July 14, 2022 • 47 mins
A legendary Hollywood mogul, a famous author, a fatal drunk driving accident, and a brilliant bit of screenwriting, left on the cutting room floor. Revisionist History engages in a pop culture what-if experiment about the 1937 version of A Star is Born.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hello, Hello Revisionist History listeners. I'm excited to announce
that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from
my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to pushkym plus.
For those who just can't get enough. We're giving every
episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus We've created
(00:37):
many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents, and
of course you'll never hear any adds. Subscribe to pushkinm
plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot FM. One summer night in nineteen
(00:59):
forty nine, Margaret Mitchell and her husband John Marsh go
out to dinner. It's August Atlanta, hot, humid. They walked
to a restaurant on Peachtree Street in Midtown, not far
from their apartment. They were going out for the evening
and they were going to go to to see The
(01:19):
Canterbury Tales, a movie at the Atlanta Art Theater, which
was located at the corner of Peachtree and Thirteenth Street.
So I'm standing in front of the side of the
theater with Michael Rose, executive vice president of the Atlanta
History Center, and so they had gone to the Woman's
Club prior to going to the to the movie and
(01:42):
just cutting across. So she was so yeah. So they
simply came out of the Woman's Club and we're going
to cross the survey. Margaret Mitchell was at that point
America's reigning literary celebrity, author of Gone with the Wind,
one of the best selling American novels ever. In Atlanta,
(02:02):
she was beloved a little pixie of a woman who
stood for everything White Southerners of that generation want to
stand for beauty, wit nostalgia. People in Atlanta called her
r Peggy. Mitchell and her husband leave the Atlanta Women's
Club cross Peachtree mid Block, and as they do, an
(02:23):
off duty taxi driver named Hugh Gravitt comes barreling around
the bend. His car is heading right for the couple.
They were maybe about halfway across. That's when we see
the car. He hits one direction, she heads the other doors.
But it's kind of like the driver I think saw
(02:46):
him first. So veers in the other direction, which is
right at her right. So Gravitt is speeding. He's going
at least fifty miles an hour down a curving two
Lane Street in the middle of a crowded city. After
driver is going fifty miles an hour in a car
from that era of fifty miles an hour is like
(03:06):
going seventy Today, it's like it's nuts. Gravitt hits Mitchell
drags her several yards along the road. She's taken to
Grady Hospital, where she lies in a coma. The nation
is in shock. President Harry Truman calls down to Atlanta
and asks to be updated on her status. Five days
(03:27):
after the accident, she dies August sixteenth, nineteen forty nine.
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This season we're
talking about experiments, magic wand experiments, natural experiments, formal experiments,
(03:50):
And in this episode I want to offer up a
thought experiment. Margaret Mitchell died in a car accident, but
I want you to consider an alternate version of events,
a version where we would never have called what happened
to her accident. Margaret Mitchell started out as a journalist
(04:21):
living in a first floor apartment in midtown Atlanta with
her husband, John marsh. It's where Margaret ended up writing
most of Gone with the Wentz. Jessica van Landit of
the Historic Oakland Foundation, is showing us around. She's working,
she's writing, and she reaggravates an ankle injury, and she's
pretty much what we would consider bad written. Right. She's
(04:44):
staying at home and recovering, and the story goes she
read through all of the books in the Atlanta library.
She just kept reading through and John said, as he's
bringing these books home. One day, he says, you've read
all the books there are, why don't you write your own?
And so he brings home a Remington typewriter. She sets
(05:04):
up kind of a little writing desk and she starts
writing the book. Then one day she attends a lunch
for a visiting editor from New York, from the McMillan
publishing House. He's come to Atlanta on a scouting trip.
Somebody invites her to kind of come along to the
luncheon and they are all kind of offering their books,
(05:26):
and there was a little bit of a snide remark
made about her, you know, something along the lines of, oh, Margaret,
I don't know why you're here. You don't have anything
to give them anyway. You know that probably did for her.
What it might do for any of us is the
Scout leaves and she runs home, and she starts gathering
(05:47):
up all of her manuscript. Mitchell takes her draft of
Gone with the Wind over to the Scouts hotel so
he can bring it back with him to New York.
There are so many pages he has to buy another
suitcase to carry them all. As a writer, one question
has been obsessing me. Did she have copies? Weren't she?
(06:07):
If her house burns down, does she lose her book? Yes? Yeah?
Who gives? She gives? Does she give her only copy
to the guy from McMillan, y, Oh my god, this
is causing me so much anxiety and the story gives
gets on the train and loves it. Immediately. At that point,
she kind of realized that what she had done and
(06:29):
was like, oh no, can I can I have it back?
And he's you know, it's too late. He wanted he
wanted the story. Mitchell's manuscript survives and becomes an instant bestseller.
A sweeping Gothic historical bodice ripper about a Southern beauty,
Scarlett O'Hara, her travails to the Civil War, her epic
love affair with the dashing Rep. Butler. The book wins
(06:50):
the pullet surprise. By the way, if you want to
know how Southerners really felt about black people, you should
be Gone with the Wind. It's all there. The book
gets snapped up by Hollywood Clark Gable and Vivian Lee,
two giant stars in the leading roles, and the result is,
to this day the biggest grossing movie of all time,
(07:11):
bigger than Star Wars, including What for generations of movie
goers is the most memorable of Hollywood lines. You go,
Where's I go? Watch I do? Frankly, my dear, I
don't give a damn the last words rhet Butler says
(07:32):
to Scarlett O'Hara as he prepares to leave her and
Atlanta forever. The film is a sensation, and when it
opens in Atlanta pandemonium. Three hundred thousand people line Peachtree
Street to watch the motorcade come in from the Candler Airfield,
carrying the stars Clark Gable, Vivian Lee, Olivia de Havelin.
(07:54):
Gary Pomeratz, who wrote Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, A
Wonderful History of Atlanta, counts the Gone with The Wind
movie premiere in Atlanta in nineteen thirty nine as one
of the signature moments in the city's history. You know,
Mitchell came from an old Atlanta family. Her two grandfathers
had fought for the Confederacy. This was all in her
(08:16):
the history of Atlanta, the history of the South. After
the showing, all the stars took turns saying a few
words into a live microphone to be broadcast far and wide,
and then Atlanta's own Margaret Mitchell took the stage, standing
up and speaking to America, Ah see alike. It's felt
(08:36):
a very great thank for Georgia and the South to
see our old confarashly come back to us. I felt
that way all this week and our factly given the
rebel of Yale to night. Ten years pass, her fame
only grows until one August night, while crossing Peachtree Street
(08:58):
with her husband, Margaret Mitchell is struck by a car
driven by Hugh Gravitt, who is speeding and who it
turns out, had spent the afternoon getting drunk. One of
the iron laws of celebrity is that what happens to
the famous matters more than what happens to the rest
(09:18):
of US. Fame magnifies impact. A classic example would be
what happened back in nineteen eighty five when the Hollywood
star Rock Hudson announced that he had AIDS. It was
a turning point in the public's attitude about the disease.
AIDS up to that point was something that people ignored,
or made tasteless jokes about, or looked away in horror.
(09:41):
Word of Rock Hudson's death, of course, spread very quickly
today through the Hollywood community. Paul Dandridge of our sister,
Hudson's death changed all that Hollywood stars rallied to the cause.
Congress passed a bill allocating hundreds of millions of dollars
to aid's research. The word, of course from mister Hudson's people,
is that he does not want flowers. He would rather
see the donation sent to the American Federation for Aid's Research.
(10:03):
That was the organization that he helped about. I mean,
that wouldn't have happened if Hudson was a minor character actor.
He was a professional, He was a gentleman, He was
a kind man. The things being said by many people.
Margaret Mitchell in her day was a hundred times more
famous than Rock Hudson was in nineteen eighty five. She
was America's darling and she's hit by a drunk driver
(10:23):
while crossing the street. Now you would think, wouldn't you,
that the death of the most famous writer in America
at the hands of someone who'd been drinking beer all
afternoon would change public attitudes towards drunk driving. But it doesn't,
and that puzzle deserves its own what if experiment. In
(10:55):
nineteen thirty seven, the legendary Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick
released A Star's Born. I'm almost certain Margaret Mitchell saw it.
Everybody did. It was a big hit. David O. Selznick
would go on to be the producer who brought Gone
with the Wind to the big screen. But there is
no other connection between Margaret Mitchell and A Star Is Born?
(11:19):
Except what if there was? What if one of those
stories bled into another? That's a thought experiment. You may
have seen the version of A Star Is Born made
in twenty eighteen, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, which
was a massive critical and commercial success in its hard keeping.
