BEAUTIFUL BLUEBLOOD, RED-BLOODED HE-MAN!
Mary Astor’s career outlasted her ‘brute’ co-star
The allure of many movies from the 1920s and ’30s has faded. But their ads are often fabulous.
A good example is Ladies Love Brutes, a comedy-drama that played the Strand Theatre at Georgia and Granville this week in 1930.
“Might vs. Manners!” blared an ad in the May 23, 1930 Vancouver Sun. “Modern women want redblooded men!”
The modern woman in this case was Mary Astor, the red-blooded man was George Bancroft and the man with manners was her estranged husband, Fredric March.
An illustration features the swarthy Bancroft atop the comely Astor, who is reclining on a couch and turns her cheek as he prepares to swoop in for a smooch. The suave March glares down, impeccably dressed in a tuxedo.
It’s very deco, a bit racy, and rather hilarious. Bancroft was a big star at the time, known for playing heavies in gangster movies like Underworld (1927) and Thunderbolt (1929).
In Ladies Love Brutes, Bancroft plays tough guy Joe Forziati, who makes a fortune in the rough and tumble construction business. He decides to break into high society, where he falls for Astor, who is attracted to the brute but doesn’t see him as step-dad material for her little boy.
Bancroft stages a fake kidnapping of the boy so he can “save” him and win Astor’s love, but a mobster from the construction world throws a wrench into his plans by abducting the kid, along with Bancroft’s own son. He gets the kids back after some slam-bang action, but gives up on Astor and returns to the rough world from whence he sprang.
Astor was never as big a star as Bancroft, but had a longer career and is better known today. She won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 1941 for The Great Lie, but her most famous role was as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon the same year.
In 1936, she was embroiled in one of Hollywood’s great scandals when she went to court with her former husband, Franklin Thorpe, over custody of their daughter.
In court, Thorpe’s lawyer insinuated the actress had many “rendezvous with men friends near her daughter’s nursery” after she split with her husband.
“While name after name of male friends was dragged into the records, Miss Astor maintained a calm demeanour, and when troubled for a ready answer, declared she could remember none of the incidents,” the Los Angeles Times reported on Aug. 11, 1936.
“Trips to New York, to Havana, to Palm Springs and a rendezvous in hotels of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts were brought into the evidence.
“Companionships with John Eldridge, brother-in-law of Fredric March; with John Barrymore, with the many-time-mentioned George Kaufmann, with Bennett Cerf, former husband of Sylvia Sydney; with Count Carpegna, Danny Silverberg and a Dr. Mortimer Rogers were among those mentioned as having provided dining or dancing engagements with the actress.”
Thorpe’s lawyers even trotted out a “purple diary ” Astor had kept that detailed her alleged indiscretions with Kaufmann, who Astor “fell (for) like a ton of bricks.”
“Tuesday night we had dinner at ‘Twenty-one’ and on the way to see Run, Little Chillun he did kiss me — and I don’t think either of us remember much what the show was about,” Astor allegedly wrote.
“Afterwards we had a drink some place and then we went to a little flat in Seventy-third Street where we could be alone and it was all very thrilling and beautiful.”
The diary and trial were so sensational the L.A. Times had three pages of stories about it on Aug. 11, including transcripts where Thorpe’s lawyer went through Astor’s gentleman friends one by one.
Kenneth Anger has some wild excerpts from the diary in his notorious book Hollywood Babylon, but the dirty bits Anger quotes aren’t in the Times stories, so it’s hard to say if they were true.
Astor denied many of the allegations, saying the diary had been stolen from her desk and parts of it were forged. The judge ordered the diary sealed and impounded. In 1952, it was destroyed.
The scandal didn’t seem to affect her career — Astor continued to act until she retired after making Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte in 1964. She wrote two bestselling memoirs, and died on Sept. 25, 1987 at the age of 81.