John Gilbert's Bugaboo (1932) 🇺🇸

These chapters from John’s past reveal, for the first time, a part of his personality which has been kept secret from the public. This revelation shows clearly why he cannot win back success, unless we — you and I — help him

by Jack Jamison

There were four half-starved extra boys living together in a seedy cottage in Culver City to save money. One of them later became a famous director, one became a star, and two disappeared. Three of them were healthy, normal, average American boys. The fourth, the one later to become a star of such magnitude as had almost never been known to the screen, the fourth was — screwy. When the others applied this inelegant but expressive adjective to him, they meant that somewhere in his head he had a screw loose. They were sure of it. Other adjectives which they frequently applied to him were bugs, nuts, batty, loco, sappy, and haywire.

He was their daily laugh. He was their twice-daily laugh. He was the poor sucker they kidded, and told tall tales to, and teased half out of his mind. He was the butt of their none-too-gentle practical jokes. He was the dummy, the feeder, the fall guy, the poor sap. He was — John Gilbert!

John Gilbert today is fighting to come back. The pictures he is making are not bad, but the public remains lukewarm, while worse actors in worse pictures are successful. They seem to miss something that they once found in John. What is it that has gone out of him? To find out, we must consider a page of his life that has never been allowed to reach print — the time when he was an extra boy.

The three other extras used to pretend to go out at night, and then sneak back and peek through the window at him. To be left alone in the house after dark terrified him. A cheap Sears-Roebuck pistol in his trembling hand, he drew his chair to the center of the room, where burglars and ghosts could scarcely approach unseen, and sat there with every light blazing. Another trick they played on him, once, was to lock the back door and hide the key. Then one boy Went outside, unseen by John, and rang the doorbell. Another, answering the door, started back in apparent fright and tried to slam the door shut, while the one outside, in a disguised voice, shouted: “You let me in! I’ll shoot that Gilbert’s black heart out! He can’t fool around my girl that way! Let me in! I’m going to kill him!” John, nearly mad with terror, almost wrenched the locked back door off its hinges. Still another time, the boys told him that they were positive he had a loathsome disease. John did not eat, did not sleep, for a whole month.

These incidents disclose a personality which has been concealed from the public always. You know why. If you had gone to a theater and seen John on the screen as a dashing hero, and known at the same time that he was afraid of the dark, nervous, panicky, fussy about his health, you wouldn’t have waited until you got home to laugh at him. Hero? “Huh, if he’s a hero then I’m Silly Willie,” you would have said: The quickest way to destroy a hero is to laugh at him. And — oh, yes — you would have laughed.

You would have laughed unless you, yourself, happen to be the one person in a thousand who can understand and sympathize with such a character ; unless you yourself happen always to have been a sensitive person looked down upon and jeered at by others. It would take that. We are not broad-minded enough. We laugh at things except when we have suffered them ourselves. Look back to your own school days, for instance. Wasn’t there a shy boy who couldn’t play baseball, who was awkward at marbles? Probably he wore glasses. You called him Four Eyes, and laughed at him. Ten to one he later became a famous engineer or lawyer or physician — but you laughed at him just the same, when he was a kid, because he was shy and sensitive and different. We’re all like that, and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We ought to pity people with such peculiarities, not mock them. It is not John Gilbert’s fault that he was born a sensitive child, and lived in an early environment which rooted deeply in him fears of the dark and such things.

If you will forgive this poring over the past, there is one more incident which throws light on John. When he came to Hollywood and became an extra, living for months and months on little more than hope, he was continually falling in love. Impetuous and flighty, when he was not in love with one extra girl, he was in love with another. For the biggest crush of all, he saved his meager earnings and bought a car — one of the old Saxons, so low that part of you dragged on the asphalt as you drove along the street, if you remember — in order to be able to take her home from the studio. The girl is nameless here, but John thought she was the big love of his life. Did the man who was later to be worshiped by a million women sweep the little extra girl off her feet with his wonderful new gasoline chariot? He did not. She turned him down cold. And — she laughed at him!... This is the point to remember, that for years and years, when he was an unknown in Hollywood, John Gilbert was despised and frustrated and kidded and laughed at.

