Then she was set for a New Haven opening of a play which she was tackling after a long absence from the stage and which she didn’t much care for. Her death from sleeping pills was called suicide and blamed on the fact that she didn’t want to open, while Equity rules insisted that she should. Cathleen Nesbitt, who had helped her in the part, could not accept that verdict. “I am as sure as I sit here,” she told me later, “that it was an accident for Maggie.”
But there was no doubt that the second daughter, Bridget, whom Margaret bore Leland Hayward, died of her own choice.
In December 1950, Henry Fonda took his third wife, Susan Blanchard, stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II and mother of Hank’s third child, Amy. The divorce came five years later. In 1957 he married for the fourth time. We see very little of his wife, the former Baroness Afdera Franchetti. She doesn’t particularly care for Hollywood.
One more bit of tragedy hovers over Hank. His best part in years was in Mr. Roberts, whose author, Thomas Heggen, he knew and liked. Thomas Heggen decided life was not worth living, too, after the play was a great success.
What her family means to Jane Fonda, only she could tell. She saw very little of her mother, was brought up by her grandmother, whom she adored. Jane went to the Actors’ Studio to study, tackled her own movie career like a she-wolf. She claimed, understandably perhaps, that marriage had no part in her plans. She could manage very well, she told me, without love in her life. When I wrote a column about her, her father telephoned. “I have no control over my daughter,” he said. “But when the right fellow comes along, she’ll marry him. She’s a very smart girl and likes to make headlines.”
One smart girl used to bring documents to me from the J. Walter Thompson agency in Los Angeles not long ago. I hadn’t heard her name until she said: “I don’t think you know it, but I’m John Gilbert’s daughter. I didn’t know my father—he died before I could remember him.”
I thought to myself that I would never forget the screen’s great lover, destroyed as an actor on the sound stage when the talkies came in. Jack’s first talking picture, His Glorious Night, was directed by Lionel Barrymore. I was in it. Jack’s first words were: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” In forming these words, his mouth and nose came together almost like a parrot’s beak. I used to see the glee on Lionel’s face as he watched Gilbert. Lionel was suffering painfully from arthritis, and by four o’clock any afternoon he could scarcely get out of his chair. If anybody tried to help him he’d knock their hands away and yell: “What’s the matter with you? Do you think I’m sick?”
That picture destroyed Jack Gilbert. He was honeymooning abroad with Ina Claire when he lost all his money in the crash of ’29. The day they landed in New York, the picture opened. He went to see it. With the opening sentence the audience started to laugh, and he crept out of the theater like a man condemned to the electric chair.
While he was abroad, the studio had built him a beautiful bungalow and raised his salary to $5000 a week. After his return, when executives saw him coming, they crossed to the other side of the street. They gave him miserable, inconsequential pictures which he did. But he never survived the hurt.
I said to his daughter: “Have you seen your father in any movies?” wondering if she knew that Jack had been desperately in love with Garbo, who was fond of him but would never marry him, for the love of her life was Maurice Stiller.