December 20, 2022 • 47 mins
She was known for her quick wit and sharp tongue. But she was also a poet, screenwriter and activist. Tune in today to learn what outside her "vicious circle."
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
stuff you should know. Yeah, all right, what are you
(00:22):
laughing at? Chuck? You made your first joke right out
of the gate. What was it? You know? You just
did it. I'm not gonna do it. Oh the little
jazz hands, Yeah, that's what I pictured. That was not
a joke. I was dead serious, all right, speaking of jazz, Chuck,
how about that jazz age? Oh, look at you don't
(00:44):
anti paca. So you requested this when Livia helped us
out with it? What? What? What? Why? What? I have
no idea why. Dorothy Parker popped into my brain. There
wasn't anything. I had seen the movie a long time
ago with the arth Dorothy Parker story. Yeah, Dorothy Parker
in the Vicious Circle was the name of the movie.
(01:04):
Great Alan Rudolph film starring Jennifer Jason Lee, j J.
L as Uh, Dorothy Parker. Great cast rounded it out,
Cambell Scott, Matthew Broderick, others. Campbell Scott was this. It
was not quite that old, but it was. I think
it was late nineties or early odds, although he was
(01:25):
just in something I saw recently. Yeah, he's in like
a Marvel movie or something. I think. Okay, is he
a good guy or a bad guy? I don't think
he's a bad guy. Um, I like Campbell Scott though
you know that's Georgeie Scott's son, right, I did not
know that for real. Yeah, he's one of those I
think that somehow that's not the most common knowledge despite
(01:48):
having the name in profession. If I didn't know, it's
not common knowledge. He doesn't really look like him, so
not at all. Uh. Yeah, I have no idea why
Dorothy Parker popped into my head. I really don't. So
it's kind of it's kind of understandable because I'm trying
to figure out how to describe her. Dorothy Parker is
(02:11):
one of those very rare people who was so witty
that that is what she's remembered for. She worked prolifically
through the through Prohibition, basically through the twenties to the
early thirties, um, and apparently like basically in step with it,
and then that was it. Like her, her her writing
(02:32):
really fell off after that. She did some screenwriting but
her body of work is not super extensive. If you
asked her, it wasn't that great. But she was so
witty and so she's sharp and funny. Um that that
she's still she just became a literary legend because of it. Yeah,
I think this quote from the New York Times kind
(02:55):
of says it all. Uh. Most writers are known for
the works they lead on. Dorothy Parker is best known
for having lunch and this was I resist. I'm not
going to say that. I'm not going to compare her
to people these days that are famous without really having
done much, because that's a different category. She was a writer,
(03:16):
and she was a very talented writer. She just wasn't
extraordinarily prolific. Um. I don't think she loved to write
from what I've gathered, Like I can't crawl into her head,
but all the stuff I've read, it didn't seem like
it was like her favorite thing in the world. Like
she you know, she was a poet, but she wouldn't
even call them poems. She called them versus. She didn't
(03:39):
know it. Yeah, she was always she's always kind of
undercutting her own work, and I think in a self
deprecating way, which was maybe just sort of part of
the stick of being Dorothy Parker. Well, I said, I
read a Esquire article from written by Wyatt Cooper, who's
Anderson Cooper's dad. Oh okay, called, um, I think whatever
(04:01):
you know about Dorothy Parker is wrong. Something along those
lines anyways on the internet. Really good. Yeah, there's like
a bunch of ellipses in there, uh in the title
um but he he kind of pegged it as she
had that same kind of um uh fear of inadequacy
(04:22):
that any writer has, but hers just got worse and
worse to the point where it paralyzed her and she
just couldn't write any longer. Yeah. She also was quoted
as saying she, um, she would write five words and
then change seven, which in and of itself is a
great line, which is what she's known for, Yeah, known
for hum Dinger's zingers one liners. Um. Yeah. And that
(04:47):
whole quote about having lunch is a reference to her
membership in the Algonquin Roundtable, which was basically basically a
lunch bunch of these great literary minds all coming together
in the Algonquin Hotel that have lunch, and it became
really famous and really beloved, and she's probably the most
famous of that whole group. Right, And that is the
(05:10):
vicious circle of the movie title. It was also called
the Vicious Circle, Yeah, the Algonquin roundtable was right. Yeah.
And it was named because they were all having lunch
one day and I'm sure someone nearby said, look at them,
that is a vicious circle. That was great. Hopefully we'll
(05:31):
be able to get across kind of what we're trying
to stay here, because this is going to be one
of the most challenging episodes ever because we have to
get across why she was so why she's worth doing
an episode on. You know, It's it's more like other
people could be like, oh, well they figured out the
double helix of DNA, or you know, they they invented
(05:52):
the race car something like that. She was as kind
of a short lived writer who had a really great
way in like, we have to flesh it out more
than that. All Right, you seem doubtful. You're not saying,
what does she ever do that was so great? Right? No,
I'm I'm questioning our ability to get across why she
(06:13):
was so great. That's my that's that's my trepidation. Okay, Well,
I mean, she would like if she was alive today,
she would be the person that was most well known
for like Twitter. Oh yeah, she would be good at that.
She'd be really good at that. All right, So let's
jump back in her life. Um her. She was born
in down the Shore in New Jersey too. She was
(06:35):
born Dorothy Rothschild. Uh. This makes me immediately sidetrack quickly.
Her nickname was dot or Dottie. Uh. And I cannot
hear the name Dotty without thinking of one of my
favorite comedy bits of all time, stand up bits, which
is Gary Goldman's bit on abbreviating the states. Have you
ever seen that? No, I don't know who carry Goldman
(06:57):
is Goldman g L M A N. He he's really tall,
he's like six six. He's a comedian. But just everyone should,
but you, especially because you like stand up, just go
go after this and and find Gary Goldman's state abbreviations
bit because it was fan fantastic. And there's a character
in the bit named Dotties. I always think of that.
(07:18):
But she was born in to a father who was Jewish.
He was in the garment district. He worked in the
garment district. Henry rothschild and her mother was Scottish American.
Her name was Eliza, And like I said, she was
born down the shore of New Jersey, but mainly I
grew up on the upper West side of Manhattan, right. Um.
(07:39):
And she had a lot of tragedy surrounding her. Yeah,
I saw, I saw her missing thropy was chalked up
to this early just about of tragedy. Yeah, okay, what
would you say, missanthropy? No, alright, so, um, she she
(08:00):
is kind of adopted this persona which is you would
call it kind of emo today a little bit, but
like a really funny, sharp emo person maybe a little bit,
especially when she was young. She described herself as um,
a plain, disagreeable child with stringy hair and agenda write poetry. Um.
And that tragedy began when she was four years old
(08:22):
when her mom died. Apparently that was just that just
shaped her immediately, which something like that will. She also
said that her father was terrible to her, possibly physically abusive,
although some of the biographers of her aren't sure if
that's true, and Olivia points out that that's an uh
long running ongoing thing about whether stuff she said about
(08:43):
herself was true or not, and then the converse of that,
she frequently denied saying some of the quips that were
attributed to her. Yeah, it's pretty interesting, like uh. She
seemed like the kind of person that would she loved
to spin a yarn and if the facts were fudged
because it made for a better story, then that's fine.
(09:04):
But it kind of makes it difficult to parse out
the person from the persona and that was certainly the case.
Like you said, some people aren't so sure about the dad. Uh.
She apparently also had a pretty evil stepmother situation. She
referred to her stepmother as the housekeeper, which I think
it's pretty funny. I also saw she would call her
hey you, hey you. Uh. Stepmom died in nineteen o three,
(09:29):
so Dorothy was still just nine years old, and also
had an uncle um that was apparently pretty close to
the family that died on the Titanic. Her dad died
shortly thereafter, and if I do the math right, I
think she was like nineteen or twenty when she was
basically kind of she seems like left alone in the
world for the most part, although she did have a sister,
(09:50):
but I didn't I didn't see much about how close
they were. I didn't even see that she had a sister. Yeah,
that was a sister in there somewhere. So when her
dad died, her dad was very prosperous um as a
garment in the garment industry. So it was her uncle. Apparently, Um,
he did not invest wisely and so when he died,
(10:12):
he didn't leave much for her. So that was the
first time that she had to go get a job.
And her first job was um playing piano in a
dance school, which is kind of a cool first job,
but apparently she hated it because it was like actual work. Yeah.
That's the one thing that maybe a through line here
is that I don't think she loved to work super hard.
(10:35):
She did not. She said she doesn't like rich people,
but she she thought she'd be a darling at it
right exactly, Um, things changed for her. Nineteen fourteen, she
sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine. It was
called any Porch, and this sort of began her career
as kind of a high society satirist. UH paid twelve
(10:55):
bucks for that poem, which is about three hundred bucks today,
which was a lot of money for a poem even today.
I mean good luck at three for a poem. Uh.
And then a gentleman came into her life name a
very formative figure named Frank Crown and Shield, and he said, Hey,
I like to cut of your jib, pretty talented writer.
(11:16):
I'm gonna give you a full time staff job here
at Vogue Magazine, and I'm gonna pay ten bucks a week,
which is not bad pay at the time, even though
apparently Parker said she spent most of that on her housing,
like eight of ten right to her room and board. Yeah.
So Crown and Shield he was the editor of Vanity Fair,
but Vogue was like a sister magazine to Vanity Fair,
(11:38):
I believe. Yeah, they were all Conde Nast publications, so
he was or she was Crowning Shields protege from what
I understand. And she went to work for a woman
named Edna W. Woodman or woman. Uh yeah, woman Chase.
