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, Revision's 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 Pushkin Plus.
For those who just can't get enough. We're giving every
episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus We've created
(00:38):
many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents. And
of course you'll never hear any ads. Subscribe to Pushkin
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 walk
to a restaurant on Peachtree Street in Midtown, not far
from their apartment.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
They were going out for the evening and they were
going to go to to see The Canterbury Tales, a
movie at the Atlanta Art Theater, which was located at
the corner of Peachtree and Thirteenth Street.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
So I'm standing in front of the side of the
theater with Michael Rose, executive vice president of the Atlanta
History Center.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And so they had gone to the Woman's Club prior
to going to the movie and just cutting across the
So she was so yeah, So they simply came out
of the Woman's Club and we're going to cross the street.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
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, 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.
(02:13):
People in Atlanta called her are Peggy Mitchell and her
husband leave the Atlanta Women's Club cross Peachtree mid Block
and as they do, an off duty taxi driver named
Hugh Gravit comes barreling around the bend. His car is
heading right for the couple.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
They were maybe about halfway across. That's when they see
the car. He heads one direction, she heads the other door.
But it's kind of like the driver I think saw
him first. So Veer's in the other direction, which is
right at her right.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So Gravit is speeding. He's going at least fifty miles
an hour down a curving two lane street in the
middle of a crowded city. If the driver's going fifty
miles an hour in a car from that era, of
fifty miles an hour is like going seventy today, it's
like it's nuts. Gravit hits Mitchell drags her several yards
(03:14):
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 after the accident, she
dies August sixteenth, nineteen forty nine. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
(03:36):
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, And in this episode, I want
to offer up a thought experiment. Margaret Mitchell died in
(04:00):
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
(04:20):
out as a journalist, living in a first floor apartment
in midtown Atlanta with her husband John marsh.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
It's where Margaret ended up writing most of Gone.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
With the wends, Jessica van Landide of the Historic Oakland Foundation,
is showing us around.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
She's working and she's writing, and she reaggravates an ankle injury,
and she's pretty much what we would consider bed written.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
She's 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
the book.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Somebody invites her to kind of come along to the
luncheon and they are all kind of offering their books,
and it 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, she you know, that probably did
for her what it might do for any of us
(05:42):
is the scout leaves and she runs home, and she
starts gathering up all of her manuscript.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Mitchell takes her draft of Gone with the Wind over
to the Scout's 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 when she if her house burns down,
does she lose her book?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Yes, yeah, she gives, she gives.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Does she give her only copy to the guy from McMillan, Yes,
Oh my god, this is caused me so much anxiety
and the.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Story gives gets on the train and loves it immediately.
At that point, she kind of realized that what she
had done and was like, oh no, I can I
have it back? And he's, you know, too late. He wanted,
he wanted the story.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
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 a dashing rep Butler. The book wins the Politzer Prize.
By the way, if you want to know how Southerners
really felt about black people, you should read Gone with
(06:58):
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, bigger than
Star Wars, including what, for generations of moviegoers is the
most memorable of Hollywood lines.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
You go whees, I go watch that do frankly might hear?
Speaker 6 (07:24):
I don't give a damn.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
The last words RTT Butler says 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.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
Three hundred thousand people lined Peachtree Street to watch the
motorcade come in from the Candler Airfield carrying the stars
Clark Gable, Vivian Lee, Olivia de Havilin.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Gary Palmertz, who wrote Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, A
Wonderful History of Atlanta counts. The Gone with the Win
movie premiere in Atlanta in nineteen thirty nine as one
of the signature moments in the city's history.
Speaker 6 (08:07):
You know, Mitchell came from an old Atlanta family. Her
two grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy. This was all
in her, the history of Atlanta, the history of the South.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Ah thee alike.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
It's felt a very great thing for Georgia.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
And the South to see our.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
Old confederates to come back to us. I felt that
way on this week, and I would factly given the
rev Yale.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
And nine.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Ten years past. Her fame only grows until one August night,
while crossing Peachtree Street 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 trunk. One of the iron laws of celebrity is
(09:14):
that what happens to the famous matters more than what
happens to the rest 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
(09:35):
something that people ignored, or made tasteless jokes about, or
looked away in horror.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
Word of Rock Hudson's death, of course, spread very quickly
today through the Hollywood community. Paul Dandridge of our System.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Hudson's death changed all that Hollywood stars rallied to the cause.
