"Hello, Elaine? ... I Am Going to Kill You": The Tale of Elaine Barrie and John Barrymore

The curtain parted swiftly with a clang of rings on rod.

“I repeat, Madam, what would you do if I tried to throw you off the terrace?”

The scene is a twentieth-floor apartment on East 79th Street, Manhattan, the year 1940. “Madam” is Elaine Barrie, aka Elaine Barrymore, and the speaker is her husband, John Barrymore.

And no, he wasn’t rehearsing.

Those are the first two lines of Elaine’s autobiography, ripely titled All My Sins Remembered. Her ghost writer, given due credit on the jacket, was Sandford Dody. As was the style with such memoirs back in 1964 when it was published, All My Sins Remembered reads more like a novel, with florid descriptions and elaborate conversations no one could possibly recall in such screenplay detail.

It’s structured like a script, too. As the curtains part in the first line, Barrymore has been in a coma, a not-infrequent occurrence as late-stage alcoholism kept nudging him toward the grave. Once he awakens, and sees the handsome male nurse assigned to keep him from dying, Barrymore terrorizes the man into leaving and begins to circle Elaine, accusing her of hiring a male hooker in disguise: “These bastards have a million disguises. Window cleaners, doormen, elevator boys, radio repairmen.” After several pages of ranting and circling, Barrymore drags his wife to the terrace: “My dear. You wanted me to give you all New York. There it is out there. You are going to get it all in one fell swoop!”

“Was this really the great John Barrymore threatening to kill me?” wonders Elaine, from twenty stories up.

Aaaaand … flashback, in the next chapter, to young Elaine’s girlhood worship of the Great Profile, how she kept a still of him as Svengali over her bed (how’s that for bizarre teenage sex objects?), and how she interviewed him for Hunter College’s paper when he was 52 years old and hospitalized for “severe flu." The phony flu was a flashing yellow light that ambitious 19-year-old Elaine drove straight through, on her way to becoming Barrymore's fourth and final wife.

The Siren bought this long-forgotten book off a sidewalk card table, took it home and gobbled every page like a plate of french fries. When she had the chance to buy Sanford Dody’s own autobiography, deliciously titled Giving Up the Ghost, she seized it, just to find out if he believed all the things he'd put in his own book. Dody's handiwork included Helen Hayes' On Reflection, First Person Plural with Dagmar Godowsky (that one's delightful), and The Lonely Life by Bette Davis (she rewrote the whole thing at the last moment, and Dody never forgave her).

And he didn't buy everything Elaine told him, no. Dody didn’t believe, for example, that Elaine fell instantly in love with the wreck that Barrymore had already become by 1934. He considered her starstruck and self-deluded about her motives for the marriage. But he didn't entirely see her as the gold-digger portrayed in the 1930s press and indeed by most John Barrymore fans to this day. He gave Elaine credit for striving to keep Barrymore sober and working, and for trying to look after his health.

Certainly she yearned to become an actress, and was eager for Barrymore to help her. In that regard, landing Barrymore was a Pyrrhic victory. She got plenty of space in the gossip columns, sure. But aside from a series of small parts in plays, a short called How to Undress for Your Husband (which somehow she doesn't mention in her book) and one small role in Midnight, Elaine's acting career never amounted to much. By the time Dody met her, Elaine was a businesswoman dividing her time between Haiti and Manhattan, producing woven-rattan baskets and placemats in the one place, to be sold at Bloomingdale’s in the other.

But one thing Sandford Dody did believe was that John Barrymore, right after coming out of an alcoholic coma, dragged his wife to their terrace, bent her over the railing and came close to pushing her over. Dody believed that, and quite a bit more. All My Sins Remembered is the memoir of an abusive marriage, published 14 years before Mommie Dearest.

All Hollywood autobiographies are exercises in unreliable narration. It isn’t so much that they deliberately lie (although some of them do that, too), it’s that they are in a business that is fundamentally about tale-spinning. Add the literary efforts of a ghostwriter, and boy do they spin. What makes this book such a temple-rubbing astonishment is that Elaine's spin isn’t vengeful, à la Christina Crawford. Her message isn't, “You should hate this great actor I married, because he was an insanely jealous and at times violent drunk.” No, these stories are meant to prove that this was a doomed, but genuine, romance. It was tempestuous. He called her Ariel, she called him Caliban, get it? “If only we had really been young together,” reads one of the picture captions, and another adds, “but it was too late for anything.”

Dody says that after many sessions of charming and/or wistful little anecdotes, Elaine let her guard down one day: “Up to now there had always been a tolerant smile about the drinking, a smugly raised eyebrow concerning the jealousy. But this session was different. With chilling eloquence, Elaine came through for me."

So this is the tale told by Elaine and Sandford:

Born Elaine Jacobs, soon after that hospital meet-up she'd changed her name to Barrie, "as close to Barrymore as I dared." She wanted out of her middle-class life on the Upper West Side, and she dreamed of becoming an actress. Barrymore, for his part, liked her bookishness, her youth and her looks, which were more Modigliani than Hollywood.

John and Elaine’s courtship was a staple of the gossip columns, especially one episode when John broke it off with Elaine and boarded a country-country train. She pursued, egged on by the newspapers that in turn pursued her, and when Ariel and Caliban caught up, they reconciled. It was to be the pattern of their time together, “tender reconciliations after spectacular quarrels,” as Barrie’s 2003 New York Times obituary put it.

According to Elaine, those “quarrels,” if you want to call them that, and the Siren doesn’t, were there almost from the beginning. Before their marriage John took Elaine to Havana on board his yacht, the Infanta, for a romantic getaway. She had already slept with him, but for appearances’ sake Elaine took along her mother, Edna. (Edna was quite a character, as omnipresent in her daughter’s life as Lela Rogers was in Ginger's. When Dody met them years later, Edna and Elaine were living together, still joined at the hip.)

Elaine arrived at the Cuban hacienda of John's brother-in-law Arturo “Mussie” de Barrio and was greeted by Mussie’s good-looking younger brother with “En esta su casa.” Whereupon John slapped Elaine’s face with a force that knocked her hat askew.

And everyone ignored it. Even Edna, who was standing right there. Elaine says her mother greeted the other guests, saying, “How do you do, señor?” then, under her breath, “Please don’t look at my daughter...Gracias, señor — don’t notice her...” Once they were alone, Edna tried to get her daughter to leave. Elaine said, “Oh, for God's sake, John’s sorry. He couldn’t help it, dear.” And later he apologized. Then John proposed, and Elaine accepted, although it took them a while to get hitched.

On the beach, John berated Elaine for wearing swimsuits that were too sexy. On board the boat returning from Havana, a man smiled at Elaine, and John tried to throw him overboard. John then chased Elaine into her stateroom, swung hard at her face and missed only because Edna’s fist had just connected with his jaw. ("He's lucky I didn't hit his nose," said Edna later. "That would have been the end of the Great Profile.")

Back in Hollywood, where Elaine and Edna had moved to be with him as he filmed Romeo and Juliet, John invited Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer to Elaine’s birthday dinner. A thrilled Elaine dressed up and worked like crazy to charm them. Midway through the dinner, John waited for a quiet moment and asked Shearer, “Tell me, Norma, I’m curious. I can’t stand whores — can you?” As Elaine, her mother and the Thalbergs tried to regain their composure, John filled his wineglass to the rim and, to make sure the point couldn’t possibly be missed, added, “The world has certainly changed. Tarts were never countenanced at a gentleman’s table, amongst such a lofty congregation, unless, of course, they were served as a sweet.”

The Thalbergs finished the meal and departed as fast as manners would permit. John drove the guests home and phoned Elaine later. His greeting was, “Hello — Elaine?...I am going to kill you.”