She was a female editor in chief, which was very
rare at the time. Um and uh, Dorothy Parker got
(12:00):
her first job writing captions, and she would get bored
easily because captions are supposed to be pretty normal and
boring is prosaic the correct word. Uh, I don't know Okay,
let's just go with prosaic because it seems like it's
the right word. But um, so she very quickly started
to trust try to slip in Remember when we used
(12:22):
to write for house stuff work, so we try to
slip in hilarious things into into um, like cut lines,
the captions under photos. Dude. I thought of us a
lot during this because that's all. We did that all
the time, to try and make things a little more interesting.
And I think both of us had editors that were
constantly saying, like, what are you doing? You can't do that?
So so she would she was doing basically the same thing.
(12:45):
So she became kind of a a thorn and Edna
Chase's side. Um, but not enough that she was fired
at this point. She actually was um. Uh. She was
promoted basically after P. G. Woodhouse Um, the humorists stopped
being the drama critic for Vanity Fair. They turned to
Dorothy Parker to become that to fill that role to
(13:05):
review plays. And she was only twenty four at the time. Uh.
And by that time she'd been married a year to
a guy named ed Edwin Pond Parker, the second stockbroker. Yeah,
he was. He enlisted in the army, as a lot
of guys did back then. What fault in World War One? Um?
And like you said, when she was twenty four, she
was this play uh or theater reviewer and was was
(13:28):
known sort of for doing the same thing in the
reviews of making sort of biting, cutting remarks about high society.
Uh one kind of funny one she was writing about
a play and she said, not even the presence in
the first night audience of Mr William Randolph Hurst could
spoil my evening. So a lot of great punch lines.
She she was pretty good at, like setting someone up
(13:49):
to think they may be getting a compliment and then
cutting their legs up from under them. That was actually
her whole thing. Like she was supposedly fairly soft spoken,
kind of quiet, you might even callers shy at first,
but also really complimentary, like really kind, and then she
would kind of build you up until you weren't even
(14:09):
paying attention to anymore because you were just so drunk
on the praise she was giving you, and then bam,
she cut your legs out. You probably didn't even notice,
but everyone else in the conversation and listening in is
having a good laugh. That was her her whole jam.
And it's really important to say her purpose wasn't to
be mean. There was a real purpose to her um
(14:34):
her like biting criticism, and it was usually um a
bullying self gratification, acceptance of praise, um worshiped from the
lower classes. Like that's why she didn't like high society types.
She also didn't like feign graciousness, like high society types
who were so nice that they they gave their housekeeper
(14:55):
an extra hour, u to go home early one one
week and now they feel really great about the selves.
Those kind of things, like just all the stuff that
just kind of makes somebody gross that she was surrounded
by in her life. That is what really kind of
drove her the craziest. And that is what she would attack.
And it didn't matter who you were, didn't matter what
your station in life. Although I don't believe she punched
(15:15):
down very often. Um, you were, you were subject to
that criticism if you kind of allowed yourself to behave
that way. Yeah, she probably would have been a stand
up comedian today now that I think about it, Like
there's a little bit of mis maasl in this, you know,
But that wasn't really a job that women had back then.
It wasn't a job period, I don't think at the time. No.
(15:38):
And there was one other criticism I want to point
out that she wrote in I don't remember where she
wrote it, but she was criticizing I think an actress
in a play and she said that um, as a
source of entertainment, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of
parsley and a single ice skate. That's just good stuff,
(15:58):
that's not even it's is smart, you know, like who
would think of a single ice skate is conveying like
just how not fun something is? Like, it's just brilliant stuff.
And she was full of that. Yeah, she pushed too
far though, as people like that often do, lost her
job in nineteen twenty. I think it was sort of
(16:18):
a you insulted the wrong person kind of thing. There
was a column where she was reviewing a play. She
accused the playwright basically of plagiarizing himself. And then what
the real deal was though, the real sort of last
straw was that was an actor, an actress named Billy
Burke in there, who was criticized and sort of likened
(16:38):
to this risque vaudeville star, which was not like a
good you know, comparison to make at the time. But
that actress was the wife of Florence Zigfield, who put
a lot of money into advertisements with Vanity Fair, and
a good friend of Nast of Conde Nast, and that
was kind of it. So apparently she got the new
(17:00):
news at the Plaza hotel, and a legend has it
she ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, then
left and took it with her. Right. So, oh, I
don't even think she took it with her. I think
she left before it came, just long enough to to
waste it. Oh I saw that she took it with her.
Oh did she awesome? Um? So uh, let's even even better. Um.
(17:21):
There's one other thing I want to point out about
her criticism, or two other things, chuck. First of all,
after she was fired from Vanity Fair, she that was
not the end of her critic critic career, like she
went onto to be a book reviewer for The New Yorker. Um,
but her her criticism, her columns, she had no training whatsoever.
(17:41):
She didn't she didn't like take any kind of classes
or education on criticism like technique in theory and all
that stuff. All of her reviews were just totally subjective.
But she was so funny and so entertaining and so
insightful that she became like an instant sensation. And then
the other thing I want to say about it, from
what I can tell, is that her criticism was not
(18:04):
always negative. That if you actually produced like a really
good or a really good book or something like that,
she could use that same wit too for praise as well.
And I read that there was there's some book that
she reviewed. Um, she was saying, to say of it
here as a magnificent novel is rather like gazing into
the Grand Canyon and saying, well, well, well, quite a slice. Yeah.
(18:26):
I mean she was a legitimate uh critique or she
put she put forth legitimate critique, right, And if it
was praise, it was praise. If it was negative, which
I think it more often was, it was negative. She
didn't like crud. Well, I don't even think it more
often was negative even. I think that's the stuff that
gets pulled because she's Dorothy Parker. I see that's a
(18:47):
really good point, Chuck. I think you might be right.
I don't think they were like, hey, this is supposed
to be a real turd. Let's put Parker on it,
because like she'll just she'll prop a new and it'll
be great. I hate that word so much. Yes, it's terrible.
It's terrible. It's even worse because it's spelled with to you.
It looks bad on paper print and it even evokes
(19:09):
the color brown somehow, somehow. Uh yeah, I think we
should take a break. We should revisit that word. M hm, no, okay,
all right, we'll be right back. Learn it's stuff with Joshua, alright,
(19:53):
Mr turd. So when when she got fired from Vanity Fair,
there were two employees, Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood,
who were such friends with her that they actually quit
and protest because apparently she wasn't wrong with her with
her um her criticism that got her fired and she
was just fired because she insulted a very high ranking
(20:16):
friend of the publisher. So um, they actually quit and protesting.
I mean that is to inspire a couple of people
to quit because you were fired, is really saying something
like it's almost like a trope, you know, but if
you stop and think about it in reality, somebody being
like so long paycheck, so long, steady works. I'm I like,
(20:37):
this person should not have been fired, and I'm I'm
taking my talents away from you because you don't deserve
them because you fired this person. That's a really big deal.
If someone fired you, I would quit. Thank you, same
to you. Okay, you hear that, everybody you hear that bosses? Yeah,
hopefully that we don't. We don't get tested, but yeah,
(20:59):
we have been fired by this point. If we were
going to at all, you would think so. But hey,
there's always the future. Uh So, now we get to
the point where we can talk about the vicious circle again,
which was the round table. Generally lunches, although they lunched
for many hours at the Algonquin Hotel, which is I
believe it's still there in New York, right, and still
(21:20):
the Algonquin. Yeah, I want to stay there sometime. I
gotta check out. But it's it's now the Algonquin by Hyatt.
That's funny and probably true. Uh So, this was a
period of time over about a decade or so that
first started in June of nineteen nineteen, when they all
(21:43):
got together for lunch to welcome home their friend Alexander
Woolcott from his World War One correspondence job. They roasted him,
they got drunk. Uh, they had a good time, and
they said, hey, let's come back tomorrow and we don't
have to have a special occasion to get together and
drink scotch at lunch. And it kind of became like
(22:04):
sort of a a Studio fifty four uh booth scene
where you know, where you see Mick Jagger with uh
Andy Warhol and like Mickey Dolan's from the Monkeys and
like a painter, you know. It was people from all
different walks of life, like Harpo Marx might be there.