Congress passed a bill allocating hundreds of millions of dollars
to AIDS research.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
The word, of course from mister Hudson's people, is that
he does not want flowers. He would rather see the
donation center, the American Federation for AIDS Research. That was
the organization that he helped out.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
That wouldn't have happened if Hudson was a minor character actor.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
He was a professional, He was a gentleman, He was
a kind man. The things being said by many people.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
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
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,
(10:40):
and that puzzle deserves its own what if experiment. In
nineteen thirty seven, the legendary Hollywood mogul David O. Selznik
(11:00):
released A Star Is Born. I'm almost certain Margaret Mitchell
saw it. Everybody did. It was a big hit. David O.
Selznik would go on to be the producer who brought
Gom with the Win to the big screen. But there
is no other connection between Margaret Mitchell and A Star
is Born? Except what if there was? What if one
(11:22):
of those stories bled into another? That's the 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 it
hard capean It's so hard.
Speaker 7 (11:44):
Core the mean land.
Speaker 6 (11:47):
See you.
Speaker 7 (11:50):
He's just read then?
Speaker 6 (11:50):
Now, Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
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 and before that,
Judy Garland and James may 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
(12:19):
comes to Hollywood in search, of course, a fame and fortune.
She happens to catch the eye of a big star
named Norman may He gets her 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 Mayine falls. Here's the nineteen thirty
(12:44):
seven version with Frederick Marsh as Norman Mayine. Does Becky
Lester live here?
Speaker 5 (12:49):
Yes, I got a package for him. I'll signed for it.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So who are you?
Speaker 7 (12:53):
I'm her husband?
Speaker 5 (12:54):
Oh sure, I'm right here, mister.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Lester, mister Lester, Oh my god. In Hollywood slang, the
husband of a star actress is called a handbag. Norman
Mayne becomes a handbag. When Norman Mane is at his lowest,
Vicki offers to sacrifice her own career in order to
save his. When Norman realizes that, he swims out into
(13:19):
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 a day, takes
amphetamines by the fistful gambols away his salary at the
Clover Club in Hollywood, writes mannic endless memos to his
(13:43):
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, and of course Margaret
Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. But back in nineteen thirty seven,
(14:04):
he was preoccupied with A Star Is Born.
Speaker 8 (14:07):
My notion was to tell in terms of a rising star,
in order to have the Cinderella element with their path
crossing that of a falling star, to get the tragedy
of the of the X Star.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
This is an interview with Salznick from the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
And we created this more or less as we went along.
We started without anything more than than a vague idea
of where we were going, and it was really a
relatively easy script to write. I can say this that
ninety five percent of the dialogue in that picture was
(14:49):
actually straight out of life and was straight reportage, so
to speak.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
A Star Is Born is a movie on one level
about alcohol. Maybe that's too reductive, but the whole plot
hinges on the fact that the star character, Norman Maine,
cannot control his drinking Salesnick is rumored to have based
Norman May on the comedian Frank Faye, who was notorious
in Hollywood as a miserable drunk, but Selznick could have
(15:16):
just as easily based the character on his own brother,
Myron Selznick, one of the biggest agents in Hollywood and
a huge alcoholic. 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.
(15:38):
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 no shortage of addiction case studies
in Hollywood in those years, so in a Star is born.
Norman Maine marries Vicki, and as her career soars, his
drinking gets worse. When Vicki wins an oscar, he crashes
(16:00):
the stage. I mean, can you imagine an angry husband
crashing the stage at the Oscars?
Speaker 6 (16:05):
Now?
