Behind the Scenes Minis: Negligence and the Good Witch

Tracy talks about how Muriel Rukeyser being the entry point for the Hawk's Tunnel Disaster episode. Holly talks about Billie Burke's writing about her husband, Flo Ziegfeld, Jr., and unfair comparisons to other performers. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. So this this episode came about Sometimes when

(00:21):
I am trying to figure out what I'm going to
do next and I have not already formulated a plan,
I wind up in this state of looking at and
discarding idea after idea. Yeah, me too, And a lot
of the time it's like, I it sounds too similar
to something we literally just did, or I realize that

(00:45):
there's a like a book that I really need to
get and it's going to take me a while to get.
Like there's a bunch of different reasons that I go
through and discard stuff and I don't even remember. Oh
it was that I was looking at at a different
disaster that I've had on my list for a while,
and as I was looking at the basics of it,
I was just like, I can't figure out why we

(01:06):
would want to talk about this, because it just feels
like a really sad, tragic thing, but not something that
we could like learn something from or that has context
that's important. It just seems like a sad, tragic series
of events, So like, what is there a reason for

(01:28):
us to talk about this that doesn't feel like just gawking?
And so then I was like, what are some what
are some other disasters that maybe led to some improvements?
And I stumbled onto the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster uh
and got to the part about Muriel Rkeiser writing this

(01:52):
poem about it, and Ruchiser was one of my favorite
poets when I was in college. She's one of the
two poets that I did my thesis on in college.
I don't think this was a part of her career
that I had really looked at a lot during that

(02:12):
period of my you know, education. But I was like, well, obviously,
and then maybe this will turn into an actual like
a Muriel ruck Isser episode. Maybe it will, maybe not,
I don't know, but that is how I wound up
narrowed down onto this one episode. And then it turned
out to be so much worse than I expected, because

(02:38):
when I saw the description of workers digging this tunnel
and getting the silica exposure and dying of silicosis, in
my head, I thought this story was going to be
We didn't know yet that silicosis was that dangerous in fact,
we had known that for twenty years, and this was
just a flagrant disregard, Yeah, to the worth of all

(02:59):
of these people who were working in the tunnel. This
episode made me so angry. We had to stop themself.
I got to the part about how especially the black workers'
bodies may have been buried, and the first place that

(03:20):
I found reference to possibly being placed along the river
bank like said this as authoritative fact, and I got
so upset about it. And I don't think it actually
helps that we don't that I know of, have substantiation
of whether that really did happen. People clearly believed sincerely

(03:43):
that that had happened, though, and it was what was
happening in that tunnel was so egregious that it doesn't
seem impossible that people's bodies could have been treated with
that kind of disrespect. Yeah, so angry, making so angry
making that's kind of what I have. Although you've made

(04:05):
me think about another thing, completely unrelated and much later
in talking about your senior thesis, because I was like,
we've never discussed what our like senior projects in college
were occurred to me maybe one day, Yeah, do you
want an earful of Samuel Beckett. I'm ready. I'm ready
if you want a very convoluted It was in hindsight,

(04:29):
I'm like, why did you all let me graduate with
this thesis? Because it was on the work of Audrey
and Rich and Muriel Rockiser. But then I also had
this like weird pop psychology angle on It's it's embarrassing
in hindsight now, and I think there, with some guidance,

(04:49):
I might could have done something I would not be
embarrassed by. Now none of this matters. I mean it
might have mattered had I gone on to go to
graduate school in literature, which was my original plan. But like,
this is no longer a thing that has relevance to
my life for career. But occasionally I'm like, remember that
embarrassing thing he wrote? So you can graduate from college,

(05:12):
I mean that's what college is, right, Yeah, for sure.
I actually did two. So I did two tracks in
the literature department, and one was the literature track and
the other was the creative writing track. So I actually
had to do two theses to graduate, and one was
this paper that was on idterin Rich and Murau Rockeiser,
and the other was like a body of my own poetry.

(05:36):
Which I haven't looked back on in twenty five or
however many years. I bet that's also embarrassing. Mine was
a one person play because I was a theater major.
I like how you did that in song I did.
I was not a musical theater major. I was very
snooty about musical theater. Yeah. Yeah, I still am not
the biggest fan of musical theater, not because I don't

(05:58):
think it's worthy, but as we've pa we discussed before,
I don't like to see the inside of people's mouths,
which happens, we're saying with great enthusiasm. Yeah, it's just
a weird one of many weird little quirks of my brain.
I feel very embarrassed and it's very awkward for There

(06:22):
are a couple of books about this disaster. One of
the books is called The Hawk's Nest Incident America's Worst
Industrial Disaster, and that was published in nineteen eighty six,
and I still feel like it's like the most authoritative
work about it. There's another book that's newer that is