(22:24):
There might be a fiction writer like Edna Ferber, or
a sportswriter like Heywood Brown, or columnists or screenwriters or playwrights,
and it was just like it kind of became the cool,
like a certain kind of cool crowd was hanging out
at this round table. Yeah. Especially it was especially considered
(22:44):
cool among the intelligentsia, right, smart and literary types generally,
So it became like a worshipful gathering um. And people
knew about it because a lot of these people were
columnists and like you know, the New York Times and
later on the New York Parker and like these big publications,
and they would write about like equip that that Dorothy
(23:05):
Parker said apparently like um, she would say something at
lunch one day and to be in the New York
Times the next day. I think why Cooper was the
one that said she was probably the most quoted woman
of the nineteen twenties. Um because she was so funny,
but also because she was in a position to be
so exposed. Um. But that the Algonquin roundtable, the fact
(23:26):
that it became the stuff of legend, the more legendary came,
the I think the more um kind of disgruntled by
the whole idea Dorothy Parker became. I think if Dorothy
Parker heard that, she would say, name one other woman
who was even quoted in the nineteen twenties, dear oh man,
and I go uh her uh uh. They became so
(23:49):
sort of popular and famous just for these lunches in
this round table that the manager of the hotel, Mr
Frank Case started seating them in a very sort of
public area in the rose room, so people could just
kind of come by and watch them have lunch and
talk smack to each other. Yes, so, um, they like
(24:10):
you said, like, these lunches would also go by the way,
I'm gonna say, Greta Garbo, how about that? Okay, Um,
these lunches would turn into dinner and in very short
order after Um there the initial meeting in June Prohibition
started so that scotch they were sipping turned into bootleg
scotch that they had to kind of surreptitiously drink. But
(24:31):
they were all super drunk from lunch onward, and they
would go to people's houses and have cocktails. Afterward, they
would vacation together. They became like really good friends. It
sounds fantastic. It does sound fun, for sure, Um. But
even more um important I would say, is that a
lot of them came to collaborate. It was like a
really productive group. And so not only did some like
(24:54):
get together and write like screenplays together or plays, they
would actually use one another characters in their books or
their plays. Like Um, Alexander Walcott. He was like the
stock acerbic, um course, um character who was kind of
the center of the man who came to dinner. It
was based on him. There are plenty of characters in
(25:16):
different plays that you never heard of that were based
on Dorothy Parker, Um, they just used each other as
inspiration in addition to collaborating with one another directly. And
as you would think, Dorothy Parker also sort of undercut
the importance of the whole algonquin vicious circle. She was
quoted as saying that round table thing was greatly overrated,
full of businessmen and publicity people and hangers on and
(25:39):
a lot of second rate writers, saying did you hear
what I said the other day? So I get the
impression that it's a little bit of both. It may
have been a little over played, but I think she
also sort of vastly underplayed what was going on in
that sort of self deprecating way. Again, well, I I
also saw that she said it was just a bunch
of loudmouth showing off save being their gags for days,
(26:01):
waiting for a chance to spring them. So um, I that,
and I think it kind of ties into that idea
of like, you know, just being grossed out by people
heaping praise onto other people and then those people accepting
all that praise and basking in it. And then the
more that that happened, the more she was like forget this.
So um, yeah, I'm sure it's like you said, it
(26:22):
was both, but I feel like that was the reason
she kind of distanced herself from it through criticism. Yeah,
I get the impression, and this is I may just
be reading too much into this that she she didn't
love the Spotlight, uh, and she was sort of in
it because she was just so smart and funny. I
think she definitely hated phonies, yes, and that sort of
(26:44):
you know, ties into the upper crust thing. Um. She
probably would have loved Catcher in the Rye. When was
that written the fifties. She's I'm sure she was alive
while it was published. She died in nineteen sixty eight.
Spoiler alert, yeah, sixty seven. She also it wasn't just
the round table. I think Livia took great pains to
(27:06):
sort of talk about other people in nonliterary people that
she hung out with, um, as well as other writers
that just didn't you know, like she was a friend
of Ernest Hemingway. But I don't think Ernest Hemingway was
one to like sit around a round table and like
crack jokes and stuff like that. He had like elephants
to shoot, So Hemingway was a buddy. Um. I think
(27:28):
he supposedly, uh at Scott Fitzgerald ended up basing a
lot of the Great Gatsby parties after what happened in
the social circle at the Algonquin. So you know, I
think she had an influence on other writers as well,
you know, for sure, um yeah. And she was very
quoted and also misquoted. Uh, And I think she inspired
(27:50):
a lot of people, for sure. Let's talk should we
talk about some of the great quotes? Sure? Al right,
Well one of them was someone said a aparently like
used the word horticulture in a sentence, and she said,
you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
And I think that's off the dome. Like she was
known for just being that quick, you know, right, Yeah,
(28:12):
that's a big part of it. And that's why she
was saying, like people would be saving their gags for days,
just waiting for a chance to spring him. She did
not do that. It just came into her head, like
she was just that sharp. Um my favorite is this?
You're ready? So Calvin Coolidge, the president, apparently he was
very famously quiet and um she uh, she was told
about the death of Calvin Coolidge, and she whispered, how
(28:35):
do they know. Yeah, it actually took me a second
to figure that one out, and then once I got it,
it was that's a really good one. Yeah, I like
that one too. But she was also, like you said,
misquoted or not only misquoted, but I think other quotes
were attributed to her that she said that she never said. Um,
a very famous one, uh from iron Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
(28:57):
Supposedly she said it is not a novel to be
tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,
which is a great quote. But she said that she
never said that. Nor did she say the first thing
I do in the morning is brush my teeth and
sharpened my tongue. Yeah, that's a little too, like she's
joining in the celebration of yeah. And she wouldn't do that.
(29:20):
I could. I could have spotted that a mile away
and been like nay, yeah. And and it seems like
she got very annoyed at being having things attributed to her,
because that's part of the phoniness. Yeah, which is why
I think she would just deny saying stuff a lot
of times too, even if she did, Yes, so, um,
what the other And also, like you said, too, I
(29:41):
think she was kind of creating this um fiction that
was more entertaining than reality in some cases, like a
character like I still think there's probably a lot of
people who don't really understand who or maybe every no
one knows who the real Dorothy Parker was. Even Dorothy
Parker might not have known, but she probably did, although
(30:01):
I'll tell you who really did know? Again? Is um
Whyatt Cooper Anderson Cooper of sixty Minutes in CNN and
New Year's Fame. Um His dad wrote that Esquire article
I mentioned, I'm finally prepared to share the title. It's
whatever you think Dorothy Cooper was, like she wasn't, and
(30:23):
it is what did I say? Cooper? Oh my god,
I got it wrong? Okay, and I even have it
written down as Cooper. That's why I got it wrong.
So that title I just said, but replaced Cooper with Parker.
And it's one of the most insightful articles I've ever
read about anybody. So even if Dorothy Parker didn't understand herself,
(30:48):
why A Cooper understood her? Like It's a really good,
interesting article that doesn't necessarily follow any timeline. It's just
like why Cooper is kind of like oh yeah, and
one other thing about her was this, and then he
back it up with like three different stories that are
also hilarious or maybe a little sad or something like that. Um. Yeah,
it's a really really good article. I would recommend anybody
(31:09):
go read it, even if you couldn't care less about
Dorothy Parker. Well, hopefully they will after the end of this. Uh.
She after she went away from Vanity Fair by getting fired,
it's a nice way to say it. She never worked
like a regular staff job again. She became a very
successful freelancer. She wrote for all kinds of magazines that
(31:30):
were popular at the time, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal.
When The New Yorker was founded by her friend Harold
ross In think you mentioned earlier, she became a regular columnist,
doing reviews, short stories, her poems again what she called versus.
Between twenty six and thirty three she did publish books
(31:52):
of poetry. She published three books of poetry and two
short story collections, and one of which was the best seller.
Enough was a poetry collection which was a best seller
and sold really well. And uh, where I'm trying to
find where it was. She won a couple of big
prizes to didn't she She won the Oh Henry Story
Prize in nine for one. UM. Oh, I can't remember
(32:14):
what it's called big Blonde about what a character I
saw described as a serial mistress? Uh in decline and
um she attempts suicide. Um. And apparently there was a
like one, a pretty prestigious prize. UM. She wrote very
frequently about uh. Love, especially modern love in the sense
(32:37):
of in the twenties, they were just starting to deal
with this idea of like, wait a minute, men and
women are like working in the same places, and you know,
we're kind of interacting more now and are you might equal? No,
that doesn't seem right, But how does that translate into dating?
You know, everybody kind of moved from the farm to
the city and they were trying to figure it out.
(32:57):
And so that was one of Dorothy Parker's favorite um
topics of of writing both verse and short stories as well. Yeah,
she eventually would get I think, kind of just leave
poetry behind. She stopped because she said that she didn't
think she was getting any better, which is man. That
is admirable. Yeah. Yeah, to not just like run something
(33:21):
into the ground like we're doing. I think we're still
getting better here and starts yeah, man, I think I
think this has been a great year. Actually, okay. Uh.
In fifty six she talked about just again, sort of
her reputation being overblown. She said it got so bad
(33:43):
that audiences began to laugh before I opened my mouth.
So her reputation preceded her in a way that she
wasn't comfortable with, and I think she didn't feel like
it was earned. Um. I have a suspicion that she
might have been deeply uh, she's some blanking what's the
word when you don't feel good about yourself? Um? Insecure? Sure.
(34:07):
A lot of these things that happened with her in
the way she betrayed herself kind of makes me think
she might have been insecure in her in her writing
and with sort of getting attention as somebody who was
doing good things. If I can't if if no one
minds me. Going back to the same well of whyatt Cooper,
he basically said, she seemed to prefer misery. That's why
(34:28):
I compared to like an emo person earlier, like um.