(11:42):
It's so hard cold then me see he's just right then? Now, Yeah,
It's Pretty Good. That version of A Star Is Born
was actually the movie's fourth go round. A version was
made in nineteen seventy six with Chris Christofferson and Barbara Streisand,
(12:06):
and before that, Judy Garland and James may And starred
in a nineteen fifty four remake. All the versions follow
the same basic plot. A young actress from some distant
corner of the country comes to Hollywood in search, of course,
a fame and fortune. She happens to catch the eye
of a big star named Norman Maine. He gets her
(12:28):
cast in one of his movies. She changes her name
to Vicky Lester becomes a huge sensation. It's Cinderella, only
with a twist. As the startup rises, Norman Maine falls.
Here's the nineteen thirty seven version with Frederick March as
Norman Maine. Does Becky Lester live here? Yes, I got
(12:49):
a package for him. I'll sign for it. So who
are you? I'm her husband? Oh sure, I'm right here,
mister Lester, mister Lester, Oh my god. In Hollywood slang,
the husband of a star actress is called a handbag.
Norman Maine becomes a handbag when Norman Mayne is at
(13:12):
his lowest, Vickie offers to sacrifice her own career in
order to save his. When Norman realizes that, he swims
out into the Malibu surf and takes his own life.
A Star Is Born, as I Said, was produced by
David o' salznick. Salznick was a whirlwind, a brilliant talker,
a legendary litharia. He smoked forty five packs of cigarettes
(13:35):
a day, takes emphetamines by the fistful gambols away his
salary at the Clover Club in Hollywood, writes manic endless
memos to his underlings at three in the morning. Starting
in the nineteen thirties, Salznick had one of the greatest
runs in Hollywood history. Won two Best Picture Oscars, does
Alfred Hitchcock's first and second American movies, Rebecca and Spellbound,
(13:58):
and of course Margaret Mitchell's Gone with a Wind. But
back in nineteen thirty seven, he was preoccupied with A
Stars Born. My notion was tosts in terms of a
rising star, in order to have the Cinderella element, with
our path crossing that of a falling star, to get
(14:19):
the tragedy of the of the X Star. This is
an interview with Salznick from the nineteen fifties, and we
created this more or less as we went along. We
started without anything more than a vague idea of where
we were going, and it was really a relatively easy
(14:41):
script to write. I can say this that ninety five
percent of the dialogue in that picture was actually straight
out of life and was straight reportaged, so to speak.
A Star Is Born is a movie on one level
about alcohol. Maybe that's too reductive, but the whole plot
(15:01):
hinges on the fact that the star character, Norman Mayne,
cannot control his drinking. Salznick his rumored to have based
Norman on the comedian Frank Faye, who was notorious in
Hollywood as a miserable drunk, but Selznick could have just
as easily based the character on his own brother, Myron Selznick,
one of the biggest agents in Hollywood and a huge alcoholic.
(15:24):
Or maybe the bits about drinking, which are easily the
best parts of the movie, are as good as they
are because one of the screenwriters who worked on the
script was Dorothy Parker, the famous wit and New Yorker
writer who later drank herself to death. Or maybe they
were the work of Parker's co writer and husband, Alan Campbell,
who would later die of a drug overdose. There were
(15:45):
no shortage of addiction case studies in Hollywood in those years,
so in a Star is born. Norman Mayne marries Vicki,
and as her career soars, his drinking gets worse. When
Vicki wins an Oscar, he crashes the stage. I mean,
can you imagine an angry husband crashing the stage at
the Oscars? Now? I want to make a speech, gentleman
(16:08):
of the Academy, a fellow suckers. I got one of
those ones for a best performance. I don't mean a
thing people get him every year. What I wants a
special award, something nobody else can get. After that performance,
Norman Mayne checks into a sanatorium, cleans himself up. Then
he goes to the racetrack, orders a ginger ale, and
(16:31):
runs into his old publicist Libby, who taunts him, I
don't feel sorry for you. You'll fix yourself nice and comfortable.
You can live off your wife now, she'll buy your
drinks and put up with you, even though nobody else will.
Norman takes a swing at Libby, a glancing blow. Libby
swings back. Norman's on the floor, humiliating, I'm Norman man,
(16:53):
That's not my fault. I don't buy it to tarts amount.
He's harmless, amsterliya let him go? What can eat it?
We can't fight any better than he can act. Norman shaken,
brushes himself off, picks up his hat, walks painfully over
to the bar, and falls off the wagon. Give me
a Scotch double. Leave the bottle here. I'm going to
(17:18):
read what happens next. After Norman's epic drinking binge, we
see Norman's car speeding along the Malibu Road. We see
Norman at the wheel, very drunk and singing She'll be
coming round the mountain in a loud voice. He comes
around the curve much too fast, tires screech. He tries
frantically to keep the big roadster on the right side
(17:39):
of the road, but can't. It drifts far to the left.
Another car appears on the curve, coming in the opposite direction.
Norman smashes into it, bounces off, weaves down the road
a little way and comes to a stop. The other
car pitches off the bank and rolls to the edge
of the water and bursts into flames. We see Norman
(18:01):
come weaving up the road from his wrecked car to
the edge of the bank. A thick stream of blood
is running down the side of his face. The fire
illuminates his face brightly as he stands staring down at
the wreck. A look of sick horror comes over him.
Dorothy Parker and her husband wrote that scene, and in
(18:24):
nineteen thirty seven it would have stunned American audiences. Automobiles
were really only a generational at that point. There wasn't
yet a moral vocabulary around what happened when an impaired
driver killed someone with their car. People in nineteen thirty
seven didn't talk about drunk driving. Prohibition had just ended
(18:46):
four years earlier, and attitudes towards drinking had swung hard
in the opposite direction. Judges in the nineteen thirties rarely
sent people to jail for drunk driving. Prosecutors rarely filed charges.
The police officer who caught you drunk driving knew that
the likelihood of anything happening was so low it was
pointless for him to even arrest you. In nineteen thirty nine,
(19:08):
the American Medical Association put out guidelines on drunk driving
and said that the threshold criminal conviction should be point
one five. Understand that right now most American states have
a threshold of half. That point one five is wasted.
I'm going to guess that you listening to this podcast
(19:30):
have never blown point one five, not even on that
night in freshman year when you did one too many
tequila shots and ended up with a hangover that lasted
into the next week. Yeah, it was. It was just
passivity throughout the system. I called up Baron Lerner, who
teaches at NYU Medical School. He wrote a fascinating history
(19:51):
of drunk driving called One for the Road, so that
the old line about the judges was, you know that
the judges themselves drank and drove, so they didn't want
to call attention to the issue. The police were frustrated
to the one at least the ones who were devoted
to public safety were frustrated that there was no prosecution. Well,
it's more than that word you use when I was
(20:14):
passivity and I was thinking about it seems more than
that in a certain sense, because you talk a lot
about how there was a feeling, that an accent that
happens because the driver is under the influence of alcohol
is somehow unintentional that you can't hold the driver responsible
in a kind of moral sense for their actions while
(20:35):
they were drunk, which is really weird to me because
implicit in that is an acknowledgement that they are impaired.
So it's not always saying, oh, you can drive just
as well drunk as sober. No, they're not saying that.
They're saying you absolutely are impaired. It's just that we're
not going to hold you responsible for it. Yeah, it's weird.
(20:57):
I thought it was weird, but it was so commonplace.
And I'm glad you mentioned the word accident. Why if
you go and drink too much and you willingly go
in your car when you know you're not supposed to,
and you crash into someone or something and there's damage
and hopefully not death, that's still called an accident. It
was called an accident in the nineteen thirties, and it's
(21:18):
still too often called an accident, although people now try
to get us to use a different word, the other
phrase wrong place, at the wrong time, all these notions that, well,
just you know, if that person hadn't been crossing the street,
sure the driver was drunk. But you know, if they
hadn't been out so late at night and crossing the street,
this wouldn't happen. It's sort of bad luck for the
(21:39):
drunk driver in a contorted sort of way. And some
people used to make the analogy. Well, it wasn't like
they put a gun in their pocket and went out
and then shot someone. They didn't mean to do this.
They were just having a couple of drinks at the
bar and wanted to get home safe. Well, they're actually
that's actually wrong. It is like putting a gun in
(22:00):
your pocket. If you want to get a sense of
how strange attitudes were towards drunk driving in the late
nineteen thirties, you should watch Topper. Topper was a big
hit in the summer of nineteen thirty seven, a comedy
(22:20):
starring a young Carrie Grant as a bon vival named George.
Grant and his wife Marian played by Constance Bennett, are
a young, rich couple who spend all their time dancing
and drinking. After an at a partying, they take a
drive much too fast. They crashed the car. George and
(22:50):
Marian both die and become ghosts, stranded unearthed because they've
done nothing to merit going to heaven, So as ghosts,
they make a plan to redeem themselves. They will rescue
their friend Topper from his boring life, how by teaching
Topper how to drink, which they proceed to do, and
then all three of them, George, Marian and Topper have
(23:13):
another car crash, and Toppers take home lesson is that
he needs to keep living it up. Well, I won't
go back an, I won't do it, won't do one,
I won't go back at three, All routine happen eight
Better than Topper perfectly captures the spirit of the times
the country is in the midst of the depression. A
movie was supposed to be in Escape Carrygrant's character wants
(23:35):
his friend Topper to drink away his troubles, which is
what audiences wanted in nineteen thirty seven. Topper made sense
in that context. But then at exactly the same time
comes A Starsborne. Drunk drivers do not live happily ever after.
