Latest / Jersey Arts Podcast / Cabaret Team Brings "Mary Astor's Purple Diary" To Life

Transcript

Cabaret Team Brings "Mary Astor's Purple Diary" To Life · Jersey Arts Podcast

• 0:02
  Maddie Orton: I'm Maddie Orton, and you're listening to the Jersey Arts Podcast.
• 0:06
  Maddie Orton: You might know classic Hollywood actor Mary Astor from "The Maltese Falcon" or "Meet Me in St.
• 0:11
  Maddie Orton: Louis," but in 1936, her name was splashed across newspapers for a very different reason.
• 0:17
  Maddie Orton: Astor was entrenched in a messy custody battle with her ex-husband--and at the center of what was then deemed "the trial of the century" was Mary Astor's own salacious diary.
• 0:28
  Maddie Orton: 90 years later, this saga is retold through a new musical, "Mary Astor's Purple Diary, " based on a book by renowned illustrator Ed Sorel.
• 0:37
  Maddie Orton: The show is written by award-winning cabaret performers and husband and wife team Michael Garin and Mardie Millett-- Garin the music and lyrics, Millit the book.
• 0:45
  Maddie Orton: This "fizzy little cocktail of a musical," as they refer to it, will have its second staged reading ever at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch on Monday, October 26th.
• 0:55
  Maddie Orton: I chatted with Mardie and Michael about the fascinating story behind the musical, as well as their creative process.
• 1:01
  Maddie Orton: While the show is still in its nascent stages, they have terrific demo tracks that we'll play little clips of throughout to give you a taste, featuring the voices of Mardie and Michael, as well as Tony Award nominee Kate Baldwin singing the part of Mary Astor, and Broadway's Max Crumm as Ed Sorel.
• 1:17
  Maddie Orton: And for a look at one of Ed Sorel's drawings, visit jerseyarts.com.
• 1:21
  Maddie Orton: Okay, without any further ado, here's my chat with Mardie and Michael.
• 1:25
  Maddie Orton: Take a listen.
• 1:25
  Maddie Orton: Hi Mardie.
• 1:32
  Maddie Orton: Hi Michael.
• 1:32
  Maddie Orton: Thanks for joining me.
• 1:33
  Michael Garin: Hi, Maddie.
• 1:34
  Mardie Millit: Thank you for having us.
• 1:35
  Maddie Orton: So the story your musical tells and the real life Hollywood scandal at the heart of it are both so fascinating.
• 1:42
  Maddie Orton: And that's to say nothing of your creative process itself.
• 1:45
  Maddie Orton: So we actually have a lot to cover today.
• 1:48
  Maddie Orton: Let's start with the basics.
• 1:49
  Maddie Orton: Who was Mary Astor and what was her purple diary?
• 1:53
  Michael Garin: Mary Astor was a well-known but not a star actress in Hollywood. And she was--
• 2:01
  Mardie Millit: She started actually in silent pictures as a child.
• 2:06
  Mardie Millit: She was a child actor.
• 2:08
  Michael Garin: Not of her choice.
• 2:09
  Mardie Millit: Right.
• 2:09
  Mardie Millit: Her parents forced her into show business.
• 2:11
  Mardie Millit: There are themes that resonate today, which is one of the reasons we love this story so much.
• 2:18
  Mardie Millit: Kids who are forced into show business and exploited, um, abused emotionally, certainly.
• 2:27
  Michael Garin: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:28
  Mardie Millit: Uh and other ways as well.
• 2:30
  Maddie Orton: Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of child actors we can all think of who fit that mold for sure.
• 2:35
  Michael Garin: Oh, sure.
• 2:36
  Michael Garin: So so um she was also brilliant.
• 2:39
  Michael Garin: And she was a very shrewd businesswoman.
• 2:42
  Michael Garin: Once she sort of realized what was going on, she made uh decisions not based on ego, the way an actor or somebody who wanted to be a superstar would behave, but she made calculated decisions about uh what project she would get involved with because--
• 3:03
  Mardie Millit: She was more interested in security.
• 3:05
  Mardie Millit: She was concerned with security because she supported her entire extended family from the time she was 11 years old.
• 3:11
  Maddie Orton: And I guess this is a good time to mention that Astor uh that she's not in fact an Astor of the Astors, right?
• 3:17
  Michael Garin: No, she was she looked so elegant and so sophisticated that the Hollywood big shots decided "No, your name is Mary Astor." Her real name was Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke.
• 3:30
  Maddie Orton: That's hard to get on a billboard, I guess.
• 3:32
  Mardie Millit: That is literally one of the lyrics in the show.
• 3:36
  Kate Baldwin Singing as "Mary Astor": Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke wouldn't fit on a movie marquee.