He gave a great example where um, you'd be hanging
out of her house and she'd get a phone call
from a friend and she'd tell the the help like,
tell tell them I'm not home. And then later on
in that same visit, she complained about how that exact
same friend never called anymore interesting, So like it was
(34:48):
a self imposed kind of thing, Like she seemed to
just feel more comfortable isolated, but tried to make it
so that it wasn't her own choice. Yeah, I don't
understand why. I don't know if it was to get sympathy,
it doesn't seem to have been. It's she was just
kind of bizarre in that way. All right, should we
(35:10):
take a second break, Yes, yes we should. All right,
so we'll take that break and we'll be back to
talk about from this point forward. In Dorothy Parker's life
(35:43):
learnt with Joshua John So Chuck, one of the things
that she did very sensibly after she kind of abandoned
poetry and short story writing was to go to Hollywood
and become a screw writer. And she did that, um
through kind of marrying a guy named Alan Campbell, an
(36:06):
actor back in he was ten years younger than she was,
and um, they ended up being screenwriting partners together after
he moved her out to Hollywood. Yeah, so her just
to tie up her first husband's situation. Uh. He came
back from the war apparently was an alcoholic and drug addict,
and they were separated. She had an abortion, uh, and
(36:28):
they got divorced. So he died of a drug overdose
at the age of thirty nine. Uh. And that's when
she met the new guy. And the new guy Alan Campbell,
and uh, like he said, went to Hollywood to write movies. Um.
She was became pregnant at the uh. And it's still,
you know, sort of old to get pregnant now, but
it's certainly at the time. Being pregnant at forty two
(36:49):
years old in the nineteen thirties was a tough situation,
and she did have a miscarriage that devastated her. UM.
But she was she sort had an on again, off
again relationship with this guy. They were the kind that
would get divorced and then reconcile and then remarry and
then split up again, then move back together again. But
(37:11):
they had a pretty prolific partnership wherein he would and
a lot of writing partners still kind of have this arrangement.
Someone might be really good at nailing dialogue and the
other partner might be really good at structure and character
development stuff like that. So he would develop the structure
of a script and sort of sketch out scenes, and
(37:31):
she would come in with her you know, rapiers wit
and come up with all that clever dialogue and got
a lot of money and attention and awards or at
least nominations. She was a co writer on A Star
Is Born, the first one from and they were making
a hundred over a hundred thousand dollars a week a week.
(37:53):
That's so much money. It's just just screenwriting. And they
were having a blast doing it. They get drunk every day,
they were everybody. Yeah. Yeah, they were friends with everybody
in their neighborhood and it was just it sounds like
a really grand time. Um. And then unfortunately, Alan Campbell died. Um.
(38:13):
They think it might be a suicide, although she apparently
decided that that was not the case, so she got
it listed as an accident on his death certificate. And
right after that, she's like, I'm I'm going back to
New York. She said, New York is the only place
to be in the whole country. Um, I'm guessing California
was a little too painful. After the death of Alan Campbell.
But I also think like she just preferred living in
(38:35):
New York. Anyway, there was another thing that happened to
her that probably prompted her to move to New York,
and that was her activism. Like she's known for her
quips and her sharp wit um and you kind of
have to dig in a little further before you realize
like she was actually like a legit died in the wool,
lefty activists who really cared about things like racism and
(38:58):
civil rights long before this was on the radar of
most people. Yeah, she was one of the founders of
the Screenwriters Guild. Very pro union, as you probably shouldn't
be surprised by this point. Uh, very anti Nazi early on.
This is like, you know, before the long before the
(39:19):
Americans were involved in World War Two. Uh. She you know,
she had a half Jewish father, and I think it
seems like sort of struggle over the years with her
Jewish heritage, but came out hard against Uh Lenni Riefenstall
when she visited Hollywood and was sort of and this
was in I think, uh and basically said like, no,
(39:40):
you shouldn't take meetings with her. You shouldn't take meetings
with any Nazis, and like all these agents need to
just close their doors to them, basically, and I thought
I couldn't admire her anymore. She founded an anti Nazi league,
I mean, hats off to her right. So she also
helped raise money to defend the Scottsboro Boys, were nine
(40:00):
black teenagers in Alabama who were unjustly convicted and sentenced
in the rape of two white women. UM and there
was a really big um push by the American Communist
Party to to basically rescue these boys from this unjust system.
And she was at the very least Communist adjacent, if
(40:23):
not an outright sympathizer. I think a lot of her
interests in viewpoints really kind of dovetailed with the Communist
Party in America at the time. UM. And she was
also virulently anti fascist. And for all of this, combined
her anti fascism, her UM work for civil rights, her
kind of sympathy for UM, the Communist Party UM got
(40:45):
her essentially first informally blacklisted and then pretty much officially
blacklisted in Hollywood starting in the forties. Yeah, so before
the blacklist, there was something called the Red Channels, which
was a pamphlet that kind of said, hey, you know,
you may not want to hire these people if you're
in broadcasting. Yeah, it was put out real quick, chuck
(41:05):
by a right wing um publication that was um called
counter Attack, I believe, and it was made by three
former FBI agents who just basically created dossiers on everybody
in Hollywood to root out who were the communists. And
a lot of them were accused just for contributing to like,
you know, civil rights causes or things like that. I
(41:26):
was just about to point that out. That is again
pre blacklist. It should not surprise you that she eventually
was officially blacklisted for a short time. She was also
on the FBI watch list Edifile honor. Uh. They called
her a concealed communist and you know, just go back
and listen to our McCarthy asm episode, uh if you
(41:47):
want to learn anything else about the House of Unamerican
Activities Committee. She did go before them in fifty five
and took the fifth and the FBI eventually would clear her,
uh being a security threat. But I think, you know,
I don't think any of those people were ever completely
off the list, if you know what I mean. No,
for sure. And if you got on that list, if
(42:07):
you were in that pamphlet, it doesn't matter how big
of a starre you were, you just could not find work.
All of us are you get fired from your current job?
It was crazy, Um, but that's what happened, and it
was part of that McCarthy era. So she moved back
to New York and um, she I saw that. She
basically lived out the last act of her life in
a very surprising manner as a little old lady. Basically, Yeah,
(42:31):
she died at a seventy three and uh, I think
she left all her her money to Reverend Martin Luther
King and then once he died, that went to the
Inn Double a c p. Uh. There's a New Yorker
article that um kind of indicates like, no one knows
exactly how much money that ended up being for the
(42:51):
Double a CP, but I think it was a lot.
And um, this is sort of a not so fun
way to end this. But one of her good friends,
Lilian Hellman, was a playwright some when she knew for
a long long time was designated as her executor for
her will in a state but was mad because she
wasn't left any money and so she basically threw all
(43:14):
her stuff away the way, all her papers, all of
the you know, manuscripts that she had been working on
in her life. And uh, Dorothy Parker did not want
to have a big deal made about her death, wanted
a quiet cremation, and she, against her wishes, organized a
big public memorial. It's it seems like just in defiance
of her wishes because she was mad about being h
(43:37):
I guess left out of her will slightly. In Hellman's defense,
she largely supported Dorothy Parker during her old age years
from nineteen to sixty seven, so I think she expected
to kind of be repaid. But still, it's definitely not
worth going against somebody's wishes, you know. So Dorothy Parker's
ashes had a really interesting afterlife. She had no heirs,
(43:59):
no family, so um, they were left at the crematorium
from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy three, when the
crematorium finally got fed up of storing it and just
mailed them to the address of her former lawyer. But
her lawyer had retired, but his partner was still in business.
Her partner didn't know anything about this, didn't know what
(44:19):
to do with the ashes, didn't know who to contact,
so he just put her in his desk drawer, and
from nineteen seventy three to Dorothy Parker spent uh in
a desk drawer in her former lawyer's office. She'd probably
think that's funny. I think so, But if she were
in there, she would have been really bored too. Yeah. Uh.
They would eventually move though. If you go to New
(44:41):
York now you can go up to the Bronx to
Woodlawn Cemetery, where a tour guide and big fan of
hers eventually put her ashes. Was given her ashes. He
didn't steal them. And there's a little small plaque with
a phrase that she apparently proposed for her epitat, which is,
excuse my dust, it's just beautiful. It beat Shakespeare's epitaph, right,
(45:06):
what was Shakespeare's? It was some clumsy, ham fisted curse
that people are like. Shakespeare wouldn't have written that gas grass?
Or what was it that no one rides for free?
Oh man, Chuck. Since Chuck said that hilarious quip, that
means this is the end of the Dorothy Parker ep
So if you want to know more about her, go
reader stuff. It's really good and uh fun. And since
(45:28):
I said it's really good and fun, that means it's
time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this a
counterpoint to another listener mail. We got the email from
the teacher that talked about p b i S positive
behavioral Interventions in support. Oh yeah, and uh apparently there's
a lot of controversy surrounding that, because Jennifer here says this, Hey,
(45:51):
guys have been listening for years. I learned so many
cool things after the Casino bombing episode. However, you read
a letter from a gentleman who wrote about using p
b i S and classroom. I taught school for thirty
years and finally left, as did hundreds of my colleagues
because p b i S has destroyed public education. Teachers
can be kind of students without a PBS program in place.
(46:13):
My co teacher was permanently disabled by a student. It's
my feeling that once you're an adult in society, uh,
society while hand you consequences, and students may not be
taught how to be prepared for that with p b
i S schools. Thanks for stating that it may or
may not work in your own home, Chuck, I was
required to take two college classes on this, so it's
(46:35):
not that I don't understand it. Keep giving us great
knowledge of millions of topics, and that is from Jennifer. Awesome.
Thank you Jennifer for the counterpoint. There may be a
good episode in there, now that I see this, Yeah,
I think you might be right, Chuck. Anytime it was
controversy like that, we're on let's do it. Every time
I hear point or counterpoint, I'm reminded of that that. Um,
(46:57):
apart from Airplane where there they're debating the whole thing
where the I think it's airplane too maybe where the
guy goes let them crash, I don't remember that line.