In a Starsborne, drunk drivers face consequences for their actions. Actually,
(23:58):
let me rephrase that A Starsborne is almost a tragedy
where drunk drivers face consequences for their actions. That scene
I read to you earlier, where Norman May drunkenly crashes
into another car and looks on in horror as blood
streams down his face. That scene, the moral center of
the original movie, gets taken out at the last moment.
(24:22):
Salznick was notorious for demanding multiple rewrites of his films,
and he was unhappy with the third act of Dorothy
Parker's script, the one that had the car crash scene.
Sealznick turns to two would be screenwriters on his staff,
Bud Schulberg and Ring Lardner junior. Schulburg is twenty two
at the time and working as a script reader, and
(24:43):
Lardner is twenty one and working as an intern in
the publicity department. Both would go on to win their
own Oscars, but at the time they're just kids. Selznick
doesn't care. Lardner and Schilburg look over the third act
of A Star Is Born and write Selznick a memo
one type written sheet about the movie's internal logic and
(25:05):
what it demands. Quote. Her proposed sacrifice, overheard by Norman,
offers no great temptation to him because there is no
possibility of a comeback for him if he didn't kill himself,
he would remain a bomb and probably a jailbird. His
suicide would still be that of a hopeless drunk trying
(25:25):
to find a way out. Selznick is convinced. On November sixth,
he writes his production supervisor, would you please advise the
necessary departments that the automobile accident scene is out. In
its place we get a very different ending. Norman goes
on a bender at the racetrack. Then he disappears for
(25:47):
four days. Turns out he's been arrested for drunk and driving,
crashing his car into a tree and assaulting a police officer.
The judge gives him a tongue lashing. You come pretty low,
haven't you. There'sn't a man here who's had the advantages
you've had. Look what you've done with him. You're nothing
but the nearest possible drunk driving about the streets with
(26:08):
a power to inflict for injury on it was some people.
I think we'd better deny you that barbar a while,
night and days listen to jail. But then Norman's beloved
comes running up to the front of the courtroom. Please wait,
I'm his wife, Yes, I recognize him. Was listing. Please, Judge,
(26:29):
I promise you this won't happen again. I'll be responsible
for him. The judge relents, suspends Norman's sentence, lets him
go free, and we have, in place of the morally
revolutionary moment in Dorothy Parker's original script, just another nineteen
thirty seven ending where a man drives blind drunk and
(26:51):
hits a tree, where the law makes a half hearted
attempt to hold him accountable, only to give up in
the face of the celebrity wife saying she can save him,
and where the drunk driver faces no consequences for his
behavior except a bit of fleeting humiliation, and then he
commits suicide. Only it's not an act of shame and
(27:13):
moral defeat. It's the ultimate sacrifice for the woman he loves.
David o' Salsnick brings in two kids from down the
hall to fix his picture, and they scale back its
ambitions so far that it becomes almost unrecognizable. So the
what if experiment, Let's imagine what would have happened if
(27:36):
Dorothy Parker's original subversive version had made it to the
big screen. The driver who hit Margaret Mitchell Hugh Gravid
spends two years in prison on manslaughter charges. Then he
(27:56):
moves to a small town outside Atlanta. He was still
living there decades later when the journalists Gary Pomerans tracked
him down. The door opened and there stood you grab it.
He was seventy one years old, and he was gaunt,
read thin, cloudy eyes, not moving well, smoking a cigarette,
(28:23):
and he smiled and said good morning. They sat outside
in his yard and talked for a few hours. One
of the things that struck me most about him was
that it wasn't just that he'd hit someone famous. He
repeated several times to me, I hit a woman. I
hit a woman, and it was the worst thing he
(28:45):
could have imagined. And again he must have said three,
four or five times, I'd rather it had been me
instead of her. Do you think he was drinking? Oh, well,
he told me he was drinking. I don't know the amount. Obviously,
this is forty two years later. I think he just
wanted to get his view out, and it was to him.
(29:10):
Alcohol wasn't a part of this. Alcohol wasn't a part
of this. That's what's so strange about going back through
the accounts of Margaret Mitchell's death, The fact that his
drinking might have been the reason he was speeding. Somehow
didn't seem to occur to any people. A police officer
at the scene later testified that he had smelled alcohol
on Gravit's breath. Gravit himself did not deny that he
(29:33):
had been drinking, but no one gave him a breathalyzer
for goodness sake, demanded over twenty previous traffic citations. Gravit
stood for half an hour of the scene before anyone
even talked to him. After his arrest, a picture of
Gravit runs in all the newspapers. He's standing next to
his arresting officers with a big smirk on his face.
(29:53):
He's a reckless menace. His license should have been revoked
years before, but in the mentality of the time, the
driver was irrelevant. He was as unlucky as the victim.
An EDITORI in the Atlanta Journal in nineteen forty nine
read quote for Gravitt as a person, we have the
(30:14):
utmost sympathy. He surely did not intend to kill anyone,
and tragedy will haunt him as long as he lives.
It was an accident, wasn't it. These things happen. Here's
a beloved author I mean the author of Gone with
the Wind, like beloved not especially in Atlanta. People were
(30:35):
man and frustrated that she died, but there was also
sympathy for the driver. This is Baron Lerner again, author
of One for the Road. People said he must feel
horrible about what he did. He's killed such a famous woman.
We need to have sympathy for him. You know, you
look at this and you say, so, what's going on here?
(30:56):
Like the tables are reversed. He was completely at fault, speeding,
probably drinking, and yet in an odd way, Mitchell partly
becomes the blame. Lerner said. The detail from this whole
story that stays with him is that Gravitt and his
wife came to Gratty Hospital with flowers from Mitchell as
(31:19):
she lay in a coma. It was seen at the
time like it, We're really sorry this happened. We want
to give you some flowers to make it better. There
was unbelievable tolerance of an activity that shouldn't have been tolerated.
It isn't just that he brought flowers. There's an article
in one of the local newspapers where a reporter goes
to visit Gravitt in jail and finds him praying a
(31:39):
Bible opened to the Book of Samuel on his bed.
Gravitt tells the reporter, I wanted to go to her funeral,
but that was impossible. And then Gravitt says, God knows
it was an accident. People also after the fact, we're
saying with no justification at all, Well, Margaret Mitchell would
have forgiven him right. How do they know? Right? But
(32:03):
that was the nature of the entity at the time.
It would be the nineteenth evanies and nineteen eighties before
Americans started having real conversations about drinking and driving. In
the interim, many people needlessly died. Could A Star Is Born,
as originally written, have started that conversation earlier? Maybe that's
(32:24):
what movies do at their best. The shocking sight of
a drunk man struggling to realize he's just killed people
could have been in the public's mind for more than
a decade by the time Margaret Mitchell died, And maybe
by the time a drunken Hugh Gravitt hits the country's
most beloved author, America would have been ready to say,
the man who greens down Peachtree is not a victim
(32:47):
he's a criminal. But we'll never know, of course, because
David O. Selznick never gave the film the ending it deserved. Incidentally,
Lardner and Schilburg write in their memo to Selznick, whether
or not you show them mangled bodies, the death of
(33:08):
two in a people as a step in the downfall
of a Star seems a little callous. Sure, let us
instead have the blind drunk Norman Mayne hit a tree
and be rescued in court by his wife. Hugh Gravett
and Norman Mayne were both tests of our tolerance for
drunk driving, and in both cases society looked at their
(33:31):
behavior and shrugged. Ring Lardner Junior and Bud Chilburg rewrote
another scene in David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born,
the very last scene in the movie. For the story
to work, Vicki Lester somehow needed to reconcile her own
rise with her husband's fall. How should she do that?
Lardner and Chilburg's solution was simple a single line. We
(33:56):
see Vicki Lester at the moment of her greatest professional triumph,
at the premiere of the movie she has just starred
in with her newfound professional freedom. A reporter puts a
microphone in front of her, Miss Lester. This microphone is
on an international hooker throughout the world. Your fans are
(34:18):
hoping that you will say a few words. There's a
dramatic pause. The music swells. Vicky looks out at her
audience and reveals the bargain she has made with her
dead husband's memory. She will stand by her man. She
will treat his sacrifice as heroic. She will bury her
identity in his. Hello, everybody, this is missus Norman's name. Frankly,
(34:51):
my dear you know the rest. Revisionist History is produced
(35:12):
by Eloise Linton Leam and Gustu and Jacob Smith, with
Tali Emlyn and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Our executive producer is Miila La Belle. Original scoring by
Luis Gara, mastering by Flawn Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence.
