According to film historian Scott MacQueen, Kohner was engaged in the late 1920s to Mary Philbin. Mary broke off the engagement at the request of her parents, as she was Irish Catholic and Kohner was a Czech Jew. While Kohner went on to have a successful marriage and career as a Hollywood agent, Philbin soon was through in pictures. Sadly, she never married and spent much of her life taking care of her aging parents, living with them in a house that she had purchased with her film earnings. After Kohner died in 1988, workers cleaning out his office at his agency found Mary`s love letters close at hand in his desk drawer, after 60 years.