Astor, Mary (1906–1987)

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Astor, Mary (1906–1987)

Urbane American actress, best known for her courtroom battle for child custody and her role as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, on May 3, 1906; died of complications from emphysema on September 25, 1987, in Los Angeles, California;daughter of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen (Vasconcells); married Kenneth Hawks (producer; brother of Howard Hawks), February 24, 1928 (died in a plane crash on January 2, 1930, while on a film assignment); married Franklyn Thorpe (a gynecologist), on June 29, 1931 (divorced 1935); married Manuel del Campo, in 1937 (divorced 1941); married Thomas Gordon Wheelock (a stockbroker), on December 24, 1945 (separated 1951, divorced 1955); children: (second marriage) Marylyn Hauoli (b. June 15, 1932); (third marriage) Anthony Paul (b. June 5, 1939).

Filmography—silents:

Sentimental Tommy (her role was lost in the cutting room); The Beggar Maid (2-reel art film, 1921); The Young Painter (2-reel art film, 1921); The Man Who Played God (UA, 1922); John Smith (Selznick, 1922); Bought and Paid For (1922, directed by William C. DeMille); The Bright Shawl (1923); Second Fiddle (1923); Success (MGM, 1923); The Marriage Maker (Paramount, 1923); Puritan Passions (1923); The Rapids (1923); Woman-Proof (Par., 1923); The Fighting Coward (Par., 1924); Beau Brummel (WB, 1924); The Fighting American (Universal, 1924); Unguarded Women (Par., 1924); The Price of a Party (1924); Inez from Hollywood (First National, 1924); Enticement (1924); Oh Doctor! (Universal, 1925); Don Q, Son of Zorro (UA, 1925); The Pace that Thrills (FN, 1925); Playing with Souls (FN, 1925); The Scarlet Saint (FN, 1925); Don Juan (1926); High Steppers (FN, 1926); The Wise Guy (FN, 1926); Forever After (1926); The Rough Riders (Par., 1926); The Sea Tiger (FN, 1927); Sunset Derby (FN, 1927); Rose of the Golden West (FN, 1927); Two Arabian Nights (UA, directed by Howard Hughes, 1927); No Place to Go (FN, 1927); Sailors' Wives (1927); Three-Ring Marriage (FN, 1928); Dressed to Kill (Fox, 1928); Once There Was a Princess (1928); Heart to Heart (1928); Romance of the Underworld (Fox, 1928); Dry Martini (Fox, 1928); New Year's Eve (Fox, 1929); The Woman from Hell (Fox, 1929).

Sound:

Ladies Love Brutes (Par., 1929); The Runaway Bride (RKO, 1929); Holiday (with Ann Harding, RKO, 1930); The Lash (FN, 1931); Smart Woman (RKO, 1931); The Sin Ship (RKO, 1931); Other Men's Women (WB, 1931); White Shoulders (RKO, 1931); The Royal Bed (RKO, 1931); The Lost Squadron (RKO, 1932); Men of Chance (RKO, 1932); A Successful Calamity (WB, 1932); Those We Love (World Wide, 1932); The Dark Tower (screenplay by George S. Kaufman, 1932); Red Dust (MGM, 1932); The Little Giant (FN, 1933); Jennie Gerhardt (Par., 1933); Convention City (FN, 1933); The Kennel Murder Case (WB, 1933); The World Changes (FN, 1933); Easy to Love (WB, 1934); Upperworld (WB, 1934); Return of the Terror (FN-WB, 1934); The Man with Two Faces (FN, 1934); The Case of the Howling Dog (WB, 1934); I Am a Thief (WB, 1935); Red Hot Tires (WB, 1935); Straight from the Heart (Universal, 1935); Dinky (WB, 1935); Page Miss Glory (WB, 1935); Man of Iron (WB, 1935); The Murder of Dr. Harrigan (FN, 1936); And So They Were Married (Columbia, 1936); Trapped by Television (Columbia, 1936); Dodsworth (UA, 1936); Lady from Nowhere (Columbia, 1936); Prisoner of Zenda (UA, 1937); The Hurricane (UA, 1937); Paradise for Three (MGM, 1938); No Time to Marry (Columbia, 1938); There's Always a Woman (Columbia, 1938); Woman Against Woman (MGM, 1938); Listen, Darling (MGM, 1938); Midnight (Par., 1939, with Claudette Colbert); Brigham Young—Frontiersman (Fox, 1940); The Great Lie (WB, 1941); The Maltese Falcon (WB, 1941); Across the Pacific (WB, 1942); The Palm Beach Story (Par., 1942); Thousands Cheer (MGM, 1943); Young Ideas (MGM, 1943); Blonde Fever (MGM, 1944); Meet Me in St. Louis (MGM, 1944); Claudia and David (Fox, 1946); Fiesta (MGM, 1947); Cynthia (MGM, 1947); Desert Fury (Par., 1947); Cass Timber-lane (MGM, 1947); Act of Violence (MGM, 1949); Little Women (MGM, 1949); Any Number Can Play (MGM, 1949); A Kiss before Dying (UA, 1956); The Power and the Prize (MGM, 1956); The Devil's Hairpin (Par., 1957); This Happy Feeling (Universal, 1958); Stranger in My Arms (Universal, 1959); Return to Peyton Place (Fox, 1961); Youngblood Hawke (WB, 1964); Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Fox, 1965).