Fact checking by Keisha Williams. Special thanks to the screenwriter
(35:34):
Charles Randolph, also close friend of mine who is a
big help in framing this episode, and Mike Barbiglia, Virginia
Heffern and Angus Fletcher and Baron Lerner who joined me
for our live show on the Stars Point and also
our live show producer Kate Down. I'm Maltain blauba Hey
(36:09):
revisionist history listeners. This is Eddie Alterman, host of one
of Pushkin's newest shows, Car Show. On our season one finale,
Malcolm and I go car shopping for what's affectionately known
as a family hauler. We cross test a four twenty
nine horsepowered German Suv, a beautiful Swedish luxury wagon, and
(36:30):
the dreaded minivan. Malcolm's choice may surprise you or not.
He'll just have to listen to find out. Here's a
clip from the episode Car Shopping with Malcolm Gladwell. So
all I have right now is a twenty fourteen BMWX
one And now most people would say that's perfectly sufficient.
(36:53):
But I wouldn't say that. You you would not say that.
I have tried it on a airport run for a
holiday with my you know, with my new plus one,
so three of us, and it was, you know, the
amount of I had totally underestimated the amount of stuff
(37:15):
that now, I mean, this is not in the last
ten years. The amount of stuff must have doubled that
you're required to carry with you and the seats to
car seats are just ginormous. They're huge. Yeah, they're they're
fortress like. We're just like so yeah, so I clearly
what I have right now is insufficient. That's me and
(37:36):
Malcolm Gladwell a couple of months ago, talking shop, just
like we always seemed to do. Talking shop is actually
how we met. I still remember when I got that
first call from him a few years ago. I was
sitting at my desk in ann Arbor as editor in
chief of Current Driver when my phone rang. I heard
(37:56):
the dulcet tones. Malcolm introduced himself as a reader, which
I could hardly believe because I was at that very
moment breaking apart in Oreo with my teeth. There was
no way this mental, giant red car magazine's. I was
also prejudiced to believe that all intellectuals hated driving and
(38:18):
thought all cars were yellow with a light on top.
But this Canadian kid impressed me. He was talking torqu
curs and limited slip deferentials. He said he was doing
a show on unintended acceleration for the first season of
his podcast, Revisionist History. Did we at Car and Driver
want to be featured on it. We sure did. Altaman
(38:40):
hits the brakes firmly, smoothly, easily, we come to a halt.
But now it was my chance to return the favor.
Malcolm needed my guidance. He needed to know how do
I effectively move around a young family and all the
stuff that comes with it. Malcolm had just become a
(39:03):
father and couldn't decide what kind of car to get
for his family. His small first generation BMW X one
SUV may have been perfect ideal even for a bachelor,
But if you're hauling kids in their tackle, a glorified
hot hatchback like the X one isn't going to cut it.
(39:24):
So I had to parachute in there. And by parachute,
I mean pack my stuff into a minivan in Detroit
and drive six hundred miles east to meet Malcolm and Hudson,
New York, home to the Pushkin offices, and together we
would go on a quest to find Malcolm a car
for the pastoral life with a child, maybe even two.
Eventually there's a great pg arooric mine. He says, having
(39:48):
one kid is like having a dog. Having two kids
is like having a zoo. That yeah, everything's exponentially greater.
You have to have way more stuff. And yeah, if
you're flying and getting the whole family packed up to
go on an airplane, you need your car seat for
the plane and for the cab and all that, and
(40:09):
you need your stroller, and there's just so much stuff.
It's like packing a small army. Here's my worry. My
worries are as well. I'm totally spoiled by I love
this car to death, my X one. Yeah, it has
that beautiful creamy in line six, and it has the
hydraulic steering. It's got like right old school. The steering
on this car is so beautiful. Every time I get
(40:31):
into any other car, regardless of the price, I don't
think it steers as well as my as my X one.
So I'm resigned to the fact I'm surrendering. So that's
a hard thing to give up, for sure. But you know,
designing which way to go for a people mover, for
a family car, for you know, something that has a
(40:53):
lot of space, it's really sort of a deep psychological question.
It is. I'm now I'm a child of all as
I'm sure all every member of my generation is. I'm
a child of the station wagon. Yeah, as I'm sure
you were. I was what was what were your family wagons? Uh?
Ultomobile custom Cruiser. That was the Biggie with the slide
(41:14):
out tailgate and the you know, the the rear facing
third row where you could put the window down and
inhale the exhaust and you could, you know, make faces
at the serial killers behind you. It's so unsafe. And
uh and my mom never got a minivan. Our car
growing up, our family wagon was up in the beginning
(41:36):
was a Pugo four O four. So yeah, I mean
our moms drove wagons, our parents drove wagons. But then
the minivan revolution came and sort of reordered the family
car universe. Now, in one fell swoop, the Chrysler minivan
destroyed the station wagon market, but then the station mark
(41:56):
then the minivan market itself got destroyed by the suv.
And so that's what we're going to look at today.
We're going to look at these three formats, like the
evolution of the family car from the station swagen to
the minivan to the suv. Which one is best for you?
For me? So we have what we have a representative
(42:17):
of each class. Yes, we have a no I'm not
committing to these particular cars. We're just trying to choose
the class. That's right. We're just towing into the frigid
waters of automotive responsibility here. It's a tough adjustment for
a guy who has an addiction to performance cars and
the speeding tickets to prove it. So I used a
(42:37):
categorical approach, positioning his options not as specific cars that
might be too depressing, but in the abstract the question
is cautiously broad. Where on the family car evolutionary ladder
will our test subject, Malcolm Land will he go retro
and choose a wagon like his parents did, or will
(43:00):
he partake of the other options in the marketplace, the
minivan or the suv. We have three vehicles for you
to check out. Okay, okay. The first is the Kia Carnival.
Oh do you know what that is? Yes? I do,
I have. I have been looking at them online really furtively. Furtively. Well,
(43:23):
I like the idea that it doesn't it's a minivan
that doesn't look like a minivan, which is you know,
but it's all minivan. I mean, you're gonna see. I
can't wait for your experience with it or in your reaction.
The second is the wagon, the thing that a minivan killed.
The wagon that we have is a Volvo V ninety
(43:45):
cross country. Ah, so this is the jacked up one. Yes. Yeah,
they're all sort of jacked up. They all want to
be SUVs now. They all have kind of exaggerated fenders,
higher ride heights. You know, it's interesting because the way
that the cargo area is packaged in wagons is usually
(44:07):
pretty good for getting kids stuff in there, because it's
it's longer, it's generally wider, and it's it's more horizontal
than vertical. And then we come to the suv. The
vehicle once used for rock crawling and mud bogging has
been brought to heal. The modern day suv is the
(44:27):
de facto family car for many, but the one we're
going to drive today blurs the line between family car
and granite bowl. Eyed. It's the Mercedes AMG g L
fifty three and it is very red, very fast, and
very very expensive. I'll give you my pre ranking of
(44:48):
of what I believe a priori what I believe my
preferences will be. The One of the most dubious of
is the overpowered suv um. It's mostly for kind of
like symbolic sociological reasons. Perfect I don't want to be
the jackass in the amg MG. Right. I briefly had
(45:12):
a Boxter, which was the most beautiful drive I've ever had,
and I got rid of it because I was the
jackass in the Boxter. I didn't want to go the
jackass in the Boxter. I understand that, so I worry
that jackass factor high. Also, I've run a foul of
the police so many times up here, and the temptation
(45:32):
to speed in this thing is going to be, I'm
guessing overwhelming. Second, I think I'm quite drawn to Station Meggans.
They have great symbolic meaningful for me. I think they're
immensely practical. I'm a little dubious of these new fangled Volvos.
I wouldn't mind something that was just a proper psix
orve eight in it. And then I think I'm probably
(45:55):
most enthusiastic about the project of a Minian interesting because
the sort of underlying thing here is that we're going
from the emotional to the rational. We're going from the
know this crazy steroidal Mercedes, it's all jacked up and
it's got like you know, nightclub lighting and everything. And
(46:16):
it's read through the more rational station wagon, where the
cargo package is a little bit more sane and makes
a little bit more sense. It's lower to the ground,
but it's still fun to drive to the completely rational,
which is the one box minivan. Not fun. I have
no kind of status anxiety about driving a miniman. Well
(46:39):
here's a really interesting point, and Dan Neil from The
Wall Street Journal makes it all the time. He says,
minivans are symbols of virility. Sports cars are not minivans.
Mean you've had kids, you've reproduced? Yes, yes, they do. Yes.
So that's our baseline. That's those are your your preexisting biases.
(47:04):
And you think you're a minivan man, I think I
might be a miniman man. Yeah. I'm Eddie Alterman and
this is Car Show, my podcast about why we drive
what we drive. On today's season finale, we asked a question.
(47:27):
When it's time to trade in the fast car for
a family car, which do you choose? SUV, minivan or
station wagon, Papa Bear, Mama Bear or baby Bear. After
the break, Malcolm and I hit the road with a
ship ton of baby stuff in the backseat. Thanks for listening,
(47:56):
you can find Car Show with a few more Malcolm
cameos wherever you like to listen.