When they finally got married some months later, in Yuma, Ariz., on Nov. 9, 1936, the following night John accused Elaine of sleeping with the bellboy and threw a glassful of Dubonnet, as well as the decanter, at her head. He missed and ruined the satin drapes, not her face.

Towards the end of their marriage they toured in a play together, by all accounts a misbegotten thing, called My Dear Children, directed by Otto Preminger. Barrymore played an aging matinee idol, and Elaine played his daughter; she picked the property herself. At that point, people were attending a John Barrymore performance to see if he'd go up on his lines or possibly even pass out, but for a while attend it they did. Above is a photograph of the play’s purported comic highlight. John played drunk often, would execute the spanking with all his strength, and Elaine went onstage every night in fear. She said she decided to leave, and accosted John in his hotel room to give him the news (by this time their rooms were separate). He yelled, “You aren’t going anywhere, you bitch,” unzipped her dress so hard it tore, twisted her arm and struck her face. Elaine called for the nurse who was on Barrymore guard duty, but she'd already locked herself in the bathroom. Elaine ran down the corridor in little more than her underwear and yelled for help until actor Lloyd Gough, who was in the play’s cast, pulled her into his room.

The producer persuaded Elaine not to walk out. On the company’s arrival in St. Louis, Preminger in turn coaxed Elaine to attend a luncheon with 300 of the city’s social and political elite. As Elaine walked to her chair, John kicked her in the shin in full view of the assembly. “You could hear the collective gasp in Chicago,” she said, but once again, everything proceeded as though nothing had taken place. That is, until John, drunk to the point of semi-coherence, rose on his hind legs and gave a rambling speech that embarrassed everyone into silence.

Elaine left the show, more or less by mutual agreement, before it hit Broadway. They were soon divorced, but the terrace incident actually happened after that, when John had temporarily moved back in with Elaine. That in turn was after she had returned to My Dear Children, now on Broadway, and started padding her backside for the spanking scene. When John still managed to hurt her, she'd revenge herself by biting his hand. Again they separated, and this time Elaine didn't go back. "What was it that definitely decided me to leave?" she asks, rhetorically. "His last threat to kill me?" I don't know, Elaine, but I sure as hell hope so.

Elaine hadn’t remarried when the book was written, and never did. All My Sins Remembered ends abruptly with Barrymore’s death in 1942. Even given a short time frame to cover, Dody had a hard time putting this one together. He complained that Elaine spent most of her day on the phone to Bloomie's about her “goddamned mats” and never offered him so much as a bowl of mixed nuts, no matter how long he was at her apartment. He’d accepted the assignment because he saw it as a book that was really about John Barrymore, whom he worshipped — as an actor.

I pitied both Mr. and Mrs. John Barrymore. The great star whose glow had attracted Elaine and died light-years before she’d ever come on the scene. She and her mother were late arrivals at the tragedy but they still got into the act….

I knew Elaine much better and I now knew Barrymore too well. As keeper of the flame, Elaine played with fire and couldn’t complain about her burns. But as awed as I was by the enormous gifts of Barrymore, his descent into the bathetic and his wallowing self-indulgent disregard of others — especially his daughter, Diana, with whom I had once worked in Hollywood — were unattractive in the extreme.

...I pitied the great actor, but I found it difficult to adore him, and this was creating a problem since Elaine still did despite her stories.

The book sold poorly. "The public no longer cared about Ariel and Caliban and their dusty shenanigans,” says Dody. All My Sins Remembered is a hell of a read, but (or do I mean because?) the dialogue is like a crazed mating dance between Jerry Wald and Noel Coward. In his own memoir Dody cheerfully admits to having written lines for Barrymore that the man never said in his life. Admits, hell, Dody brags.

You can feel him straining to lighten the mood. Mother Edna is used extensively for comic relief, and many of her lines have a whiff of the Ghost. After she socks John in the jaw, Edna announces, “We are leaving the Good Ship Lollipop, my dear, and right now!” Even the worst marital episodes tend to end with either Elaine or John coming up with some witticism. When John throws a full decanter at her, Elaine looks at the ruined drapes and supposedly cracks, "Let all Hollywood use William Haines. For the the ultimate in interiors give me that unmistakable Barrymore touch." The scene on the terrace, however, ended with Elaine telling John go ahead, kill her. He burst into tears and let her go, and then she began to sob with him. That, Dody admits in his book, is the way Elaine said it usually ended.

Barrymore’s forlorn childhood is covered, sympathetically. On a personal level he never had a chance, not with his alcoholic and/or neglectful parents, and adults around whose idea of how to comfort the child Jack, when his mother failed to show for a dearly anticipated lunch, was to ply him with cake and gin. As for Ethel and Lionel, Elaine admired them as artists, especially Ethel. But they despised her, and she was not fond of them: “They were hypocrites, especially Lionel, who was guilty of excesses that revolted even John. They both drank more than he did though that may seem impossible.” (It does, actually, but who knows.)

Hollywood books are replete with the hell-raising adventures of John Barrymore and his mates, such as journalist Gene Fowler, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and poet/critic Sadakichi Hartmann. The Bundy Drive Boys, they called them, a proto-Rat Pack who drank, wenched, gambled, made for great copy and were probably fun, if you were one of them. Elaine wasn’t one of them. To her, they were an unrelenting pain in the neck, the men who would coax or push her husband off the wagon every time. They, in turn, took posterity's revenge. In Gene Fowler’s biography of Barrymore, says Elaine, “I emerged as a combination of Lilith and the inventor of diptheria.”

Some may have seen things a bit differently. From All My Sins Remembered, this is Elaine's account of Christmas 1935.

John took me up to Nyack to week-end with his old friend, Charles MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes. It was not only exciting for me but most pleasant. During the evening, while John and MacArthur were at their brandy and reading poetry aloud, I helped my hostess trim her Christmas trees.

He eyes glowed as she spoke of her adored husband. She then became silent as she studied me. It was obvious that she had something on her mind and didn’t know how to say it. She decided to take a stab at it. “Elaine, I’m always grateful when Charlie does his heavier drinking at ‘21.’ When he passes out, they put him in a little room upstairs they’ve told me about — I know he’s safe and I can stop torturing myself. It isn’t always that comforting. Sometimes I’m worried half to death!”

This rush of confidence astonished me, until I realized it was more a veteran’s subtle warning to a novice. How kind she was, and how unnecessary her concern.

“It’s going to be different with me, Miss Hayes. John has promised to stop that kind of drinking — and anyway I’m going to see to it that he does.”

She looked at me with that familiar and sad little smile.

“I’m serious, Miss Hayes. You’ll see. It’s all going to be different with us.”

I could almost hear her sigh as she busied herself with a frosted ornament.

(This post is a late-breaking contribution to Crystal Kalyana Pacey's The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon, at her blog, In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. Many great contributions can be found at the links page.)

More Mary & Marylyn

The Siren gets a steady trickle of emails from readers who are a little intimidated by what the Mighty James Wolcott called the "cocktail-party bonhomie" of her comments section. And this week one well-loved reader sent along some beautiful, rare photos of Mary Astor, which were duly forwarded to daughter Marylyn Roh.

You see one such above, carefully cleaned up to eliminate a crease. The Siren has never seen it before, and she and Marylyn were mesmerized by the same thing. "Those shoes--do you bet they're red?" asked Marylyn. Yes, I bet they were.

Marylyn has been avidly reading the comments to her interview, but has given up on navigating Blogger's fussy demands about how to log in and respond. (Glenn Kenny has the same problem, and don't even get the Siren started on Mubi, a brilliant site with a comments-registration system that has been merrily blackballing her almost since its inception.) Marylyn emailed some responses, and the Siren posts them here.

