Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 921 ASTOR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 921 ASTOR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 ASTOR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 921 ASTOR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In 1965, a young, up-and-coming illustrator by the name of Edward Sorel was living in a $97-a-month railroad flat on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Resolved to fix up the place, Sorel began pulling up the linoleum on his kitchen floor, tearing away layer after layer until he discovered a hidden treasure: issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936, each ablaze with a scandalous child custody trial taking place in Hollywood and starring the actress Mary Astor. Sorel forgot about his kitchen and lost himself in the story that had pushed Hitler and Franco off the front pages.
At the time of the trial, Mary Astor was still only a supporting player in movies, but enough of a star to make headlines when it came out that George S. Kaufman, then the most successful playwright on Broadway and a married man to boot, had been her lover. The scandal revolved around Mary's diary, which her ex-husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, had found when they were still together. Its incriminating contents had forced Mary to give up custody of their daughter in order to obtain a divorce. By 1936 she had decided to challenge the arrangement, even though Thorpe planned to use the diary to prove she was an unfit mother. Mary, he claimed, had not only kept a tally of all her extramarital affairs but graded them--and he'd already alerted the press. Enraptured by this sensational case and the actress at the heart of it, Sorel began a life-long obsession that now reaches its apex.
Featuring over sixty original illustrations, Mary Astor's Purple Diary narrates and illustrates the travails of the Oscar-winning actress alongside Sorel's own personal story of discovering an unlikely muse. Throughout, we get his wry take on all the juicy details of this particular slice of Hollywood Babylon, including Mary's life as a child star--her career in silent films began at age fourteen--presided over by her tyrannical father, Otto, who "managed" her full-time and treated his daughter like an ATM machine. Sorel also animates her teenage love affair with probably the biggest star of the silent era, the much older John Barrymore, who seduced her on the set of a movie and convinced her parents to allow her to be alone with him for private "acting lessons."
Sorel imbues Mary Astor's life with the kind of wit and eye for character that his art is famous for, but here he also emerges as a writer, creating a compassionate character study of Astor, a woman who ultimately achieved a life of independence after spending so much of it bullied by others.
Featuring ribald and rapturous art throughout, Mary Astor's Purple Diary is a passion project that becomes the masterpiece of one of America's greatest illustrators.
Author Notes
Edward Sorel is an illustrator, caricaturist, and cartoonist whose satires and pictorial essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, the Nation, and The New Yorker, for which he has done forty-six covers. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Acclaimed illustrator and writer Sorel (The Mural at the Waverly Inn: A Portrait of Greenwich Village Bohemians) shares his lifelong appreciation of classic film in this utterly charming, and colorfully illustrated, account of the life of Oscar-winning actor Mary Astor (1906-1987). Astor, best known for The Maltese Falcon (1941), lived a life that was often more fascinating than the roles she was offered. Despite being acclaimed both for her talent and beauty, she suffered several professional lows and endured one of the most scandalous episodes of 1930s Hollywood when her ex-husband stole her diary and used passages revealing her affairs to contest Astor's custody of their daughter. After coming across old tabloid newspapers detailing the trial, Sorel developed an obsession with Astor that has lasted for more than 50 years. In this succinct and poignant book, Sorel traces the trajectory of Astor's career as it melds with his own. She emerges as a troubled figure who struggled to navigate the choppy waters of success. The author's lively narrative and vibrant images gives the actor a new role as an artist's muse. