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by Leatrice Gilbert Fountain

The daughter of romantic idol John Gilbert offers a sympathetic, fairly candid, but not-very-probing biography--which more or less blames his downfall on a conspiracy of sabotage masterminded by MGM's Louis B. Mayer. (It's a familiar theory--on view in Garson Kanin's trashy novel Moviola, in recent Mayer bios, and elsewhere.) Drawing, perhaps too uncritically, on her father's memoirs, Fountain sketches in Gilbert's early years: his ""spirit-crushing childhood"" with no father and a self-centered mother (a touring actress who frequently abandoned the boy); his storybook climb from teenage poverty to beginnings, as a gawky extra, in the silents (""If there was a heaven, Jack felt, it couldn't be more thrilling than this""); his rocky marriage to Fountain's mother, actress Leatrice Joy, who was the bigger draw at the start. Then comes Gilbert's mid-1920s burst of superstardom--from Elinor Glyn's His Hour through The Merry Widow, The Big Parade, Flesh and the Devil, and Love. The last two