Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 PDF Author: Edward Sorel
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631490249
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In a hilarious send-up of sex, scandal, and the Golden Age of Hollywood, legendary cartoonist Edward Sorel brings us a story (literally) ripped from the headlines of a bygone era. In 1965, a young, up-and-coming illustrator by the name of Edward Sorel was living in a $97-a-month railroad flat on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Resolved to fix up the place, Sorel began pulling up the linoleum on his kitchen floor, tearing away layer after layer until he discovered a hidden treasure: issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936, each ablaze with a scandalous child custody trial taking place in Hollywood and starring the actress Mary Astor. Sorel forgot about his kitchen and lost himself in the story that had pushed Hitler and Franco off the front pages. At the time of the trial, Mary Astor was still only a supporting 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 a married man to boot, had been her lover. The scandal revolved around Mary’s diary, which her ex-husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, had found when they were still together. Its incriminating contents had forced Mary to give up custody of their daughter in order to obtain a divorce. By 1936 she had decided to challenge the arrangement, even though Thorpe 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—and he’d already alerted the press. Enraptured by this sensational case and the actress at the heart of it, Sorel began a life-long obsession that now reaches its apex. Featuring over sixty original illustrations, Mary Astor's Purple Diary narrates and illustrates the travails of the Oscar-winning actress alongside Sorel’s own personal story of discovering an unlikely muse. Throughout, we get his wry take on all the juicy details of this particular slice of Hollywood Babylon, including Mary's life as a child star—her career in silent films began at age fourteen—presided over by her tyrannical father, Otto, who "managed" her full-time and treated his daughter like an ATM machine. Sorel also animates her teenage love affair with probably the biggest star of the silent era, the much older John Barrymore, who seduced her on the set of a movie and convinced her parents to allow her to be alone with him for private "acting lessons." Sorel imbues Mary Astor's life with the kind of wit and eye for character that his art is famous for, but here he also emerges as a writer, creating a compassionate character study of Astor, a woman who ultimately achieved a life of independence after spending so much of it bullied by others. Featuring ribald and rapturous art throughout, Mary Astor's Purple Diary is a passion project that becomes the masterpiece of one of America’s greatest illustrators.

Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 PDF Author: Edward Sorel
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631490249
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book

Book Description
In a hilarious send-up of sex, scandal, and the Golden Age of Hollywood, legendary cartoonist Edward Sorel brings us a story (literally) ripped from the headlines of a bygone era. In 1965, a young, up-and-coming illustrator by the name of Edward Sorel was living in a $97-a-month railroad flat on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Resolved to fix up the place, Sorel began pulling up the linoleum on his kitchen floor, tearing away layer after layer until he discovered a hidden treasure: issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936, each ablaze with a scandalous child custody trial taking place in Hollywood and starring the actress Mary Astor. Sorel forgot about his kitchen and lost himself in the story that had pushed Hitler and Franco off the front pages. At the time of the trial, Mary Astor was still only a supporting 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 a married man to boot, had been her lover. The scandal revolved around Mary’s diary, which her ex-husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, had found when they were still together. Its incriminating contents had forced Mary to give up custody of their daughter in order to obtain a divorce. By 1936 she had decided to challenge the arrangement, even though Thorpe 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—and he’d already alerted the press. Enraptured by this sensational case and the actress at the heart of it, Sorel began a life-long obsession that now reaches its apex. Featuring over sixty original illustrations, Mary Astor's Purple Diary narrates and illustrates the travails of the Oscar-winning actress alongside Sorel’s own personal story of discovering an unlikely muse. Throughout, we get his wry take on all the juicy details of this particular slice of Hollywood Babylon, including Mary's life as a child star—her career in silent films began at age fourteen—presided over by her tyrannical father, Otto, who "managed" her full-time and treated his daughter like an ATM machine. Sorel also animates her teenage love affair with probably the biggest star of the silent era, the much older John Barrymore, who seduced her on the set of a movie and convinced her parents to allow her to be alone with him for private "acting lessons." Sorel imbues Mary Astor's life with the kind of wit and eye for character that his art is famous for, but here he also emerges as a writer, creating a compassionate character study of Astor, a woman who ultimately achieved a life of independence after spending so much of it bullied by others. Featuring ribald and rapturous art throughout, Mary Astor's Purple Diary is a passion project that becomes the masterpiece of one of America’s greatest illustrators.

