Cinema: Thorpe v. Astor

On view last week was another of those scandals which periodically afford U. S. film followers an intimate glimpse of high & low life in Hollywood. While the cinema colony shamefully hung its tail between its legs, while circulation managers of the tabloid Press howled with delight, Mary Astor and Dr. Franklyn Thorpe battled for the custody of their 4-year-old daughter in a mud-slinging contest in which the purpose of each was to make the other appear grossly immoral.

Lucille Langhanke was born in Quincy, Ill. 30 years ago. When she grew up pretty, her parents started to train her for the films. Running second to Clara Bow in a beauty contest, Lucille went West. In 1925 Douglas Fairbanks chose her for leading lady in Don Q. Thereafter, as Mary Astor, she enjoyed a profitable, if not sensational, cinema career. In 1930 Miss Astor’s first husband, Director Kenneth Hawks, was killed in a plane smash. Recovering from this shock, Miss Astorwas attended by Dr. Thorpe, a dressy Hollywood gynecologist, whomshe married within a year. In 1934 Miss Astor’s parents, who evidentlyregarded their daughter as a speculative investment, complained incourt that she had failed to keep them in luxury (TIME, April 2, 1934). Pacified with an extra-legal settlement, the old folks retired to a goat ranch near Hollywood. Meanwhile, Mary Astor’s and Franklyn Thorpe’s child was born, named Marylyn.

Last year Miss Astor gave Dr. Thorpe an uncontested divorce, custody of little Marylyn, a property settlement of $60,000. Last month the dark, willowy young actress suddenly petitioned the Los Angeles Superior Court for full custody of her child, an annulment of her marriage and divorce. Each of these objectives Dr. Thorpe promptly opposed.

The “Astor Case” began conventionally enough with the mother telling the court that the father was no fit parent because he had “shaken the baby so hard that her teeth rattled.” To that the father replied that on those occasions when the mother cared for the child it was not fed the diet which he, as a physician, hadrecommended. Then the case passed from the nursery to the boudoir as each of the disputants began telling not the judge but the Press how oversexed the other was.

A tattling nurse produced by Miss Astor named four women who at various times after the divorce had apparently spent the night with Dr. Thorpe. One of these, a blonde onetime showgirl named Norma Taylor*, was also recalled by a Los Angeles policeman. Dr. Thorpe had summoned him in after Miss Taylor, intoxicated, had invaded his dining room when he was eating with his daughter, brandished a candlestick, chased him upstairs, cornered him in a bathroom, plunged a fork into his thigh.

In rebuttal. Dr. Thorpe’s attorneys wheeled into action the most formidable instrument for destroying a film character by sexual innuendo that California had seen since the 1922 “Fatty” Arbuckle case. Dr. Thorpe, after the divorce, had apparently stolen a two-volume diary kept by his exwife. Its revelations, doled out day by day from his attorney’s office, were as purple as the ink they were written in. “Why the hell I keep writing things down in this book I don’t know,” began the first instalment of what the tabloid Press promptly labeled “The Misstep Diary.” “It seems to help for some reason. Then, too, Baby Marylyn some day would like to know what sort of a person her mother was and maybe she will be consoled when she makes mistakes and gets into jams to know that mother was a champion at making mistakes. I blush a little (very little) at the idea of her reading some of the stuff in this book. I have been and am such a fool.”When Dr. Thorpe’s Iawyers mentioned the name of John Barrymore, whom they proposed to question in connection with “statements in Miss Astor’s diary,” that life-worn old actor immediately reported sick in a Culver City sanitarium. However, no screen lover but a sad-eyed dramatist was cast as Miss Astor’s No. 1 partner-in-sin. Browsing through Miss Astor’s diary, the doctor’s lawyers said they found that she had recorded experiencing a “thrilling ecstasy” in the company of George S. Kaufman (Merrily We Roll Along, Once in a Lifetime). “He fits me perfectly,” stated Miss Astor, recalling, “many exquisite moments . . . twenty—count them, diary, twenty. . . . I don’t see how he does it… he is perfect.”In October 1935, Actress Astor admitted on the stand, she had telephoned Mr. Kaufman, whom she had not met, from a Manhattan saloon, asked him if he would care to make her acquaintance. He would and did, the upshot being that playwright and actress spent ten days together in a “snug and delightfully cozy” Manhattan apartment. Miss Astor wrote in her diary that she asked Mr. Kaufman: “How is it that you don’t tell me you love me?” The worldly, 47-year-old dramatist, according to the Astor diary, replied, “Well, I’ll tell you; I am not going to say I love you because I don’t. I was through with love long ago.”

Subpoenaed last week as he stepped from the yacht of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Producer Irving Thalberg, Playwright Kaufman made no formal comment to the Press, but was reported by friends to have torn his hair and cried “I’m being crucified —crucified!” When he failed to appear as the subpoena directed, a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Meanwhile, jittery producers listened to frightening rumors, set afloat by Dr. Thorpe’s lawyers, that the Astor diary listed six actors who Miss Astor considered the “greatest lovers” of the cinema industry, feared that millions of dollars worth of pictures now in production might be in jeopardy in a land which insists that its film stars be sexy but not immoral. Hollywood’s most worried man was old Sam Goldwyn, in whose Dodsworth Miss Astor is currently cast as the expatriate seductress. Guarding Miss Astor from newshawks, the Goldwyn pressagents explained: “Mary is a trouper, but you never can tell. She might ‘blow up’ under pressure if we let people see her and then where would we be?”

Though the Press reported that “Diary-burning was now Hollywood’s main concern,” Miss Astor’s colleagues displayed monumental discretion when asked to comment on her case. Said William Powell: “Excuse me!” Jack Oakie: “It’s a nice day.” Claudette Colbert: “Uh-huh . . . that’s bad.” Miss Astor’s one stanch friend was Ruth Chatterton, also inDodsworth. Miss Chatterton attended most sessions of the trial, told the Press: “I admire Miss Astor very much for her courage. I am for her all the way.”

About the only person who seemed to take the Astor case calmly was Mrs. Kaufman, wife of the playwright, who is fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Interviewed in London last week she declared:

“I knew all about this case before it caught the limelight. … I know Mary Astor well. My husband met her just about this time a year ago. I was in Honolulu and he was working in Hollywood. They had a flirtation. … I cannot see any terrible harm in that. Is it unusual for a husband to flirt with an actress? We have been married 20 years. We are adults, leading our own lives in adult fashion.

“George is a good husband. I love him very much and he is in love with me. . . . Please do not ask me to discuss Miss Astor. She is a film actress and kept a diary. Very stupid, that. . . .”

*Last week Miss Taylor was discovered at the Westchester County, N. Y. estate of Thomas Franklyn (“Tommy”) Manville Jr., asbestos heir, who is separated from his wife but plays public host to a beauteous blonde “secretary” and a beauteous brunette “French teacher,” Last week Manville happily gibbered to news hawks: “Miss Taylor is no relation at all, ex cept that I am in love with her. . . . This isn’t Utah. I am already married. But if I am ever divorced from my wife. … I may marry Nancy Carroll.” †With Norma Taylor.