That's good. Um, Yeah, it's way funnier in the movie
than what I just did. If you want to get
in touch with this, like Jennifer didn't offer a counterpoint,
you can send it to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio
(47:20):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
stuff you should know. Yeah, all right, what are you
(00:22):
laughing at? Chuck? You made your first joke right out
of the gate. What was it? You know? You just
did it. I'm not gonna do it. Oh the little
jazz hands, Yeah, that's what I pictured. That was not
a joke. I was dead serious, all right, speaking of jazz, Chuck,
how about that jazz age? Oh, look at you don't
(00:44):
anti paca. So you requested this when Livia helped us
out with it? What? What? What? Why? What? I have
no idea why. Dorothy Parker popped into my brain. There
wasn't anything. I had seen the movie a long time
ago with the arth Dorothy Parker story. Yeah, Dorothy Parker
in the Vicious Circle was the name of the movie.
(01:04):
Great Alan Rudolph film starring Jennifer Jason Lee, j J.
L as Uh, Dorothy Parker. Great cast rounded it out,
Cambell Scott, Matthew Broderick, others. Campbell Scott was this. It
was not quite that old, but it was. I think
it was late nineties or early odds, although he was
(01:25):
just in something I saw recently. Yeah, he's in like
a Marvel movie or something. I think. Okay, is he
a good guy or a bad guy? I don't think
he's a bad guy. Um, I like Campbell Scott though
you know that's Georgeie Scott's son, right, I did not
know that for real. Yeah, he's one of those I
think that somehow that's not the most common knowledge despite
(01:48):
having the name in profession. If I didn't know, it's
not common knowledge. He doesn't really look like him, so
not at all. Uh. Yeah, I have no idea why
Dorothy Parker popped into my head. I really don't. So
it's kind of it's kind of understandable because I'm trying
to figure out how to describe her. Dorothy Parker is
(02:11):
one of those very rare people who was so witty
that that is what she's remembered for. She worked prolifically
through the through Prohibition, basically through the twenties to the
early thirties, um, and apparently like basically in step with it,
and then that was it. Like her, her her writing
(02:32):
really fell off after that. She did some screenwriting but
her body of work is not super extensive. If you
asked her, it wasn't that great. But she was so
witty and so she's sharp and funny. Um that that
she's still she just became a literary legend because of it. Yeah,
I think this quote from the New York Times kind
(02:55):
of says it all. Uh. Most writers are known for
the works they lead on. Dorothy Parker is best known
for having lunch and this was I resist. I'm not
going to say that. I'm not going to compare her
to people these days that are famous without really having
done much, because that's a different category. She was a writer,
(03:16):
and she was a very talented writer. She just wasn't
extraordinarily prolific. Um. I don't think she loved to write
from what I've gathered, Like I can't crawl into her head,
but all the stuff I've read, it didn't seem like
it was like her favorite thing in the world. Like
she you know, she was a poet, but she wouldn't
even call them poems. She called them versus. She didn't
(03:39):
know it. Yeah, she was always she's always kind of
undercutting her own work, and I think in a self
deprecating way, which was maybe just sort of part of
the stick of being Dorothy Parker. Well, I said, I
read a Esquire article from written by Wyatt Cooper, who's
Anderson Cooper's dad. Oh okay, called, um, I think whatever
(04:01):
you know about Dorothy Parker is wrong. Something along those
lines anyways on the internet. Really good. Yeah, there's like
a bunch of ellipses in there, uh in the title
um but he he kind of pegged it as she
had that same kind of um uh fear of inadequacy
(04:22):
that any writer has, but hers just got worse and
worse to the point where it paralyzed her and she
just couldn't write any longer. Yeah. She also was quoted
as saying she, um, she would write five words and
then change seven, which in and of itself is a
great line, which is what she's known for, Yeah, known
for hum Dinger's zingers one liners. Um. Yeah. And that
(04:47):
whole quote about having lunch is a reference to her
membership in the Algonquin Roundtable, which was basically basically a
lunch bunch of these great literary minds all coming together
in the Algonquin Hotel that have lunch, and it became
really famous and really beloved, and she's probably the most
famous of that whole group. Right, And that is the
(05:10):
vicious circle of the movie title. It was also called
the Vicious Circle, Yeah, the Algonquin roundtable was right. Yeah.
And it was named because they were all having lunch
one day and I'm sure someone nearby said, look at them,
that is a vicious circle. That was great. Hopefully we'll
(05:31):
be able to get across kind of what we're trying
to stay here, because this is going to be one
of the most challenging episodes ever because we have to
get across why she was so why she's worth doing
an episode on. You know, It's it's more like other
people could be like, oh, well they figured out the
double helix of DNA, or you know, they they invented
(05:52):
the race car something like that. She was as kind
of a short lived writer who had a really great
way in like, we have to flesh it out more
than that. All Right, you seem doubtful. You're not saying,
what does she ever do that was so great? Right? No,
I'm I'm questioning our ability to get across why she
(06:13):
was so great. That's my that's that's my trepidation. Okay, Well,
I mean, she would like if she was alive today,
she would be the person that was most well known
for like Twitter. Oh yeah, she would be good at that.
She'd be really good at that. All right, So let's
jump back in her life. Um her. She was born
in down the Shore in New Jersey too. She was
(06:35):
born Dorothy Rothschild. Uh. This makes me immediately sidetrack quickly.
Her nickname was dot or Dottie. Uh. And I cannot
hear the name Dotty without thinking of one of my
favorite comedy bits of all time, stand up bits, which
is Gary Goldman's bit on abbreviating the states. Have you
ever seen that? No, I don't know who carry Goldman
(06:57):
is Goldman g L M A N. He he's really tall,
he's like six six. He's a comedian. But just everyone should,
but you, especially because you like stand up, just go
go after this and and find Gary Goldman's state abbreviations
bit because it was fan fantastic. And there's a character
in the bit named Dotties. I always think of that.
(07:18):
But she was born in to a father who was Jewish.
He was in the garment district. He worked in the
garment district. Henry rothschild and her mother was Scottish American.
Her name was Eliza, And like I said, she was
born down the shore of New Jersey, but mainly I
grew up on the upper West side of Manhattan, right. Um.
(07:39):
And she had a lot of tragedy surrounding her. Yeah,
I saw, I saw her missing thropy was chalked up
to this early just about of tragedy. Yeah, okay, what
would you say, missanthropy? No, alright, so, um, she she
(08:00):
is kind of adopted this persona which is you would
call it kind of emo today a little bit, but
like a really funny, sharp emo person maybe a little bit,
especially when she was young. She described herself as um,
a plain, disagreeable child with stringy hair and agenda write poetry. Um.
And that tragedy began when she was four years old
(08:22):
when her mom died. Apparently that was just that just
shaped her immediately, which something like that will. She also
said that her father was terrible to her, possibly physically abusive,
although some of the biographers of her aren't sure if
that's true, and Olivia points out that that's an uh
long running ongoing thing about whether stuff she said about
(08:43):
herself was true or not, and then the converse of that,
she frequently denied saying some of the quips that were
attributed to her. Yeah, it's pretty interesting, like uh. She
seemed like the kind of person that would she loved
to spin a yarn and if the facts were fudged
because it made for a better story, then that's fine.
(09:04):
But it kind of makes it difficult to parse out
the person from the persona and that was certainly the case.
Like you said, some people aren't so sure about the dad. Uh.
She apparently also had a pretty evil stepmother situation. She
referred to her stepmother as the housekeeper, which I think
it's pretty funny. I also saw she would call her
hey you, hey you. Uh. Stepmom died in nineteen o three,
(09:29):
so Dorothy was still just nine years old, and also
had an uncle um that was apparently pretty close to
the family that died on the Titanic. Her dad died
shortly thereafter, and if I do the math right, I
think she was like nineteen or twenty when she was
basically kind of she seems like left alone in the
world for the most part, although she did have a sister,
(09:50):
but I didn't I didn't see much about how close
they were. I didn't even see that she had a sister. Yeah,
that was a sister in there somewhere. So when her
dad died, her dad was very prosperous um as a
garment in the garment industry. So it was her uncle. Apparently, Um,
he did not invest wisely and so when he died,
(10:12):
he didn't leave much for her. So that was the
first time that she had to go get a job.
And her first job was um playing piano in a
dance school, which is kind of a cool first job,
but apparently she hated it because it was like actual work. Yeah.
That's the one thing that maybe a through line here
is that I don't think she loved to work super hard.
(10:35):
She did not. She said she doesn't like rich people,
but she she thought she'd be a darling at it
right exactly, Um, things changed for her. Nineteen fourteen, she
sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine. It was
called any Porch, and this sort of began her career
as kind of a high society satirist. UH paid twelve
(10:55):
bucks for that poem, which is about three hundred bucks today,
which was a lot of money for a poem even today.
I mean good luck at three for a poem. Uh.
And then a gentleman came into her life name a
very formative figure named Frank Crown and Shield, and he said, Hey,
I like to cut of your jib, pretty talented writer.
(11:16):
I'm gonna give you a full time staff job here
at Vogue Magazine, and I'm gonna pay ten bucks a week,
which is not bad pay at the time, even though
apparently Parker said she spent most of that on her housing,
like eight of ten right to her room and board. Yeah.
So Crown and Shield he was the editor of Vanity Fair,
but Vogue was like a sister magazine to Vanity Fair,
(11:38):
I believe. Yeah, they were all Conde Nast publications, so
he was or she was Crowning Shields protege from what
I understand. And she went to work for a woman
named Edna W. Woodman or woman. Uh yeah, woman Chase.
