“Leatrice is the name my mother gave me. She made it up all by herself. She liked the name ‘Beatrice’ because it means ‘blessing from God’ — Dante’s Beatrice, you know. But my father once had a girl friend named Beatrice, so my mother didn’t want to call her that, no matter how much I came from God. So she went down the alphabet until she came to a letter combination she liked. She settled on ‘L — Leatrice.’ The name, ‘Joy,’ was my mother’s family name.” — Leatrice Joy. (Source: Columnist Robert McMorris in 1968)
In 1922, her mother claimed that she chose the ‘L’ because it was the first letter in ‘Love.’
After Joy married John Gilbert, the couple named their daughter, Leatrice Joy Gilbert. Newspapers frequently referred to the child as Leatrice Joy II.
Fans also began to name their own daughters after their idol. In 1930, Joy told the San Diego Union that she “used to send little gold medallions inscribed ‘To Leatrice Joy from Leatrice Joy,’ and I still do. Why I’ll bet if you could string all those medallions together, they’d stretch around the world or something.”
“It’s a great question when you come into a little success whether to be yourself or to be someone else. So many girls seem to find relief in accepted speech and affectations. But I think they do not realize that in remodeling themselves to fit success they may be destroying the very qualities that gained it for them. It seems a little silly, and such a lot of trouble.” — Leatrice Joy in 1922.
Source: Willis Goldbeck
A lobby card for You Can’t Fool Your Wife (1923)
Vanity (1927)
