Mary Astor

Real Tinsel:

How Lucile Langhanke of Quincy 

Became Mary Astor of the Silver Screen

Kathleen Spaltro

(C) (2018) All Rights Reserved. 

"Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel." — Oscar Levant

For both good and ill, the talented actress Mary Astor—the veteran of almost 45 years of silent films and talkies, stage and TV—also wrote, often and well. American newspapers salivated in 1936 over extracts from Astor's allegedly graphic sex diary that her ex-husband threatened to submit as evidence in a child custody trial. Long after both her scandal and her stardom had faded, Astor wrote two best-selling memoirs, My Story and A Life on Film; the financial success of her autobiographies encouraged her into writing novels. Astor's novels and her diary aside, her memoirs stand as well-written, insightful, and intelligent testimony to a life spent struggling with the residue of exploitation by people she should have been able to trust—a life spent discerning phony tinsel and all too often finding real tinsel in its stead.

Parental Hate

Astor graduated from being the practically cloistered daughter of smothering, controlling, disapproving, and demanding parents to being the rebellious wife in four failed marriages fraught with emotional disappointment and financial distress. She served as a lodestar for parents and husbands seeking to capitalize on her exquisite, delicate beauty and her acting ability with its consequent large salaries. Naturally, this sensitive girl, untrained in life's practical tasks and confused about parental, sexual, and spousal love, grew up into a brittle woman, uncertain about trust, inclined to make bad decisions about money and people, and full of self-hate. Indeed, the adult Astor would conclude that her parents' legacy to her was hate.

Born in Quincy's Blessing Hospital on 3 May 1906 as Lucile Langhanke, she was the only child of Otto Langhanke and Helen Vasconcells Langhanke. Emigrating from Germany sometime between 1889 to 1891, Otto had come to Quincy in 1904 and taught German from 1906 at Quincy High School. The high school fired him in 1912 after a fistfight in the school halls with another teacher but reinstated him by 1915 and retained him in 1916. Other occupations included decorating store display windows in 1914 at the Stern Clothing Company and running his own poultry farm. Born in Jacksonville, Helen was a drama teacher who wanted to be an actress; she also taught German in 1917 at the Quincy College of Music and Art (as had Otto from 1905). 

When Lucile was born in 1906, her family lived in an apartment over a saloon. In 1908, their address was 725 1-3 Hampshire; from at least 1910 until 1913, their address was 1837 Broadway. In 1913, they rented a 12-room Victorian mansion on North Twelfth Street, just north of the Soldiers' Home and outside Quincy city limits. Lucile loved being by herself on this eight-acre farm. When Otto got his teaching job back, the family left the farm for Kentucky Street in Quincy, and Lucile attended Highland School, a two-room schoolhouse.

The author of a German language textbook and teacher's manual, and a faculty member for the 1917–1918 school year, Otto lost his teaching job at Quincy High School again because of anti-German feeling. The Quincy Daily Journal on 5 April 1918 reported a resolution unanimously adopted by the board of education to "remove German sympathizers and the German language from the public schools" at the end of the school year. This prompted the Langhankes' exodus to Chicago.

There they resided in an apartment on East 47th Street, and Lucile miserably attended public school. After Helen became a teacher of literature and drama at the Kenwood-Loring School for Girls, 4600 Ellis Avenue, Lucile was admitted as a tuition-free pupil; she loved the school and enjoyed her mother's teaching. Lucile graduated in 1919.

Trapped by Beauty

Lucile won attention by entering beauty contests in 1919 and 1920 sponsored by Motion Picture magazine. On the strength of this thin reed, the Langhankes moved to New York, where Otto sought to promote Lucile as a fledgling actress. The gifted photographer Charles Albin created some hauntingly beautiful photographs of her; they finally caught the attention of movie executives, got her parts in silent films, and eventually won her contracts as the newly renamed "Mary Astor." When Astor won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Great Lie in 1942, she commented, "twenty-two years ago this coming June I first faced a motion picture camera—I hasten to add I was very young." In 1920, she was only 14—and a very young, very intimidated child-woman.

