Published September 19, 2021
By Kathleen Spaltro
Born in Blessing Hospital in Quincy, on May 3, 1906, Lucile Langhanke was the only child of Otto
Langhanke and Helen Vasconcells Langhanke. Emigrating from Germany in 1890,
Otto eventually lived with his mother in Topeka, Kansas, where he worked as a
window trimmer for Crosby Brothers. On August 3, 1904, Otto married fellow Crosby
Brothers employee Helen Vasconcells in Kansas. They moved to Quincy in 1904 where
Otto had a job at the Stern Clothing Company and taught German at Gem City
Business College. In 1906 he began teaching at Quincy High School. After a
fistfight in the school halls with another teacher, the high school fired him
in 1912 but reinstated him in 1916. Other occupations included decorating store
display windows in 1914 at Stern and running his own poultry farm. Born in
Jacksonville, Illinois, Helen was a drama teacher who wanted to be an actress.
She also taught German in 1917 at the Quincy College of Music and Art, as had
Otto from 1905.
After Lucile was born in 1906, her family lived for a few years in
an apartment over the Boston Store, a dry goods store, at 725 1-3 Hampshire.
From at least 1910 until 1913, their address was 1837 Broadway. In 1913, they
rented a 12-room Victorian mansion on 2335 N. Twelfth Street, outside of the
Quincy city limits, and just north of the Illinois Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home,
now known as the Illinois Veterans Home at Quincy. Lucile loved being by
herself on this eight-acre farm. She attended Highland School, a two-room
schoolhouse. When Otto got his teaching job back, the family left the farm for
1244 Kentucky Street in Quincy.
The author of a German-language textbook and a teacher’s manual, Otto
was a faculty member at Quincy High School for the 1917–1918 school year. Because
of anti-German feeling he again lost his teaching job. This prompted the
Langhankes’ move to Chicago. There they resided in an apartment at 1120 East
47th Street, and Lucile miserably attended public school. After Helen became a
teacher of literature and drama at the Kenwood–Loring School for Girls, at 4600
Ellis Avenue, Lucile was admitted as a tuition-free pupil. She loved the school
and enjoyed her mother’s teaching. Lucile graduated in 1919.
Lucile won some attention by entering beauty contests sponsored by
Motion Picture
magazine. On the
strength of this thin reed, the Langhankes moved to New York, where Otto sought
to promote Lucile as a fledgling actress. The photographer Charles Albin
created some hauntingly beautiful photographs of her. They finally caught the
attention of movie executives which got her parts in silent films, and
eventually won her contracts as the newly renamed “Mary Astor.” In 1920, she
was only 14—a very young, very intimidated child-woman.
For many years, Otto was Astor’s business manager and
controlled/spent her income. More than that, Otto and Helen controlled their
daughter’s every move. She had no studies, no boyfriends, no girl confidantes.
Her parents opened her mail, read any letters she wrote, did not allow her to
venture out alone, not even to the mailbox, and discouraged any friendships
outside the family.
Besides controlling her money and her every waking moment, Otto
berated her as a stupid, bad daughter. According to her book,
A Life on
Film
.
“I was a constant failure. He indicated his disappointment with windy sighs and
shakes of the head.” “He was going to be a rich man if it killed me….I was a
real disappointment, that I could see.” Helen’s attitude was no more accepting.
Inscribing her diary with hostile words, Helen left for her daughter to read
after Helen’s death a journal filled with hate.
In
My Story: An Autobiography
, published in 1959, Mary
Astor was candid about her four troubled marriages and recurrent financial
stress, as well as a sex scandal fueled by speculation about the real content
and the forged pages of her private diary, left deep wounds. Her lifelong
struggle with alcohol was eased at times by her religious faith, which
encouraged self-awareness, self-acceptance, freedom from “the confining mass of
self-centered thinking—infantile, emotional, ineffective solutions to problems
that had bound me deeper and deeper in loneliness and misery.” Weak in many
ways, she yet had a strong core: “I was fortunate enough to have an inherent
vitality; the deepest need, survival, was very strong.” Astor’s courageous
description in her memoirs of her plight demonstrated great strength underlying
manifest weakness.
Self-acceptance demanded the rejection of “Mary Astor,” the
imposed identity and enforced ambition. Writing as “Rusty,” in a late-life
letter to her only childhood friend, Marian Fisher Kesler of Quincy, she
confided, “I have been going through a battle royal with the devils that seem
to pursue me. . . .when I first turned my back completely on ‘Mary Astor’ ‘She’
was furious! And I fled and kept running. And ran into ‘her’ everywhere I
went….let’s let ‘Mary Astor’ belong to history. Let her have her Oscars and her
glory—and let ‘her’
die
. Damn her.
She is no part of
my
soul…. So have
faith in your friend and
pray
for
Rusty.”
The question remains, if Mary Astor
was one of the biggest female stars of the silent era, why wasn’t she doing
more leading roles in sound films? She seemed to suffer from depression,
as well as alcohol abuse, and she had tried suicide. Her memoirs describe
financial exploitation and emotional abuse. All of this creates a picture of
self-destructiveness. But this is far from the whole story, which is one
of courage and recovery. Today she is mostly remembered for
her roles in
The Maltese Falcon
and
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Her best acting
Oscar was won in 1941 for
The Great Lie.
Sources
1900 and 1910 United States census.
Astor, Mary.
A Life on Film
. New York: Delacorte Press,
1971.
Astor, Mary.
My Story:
An Autobiography.
Garden City, NY:
Doubleday & Company, 1959, pp. 29-30.
Document 2B5, Mary Astor Papers: Marian Kesler Collection. Quincy
Public Library, Quincy, IL.
Landrum, Carl. “Lucile
Langhanke Was Mary Astor—Quincy’s Famous Movie Star,”
Quincy Herald-Whig
, 10 December 2000.
Landrum Carl and Shirley Landrum.
Quincy, Illinois.
Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 1999, p. 40.
Mary Astor, Letter 2A45-2, 2A45-3, and 2A45-4 to Marian Kesler,
undated [between 1972 and 1974], Mary Astor
Papers: Marian Kesler Collection. Quincy Public Library: Quincy,
IL.
New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and
Ellis Island), 1820-1957.
SeeQuincy.com,
Quincy Off
the Record.
n.d. pp. 2, 4.
Topeka, Kansas, City Directory, 1902.