I'm bowled over by the responses! Bless all their darling hearts.

The last post I read was from Krystin who is my niece--not my granddaughter as she said. Her dad is my "baby brother." She's another beauty in the family. My brother, Tony del Campo, is the son of Manuel (Mike) del Campo.

For Falcon fans--so many out there! Thank you for your generous remarks and appreciation. I wonder if you know that The Maltese Falcon was used at UCLA California to teach drama, cinematic photography, and related subjects for several years. It was an archetype of detective movies. When Ted Turner managed to ruin the dramatic B&W movies, with fake colorization, Mom's hair turned straw-colored, lipstick was pasty, and the clothes were boring because they were chosen for black & white. All the mystery of the film was squelched to the max.

I can't begin to thank you all for writing. I've never done blogging before! I did want to correct the following: On the web, there are references to me, Marylyn, as named MARYLYN ASTOR THORPE, born June 16, 1932. The extra Y in MarYlyn isn't a typo. It's from MARY, and FrankLYN Thorpe my Dad. My middle name is Hauoli, meaning "happy" in Hawaiian. My parents went on a yacht race from San Pedro, Calif., to Hawaii when Mom was 6 1/2 months pregnant. They came upon heavy weather. They landed OK, but I was born two months early at 4 pounds 11 oz. You can look in the newspaper morgues for dozens of pictures of this event, and also look for the "Purple Diary" news and the custody battle of my parents. I doubt if the REAL truth will ever come out about these things.

For David Ehrenstein, about Fayard Nicholas: :o) When I was little, I went to see Fayard and his brother in every movie they were in; the most brilliant tap dancers on the planet, ever. I was visiting Mom at the MPCH and Fayard, who was living there at the time, came to visit her. I nearly fainted. Mom had never seen me so badly starstruck. We had a great conversation together. He's adorable!

I am reading Larry Harnisch's newspaper article on the custody battle with that picture I've never seen. I also have a picture of 'little Marylyn' sitting on the lap of Goodwin Knight, who because he won the case for Mom, became California's governor in those years.

And, in response to another photo sent by the same reader, Marylyn says:

Your friend has the best of the best of young Mary. Note the early pathos in her bearing. The eyes kill ya, don't they? Little did she know then what she was going to go through in her life.

Now the Siren seizes the chance to post another picture from her email pal and to quote two passages, about the great John Barrymore, from Astor's A Life on Film. Truly, if you have any interest in the nuts and bolts of being an actor in the studio era, the Siren can't recommend this book highly enough. Robert Avrech and Marylyn both cite the chapter about filming a love scene with Clark Gable as their favorite, and certainly no actress ever did a better job of explaining the decidedly anti-erotic nature of shooting a kiss. This next passage, however, is the Siren's favorite, chiefly for the way it gives the lie to the notion that the actors in classic films were all instinct and calculation and no technique.

I remember we were sitting at lunch and I said, 'May I have some more butter, please.' [Barrymore] used it. He said, 'Before any scene--go over how long you've known him--or her. You even say "Pass the butter" differently, according to how you feel. Right now you're bored--I can hear it. There's always something under what you are saying--caused by a million things. How does it make you feel? Suppose, for instance, the guy says--maybe he's your husband--"I've quit my job." And your line is "Pass the butter, please." O.K., now don't giggle like an ass. Listen, there'd be a world of difference if you think, "Well screw him, I'll get somebody else to buy my sable coat." Or if you feel happy that the guy's finally got up nerve to do something that was your idea all along. Now let's try it. Let's improvise. I'll go out and come in and tell you I've quit my job and you invent something and let me see you thinking.'

A few years ago I was working with Actors' Studio people in a TV show, trying to make sense of the nomenclature they used. I asked one of them, 'What do you mean by "subtext?"' He explained. My thoughts whisked back thirty years to 'Pass the butter.'

The Siren already referred briefly to Astor's last meeting with Barrymore, who was in the final stages of his alcoholism; they were doing a radio show together. God knows you can read endless anecdotes about the drinking habits of the great stars, and some of the stories are amusing. And even in our Celebrity Rehab age there's some glamor that clings to tales of dissipated nights at El Morocco. But the Siren finds, as she reads Lee Server's excellent, admiring Mitchum and Gardner biographies, or encounters yet another hell-raising tale of Errol Flynn, that the reality was far less rollicking.

This week, by coincidence, the gossip outlets were rocking with laughter over Lindsay Lohan's travails. In between the bad jokes you could hear people tongue-clucking over Lohan's lack of character. Such beauty, such talent and privilege, recklessly thrown away--as though this is somehow worse than an ordinary person tossing life's small gifts over the hedge. The Siren encapsulated her double reaction in an email to a dear friend: "Basically, I a. do not find drunk jokes funny in general and b. really bleeping viscerally hate a mob of people in high moral dudgeon over someone's personal failings."

If that seems like a strange and contradictory response to a modern actress whose filmography could be kindly described as "inconsistent," the Siren thinks Mary Astor, with her extraordinary talent and troubles, might have understood.

A long bleak fluorescent lighted hall: There was no one else around. I saw him walking alone down the hall ahead of me. I wanted to catch up and say hello, but I didn't. He had stopped, like someone who just couldn't walk another step; he leaned against the wall in sheer fatigue. His body sagged. It was no time to intrude, so I retraced my steps. I couldn't help thinking: Where was everybody? Where were the valets, the little train of admiring hangers-on?...I hated all the Barrymore jokes--the sick ones, the dirty ones. I hated the people who said, "I was with Jack at a bar one night," ready to recount a wild story. This was a giant of a man, one of the few greats of our time. He was someone with enormous dignity, and he never lost it. He occasionally threw it away--for his own reasons. But that was his business. And now, in that long bleak hall, I saw a man who was catching his breath before doing battle, and quite a battle it was, with death.

"You Don't Wanna Know About How Frank She Was:" A Conversation with Marylyn Roh About Her Mother, Mary Astor

About two weeks ago, the Siren logged into her email and found a note from one Marylyn Roh of Utah. Subject heading: Mary Astor.

I just crossed your blog postings about my mother, Mary Astor. Yes, I am that child of custody you mentioned, Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe (Roh). (6/15/32)

That got the Siren’s attention, all right.

…Always I learn more things each time I read something about Mom, knowing that much must be taken with a grain of salt.It was fun reading. I don't blog or Facebook, but if you'd like to know stuff about her, that you don't already know, I'll be glad to add my two bits. I just received a bio book of Ann Harding by Scott O'Brien which I helped him with a bit in that way. Mom and Ann did Holiday together - she was expecting me during the making of that picture.

I'm always surprised that Mom still has so many fans all over the world - she died 9/1987.

The Siren wrote back immediately to say that in our corner of the Web, the name Mary Astor still means a great deal. Last week, for example, the Siren watched Meet Me in St. Louis with her daughter and was entranced all over again with one of Mary Astor's small moments. It's the scene where the father tells them they are moving to New York and then, in a quintessentially male gesture, tries to ameliorate this catastrophe by making them eat cake. He cuts a huge piece for Astor; she makes a weary face, takes her fork, cuts off one finger-size sliver and slides it onto her plate. There is so much in that little cake maneuver--her unhappiness over the move, her resignation that she isn't going to change her husband's mind, her still wanting him to know she's upset. Watching Mary Astor in even the least of her many movies always yields such a moment, and it's why so many cinephiles treasure her memory.

Well, Marylyn turned out to be a joy, and she was happy to give some sharp, forthcoming answers to the Siren’s questions about her mother and her own life as a child of Golden Age Hollywood.

Cobbled together from several different emails, here is what we talked about.