Success came. Everyone knows about that. Almost never was there such a rush of popularity as greeted Gilbert when he started suddenly to climb. The Emperor of Emotions! What did success do to him? Around the studio he behaved like a crazy man. He had temperament with a vengeance. He flared into sudden rages. He was hysterical. He raged and shrieked when things went wrong. No one could get along with him, unless he was happy. You remember his fight with Jim Tully, for printing some of these things about him? No one could understand what was wrong with him. They said he was crazy, or faking a temperament. What was wrong with him? Any psychiatrist will recognize the symptoms. Give a beggar a million dollars, and he goes wild. That was it. John Gilbert, scorned by everyone from roommates to extra girls, was overnight a success. The recognition, the justification, were simply too much for him to stand. He had money, he had fame, he had power. The most desired of all women — Greta Garbo — was seen everywhere with him. He was the Emperor of Emotions. People could no longer laugh at him. He could get them fired if they did. Thousands of fans wrote him letters, women begging him to marry them, to write them a letter, even to send him a photo autographed in his name by a secretary. Where he had been the lowest of the low, now he was the highest of the high. Being what he was, John could not take it casually. He swaggered. He swaggered on Hollywood Boulevard, and he swaggered on home. Can you blame him? His popularity doubled again. It was that swagger which the public liked. Here was a brave man who took what he wanted, who was devil-may-care with the ladies and with life, who saw what hurdles lay in his path and laughed at them, who above all things was sure of himself! We all feel admiration for people who are sure of themselves. Older fans will recall that, in the days when Otis Skinner was a matinee idol, the chief reason why audiences adored him was his swagger, so much like Gilbert’s. Confidence! Self-confidence! John had it, all right. What the public never knew was that this was the first time in his life he had ever had it. It made a new man of him — the man the entire nation admired.

What happened then, everyone knows. The talkies came. The mike played tricks with John’s voice. He said “I love you,” and audiences from Shanghai to Le Havre laughed. If they had been angry, if they had been disgusted, if they had been bored — anything but laughter! The irony of it! The pitiableness and sheer tough luck of it! All his life John had been laughed at. Success brought him freedom from it for the first time. Anything else he could have stood; but laughter knocked all the support out from under him, took everything he had gained, and thrust him right back where he had started. One laugh — and he lost confidence in himself, got his inferiority complex back again, and no longer was able to muster the little swagger, the cocky twinkle in his eye, which captivated his fans. It was this swagger which went out of him. Laughter did it. That he could not bear. Anything but laughter! John, at the time, was a married man. It is quite possible that, had his wife been the right woman, she could have prevented the crashing destruction of his character which followed. She had only to sympathize with him, and tell him that she believed in him. What did she do, instead? Tough luck was piled on tough luck. Of all the things she might have done, she picked the one thing which made the ruin instantaneously complete. She laughed at him! That finished Jack.

How completely it finished him was determined by his personality. The Emperor of Emotions, they called him, and there was a good deal of truth in the title. John is a shell inside which moil the cross-currents of red-hot streams of the lava of emotion. He is all emotion; there is little else to him. He has no inheritance of conservatism, no counterbalance of common sense to check him. No amount of experience has been able to teach him caution, or reserve. As a gypsy might say, he is all heart line and no head line. His feelings rule him. When he smashed, he smashed into a million pieces. The thing dynamite is best known for is that it blows up.

The warm glow of confidence and cocksureness which seemed to come out from the screen, when John was at the height of his success, was that which comes from a man with limitless faith in himself. The incredible part of it — and these things are very delicate, and very hard to comprehend — was that it was not his own faith in himself, but ours. We had faith in him, and he felt it; and it was from that borrowed reservoir of strength that he drew his power. Remember the charming, jaunty chap who swaggered through Twelve Miles Out? Or the gallant, alert gentleman of Flesh and the Devil? That was the John Gilbert who was sure of himself because he sensed that you and I were sure of him. That was the John, in short, which you and I manufactured, with our own hands, by lending faith to a man who never in his life had had faith in himself before! He was our creation, as surely as Hamlet is Shakespeare’s! We made him, with our admiration and confidence and love. We broke him, with laughter.

And that we took away, with one sweep, the happiness and success we had given this man Gilbert, is one of the saddest things ever to happen in the cruel town of Hollywood.

Neither John nor the studio will like our telling all this here. John will think we are maliciously disclosing his weaknesses. If only he would realize it, such weaknesses are nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone has them. No one can help what he was born. The real truth is, he has had a terribly heavy dose of the hardest luck in the world. He received a foul. John thinks the public is still laughing at him. He would be surprised if he knew how many people are sorry for him, and think he got a dirty deal, and wish him all the luck in the world.

John can come back. What we want from him is the old self-sureness, the little swaggering walk, the twinkling-eyed wink at life. To give that to us once more, all John needs to do is build up a little confidence, a little faith, in himself!

There are only two people in the world who are able to give him back that faith.

You, and I.

(Top of page) As he looked at the time of his first success. He was playing in such pictures as His Hour and He Who Gets Slapped then.

(Center) In the swimming pool of the home which he built when he was the Emperor of Emotions.

(Lower) The John Gilbert of today. The twinkle and the swagger have gone. Can he regain them?

Since his first talkie failure, John has tried several different types of roles. His latest is cowboy stuff — in West of Broadway. But can he recapture that swagger? We hope so. You can help him.

Collection: Modern Screen Magazine, January 1932