Symphony to Screen John Gilbert Classic : Daughter Speaks Up About a Silent Legend

Leatrice Gilbert Fountain has never had much faith in the Hollywood gossip mill, which for more than 50 years has been grinding out all sorts of nasty stories about her father, silent-screen star John Gilbert.

In the 1920s, Gilbert was as big a box office star as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and he was paid more money per film than even the legendary Rudolph Valentino. He starred in more than 80 silent movies, including the classics “The Merry Widow,” “The Big Parade,” and “Flesh and the Devil,” one of the four movies in which he co-starred with his off-screen lover Greta Garbo.

But when Gilbert died in 1936, seven years after he had failed to make the transition from silent to talking pictures, he was a has-been with a tarnished legacy. According to Hollywood lore, Gilbert’s career was undone by a squeaky falsetto voice that belied his romantic screen image.

“Here was this great silent-screen lover, and all of a sudden (when) he opened his mouth, a little canary voice came out, and his movie career was finished,” said Fountain, Gilbert’s daughter by actress Leatrice Joy.

“My mother and I, however, remembered him as having a perfectly light baritone . . . “ she said. “So the more we heard people talking about how my father was a victim of his voice, the more we wondered about what really happened.”

Fountain will be in San Diego Saturday evening for the screening of “Flesh and the Devil,” the second selection in the San Diego Symphony’s Nickelodeon Concert series. The symphony, conducted by Carl Daehler and featuring organist Dennis James, will perform the original musical score for the film classic.

Before Saturday’s screening/concert, Fountain, 63, will discuss her father and her personal mission 15 years ago to Hollywood to learn the truth of his fall from grace. What she learned, mostly from interviews with people who knew him, became the basis of her 1985 book, “Dark Star--The Untold Story of the Meteoric Rise and Fall of the Legendary John Gilbert.”

“What I discovered in the course of my research,” Fountain said in a phone interview from her home in Connecticut, “is that my father’s career came to an end not because of his voice, but because of the immense hatred (of him by) Louis B. Mayer, the head of my father’s studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”

That hatred, Fountain said, was prompted by Gilbert’s refusal to give Mayer “the kind of deference he demanded from his actors and actresses.”

As a result, she said, the fiery MGM studio chief vowed to destroy Gilbert’s career--and with the advent of talkies in 1929, he finally found a way. Fountain believes Mayer deliberately tampered with the sound track to Gilbert’s first talkie, “His Glorious Night,” to make the actor’s voice sound laughably high-pitched.

“I never could prove that’s what happened,” Fountain said. “But I do know that when my father’s performance in ‘His Glorious Night’ was panned by critics, Mayer came home, threw the bad reviews on the table, and told his family, ‘That should show Mr. Gilbert.’

“It certainly did, because from that point on, my father’s career went down, down, down. The only roles he could get were in little potboiler movies that were given no publicity, and eventually he was just ground to death.”

Fountain said she learned about the San Diego Symphony’s Nickelodeon series presentation of “Flesh and the Devil” from a letter written to her by a retired La Costa schoolteacher.

“I immediately contacted the symphony and told them that I would love to be involved in some way,” she said.

Fountain added that there has been a resurgence of interest in her father since her book came out. His movies show up more often on television, and the John Gilbert Fan Club--first established in 1926--has been revived and now has more than 150 members.

“Flesh and the Devil,” released by MGM in 1927, is based on the book “The Undying Past” by German author Hermann Sudermann. It tells the story of two young officers in the German army “who have this lifelong friendship, and then in between them comes the devil in the guise of a beautiful woman who tempts them both,” Fountain said.

The film, noted for its revolutionary lighting techniques, broke all previous box-office records within two weeks of its release, and solidified the popularity of both Gilbert and Garbo with American moviegoers.

As in all silent movies, Fountain said, the musical score for “Flesh and the Devil” is every bit as important as the visuals.

“When they first came out, silent movies were never silent,” she said. “There was always an orchestra in big theaters and a string ensemble, or at least an organist, in smaller ones. Music helps you bridge the gap between the image on the screen and the image in your mind. It steers your emotions; it directs you to what’s going on.

“That’s why even today, there’s more music than dialogue in most movies.”

Fountain, who was born in 1924, never had the chance to really get to know her father. He had divorced her mother when she was a year old, and he died when she was 11.

“He was like a fairy prince,” she recalled. “He would suddenly appear at birthdays and at Christmas and bring gifts, and from time to time I would run into him on Malibu Beach, where my mother and he both had houses.”

For a brief time, Fountain toyed with an acting career herself. As an MGM starlet in the 1930s and early ‘40s, she had bit parts in several major motion pictures, including “Of Human Hearts,” which starred Jimmy Stewart.

But after World War II, she said, she turned her back on Hollywood in favor of a less-glamorous life as a housewife, mother and short-story writer.

“You have to be very tough to become a big star,” Fountain said, “and I guess I just didn’t want it that badly--particularly since it hadn’t made my father’s life very happy.”