For background on my discussion with Marylyn, you can check my old post, as well as this beautiful Slant Magazine essay by the awesome Dan Callahan. One of Marylyn's grandchildren, Andrew Yang, has a blog where he writes of his famous great-grandmother from time to time, and if you click through you can see a wonderful, rare photo of Astor with James Dean. See also this great L.A. Times blog post, about the custody battle for Marylyn, by the ever-excellent writer (and Siren Facebook pal) Larry Harnisch.

Your mother is one of the few Golden Age actresses, aside from her friend Bette Davis, who talked extensively in her memoirs about technique and preparing for roles. Did you ever see any of these preparations, or did she talk to you about them?

No, the only prep I witnessed was how she memorized her scripts. She took ten matches and counted how many times she took to memorize a paragraph or scene. With her gone from 5:30 am to midnight or so, I didn't see any preparation, even when I was on set.

Did you ever spend time on her sets? Was it fun, or a chore?
Yes, many hours on the set when the nanny was off. I met many stars over the years. But if you knew me, you'd know I have never been hooked on celebrity. They were not the people they were on film. They were just doing their job. I had a crush at age nine on Bogie. Heh heh. On Meet Me in St. Louis, I met Judy and the rest of the cast. She was darling in those years. Little Women gave me the chance to have lunch at the commissary with Liz Taylor. Lavender-eyed beauty, always late on the set. Mom was ALWAYS on time--which she gave to me. Fun most of the time, but tedious when all you really do is sit around and wait for the cue to get up and "act." Even though I had acting talent, I am grateful to have stayed clear of that kind of life.

Have to tell you this "funny" before leaving this question. We were in the mountain location for Brigham Young, Frontiersman in Big Bear, Calif., (1939?) and it was hot and out in the fields with horses and equipment all around. There had been an unbearably long silence. This seven-year-old could stand it no longer. Apparently, the cast was doing their lines out of my hearing range, and M was a part of it. I yelled out, "IS SHE WORKING YET?” They had to do the whole scene entirely over again. Bux bux bux. $$

Are you laughing yet? M was really sore at me.

I am laughing, because I can hear one of my seven-year-olds doing the same thing. When I wrote about her before, I said it was evident to me that acting never engaged Astor's full intelligence. Do you agree? What sort of intellectual outlets did she rely on--books, current events, socializing with like-minded people?
She was a rabid reader of heavy-duty history books mostly. She was definitely multitalented. She did put her all into her roles, for sure. She was a legend. A very unique personality. You either loved her or couldn't stand her! Years ago during World War II she knitted socks for the service men. She enjoyed playing the piano, and was an avid classical music fan. Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Gershwin, et al. Read in her first book of how she stopped singing.

Brilliant mind; she was self-taught because she left school after 8th grade. Remember that her dad, Otto Langhanke, had $$ in his eyes once she entered the beauty contest. She didn't win, but he hauled her off to Jesse Lasky's office for an interview. She was deeply scarred by ol' Otto. What greed!




As for socializing--her 3rd husband, Mike Del Campo, was a playboy and they did some heavy-duty nightclubbing. But she hated it because she was the one who had to get up to get to the studio. Mike was gorgeous, and at age seven what does a little girl (me) know about playboys, nightlife, the hot-and-heavy and seedy side of the industry. My mother divorced him because of his not being dependable, not a “husband,” which she couldn't maintain anyway with her career--and he was in the RCAF in England. He was a lush and an opportunist. Nice enough, and I really liked him a lot, if and when I saw him. After their split, Mom and I lived in a huge Georgian mansion with my baby brother, and servants. She threw parties; Bogie and I chatted for a bit. He was nice.




Although she never says so explicitly in her two autobiographies, it seems that John Barrymore was the real love of your mother's life, and that he had a huge influence on her acting as well. By far the most heartbreaking passage in A Life on Film is her encounter with him shortly before he died; you can see how protective she was of his memory. Did you have the same impression? Did she ever speak of him to you?

Oh my yes. Again ol' Otto got in the way. [Note: Astor said Langhanke’s influence made Barrymore despair of the relationship with her, and Barrymore moved on to Dolores Costello.] Yet here was a non husband-type that might have been my father. She had to make a choice. Otto was a toughie. No thanks. JB taught her elocution for two years when sound came along and actors dropped away like flies because of their lousy speaking voices, and M, as you know, had a perfect speaking voice, without her Midwest twang. She told me a lot about "Jack" Barrymore, but probably not much more than you know from your sources. Yes, that was a sad encounter. They looked fabulous onscreen together, viz. Beau Brummel.

Astor was also very frank, in a way most actresses aren't, about the psychological difficulty of making the transition to “mother” roles when she was still under 40 and attractive. Did you see any impact from that at home?

You don't wanna know about how frank she was. I’m sometimes accused of the same behavior and I shrink with horror at the idea.

I didn’t see the difficulty especially. I think she felt the fall from more specialized roles. She was an active alcoholic, and the 40s were especially hard on her. Although the change to TV appearances took its toll on her, it encouraged her to finally begin writing as she always wanted to. She didn't feel glamorous any more. It was too much trouble to be dressed up, to go to the set. Both my brother and I were in boarding schools; she was married off and on. What kind of life is that?



I don’t want to pry too much…
Pry away girl!

All right then. When did you see her alcoholism come into full force? Did she quit drinking permanently, or take it up again later?

Let's put it this way. I imagine M had been drinking fairly heavily a long time before I noticed it. When I was a teen coming home on weekends from boarding school, my stepfather [fourth husband Thomas Gordon Wheelock] and she were heavy at it. They always had weekend drinking friends over and it would get louder and louder--one guy was a songwriter and another played whore-house piano. HA! My sainted mother gave me rum and cokes (deadly) to drink during my 14th summer. Eek! While I drank with my husband years later, I only remember one time I was actually out of it! Never came near being addicted. I haven't had anything heavy since 1972.

I know she at one time got so bad she did a job on her wrists in the bathtub, my sister-in-law found her, and my brother was booked for questioning. I know that in her young New York theatre years, she'd party with drug-lit people. I imagine she did her share of heavy everything. She had the reputation of never drinking on the set.

Did you want to know this much?! There was actually a two-year stretch when she was writing she was dry. But then she was back to square one when her Siamese kitty was killed by a German shepherd before her eyes. So yes, she took it up then--and until about 1985--because she had to stay in the Motion Picture Country Hospital. She was there until her death. Emphysema, heart disease. And, obviously, she HAD to quit smoking--at last!

There have been many instances of children of stars who grew up bitter and maladjusted. You, however, seem to have turned out secure and happy, with a genuine admiration for your mother--this after being the subject of one of Hollywood's most famous custody disputes. Do you have any observations about life as the child of a star?
Well, I'll tell you, I don't know about being all that secure, or "unmaladjusted!" I have chronic anxiety, for one thing. I was married for 57 years to Frank Roh. We had four children, then 33 grand and great-grand children. I think about schoolmate Shirley Temple and Margaret O’Brian, who were deadly doted on by their parents on the set. I'm glad I never got into the business.

I loved my mother, but was usually scared of her. I never won. She was always right. I was always “Mary Astor's daughter,” which in a way was a burden, being only recognized as such. I was her "shadow" for years--not good! (Boring! Are you asleep yet?)



My favorite Mary Astor performance (and that of many other film writers) is her superb work in Dodsworth, the movie she was making during the legal battle over you.

Of course! It was also her favorite of them all.

Which of her movies are your favorites? Are there any relatively obscure movies that you think people should seek out?
I think Red Dust is pretty sultry. I love The Maltese Falcon over and over, and Little Women and Meet Me in St. Louis. I'm a silents fan, so any of those are fun. (I'm also a Chaplin fan.)



There isn't a lot of material out there about your mother's waning years. Can you fill in any of the blanks?