Speaker 5 (16:05):
I want to make a speech, gentlemen of the Academy
and fellow suckers. I got one of those ones for
a best performance. They don't mean a thing. People get
him every year. What I want is a special award,
something nobody else can get.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
After that performance, Norman Mayne checks into a sanatorium, cleans
himself up. Then he goes to the racetrack, orders a
ginger ale, and runs into his old publicist Libby, who
taunts him.
Speaker 8 (16:35):
I don't feel sorry for you.
Speaker 5 (16:37):
You've fixed yourself nice and comfortable.
Speaker 6 (16:39):
You can live off your wife. Now she'll buy your
drinks and put up with you, even though nobody else will.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Norman takes a swing at Libby, a glancing blow. Libby
swings back Norman's on the floor, humiliated for you. I'm
Norman may Well, that's not my pall.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
I don't bother to toasts him out.
Speaker 6 (16:56):
He's harmless, all add mister Levy, if you'll go let
him go what you eat to We can't fight any
better than he can act.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Norman shaken, brushes himself off, picks up his hat, walks
painfully over to the bar, and falls off the wagon.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
Give me a Scotch double. Leave the bottle here.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
I'm going to read what happens next. After Norman's epic
drinking pinge, we see Norman's cars speeding along the Malabu Road.
We see Norman at the wheel, very drunk and singing
should 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
(17:39):
right side 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.
(18:00):
We see Norman 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,
(18:24):
and in nineteen thirty seven it would have stunned American audiences.
Automobiles were really on your generation old 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
(18:46):
just ended 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.
(19:07):
In nineteen thirty nine, American Medical Association put out guidelines
on drunk driving and said that the threshold for 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 ninety
(19:27):
nine percent of you listening to this podcast 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.
Speaker 9 (19:43):
Yeah, it was. It was just passivity throughout the system.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I called up Baron Lerner, who teaches at NYU Medical School.
He wrote a fascinating history of drunk driving called One
for the Road.
Speaker 9 (19:54):
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 thee at least the ones who were
devoted to public safety were from frustrated that there was
no prosecution.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Well, it's more than that word you use right now
as 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 of an
accident that happens because the driver is under the influence
of alcohol is somehow unintentional that you can't hold the
(20:31):
driver responsible in a kind of moral sense for their
actions while they were drunk, which is really weird to
me because implicit in that is an acknowledgment 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
(20:52):
that we're not going to hold you responsible for it. Yeah,
it's weird.
Speaker 9 (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. Sort of bad luck for the drunk
(21:40):
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 your pocket.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
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 starring a
young Carrie Grant as a bon vivon named George. Grant
and his wife Marian played by Constance Bennett, are a young,
rich couple who spend all their time dancing and drinking.
(22:33):
After another of partying, they take a drive much too fast.
They crashed the car. George and Marian both die and
become ghosts. Stranded on earth because they've done nothing to
(22:56):
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 another car crash, and Topper's take
home lesson is that he needs to keep living it up.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Well, I won't go back why I won't do it,
won't do what? I won't go back to the routine.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
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 Carry Grant's character wants 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
(23:47):
A Star is Born. Drunk drivers do not live happily
ever after. In A Star is Born, drunk drivers face
consequences for their actions. Actually, let me rephrase that A
Star Is Born is almost a tragedy where drunk drivers
face consequences for their actions. That scene I read to
you earlier, or Norman Mayane drunkenly crashes into another car
(24:11):
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. Salsnick 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. Salsnick turns to two
(24:34):
would be screenwriters on his staff, Bud Schulberg and Ring
Lardner junior. Schaalberg is twenty two at the time and
working as a script reader, and 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. Salznick doesn't care. Lardner and
(24:55):
Sholberg look over the third act of A Star is
Born and writes Selznick a memo one type written sheet
about the movie's internal logic and what it demands. Quote.
Her proposed sacrifice, overheard by Norman, offers no great temptation
to him because there is no possibility of a comeback
(25:16):
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 to find a
way out. Selznik is convinced. On November sixth, he writes
his production supervisor, would you please advise the necessary departments
(25:36):
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 four days.
