1951 SUICIDE ATTEMPT

This is what Mary Astor wrote in 1959 about her 1951 ‘”suicide attempt:”  One night when [her husband] Tommy was out I caught sight of a bottle of vodka on the bar, and began drinking, and the rest of that horrible night I recall only in disjointed fragments. I remember thinking that I would take a couple of sleeping pills and go to sleep.  The pills were in the bedroom, on the mantel above the fire place. As I opened the box I jerked the lid, and I remember the white capsules falling all over the bricks and popping up like pop corn. Finally I gave up trying to retrieve them all, and I walked back into the living room and poured another drink of vodka to wash them down.  The rest is secondhand. [I was told] I phoned [someone] and said, “I’ve taken poison get help.” He was too far to be of immediate help, so he phoned [someone else who]  got there in about five minutes, and I was lying on the floor. He thought I was dead, or very near death. The quickest thing he couldn’t think of was the police. He called them, and they came with an ambulance and they took a look at the pictures in the hall and recognized the fact that this was Mary Astor.  I was taken to the Van Nuys Receiving Hospital, where the press got a good picture of me having my stomach pumped. And all the papers carried the story of “Attempted Suicide.”  It was a front page story at the time.  In these press photographs Astor is having her stomach pumped

 

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