(06:43):
more of a collection of like congressional testimony and things
like that. Like it's it's not a narrative as much.
There's it sort of brings together all these other resources.
Would you like to hear a one star Amazon review
of that other book? Yes. I was expecting an engineering
history in the same vein as David mcculluff's excellent books

(07:05):
in the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, all
I got was newspaper clippings, court testimony, and endless government
documents all about silicosis, silicosis and more silicosis ad nauseum.
Very disappointing. I returned to the book. I was like, Wow,
this person seems to have not understood the point of

(07:27):
and then the next paragraph is I spent my whole
career working as a control systems engineer for Union Carbide.
I never knew anyone who was not of the highest integrity.
Everything we did kept safety as a foremost concern. I
can't speak for the early thirties. This is a very
different country then, And I was like, were you personally

(07:48):
upset by Union Carbides' role in this disaster? Maybe? Anyway,
that was when I saw that. I was like, Wow,
this is one of the more fascinating one star Amazon reviews.

(08:14):
We talked about Billie Burke this week. YEP, I love
her wacky life. Yeah, I do. I here's a thing
I super like about her. She is very frank about
her marriage and that it was a mess and that
sometimes it made her very unhappy, but that at the

(08:34):
end of the day, they really loved each other and
it was just like a good example of how a
thing that I know is easy for me to forget. Like, right,
everybody wants to judge everybody else's relationship, but nobody knows
except the people on the inside what it really is.
And so I just think she's a good example of
how you can have a marriage that people don't think
is right and still be like, no, that was still

(08:56):
the thing I was gonna do, which I just love.
She really really does speak very very lovingly about Florence
Ziegfeld Junior and how even though she recognized all of
his faults and that he did cheat on her many times,

(09:17):
she still saw a lot of good in him, which
is pretty interesting, and she talks about him in ways
like that are really quite a brilliant and adoring and
I kind of loved them. One of the things she
talks about a lot is that he didn't know how
to do anything the small way, and how like he
would do things like, hey, I got you a gift,

(09:38):
and she would find out he had spent thirty five
thousand dollars on like a whole set of golden plates
and cutlery for her. How I'd be like, you're sending
those back and that the second he would then kind
of trade down to a more reasonable gift, but it
was always in really good taste, and she'd be like,
it took him some tries, but he always got there,

(10:00):
and there was a really One of the I will
read a couple of quotes from her because they're so cute.
One is when she talks about when he started to
have to wear glasses, and she wrote, when he was
about forty five, he began to wear reading glasses for
the first time in his life. He did this as
he did everything else. He wore more glasses than anybody

(10:20):
he had, I suppose fifty payers, which I love. The
other thing that I think really endeared him to her
forever was that he and her mom were like BFFs.
And she tells so many cute stories of them, like
cutting out and going to the movies together, or like,

(10:41):
oh nice. There's one story she has in her first
book about the two of them sitting out by the
pool and kind of like lovingly bickering over who has
prettier feet, and like how you know, as her mom
got ill, that he just doted on her and made
sure she had everything she could possibly need, and it's
it's really, really quite sweet. She also made this point

(11:09):
in her first book that really I had not realized,
you know, Florence Ziegfeld Junior is attached to so many
people we have talked about on the show before, including
like Eugen Sandau and a lot of famous singers and
performers that came through vaudeville. But there's one section of
the book where she talks about how he was one

(11:32):
of the first people in the entertainment industry to recognize
the value of black performers and how he would not
only book them when other people would not, but he
was adamant that like this was the level playing field,
and they got booked into the same hotels when they
were touring. If a hotel wouldn't take them, they didn't

(11:52):
stay there. They got the same treatment backstage as everybody else.
Like he was really really adamant, and to her that
was like one of those mitigating things that made the
uglier parts of his personality a little bit easy for
her to ignore because she respected him so much. It's
very very sweet. There's a very sad part of her,

(12:14):
you know, final moments with him after he had died.
She had been on set doing a screen test when
she got the call that was like come home right now,
and she did, and she realized when she got there
she had not changed and she was in a dress
that she had been sewn into for this screen test
and she can get out of it. So she was
kind of like freaking out with grief and had to

(12:34):
be cut out of her clothes because she didn't have
a zipper. And it's like this heartbreaking moment where you're like,
that's the last thing you need to worry about when
you are grieving the person that, for better or for worse,
was the love of your life. She also tells a
story in her book to Go to. She has many
cute stories. One that is not cute is that she

(12:56):
is also very frank about how she's a little cagey
about the language. So I don't know if anything inappropriate
ever actually happened, but about how freely men were willing
to make advances on her when she was a teenager
in London. Oh wow, And how like that kind of
just came with the territory of being an entertainment and

(13:16):
it's like she kind of glosses through it. And I'm like,
is this her way of like compartmentalizing that or did
she manage to sidestep it to a point where she
can acknowledge it and move on? And I don't know,
but it was just one of those things that made
me go, man, here's a bad thing she did as
a teenage performer. Okay, she and one of the other

