I don’t get it…who are you talking about?

Stockholm, Sweden

Dear Mago,
Since International Women’s Day will begin here in a matter of minutes CET, Central European Time, it’s high time to try to answer some questions I’ve had about something you wrote in the first entry in your diary:

"For years I've felt that anyone who kept a diary was adolescent, neurotic, or particularly erudite. Of course, if I were Polly with a past and could write something so daring as Amy Crocker, Amy McPherson, Mary Astor and many others that might have been some inducement, but I'm just plain me…"

To begin with I didn’t understand what you meant by “Polly with a Past”. A little research tells me that you’re referring to a comedy in three acts about a small town American girl who goes to Paris to study singing, but winds up as a maid for a couple of bachelors. Needless-to-say, I’m still more interested in the American girl who grew up on a pig farm in Indiana (even if she did have a younger sister who studied and taught singing). I’m more interested in the young woman who studied English and who, after a brief marriage, took off alone with her young son for San Francisco in 1910.

And then I was wondering about the three pollies you mentioned. In order to still my curiosity today I’ve managed to unearth an interesting trio: a traveler, an evangelist, and an actress.

The most enigmatic of the three is Aimee Crocker. It seems she was a wealthy San Francisco socialite who wrote under the pseudonym Princess Galitzine. Aimee was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed woman who refused to play by the Victorian rules of her conservative family home. The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen alludes to her association with Oscar Wilde. She could only go farther west than you by taking to the sea, and ended up in India, from where she wrote "…here I am, [in] a country whose individual life covers over 4,000 years, and whose living breath had been blowing upon me across broad seas, whose finger had been beckoning me."

Sister Aimee Semple McPherson (1890 -1944) turned out to be a controversial evangelist and media sensation in southern California in the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by the Salvation Army, she eventually set up her own Salvation Navy, with lighthouse parishes. Her fate was to die on an overdose of drugs.

It appears that Mary Astor (1906-1987) was an award-winning actress, who wrote a diary that was eventually published in some newspapers. Although the excerpts that were published were "fairly harmless – romantic and sentimental chatter in no detail” – tales of sexually explicit content began to circulate though no one had evidently ever read her authentic diary. Referring to the five stages of her career, one of Mary Astor’s most famous quotes is purported to be: “Who’s Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who’s Mary Astor?"

It’s amazing how quickly our frames of reference change, and either distort meaning into meaningless banter, or offer fresh perspectives on life. These days feminist writers here in Scandinavia are fascinated by the lives of a postwar generation of California residents like Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971) and Valerie Solanas (1936-1988), both of whom led perilous lives in the periphery of the New York art scene. Like your Sister Aimee, Sedgwick died of an overdose. Like mother Anne, Solanos ended up with a case of emphysema and pneumonia. Solanos' last days were spent in a welfare hotel in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Perhaps she died in the same hotel where mother Anne’s sister Evelyn lived between the death of her mother and her move to a mental institution in Redwood City.

Perhaps what is new is the way we dare to cut and paste references to the lives of real people whom we have never met, in an effort to express the vicarious joys and tragedies of our own lives.
To be continued...

Your devoted granddaughter