Mary Astor is best remembered for her role as the treacherous Brigid O’Shaughnessy in “The Maltese Falcon,” the classic detective movie brimming with intrigue and twists and turns.
But the late actress’ own life was far more fascinating than most Hollywood scripts.
Astor’s film career began as a teenager in the silent era of the 1920s, but a scandal nearly derailed it in 1936. She was able to regain footing and take on a number of memorable parts, winning an Academy Award five years later for “The Great Lie.”
The first full biography of her life, “The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor” by Kathleen Spaltro, was recently published.
Spaltro has written biographical articles about such notables as Preston Sturges, Orson Welles and Frank Capra, as well as more than 40 biographical profiles in “Royals of England: A Guide for Readers, Travelers, and Genealogists.”
She recently discussed her research into Astor’s life with The Republican.
What sparked your interest in Astor?
As a film buff, I of course felt impressed by her in “The Maltese Falcon.” I wondered why I did not see her act in more leading roles in 40s and 50s films. I was surprised to learn she was one of the biggest female stars of the silent era.
I had heard sad accounts of her 1936 sex scandal, alcoholism, and suicide attempts. I learned more from her two memoirs, “My Story” and “A Life on Film,” of financial exploitation and emotional abuse. This created a picture of self-destructiveness. After I gradually realized that this was only part of the story — and not the most interesting part, I decided to write about her.
You discovered some of Astor’s personal papers in her hometown library in Quincy, Illinois. What materials did you find there and elsewhere?
The Quincy Public Library’s Marian Kesler Collection contains Astor’s letters to her lifelong friend, as well as the digitization of the three daily newspapers published in Quincy while Astor and her parents lived there. The daily papers of the time focused on minute details of social life, and her family members often appeared in news articles.
In addition, the Boston University Library Mary Astor archive, to which she donated her papers, and also the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other resources were invaluable.
Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart in a scene from "The Maltese Falcon." (Warner Bros. Pictures)
What would say were Astor’s greatest film roles?
Astor was an unwilling movie star and was very critical about her output. If anything, she undervalued her achievement as a film actress. She preferred acting in radio shows, live theater and live TV. From chronic boredom, she graduated to a sense of professionalism as her self-concept changed from movie star to film actress. She also chose to relinquish being a leading lady to become a character actress/featured player.
Her best performances were: “Dodsworth,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Great Lie,” “The Palm Beach Story,” “Desert Fury,” “Act of Violence,” “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “Hush, Hush ... Sweet Charlotte.”
Astor won an Oscar for her portrayal of concert pianist Sandra Kovak in “The Great Lie.” But your book’s title is more than just a play on an old movie title. What was the great lie about Astor?
Many lies have been told about Mary Astor. She never abandoned her parents to poverty. Her face was their fortune rather than her own. Nor did she rate on a private scorecard the sexual prowess of Hollywood leading men.
But two more dangerous and persistent lies have distorted the understanding of her life. One lie defines Astor as the survivor of sex scandals and suicide attempts who ended up living on charity in a retirement home for film folk. There is much more to her story than that miserable scenario. In fact, with grit and determination, she rebounded from middle-aged decline to invest her energies in a new career as an excellent memoirist and novelist.
The other most important lie — indeed, the great lie — robbed her of her core identity as Lucile Langhanke and imposed on her a movie stardom that she never wanted. This book tells how “Mary Astor” recovered who she really was and really wanted to be.
Her upbringing, as well as her becoming, at others’ insistence, a commodity, created what she bitterly called “the product called Mary Astor.” The betrayal of her “true self” is at the core of both her personal troubles and her ambivalent relationship with stardom. The imposition upon her of her identity and her acting vocation was her tragedy. The identity “Mary Astor” trapped her in a gilded cage of unhappiness and self-loathing. Some of her self-destructiveness came out of having to disavow who she really was to placate others. Eventually, she rescued herself from this predicament.
A highly intelligent, creative, and gifted person, Astor overcame longstanding abuse and exploitation and turned away from self-destruction. Grasping a new self-concept in later life, she then pursued a career that reflected her true self.
What can you say about Astor as a writer and how it relates to her life and career?
From 1959 to 1971, she published five novels and two memoirs. She had always wanted to be a writer and was a writer forced into acting rather than an actress who developed a later-life writing hobby. By forsaking acting for writing, she found and expressed herself; she had the courage both to reinvent herself and to risk failure.
A writer by both nature and fate who had worked as an actress, rather than an actress whose late-life hobby was writing, Astor left her papers to an university archive but preserved in that archive nothing of her film career that did not relate to her primary interest, writing memoirs and novels.
What would you like readers to come away with after finishing “The Great Lie”?
I would like them to understand how dehumanizing “stardom” often has been and to respect this woman who fought to reclaim her true identity and control of her life after many years as a star.
(“The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor” is available on Kindle, paperback and hardcover from Amazon.)