Pushkin Hello, Hello Revisionist History listeners. I'm excited to announce
that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from
my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to pushkym plus.
For those who just can't get enough. We're giving every
episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus We've created
(00:37):
many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents, and
of course you'll never hear any adds. Subscribe to pushkinm
plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot FM. One summer night in nineteen
(00:59):
forty nine, Margaret Mitchell and her husband John Marsh go
out to dinner. It's August Atlanta, hot, humid. They walked
to a restaurant on Peachtree Street in Midtown, not far
from their apartment. They were going out for the evening
and they were going to go to to see The
(01:19):
Canterbury Tales, a movie at the Atlanta Art Theater, which
was located at the corner of Peachtree and Thirteenth Street.
So I'm standing in front of the side of the
theater with Michael Rose, executive vice president of the Atlanta
History Center, and so they had gone to the Woman's
Club prior to going to the to the movie and
(01:42):
just cutting across. So she was so yeah. So they
simply came out of the Woman's Club and we're going
to cross the survey. Margaret Mitchell was at that point
America's reigning literary celebrity, author of Gone with the Wind,
one of the best selling American novels ever. In Atlanta,
(02:02):
she was beloved a little pixie of a woman who
stood for everything White Southerners of that generation want to
stand for beauty, wit nostalgia. People in Atlanta called her
r Peggy. Mitchell and her husband leave the Atlanta Women's
Club cross Peachtree mid Block, and as they do, an
(02:23):
off duty taxi driver named Hugh Gravitt comes barreling around
the bend. His car is heading right for the couple.
They were maybe about halfway across. That's when we see
the car. He hits one direction, she heads the other doors.
But it's kind of like the driver I think saw
(02:46):
him first. So veers in the other direction, which is
right at her right. So Gravitt is speeding. He's going
at least fifty miles an hour down a curving two
Lane Street in the middle of a crowded city. After
driver is going fifty miles an hour in a car
from that era of fifty miles an hour is like
(03:06):
going seventy Today, it's like it's nuts. Gravitt hits Mitchell
drags her several yards along the road. She's taken to
Grady Hospital, where she lies in a coma. The nation
is in shock. President Harry Truman calls down to Atlanta
and asks to be updated on her status. Five days
(03:27):
after the accident, she dies August sixteenth, nineteen forty nine.
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This season we're
talking about experiments, magic wand experiments, natural experiments, formal experiments,
(03:50):
And in this episode I want to offer up a
thought experiment. Margaret Mitchell died in a car accident, but
I want you to consider an alternate version of events,
a version where we would never have called what happened
to her accident. Margaret Mitchell started out as a journalist
(04:21):
living in a first floor apartment in midtown Atlanta with
her husband, John marsh. It's where Margaret ended up writing
most of Gone with the Wentz. Jessica van Landit of
the Historic Oakland Foundation, is showing us around. She's working,
she's writing, and she reaggravates an ankle injury, and she's
pretty much what we would consider bad written. Right. She's
(04:44):
staying at home and recovering, and the story goes she
read through all of the books in the Atlanta library.
She just kept reading through and John said, as he's
bringing these books home. One day, he says, you've read
all the books there are, why don't you write your own?
And so he brings home a Remington typewriter. She sets
(05:04):
up kind of a little writing desk and she starts
writing the book. Then one day she attends a lunch
for a visiting editor from New York, from the McMillan
publishing House. He's come to Atlanta on a scouting trip.
Somebody invites her to kind of come along to the
luncheon and they are all kind of offering their books,
(05:26):
and there was a little bit of a snide remark
made about her, you know, something along the lines of, oh, Margaret,
I don't know why you're here. You don't have anything
to give them anyway. You know that probably did for her.
What it might do for any of us is the
Scout leaves and she runs home, and she starts gathering
(05:47):
up all of her manuscript. Mitchell takes her draft of
Gone with the Wind over to the Scouts hotel so
he can bring it back with him to New York.
There are so many pages he has to buy another
suitcase to carry them all. As a writer, one question
has been obsessing me. Did she have copies? Weren't she?
(06:07):
If her house burns down, does she lose her book? Yes? Yeah?
Who gives? She gives? Does she give her only copy
to the guy from McMillan, y, Oh my god, this
is causing me so much anxiety and the story gives
gets on the train and loves it. Immediately. At that point,
she kind of realized that what she had done and
(06:29):
was like, oh no, can I can I have it back?
And he's you know, it's too late. He wanted he
wanted the story. Mitchell's manuscript survives and becomes an instant bestseller.
A sweeping Gothic historical bodice ripper about a Southern beauty,
Scarlett O'Hara, her travails to the Civil War, her epic
love affair with the dashing Rep. Butler. The book wins
(06:50):
the pullet surprise. By the way, if you want to
know how Southerners really felt about black people, you should
be Gone with the Wind. It's all there. The book
gets snapped up by Hollywood Clark Gable and Vivian Lee,
two giant stars in the leading roles, and the result is,
to this day the biggest grossing movie of all time,
(07:11):
bigger than Star Wars, including What for generations of movie
goers is the most memorable of Hollywood lines. You go,
Where's I go? Watch I do? Frankly, my dear, I
don't give a damn the last words rhet Butler says
(07:32):
to Scarlett O'Hara as he prepares to leave her and
Atlanta forever. The film is a sensation, and when it
opens in Atlanta pandemonium. Three hundred thousand people line Peachtree
Street to watch the motorcade come in from the Candler Airfield,
carrying the stars Clark Gable, Vivian Lee, Olivia de Havelin.
(07:54):
Gary Pomeratz, who wrote Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, A
Wonderful History of Atlanta, counts the Gone with The Wind
movie premiere in Atlanta in nineteen thirty nine as one
of the signature moments in the city's history. You know,
Mitchell came from an old Atlanta family. Her two grandfathers
had fought for the Confederacy. This was all in her
(08:16):
the history of Atlanta, the history of the South. After
the showing, all the stars took turns saying a few
words into a live microphone to be broadcast far and wide,
and then Atlanta's own Margaret Mitchell took the stage, standing
up and speaking to America, Ah see alike. It's felt
(08:36):
a very great thank for Georgia and the South to
see our old confarashly come back to us. I felt
that way all this week and our factly given the
rebel of Yale to night. Ten years pass, her fame
only grows until one August night, while crossing Peachtree Street
(08:58):
with her husband, Margaret Mitchell is struck by a car
driven by Hugh Gravitt, who is speeding and who it
turns out, had spent the afternoon getting drunk. One of
the iron laws of celebrity is that what happens to
the famous matters more than what happens to the rest
(09:18):
of US. Fame magnifies impact. A classic example would be
what happened back in nineteen eighty five when the Hollywood
star Rock Hudson announced that he had AIDS. It was
a turning point in the public's attitude about the disease.
AIDS up to that point was something that people ignored,
or made tasteless jokes about, or looked away in horror.
(09:41):
Word of Rock Hudson's death, of course, spread very quickly
today through the Hollywood community. Paul Dandridge of our sister,
Hudson's death changed all that Hollywood stars rallied to the cause.
Congress passed a bill allocating hundreds of millions of dollars
to aid's research. The word, of course from mister Hudson's people,
is that he does not want flowers. He would rather
see the donation sent to the American Federation for Aid's Research.
(10:03):
That was the organization that he helped about. I mean,
that wouldn't have happened if Hudson was a minor character actor.
He was a professional, He was a gentleman, He was
a kind man. The things being said by many people.
Margaret Mitchell in her day was a hundred times more
famous than Rock Hudson was in nineteen eighty five. She
was America's darling and she's hit by a drunk driver
(10:23):
while crossing the street. Now you would think, wouldn't you,
that the death of the most famous writer in America
at the hands of someone who'd been drinking beer all
afternoon would change public attitudes towards drunk driving. But it doesn't,
and that puzzle deserves its own what if experiment. In
(10:55):
nineteen thirty seven, the legendary Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick
released A Star's Born. I'm almost certain Margaret Mitchell saw it.
Everybody did. It was a big hit. David O. Selznick
would go on to be the producer who brought Gone
with the Wind to the big screen. But there is
no other connection between Margaret Mitchell and A Star Is Born?
(11:19):
Except what if there was? What if one of those
stories bled into another? That's a thought experiment. You may
have seen the version of A Star Is Born made
in twenty eighteen, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, which
was a massive critical and commercial success in its hard keeping.
(11:42):
It's so hard cold then me see he's just right then? Now, Yeah,
It's Pretty Good. That version of A Star Is Born
was actually the movie's fourth go round. A version was
made in nineteen seventy six with Chris Christofferson and Barbara Streisand,
(12:06):
and before that, Judy Garland and James may And starred
in a nineteen fifty four remake. All the versions follow
the same basic plot. A young actress from some distant
corner of the country comes to Hollywood in search, of course,
a fame and fortune. She happens to catch the eye
of a big star named Norman Maine. He gets her
(12:28):
cast in one of his movies. She changes her name
to Vicky Lester becomes a huge sensation. It's Cinderella, only
with a twist. As the startup rises, Norman Maine falls.