She wanted it that way, just to kind of blend in with the scenery when she worked mostly in television; those years aren't covered in her two books. I can’t really fill things in. I didn't see her much in those years; I was married in 1950 and in my own world of a teen mother.

Was novel-writing a large source of contentment for her?
She loved it, but her subject matter was a bit too lurid for me. And boring. A Life on Film and Mary Astor: My Story were readable and were best sellers for a short time. My favorite chapter in ALOF: "What It’s Like to Kiss Clark Gable." Heh heh.

I read A Place Called Saturday, which I guess fulfills your adjective "lurid," as it's about a woman who is raped, conceives a child and refuses to have an abortion.

You know, Farran, frankly I had to force myself to read two of her novels, beside the bios. She definitely had a talent and a way with words, but to me, they were just boring. She probably took snippets of her life as an abused child and experiences. She had a great imagination as well. That's what made her good at her crafts of writing and acting. She couldn't speak in front of people without a script though. No teleprompters in those days!

She had talent, alright. She also was an avid reader of anything she could get her hands on, even the medicine bottles around her. (She told me that she always looked around for something to read. That's pretty desperate. Ha!) With me, it's crosswords. It infuriated her that I couldn't read like she could; I had astigmatism as a child and now. She also played the piano, (The Great Lie), painted and sculpted, and was an avid "birder." She loved nature. She didn't really like people very much. She was pretty much "on stage" at any one time, i.e., the center of attention.




How often did you visit her at the Motion Picture Country House? Was she happy there?

M lived about 10 years at the MPCH. She had her own little cottage with her personal belongings. She ate her meals in the common dining room, she had her own little table, so she wouldn’t have to listen to the "old folks" and their "organ recitals"--my kidney this, my bladder did that, my eyes this, my heart that. Organs! (Was she funny or not!) She was happy enough there where she could do her writing away from “people.” She couldn't “stand all those old people,” she told me. She also claimed it was hard for her to see her peers at the place leave the planet before her. “Why can't I go too,” she'd say. She made it to 81, in spite of how badly she treated her body.

Yes, I visited her as often as I could, but I had children, and she couldn't stand them for more than 15 minutes. I also lived at a distance--the final years, a three-hour drive from the mountains--ironically, back in Big Bear, Calif. We had a set-to my last visit, where she simply told me to GO! I went, and never saw her alive again. She died four months after.


What made her a unique actress?

I believe it's the various painful experiences she suffered throughout her life. Abuse, early widowhood, four husbands, her own temperament, alcoholism, and her own drive for perfection! She was scarred by a lot of it, yet she was indomitable, picked herself up and carried on, in spite of three tries at suicide.

You knew all that though, right?


Many thanks, Marylyn, for giving so generously of your time and memories.

Say hi to your readers and tell them I appreciate their support for Mary. She would have loved it, and would have written a few comments with her own special wit.


(Except for the stills from Beau Brummel, Dodsworth and Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte, all pictures are courtesy of Marylyn Roh. From top: Marylyn's favorite picture of her mother and herself. Next: "This is Mom and her green 1934 (?) Cadillac LaSalle in front of the house where I was a new baby. It was a wonderful Spanish home in the area of a lot of stars' homes in Toluca Lake, Calif. Bing and Bob were just down the street. Harold Arlen lived across the little manmade lake from us." Next, a publicity shot of a young and gorgeous Astor. Finally, Marylyn as a young mother, aged 20.)

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon Master List

The Siren is exhausted, but very, very happy.

It's the last day of the blogathon, and donations and posts are still coming in. Let's make this the best day yet. Keep reading, and if you have not done so already, toss something in the hat.

As Marilyn has posted on our Facebook page, the troops have answered the rallying cry: "We've raised enough to preserve a 1,200-foot black-and-white nitrate silent film in fair condition, starting with lab inspection, cleaning, minor repair, and then moving on to make a new negative and print."

And what's more, "If we keep the donations coming, we might even be able to save a two-reeler or three-reeler."

The Siren has been delighted with the number of bloggers participating, and the very high quality of their posts. We are raising awareness in a big way, and creating an archive on this topic that will be a great resource on the Net.

But of course, the point is to raise money. And while donations have been present, and steady, and the good folks at the National Film Preservation Foundation are grateful for every dime, the Siren thinks we can do better.

First person truth time here: I've been running this blog for five years, and never asked anyone for a dime, until now. Please consider throwing a donation into the hat for the NFPF, no matter how small.

DONATE NOW!

This week, the film blogosphere is demonstrating vast knowledge and love of film history. Let's also show our generosity.

More in store today here and at Ferdy on Films. I have a new post up, an interview with Lee Tsiantis, the man who played a key role in bringing the RKO Six back onto our screens a couple of years ago. Lee is a film lover working a dream job as Corporate Legal Manager at Turner Broadcasting. His work entails sifting through the vast paperwork associated with the film library there, and he has much to say about the ins and outs of film rights.



Welcome! Here is where the Siren will be keeping track of posts as they come from bloggers. You can drop her a line in comments or via email (campaspe101@yahoo.com) to say your post is up. And please do the same at Marilyn's place, Ferdy on Films; as co-hosts we will be both be keeping lists.

Over at Cinema Styles, Greg has a beautiful new commercial for the Blogathon, suitable for embedding.

And remember to include the all-important

CONTRIBUTION LINK

to the National Film Preservation Foundation. Feel free to include the following boilerplate, for your readers' convenience:

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Do follow the links to the posts. The Siren is mighty impressed with the lineup and can't wait to read the contributions herself. Remember too that comments are a blogger's joy.

As the week goes on, this post will be continue to be top o' the Siren's blog; her own preservation posts will be immediately below.

Sunday, February 21st

The mighty James Wolcott sets a good example with his own donation and notes with pleasure that he's helping to save, among others, a Norman Mailer film called [untitled].

C. Jerry Kutner of Bright Lights After Dark has a lovely screen-cap essay on Maurice Tourneur's Victory. Stunning images, complete with the original tinting.

Mary Hess of Eastman House pays tribute to her mentor, James Card, who is a hero to all those who care about preservation. Includes a clip from the restoration of Melies' Peter Pan, which Card supervised; at Mary's new blog, Laughing Willow.

Toby Roan, of 50 Westerns from the 50s, a great blog that's new to the Siren, posts about the near-miss involving Jacques Tourneur's Stranger on Horseback, starring the beloved Joel McCrea.

Noel Vera, a familiar name to the Siren's readers, brings a preservation bulletin from the Philippines (the news ain't good) and a brilliant write-up of a sharp and prescient film that is almost entirely lost--and it was made in 1986.

Arthur S. discusses Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow, arguing passionately for the film's greatness and lamenting its lack of availability. (And by special request of the Siren, he includes a link to a piece on The Cobweb, a film we would both like to see resurrected.)

David Cairns devotes his Sunday Intertitle to our blogathon. The Siren won't tell you the one word of the intertitle, but she will tell you the post focuses on a name that makes her happy just to hear or look at: Lubitsch. And there is more Lubitsch here, in the splendid "Trailers for Lost Films."

MovieMan0283, at his Dancing Image blog, has an absolutely not-to-be-missed roundup of images , many from movies that are either unavailable, or damn close to it. The good news: In the year since he compiled the list, a number have been released from non-DVD purgatory (I see you, African Queen.)

Tinky Weisblatt returns to give props to three more heros of preservation, as well as to the bienniel Orphan Film Symposium. All this, and an easy recipe for peach jam. Yum!

DeeDee of Noirish City wraps up her blogathon posting with another reminder of what is at stake for film lovers. Thanks so much for your week-long support, DeeDee!

Sarah Baker, who wrote so movingly about Olive Thomas, has another must-read post, Reputations Restored: Lost and Found Movies of 1929.