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Prominent illustrator and cartoonist Sorel grew up in the Bronx during the Great Depression as a latchkey kid who entertained himself by drawing and going to the movies, passions that fuel this unique, witty, deeply involving illustrated chronicle of his long enthrallment with the movie star Mary Astor. His obsession was triggered in 1965 when he ripped up an old linoleum floor and discovered a layer of tabloid newspapers from 1936 recounting in screeching headlines Astor's scandalous custody battle for her daughter after her current husband got hold of her diary and its explicit record of her affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. Steeped in Astor's troubled life, Sorel recounts her monstrous parents' brutal exploitation of her beauty and talent, her initiation into acting and sex by John Barrymore, her disastrous marriages to cruel mooches, her love for Kaufman, her depression, her vicious prosecution, and her triumphant grace under pressure. Sorel deftly mixes in compelling episodes from his own life, including run-ins with the FBI and the impetus for the left-wing political satire in his famous work for the Nation, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. Sorel's writing is jaunty and affecting, and his jazzily dynamic and keenly expressive drawings masterfully capture the edginess and glamour of Astor's world as he brings the underappreciated actor back into the limelight with verve and empathy.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
life is so unfair. I tore up the old linoleum in a grungy apartment I rented years ago and found under it only schmutz, hardened chewing gum and a torn ticket stub to "Moose Murders." Ed Sorel tears up the old linoleum in his apartment and finds yellowing newspapers with headlines screaming about a scandal that gave him material for a terrific book. Not only does he then write a terrific book, but he illustrates it with his wonderful caricature drawings. Who would figure that Mary Astor's life would provide such entertaining reading, but in Sorel's colloquial, eccentric style, the tale he tells is juicy, funny and, in the end, touching. But why Mary Astor? Just because she happened to be under his linoleum? I mean I liked Mary Astor. I enjoyed seeing her up on the screen, but I never lost my heart to her the way Sorel has, and if it had been my linoleum she surfaced from, I wouldn't have felt driven to research all the interesting details that have mesmerized the author. To me, Mary Astor was a very good, solid actress but not the exciting equal of, say, Bette Davis or Vivien Leigh. (Who was the equal of Vivien Leigh?) And when Bogart, in "The Maltese Falcon," says his murdered partner was too smart a detective to follow a man he was shadowing up a blind alley but then tells Astor, "But he'd have gone up there with you, angel. ... He'd have looked you up and down and licked his lips and gone, grinning from ear to ear," I give this appraisal a lukewarm nod. The truth is I can think of a dozen other femmes fatales I'd prefer to be lured up a dark alley with to enjoy a beating or violent death. Even Sorel, who is so smitten with this movie star that he wants to see her put on a postage stamp, agrees she never achieved the sensual humidity of Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe. So what did Mary Astor have that such a good book could be written about her? Well, for one thing, she had a major scandal - and a torrid one at that. And while she may not have projected sex appeal, she did reek of aristocracy, or at least her name, Astor, smacked of the manor. Of course she was in no way related to the richest man who went down on the Titanic. Astor wasn't her real name. She was born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke, a name that would probably never even fit on the average movie marquee. And as we study Sorel's text, we are surprised to learn that the woman who played the warm, wise mother of daughters Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien in "Meet Me in St. Louis," the maternal presence who sang with her spouse in the film's Victorian parlor was in fact a foulmouthed, hard-drinking, sex-hungry carouser. Born to awful parents, a mother who never seemed to like her and a father who exploited her success financially, she developed acting aspirations early and was fortunately blessed not just with talent but great beauty. Just after turning 17, despite her pair of helicopter parents, she was already having a major affair with John Barrymore, who was hugely older than she, infinitely more experienced, a big league boozer and one of the greatest actors on the American stage. A partnering like theirs required clandestine meetings and stolen moments of passion; they met in hotel rooms, they made love. The affair, with its close calls and heavy breathing, is chronicled by Sorel with pace and humor. I used the word eccentric before to describe his storytelling style, and it includes delightful digressions into his own life experiences. He will suddenly leave the main shenanigans to describe personal anecdotes that somehow seem to add to and not distract from his narrative. In the midst of everything, he suddenly channels the departed Mary from the beyond and converses with her as she candidly reveals personal feelings in a novel interview. At first, Lucile Langhanke was doing some small acting, being noticed mainly for her looks. She soon winds up in the film capital and captures the imagination of Jesse Lasky, a studio big who wants to sign her for pictures. Lasky changes her unwieldy Teutonic birth name, and suddenly she is transmogrified by this Hollywood god into Mary Astor. At first she does small parts in undistinguished celluloid nonsense, but eventually she gains some traction and finds herself a promising actress running with the West Coast party set. As the affair with Barrymore has