Turns out he's been arrested for drunken driving, crashing his
car into a tree, and assaulting a police officer. The
judge gives him a tongue lashing.
Speaker 5 (25:58):
You've come pretty low, haven't you. There isn'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 the power to inflict ye
have for injury on emicent people. I think we'd better
deny you that barber a while. Nither days the set
of jail.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
But then Norman's beloved comes running up to the front
of the courtroom.
Speaker 6 (26:21):
Please wait, I'm his wife.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Yes, I recognize him as Lester.
Speaker 6 (26:27):
Please, Judge, I promise you this won't happen again.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
I'll be responsible for him.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
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 hits a tree,
where the law makes a half hearted attempt to hold
(26:56):
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 moral defeat.
It's the ultimate sacrifice for the woman he loves. David O.
(27:21):
Selznick 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 Dorothy Parker's original
subversive version had made it to the big screen. The
(27:50):
driver who hit Margaret Mitchell, Hugh Gravit spends two years
in prison on manslaughter charges. Then he moves to a
small town outside Atlanta. He was still living there decades
later when the journalist Gary Pomerantz tracked him down.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
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, and he
smiled and said good morning.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
They sat outside in his yard and talked for a
few hours.
Speaker 6 (28:28):
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 could have imagined. And again he must have said three,
(28:49):
four or five times, I'd rather it had been me
instead of her.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Do you think he was drinking?
Speaker 6 (28:56):
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 wasn't to him. Alcohol wasn't a part of this.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Alcohol wasn't a part of this. That's what's so strange
about going back through the accounts of markeat Mitchell's death
the fact that his drinking might have been the reason
he was speeding, somehow didn't seem to occur to many people.
A police officer at the scene later testified that he
had smelled alcohol on Gravit's breath. Gravit himself did not
(29:33):
deny that he had been drinking, but no one gave
him a breathalyzer. For goodness sake, the man had over
twenty previous traffic citations. Gravit stood for half an hour
at 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. He's a reckless menace. His license
(29:56):
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 editorial in the Atlanta Journal
in nineteen forty nine read quote for Gravit as a person,
we have the utmost sympathy. He surely did not intend
(30:18):
to kill anyone, and tragedy will haunt him as long
as he lives. It was an accident, wasn't it? These
things happen.
Speaker 9 (30:28):
Here's a beloved author, I mean the author have gone
with the wind like beloved. Not especially in Atlanta. People
were man and frustrated that she died, But there was
also sympathy for the driver.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
This is Baron Lerner again, author of One for the Road.
Speaker 9 (30:43):
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, what's going on here? Like the tables are reversed.
He was completely at fault, speeding, probably drinking, and yet
(31:04):
in an odd way, Mitchell partly becomes the blame.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Lerner said. The detail from this whole story that stays
with him is that Gravitt and his wife came to
Grady Hospital with flowers for Mitchell as she lay in
a coma.
Speaker 9 (31:20):
It was seen at the time like, i''re really sorry
this happened. We want to give you some flowers that
make it better. There was unbelievable tolerance of an activity
that shouldn't have been tolerated.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
It isn't just that he brought flowers. There's an article
in one of the local newspapers where a reporter goes
to visit Gravit in jail and finds him praying a
Bible opened to the Book of Samuel on his bed.
Gravit tells the reporter, I wanted to go to her funeral,
but that was impossible, And then Gravit says, God knows
it was an accident.
Speaker 9 (31:52):
People also after the fact were saying, with no justification
at all, well, Margaret Mitchell would have forgiven him right.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
How did they know right?
Speaker 9 (32:03):
But that was the nature of the entity at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
It would be the nineteen cents, seventies 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 what movies do at their best. The shocking
sight of a drunk man struggling to realize he's just
(32:30):
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 Gravit hits
the country's most beloved author, America would have been ready
to say the man who greens down Peachtree is not
a victim. He's a criminal. But we'll never know, of course,
(32:51):
because David O. Selznick never gave the film the ending
it deserved. Incidentally, Ardner and Schulberg write in their memo
to Selznick, whether or not you show them mangled bodies,
the death of two innocent people as a step in
the downfall of A Star seems a little callous. Sure,
(33:15):
let us instead have the blind drunk Norman Mayne hid
a tree and be rescued in court by his wife.