Here's the nineteen thirty seven version with Frederick March as
Norman Maine. Does Becky Lester live here? Yes, I got
(12:49):
a package for him. I'll sign for it. So who
are you? I'm her husband? Oh sure, I'm right here,
mister Lester, mister Lester, Oh my god. In Hollywood slang,
the husband of a star actress is called a handbag.
Norman Maine becomes a handbag when Norman Mayne is at
(13:12):
his lowest, Vickie offers to sacrifice her own career in
order to save his. When Norman realizes that, he swims
out into the Malibu surf and takes his own life.
A Star Is Born, as I Said, was produced by
David o' salznick. Salznick was a whirlwind, a brilliant talker,
a legendary litharia. He smoked forty five packs of cigarettes
(13:35):
a day, takes emphetamines by the fistful gambols away his
salary at the Clover Club in Hollywood, writes manic endless
memos to his underlings at three in the morning. Starting
in the nineteen thirties, Salznick had one of the greatest
runs in Hollywood history. Won two Best Picture Oscars, does
Alfred Hitchcock's first and second American movies, Rebecca and Spellbound,
(13:58):
and of course Margaret Mitchell's Gone with a Wind. But
back in nineteen thirty seven, he was preoccupied with A
Stars Born. My notion was tosts in terms of a
rising star, in order to have the Cinderella element, with
our path crossing that of a falling star, to get
(14:19):
the tragedy of the of the X Star. This is
an interview with Salznick from the nineteen fifties, and we
created this more or less as we went along. We
started without anything more than a vague idea of where
we were going, and it was really a relatively easy
(14:41):
script to write. I can say this that ninety five
percent of the dialogue in that picture was actually straight
out of life and was straight reportaged, so to speak.
A Star Is Born is a movie on one level
about alcohol. Maybe that's too reductive, but the whole plot
(15:01):
hinges on the fact that the star character, Norman Mayne,
cannot control his drinking. Salznick his rumored to have based
Norman on the comedian Frank Faye, who was notorious in
Hollywood as a miserable drunk, but Selznick could have just
as easily based the character on his own brother, Myron Selznick,
one of the biggest agents in Hollywood and a huge alcoholic.
(15:24):
Or maybe the bits about drinking, which are easily the
best parts of the movie, are as good as they
are because one of the screenwriters who worked on the
script was Dorothy Parker, the famous wit and New Yorker
writer who later drank herself to death. Or maybe they
were the work of Parker's co writer and husband, Alan Campbell,
who would later die of a drug overdose. There were
(15:45):
no shortage of addiction case studies in Hollywood in those years,
so in a Star is born. Norman Mayne marries Vicki,
and as her career soars, his drinking gets worse. When
Vicki wins an Oscar, he crashes the stage. I mean,
can you imagine an angry husband crashing the stage at
the Oscars? Now? I want to make a speech, gentleman
(16:08):
of the Academy, a fellow suckers. I got one of
those ones for a best performance. I don't mean a
thing people get him every year. What I wants a
special award, something nobody else can get. After that performance,
Norman Mayne checks into a sanatorium, cleans himself up. Then
he goes to the racetrack, orders a ginger ale, and
(16:31):
runs into his old publicist Libby, who taunts him, I
don't feel sorry for you. You'll fix yourself nice and comfortable.
You can live off your wife now, she'll buy your
drinks and put up with you, even though nobody else will.
Norman takes a swing at Libby, a glancing blow. Libby
swings back. Norman's on the floor, humiliating, I'm Norman man,
(16:53):
That's not my fault. I don't buy it to tarts amount.
He's harmless, amsterliya let him go? What can eat it?
We can't fight any better than he can act. Norman shaken,
brushes himself off, picks up his hat, walks painfully over
to the bar, and falls off the wagon. Give me
a Scotch double. Leave the bottle here. I'm going to
(17:18):
read what happens next. After Norman's epic drinking binge, we
see Norman's car speeding along the Malibu Road. We see
Norman at the wheel, very drunk and singing She'll be
coming round the mountain in a loud voice. He comes
around the curve much too fast, tires screech. He tries
frantically to keep the big roadster on the right side
(17:39):
of the road, but can't. It drifts far to the left.
Another car appears on the curve, coming in the opposite direction.
Norman smashes into it, bounces off, weaves down the road
a little way and comes to a stop. The other
car pitches off the bank and rolls to the edge
of the water and bursts into flames. We see Norman
(18:01):
come weaving up the road from his wrecked car to
the edge of the bank. A thick stream of blood
is running down the side of his face. The fire
illuminates his face brightly as he stands staring down at
the wreck. A look of sick horror comes over him.
Dorothy Parker and her husband wrote that scene, and in
(18:24):
nineteen thirty seven it would have stunned American audiences. Automobiles
were really only a generational at that point. There wasn't
yet a moral vocabulary around what happened when an impaired
driver killed someone with their car. People in nineteen thirty
seven didn't talk about drunk driving. Prohibition had just ended
(18:46):
four years earlier, and attitudes towards drinking had swung hard
in the opposite direction. Judges in the nineteen thirties rarely
sent people to jail for drunk driving. Prosecutors rarely filed charges.
The police officer who caught you drunk driving knew that
the likelihood of anything happening was so low it was
pointless for him to even arrest you. In nineteen thirty nine,
(19:08):
the American Medical Association put out guidelines on drunk driving
and said that the threshold criminal conviction should be point
one five. Understand that right now most American states have
a threshold of half. That point one five is wasted.
I'm going to guess that you listening to this podcast
(19:30):
have never blown point one five, not even on that
night in freshman year when you did one too many
tequila shots and ended up with a hangover that lasted
into the next week. Yeah, it was. It was just
passivity throughout the system. I called up Baron Lerner, who
teaches at NYU Medical School. He wrote a fascinating history
(19:51):
of drunk driving called One for the Road, so that
the old line about the judges was, you know that
the judges themselves drank and drove, so they didn't want
to call attention to the issue. The police were frustrated
to the one at least the ones who were devoted
to public safety were frustrated that there was no prosecution. Well,
it's more than that word you use when I was
(20:14):
passivity and I was thinking about it seems more than
that in a certain sense, because you talk a lot
about how there was a feeling, that an accent that
happens because the driver is under the influence of alcohol
is somehow unintentional that you can't hold the driver responsible
in a kind of moral sense for their actions while
(20:35):
they were drunk, which is really weird to me because
implicit in that is an acknowledgement that they are impaired.
So it's not always saying, oh, you can drive just
as well drunk as sober. No, they're not saying that.
They're saying you absolutely are impaired. It's just that we're
not going to hold you responsible for it. Yeah, it's weird.
(20:57):
I thought it was weird, but it was so commonplace.
And I'm glad you mentioned the word accident. Why if
you go and drink too much and you willingly go
in your car when you know you're not supposed to,
and you crash into someone or something and there's damage
and hopefully not death, that's still called an accident. It
was called an accident in the nineteen thirties, and it's
(21:18):
still too often called an accident, although people now try
to get us to use a different word, the other
phrase wrong place, at the wrong time, all these notions that, well,
just you know, if that person hadn't been crossing the street,
sure the driver was drunk. But you know, if they
hadn't been out so late at night and crossing the street,
this wouldn't happen. It's sort of bad luck for the
(21:39):
drunk driver in a contorted sort of way. And some
people used to make the analogy. Well, it wasn't like
they put a gun in their pocket and went out
and then shot someone. They didn't mean to do this.
They were just having a couple of drinks at the
bar and wanted to get home safe. Well, they're actually
that's actually wrong. It is like putting a gun in
(22:00):
your pocket. If you want to get a sense of
how strange attitudes were towards drunk driving in the late
nineteen thirties, you should watch Topper. Topper was a big
hit in the summer of nineteen thirty seven, a comedy
(22:20):
starring a young Carrie Grant as a bon vival named George.
Grant and his wife Marian played by Constance Bennett, are
a young, rich couple who spend all their time dancing
and drinking. After an at a partying, they take a
drive much too fast. They crashed the car. George and
(22:50):
Marian both die and become ghosts, stranded unearthed because they've
done nothing to merit going to heaven, So as ghosts,
they make a plan to redeem themselves. They will rescue
their friend Topper from his boring life, how by teaching
Topper how to drink, which they proceed to do, and
then all three of them, George, Marian and Topper have
(23:13):
another car crash, and Toppers take home lesson is that
he needs to keep living it up. Well, I won't
go back an, I won't do it, won't do one,
I won't go back at three, All routine happen eight
Better than Topper perfectly captures the spirit of the times
the country is in the midst of the depression. A
movie was supposed to be in Escape Carrygrant's character wants
(23:35):
his friend Topper to drink away his troubles, which is
what audiences wanted in nineteen thirty seven. Topper made sense
in that context. But then at exactly the same time
comes A Starsborne. Drunk drivers do not live happily ever after.