• 3:46
  Kate Baldwin Singing as "Mary Astor": Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke.
• 3:52
  Kate Baldwin Singing as "Mary Astor": Once upon a time she was me til somebody somewhere saw something in me, like rubes at a carney, they all try to win me.
• 4:10
  Maddie Orton: What period are we talking about with Mary Astor?
• 4:13
  Mardie Millit: She was most famous in the 1930s.
• 4:15
  Mardie Millit: She was the female lead in "The Maltese Falcon." That's the thing that most people would know her from.
• 4:22
  Michael Garin: Yeah.
• 4:22
  Mardie Millit: But then she was very soon after that, she was Judy Garland's mother in "Meet Me in St.
• 4:28
  Mardie Millit: Louis." So she had a very short, you know, women have a short shelf life in show business,
• 4:34
  Maddie Orton: Especially then, sure.
• 4:36
  Michael Garin: She also was this delightful sort of glass of champagne, effervescent comedic character in "The Palm Beach Story." Which is a Preston Sturges movie.
• 4:46
  Michael Garin: So in many ways, you know, if somebody says Betty Davis, you can almost do an impression, "What a dump," or Cary Grant, "Judy Judy Judy," or one of those things. There is no Mary Astor prototype that--
• 4:59
  Mardie Millit: Yeah, there's no cliche of what Mary Astor was.
• 5:07
  Michael Garin: You can't do a Mary Astor impersonation because she was too varied in her--You know, she was the cold murderess in uh "Maltese Falcon." She was this bubbly effervescent glass of champagne gal you want to, you know, take dancing in "Palm Beach Story," and then the very matronly mother in "Meet Me in St.
• 5:28
  Michael Garin: Louis," and the love interest in "Dodsworth," which was shot during the custody trial on which all of this is based.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: What happened with her life and her career? And then, of course, I guess we should get to what is the diary?
• 5:43
  Mardie Millit: The purple diary refers to a diary that she definitely did keep while she was married to her second husband, Franklin Thorpe, which contained, among other things, a list of her lovers, and she slept with everybody, apparently.
• 6:05
  Michael Garin: How did she do it?
• 6:06
  Michael Garin: Volume.
• 6:08
  Mardie Millit: Exactly.
• 6:08
  Mardie Millit: The thing is, we don't know what was in the diary because, spoiler alert, they ended up being the subject of a custody battle post-divorce from this guy.
• 6:21
  Mardie Millit: She wanted custody of their daughter, she wanted full custody of their daughter because he was abusive to the child.
• 6:27
  Mardie Millit: And he said, "You're not gonna get it.
• 6:30
  Mardie Millit: And if you try to take me to court, I'm going to expose this diary of yours that I have." And she's like, "No, actually, F you.
• 6:40
  Mardie Millit: I I want custody of my daughter, she should be with me.
• 6:44
  Mardie Millit: You're a terrible parent.
• 6:45
  Mardie Millit: I know what's best for her, and I don't care.
• 6:48
  Mardie Millit: Go ahead.
• 6:48
  Mardie Millit: "
• 6:48
  Maddie Orton: Wow.
• 6:49
  Mardie Millit: He said he was gonna scandalize her, which was you know a big threat back then.
• 6:54
  Maddie Orton: Of course,
• 6:55
  Michael Garin: Among you know, and allegedly she listed her boyfriends like "Consumers Report," in order of excellence, and I don't mean the way they dressed.
• 7:06
  Mardie Millit: Yeah.
• 7:06
  Mardie Millit: She allegedly ranked them.
• 7:08
  Mardie Millit: That it's unclear whether that was actually true or not.
• 7:11
  Maddie Orton: That's my question, too, is how how do we know if any of this, I mean, obviously we know there was a diary, but beyond that, do we know the contents, how much of this is true, how much of this was created by the ex-husband?
• 7:22
  Mardie Millit: Yes, she actually wrote a memoir later in her life.
• 7:26
  Mardie Millit: Um, and a lot of what was reported by the gossip columns was complete fabrication.
• 7:33
  Mardie Millit: But some of it was true.
• 7:37
  Mardie Millit: Like, her her number one boyfriend, who she considered one of the great loves of her life, was the famous playwright George S.
• 7:46
  Mardie Millit: Kaufman.
• 7:47
  Mardie Millit: And, who with Moss Hart ,wrote a whole bunch of very famous and seminal American plays, including "Merrily We Roll Along, "which later became a musical by Stephen Sondheim.
• 7:59
  Mardie Millit: Uh, that's, I mean, I'm a big Sondheim geek.
• 8:02
  Mardie Millit: So that's what I'm saying.
• 8:02
  Maddie Orton: I was gonna say that's what I know him from, right?
