My Story: An Autobiography, Paperback/Mary Astor

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My Story: an Autobiography By Mary Astor Prologue People have often said to me, "You haven t changed a bit " They meant it as a compliment, but I could hear it only as an accusation, a statement of brutal fact. And I have thought bitterly, "You are so right " For I knew that if I had not changed I had not grown. To be a perennial child, an ethereal Peter Pan playing with pirates and Indians throughout all eternity, can be a lovely thing in the never-never land of fantasy, but it is an unhappy thing in life, The child is born so that he may become a man. It is his destiny to grow to learn, to understand, to assume responsibilities. Growth can be painful, I know; but I have found that a stunted and retarded growth can be a pain beyond belief. My father often used to rebuke me by saying, "You are almost nine years old" (and then "ten," and then "eleven," and "twelve") "and you haven t learned a thing " Well, here I was, fifty years old, and 1 still hadn't learned a thing My father s rebuke had always seemed to imply a promise that years, the very accumulation of years, would bring experience and understanding, So, at whatever age I was, I wished I were older. At seventeen I longed to be twenty-five. At twenty I wanted to be a woman of the world of thirty. At thirty I read that the French thought a woman did not reach a full maturity of beauty and attractiveness until she was forty. Finally, at forty-five, I decided that the whole thing was a pack of lies. Where was the "serenity" that the years were to bring? Where was "the cooling of passion s blood?" I realized that I, who leaned on so many people and things, had been leaning even on the abstraction of time. I was still refusing to grow up, to face the oppressive fact that I should long since have become a responsible, mature adult. I continued to seek people and things I could lean on, to escape the need for making my own decisions and assuming responsibility for my own acts. One event above all others should have br