Mary Astor

Mary Astor wrote two biographies. My Story: An Autobiography was exactly what it sounds like. It was Astor explaining the history of her life, and it was quite a life. We’ll be getting to it soon. But people who wanted to know about the movies, which are apparently not covered in it, were unhappy. So eight years later—after having published four novels, incidentally—she wrote A Life on Film. This was just about the movies and didn’t cover the autobiographical stuff at all. It seems a nice balance, and why not follow her example?

Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke was born in Quincy, Illinois, 120 years ago tomorrow. Her father was a German immigrant who worked teaching the language in the local high school; her mother was of Portuguese descent and taught drama and elocution. Her parents homeschooled her. The family moved to Chicago and then New York to benefit her career, all while she was still a teenager. In 1923, they moved to California. At age seventeen, she became engaged to John Barrymore, but her parents controlled her life completely and the couple never wed. She was married four times, first to Kenneth Hawks—brother of Howard—and had two children. The custody battle over her daughter was brutal. She was by then an alcoholic.

One of the lesser-known details of her life is that she was actually a relatively successful writer. She wrote a total of five novels over the years, mostly between her two autobiographies, though one was after. Her first novel, The Incredible Charlie Carewe, is a truly bonkers-sounding novel about a sociopath. I can’t find plots for all of them, but for some mysterious reason she seems to have been drawn to the darker aspects of human nature. Can’t imagine where that came from.

Meanwhile, she had herself been trying to get a career started by the time she was thirteen. She moved to Hollywood because she contracted to Paramount Pictures, and Jesse Lasky, Walter Wanger, and Louella Parsons chose the name Mary Astor for her. She got started in silent pictures, but of course her best-known picture would be 1941’s The Maltese Falcon. She took a hated MGM contract where she mostly played what she called “Mothers for MGM.” She did some TV and some stage, and she ended her career with a critically acclaimed turn in Return to Peyton Place and a bit part in Hush . . . Hush Sweet Charlotte.

There’s barely any time to get into the truly fascinating aspect of her life and career. I’ve been toying for years with the idea of expanding a dozen or two essays from this series into book chapters, and my Gods is Astor rich for that treatment. I’d want to read both her autobiographies and at least one of her novels, first, but goodness she had a dark and sad life. And she was a talented actress, too, who was never given the roles she was so skilled at for much of her career. All of that and she’s practically forgotten today. Poor woman.