Hugh Gravitt and Norman Mayne were both tests of our
tolerance for drunk driving, and in both cases, society looked
at their behavior and shrugged ring. Lardner Junior and Bud
Schulberg rewrote another scene in David O. Selznick's A Star
(33:39):
Is Born, the very last scene in the movie. For
the story to work, Vicky Lester somehow needed to reconcile
her own rise with her husband's fall. How should she
do that? Lardner and Schilberg's solution was simple, a single line.
We see Vicky Lester at the moment of her greatest
professional triumph at the premiere of the movie. She has
(34:02):
just start in with her new found professional freedom. A
reporter puts a microphone in front.
Speaker 6 (34:07):
Of her ms left.
Speaker 7 (34:14):
This microphone is on an international hooker throughout the world.
Speaker 5 (34:18):
Your fans are hoping that you will say a few words.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
To 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.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
Hello, everybody, this is missus Norman Maine.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Frankly, my dear you know the rest Revisionist History is
(35:12):
produced by Elouise Linton, Leeman Gestu and Jacob Smith, with
Tolly Emlin and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Bartner.
Our executive producer is Miila Bell. Original scoring by Luis Karra,
mastering by Flon Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact
checking by Keishaw Williams. Special thanks to the screenwriter Charles Randolph,
(35:35):
also close friend of mine who is a big help
in framing this episode, with Mike Berbiglia, Virginia Huffern and
Angus Fletcher and Baron Lerner, who joined me for our
live show on the Star's Board, and also our live
show producer Kate Downer.
Speaker 7 (35:51):
I'm Malcolm Glava, revisionist history listeners. This is Eddie Alterman,
(36:12):
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 haller. We crossed
test a four hundred and twenty nine horsepower German suv,
a beautiful Swedish luxury wagon, and the dreaded Mini van.
(36:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
So all I have right now is a twenty fourteen
BMWX one And.
Speaker 7 (36:50):
Now most people would say that's perfectly sufficient, but I
wouldn't say that.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
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 that now, I mean, this
(37:17):
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. Car seats are just ginormous.
Speaker 7 (37:25):
They're huge. Yeah, they're fortress like.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
They were just like so yeah, so I clearly what
I have right now is insufficient.
Speaker 7 (37:35):
That's me and Malcolm Gladwell a couple of months ago,
talking shop, just like we always seem 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.
(37:56):
I heard the dulcet tones. Malcolm introduced himself as a reader,
which I could hardly believe because I was at that
very moment breaking apart an 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
(38:18):
and thought all cars were yellow with a light on top.
But this Canadian kid impressed me. He was talking torque
curves and limited slip differentials. 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.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Altamon hits the brakes firmly, smoothly, easily. We'd come to
a halt.
Speaker 7 (38:45):
Throng was open. But now it was my chance to
return the favor. Malcolm needed my guidance. He needed to know.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
How do I effectively move around a young family and
all the stuff that comes with it.
Speaker 7 (39:02):
Malcolm had just become a 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. So I had a
(39:25):
pairachute in there. And by parachute, I mean pack my
stuff into a mini van in Detroit and drive six
hundred miles east to meet Malcolm in Hudson, New York,
home to the Pushkin offices, and together we would go
on a quest to find Malcolm macarr for the pastoral
life with a child, maybe even two eventually. There's a
(39:45):
great PGA heroic mind. He says, having one kid is
like having a dog. Having two kids is like having
a zoo. 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,
(40:05):
you need your car seat for the plane and for
the cab and all that, and you need your stroller,
and there's just so much stuff. It's like packing a
small army.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
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 creamium line six, and it has
the hydraulic steering. It's got like old school. The steering
on this car is so beautiful. And every time I
get into any other car, regardless of the price, I
(40:35):
don't think it steers as well as my as my
ex one. So I'm resigned to the fact I'm surrendering.