The Purple Diaries

The Purple Diaries PDF Author: Joseph Egan
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1682302989
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The “endlessly fascinating” true story of a custody battle that threatened to expose the seedy secrets of Hollywood’s Golden Age—illustrated with photos (Entertainment Weekly). Most famous for playing opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Mary Astor was one of Hollywood’s most beloved film stars. But her story wasn’t a happy one. Widowed at twenty-four, she quickly entered a rocky marriage with Dr. Franklyn Thorpe in which both were unfaithful. When they finally divorced in 1936, Astor sued for custody of their baby daughter Marylyn, setting off one of Hollywood’s most scandalous court cases. In the ruthless court battle, Thorpe held a trump card: the diaries Astor had been keeping for years. In them, Astor detailed her own affairs—including with playwright George S. Kaufman—as well as the myriad dalliances of some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Studio heads were desperate to keep such damning details from leaking. But speculation of the dairy’s contents became a major news story, stealing the front page from The Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s 1936 Olympic Games in newspapers all over America. With unlimited access to the photographs and memorabilia of Mary Astor’s estate, The Purples Diaries is an in-depth look at Hollywood’s Golden Age as it has never been seen before.

Profusely Illustrated

Profusely Illustrated PDF Author: Edward Sorel
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525521070
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The fabulous life and times of one of our wittiest, most endearing and enduring caricaturists—in his own words and inimitable art. Sorel has given us "some of the best pictorial satire of our time ... [his] pen can slash as well as any sword” (The Washington Post). Alongside more than 172 of his drawings, cartoons, and caricatures—and in prose as spirited and wickedly pointed as his artwork—Edward Sorel gives us an unforgettable self-portrait: his poor Depression-era childhood in the Bronx (surrounded by loving Romanian immigrant grandparents and a clan of mostly left-leaning aunts and uncles); his first stabs at drawing when pneumonia kept him out of school at age eight; his time as a student at New York’s famed High School of Music and Art; the scrappy early days of Push Pin Studios, founded with fellow Cooper Union alums Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, which became the hottest design group of the 1960s; his two marriages and four children; and his many friends in New York’s art and literary circles. As the “young lefty” becomes an “old lefty,” Sorel charts the highlights of his remarkable life, by both telling us and showing us how in magazines and newspapers, books, murals, cartoons, and comic strips, he steadily lampooned—and celebrated—American cultural and political life. He sets his story in the parallel trajectory of American presidents, from FDR’s time to the present day—with the candor and depth of insight that could come only from someone who lived through it all. In Profusely Illustrated, Sorel reveals the kaleidoscopic ways in which the personal and political collide in art—a collision that is simultaneously brilliant in concept and uproarious and beautiful in its representation.

The New Builders

The New Builders PDF Author: Seth Levine
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119797365
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Despite popular belief to the contrary, entrepreneurship in the United States is dying. It has been since before the Great Recession of 2008, and the negative trend in American entrepreneurship has been accelerated by the Covid pandemic. New firms are being started at a slower rate, are employing fewer workers, and are being formed disproportionately in just a few major cities in the U.S. At the same time, large chains are opening more locations. Companies such as Amazon with their "deliver everything and anything" are rapidly displacing Main Street businesses. In The New Builders, we tell the stories of the next generation of entrepreneurs -- and argue for the future of American entrepreneurship. That future lies in surprising places -- and will in particular rely on the success of women, black and brown entrepreneurs. Our country hasn't yet even recognized the identities of the New Builders, let alone developed strategies to support them. Our misunderstanding is driven by a core misperception. Consider a "typical" American entrepreneur. Think about the entrepreneur who appears on TV, the business leader making headlines during the pandemic. Think of the type of businesses she or he is building, the college or business school they attended, the place they grew up. The image you probably conjured is that of a young, white male starting a technology business. He's likely in Silicon Valley. Possibly New York or Boston. He's self-confident, versed in the ins and outs of business funding and has an extensive (Ivy League?) network of peers and mentors eager to help his business thrive, grow and make millions, if not billions. You’d think entrepreneurship is thriving, and helping the United States maintain its economic power. You'd be almost completely wrong. The dominant image of an entrepreneur as a young white man starting a tech business on the coasts isn't correct at all. Today's American entrepreneurs, the people who drive critical parts of our economy, are more likely to be female and non-white. In fact, the number of women-owned businesses has increased 31 times between 1972 and 2018 according to the Kauffman Foundation (in 1972, women-owned businesses accounted for just 4.6% of all firms; in 2018 that figure was 40%). The fastest-growing group of female entrepreneurs are women of color, who are responsible for 64% of new women-owned businesses being created. In a few years, we believe women will make up more than half of the entrepreneurs in America. The age of the average American entrepreneur also belies conventional wisdom: It's 42. The average age of the most successful entrepreneurs -- those in the top .01% in terms of their company's growth in the first five years -- is 45. These are the New Builders. Women, people of color, immigrants and people over 40. We're failing them. And by doing so, we are failing ourselves. In this book, you'll learn: How the definition of business success in America today has grown corporate and around the concepts of growth, size, and consumption. Why and how our collective understanding of "entrepreneurship" has dangerously narrowed. Once a broad term including people starting businesses of all types, entrepreneurship has come to describe only the brash technology founders on the way to becoming big. Who are the fastest growing groups of entrepreneurs? What are they working on? What drives them? The real engine that drove Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs. The government had a much bigger role than is widely known The extent to which entrepreneurs and small businesses are woven through our history, and the ways we have forgotten women and people of color who owned small businesses in the past. How we're increasingly afraid to fail The role small businesses are playing saving the wilderness, small towns and redlined communities What we can do to turn the decline in entrepreneurship around, especially be supporting the people who are courageously starting small companies today.