For many years, Otto was Astor's business manager and controlled/spent her income. More than that, Otto and Helen controlled their daughter's every move. "I had never been permitted to grow. Too early I became a very valuable piece of property to my parents, closely guarded, closely watched. I was not permitted to make decisions, therefore I could not learn how to make decisions.… No imprisonment could have been more thorough and more stultifying….The closely guarded young girl of European countries is trained for womanhood and marriage. For me there was no goal—except tomorrow's movie job. I escaped—the desperate flight of a child into an unmapped and unknown adult world. And I rushed headlong into nothing but trouble!"

"I had no personal life. There was no school, no beaux, no parties, no friends of my own age. There was just Mother and Daddy and the people in the studios. And I was chaperoned ever more and more closely." Her parents opened her mail, read any letters she wrote, did not allow her to venture out alone, not even to the mailbox, and discouraged any friendships outside the family.

More even than this: besides controlling her money and her every waking moment, Otto berated her as a disappointing, stupid, bad daughter. "I was a constant failure; he indicated his disappointment with windy sighs and shakes of the head." "He was going to be a rich man if it killed me….I was a real disappointment, that I could see." Helen's attitude was no more accepting. Inscribing her diary, "This is for Lucile—she asked for it!", Helen left for her daughter to read after Helen's death "a shocking hymn of hate for me from the time I was born."

This child-woman on the brink of stardom was ripe for financial and emotional exploitation by others, including her first lover and the love of her life, John Barrymore, 42 to her 17. "I was all messed up in an affair with a man twenty-five years older than I and I was terrified if I ever so much as whispered a thought of my own." Barrymore shocked his timid virgin-mistress by implying that her parents had guessed about their affair and tacitly accepted it as way of controlling her and increasing her financial value to them. He challenged her to break from Otto and Helen—"They'll just make a meal ticket out of you"—but she was not yet strong enough to leave her parents for Barrymore. Losing him prompted her to rebel, finally, but, unmoored from parental control, she was unprepared to recognize exploitive motives in others or to manage her own life well.

Four failed marriages and recurrent financial stress, as well as a sex scandal fueled by speculation about the real content and the forged pages of her private diary, left deep wounds. "I hated everything, including myself—especially myself. Drinking helped for a few hours at a time, but alcohol will soothe and relax only for a while. Then it will turn and viciously exaggerate the moods of the drinker. And this drinker's moods were not the kind that could safely be exaggerated."

Self-Acceptance

Her lifelong struggle with alcohol was eased at times by her religious faith, which encouraged self-awareness, self-acceptance, freedom from "the confining mass of self-centered thinking—infantile, emotional, ineffective solutions to problems that had bound me deeper and deeper in loneliness and misery." Weak in many ways, she yet had a strong core: "I was fortunate enough to have an inherent vitality; the deepest need, survival, was very strong." Astor's courageous description in her memoirs of her plight demonstrates great strength underlying manifest weakness.

Self-acceptance demanded the rejection of "Mary Astor," the imposed identity and enforced ambition. Even at the beginning of her career, "the feeling I was to have always [was]: 'What's this got to do with me?' " "As well as I know the actress, Mary Astor—every movement, every shade of voice, and I learned to manipulate her into many different kinds of women—she is still not 'me'." Writing as "Rusty," in a late-life letter to her only childhood friend, Marian, she confided, "I have been going through a battle royal with the devils that seem to pursue me….when I first turned my back completely on 'Mary Astor' 'She' was furious! And I fled and kept running. And ran into 'her' everywhere I went….let's let 'Mary Astor' belong to history. Let her have her Oscars and her glory—and let 'her' die. Damn her. She is no part of my soul…. So have faith in your friend and pray for Rusty."

For Further Reading

Astor, Mary. A Life on Film. New York : Delacorte Press, 1971.

________. My Story:  An Autobiography. Garden City, NY:   Doubleday & Company, 1959.

Egan, Joseph. The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s. New York: Diversion Books, 2016.

Mary Astor Papers: Marian Kesler Collection. Quincy Public Library, Quincy, IL.

Oral History Interview with Mary Astor in Hollywood Film Industry Oral History Project, Columbia Center for Oral History Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. [Astor was interviewed by Nicholas  Benton on 7 June 1971 in Fountain Valley, CA.]

Quincy's Historical Newspaper Archive. http://quincylibrary.org/newspaper-archive/

Sorel, Edward. Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936. New York : Liveright, 2016.

This article originally appeared in The Woodstock Independent.