Dark Star

London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Near Fine in Near Fine dj. 1985. 1st UK edition. Hardcover. [nice clean book, upper corners bumped but no other significant wear, small bookseller's stamp on front endpaper (Larry Edmunds Cinema Bookshop); jacket lightly worn, slightly bumped at the upper extremities]. (B&W photographs) A biography, by his daughter, of the silent screen idol John Gilbert -- he whose career famously (or perhaps one should say mythologically) went rapidly downhill after the advent of the talkies, allegedly due to his insufficiently manly speaking voice. All nonsense, says his daughter, whose premise (per the jacket copy) is that his "career declined not because of his unsuitability for talking pictures (he spoke in a light baritone) but because of the implacable hatred of Louis B. Mayer, the tyrannical head of MGM," who deliberately destroyed Gilbert's career due to their clashes "over artistic and personal differences." .