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The Great Lie:: The Creation of Mary Astor
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About The Great Lie:: The Creation Of Mary Astor
Review A Gibson Girl beauty pushed into becoming a movie star in her teens by the archetypal stage parents, Lucille Langhanke went through heartbreak and scandal as "Mary Astor" before refining her craft, becoming sober and finding a new creative outlet as a memoirist and novelist in mid-career and later life. Illinois-based historian Kathleen Spaltro found a previously unseen collection of Astor's letters to a childhood friend in the library in Quincy, Illinois, which started her on her journey to tell the story of the star who became the original noir bad girl in The Maltese Falcon, in her independently published The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor. nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=31484 Interview of Kathleen Spaltro by Carl Rollyson about The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astoranchor.fm/carl-rollyson/episodes/Episode-49-A-talk-with-Kathleen-Spaltro--Author-of-The-Great-Lie-The-Creation-of-Mary-Astor-erpmno?fbclid=IwAR0drc_tVRfbEKuZEwuNPXz6Jgkwstq-upA2mP5xamkS4RROmGXWNPxy4Qo 'The Great Lie' chronicles life, struggles of Mary AstorMarch 31, 2021BY RAY KELLY 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. 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? It 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