petered out, she dates, and takes up with a benign character named Glass, who held her interest for a while much to the consternation of her parents, whose influence she has trouble shaking. She drops Glass and meets Ken Hawks, the brother of the great director Howard Hawks. Him she marries, and while he proves companionable as a husband, from the get-go she notices a certain sluggish quality to his libido. Red-blooded herself, young Mary begins an affair with a producer who impregnates her. She doesn't want the baby, but an abortion would be a career meltdown given prevalent Catholic pressures. She enters some trickedout joint that advertises what they call "therapeutic treatment" but in fact is a cover for the necessary surgery to send her home appropriately pristine. Cut back to Ken Hawks, her amiable milchidik bedmate who is directing an airplane epic, and wouldn't you know it, while shooting a flying scene, his own plane crashes and Mary is a widow. Devastated, she is helped in her grief by movie colony friends like Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, by Edward Everett Horton and other familiar onscreen faces because she is by now a regular working actress in the movie community. All the above and the lurid drama about to unfold are recounted by Sorel in much livelier fashion than my own little sketch-in of events, and his drawings beef up the flavor of the environment he depicts. Mary is sad, she drinks, she works, and eventually meets a doctor named Franklyn Thorpe. Thorpe is a jazzy L.A. medic, in fact, doctor to the stars with a celebrated clientele. He and Mary marry, and in time, although they have a child together, Dr. Thorpe apparently fails the trial by mattress that seems to trip up certain men in Mary's life. Sorel notes she makes bad choices, and Thorpe is one of them. But while married life between the percales is again humdrum and the relationship is deteriorating, her career is now ascending, and she lands a choice part in the film version of the hit Broadway play "Dodsworth." One of the stars is the wonderful Walter Huston, and playing his wife is Ruth Chatterton. Mary is the third of the illustrious cast, a prestige score for her. At this point she would really like to be rid of her husband, and who can blame her? His practice has fallen off, and he is dependent on Mary's fame and fortune for status, much the same as her parasite father was. Dr. Thorpe does not relish the idea of a divorce, and the pair drone on in limbo, paralyzed by those twin gods of failing matrimony, Fear and Inertia. Then comes a trip to New York for Mary, away from her husband. Her hormones tintinnabulating as usual, one senses the critical mass for playing around has been reached. In New York she is introduced by Bennett Cerf to George S. Kaufman, the most successful comic playwright on Broadway. As much as I love Kaufman and grew up idolizing his inspiration and craftsmanship, I would not rank him Adonis-wise with, say, Clark Gable or Gary Cooper. Despite his brilliant mind and directorial skills, I have to say he was basically a nerdy-looking, professorial type of Jew, complete with standard tribal hooter and the natural blessing of wit common to his people. Behind his long, gloomy face and spectacles this man could never be mistaken for a boudoir mechanic. In fact, Kaufman was a terrified germophobe, and here we see how deep kissing with a hot partner always trumps bacteria. Kaufman swept Mary off her feet. In addition to taking her to empyrean heights in bed, he took her to the theater, to the opera, to "21" and the fabled Algonquin Round Table for lunches alongside Woollcott, Benchley and viper-sharp Dorothy Parker. Another pleasure of the book that Sorel treated me to is a quote of Dorothy Parker's I never came across before, and I am a devoted Algonquin fan. Apparently disgusted with the trash the Hollywood studios turned out, Miss Parker quipped that MGM stood for "Metro-Goldwyn-Merde." He also quotes Lillian Heilman's great description of a vacuous actress: "Her face is unclouded by thought." So here is our heroine, miserably unhappy in her marriage, doing New York with Groucho Marx's favorite comedy writer, and that's saying a lot for Kaufman. When the clock strikes midnight and she must return to California, she presses her husband for that divorce but Thorpe remains intransigent. Opposing lawyers take up arms, and a custody fight ensues for the Thorpes' only child. The doctor uses the daughter as a weapon to prevent Mary from leaving him. He claims she is unfit as a mother to have possession of their child, and as proof, he says she is a flagrant adulteress. To bear that out, he offers up her diary. Oy vey, there's a diary. Can you believe this woman committed those four-times-a-night workouts with Kaufman to print and, worse, her husband has somehow secured said raunchy volume? In it are graphic accounts of the sex between this married mother and another woman's spouse. Yes, Kaufman too was a married man, and as the first accounts of their purple canoodling hit the tabloids, the court fight turns into a blood bath. Of course it must be said Kaufman and his wife Beatrice had an open marriage, which meant