• 8:04
  Maddie Orton: Is that the work that that's based on, or did he write the actual book, or it's the work that it's based on?
• 8:10
  Mardie Millit: It's it is that is the play that Sondheim's musical was based on.
• 8:13
  Mardie Millit: Yes, those those characters, and also the fact that it goes backwards, right?
• 8:18
  Mardie Millit: That was in the original play.
• 8:20
  Michael Garin: So so this is now um, you know, the fact that he was tied into this now.
• 8:28
  Mardie Millit: That was a huge scandal for George S.
• 8:29
  Mardie Millit: Kaufman to be involved.
• 8:31
  Michael Garin: Who was also married.
• 8:32
  Mardie Millit: Yeah.
• 8:32
  Mardie Millit: But he was known to, he and his wife apparently had an open marriage, and they both slept with whoever they wanted.
• 8:39
  Mardie Millit: But that's the kind of thing that was wide -- it was known within the industry, but it was not the kind of thing that you could let people in Muncie, Indiana know about, or Shady Side, Ohio, which is where I'm from at the time.
• 8:54
  Michael Garin: Or Greenbelt, Maryland, which didn't exist.
• 8:56
  Michael Garin: So uh that that is part of the uh thing that made this such an overpowering scandal.
• 9:05
  Mardie Millit: It was called "the trial of the century."
• 9:07
  Michael Garin: Right.
• 9:07
  Maddie Orton: Ugh.
• 9:07
  Maddie Orton: Of course how many "trials of the century" were there?
• 9:10
  Maddie Orton: I can't imagine, but I'm sure it was quite scandalous.
• 9:15
  "The Trial of the Century" song from the musical: The trial of the century in 1936.
• 9:18
  "The Trial of the Century" song from the musical: Hollywood and lots and lots of sex, lots of sex. A battle over custody with lots of dirty tricks.
• 9:24
  "The Trial of the Century" song from the musical: Custody and lots and lots of sex, lots of sex.
• 9:28
  Michael Garin: This was right at the same time as the Spanish Civil War, which was sort of the opening act to World War II.
• 9:35
  Michael Garin: And it knocked Hitler and the Spanish Civil War and Franco off the front page.
• 9:40
  Michael Garin: Everything was about--it was like O.J.
• 9:43
  Michael Garin: Simpson's trial.
• 9:44
  Michael Garin: It was that big.
• 9:46
  Mardie Millit: All of the headlines were about Mary Astor's custody trial.
• 9:49
  Michael Garin: And if it were a guy who had a diary that listed all of his girlfriends, nobody would have --
• 9:54
  Mardie Millit: It never would have made the news.
• 9:57
  Michael Garin: It wouldn't have mattered. Again, it's one of the lyrics is , "For a guy, a different game is played.
• 10:01
  Michael Garin: There's a box of cigars and a big parade.
• 10:03
  Michael Garin: "
• 10:03
  Mardie Millit: That's right.
• 10:04
  Maddie Orton: So what happens to her, and and the child, and the diary?
• 10:08
  Michael Garin: The diary was burned.
• 10:11
  Mardie Millit: At the end of the that was one of the stipulations of the settlement.
• 10:14
  Mardie Millit: They they settled out of court.
• 10:16
  Mardie Millit: She pretty much had to to save her career.
• 10:19
  Mardie Millit: Yeah.
• 10:20
  Mardie Millit: And uh she ended up getting mostly not sole custody, but she ended up getting close to what she wanted.
• 10:27
  Mardie Millit: Yeah, nobody won, is the upshot.
• 10:30
  Mardie Millit: As in most cases like this, nobody really won.
• 10:33
  Mardie Millit: But but the kid ended up having a normal, non, non-combative, non-showbiz life, which is what Mary wanted for her.
• 10:43
  Mardie Millit: Because the guy, the the her father, was bringing in all of these uh different girls, a different girlfriend every week and stuff.
• 10:51
  Mardie Millit: And Mary, although she saw other men, kept all of that separate from her life with her child.
• 10:57
  Mardie Millit: And the the father was uh not doing that and was also physically abusive to her.
• 11:03
  Mardie Millit: There's testimony that he used to shake the kid and stuff.
• 11:07
  Mardie Millit: Stuff that we wouldn't that we wouldn't conscience today that people thought was a normal way to treat your kid back in 1936, but it wasn't okay with her.
• 11:16
  Michael Garin: It really was uh sort of the first uh there was no television, but it was like a reality show that everybody was flipping out over.
• 11:24
  Michael Garin: So uh that was essentially and the to make it even more complicated, as if this weren't complicated enough, she was shooting a movie in the morning.
• 11:37
  Mardie Millit: And the judge had agreed to have the trial at night.