She was a female editor in chief, which was very
rare at the time. Um and uh, Dorothy Parker got
(12:00):
her first job writing captions, and she would get bored
easily because captions are supposed to be pretty normal and
boring is prosaic the correct word. Uh, I don't know Okay,
let's just go with prosaic because it seems like it's
the right word. But um, so she very quickly started
to trust try to slip in Remember when we used
(12:22):
to write for house stuff work, so we try to
slip in hilarious things into into um, like cut lines,
the captions under photos. Dude. I thought of us a
lot during this because that's all. We did that all
the time, to try and make things a little more interesting.
And I think both of us had editors that were
constantly saying, like, what are you doing? You can't do that?
So so she would she was doing basically the same thing.
(12:45):
So she became kind of a a thorn and Edna
Chase's side. Um, but not enough that she was fired
at this point. She actually was um. Uh. She was
promoted basically after P. G. Woodhouse Um, the humorists stopped
being the drama critic for Vanity Fair. They turned to
Dorothy Parker to become that to fill that role to
(13:05):
review plays. And she was only twenty four at the time. Uh.
And by that time she'd been married a year to
a guy named ed Edwin Pond Parker, the second stockbroker. Yeah,
he was. He enlisted in the army, as a lot
of guys did back then. What fault in World War One? Um?
And like you said, when she was twenty four, she
was this play uh or theater reviewer and was was
(13:28):
known sort of for doing the same thing in the
reviews of making sort of biting, cutting remarks about high society.
Uh one kind of funny one she was writing about
a play and she said, not even the presence in
the first night audience of Mr William Randolph Hurst could
spoil my evening. So a lot of great punch lines.
She she was pretty good at, like setting someone up
(13:49):
to think they may be getting a compliment and then
cutting their legs up from under them. That was actually
her whole thing. Like she was supposedly fairly soft spoken,
kind of quiet, you might even callers shy at first,
but also really complimentary, like really kind, and then she
would kind of build you up until you weren't even
(14:09):
paying attention to anymore because you were just so drunk
on the praise she was giving you, and then bam,
she cut your legs out. You probably didn't even notice,
but everyone else in the conversation and listening in is
having a good laugh. That was her her whole jam.
And it's really important to say her purpose wasn't to
be mean. There was a real purpose to her um
(14:34):
her like biting criticism, and it was usually um a
bullying self gratification, acceptance of praise, um worshiped from the
lower classes. Like that's why she didn't like high society types.
She also didn't like feign graciousness, like high society types
who were so nice that they they gave their housekeeper
(14:55):
an extra hour, u to go home early one one
week and now they feel really great about the selves.
Those kind of things, like just all the stuff that
just kind of makes somebody gross that she was surrounded
by in her life. That is what really kind of
drove her the craziest. And that is what she would attack.
And it didn't matter who you were, didn't matter what
your station in life. Although I don't believe she punched
(15:15):
down very often. Um, you were, you were subject to
that criticism if you kind of allowed yourself to behave
that way. Yeah, she probably would have been a stand
up comedian today now that I think about it, Like
there's a little bit of mis maasl in this, you know,
But that wasn't really a job that women had back then.
It wasn't a job period, I don't think at the time. No.
(15:38):
And there was one other criticism I want to point
out that she wrote in I don't remember where she
wrote it, but she was criticizing I think an actress
in a play and she said that um, as a
source of entertainment, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of
parsley and a single ice skate. That's just good stuff,
(15:58):
that's not even it's is smart, you know, like who
would think of a single ice skate is conveying like
just how not fun something is? Like, it's just brilliant stuff.
And she was full of that. Yeah, she pushed too
far though, as people like that often do, lost her
job in nineteen twenty. I think it was sort of
(16:18):
a you insulted the wrong person kind of thing. There
was a column where she was reviewing a play. She
accused the playwright basically of plagiarizing himself. And then what
the real deal was though, the real sort of last
straw was that was an actor, an actress named Billy
Burke in there, who was criticized and sort of likened
(16:38):
to this risque vaudeville star, which was not like a
good you know, comparison to make at the time. But
that actress was the wife of Florence Zigfield, who put
a lot of money into advertisements with Vanity Fair, and
a good friend of Nast of Conde Nast, and that
was kind of it. So apparently she got the new
(17:00):
news at the Plaza hotel, and a legend has it
she ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, then
left and took it with her. Right. So, oh, I
don't even think she took it with her. I think
she left before it came, just long enough to to
waste it. Oh I saw that she took it with her.
Oh did she awesome? Um? So uh, let's even even better. Um.
(17:21):
There's one other thing I want to point out about
her criticism, or two other things, chuck. First of all,
after she was fired from Vanity Fair, she that was
not the end of her critic critic career, like she
went onto to be a book reviewer for The New Yorker. Um,
but her her criticism, her columns, she had no training whatsoever.
(17:41):
She didn't she didn't like take any kind of classes
or education on criticism like technique in theory and all
that stuff. All of her reviews were just totally subjective.
But she was so funny and so entertaining and so
insightful that she became like an instant sensation. And then
the other thing I want to say about it, from
what I can tell, is that her criticism was not
(18:04):
always negative. That if you actually produced like a really
good or a really good book or something like that,
she could use that same wit too for praise as well.
And I read that there was there's some book that
she reviewed. Um, she was saying, to say of it
here as a magnificent novel is rather like gazing into
the Grand Canyon and saying, well, well, well, quite a slice. Yeah.
(18:26):
I mean she was a legitimate uh critique or she
put she put forth legitimate critique, right, And if it
was praise, it was praise. If it was negative, which
I think it more often was, it was negative. She
didn't like crud. Well, I don't even think it more
often was negative even. I think that's the stuff that
gets pulled because she's Dorothy Parker. I see that's a
(18:47):
really good point, Chuck. I think you might be right.
I don't think they were like, hey, this is supposed
to be a real turd. Let's put Parker on it,
because like she'll just she'll prop a new and it'll
be great. I hate that word so much. Yes, it's terrible.
It's terrible. It's even worse because it's spelled with to you.
It looks bad on paper print and it even evokes
(19:09):
the color brown somehow, somehow. Uh yeah, I think we
should take a break. We should revisit that word. M hm, no, okay,
all right, we'll be right back. Learn it's stuff with Joshua, alright,
(19:53):
Mr turd. So when when she got fired from Vanity Fair,
there were two employees, Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood,
who were such friends with her that they actually quit
and protest because apparently she wasn't wrong with her with
her um her criticism that got her fired and she
was just fired because she insulted a very high ranking
(20:16):
friend of the publisher. So um, they actually quit and protesting.
I mean that is to inspire a couple of people
to quit because you were fired, is really saying something
like it's almost like a trope, you know, but if
you stop and think about it in reality, somebody being
like so long paycheck, so long, steady works. I'm I like,
(20:37):
this person should not have been fired, and I'm I'm
taking my talents away from you because you don't deserve
them because you fired this person. That's a really big deal.
If someone fired you, I would quit. Thank you, same
to you. Okay, you hear that, everybody you hear that bosses? Yeah,
hopefully that we don't. We don't get tested, but yeah,
(20:59):
we have been fired by this point. If we were
going to at all, you would think so. But hey,
there's always the future. Uh So, now we get to
the point where we can talk about the vicious circle again,
which was the round table. Generally lunches, although they lunched
for many hours at the Algonquin Hotel, which is I
believe it's still there in New York, right, and still
(21:20):
the Algonquin. Yeah, I want to stay there sometime. I
gotta check out. But it's it's now the Algonquin by Hyatt.
That's funny and probably true. Uh So, this was a
period of time over about a decade or so that
first started in June of nineteen nineteen, when they all
(21:43):
got together for lunch to welcome home their friend Alexander
Woolcott from his World War One correspondence job. They roasted him,
they got drunk. Uh, they had a good time, and
they said, hey, let's come back tomorrow and we don't
have to have a special occasion to get together and
drink scotch at lunch. And it kind of became like
(22:04):
sort of a a Studio fifty four uh booth scene
where you know, where you see Mick Jagger with uh
Andy Warhol and like Mickey Dolan's from the Monkeys and
like a painter, you know. It was people from all
different walks of life, like Harpo Marx might be there.