"I became a valuable piece of property to my parents, closely guarded, closely watched," wrote Mary Astor in the highly successful autobiography My Story. "The nun cloistered in a convent is trained in character, … the closely guarded young girl of European countries is trained for womanhood and marriage. For me there was no goal—except tomorrow's movie job."

Born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois, in 1906, Mary Astor was the daughter of a jealous mother, whose quarrels with her husband were inevitably "about the baby," and a frustrated, ambitious father, whose idea of success was always out of reach. Hers was a solitary childhood; the household was tense and took its cue from Otto Langhanke's moods and grandiose schemes. She was their only child.

When Astor was seven, the family moved from their tiny flat over a saloon in Quincy to a large Victorian farmhouse, where Otto taught German and worked at another of his "Great Ideas," creating a magnificent "Edel-weiss Poultry Farm." The next four years were

blessed, wrote Astor, but with the onset of the First World War, her father's pro-German sympathies cost him his job; his textbook on the study of German could not find a publisher; and his daughter's echoing of his view ("The Germans'll win, the Germans'll win")—along with her perfectly brushed curls—cost Astor her grade-school popularity. As a child, she was usually the cause of her father's irritation. His harangue would start at the dinner table, wrote Astor, "and Mother and I would eat as unobtrusively as possible, our eyes on our plates, and at the close of the meal, after Daddy had stormed out, we would wordlessly do the dishes."

When the poultry business failed, Otto's daughter became the next enterprise. He decided she was to be a great musician. A piano was purchased, a teacher hired. The lessons went well enough, but the practice was an ordeal for Astor. "My nerves jangled at the loud, sharp 'No!' from another room if I missed the lift of a phrase," she wrote. "I sat on edge, waiting for the caustic … 'Can't you get some life into it?'" At the end of the war in 1916, the family moved back to town, where the piano practice continued. Fortunately, her father became aware that the regimen was wearing her down. She recalls him asking gently, "Don't you want to be somebody?":

"Daddy," I said, "I am somebody, I am myself."
"Well, what do you want to do then? …"
"I just want to grow up, and go to high school and maybe Gem City Business College. I want to work a little, and then get married and have children."
The heavens and earth opened in wrath; fire and brimstone rained down on my head. I was lectured as I had never been lectured before; I was shaken with a violence and fury that I had never seen in my father in even his worst moods…. It was the end of any possible un derstanding between my father and me.

It was also the end of her saying "no" to his demands for a long, long time.

On a whim, along with a friend, Astor entered a film-fan magazine competition with Brewster Publications, publisher of Shadowland and Motion Picture Magazine. At year's end, four finalists would be selected from the monthly winners for screen tests; one would get a studio contract. When Astor was a monthly finalist, among a list of eight, Otto Langhanke pulled her out of school and moved the family to Chicago. He had another Great Idea. She would become an actress; after all, motion pictures were the new gold rush.

Unable to get a job teaching without taking a city qualifying exam, Otto turned to making advertising cards for store windows. Astor's mother took a volunteer position teaching English literature and drama at the Kenwood-Loring School for Girls, an exclusive private school, on condition that her daughter receive free attendance. Astor loved the school and loved learning. In later life, she would sometimes read up to ten books a week: psychology, biography, history, poetry. On Saturdays, Astor also trained at a drama school with a friend of her mother's, Bertha Iles .

Upon Astor's graduation from Kenwood-Loring in 1919, the family set out for New York with $300 and their newly trained investment. They leased an apartment on West 110th street. Otto Langhanke began to pound the pavement with rapid results. After New York photographer Charles Albin took one look at the young girl and saw a "Madonna quality," he asked her to sit for some portrait shots. In turn, he introduced her to Lillian Gish , who also took an interest and directed an Astor screen test at D.W. Griffith's studio at Mamaroneck.