• 11:41
  Mardie Millit: So she would shoot this movie all day from you know how early movie shoots start until you know it got dark,
• 11:49
  Michael Garin: And then they'd go to --
• 11:50
  Mardie Millit: And then she'd go to the courthouse. Oh, it was eating her alive.
• 11:50
  Michael Garin: Yeah.
• 11:50
  Maddie Orton: Oh, that's terrible.
• 11:55
  Michael Garin: And her opponent, the fictional opponent in the movie, the actress named Ruth Chatterton, urged her, said, "You know what?
• 12:04
  Michael Garin: I'm gonna be at the courtroom every day with you, and I'm gonna be your uh support.
• 12:10
  Michael Garin: Just stay in character."
• 12:12
  Mardie Millit: Because the character she was playing was very strong and and uh unflappable.
• 12:18
  Mardie Millit: And Ruth Chatterton said to her, stay in character when you leave the set, play that character in the courtroom, and that's what turned it around for her.
• 12:27
  Mardie Millit: She was gonna have a nervous breakdown.
• 12:30
  Mardie Millit: It was it was so upsetting and humiliating to have her dirty laundry aired like that, and she just decided to approach the whole thing as an actor.
• 12:38
  Mardie Millit: And the idea of these two actresses instead of tearing each other's hair out, banding together--
• 12:45
  Michael Garin: Which, in the movie , they're like trying to kill each other.
• 12:48
  Mardie Millit: Not exactly.
• 12:50
  Michael Garin: Ah, you know what I mean.
• 12:50
  Mardie Millit: They're they're not friends in the movie.
• 12:52
  Mardie Millit: They're not friends in the movie.
• 12:53
  Mardie Millit: So yeah, it's it's a good story of women lifting each other up, which I think we need a lot more stories like that.
• 13:01
  Maddie Orton: Absolutely.
• 13:02
  Maddie Orton: And and I think I mean the the scandal aspect of it and and all of this is so of the moment as well.
• 13:09
  Maddie Orton: Um, that's pretty timeless, I guess.
• 13:11
  Maddie Orton: It's a really fascinating story.
• 13:13
  Maddie Orton: How did the two of you come across this story?
• 13:16
  Maddie Orton: And how did the musical come to be?
• 13:18
  Michael Garin: Well, there's that's a story too.
• 13:20
  Mardie Millit: The story is based on a book by the very well-known illustrator, Edward Sorel.
• 13:26
  Mardie Millit: He's done a bunch of covers for "The New Yorker.
• 13:29
  Mardie Millit: "Uh he did uh cartoons for he did covers and cartoons for "Esquire" magazine.
• 13:35
  Michael Garin: "Vanity Fair."
• 13:37
  Mardie Millit: Yes, there are murals and murals in a couple of restaurants in New York City, the Waverly Inn and the Monkey Bar.
• 13:43
  Mardie Millit: They're all like old Hollywood murals, and he did all of those as well.
• 13:47
  Mardie Millit: So you've seen his work, you just don't know his name.
• 13:50
  Michael Garin: So here's here's a little side show business story.
• 13:54
  Michael Garin: We live in Harlem, and I noticed that there was a little French bistro near where we live that had a piano in the bar.
• 14:03
  Michael Garin: And I thought, "Well, that's convenient to where I live, why don't I become the piano player here?
• 14:10
  Michael Garin: " It took me uh between a year and a half and two years of very patient but very consistent pestering to even get them to listen to me play.
• 14:23
  Maddie Orton: Okay.
• 14:24
  Michael Garin: Every few months I'd stop by and say, Hey, it's me again.
• 14:28
  Michael Garin: You want to hear me play?
• 14:29
  Michael Garin: No, no, no, we're good.
• 14:30
  Michael Garin: Eventually the stars aligned, and the owner instead of the manager had a chat with me.
• 14:38
  Michael Garin: And I said, Look, I live down the street.
• 14:41
  Michael Garin: I'm a really well-known pianist in New York City.
• 14:44
  Michael Garin: I I was 12 years at the monkey bar.
• 14:46
  Michael Garin: I used to play at the VIP room in a disco called Limelight.
• 14:51
  Michael Garin: Oh, sure.
• 14:52
  Michael Garin: Yeah.
• 14:53
  Michael Garin: So back in the day, and I was a musical director at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and I'm an actor.
• 14:59
  Michael Garin: So anyway, they said, okay, you get a couple of Thursdays.
• 15:05
  Michael Garin: And on one of those Thursdays, the one and only time he ever went to this restaurant, Ed Sorel, who I'd always been a fan of but never knew what he looked like, shows up and says, Excuse me, do you know I can't get started?
• 15:22
  Michael Garin: I said, Of course.
• 15:23
  Michael Garin: I played, I can't get started.