Donna Hill closes out her blogathon posting with a series of marvelous clips from the silent era.

Joshua Ranger argues for preserving the lesser lights of filmdom, including the unloved biopic: "we also have to maintain the insignificant because it, too, is a piece of the picture of the past."

Jaime Grijalba posts, in Spanish, on Exodus 8:2 about one of the most keenly lamented of all lost films, London After Midnight.

Finally, my pal Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running gives us another plug, and fulfills a previously unrecognized but nonetheless urgent need: The blogathon's own haiku.

Saturday, February 20th

Buckey Grimm sums up his series with a post in praise of those who have been doing the hard work of preservation for decades now.

Dennis Nyback is back with a post about a 1940 movie, which Dennis transfered himself, of singer Ronnie Mansfield--which he screened for Mansfield's granddaughter and her children.

Stephen Morgan at Screen Addict writes about original intent--not constitutional, but cinematic.

Sara Freeman of Today's Chicago Woman has a tribute to women of the cinema, with special mention of the radiant Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter.

Hind Mezaina returns with clips of women having fun with swimming, cycling and sending Valentines in the early days of the century.

Tom at Motion Picture Gems posts about a film the Siren believes to be seriously underrated, Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, and the preservation message it carries.

Ryan Kelly of Medfly Quarantine signs in with a piece about that screwy, ballyhooey, phoney, super Coney, one and only...Fort Lee, New Jersey! What, you were expecting someplace else?

J.C. Loophole of The Shelf outs himself as an academic, an historian to be precise, and explains with great eloquence the historical case for film preservation: "The images we have of our nation, of our entertainment, or our highs and lows, of how we interpret those highs and lows are as important as the self-same written documents and government papers that we spend so much time and effort to preserve."

Andreas at Pussy Goes Grrr ponders the tragedy of lost films, including janitors both shamed and redeemed.

They tell me there's an Olympics going on; well, David Cairns has a clip depicting (ahem) amazing athleticism at Shadowplay.

Paula has more stills, this time from The Shamrock Handicap.

Friday, February 19th

Marilyn is looking deep into the eyes of Theda Bara in A Fool There Was.

At Gareth's Movie Diary, the proprietor uses the beguiling Bar Harbor Movie Queen, among others, to talk about the urge not only to preserve, but to present.

Jenny the Nipper of Cinema OCD has an excellent and provocative post: Bootleggers or Preservationists?

From the University of Vermont comes Adrian J. Ivakhiv at his blog Immanence, talking about the ways in which Decasia "comments on its own materiality."

Joe Thompson ends his series on the history of nitrate with a bang: the 1909 Pittsburgh film exchange explosion. Many photos.

Marilyn and I are very pleased to be joined by students, including Trish Lendo, Sadie Menchen and Charles Edward Rogers, in the moving-picture archive program at UCLA--they are the the future of preservation. (I'm also very taken with "Let Us Now Praise Scratchy Prints.")

Hind Mezaina, who writes The Culturist blog from her home in Dubai, brings in an international flavor with a series of posts that include some marvelous clips from the BFI Archive.

Justin Muschong returns with A Trip to the Acme Film Preservation Emporium.

Donna Hill also returns with stills and posters from lost films.

Thursday, February 18th

At the Phil Nugent Experience, the host gives props to several heroes of film preservation, including the inimitable Henri Langlois.

Shahn runs Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, that pictorial temple to the art of black and white; but in this photo series, she shows the ravages of decay.

Before the blogathon began, a man of the Siren's acquaintance demanded, "If this is about saving all film, what about porn, huh?" Well then, here is Doug Bonner, with a post about the perfect film stock for the Golden Age of Porn and which film from that era he would most like to see preserved.

Movie Man at The Sun's Not Yellow warms up with a post on Rossellini's Stromboli, ahead of another promised post on Sunday.

Tinky Weisblat of Our Grandmother's Kitchen posts some reminiscences about Britain's Iris Barry, who used her influence as a critic to support preservation early on. And there's also a swell recipe for tea sandwiches.

Kendra at Viv & Larry has another entry in her series tribute to the fine folks at Criterion, this one on Nights of Cabiria.

Tim Brayton at Antagony & Ecstasy finds three different faces of film preservation in those once and future media darlings, vampires.

DeeDee of Noirish City returns with a post about George Melies' The Impossible Voyage.

Buckey Grimm continues his Brief History of Nitrate with a brief post about nitrate testing, and a link to remarkable photos from some tests.

Catherine Grant at the invaluable Film Studies for Free contributes a plug and clips from "some entertaining and informative online videos about film preservation," as well as links to "openly accessible, scholarly material about this essential but expensive art and science."

Ed Howard of Only the Cinema writes about two avant-garde shorts, by Bruce Baillie and Storm de Hirsch, that have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives and included on the Treasures IV set from the NFPF.

The Siren adores Greenbriar Picture Shows, and thoughtful, funny, well-versed John McElwee, who runs it. You owe it to yourself to click on this one: "We Are All Preservationists."

The name James Card should be as familiar to film lovers as Henri Langlois. Jon Marquis, of Thoughts of Stream, shows why as he examines Pandora's Box, the resurrection of which was one of Card's finest accomplishments.

Joe Thompson is back with part II of a Brief History of Nitrate, including the perils of moviegoing at the turn of the century.

Mark Edward Heuck, who does freelance work rescuing genre and exploitation films from limbo and coaxing them onto DVD, has a touching story about how one such film brought back a small piece of a wife and mother for her famous widower and son. At the delightfully named blog The Projector Has Been Drinking.

Peter Nelhaus returns with a post about the 1934 Chinese film The Goddess, saved through the efforts of a single person, Professor Richard J. Meyer.

What this blogathon really needed was more Conrad Veidt; Paula's Movie Page has a boatload of pictures from Different From the Others.

Wednesday, February 17th

Lou Lumenick, New York Post head film critic and the Siren's TCM comrade, has a fantastic piece of writing and research at his place, about the Public Domain Purgatory of Henry Hathaway's To the Last Man--"a tight, surprisingly dark and impressive little movie."

Adam Zanzie at Icebox Movies examines Fear and Desire, the hard-to-see Stanley Kubrick film that for years has garnered "a frown, a groan, a snicker, or a goofy grin" from fans.

Brent Walker, at his blog devoted to Mack Sennett, uses that director's career to explain why the best fate for a silent movie was to be made for a company that went out of business.

Brian Herrera of Stinky Lulu signs in with a post on the sui generis Who Killed Teddy Bear, analyzing it as artifact of its era ("like a nudist magazine, Teddy Bear lets it all hang out without really ever showing anything") and as a "queer" film.

Buckey Grimm of Mindless Meanderings explains the origins and preservation methods of the Library of Congress Paper Print collection.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson lend their highly respected voices in support of our efforts; the plug is part of an essay about the intricacies of preserving experimental films, when the "flaws" are deliberate.

David Cairns is back with a look at the avant-garde film Decasia, so brief and impeccable the Siren will spoil it no further.

Dennis Nyback returns with an elegiac tribute to two theatres that were once grand temples of nitrate, the Michigan Theater and the Grand Riviera, both in Detroit.

Greg Ferrara, having done so much with promoting the blogathon, chips in even more at his blog Cinema Styles, with a post about C.B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, a recently restored silent sent to him by the NFPF: "The restoration of The Godless Girl allows cinephiles everywhere to witness the last great gasp of a director in the silent era before sound slowed him down."

Director Jeffrey Goodman joins in with memories of screening films with the ghost of Henri Langlois, at The Last Lullaby (and) Peril.

Justin Muschong, at Brilliant in Context, meditates on which film is worth saving ("all of it") in a witty essay that ranges from Welles to Army boots.

