Did Howard Hughes cost a starlet a plum part in “The Wizard of Oz”?
On the 75th anniversary of the Judy Garland classic, a new book revives the story that Helen Gilbert lost the role of Glinda the good witch to Billie Burke because of Gilbert’s dalliance with the eccentric billionaire.
Books and documentaries have long hashed over the film’s casting issues — some MGM executives wanted Shirley Temple, who couldn’t handle the songs, as Dorothy; W.C. Fields might have played the Wizard if he hadn’t asked for more money.
But Gilbert’s rarely rated more than a paragraph, like this one in David J. Hogan’s new “The Wizard of Oz FAQ”:
“Shortly after a young MGM contract player named Helen Gilbert was cast as Glinda, the inveterate girl-chaser Howard Hughes spirited her away for a fling…Gilbert was suspended, and the studio, which had been building her as a leading lady, allowed her contract to lapse after 1940.”
According to Hogan, a veteran film writer, “Hughes was always interested in attractive young actresses, and Gilbert was one of many,” he tells The Post. “In the eyes of MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, a contract actress who associated with Hughes was foolish and probably not deserving of star treatment.”
There’s no doubt MGM had high hopes for Gilbert — a cellist recruited from the studio orchestra because of her beauty.
She made her screen debut in 1939’s “Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever” as the drama teacher Andy Hardy develops a crush on.
She’s touted as “the new personality” in the trailer for that year’s “The Secret of Dr. Kildare,” playing a patient with “psychosomatic blindness” who catches Lew Ayres’ eye.
She was photographed at a December 1939 charity event in Los Angeles with Hughes — wearing a costume from “Florian,” a horse-racing drama that turned out to be her only lead role.
Just a month before, she won an uncontested divorce from composer Mischa Bakaleinikoff, the first of her seven husbands.
“What’s there about this acting business that nurtures interlocutory decrees?” asked a disapproving Hollywood columnist.
Even as her career waned, Gilbert remained a regular in gossip columns.
Louella Parsons one remarked cryptically that “something happened” to sour MGM’s interest in Gilbert — who, four years after “Oz,” was reduced to an unbilled bit as one of the girls in “The Trolley Song” in “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
Film historian Alicia Mayer says the studio may well have dropped Gilbert if she were fooling around with Hughes — though she doubts her great-uncle Louis B. Mayer would have been involved personally.
“I think by then MGM was a fairly sophisticated outfit and certainly if anyone was going to be difficult to work with, or they had displayed signs of instability, off they went,” Mayer e-mailed from Australia. “Who has time for that?”
Except for a nice featured role as a gangster’s moll in “The Falcon Takes Over” (1942), Gilbert was known mostly for dating actors and other high-profile men like Judy Garland’s agent, Victor Orsatti.
Her husbands included a restaurateur who died of a heart attack in Rome, where they had gone in a failed attempt to restart her acting career in 1948.
The following year, she was wed for five months to Johnny Stompanato, a gangster who years later was stabbed to death by the teenage daughter of his girlfriend, Lana Turner.
At their 1949 divorce hearing, Gilbert testified: “Johnny had no means. I did what I could to support him.”
A friendship with producer Alex Gordon finally yielded a brief comeback in 1956, when Gilbert, still beautiful, landed a juicy role in “Girls in Prison.”
Nothing more is known about the would-be Glinda, who died of cardiac arrest in Los Angeles, age 80, in 1995.