• 15:25
  Michael Garin: He comes back and he goes, My companion and I are really enjoying your your music.
• 15:30
  Michael Garin: I said, Thank you very much.
• 15:31
  Michael Garin: He goes, Have you ever thought about writing a musical?
• 15:34
  Michael Garin: And I went, actually, I I do that.
• 15:37
  Michael Garin: I I'm a drama desk winning theater composer for Song of Singapore.
• 15:42
  Michael Garin: And he goes, I wrote this book, and I'm thinking, Huh, pardon me, who the fuck is this guy?
• 15:48
  Michael Garin: So he I hand him my card, and that night I get an email from Ed Sarrell.
• 15:55
  Michael Garin: I said, That was Ed Sorel?
• 15:57
  Maddie Orton: Oh my gosh.
• 15:57
  Maddie Orton: And you would have known his work.
• 15:59
  Maddie Orton: I mean, if you were in the monkey bar, you would have to do it.
• 16:01
  Maddie Orton: Oh, yeah, I used to buy looking at his work, right?
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: They changed the uh uh he did the murals after I had left when Graden Carter, who's his uh one of his biggest supporters, and the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, said, I just took over the monkey bar, do the new uh the dining room.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: And he actually took us out to dinner there sitting under his illustrations.
• 16:23
  Maddie Orton: Oh, that's cool.
• 16:24
  Michael Garin: So um I he sent me the galleys of the book that night.
• 16:28
  Michael Garin: And I went, that was Ed's that was Ed Sorel.
• 16:32
  Michael Garin: Wow.
• 16:33
  Michael Garin: Um, okay, and I read one paragraph and I went, oh shit.
• 16:37
  Michael Garin: This is this is great.
• 16:39
  Maddie Orton: I mean, oh my gosh, that's fantastic.
• 16:42
  Michael Garin: I went, holy mackerel.
• 16:43
  Michael Garin: I said, as I read the whole thing in one sitting, and I went, this is the this is like Kurt Vonnegut wrote a rom com.
• 16:50
  Michael Garin: I mean, it was like, wow.
• 16:53
  Maddie Orton: That is a tagline.
• 16:54
  Maddie Orton: Oh my gosh.
• 16:55
  Maddie Orton: Okay.
• 16:56
  Michael Garin: So I said, man, this is great.
• 16:58
  Michael Garin: And I said, I loved your book.
• 17:00
  Michael Garin: I'd love to turn this into a musical.
• 17:03
  "Eddie Schwartz from the Bronx" song from the musical: Eddie Schwartz from the Bronx, dreaming, drawing shapes on a shirt, board making a face.
• 17:11
  Mardie Millit: Ed's book, Ed's original book, is part memoir of his life of at the time that he became obsessed with Mary Astor.
• 17:21
  Mardie Millit: And it's part an account of the trial of Mary Astor.
• 17:27
  Mardie Millit: And then it's heavily illustrated, almost to the point of being a graphic novel.
• 17:32
  Maddie Orton: Well, so then let's go to how Ed learned about Mary Astor.
• 17:36
  Maddie Orton: How did how did the Mary Astor uh scandal enter into his life?
• 17:40
  Mardie Millit: In our show, this is where the magical realism comes in, but for Ed, it was a real event.
• 17:46
  Mardie Millit: He had just moved into this new apartment with his new wife, and it was an old tenement, and it was a wreck, and he was paying, you know, $70 a month for it.
• 17:55
  Maddie Orton: $70?
• 17:55
  Maddie Orton: What year is this?
• 17:57
  Mardie Millit: 1965.
• 17:58
  Maddie Orton: Okay, okay.
• 17:59
  Mardie Millit: So he was stripping out the old linoleum, and to level out the floors, they used to use old newspapers.
• 18:07
  Mardie Millit: And Ed was a longtime movie buff.
• 18:10
  Mardie Millit: Like I said, he always drew these pictures of old Hollywood.
• 18:13
  Mardie Millit: And he started looking at these old newspapers.
• 18:18
  Mardie Millit: Every single one of them had the Mary Astor scandal on the front of my gosh as the headline.
• 18:25
  Mardie Millit: And he was like, I was a kid when this was going on, and I don't, you know, I didn't know about this when it was happening.
• 18:32
  Mardie Millit: And he got, he's such a fanboy of all things Hollywood.
• 18:37
  Mardie Millit: He just got obsessed with this scandal, and by extension, with Mary Astor herself.
• 18:46
  Mardie Millit: And he, whenever he was drawing whatever he was drawing for money, on the side, he always had a drawing or two of Mary Astor going.
• 18:57
  Mardie Millit: And he draws freehand without sketching in pencil first, with ink, and then colors, I think, with watercolor.
