Mary Astor's last day on "Dodsworth" (1936) was still during her very long divorce turned child custody trial to Doctor Franklyn Thorpe. By this point, Thorpe already had unleashed the facts of her diaries which chronicled her adulterous relationships with playwright George Kaufman along with many others. The media and some less than desirable journalists had already took advantage of the supposedly racy documents already used in court and had created passages far more scandalized than the originals. Regardless, it was a surprise when she was asked up to the already terminally ill Sam Goldwyn's office on that Saturday in August.
As it turned out, all of the studio heads from Louis B. Mayer to Jack Warner to Carl Laemmle, along with their lawyers, were sent copies of the forged diary complete with "sexual performance scorecards and steamy passages." ("JOSEPH EGAN TALKS ABOUT MARY ASTOR AND THE PURPLE DIARIES - The Purple Diaries") They actually believed this was the real diary and had a mission to convince Astor to settle her trial as well as by extension, give up her daughter to the already unfaithful Thorpe. It also did not help that Astor's lawyer Roland Woolley was also present and didn't even warn her about this meeting. Irving Thalberg came down hard on her and if Mary did not settle, there was a possibility of the government intervening in their already strict censorship laws. It would also not help the facade Hollywood attempted to mask from the public and would surely destroy her career as well as the industry itself.
Astor deemed this whole meeting ridiculous since she was the writer of the original diaries and would remember if she had written anything pornographic. "All I could say was that it just wasn't true and if there were such pages, they had to be a forgery" Astor would later recount in her autobiography. But Thalberg believed it would be best advisable to settle the trial out of court but with a quick shake of Woolley's head to his client, even that wouldn't happen. "I'm sorry gentlemen, but I will proceed with the case as my lawyer has just advised me" and with that, Astor got up from the conference table and left the room.
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