Toward the end of his adoring tribute to Mary Astor, the villainess star of The Maltese Falcon, the famous cartoonist Edward Sorel explains his half-century infatuation with Mary as just another odd ...

Mary Astor's Purple Diary is a musical fairy tale for adults, inspired by Ed Sorel's best-selling book of the same name. It's a fizzy little cocktail of a musical about a Hollywood sex scandal, love, ...

"Bare Excerpts of Mary Astor's 'Lavender Diary,'" screamed a headline. Another: "Astor's Sensations Scare Film Moguls." This was the sex scandal that fascinated and titillated the nation 80 years ago ...

Many movie lovers know actress Mary Astor for her role in the 1941 Warner Bros. film, "The Maltese Falcon," but even those who have followed her work may not know the details of the scandal that ...

Most of us have done it. We’ve pulled up a floor covering — linoleum or vinyl in the kitchen, or maybe some old wall-to-wall — and discovered some horror underneath. Edward Sorel did it in an ...

Deutsch, James I. 2009. "Film Star Mary Astor’s Diary Becomes a Public Sensation." In Great Events from History: Modern Scandals. Bankston, Carl L., editor. 184 ...

Elderly Hollywood breathed a little easier. By court order, the torch had been put to Actress Mary Astor’s famed “Purple Diary,” introduced by her then husband Dr. Franklyn Thorpe in his 1936 suit for ...

Who can forget Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaughnessy, with her limpid eyes and quivering chin, imploring Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade to save her from the cops at the end of “The Maltese Falcon”? Astor ...