Karie Bible of Film Radar takes us through the lost films of Clara Bow, as well as hope in the form of some that have been restored.

Kendra at Viv & Larry is back with a loving tribute to the immortal romance of Brief Encounter.

Leo Lo, whose blog is 365 Films a Year: A Librarian's Film Journal, tackles the question of what academic librarians can do to preserve films.

At Paula's Movie Page, she has posted more stills, from Where Are My Children? and Lady Windemere's Fan. paulasmoviepage.shutterfly.com.

Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder checks in with a review of the recently restored 1922 Sherlock Holmes, and finds not only a subdued performance from John Barrymore, but also a supporting cast that includes a future ghost magnet, a future columnist and a future martini-drinking icon.

Tuesday, February 16th

Roger Ebert is once again rallying the troop for the blogathon, with more tweets about our fundraising and praise for the contributors. His devotion to preserving cinema has been an example to everyone for more than forty years, and his support gladdens our hearts.

James Wolcott gives us more reason to rejoice, with a rousing plug for the blogathon, full of links, praise and the all-important donation link to the NFPF.

Gloria Porta, lover of film in general and Charles Laughton in particular, has an amazing treat for all fans of the actor and Spartacus: an in-depth look at the movie's convoluted filming, from screenwriting to editing, and extensive discussion of Laughton's preparation and interactions on set, and a huge, invaluable list of references and links.

Gordon Dymoski of Blog This, Pal writes about the intersection of film preservation and pop culture with a piece about VCI Entertainment's reissue of the first Green Hornet serial.

Joe Thompson at The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion offers a history of nitrate, via newspaper articles and clippings from as early as 1889--for example, a letter to the editor, in 1897, from a fire warden worried about the dangers of the movie projector setup.

Kendra of Viv & Larry continues her appreciation of all things Criterion with a post about Days of Heaven, surely on everyone's list of the most beautiful movies ever made.

Peter Nelhaus of Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee, who is rumored to have seen everything, makes his first contribution: a look at Lon Chaney's first starring role in The Penalty, detailing Chaney's amazing preparations for the role of a legless crime lord.

Sarah Baker at Flapper Jane continues her contributions with three simple, but eloquent, reasons to support film preservation.

Monday, February 15th

Catherine Krummey at Speaking of Cinema pays tribute to Martin Scorsese, a hero to preservationists everywhere, and gives a link to his acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes.

Christopher Snowden of The Silent Movie Blog has a beautiful set of rare stills from lost movies, and some witty suggestions as to where to find the missing films--far off the beaten track.

Dennis Nyback, having wowed everyone in his interview with Anne Richardson, is going even further to help out, via a post at his own site. The irresistible title: "Nitrate Film – More Feared Than Frankenstein – Less Understood Than Eraser Head – More Dangerous than repeated viewing of Sleepless in Seattle."

Erik Loomis of alterdestiny is a historian with a specialty in the late 19th and early 20th century. Here he talks about the importance of the NFPF archives in his teaching work, using the example of a chilling 1912 movie about slum life, The Land Beyond the Sunset.

Greg offers a concentrated dose of gorgeous in a teaser post at his pictures-only blog Unexplained Cinema: 10 Frames: The Godless Girl.

Jacqueline T. Lynch at Another Old Movie Blog delves into Vertigo, reminding us that it took years for the movie's stature to grow. Although Vertigo was made in 1958, restorers stil found film stock of Hitchcock's masterpiece that was rotting in the can.

Kendra at Viv & Larry continues her blogathon contributions with a loving writeup of That Hamilton Woman, in which she pays careful attention to the design and cinematography of the film as well as the two glorious leads.

Maggie at Silver Screen Dream bemoans the state of Love Affair's print; and fearlessly tackles the question of whether some films are "worth saving."

Paula will be promoting us by posting movie pictures at her Shutterfly page all week; view the first batches here.

Rob at Rob's Movie Vault dubs The Race to Save 100 Years "Preservation 101," and unearths many salient facts among the paeans to Ted Turner. (We forgive him for that fling with colorization now, don't we?)

Sunday, February 14th

Anne Richardson of Oregon Movies A to Z has an interview with Dennis Nyback, a collector, curator and projectionist with much experience of nitrate--and film booth stories to scare the hell out of Quentin Tarantino.

Arthur S. brings his unerring eye and deep sense of film history to bear on the great Raoul Walsh and two early sound pre-Code films, The Bowery and Me and My Gal.

Betty Jo Tucker of Reel Talk Movie Reviews looks at Martin Scorsese's invaluable role as a high-profile, tireless advocate for film preservation.

Bob Fergusson, the Operator 99 of Allure, takes a single issue of Photoplay magazine from 1931 and analyzes the survival status of all 186 movies listed in it, in a riveting exercise he calls "Now You See It, Now You Don't." A must for Pre-Code hounds.

Buckey, back at his blog Mindless Meanderings, writes about the early days of film preservation, while silent movies still reigned. Among many things the Siren learned from this piece: "Productions such as D.W.Griffith’s ‘The Avenging Conscience’ were totally unusable in as little as 10 years after its release."

Buttermilk Sky, long a treasured commenter at the Siren's place, has a post on her favorite Marx Brothers film, Monkey Business, and why it deserves restoration. You had me at "Marx Brothers," though!

David Cairns, whose Shadowplay is simply one of the best classic-movie blogs anywhere on the Interwebz, ponders why Rin Tin Tin is more like Burt Lancaster than Montgomery Clift.

David Ehrenstein of FaBlog has a clip-studded tour through the highly flammable, but oh-so fabuloso history of nitrate, with Max Reinhardt's gleaming, glorious A Midsummer Night's Dream as the centerpiece.

DeeDee at Noirish City has links to the blogathon, her thoughts on and her own pledges for film preservation--and plans for her own giveaway. Check it out!

Donna at Strictly Vintage Hollywood furthers her love of all things Rudolph Valentino with a look at the great lover's three lost films. Two of these, A Sainted Devil and The Young Rajah, have fragments surviving; but Donna gives a complete storyline and numerous production stills for Uncharted Seas, not one frame of which is still with us.

Dwight Swanson of Home & Amateur writes about the poignant history of Think of Me First as a Person, a documentary put together from home-movie footage that was shot in the 1960s and 1970s by the father of a child with Down Syndrome.

Eddie Muller, president of the Film Noir Foundation, guest blogs at Marilyn's Ferdy on Films. He describes the making of Cry Danger, praises the film's excellence, and offers a heartening example of how his foundation worked with studios to get a decent print circulating once more. Lucky San Franciscans will be able to see it at the Noir City festival this year.

Ivan G. Shreve untangles the Very Meta Mystery of the two versions of It's in the Bag! (1945), one of only six movies made by radio legend Fred Allen. Ivan has even included a transcript, so you can play along at home.

Kendra of the smart, well-written Leigh & Olivier fan blog, Viv & Larry, pays tribute to everyone's favorite DVD house, Criterion.

Lou Lumenick, chief film critic of the New York Post, links arms with the blogosphere and plugs the blogathon. His teaser post has a cameo from a sad Kay Francis and a high-profile villain: Joseph P. Kennedy.

At her blog Or Maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax, Meredith chooses the restored version of The Red Shoes to be her valentine, after seeing it at the British Film Institute--along with memorabilia from the movie, lent by Martin Scorsese.

Ray Young of Flickhead, one of the most original film writers around, reviews all six pounds of the apparently definitive work of research and love, This Film Is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film. Amazon, anyone?

Sarah Jane Baker, the film historian and writer who maintains the Flapper Jane blog, has a lovely piece about that iconic figure of Hollywood tragedy, Olive Thomas. In Sarah's quest to blow the cobwebs off the legend, she was able to locate and preserve some films that reacquaint us with Olive, the talented actress.