(22:24):
There might be a fiction writer like Edna Ferber, or
a sportswriter like Heywood Brown, or columnists or screenwriters or playwrights,
and it was just like it kind of became the cool,
like a certain kind of cool crowd was hanging out
at this round table. Yeah. Especially it was especially considered
(22:44):
cool among the intelligentsia, right, smart and literary types generally,
So it became like a worshipful gathering um. And people
knew about it because a lot of these people were
columnists and like you know, the New York Times and
later on the New York Parker and like these big publications,
and they would write about like equip that that Dorothy
(23:05):
Parker said apparently like um, she would say something at
lunch one day and to be in the New York
Times the next day. I think why Cooper was the
one that said she was probably the most quoted woman
of the nineteen twenties. Um because she was so funny,
but also because she was in a position to be
so exposed. Um. But that the Algonquin roundtable, the fact
(23:26):
that it became the stuff of legend, the more legendary came,
the I think the more um kind of disgruntled by
the whole idea Dorothy Parker became. I think if Dorothy
Parker heard that, she would say, name one other woman
who was even quoted in the nineteen twenties, dear oh man,
and I go uh her uh uh. They became so
(23:49):
sort of popular and famous just for these lunches in
this round table that the manager of the hotel, Mr
Frank Case started seating them in a very sort of
public area in the rose room, so people could just
kind of come by and watch them have lunch and
talk smack to each other. Yes, so, um, they like
(24:10):
you said, like, these lunches would also go by the way,
I'm gonna say, Greta Garbo, how about that? Okay, Um,
these lunches would turn into dinner and in very short
order after Um there the initial meeting in June Prohibition
started so that scotch they were sipping turned into bootleg
scotch that they had to kind of surreptitiously drink. But
(24:31):
they were all super drunk from lunch onward, and they
would go to people's houses and have cocktails. Afterward, they
would vacation together. They became like really good friends. It
sounds fantastic. It does sound fun, for sure, Um. But
even more um important I would say, is that a
lot of them came to collaborate. It was like a
really productive group. And so not only did some like
(24:54):
get together and write like screenplays together or plays, they
would actually use one another characters in their books or
their plays. Like Um, Alexander Walcott. He was like the
stock acerbic, um course, um character who was kind of
the center of the man who came to dinner. It
was based on him. There are plenty of characters in
(25:16):
different plays that you never heard of that were based
on Dorothy Parker, Um, they just used each other as
inspiration in addition to collaborating with one another directly. And
as you would think, Dorothy Parker also sort of undercut
the importance of the whole algonquin vicious circle. She was
quoted as saying that round table thing was greatly overrated,
full of businessmen and publicity people and hangers on and
(25:39):
a lot of second rate writers, saying did you hear
what I said the other day? So I get the
impression that it's a little bit of both. It may
have been a little over played, but I think she
also sort of vastly underplayed what was going on in
that sort of self deprecating way. Again, well, I I
also saw that she said it was just a bunch
of loudmouth showing off save being their gags for days,
(26:01):
waiting for a chance to spring them. So um, I that,
and I think it kind of ties into that idea
of like, you know, just being grossed out by people
heaping praise onto other people and then those people accepting
all that praise and basking in it. And then the
more that that happened, the more she was like forget this.
So um, yeah, I'm sure it's like you said, it
(26:22):
was both, but I feel like that was the reason
she kind of distanced herself from it through criticism. Yeah,
I get the impression, and this is I may just
be reading too much into this that she she didn't
love the Spotlight, uh, and she was sort of in
it because she was just so smart and funny. I
think she definitely hated phonies, yes, and that sort of
(26:44):
you know, ties into the upper crust thing. Um. She
probably would have loved Catcher in the Rye. When was
that written the fifties. She's I'm sure she was alive
while it was published. She died in nineteen sixty eight.
Spoiler alert, yeah, sixty seven. She also it wasn't just
the round table. I think Livia took great pains to
(27:06):
sort of talk about other people in nonliterary people that
she hung out with, um, as well as other writers
that just didn't you know, like she was a friend
of Ernest Hemingway. But I don't think Ernest Hemingway was
one to like sit around a round table and like
crack jokes and stuff like that. He had like elephants
to shoot, So Hemingway was a buddy. Um. I think
(27:28):
he supposedly, uh at Scott Fitzgerald ended up basing a
lot of the Great Gatsby parties after what happened in
the social circle at the Algonquin. So you know, I
think she had an influence on other writers as well,
you know, for sure, um yeah. And she was very
quoted and also misquoted. Uh, And I think she inspired
(27:50):
a lot of people, for sure. Let's talk should we
talk about some of the great quotes? Sure? Al right,
Well one of them was someone said a aparently like
used the word horticulture in a sentence, and she said,
you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
And I think that's off the dome. Like she was
known for just being that quick, you know, right, Yeah,
(28:12):
that's a big part of it. And that's why she
was saying, like people would be saving their gags for days,
just waiting for a chance to spring him. She did
not do that. It just came into her head, like
she was just that sharp. Um my favorite is this?
You're ready? So Calvin Coolidge, the president, apparently he was
very famously quiet and um she uh, she was told
about the death of Calvin Coolidge, and she whispered, how
(28:35):
do they know. Yeah, it actually took me a second
to figure that one out, and then once I got it,
it was that's a really good one. Yeah, I like
that one too. But she was also, like you said,
misquoted or not only misquoted, but I think other quotes
were attributed to her that she said that she never said. Um,
a very famous one, uh from iron Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
(28:57):
Supposedly she said it is not a novel to be
tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,
which is a great quote. But she said that she
never said that. Nor did she say the first thing
I do in the morning is brush my teeth and
sharpened my tongue. Yeah, that's a little too, like she's
joining in the celebration of yeah. And she wouldn't do that.
(29:20):
I could. I could have spotted that a mile away
and been like nay, yeah. And and it seems like
she got very annoyed at being having things attributed to her,
because that's part of the phoniness. Yeah, which is why
I think she would just deny saying stuff a lot
of times too, even if she did, Yes, so, um,
what the other And also, like you said, too, I
(29:41):
think she was kind of creating this um fiction that
was more entertaining than reality in some cases, like a
character like I still think there's probably a lot of
people who don't really understand who or maybe every no
one knows who the real Dorothy Parker was. Even Dorothy
Parker might not have known, but she probably did, although
(30:01):
I'll tell you who really did know? Again? Is um
Whyatt Cooper Anderson Cooper of sixty Minutes in CNN and
New Year's Fame. Um His dad wrote that Esquire article
I mentioned, I'm finally prepared to share the title. It's
whatever you think Dorothy Cooper was, like she wasn't, and
(30:23):
it is what did I say? Cooper? Oh my god,
I got it wrong? Okay, and I even have it
written down as Cooper. That's why I got it wrong.
So that title I just said, but replaced Cooper with Parker.
And it's one of the most insightful articles I've ever
read about anybody. So even if Dorothy Parker didn't understand herself,
(30:48):
why A Cooper understood her? Like It's a really good,
interesting article that doesn't necessarily follow any timeline. It's just
like why Cooper is kind of like oh yeah, and
one other thing about her was this, and then he
back it up with like three different stories that are
also hilarious or maybe a little sad or something like that. Um. Yeah,
it's a really really good article. I would recommend anybody
(31:09):
go read it, even if you couldn't care less about
Dorothy Parker. Well, hopefully they will after the end of this. Uh.
She after she went away from Vanity Fair by getting fired,
it's a nice way to say it. She never worked
like a regular staff job again. She became a very
successful freelancer. She wrote for all kinds of magazines that
(31:30):
were popular at the time, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal.
When The New Yorker was founded by her friend Harold
ross In think you mentioned earlier, she became a regular columnist,
doing reviews, short stories, her poems again what she called versus.
Between twenty six and thirty three she did publish books
(31:52):
of poetry. She published three books of poetry and two
short story collections, and one of which was the best seller.
Enough was a poetry collection which was a best seller
and sold really well. And uh, where I'm trying to
find where it was. She won a couple of big
prizes to didn't she She won the Oh Henry Story
Prize in nine for one. UM. Oh, I can't remember
(32:14):
what it's called big Blonde about what a character I
saw described as a serial mistress? Uh in decline and
um she attempts suicide. Um. And apparently there was a
like one, a pretty prestigious prize. UM. She wrote very
frequently about uh. Love, especially modern love in the sense
(32:37):
of in the twenties, they were just starting to deal
with this idea of like, wait a minute, men and
women are like working in the same places, and you know,
we're kind of interacting more now and are you might equal? No,
that doesn't seem right, But how does that translate into dating?
You know, everybody kind of moved from the farm to
the city and they were trying to figure it out.
(32:57):
And so that was one of Dorothy Parker's favorite um
topics of of writing both verse and short stories as well. Yeah,
she eventually would get I think, kind of just leave
poetry behind. She stopped because she said that she didn't
think she was getting any better, which is man. That
is admirable. Yeah. Yeah, to not just like run something
(33:21):
into the ground like we're doing. I think we're still
getting better here and starts yeah, man, I think I
think this has been a great year. Actually, okay. Uh.
In fifty six she talked about just again, sort of
her reputation being overblown. She said it got so bad
(33:43):
that audiences began to laugh before I opened my mouth.
So her reputation preceded her in a way that she
wasn't comfortable with, and I think she didn't feel like
it was earned. Um. I have a suspicion that she
might have been deeply uh, she's some blanking what's the
word when you don't feel good about yourself? Um? Insecure? Sure.
(34:07):
A lot of these things that happened with her in
the way she betrayed herself kind of makes me think
she might have been insecure in her in her writing
and with sort of getting attention as somebody who was
doing good things. If I can't if if no one
minds me. Going back to the same well of whyatt Cooper,
he basically said, she seemed to prefer misery. That's why
(34:28):
I compared to like an emo person earlier, like um.
He gave a great example where um, you'd be hanging
out of her house and she'd get a phone call
from a friend and she'd tell the the help like,
tell tell them I'm not home. And then later on
in that same visit, she complained about how that exact
same friend never called anymore interesting, So like it was
(34:48):
a self imposed kind of thing, Like she seemed to
just feel more comfortable isolated, but tried to make it
so that it wasn't her own choice. Yeah, I don't
understand why. I don't know if it was to get sympathy,
it doesn't seem to have been. It's she was just
kind of bizarre in that way. All right, should we
(35:10):
take a second break, Yes, yes we should. All right,
so we'll take that break and we'll be back to
talk about from this point forward. In Dorothy Parker's life
(35:43):
learnt with Joshua John So Chuck, one of the things
that she did very sensibly after she kind of abandoned
poetry and short story writing was to go to Hollywood
and become a screw writer. And she did that, um
through kind of marrying a guy named Alan Campbell, an
(36:06):
actor back in he was ten years younger than she was,
and um, they ended up being screenwriting partners together after
he moved her out to Hollywood. Yeah, so her just
to tie up her first husband's situation. Uh. He came
back from the war apparently was an alcoholic and drug addict,
and they were separated. She had an abortion, uh, and
(36:28):
they got divorced. So he died of a drug overdose
at the age of thirty nine. Uh. And that's when
she met the new guy. And the new guy Alan Campbell,
and uh, like he said, went to Hollywood to write movies. Um.