The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley

The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley PDF Author: R. Alton Lee
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813197422
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
By 1926, it seemed that John R. Brinkley's experimental rejuvenation cure—transplanting goat glands into aging men—had taken the nation by storm. Never mind that "Doc" Brinkley's medical credentials were shaky at best and that he prescribed medication over the airwaves via his high-power radio stations. To most in the medical field, he was a quack. But to his many patients and listeners, he was a brilliant surgeon, a savior of their lost manhood and youth. His rogue radio stations, XER and its successor XERA, eventually broadcast at an antenna-shattering 1,000,000 watts and not only were a megaphone for Brinkley's lucrative quackery but also hosted an unprecedented number of then-unknown country musicians and other guests. The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley tells the story of the infamous "Goat Gland Doctor"—a controversial medical charlatan, groundbreaking radio impresario, and prescient political campaigner—and recounts his amazing rags-to-riches-to-rags career. A master manipulator and skilled con artist, Brinkley left behind a patchwork of myths and unreliable personal accounts that many writers have merely perpetuated—until now. Alton Lee brings Brinkley's infamous legacy to the forefront, exploring how he ruthlessly exploited the sexual frustrations of aging men and the general public's antipathy toward medical doctors. Lee leaves no stone unturned in this account of a man who changed the course of American institutions forever.

America's Great Game

America's Great Game PDF Author: Hugh Wilford
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 046501965X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
From the 9/11 attacks to waterboarding to drone strikes, relations between the United States and the Middle East seem caught in a downward spiral. And all too often, the Central Intelligence Agency has made the situation worse. But this crisis was not a historical inevitability—far from it. Indeed, the earliest generation of CIA operatives was actually the region’s staunchest western ally. In America’s Great Game, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford reveals the surprising history of the CIA’s pro-Arab operations in the 1940s and 50s by tracing the work of the agency’s three most influential—and colorful—officers in the Middle East. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and the first head of CIA covert action in the region; his cousin, Archie Roosevelt, was a Middle East scholar and chief of the Beirut station. The two Roosevelts joined combined forces with Miles Copeland, a maverick covert operations specialist who had joined the American intelligence establishment during World War II. With their deep knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, the three men were heirs to an American missionary tradition that engaged Arabs and Muslims with respect and empathy. Yet they were also fascinated by imperial intrigue, and were eager to play a modern rematch of the “Great Game,” the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control over central Asia. Despite their good intentions, these “Arabists” propped up authoritarian regimes, attempted secretly to sway public opinion in America against support for the new state of Israel, and staged coups that irrevocably destabilized the nations with which they empathized. Their efforts, and ultimate failure, would shape the course of U.S.–Middle Eastern relations for decades to come. Based on a vast array of declassified government records, private papers, and personal interviews, America’s Great Game tells the riveting story of the merry band of CIA officers whose spy games forever changed U.S. foreign policy.

Empress of the East

Empress of the East PDF Author: Leslie Peirce
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The "fascinating . . . lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

Five Sisters

Five Sisters PDF Author: James Fox
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743217004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
The author of the bestseller White Mischief tells the story of the beautiful Langhorne sisters, who lived at the Pinnacle of high and powerful society from the end of the Civil War through the Second World War. Making their way across two continents, they left in their wakes rich husbands, fame, adoration, and scandal. Lizzie, Irene, Nancy, Phyllis, and Nora were born in Virginia to a family impoverished by the Civil War. Their father remade his fortune by collaborating with the Yankees and building rail-roads; the sisters became southern belles and northern debutantes. James Fox draws on unpublished correspondence between the sisters and their husbands, lovers, children, and the powerful and glamorous of their day to construct a plural topography with the scope of a grand novel and the pace of a historical thriller. At its center is the most famous sister, Nancy, who married Waldorf Astor, one of the richest men in the world. Heroic, hilarious, magnetically charming, and a bully, Lady Astor became Britain's first female MP, championing women's rights and the poor. The beautiful Irene married Charles Dana Gibson and was the model for the Gibson Girl. The author's grandmother, Phyllis, married a famous economist, one of the architects of modern Europe. Fox has written an absorbing and spirited, intimate and sweeping account of extraordinary women at the highest reaches of society, their adventures set against the background of a tumultuous century.

My Story an Autobiography

My Story an Autobiography PDF Author: Mary Astor
Publisher: Franklin Classics Trade Press
ISBN: 9780353307469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Divo and the Duce

The Divo and the Duce PDF Author: Giorgio Bertellini
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520301366
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority. This is the first volume in the new Cinema Cultures in Contact series, coedited by Giorgio Bertellini, Richard Abel, and Matthew Solomon.