"After I read her memoirs and realized she had a gift for writing, I really fell for her. I decided to become her champion...She wasn't even a huge star, and that in itself made me want to shine a light on her. Then, too, the fluky way in which I found out about the scandal led me to believe that I was somehow fated to be the keeper of her flame. She was a great actress, and dammit--I want to see her on a goddamn postage stamp!!"
The author is a cartoonist who got really, really obsessed with the life story of Mary Astor, particularly the scandal of her second divorce/child custody trial, in which her diary was waved around like a big ol' threat. Per his day job, he throws in a fair number of cartoons he drew of the scandal, and mixes in his personal fascination of Mary's life with the occasional aside as to how he first married a woman he didn't love, got divorced, and married happily a second time. The author's writing style is dishy as heck, which makes it worth reading.
Though I am ah...wondering about the chapter in which he supposedly held a seance to talk with Mary herself from beyond the grave about her sexytime with George Kaufman. I note that in the acknowledgements, he mentions "the chapter where I imagine meeting Mary Astor," and having a friend "conjuring the actress out of a guy from the Bronx," which I will always wonder about.
It's pretty short, and Mary definitely did not have a happy life or marital relationship (sounds like the first husband, who didn't want to have sex, was the best of the bunch), and she drank and drank and drank. Awww.
(Wondering what the diary was like? Oh look, excerpt.)
Here's some quotes so you get the idea of what I mean by the writer's style:
- "Forty years after my fascination with Mary began, I still cannot fathom her desire to simply play the bourgeois wifey and breed. Did she really have no ambition? No respect for her talent or profession? No curiosity to find out what she was capable of?"
- "Cursed with the world's foremost fixation on Mary Astor, I had to know more about what happened during that trip than the bowdlerized version she presented in her memoir...I decided the only thing to do was to channel her in Catholic heaven."
- "I was appalled at Mary's inability to protect her daughter from that hate-filled scene. Where was the ferocity she would show with Peter Lorre in Falcon, when she kicks him in the shins? How could she sit silently while her terrified daughter was forced to witness the hatred her parents now had for each other? Why was Mary powerless everywhere except on a movie soundstage?" (Me: "Because movies aren't real and this was real life?")
- "As for the diary, its final disposition rested with the court. "It is part of the agreement," said Thorpe's attorney, "that no one, save the litigants, their counsel, and the court, will ever know what became of that diary. It will remain a mystery." ... "In 1952 Mary's diary and its copy were removed by court order from the bank vault where it had sat for sixteen years, and, with a judge standing by, the pages were set aflame and turned to ashes."
It's short, but dishy and entertaining for what you get. Alas, I don't feel like I'm doing this book justice in the review, so read this one instead, it's better. Overall I give it 3.5 stars but only because I wanted more. It's fun.
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