuvering of Paul Bern and Irving Thalberg, she signed a seven-year contract with MGM. Her first film for the preeminent studio was Red-Headed Woman (1932), and it was tailored to her style and personality with added emphasis on humor to soften the perception of overt sexuality. Jean Harlow made 13 more films for MGM, all of them popular, several of them classics, and was a top Hollywood star for the rest of her short life.

Loretta Young's acting career covered more than 75 years, but her ascent to stardom only began in earnest when she signed with 20th Century Fox in the mid-'30's. She won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in The Farmer's Daughter (1947) and later won three Best Actress Emmys for her 1950s TV anthology series.

Capra and Riskin went on to make a string of classic films together. It's significant that the primary characters and themes of Platinum Blonde would be revisited and refined in their later collaborations. The two men next worked on American Madness (1932) and then came Lady for a Day (1933) bringing Oscar nods to each of them. It was the following year, with It Happened One Night (1934), that Capra's and Riskin's reputations were made. The film won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writing/Adaptation. In his career, Riskin was nominated for a total of five Oscars, all were for Capra films. Capra was nominated for six Oscars and won three; all winning films were those on which he'd collaborated with Riskin. Their first success working together had been Platinum Blonde...

Robert Williams


I realized on first viewing Platinum Blonde that the standout performance and the heart of the film was the male lead. I wondered who Robert Williams was and why I hadn't seen his name before. He was enormously talented, facile, charismatic...and attractive enough to make the grade - yet I'd never heard of him. There was a very good reason.

When Platinum Blonde opened Williams received glowing reviews. He must have realized that he was about to break out, but he had little time to enjoy his new caché. Just as the film was opening, Williams took a trip to Catalina Island, a popular getaway for Hollywood folk in those days. While he was there his appendix ruptured and by the time he managed to return to the mainland and go into a hospital he'd developed peritonitis. He underwent surgery but died on November 3, four days after Platinum Blonde's release and on the same day Variety singled out his performance and predicted a promising future.


There isn't much available on YouTube from Platinum Blonde, but the scene below provides a moment of pre-Code mischief (if some of the dialogue seems politically incorrect remember, this film is 80 years old)...

TCM will air Platinum Blonde on Tuesday, March 29, 11:30pm Eastern/8:30pm Pacific

Loretta Young, Robert Williams, Jean Harlow

Darrell Rooney and Mark Vieira's new book Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928 - 1937 (click here to learn more) is scheduled for release in  March from Angel City Press.

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