In a Starsborne, drunk drivers face consequences for their actions. Actually,
(23:58):
let me rephrase that A Starsborne is almost a tragedy
where drunk drivers face consequences for their actions. That scene
I read to you earlier, where Norman May drunkenly crashes
into another car and looks on in horror as blood
streams down his face. That scene, the moral center of
the original movie, gets taken out at the last moment.
(24:22):
Salznick was notorious for demanding multiple rewrites of his films,
and he was unhappy with the third act of Dorothy
Parker's script, the one that had the car crash scene.
Sealznick turns to two would be screenwriters on his staff,
Bud Schulberg and Ring Lardner junior. Schulburg is twenty two
at the time and working as a script reader, and
(24:43):
Lardner is twenty one and working as an intern in
the publicity department. Both would go on to win their
own Oscars, but at the time they're just kids. Selznick
doesn't care. Lardner and Schilburg look over the third act
of A Star Is Born and write Selznick a memo
one type written sheet about the movie's internal logic and
(25:05):
what it demands. Quote. Her proposed sacrifice, overheard by Norman,
offers no great temptation to him because there is no
possibility of a comeback for him if he didn't kill himself,
he would remain a bomb and probably a jailbird. His
suicide would still be that of a hopeless drunk trying
(25:25):
to find a way out. Selznick is convinced. On November sixth,
he writes his production supervisor, would you please advise the
necessary departments that the automobile accident scene is out. In
its place we get a very different ending. Norman goes
on a bender at the racetrack. Then he disappears for
(25:47):
four days. Turns out he's been arrested for drunk and driving,
crashing his car into a tree and assaulting a police officer.
The judge gives him a tongue lashing. You come pretty low,
haven't you. There'sn't a man here who's had the advantages
you've had. Look what you've done with him. You're nothing
but the nearest possible drunk driving about the streets with
(26:08):
a power to inflict for injury on it was some people.
I think we'd better deny you that barbar a while,
night and days listen to jail. But then Norman's beloved
comes running up to the front of the courtroom. Please wait,
I'm his wife, Yes, I recognize him. Was listing. Please, Judge,
(26:29):
I promise you this won't happen again. I'll be responsible
for him. The judge relents, suspends Norman's sentence, lets him
go free, and we have, in place of the morally
revolutionary moment in Dorothy Parker's original script, just another nineteen
thirty seven ending where a man drives blind drunk and
(26:51):
hits a tree, where the law makes a half hearted
attempt to hold him accountable, only to give up in
the face of the celebrity wife saying she can save him,
and where the drunk driver faces no consequences for his
behavior except a bit of fleeting humiliation, and then he
commits suicide. Only it's not an act of shame and
(27:13):
moral defeat. It's the ultimate sacrifice for the woman he loves.
David o' Salsnick brings in two kids from down the
hall to fix his picture, and they scale back its
ambitions so far that it becomes almost unrecognizable. So the
what if experiment, Let's imagine what would have happened if
(27:36):
Dorothy Parker's original subversive version had made it to the
big screen. The driver who hit Margaret Mitchell Hugh Gravid
spends two years in prison on manslaughter charges. Then he
(27:56):
moves to a small town outside Atlanta. He was still
living there decades later when the journalists Gary Pomerans tracked
him down. The door opened and there stood you grab it.
He was seventy one years old, and he was gaunt,
read thin, cloudy eyes, not moving well, smoking a cigarette,
(28:23):
and he smiled and said good morning. They sat outside
in his yard and talked for a few hours. One
of the things that struck me most about him was
that it wasn't just that he'd hit someone famous. He
repeated several times to me, I hit a woman. I
hit a woman, and it was the worst thing he
(28:45):
could have imagined. And again he must have said three,
four or five times, I'd rather it had been me
instead of her. Do you think he was drinking? Oh, well,
he told me he was drinking. I don't know the amount. Obviously,
this is forty two years later. I think he just
wanted to get his view out, and it was to him.
(29:10):
Alcohol wasn't a part of this. Alcohol wasn't a part
of this. That's what's so strange about going back through
the accounts of Margaret Mitchell's death, The fact that his
drinking might have been the reason he was speeding. Somehow
didn't seem to occur to any people. A police officer
at the scene later testified that he had smelled alcohol
on Gravit's breath. Gravit himself did not deny that he
(29:33):
had been drinking, but no one gave him a breathalyzer
for goodness sake, demanded over twenty previous traffic citations. Gravit
stood for half an hour of the scene before anyone
even talked to him. After his arrest, a picture of
Gravit runs in all the newspapers. He's standing next to
his arresting officers with a big smirk on his face.
(29:53):
He's a reckless menace. His license should have been revoked
years before, but in the mentality of the time, the
driver was irrelevant. He was as unlucky as the victim.
An EDITORI in the Atlanta Journal in nineteen forty nine
read quote for Gravitt as a person, we have the
(30:14):
utmost sympathy. He surely did not intend to kill anyone,
and tragedy will haunt him as long as he lives.
It was an accident, wasn't it. These things happen. Here's
a beloved author I mean the author of Gone with
the Wind, like beloved not especially in Atlanta. People were
(30:35):
man and frustrated that she died, but there was also
sympathy for the driver. This is Baron Lerner again, author
of One for the Road. People said he must feel
horrible about what he did. He's killed such a famous woman.
We need to have sympathy for him. You know, you
look at this and you say, so, what's going on here?
(30:56):
Like the tables are reversed. He was completely at fault, speeding,
probably drinking, and yet in an odd way, Mitchell partly
becomes the blame. Lerner said. The detail from this whole
story that stays with him is that Gravitt and his
wife came to Gratty Hospital with flowers from Mitchell as
(31:19):
she lay in a coma. It was seen at the
time like it, We're really sorry this happened. We want
to give you some flowers to make it better. There
was unbelievable tolerance of an activity that shouldn't have been tolerated.
It isn't just that he brought flowers. There's an article
in one of the local newspapers where a reporter goes
to visit Gravitt in jail and finds him praying a
(31:39):
Bible opened to the Book of Samuel on his bed.
Gravitt tells the reporter, I wanted to go to her funeral,
but that was impossible. And then Gravitt says, God knows
it was an accident. People also after the fact, we're
saying with no justification at all, Well, Margaret Mitchell would
have forgiven him right. How do they know? Right? But
(32:03):
that was the nature of the entity at the time.
It would be the nineteenth evanies and nineteen eighties before
Americans started having real conversations about drinking and driving. In
the interim, many people needlessly died. Could A Star Is Born,
as originally written, have started that conversation earlier? Maybe that's
(32:24):
what movies do at their best. The shocking sight of
a drunk man struggling to realize he's just killed people
could have been in the public's mind for more than
a decade by the time Margaret Mitchell died, And maybe
by the time a drunken Hugh Gravitt hits the country's
most beloved author, America would have been ready to say,
the man who greens down Peachtree is not a victim
(32:47):
he's a criminal. But we'll never know, of course, because
David O. Selznick never gave the film the ending it deserved. Incidentally,
Lardner and Schilburg write in their memo to Selznick, whether
or not you show them mangled bodies, the death of
(33:08):
two in a people as a step in the downfall
of a Star seems a little callous. Sure, let us
instead have the blind drunk Norman Mayne hit a tree
and be rescued in court by his wife. Hugh Gravett
and Norman Mayne were both tests of our tolerance for
drunk driving, and in both cases society looked at their
(33:31):
behavior and shrugged. Ring Lardner Junior and Bud Chilburg rewrote
another scene in David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born,
the very last scene in the movie. For the story
to work, Vicki Lester somehow needed to reconcile her own
rise with her husband's fall. How should she do that?
Lardner and Chilburg's solution was simple a single line. We
(33:56):
see Vicki Lester at the moment of her greatest professional triumph,
at the premiere of the movie she has just starred
in with her newfound professional freedom. A reporter puts a
microphone in front of her, Miss Lester. This microphone is
on an international hooker throughout the world. Your fans are
(34:18):
hoping that you will say a few words. There's a
dramatic pause. The music swells. Vicky looks out at her
audience and reveals the bargain she has made with her
dead husband's memory. She will stand by her man. She
will treat his sacrifice as heroic. She will bury her
identity in his. Hello, everybody, this is missus Norman's name. Frankly,
(34:51):
my dear you know the rest. Revisionist History is produced
(35:12):
by Eloise Linton Leam and Gustu and Jacob Smith, with
Tali Emlyn and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Our executive producer is Miila La Belle. Original scoring by
Luis Gara, mastering by Flawn Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence.
