Book Review: The Purple Diaries

[osprey_archer]

I read Joseph Egan’s The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s, which oversells itself a bit in that subtitle, frankly; the newspapers may have written that Hollywood was shaking in its boots over the potential revelations in Mary Astor’s diaries, but it’s pretty clear from Egan’s telling (although he

Comments

[asakiyume]

I know my mom read a book on the (somewhat eccentric?) Astors, but it won't have been that one. Yeah, I think it was probably this one, which is quite old.

[osprey_archer]

I think that's actually a different set of Astors; Mary Astor's original name was something else, but I can't remember what as it was long and cumbersome and Germanic, which doubtless is why the studios changed it for the movies.

I bet they picked Astor in part for its connotations of great wealth from those original Astors, though.