• 19:05
  Mardie Millit: And so he has like, I don't know, hundreds of pictures of Mary Astor.
• 19:13
  Mardie Millit: And some of them are imagined scenes from the courtroom, some of them are of her as a child star.
• 19:21
  Mardie Millit: Uh, there's one of her father raging at her with his fists in the air.
• 19:26
  Mardie Millit: Um, all those things are in the book.
• 19:28
  "So I Draw Her" song from the musical: So I draw her when she kills a man for a bird, I draw her in a "Palm Beach Story" absurd.
• 19:45
  Maddie Orton: So, how do you then, as people adapting this into a musical, This is like layer upon layer, and so many characters, how do you create the like the scaffolding for the story?
• 19:58
  Mardie Millit: For one thing, Ed's illustrations have to be a part of the show.
• 20:02
  Mardie Millit: You can't you can't tell the story without his illustrations.
• 20:06
  Mardie Millit: So we're always nice to Ed.
• 20:08
  Mardie Millit: We have to keep being nice to Ed forever because it's through his good graces giving us the rights to the all of that stuff.
• 20:17
  Michael Garin: When I what when I read the uh uh when I read the book, there is a sort of an imaginary moment where he goes to a uh a church.
• 20:26
  Michael Garin: Mary became a uh a Roman Catholic later in her life.
• 20:29
  Michael Garin: And Ed goes to a Monsignor and asks if he can summon Mary from Catholic Heaven to talk to her.
• 20:37
  Michael Garin: So he does, and he goes, uh, you can use my ante-room.
• 20:42
  Michael Garin: No, ask you're not allowed to ask questions about the afterlife.
• 20:45
  Michael Garin: He goes, fine.
• 20:46
  Michael Garin: And I said, that is the fulcrum or the lever, the level upon which this show is built.
• 20:54
  Michael Garin: Except instead of going to a church, when he lifts up, and I had this completely worked out in my head, he lifts up the linoleum, and like Tinkerbell, she appears in the doorway and they repair to a bar at the uh the outside of time and space.
• 21:12
  Michael Garin: Outside of time and space, the staff of the bar will become the various characters that they have to interact with to tell the story.
• 21:21
  Michael Garin: So the the stout the staff of the bar becomes the Algonquin Roundtable, Sam Goldwyn, John Barrymore.
• 21:28
  Michael Garin: Oh my god.
• 21:28
  Michael Garin: And I thought this way, because I was thinking as a producer, I want a small cast, I want one set, I want to keep this thing inexpensive and doable because I know how expensive musicals can get.
• 21:41
  Mardie Millit: And having the ensemble play all of those roles also gives us a chance as people working in the 21st century to make the cast diverse and inclusive.
• 21:51
  Mardie Millit: Uh, because that's also very important to us.
• 21:54
  Mardie Millit: Even though, you know, that Hollywood was not diverse or inclusive back then, but we get a chance to make it that.
• 21:59
  Mardie Millit: Way now.
• 22:00
  Michael Garin: We get a chance to do that.
• 22:01
  Michael Garin: And it also attracts a better caliber of actors if they know they can be Alexander Woolcott, Sam Goldwyn, or Dorothy Parker or what have you.
• 22:09
  Michael Garin: Yes.
• 22:09
  Michael Garin: And so uh that uh happened, and Ed had an idea of somebody to write the script.
• 22:16
  Michael Garin: Extremely talented writer, it didn't work out.
• 22:19
  Michael Garin: They didn't see what I clearly saw as the vision for the show.
• 22:23
  Michael Garin: I went out and find somebody, also a very talented writer.
• 22:27
  Michael Garin: It didn't work out.
• 22:28
  Michael Garin: She had a completely different concept, it didn't work out, and along comes COVID.
• 22:33
  Michael Garin: Take it away, Mardie.
• 22:35
  Mardie Millit: So he had a contract that they had to present a professional presentation of the songs by December 31st, 2022.
• 22:47
  Mardie Millit: And the fact that COVID had happened did not negate that contract.
• 22:51
  Mardie Millit: So uh restrictions were beginning to lift, and he already had a director attached to the program to sort of shepherd it along, who is still our director today, Carl Andrus.
• 23:02
  Mardie Millit: Um, and yes, our our fearless leader.
• 23:05
  Mardie Millit: And Carl said, um, look, maybe we just do, we have this deadline breathing down our next.
• 23:12
  Michael Garin: We had a bunch of songs.
• 23:13
  Mardie Millit: I mean, I Michael had already written almost all of the songs.
• 23:16
  Mardie Millit: Oh wow.
• 23:17
  Mardie Millit: But we did not, he did not have a book writer.
• 23:19
  Mardie Millit: I'm on the sideline, Gen X, with my gum going, gee, that's really tough.