Vince is the proprietor of Carole & Co., a fan blog cherished by all who appreciate painstaking research and excellent writing, as well as the great Carole Lombard. His post delves into the mystery of what Lombard looked like before her facial injuries in a 1926 car accident, and describes the fate of two early Lombard sound films.

A Matter of Rights: A Talk with Lee Tsiantis

Everyone loves good news, and in 2007 classic film lovers got six doses of it: the RKO “Lost and Found” movies, unseen for decades due to an unusual rights situation, dusted off and unveiled for a delighted public by Turner Classic Movies. The RKO Six are Rafter Romance (1933), the Siren’s personal favorite of the group, a charming Depression comedy starring a young and delicious Ginger Rogers; Double Harness (1933), a wry comedy-drama of marriage and morals with William Powell and the underseen Ann Harding; Stingaree (1934), a rare musical outing for William Wellman and Irene Dunne’s second singing film role; Living on Love (1937), a remake of Rafter Romance whose virtues include Franklin Pangborn; One Man’s Journey (1933), a medical drama starring Lionel Barrymore and Joel McCrea; and its superior remake, A Man to Remember (1938), which boasted Garson Kanin’s first credit as director and a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo.

Not many cinephiles wallowing in all this RKO bounty realized that the movies had reappeared due in part to the efforts of Lee Tsiantis, a film lover and industry veteran toiling in the field of rights research for TCM and Warner Home Video. Well, toiling is not the word--Lee loves his work and cares passionately about preservation. Since rights issues stand in the way of our seeing a number of cherished films, Lee agreed to answer some questions via email about the RKO Six and the nuts and bolts of his job.


Please describe your role at Turner Broadcasting System.

I am a Corporate Legal Manager at Turner Broadcasting System's Entertainment Division in Atlanta, and have been with the company for 12 years. Prior to Turner, but still based in Atlanta, I handled regional publicity/promotions for a major studio and long ago worked in the late, lamented 16mm nontheatrical distribution market for Films Inc., where I was able to view hundreds of films from their library. My work tools at Turner are the supporting original studio legal documents of the approximately 3900 RKO, pre-1986 MGM and pre-1950 Warner Bros. features that Ted Turner bought in 1986-87. These films comprise the Turner Entertainment Co. (TEC) library, which is currently owned and administrated by Warner Bros. Entertainment. I do rights research on these films for various corporate clients, including Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and sister company Warner Home Video, which exploits the library on DVD and now Blu-ray. It certainly doesn't hurt to have a film background that helps me to connect the dots found in the documents.



Were the mechanics of resolving the rights entanglements of the RKO Six typical of your work?

The situation that brought the six RKO "Lost and Found" titles to light was atypical. The inquiries that come my way from company clients usually ask me to confirm TEC's rights in a particular film or asset, reaffirming a division's ability to exploit the property. Usually, and ideally, these rights are fairly broad, allowing for distribution and exhibition of a film worldwide, perpetually and in all media.

For an unresearched asset, I have to refer to the original studio agreements by which a source story or underlying literary property (in shorthand legalese, the ULP) was acquired. Those agreements, along with the copyright registration records, are key links in proving TEC's chain-of-title ownership of the "derivative work" (the film).

The path that led to the discovery of the RKO Six's rights situation began in 2006, when a TCM viewer asked why a 1933 John Cromwell film, Double Harness, never seemed to show up on the channel's schedule. As it was produced by RKO, it should have been part of the TEC library, but it wasn't on any of the master lists of TEC/RKO titles. TCM's Senior Programming Manager, Dennis Millay, asked me to research the film, and through evidence in the meticulously maintained and organized RKO documents, I was able to piece together a narrative that traced the ownership history not only of Double Harness, but also five other RKO films of the period.



It turned out all six were sold as a package out of the RKO library to former studio head Merian C. Cooper in 1947. Thus, the sale predated by 40 years Turner's 1987 acquisition of its distribution rights to the RKO titles; the six films were never part of the library Turner bought. With dogged persistence and the help of the Internet, Dennis and I were able to track down the son of the person who had been assigned Cooper's copyright ownership--who was totally unaware of that ownership--and six months later, TCM purchased all right, title and interest to the films from his family. Additionally, once prints were tracked down (we even found materials located in France and the Netherlands), TCM financed the cost of physically generating 35mm film preservation elements on all six titles (heroic work here from Dennis), guaranteeing they would have as close to a perpetual big-screen life as is physically possible with film.

After a single-week theatrical engagement at the Film Forum in NYC in Feburary, 2007, the films had their TCM broadcast premieres that April. Barring occasional showings at gatherings like Cinefest in Syracuse, NY, the films hadn’t been shown to a wide audience in almost 50 years. The whole saga, for those interested, can be found here.

None of the titles rewrite film history, but virtually all have distinctive attributes; Garson Kanin's A Man to Remember (1938) seems especially timely today, as it deals with medical ethics and health care responsibilities, but in the context of a deceptively small story about an altruistic country doctor. Film culture is enormously enriched by little gems such as the RKO Six, and TCM's role in resurrecting them attests to the channel's perseverance and commitment to keeping the culture alive.

I think we might have tapped the mother lode for this unorthodox category of rights-orphaned films; we haven't since come across a similar grouping to revive from obscurity.



What role can film preservation funding play in helping to resolve rights issues that keep films unseen? Must the profit motive always play a part?

I would only say that if a film's rights are unresolved, making the film impossible to distribute, there's little incentive to spend preservation money on it. For a studio, funds are better spent on owned, but unexploited assets in need of restoration--with no rights intangibles. Studio preservationists have enough on their plates trying to prioritize and save films whose rights are clear and unencumbered, but whose materials may be on their last legs.



Have you found any patterns in issues that tie up a movie's rights? Are the problems more prevalent with certain types of films?

Legal issues that prevent distribution of a film vary greatly and generally speaking, rarely have anything to do with the type of film in question. Instead they often have everything to do with the term of the original grant of rights in the underlying literary property, or ULP, by an author to the studio producing the film. On rare occasions, the story rights term will expire altogether, or expire with renewal options, and the studio, in order to continue to exploit the film (and despite the fact it may possess a valid copyright in the film itself), must renegotiate an extension with the ULP author, the author’s heirs or other successor-in-interest.

If the ULP owners hold out for what might be considered a disproportionate renewal fee that exceeds what the studio expects to economically return on the title, there can be an impasse, resulting in the frustrating situation where the studio owns the film--but can't distribute or otherwise exploit it. This is doubly frustrating if viable--and sometimes original camera negative--film materials exist in studio vaults.

As a result, certain films have been held up for decades in rights limbo--or at least until the film's ULP lapses into the U.S. public domain. In certain cases, the studio wants to negotiate with the owner of the story rights, but can't track the owner down! This is common in the case of authors who may reside outside the U.S., or authors whose families may not even be aware they are successors to a relative's literary rights. When trails go cold, major sleuthing is in order, but the sheer task of administration can impede the inclination to do the follow-through.

In 1990, a controversial Supreme Court decision involving copyright renewal rights to the Cornell Woolrich short story on which Rear Window was based had the immediate effect of tying up U.S. distribution to a number of notable films. The particulars are too complex to go into here, but for those who are interested (and have the stamina), the full text of the court’s decision is available online.



Do you have any encouraging words for those who view personal or collector’s copies of unobtainable films, and worry about their state of preservation?

I will say this: it's unfair to assume that a poor-quality bootleg copy of a long-unavailable film with rights issues might in any way be representative of the actual condition of film materials archived by a studio.

Thank you, Lee. We will continue to hope for more good news from the Turner vaults.