Edward Sorel - Mary Astors Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

For Madeline, Leo, Jenny, and Katherine

About the Author

Edward Sorel is the author of Unauthorized Portraits and the illustrator of First Encounters, which was written by his late wife, Nancy Caldwell Sorel. His satires and pictorial essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, for which he has done forty-six covers. In 2009 he completed the mural at the Waverly Inn, and two years later the mural for the Monkey Bar, both in New York. His caricatures have been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, and at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London. He is the recipient of the George Polk Award for Satiric Drawing and the Karikaturpreis der deutschen Anwaltschaft from the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany. He lives in Harlem.

Copyright 2016 by Edward Sorel

All rights reserved
First Edition

Jacket design by Walter Bernard Design

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Sorel, Edward, 1929 author.
Title: Mary Astors Purple diary : the great American sex scandal of 1936 /
Edward Sorel.
Other titles: Purple diary
Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Company,
a division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012782 | ISBN 9781631490231 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Astor, Mary, 19061987Comic books, strips, etc. | Motion
picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiographyComic books,
strips, etc. | Graphic novels.
Classification: LCC PN2287.A8 S67 2016 | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B] dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012782

ISBN 978-1-63149-024-8 (e-book)

Liveright Publishing Corporation
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

Acknowledgments

Ive nursed the idea for this book for half a century, but might never have written it if my friend Richard Lingeman hadnt offered to help me with research. Richard, the acclaimed biographer of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, was able to discover arcane material that I would never have found on my own. I owe him big-time.

I couldnt have wished for more enthusiastic editors than Robert Weil and William Menaker. Their close readings and detailed suggestions helped me find the books final form.

My friend Dan Okrent read early drafts, assured me that I really could write, and urged me to insert more of my own life into the story. Since I know Dan to be right about everything, I chose to believe him.

Prudence Crowther raised frisky questions, shot troubles, and turned many, many phrases. In the chapter where I imagine meeting Mary Astor, she conjured the actress out of a guy from the Bronx. Im happily indebted to her candor and friendly combat.

The Start of My Long Affair with Mary Astor

I GUESS YOU COULD SAY Mary Astor and I met cute, the way romantic leads always do. It happened in 1965. I was thirty-six, a freelance illustrator who, thanks to Vietnam, had begun doing political satire in a left-wing magazine called Ramparts. I had long hair and dressed like a slob to show I wasnt one of the suits who had gotten us into the war. Mary, as I would come to call her, had retired from the screen a year earlier, after a career often playing soign, exquisitely coiffed upper-class women. She was fifty-nine.

I had just married for the second time, and Nancy and I were lucky enough to find a railroad flat in one of the remaining tenements on Manhattans Upper East Side. It was listed as a professional apartment, meaning the renter had to run a business from home. In a rent-controlled building that meant the landlord could charge more. Still, I was delighted to pay the legal limit of $97.14 a month.

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 ASTORS BABY TO BE JUDGE. Next came ASTORS 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.

The Astor in question, I understood, was Mary. In 1936 she was only a featured 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 married, had been her lover. Once his name emerged in Marys child custody battle, the story pushed Hitler and Franco off tabloid front pages. I myself forgot the new linoleum and kept reading.

The scandal revolved around Marys diary, which her ex-husband had found when they were still married. Its incriminating contents had forced Mary to give up custody of their daughter to her husband in order to obtain a divorce. But by 1936 she had decided to challenge the custody arrangement concerning their little girl. The husband 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. He threatened to put the document into evidence, and had already shown a page of it to the press. Although Mary had in fact used brown ink in her fountain pen, the tabloids couldnt resist making it jibe with the prose so they could call it the Purple Diary.

My small collection of papers ran out before I learned the outcome of the trial, or whether Kaufman, then in Hollywood, had been forced to testify. I had to know. But further research would have to wait until I put down the new linoleum and met my deadlines.

One was for Ramparts, which was published in San Francisco. I had a monthly feature in it called Sorels Bestiary. Each month I caricatured liberal wafflers on Vietnam or right-wing war hawks as the birds they most resembled, and then wrote about their characteristics in the manner of an ornithologist. It was a visual device that was already old in the nineteenth century, but