• 23:24
  Mardie Millit: Gosh, even and I'm reading these scripts and I'm going, "geez, even I could write a better.
• 23:31
  Mardie Millit: Oh crap, it's gonna be me.
• 23:34
  Mardie Millit: It's it's gonna be me.
• 23:36
  Mardie Millit: " I was like, I don't know how to do this, and it's going to be me.
• 23:39
  Mardie Millit: Because all the guardrails were off during COVID.
• 23:42
  Mardie Millit: And so we did things that we were like, might as well.
• 23:46
  Mardie Millit: I'm not really it's not gonna get done if I don't do it.
• 23:50
  Mardie Millit: Nobody else is doing it.
• 23:51
  Mardie Millit: How how bad could okay?
• 23:53
  Mardie Millit: So uh Carl said to me, uh, Mardie, why don't you just write a synopsis of the story?
• 24:01
  Mardie Millit: Uh, because Michael had an idea of how he wanted the story to go, and we had the songs.
• 24:05
  Mardie Millit: Right.
• 24:05
  Mardie Millit: So he wanted you to write like introductions to the songs, like liner notes on the back of your cast album.
• 24:10
  Mardie Millit: So I said, I can do that.
• 24:13
  Mardie Millit: Uh I minored in creative writing in college.
• 24:15
  Mardie Millit: I got a degree in singing, but I minored in creative writing, but I was writing poetry.
• 24:21
  Mardie Millit: So I started writing the synopsis, and there's no other way to say it.
• 24:27
  Mardie Millit: The characters began speaking to me, and I started taking dictation, and by the end of that first session, I had three pages of dialogue between Ed and Mary.
• 24:37
  Mardie Millit: Phenomenal.
• 24:38
  Mardie Millit: So I love that.
• 24:39
  Mardie Millit: Somebody wanted me to do this, is what I think.
• 24:43
  Mardie Millit: I mean, you know, I have my own uh pretty woo-woo beliefs about all of this stuff.
• 24:48
  Mardie Millit: Um who, whoever it was, I have a friend who's a psychic who says that Mary Astor herself is sort of whispering in my ear and channeling herself to me because she wants her story to be told correctly.
• 25:01
  Michael Garin: By the way, the same psychic said a while back, there's gonna be an old guy that comes into your life that changes everything.
• 25:09
  Mardie Millit: And she wasn't talking about you?
• 25:11
  Michael Garin: I am the old guy.
• 25:15
  Mardie Millit: She told him that before he was an old guy.
• 25:18
  Mardie Millit: Um, so uh, so that's how I became the book writer.
• 25:22
  Mardie Millit: And I thought, well, it's COVID, I'm gonna write a draft.
• 25:27
  Mardie Millit: And then, you know, Carl came over to our place when as you know, lockdown was lifted.
• 25:34
  Mardie Millit: Carl and I read through the script, and Michael played each song as we got to it, very informal.
• 25:40
  Mardie Millit: We got to the end of it, and I thought he was gonna say, "Mardie, thank you for getting us to this point.
• 25:45
  Mardie Millit: Now it's time for us to go and find a real playwright." And instead, he said, "Good, I think this is a good start.
• 25:52
  Mardie Millit: I'm gonna email you some notes, and I'd like to see a second draft within the month." And I was like "Fantastic."
• 25:59
  Michael Garin: Mardie has absolutely uh knocked it out of the park, so much so that Ed told me, you know, she saved the show.
• 26:07
  Maddie Orton: Wow. Oh, that must feel nice.
• 26:08
  Mardie Millit: But like I said, I I have felt from the beginning like I was just letting the characters speak.
• 26:16
  Mardie Millit: It helps that I already loved old movies.
• 26:19
  Mardie Millit: I knew who all these people were, and the idea of writing dialogue for people like Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woolcott, Jimmy, sure.
• 26:28
  Mardie Millit: I mean, complete pinch me.
• 26:30
  Michael Garin: And put words in my mouth all the time.
• 26:33
  Mardie Millit: I was like, I get to do this, but it was so much fun because now that we have the internet, I can just I can go on YouTube and actually find their voices recording and reading their own work or or talking in an interview or whatever.
• 26:48
  Mardie Millit: So I had so much help from actual reality in writing these characters.
• 26:54
  Mardie Millit: I I know I know who they are because most of them were they they were all real people.
• 26:59
  Mardie Millit: Once I got into the project and realized that the themes that were going to be important in the in the book, it was really important to me that Mary be allowed to speak for herself and tell her story in her own words as much as possible.
• 27:20
  Mardie Millit: I use her own words as much as I possibly can.
• 27:22
  Mardie Millit: Um but to give this woman's perspective, because it was an industry and a time in which this was just not allowed.