"The test was long and difficult," wrote Astor. "Lillian sat in a camp chair beside the camera, suggesting shots, suggesting angles and lighting and movements. She had me recite a few lines of poetry. It took hours, but they were exciting, rapturous hours." But after the test the Langhanke's heard nothing. They began to live on coffee, cereal, and bread. A few years later, Gish explained the silence to Astor: "Mr. Griffith is peculiar…. He likes to make his own dis coveries, and I think I pushed too hard." It would take 30 more years, however, for Gish to fully fess up: after taking one look at Otto Lang-hanke, Griffith had told Gish, "The man is a walking cash register; … he'll always be an interfering nuisance." Wrote Astor:

Of course, D.W. was right. In about ten years the Motion Picture Producers Association would tell Daddy the same thing, and they would state it flatly: I would simply not get any more work if he continued to represent me. He was just too much trouble; every item of a contract became an argument. They could not tolerate his arrogance.

With the help of the Albin photos, Lucile Langhanke was given a six-month contract with Famous Players-Lasky and a new name: Mary Astor. But at the end of the term, she had only a shelved one-reeler and a feature picture to her credit; her part could be found on the cutting-room floor. She was soon signed, however, with artist Léjaron Hiller, who was experimenting with diffusion photography in a series of tworeelers. She found her name atop the marquee of the Rivoli Theatre: Mary Astor in The Beggar Maid; the critics called it "a little gem." Astor was now practicing the piano six hours a day, taking vocal lessons at Carnegie Hall, and attending dance class at the Denishawn school under the tutelage of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. She found the dance an "exhilarating outlet for all my built-up aggressions."

After six more two-reelers, she made her first feature, a small part in John Smith for Louis J. Selznick. Her most important film of that period was the lead opposite Richard Barthelmess in The Bright Shawl. In April 1923, she signed a much better contract with Famous Players (one year, $500 a week) and was sent to the West Coast. Astor arrived in Hollywood with her mother (her father stayed behind to look after work on their new apartment) two weeks before her 17th birthday.

When John Barrymore asked Warner Bros. to test her to play opposite him in Beau Brummel, Otto Langhanke closed the apartment in New York and joined his family in Hollywood. The intelligent 17-year-old fell head over heels for the 40-year-old Barrymore (during the test, he had whispered in her ear: "You are so goddamned beautiful, you make me feel faint"). "So on afternoons when we were not working on the picture," wrote Astor:

Mother and Daddy sat in the dining room, reading and whispering, while in the living room Jack talked to me. He talked about fundamentals of breathing and of diction, and gave me exercises in both. He explained to me about "authority" and "vitality." … He finally told Mother and Daddy that he must work alone with me…. They hesitat ed. He knew what they were thinking, and he beat them to the point. "Don't be ridiculous!" he said. "This is a kid!" Every Sunday for the rest of the summer he sent his car for Mother and me, and we rode to his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There Mother sat on the veranda and sewed.

Beau Brummel would bring her success and stardom throughout the 1920s, '30s and '40s, but the early scripts were unexciting and her teenage attention was focused on Barrymore. The affair was important to both; he talked of marriage, she shied away. After the filming, they remet in New York while he was doing Hamlet, then Barrymore went on tour for 17 months. During that time, Astor was hard at work, shooting silent after silent. In early 1925, her parents bought an ornate home on Temple Hill Drive. They also acquired a maid, a gardener, a Pierce-Arrow limousine, and a chauffeur. But all her thoughts were centered on John Barrymore. She started a diary, filled it with coded words and symbols, and diligently noted cables "from J.B."

When they met again in New York, Barrymore had been signed to do Richard III in London the following season and wanted her to play Anne of Warwick . When they approached her father over dinner, he quickly put the kibosh on it, saying "We couldn't afford it." There was a large difference in take-home pay between movies and the theater. Astor said nothing. "I think now that this was the critical moment," she later wrote, "I think Jack sat there waiting for me to assert myself."

Though they started filming Don Juan together (a movie that heralded the beginning of sound with the first Vitaphone recording of background music), Astor began to hear rumors of his interest in Dolores Costello , his leading lady in the just finished adaptation of Moby Dick (renamed The Sea Beast). It didn't help that Dolores' sister Helene Costello had a part in Don Juan. The day Dolores visited the set, something inside of Astor clicked. That night, when her father shook her for not practicing her singing, she raged: "You keep your hands off me! … I'm nineteen years old, and I won't take any more of this shoving around and being slapped."