(13:39):
teenagers in that first show where she became very, very popular,
the schoolgirl would do this thing as they were leaving stage.
They would step out of their shoes and leave them
on the stage so other performers would trip on them
because you know, it's hilarious, which is awful, but she
was a teenager and need an entertainment. She also tells

(14:01):
a hilarious story about Missus Patrick Campbell, who we have
talked about. Yeah, yeah, we did, because Missus Patrick Campbell
also worked with Charles Frohman, and she says at one
point Froeman gave her gave Missus Campbell a note and
apparently she did not enjoy notes, and Missus Patrick Campbell replied,
pardon me, mister Frohman, but you forget that I am
an artist. And his response was, Missus Campbell, I'll keep

(14:25):
your secret, which is like the best whammo of all time.
I also really like the fact that there is a
creator on Mercury named for her. When that's We're All
and My Billy Burke a brilliance. Yeah, she Syman in space,
she's pretty fun. Glinda the Goodwitch iconic forever. Yeah. So

(14:47):
we talk about how she looks younger than fifty six
in that movie, like she was fifty four. I don't
know what, I don't know why, fifties. Yeah, And so
I went and watched a clip from it because in
my mind, Glinda the Goodwitch is like ethereally flawless almost,

(15:08):
and knowing how old she actually was when she filmed it,
she looks older on than I remembered in my memory, right,
so still looking very young, but not as like ethereally
young as the memory. That's right, My mind made of
what Glinda the Goodwitch looks like. If that makes sense.

(15:31):
It does. So there's an interesting thing about that and
I didn't mention it in the episode proper because I
didn't want it to become a whole other topic. But
it's worth mentioning. One of the ways that that film
and how young she looks in it is often written
up is that, oh, she was actually eighteen years older

(15:54):
than Margaret Hamilton, who looks like a horrible hag. And
it's like, wait, wait, wait, one, don't compare people to
each other too. Margaret Hamilton was in a ton of makeup, like,
you can't do that. She literally like witch makeup on,
whereas Billy Burke was made to look glamorous and beautiful.
That's not a fair comparison, right. I also was curs
I was like, how how much did you keep the

(16:16):
sun off your face? I think probably a lot, Probably
a lot, because that will make a big difference in
how old folks look a lot of the time. Yes, yes,
And it's interesting. She talked about how, you know, they
certainly wore makeup for film, but she didn't like to
wear a lot of makeup in day to day life,

(16:36):
you know, unless she was doing a stage show, and
that it was kind of like tawdry for women to
wear makeup in the time, right, certainly the levels of
makeup we wear now not everyone, but yeah, like a
level I wear is none right makeup, it's a level

(16:57):
little glitter, A love A little glitter would be just
you know who? That the worst insult. She mentions that
you could give someone as oh she paints and oh yeah,
And I'm like with Jesso. Yeah, she's really fun. I
really do. If you just want like and I want

(17:18):
to say it's a light read because she's talking about
heavy stuff. She's talking about infidelity and marital issues and
problems that are going on. But her tone, and granted
some of that is her co writer, is so good,
and you really get the sense that she was like
a person who I mean, they went through rough stuff

(17:39):
aside from any issues between them, like the fact that
they lost everything after leading this very lavish lifestyle, and
she's like, all right, I'll just go back to movies.
That's fine, and rebuilt really a wonderful career for herself.
She just seems like a trooper. Just funny when you
consider she did not want to go into acting initially.

(18:01):
So yeah, fascinating, fascinating. Billy Burke, I want to watch
Wizard of Oz again. Love it. Yeah, I mean I haven't.
I haven't seen it in many years. But it was
a favorite favorite when I was little. Oh love it,
love it. Granted. You know, there's a whole other depressing
story about Judy Garland, sure, that whole thing. Margaret Hamilton,

(18:22):
though favorite for a long time. Did you ever see
the Mister Rogers that she was on? I think so
where she brought her I don't know if it was
her original witch hat from the movie or if he
had one, I can't remember, but they put it on
and it was just the cutest, like her talking about
being in the movie. And you know that movie has

(18:45):
I think launched many many's people, many many people's imaginations.
So near and dear to my heart. Anyway, Billy Burke,
I'll talk about her forever if you let me. Don't
let me. There are other things to talk about. But
we hope if this is your weekend coming up, you
get to either watch a movie you love or do
something that you love or that relaxes you. If you

(19:07):
don't have time off, I still hope you wedge in
some fun. I will probably be watching Who with your
device while I work on other stuff. I'm very easily impressionable.
We hope that you are having the best possible year
you can. We will be right back here tomorrow with
a classic, and then on Monday there'll be another brand

(19:29):
new episode. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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