She was became pregnant at the uh. And it's still,
you know, sort of old to get pregnant now, but
it's certainly at the time. Being pregnant at forty two
(36:49):
years old in the nineteen thirties was a tough situation,
and she did have a miscarriage that devastated her. UM.
But she was she sort had an on again, off
again relationship with this guy. They were the kind that
would get divorced and then reconcile and then remarry and
then split up again, then move back together again. But
(37:11):
they had a pretty prolific partnership wherein he would and
a lot of writing partners still kind of have this arrangement.
Someone might be really good at nailing dialogue and the
other partner might be really good at structure and character
development stuff like that. So he would develop the structure
of a script and sort of sketch out scenes, and
(37:31):
she would come in with her you know, rapiers wit
and come up with all that clever dialogue and got
a lot of money and attention and awards or at
least nominations. She was a co writer on A Star
Is Born, the first one from and they were making
a hundred over a hundred thousand dollars a week a week.
(37:53):
That's so much money. It's just just screenwriting. And they
were having a blast doing it. They get drunk every day,
they were everybody. Yeah. Yeah, they were friends with everybody
in their neighborhood and it was just it sounds like
a really grand time. Um. And then unfortunately, Alan Campbell died. Um.
(38:13):
They think it might be a suicide, although she apparently
decided that that was not the case, so she got
it listed as an accident on his death certificate. And
right after that, she's like, I'm I'm going back to
New York. She said, New York is the only place
to be in the whole country. Um, I'm guessing California
was a little too painful. After the death of Alan Campbell.
But I also think like she just preferred living in
(38:35):
New York. Anyway, there was another thing that happened to
her that probably prompted her to move to New York,
and that was her activism. Like she's known for her
quips and her sharp wit um and you kind of
have to dig in a little further before you realize
like she was actually like a legit died in the wool,
lefty activists who really cared about things like racism and
(38:58):
civil rights long before this was on the radar of
most people. Yeah, she was one of the founders of
the Screenwriters Guild. Very pro union, as you probably shouldn't
be surprised by this point. Uh, very anti Nazi early on.
This is like, you know, before the long before the
(39:19):
Americans were involved in World War Two. Uh. She you know,
she had a half Jewish father, and I think it
seems like sort of struggle over the years with her
Jewish heritage, but came out hard against Uh Lenni Riefenstall
when she visited Hollywood and was sort of and this
was in I think, uh and basically said like, no,
(39:40):
you shouldn't take meetings with her. You shouldn't take meetings
with any Nazis, and like all these agents need to
just close their doors to them, basically, and I thought
I couldn't admire her anymore. She founded an anti Nazi league,
I mean, hats off to her right. So she also
helped raise money to defend the Scottsboro Boys, were nine
(40:00):
black teenagers in Alabama who were unjustly convicted and sentenced
in the rape of two white women. UM and there
was a really big um push by the American Communist
Party to to basically rescue these boys from this unjust system.
And she was at the very least Communist adjacent, if
(40:23):
not an outright sympathizer. I think a lot of her
interests in viewpoints really kind of dovetailed with the Communist
Party in America at the time. UM. And she was
also virulently anti fascist. And for all of this, combined
her anti fascism, her UM work for civil rights, her
kind of sympathy for UM, the Communist Party UM got
(40:45):
her essentially first informally blacklisted and then pretty much officially
blacklisted in Hollywood starting in the forties. Yeah, so before
the blacklist, there was something called the Red Channels, which
was a pamphlet that kind of said, hey, you know,
you may not want to hire these people if you're
in broadcasting. Yeah, it was put out real quick, chuck
(41:05):
by a right wing um publication that was um called
counter Attack, I believe, and it was made by three
former FBI agents who just basically created dossiers on everybody
in Hollywood to root out who were the communists. And
a lot of them were accused just for contributing to like,
you know, civil rights causes or things like that. I
(41:26):
was just about to point that out. That is again
pre blacklist. It should not surprise you that she eventually
was officially blacklisted for a short time. She was also
on the FBI watch list Edifile honor. Uh. They called
her a concealed communist and you know, just go back
and listen to our McCarthy asm episode, uh if you
(41:47):
want to learn anything else about the House of Unamerican
Activities Committee. She did go before them in fifty five
and took the fifth and the FBI eventually would clear her,
uh being a security threat. But I think, you know,
I don't think any of those people were ever completely
off the list, if you know what I mean. No,
for sure. And if you got on that list, if
(42:07):
you were in that pamphlet, it doesn't matter how big
of a starre you were, you just could not find work.
All of us are you get fired from your current job?
It was crazy, Um, but that's what happened, and it
was part of that McCarthy era. So she moved back
to New York and um, she I saw that. She
basically lived out the last act of her life in
a very surprising manner as a little old lady. Basically, Yeah,
(42:31):
she died at a seventy three and uh, I think
she left all her her money to Reverend Martin Luther
King and then once he died, that went to the
Inn Double a c p. Uh. There's a New Yorker
article that um kind of indicates like, no one knows
exactly how much money that ended up being for the
(42:51):
Double a CP, but I think it was a lot.
And um, this is sort of a not so fun
way to end this. But one of her good friends,
Lilian Hellman, was a playwright some when she knew for
a long long time was designated as her executor for
her will in a state but was mad because she
wasn't left any money and so she basically threw all
(43:14):
her stuff away the way, all her papers, all of
the you know, manuscripts that she had been working on
in her life. And uh, Dorothy Parker did not want
to have a big deal made about her death, wanted
a quiet cremation, and she, against her wishes, organized a
big public memorial. It's it seems like just in defiance
of her wishes because she was mad about being h
(43:37):
I guess left out of her will slightly. In Hellman's defense,
she largely supported Dorothy Parker during her old age years
from nineteen to sixty seven, so I think she expected
to kind of be repaid. But still, it's definitely not
worth going against somebody's wishes, you know. So Dorothy Parker's
ashes had a really interesting afterlife. She had no heirs,
(43:59):
no family, so um, they were left at the crematorium
from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy three, when the
crematorium finally got fed up of storing it and just
mailed them to the address of her former lawyer. But
her lawyer had retired, but his partner was still in business.
Her partner didn't know anything about this, didn't know what
(44:19):
to do with the ashes, didn't know who to contact,
so he just put her in his desk drawer, and
from nineteen seventy three to Dorothy Parker spent uh in
a desk drawer in her former lawyer's office. She'd probably
think that's funny. I think so, But if she were
in there, she would have been really bored too. Yeah. Uh.
They would eventually move though. If you go to New
(44:41):
York now you can go up to the Bronx to
Woodlawn Cemetery, where a tour guide and big fan of
hers eventually put her ashes. Was given her ashes. He
didn't steal them. And there's a little small plaque with
a phrase that she apparently proposed for her epitat, which is,
excuse my dust, it's just beautiful. It beat Shakespeare's epitaph, right,
(45:06):
what was Shakespeare's? It was some clumsy, ham fisted curse
that people are like. Shakespeare wouldn't have written that gas grass?
Or what was it that no one rides for free?
Oh man, Chuck. Since Chuck said that hilarious quip, that
means this is the end of the Dorothy Parker ep
So if you want to know more about her, go
reader stuff. It's really good and uh fun. And since
(45:28):
I said it's really good and fun, that means it's
time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this a
counterpoint to another listener mail. We got the email from
the teacher that talked about p b i S positive
behavioral Interventions in support. Oh yeah, and uh apparently there's
a lot of controversy surrounding that, because Jennifer here says this, Hey,
(45:51):
guys have been listening for years. I learned so many
cool things after the Casino bombing episode. However, you read
a letter from a gentleman who wrote about using p
b i S and classroom. I taught school for thirty
years and finally left, as did hundreds of my colleagues
because p b i S has destroyed public education. Teachers
can be kind of students without a PBS program in place.
(46:13):
My co teacher was permanently disabled by a student. It's
my feeling that once you're an adult in society, uh,
society while hand you consequences, and students may not be
taught how to be prepared for that with p b
i S schools. Thanks for stating that it may or
may not work in your own home, Chuck, I was
required to take two college classes on this, so it's
(46:35):
not that I don't understand it. Keep giving us great
knowledge of millions of topics, and that is from Jennifer. Awesome.
Thank you Jennifer for the counterpoint. There may be a
good episode in there, now that I see this, Yeah,
I think you might be right, Chuck. Anytime it was
controversy like that, we're on let's do it. Every time
I hear point or counterpoint, I'm reminded of that that. Um,
(46:57):
apart from Airplane where there they're debating the whole thing
where the I think it's airplane too maybe where the
guy goes let them crash, I don't remember that line.
That's good. Um, Yeah, it's way funnier in the movie
than what I just did. If you want to get
in touch with this, like Jennifer didn't offer a counterpoint,
you can send it to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio
(47:20):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
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