Shortly after, she met Kenneth Hawks, a producer and brother of director Howard Hawkes, and they were married. She also made new friends, Bessie Love and Marian Spitzer , a journalist for the New York Globe. Since her husband was determined to be the breadwinner, her earnings continued to go to her parents in the mansion on Temple Hill Drive. Her father was using the money to improve the property, he said, property that was now split three ways between her mother, her father, and herself. It was a good marriage, but Hawkes wasn't entirely interested in the physical part of the relationship, and she had an affair. This too went into the diary. In 1930, while filming a parachute drop with two Ford tri-motor planes flying close together, Hawkes was killed, along with nine others.

The disaster left Astor husbandless and broke. In the preceding ten years, she had earned close to half a million dollars but had only $3,000 in her bank account. When a friend of hers suggested to her father that he sell Temple Hill and live in a place less grand, he laughed. While her parents lived in a house with two cars and three servants, Astor rented a small apartment in Hollywood. She rushed into another marriage with physician Franklyn Thorpe, the high point of which was the birth of her daughter.

Otto Langhanke continued to protest that they needed her money for maintenance on the Temple Hill house. Astor finally went to him, offered him her third, and said they would receive no more money. Her parents then sued her for maintenance. The newspaper colony had a field day. Under one photo of her father, posing over the bridge he had added to the estate's swimming pool, ran the headline: "Down to their last swimming pool." After she agreed to $100 a month continued support, the case was dismissed.

During her marriage to Thorpe, Astor journeyed to New York on holiday and became an exhilarated addition to the New York literati: Edna Ferber , Bennett Cerf, Moss Hart, and Oscar Levant. She also became a close friend of George S. Kaufman, who accompanied her everywhere. Returning home, she filmed Red Dust with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow . (The movie was later remade as Mogambo with Grace Kelly playing the part Astor originated.) Astor continued to see Kaufman while he was working on a play in Palm Springs. Aware that her marriage to Thorpe was a sham, she asked for a divorce, but her husband threatened the use of her diary in divorce court.

For a long time after the trial I was shy of people. I was afraid of what the notoriety might do to my work…. Wearing glasses and wrapped in scarves, I went one night to see [Dodsworth]…. My first line was spoken off screen, but the moment they heard it the audience burst into spontaneous applause…. I was told that it happened at every performance at that theatre.
—Mary Astor

Knowing the consequences of such disclosure would not only touch her life but the lives of her daughter Marylyn and many others, Astor was frightened and agreed to an uncontested divorce and her husband's legal custody of the child. When friends convinced her to assert herself and connected her with a lawyer who vowed that the diary would never be admissible in court, Astor sued for custody of her daughter. Before long, she was called into a meeting with a room full of major Hollywood producers (Thalberg, Gold-wyn, Warner, Cohn, and others), asking her to back down. The trial would create a scandal, they said, and give the industry a bad name; she would "probably lose the case and the child too." Astor was puzzled until she later learned that someone mentioned in the diary was distributing a forgery, a more salacious version that contained a "box score" of name after Hollywood name; he hoped the falsified account would incite her producers to pressure Astor into a dismissal of the suit. Portions of the phoney diary were leaked to the press, quoted, and requoted. "I could not sue the fourth estate," wrote Astor, "because, of course, each paper was 'simply quoting' material from another paper. I could only cry futilely, 'There wasn't any "box score" and I never called the damned thing "Dear Diary."'"

A few pages of the authentic diary landed in the pages of the Los Angeles Examiner. "This was mostly the account, romantic and sentimental, certainly not pornographic, of my friendship with George Kaufman," wrote Astor. "The entire association as revealed by those papers should have been interpreted as nothing more than a close friendship. But when people thought of 'the diary' they thought not of these rather mild pages, but of the lurid lines quoted from the forgery."

Considered the Hollywood trial of the 1930s, Astor's custody battle lasted for 30 days. Outside the courtroom, vendors hawked their wares; inside, the room was packed. Her lawyer proved as good as his word. He called for the diary to be admitted, fairly sure that they only had these Kaufman fragments, and he was right. A portion of a document cannot be used as evidence in court; rather, it must be whole. The judge ordered joint custody, and the diary, impounded and sealed, would be destroyed by court order in 1952 (or at least that's what Astor thought; historian Robert Parish claims it reposes in the managing editor's confidential file at the New York Daily News).

Surprisingly, the notoriety helped rather than hurt Astor's career. In the eyes of moviegoers, she was a woman who put her reputation on the line to fight for her child. Her next part of Edith Cortwright, the sympathetic widow in Dodsworth, also helped her public image. Two years later, she married once more and had a son Anthony Paul. But her new husband joined the Canadian Air Force and flew off to war.

