Mary Astor's Purple Diary Quotes

“George S. Kaufman was not Miss Astor’s last love. George had been supplanted in her affections by one of his best friends, whose name would surely have been disclosed had the hearing gone on. The scoop appeared on August 12 in the Daily Mirror, announcing that the best friend, an unnamed dashing broker and bachelor, maintained a seven-room penthouse on Park Avenue, complete with butler and maid. Kaufman had introduced Mary to “Mr. Big” in December, according to the Mirror.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Postscript: 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.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“She was a great actress, and dammit—I want to see her on a goddam postage stamp!!”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“If you are proud that God loves you, that He has given you great gifts, then you are acknowledging His existence and dependence on Him—and that is humility.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“WHEN DODSWORTH OPENED two months later, there were lines around the block at New York’s Rivoli Theatre. Mary snuck into a theater in Los Angeles to catch it. As soon as the audience heard her voice offscreen they burst into applause. She said it was one of the most satisfying moments in her life.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Why would Donald Trump, who prides himself on his good taste, fall in love with Donald Trump? I mean, who can explain these things? Obsessions by their very nature defy reason.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“The very word “diary” had become risqué, so that every fan magazine tried to capitalize on it. The October issue of Fawcett’s Movie Classic, for instance: EXCLUSIVE! FRED MACMURRAY’S HONEYMOON DIARY.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Newsmen went after any man named in the diary. No stud was left unturned. The press even dug up Bennett Cerf, who had barely been mentioned. He laughed when told in what context his name appeared. “Well, well! So she broke that date with me to go out with George, did she? In the light of everything that’s happened since, it would appear a broken date made that one of the luckiest days of my life.” Lest anyone think he’d fallen on the wrong side of Mary’s love ledger, he added, “Our meetings were always casual, and we were never alone.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Some papers hired graphologists to analyze Mary’s character on the basis of photos of her handwriting from the diary. Another psychologist, Dr. Frank Payne, said only, “Writers of intimate diaries are victims of infantile exhibitionism.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“keep the pot boiling, the Mirror got a popular psychologist, Dr. William Marston, to make “a close study of the photographs of the petite film star.” As the inventor of the lie detector test and eventual creator of Wonder Woman, Marston obviously had the probity for the job. He determined that Mary was “a pleasure seeker, secretive . . . a square shooter . . . an introspective, pugnacious individual,” who was “inclined to be oblivious to the ordinary conventions and social rules when she is set on a course of her own.” A photo of her face in profile showed that her forehead, nose, and chin barely protruded to the vertical line they had superimposed on the picture. This meant they were “hidden” features, evidence that Mary was a secretive type.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“When Dodsworth was released, in September 1936, just two months after the trial ended, Mary’s performance together with that film’s emotional ending would win her forgiveness and new admirers, and mark a turn in her career.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Mary felt the cause of the conflict was Chatterton’s hatred of her role, that of a woman “trying to hang on to her youth—which is exactly what Ruth herself was doing.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Ruth Chatterton wanted to play Fran as totally self-centered, without any redeeming features. The director insisted it be done his way, all the while smiling, which only increased her outrage. On one occasion she slapped him and stormed off to her dressing room. Thanks to Wyler’s intransigence, Chatterton gave her greatest screen performance, but the public held the part against her. Dodsworth was the last movie she made in America. After two more movies made in Britain she returned to the stage.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Sam Goldwyn hated above all others was Mayer, who had forced Sam out after he and Louis had formed MGM. “Once Mayer told him to dump you, your future was secure.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“A woman fighting for her child?” he said. “THIS IS GOOD!!!”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“I SHALL PROCEED WITH MY CASE AS MY LAWYER HAS ADVISED ME!”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Thalberg rose in all his craven majesty. Speaking for the assembled, he said the plaintiff and her attorney were making a grave mistake. The diary, in addition to creating a scandal devastating to the industry, would probably cause her to lose the case and the child too. They urged her to drop it and seek an out-of-court settlement.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“In 1934, with the country nowhere near able to climb out of the Great Depression, Upton Sinclair, famous for his muckraking novel The Jungle and his socialistic solutions for the ailing economy, had swept the Democratic primary for governor of California. (He was hardly alone in turning to socialism at such a dire time.) Mayer, fearful Sinclair would tax the movie studios to pay for his socialist programs, warned that MGM and other studios would move back east if Sinclair won—not anything he was prepared to let happen. Calling in Irving Thalberg, head of production, Mayer told him to create a fake newsreel showing the disasters that would follow such an election outcome. Movie theaters were forced to show the film when they booked an MGM movie, and William Randolph Hearst would see to its distribution to all other theaters in the state. And indeed, as soon as the fake exposé hit the screens, Sinclair’s huge lead vanished, and Frank Merriam became governor. The dirty politics and stealth tactics of Richard Nixon? As you can see, just a rerun.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Lillian Hellman once described Shearer as having “a face unclouded by thought.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“As he once famously said, “I’m not always right, but I’m never wrong.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Otto’s racial theories. These boiled down to the unquestionable fact that the German race had produced the greatest geniuses in art, music, and literature. As a member of that race, Otto found it insufferable that he was now forced to deal with, as he saw it, his inferiors, a bunch of illiterate, lecherous Jews who cared only about money.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Barrymore turned on the charm, making her feel they were both professionals involved in a silly enterprise unworthy of their talents. When the time came for them to align their silhouettes, he whispered, “You are so goddamned beautiful you make me feel faint.” Mary, as she later revealed in her memoir, was instantly, madly, and completely in love with him, and he apparently with her—since even the most expert seducer may occasionally transcend himself.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Thanks to her having kept a diary even as a teenager, Mary was able to give the exact date of her arrival in Hollywood: April 19, 1923, two weeks before her seventeenth birthday.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“when the Internet made it possible, I was in touch with her daughter, Marylyn, who was living in a mobile home in Utah with a companion. She was the grandmother of eighteen children and the great-grandmother of twenty-two. In what she said online, Marylyn had nothing but kind words to say about both parents, upsetting my conviction, after reading Mary’s memoir, that Daddy was the bad guy.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“Mary had written a memoir in 1959, making it easy for me to scratch the surface of her life. I found a dog-eared copy at the Strand Book Store downtown, read it, and was hooked. She was smart, witty, and self-denigrating.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“I tried finding out all I could about Mary Astor. My curiosity was obviously prurient in nature, whetted by those 1936 tabloids. They had given me an itch to find out all I could about the scandal.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

“The place was a wreck, and Nancy insisted that the first thing we had to do was tear up the rotting linoleum in the kitchen. One layer yielded to another, until finally I came to a bunch of newspapers that had been laid over the warped wooden floor to make it level. They were issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936. The papers, nearly thirty years old, were smelly and yellow with age, but otherwise readable. The giant black headlines concerned a child custody trial in Los Angeles. The News banner for August 1 screamed ASTOR’S BABY TO BE JUDGE. Next came ASTOR’S SENSATIONS SCARE FILM MOGULS. And by August 8 it was ASTOR DIARY “ECSTACY” (sic), with the subhead G. S. KAUFMAN TRYST BARED. I began piecing the pages together chronologically.”
― Edward Sorel, Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936