Mary Astor: From Lucy Langhanke to Hollywood Icon
Lucy Langhanke. You’d have to be unhealthily obsessed with movies to know that’s the real name of Mary Astor, the great actress of the 1930s and ’40s. Audiences best remember her for a handful of things. She played Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. She won an Academy Award for The Great Lie. And she fought one of the most scandalous child custody battles in Hollywood history—until the Brad–Angelina war was declared.
Mary Astor’s Custody Battle in 1930s Hollywood
Mary Astor’s custody fight happened in the mid-1930’s, in the middle of the Depression and with Hollywood perhaps at its height. On the surface, it seems to have nothing in common with divorce and custody hearings today. But here the surface is just that.
The Affair, the Diary, and the Divorce
The facts are these: Mary Astor married Dr. Franklyn Thorpe in June, 1931. They had a child, Marilyn, in June 1932. In late 1933, Mary, unhappy in the marriage and in her career, went to New York to work on the stage. She carried on an affair – ‘torrid’ being the mildest word the tabloids of the day used – with playwright and Broadway director George S. Kaufman, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Mary, an excellent writer (she would go on to write two bestselling memoirs and five novels), kept a well-written, fairly detailed diary.
Back in Hollywood in late 1935, Mary returned to work. In 1936, Dr. Thorpe secured an uncontested divorce. Then he found the diary. Then he demanded custody. The case went to trial. And then it got ugly.
The one thing to immediately take from this in the age of litigation and the Internet is pretty clear: you can hide a
diary, most people probably a little bit better than Mary Astor, but you can’t hide your social media. Enough said, that’s not where I’m really going with this.
The Diary Scandal and Custody Fight
Dr. Thorpe claimed that Mary was an unfit mother because she had affairs. Well, probably not so much that as the fact she wrote about them and he did not do well in any of her comparisons – and she compared a lot Nevertheless, it didn’t look good for Mary – in civil court or the court of public opinion. Absent a good attorney, in 1936, Mary’s prognosis was bleak.
But, several things happened in short order. Mary retained an attorney almost as famous as her, George Simon Kaufman. He had the diary thrown out, made inadmissible. The fact that Thorpe had shared it with the gossip columnist for The New York Daily News and they added their own entries and changed others probably had a lot to do with that decision.
Mary Astor’s Troubled Childhood
Perhaps just as important, Kaufman laid out all the facts. Facts like these: Back when Mary was still Lucy, she lived with the stage parents from hell. She made her screen debut at 14 and signed a studio contract for $500 a week (about $7,000 today). Meanwhile, her parents kept her essentially imprisoned at home. Her parents, to be kind, never let her out of their sight. She was allotted a $5/week allowance, although, of course, she had no place to spend it. Her father, meanwhile, was physically abusive and constantly demeaned her performances.
Mary managed to. literally, escape – she fled the mansion her parents bought with her money through a carelessly left-open third floor window. At the time, 1928, she was earning $3750/wk ($53,000 … a week). She married a director in 1929, but her parents still kept a tight reign on the money. By 1932, when she finally gained control of her finances, she found so little money left that she had to ask the Screen Actors Guild for assistance. Her parents promptly sued her for support.
Financial Struggles and Personal Tragedy
In 1930, a plane crash killed Mary’s husband, Kenneth Hawks—the brother of famed director Howard Hawks. It was devastating. Mary had a nervous breakdown, took a leave of absence from her studio, and signed herself into inpatient treatment. By now you can guess who her doctor was – Thorpe.
Thorpe’s Motives and the Custody Verdict
No one will know if Thorpe ever loved his wife, but there are piles of evidence that he loved her money. Immediately after the wedding he bought a yacht and opened his own practice.
All this, obviously, filled in all the blanks in the case. It was enough for the judge – he awarded Mary full custody. Probably not coincidentally, her career took off. The diary disappeared sometime during the trial. It was like the Loch Ness monster of Hollywood for years, sightings were rare but hyped. In 1953, officials discovered it in a safety deposit box and, by court order, burned it.
Lessons from Mary Astor’s Custody Battle
There are, obviously, a lot of lessons here. Perhaps the most important one is this – facts are just facts until someone puts them into a narrative.