both were free to explore their own romantic adventures without threat to the household. While these ground rules make cheating a nonissue for Kaufman, the public embarrassment of having one's every fondle logged rhapsodically, even with an A-plus report card, can make a man somewhat self-conscious entering a restaurant. Also the level of sophistication required to appreciate Kaufman's type of freeloving arrangement with his wife reads like Swahili to Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, and the Porches were precisely who kept the nation's motion picture industry solvent. Many a Beverly Hills swimming pool was dependent on popcorn sold in the Bible Belt. On top of this, our heroine was still in the middle of filming "Dodsworth," her big opportunity to move up in class. Suddenly the studio looks around and realizes they have a very heavy financial investment in a movie featuring a tabloid adulteress doing a laundry list of abominations with a libertine New York husband whose ancestors were slaves to Pharaoh, if you get my meaning. The panicky moguls hear certain church fathers float the word boycott. They begin to smell box office leprosy. After all, the American public was at that time such a clean public, such a naive nation of holier-than-thou prudes. Think about how demonstrably upset even in much more liberal years people were during the making of "Cleopatra" when Richard Burton was fooling around on the set with succulent Liz Taylor while she was still married. Now imagine you're Sam Goldwyn sitting on top of his liability with half a movie in the can and one of the stars is suddenly famously wicked. What would you do? Goldwyn did what any businessman in crisis mode would do. He called a meeting. Should they fire Mary, eat the money already spent filming half a movie, recast and begin again? Do they scrap the whole project altogether and flush away production costs plus the numerous bucks they shelled out to buy the rights? Meanwhile, as the tabloids ran excerpts from the portion of the diary allowed in evidence, many a celebrity sweated audibly over the nightmare that he might wind up doing a walk-on part in the next installment of Astor's caloric hanky-panky. Fortunately for all, the judge on the case was into the studio heads for several career favors, and at this point I will bail and refer you to Sorel's book for an account of how things turned out, which he does much better than I ever could. It is, of course, common knowledge that Mary did go on eventually to do "The Maltese Falcon" and "Meet Me in St. Louis," two great American movies, and she was quite effective in the disparate roles. She continued to act, she retired, wrote books that hit the best-seller lists and in a moving finale to this whole mishegas, she gets done in by the demon rum, the ravages of age and the toll of a life lived on an emotional trampoline. Her last days are spent in an actors' retirement home, a very lovely one with individual cottages. There is much good companionship available there, but she mostly chooses to dine alone and to be by herself. She dies in bed peacefully, leaving behind a legacy of fine movie performances. I believe it was Sartre who said all lives were of equal value and who am I to argue the point, but some lives are so much more fun to read about than others, and Sorel has told Astor's story with great flair and energy. I hope he gets his wish and over time Mary winds up commemorated on a postage stamp. Until then, I'm going to have another look under my linoleum. Maybe among all that schmutz there's an idea I could take to the bank. ? A Hollywood star with a love life that provided endless fodder for the tabloids. woody allen is a writer and director, most recently of the film "Café Society."
Library Journal Review
Illustrator/cartoonist/caricaturist Sorel's new book is part memoir, part Tinseltown tell-all, part graphic novel, and part love letter to American actress Mary Astor (1906-87), whose most famous role was alongside Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Her greatest offscreen role was as sexual adventuress, when her husband discovered her "purple diary" (actually, Sorel tells us, the ink was brown) going into great detail about her affair with New York-based playwright George S. Kaufman. When -Astor sued for custody of their daughter, her aggrieved husband leaked the diary to the press, and the "sex scandal of 1936" was on. Thirty years after the trial, young illustrator Sorel finds wrinkled newspapers covering the case under the linoleum in his kitchen and an obsession is born. Using his slightly frenetic drawing style, which will be familiar to readers of the New York Observer, the Nation, and many other publications, the author recounts his and Astor's semicommingled life stories. VERDICT Sorel doesn't quite crack his love object's façade, but his reportage and drawings are enjoyable and evocative. Especially recommended for those who've heard about the sex scandal of 1936 but also for fans of intelligent graphic novels such as Jules Feiffer's Kill My Mother and Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?-Liz French, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.