In 1940, Bette Davis asked Astor to join the cast of The Great Lie. Astor was to play a self-centered, world-famous pianist, and all those piano lessons were about to pay off. She remarked, "It was the greatest challenge I had so far met in my career." Mid-filming, Davis appeared in her dressing room complaining of the story and claiming that the most interesting conflict in the movie was between their characters. Davis asked Astor if she'd be interested in working with her in building up the characters. They wrote dialogue together, went over their scenes, and became "as simpatico as a pair of dancers." The following year, Astor won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for the film. Though some asserted that she stole the picture from Davis, Astor adamantly denied it: "She handed it to me on a silver platter."

In 1941, Astor learned to fly and began to take on radio assignments: "Lux" and "Screen Guild." She had her own show for a year, "Hollywood Showcase," and a show for Roma Wines. Then, in a part originally intended for Geraldine Fitzgerald , she portrayed Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the perpetual liar, in Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon. "With her breathless, orgasmic voice," writes Marjorie Rosen in Popcorn Venus, Astor's performance was a "masterpiece of deception." In fact, as Jay Nash and Stanley Ross report, Astor "purposely hyperventilated to capture a breath-catching look, and she is so convincing that Bogart can only blurt admiration for her lies, … 'You're good, you're real good.'" The film was John Huston's first directing chore, but his casting was perfection: Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Gladys George , and Sydney Greenstreet. The Maltese Falcon set became so notorious for hijinks and salty talk that the studio placed it off limits to the press. Astor would also star with Bogart in Across the Pacific in 1942.

In 1944, her father Otto died. Astor became reclusive and began to drink more; she also half-heartedly converted to Catholicism. In 1942, she had signed a six-year contract with MGM. Despite Metro's promise of a buildup, the studio was putting the 38-year-old Astor in a series of mother roles in undistinguished films. "My femme fatale image of the Diary days went down the Culver City drain," she wrote. She was Kathryn Grayson 's mother in Thousands Cheer,Elizabeth Taylor 's mother in Cynthia,Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien 's mother in Meet Me in St. Louis, and strong-willed Lizbeth Scott 's mother in Desert Fury.

In frustration, Astor took six months off to do Clare Kummer 's Many Happy Returns in New York with Henry Hull. Though the play was panned, she walked away with excellent reviews. She married for a fourth time in 1945, to the stockbroker Thomas Gordon Wheelock, and they drank together. A few months later, she was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. Astor began to develop what were considered psychosomatic symptoms, breathing problems, aches and pains. A little dance she was supposed to perform with her "daughters" (June Allyson , Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh , and Margaret O'Brien) while shooting Little Women was too much for her. The director allowed her to stand by and watch.

Tired of working and tired of supporting people, Astor wanted out of her contract with Metro. Her nerves were taut; she was jumpy, hated noise, and was relying heavily on the sedative Seconal. Though she couldn't sleep, she spent most of 1949 in bed, taking more pills, consuming more Vodka. After an overdose (and pumped stomach) that newspapers dubbed an attempted suicide, Astor was taken to a sanitarium. While there, someone handed her Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain, and she began to find her way back.

But 1951 brought more disintegration. Astor fought the decline by becoming more and more involved with the Catholic Church. With no film work, debts began to pile up. She dealt with a broken fibula, another divorce. The actress Louise Fazenda sent over a loan, and others helped. When Astor entered the Motion Picture Relief Hospital with bronchial pneumonia, a serious embedding of large fibroids in the uterus was discovered that may have caused the "psychosomatic" aches and pains. An operation found them benign.

Astor was now 46, inactive in Hollywood, and had not been seen socially for three years. "I did not yet know that I had a real recognized disease, the disease of alcoholism, which is now known to be as insidious and fatal as cancer or

tuberculosis, and no more shameful, and just as 'arrestable.'" Then she was offered the job of replacing Shirley Booth on Broadway in Time of the Cuckoo. Astor followed with one theater job after another for four years, but she was still in debt, still sickly, still drinking. Her sobriety was reserved for television and the stage.

Nothing pleased her more than a good feud.
—Noel Annan

In 1955, she returned to Los Angeles. It took a few more years before she realized she could not tolerate even one drink. Her life did an about-face. After a heart condition effectively ended her career in 1965, Astor spent her last years at the Motion Picture Country Home. Her second book, the autobiographical A Life on Film, was published by Delacorte in 1967; she also wrote several novels, including The Incredible Charlie Carewe and A Place Called Saturday. At age 81, Mary Astor died of complications from emphysema on September 25, 1987.