Fact checking by Keisha Williams. Special thanks to the screenwriter
(35:34):
Charles Randolph, also close friend of mine who is a
big help in framing this episode, and Mike Barbiglia, Virginia
Heffern and Angus Fletcher and Baron Lerner who joined me
for our live show on the Stars Point and also
our live show producer Kate Down. I'm Maltain blauba Hey
(36:09):
revisionist history listeners. This is Eddie Alterman, host of one
of Pushkin's newest shows, Car Show. On our season one finale,
Malcolm and I go car shopping for what's affectionately known
as a family hauler. We cross test a four twenty
nine horsepowered German Suv, a beautiful Swedish luxury wagon, and
(36:30):
the dreaded minivan. Malcolm's choice may surprise you or not.
He'll just have to listen to find out. Here's a
clip from the episode Car Shopping with Malcolm Gladwell. So
all I have right now is a twenty fourteen BMWX
one And now most people would say that's perfectly sufficient.
(36:53):
But I wouldn't say that. You you would not say that.
I have tried it on a airport run for a
holiday with my you know, with my new plus one,
so three of us, and it was, you know, the
amount of I had totally underestimated the amount of stuff
(37:15):
that now, I mean, this is not in the last
ten years. The amount of stuff must have doubled that
you're required to carry with you and the seats to
car seats are just ginormous. They're huge. Yeah, they're they're
fortress like. We're just like so yeah, so I clearly
what I have right now is insufficient. That's me and
(37:36):
Malcolm Gladwell a couple of months ago, talking shop, just
like we always seemed to do. Talking shop is actually
how we met. I still remember when I got that
first call from him a few years ago. I was
sitting at my desk in ann Arbor as editor in
chief of Current Driver when my phone rang. I heard
(37:56):
the dulcet tones. Malcolm introduced himself as a reader, which
I could hardly believe because I was at that very
moment breaking apart in Oreo with my teeth. There was
no way this mental, giant red car magazine's. I was
also prejudiced to believe that all intellectuals hated driving and
(38:18):
thought all cars were yellow with a light on top.
But this Canadian kid impressed me. He was talking torqu
curs and limited slip deferentials. He said he was doing
a show on unintended acceleration for the first season of
his podcast, Revisionist History. Did we at Car and Driver
want to be featured on it. We sure did. Altaman
(38:40):
hits the brakes firmly, smoothly, easily, we come to a halt.
But now it was my chance to return the favor.
Malcolm needed my guidance. He needed to know how do
I effectively move around a young family and all the
stuff that comes with it. Malcolm had just become a
(39:03):
father and couldn't decide what kind of car to get
for his family. His small first generation BMW X one
SUV may have been perfect ideal even for a bachelor,
But if you're hauling kids in their tackle, a glorified
hot hatchback like the X one isn't going to cut it.
(39:24):
So I had to parachute in there. And by parachute,
I mean pack my stuff into a minivan in Detroit
and drive six hundred miles east to meet Malcolm and Hudson,
New York, home to the Pushkin offices, and together we
would go on a quest to find Malcolm a car
for the pastoral life with a child, maybe even two.
Eventually there's a great pg arooric mine. He says, having
(39:48):
one kid is like having a dog. Having two kids
is like having a zoo. That yeah, everything's exponentially greater.
You have to have way more stuff. And yeah, if
you're flying and getting the whole family packed up to
go on an airplane, you need your car seat for
the plane and for the cab and all that, and
(40:09):
you need your stroller, and there's just so much stuff.
It's like packing a small army. Here's my worry. My
worries are as well. I'm totally spoiled by I love
this car to death, my X one. Yeah, it has
that beautiful creamy in line six, and it has the
hydraulic steering. It's got like right old school. The steering
on this car is so beautiful. Every time I get
(40:31):
into any other car, regardless of the price, I don't
think it steers as well as my as my X one.
So I'm resigned to the fact I'm surrendering. So that's
a hard thing to give up, for sure. But you know,
designing which way to go for a people mover, for
a family car, for you know, something that has a
(40:53):
lot of space, it's really sort of a deep psychological question.
It is. I'm now I'm a child of all as
I'm sure all every member of my generation is. I'm
a child of the station wagon. Yeah, as I'm sure
you were. I was what was what were your family wagons? Uh?
Ultomobile custom Cruiser. That was the Biggie with the slide
(41:14):
out tailgate and the you know, the the rear facing
third row where you could put the window down and
inhale the exhaust and you could, you know, make faces
at the serial killers behind you. It's so unsafe. And
uh and my mom never got a minivan. Our car
growing up, our family wagon was up in the beginning
(41:36):
was a Pugo four O four. So yeah, I mean
our moms drove wagons, our parents drove wagons. But then
the minivan revolution came and sort of reordered the family
car universe. Now, in one fell swoop, the Chrysler minivan
destroyed the station wagon market, but then the station mark
(41:56):
then the minivan market itself got destroyed by the suv.
And so that's what we're going to look at today.
We're going to look at these three formats, like the
evolution of the family car from the station swagen to
the minivan to the suv. Which one is best for you?
For me? So we have what we have a representative
(42:17):
of each class. Yes, we have a no I'm not
committing to these particular cars. We're just trying to choose
the class. That's right. We're just towing into the frigid
waters of automotive responsibility here. It's a tough adjustment for
a guy who has an addiction to performance cars and
the speeding tickets to prove it. So I used a
(42:37):
categorical approach, positioning his options not as specific cars that
might be too depressing, but in the abstract the question
is cautiously broad. Where on the family car evolutionary ladder
will our test subject, Malcolm Land will he go retro
and choose a wagon like his parents did, or will
(43:00):
he partake of the other options in the marketplace, the
minivan or the suv. We have three vehicles for you
to check out. Okay, okay. The first is the Kia Carnival.
Oh do you know what that is? Yes? I do,
I have. I have been looking at them online really furtively. Furtively. Well,
(43:23):
I like the idea that it doesn't it's a minivan
that doesn't look like a minivan, which is you know,
but it's all minivan. I mean, you're gonna see. I
can't wait for your experience with it or in your reaction.
The second is the wagon, the thing that a minivan killed.
The wagon that we have is a Volvo V ninety
(43:45):
cross country. Ah, so this is the jacked up one. Yes. Yeah,
they're all sort of jacked up. They all want to
be SUVs now. They all have kind of exaggerated fenders,
higher ride heights. You know, it's interesting because the way
that the cargo area is packaged in wagons is usually
(44:07):
pretty good for getting kids stuff in there, because it's
it's longer, it's generally wider, and it's it's more horizontal
than vertical. And then we come to the suv. The
vehicle once used for rock crawling and mud bogging has
been brought to heal. The modern day suv is the
(44:27):
de facto family car for many, but the one we're
going to drive today blurs the line between family car
and granite bowl. Eyed. It's the Mercedes AMG g L
fifty three and it is very red, very fast, and
very very expensive. I'll give you my pre ranking of
(44:48):
of what I believe a priori what I believe my
preferences will be. The One of the most dubious of
is the overpowered suv um. It's mostly for kind of
like symbolic sociological reasons. Perfect I don't want to be
the jackass in the amg MG. Right. I briefly had
(45:12):
a Boxter, which was the most beautiful drive I've ever had,
and I got rid of it because I was the
jackass in the Boxter. I didn't want to go the
jackass in the Boxter. I understand that, so I worry
that jackass factor high. Also, I've run a foul of
the police so many times up here, and the temptation
(45:32):
to speed in this thing is going to be, I'm
guessing overwhelming. Second, I think I'm quite drawn to Station Meggans.
They have great symbolic meaningful for me. I think they're
immensely practical. I'm a little dubious of these new fangled Volvos.
I wouldn't mind something that was just a proper psix
orve eight in it. And then I think I'm probably
(45:55):
most enthusiastic about the project of a Minian interesting because
the sort of underlying thing here is that we're going
from the emotional to the rational. We're going from the
know this crazy steroidal Mercedes, it's all jacked up and
it's got like you know, nightclub lighting and everything. And
(46:16):
it's read through the more rational station wagon, where the
cargo package is a little bit more sane and makes
a little bit more sense. It's lower to the ground,
but it's still fun to drive to the completely rational,
which is the one box minivan. Not fun. I have
no kind of status anxiety about driving a miniman. Well
(46:39):
here's a really interesting point, and Dan Neil from The
Wall Street Journal makes it all the time. He says,
minivans are symbols of virility. Sports cars are not minivans.
Mean you've had kids, you've reproduced? Yes, yes, they do. Yes.
So that's our baseline. That's those are your your preexisting biases.
(47:04):
And you think you're a minivan man, I think I
might be a miniman man. Yeah. I'm Eddie Alterman and
this is Car Show, my podcast about why we drive
what we drive. On today's season finale, we asked a question.
(47:27):
When it's time to trade in the fast car for
a family car, which do you choose? SUV, minivan or
station wagon, Papa Bear, Mama Bear or baby Bear. After
the break, Malcolm and I hit the road with a
ship ton of baby stuff in the backseat. Thanks for listening,
(47:56):
you can find Car Show with a few more Malcolm
cameos wherever you like to listen.
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