• 27:35
  Mardie Millit: And one of the reasons that the real Ed Sorel loves Mary Astor so much is this fact that she stood up in a time when women didn't stand up for themselves in custody trials like this and said, No, this is wrong.
• 27:53
  Mardie Millit: It's my child's welfare.
• 27:55
  Mardie Millit: I don't care what you do to me, and I don't care if you tell them I slept with everybody in Hollywood.
• 28:01
  Mardie Millit: That's amazing.
• 28:02
  Mardie Millit: Ed loved that about her, and I said, you know, I love that about her too.
• 28:08
  Mardie Millit: And let's look into what makes her the hero of this piece.
• 28:15
  "Find your Light" song from the musical: Find your light, step into it, and suddenly you're seen.
• 28:24
  "Find your Light" song from the musical: Find your light, get into it.
• 28:29
  "Find your Light" song from the musical: There is no in between.
• 28:32
  Maddie Orton: You are still within the creative process of this, right?
• 28:36
  Maddie Orton: You're doing readings.
• 28:37
  Maddie Orton: So, how many readings have you done of this so far?
• 28:40
  Mardie Millit: Only one other official professional reading have we done, and that was in 2022, the one that I was telling you about that was contractually obligated.
• 28:49
  Mardie Millit: And that was done here in New York, and it was literally the first time I had heard other people speak my words.
• 28:57
  Maddie Orton: Oh, that's so cool.
• 28:58
  Mardie Millit: So that was a very early place in the evolution of the show.
• 29:04
  Mardie Millit: We learned so much.
• 29:05
  Mardie Millit: Oh, yeah.
• 29:06
  Mardie Millit: We learned so much.
• 29:07
  Michael Garin: Yeah.
• 29:07
  Maddie Orton: Well, and that's what I wanted to ask you a little bit about is I I love, love, love going to play in musical readings because to me, it's like I, as an audience member, am getting this sort of sneak peek experience of something.
• 29:21
  Maddie Orton: But then also I know that it might change and that I am my feedback in some teeny tiny way is contributing to the process.
• 29:33
  Maddie Orton: But so for you as creators, what does the role of a reading do for you?
• 29:39
  Maddie Orton: And what do audiences expect from a reading like this?
• 29:42
  Mardie Millit: I'll tell you, I really thought that during the rehearsal process for the reading, I was learning, I and I was, I was learning so much about how the dialogue worked or didn't work in people's mouths.
• 29:56
  Mardie Millit: And so I made a lot of edits while we were rehearsing, which is just a week.
• 30:00
  Mardie Millit: You only get one week of rehearsal.
• 30:02
  Mardie Millit: But the single performance that we had of that reading educated me 10 times more than the rehearsal process because it was in front of an audience and the jokes were happening or not happening, and the information was being received or not received in real time.
• 30:23
  Mardie Millit: And so, if you had been there, you would have seen me with my pencil either crossing out things or ripping out pages and tossing them while the thing was going on.
• 30:34
  Mardie Millit: Oh, that's exciting.
• 30:35
  Mardie Millit: Bugs Bunny cartoon.
• 30:37
  Mardie Millit: Find your light, it's yours to keep and also yours to share.
• 30:45
  Maddie Orton: Mardie, Michael, thank you so much for chatting with me about this.
• 30:48
  Maddie Orton: This sounds really exciting.
• 30:50
  Maddie Orton: Thank you for letting us run our mouths for as long as we did.
• 30:53
  Maddie Orton: It's my pleasure.
• 30:55
  Maddie Orton: You guys are a blast.
• 30:56
  Maddie Orton: This reading of Mary Astor's Purple Diary will be held at New Jersey Repertory Company on Monday, October 26th.
• 31:16
  Maddie Orton: For more information, visit njrep.org.
• 31:19
  Maddie Orton: If you like this episode, be sure to give us a review, subscribe, and tell your friends.
• 31:23
  Maddie Orton: A transcript of this podcast, as well as links to related content and more about the arts in New Jersey, can be found on jerseyarts.com.
• 31:31
  Maddie Orton: The JerseyArts Podcast is presented by Art Pride New Jersey, advancing a state of creativity since 1986.
• 31:37
  Maddie Orton: The show is co-founded by and currently supported by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
• 31:43
  Maddie Orton: This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by yours truly, Maddie Orton.
• 31:47
  Maddie Orton: Executive producer is Jim Atkinson.
• 31:50
  Maddie Orton: Special thanks to Michael Guerin, Mardie Millett, Dominic Valletta, and Ed Sorel.
• 31:54
  Maddie Orton: I'm Matty Orton for the Jersey Arts Podcast.
• 31:57
  Maddie Orton: Thanks for listening.