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PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE FOR SEPTEMBER
Stars Are Human After All
[ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25 J
I NEVER knew the John Gilbert who passed away recently, any more than I know the Jean Harlow that the movie press agents and chatter columnists have stamped with a Hollywood pattern — that is, with all eyes directly on the box office.
I never knew the John Gilbert they said was a lonely hermit in a great house high on a hill. Despite our long friendship, I could not get to know that Jack Gilbert. None of us could, although many of the "old gang" tried to break through the fence he built around himself. We couldn't very often get inside. The fence was nebulous, but most of the time, during the last two years, we couldn't find any gate.
But I did know the merry and marvelous Jack Gilbert with whom I once lived in that house on the hill; the Jack of "Jack and Paul and Carey" who lived together ten years ago in a bungalow that was alternately a madhouse and a haven.
To know that Jack was to identify him by an incoherent flood of unrelated incidents — the things Jack did or said that were so completely Jack. For instance, the Jack Gilbert to whom the late Paul Bern went to ask a favor. Not for himself, of course, for when Paul requested a favor it was always for someone else, and seldom did he tell you whom he wanted to help.
Few ever heard of this particular case. It appears that one who had been high in the favor of the cinema gods, rich, famous, and generous, had fallen into evil times. He was in New York and needed a thousand dollars So he promptly telegraphed Paul Bern.
Everybody always telegraphed or telephoned Paul when they needed money. Now, at the moment — or rather for the week — Paul's finances were temporarily shattered by another heavy demand on his ever generous checkbook.
So Paul hied himself to Jack, concocted a hair-raising story of disaster that would happen to himself, Paul Bern, if he did not secure a thousand dollars within the hour.
Jack did not hesitate a second. He walked to his desk, wrote out a check and stuffed it into Paul's hand. "Get yourself out of the jam, old kid," he said.
A week later Paul's own liberal salary provided the wherewithal to pay back the thousand dollars. But, in the meantime, someone had told Jack of Paul's charitable deception. So Jack accepted Paul's check and immediately tore it up. " When he pays you, Paul," he said, "then you pay me."
That was the Jack I knew.
I'VE heard — and I've read — of a vague, 'mysterious, almost legendary figure. Garbo, the myth of myths in a thoroughly mythical kingdom. The famed female whose prestige is so anchored in the granite bedrock of tradition that she alone is identified completely by the two simple syllables of her surname.
Garbo, the elusive! Garbo, the shy! Garbo, whose most popularly credited phrase would seem to be: "I tank I go home now."
I never knew that Garbo. I did know — and do know — a fascinatingly young and primitive creature whose pet nickname used to be, and probably still is, a broad American pronuncia