Speaker 7 (40:41):
So that's a hard thing to give up, for sure.
But you know, deciding which way to go for a
people mover, for a family car, for you know, something
that has a lot of space, it's really sort of
a deep psychological question.
Speaker 8 (40:57):
It is.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
I now, I'm a child, as I'm sure all every
member of my generation is. I'm a child of the
station wagon. Yeah, I'm sure you were. I was what
was what were your family wagons?
Speaker 4 (41:09):
Uh?
Speaker 7 (41:10):
Ultomobile custom Cruiser. Uh that was the biggie with the
slide 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. So unsafe. And
(41:30):
my mom never got a minivan.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Our car growing up, our family wagon was a in
the beginning was a Poujo four O four.
Speaker 7 (41:38):
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 then the minivan market itself got destroyed by
(41:59):
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
wagon to the minivan to the suv. Which one is
best for you? For me?
Speaker 1 (42:15):
So we have what we have a we have a
representative of each class. Yes, we have a no I'm
not committing to these particular cars. I'm we're just trying
to choose the class.
Speaker 7 (42:25):
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 categorical approach,
positioning his options not as specific cars that might be
too depressing, but in the abstract the question is cautiously broad.
(42:49):
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 he partake of the
other options in the marketplace, the minivan or the suv.
We have three vehicles for you to check out.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Okay, okay.
Speaker 7 (43:09):
The first is the Kia Carnival. Oh do you know
what that is?
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (43:14):
I do.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
I have been looking at them online really.
Speaker 7 (43:20):
Furtively.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
For furtively, Well, I like the idea that it doesn't
it's a minivan that doesn't look like a minivan, which
is you.
Speaker 7 (43:29):
Know, but it's all minivan. I mean, you're gonna see.
I can't wait for your experience with it and your reaction.
The second is the wagon, the thing the minivan killed.
The wagon that we have is a Volvo V ninety
cross Country.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Ah, so this is the jacked up one.
Speaker 6 (43:49):
Yes.
Speaker 7 (43:49):
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
pretty good for getting kids stuff in there, because it's
(44:10):
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
de facto family car for many, but the one we're
(44:31):
going to drive today blurs the line between family car
and granite bowl. Eyede. It's the Mercedes AMG G L
E fifty three, and it is very red, very fast,
and very very expensive.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
I'll give you my pre ranking of what I believe
a priori what I believe my preferences will be. The
one I'm most dubious of is the overpowered suv. It's
mostly for kind of like symbolic sociological reasons perfect. I
don't want to be the jackass in the amg AMG Right.
(45:10):
I briefly had 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 be the jackass in the box I understand that,
so I worry that jackass factor high. Also, I have
run a foul of the police so many times up here,
(45:30):
and the temptation to speed in this thing is going
to be, I'm guessing overwhelming. Second, I think I'm quite
drawn to station Megans. They have great symbolic meaning 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 B six or V eight in it.
(45:53):
And then I think I'm probably most enthusiastic about the
prospect of a Miniat.
Speaker 7 (45:58):
Interesting because the sort of underlying thing here is that
we're going from the emotional to the rational. We're going
from you know, this crazy steroidal Mercedes. It's all jacked
up and it's got like, you know, nightclub lighting and everything,
and it's red through the more rational station wagon, where
(46:22):
the cargo package is a little bit more sane and
makes a little bit more sense. It's all ower to
the ground, but it's still fun to drive to the
completely rational, which is the one box minivan. Not fun.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
I have no kind of status anxiety about driving a miniman.
Speaker 7 (46:39):
Well here's a really interesting point, and Dan Neil from
the Wall Street Journal makes it all the time. He says,
minivans are simples of virility. Sports cars are not minivans.
Mean you've had kids, you've reproduced?
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Yes, yes they do.
Speaker 8 (46:56):
Yes.
Speaker 7 (46:59):
So that's our baseline. That's those are your pre existing biases.
And you think you're a minivanman, I think I might
be a minivanman. Yeah. I'm Eddie Alterman, and this is
Car Show, my podcast about why we drive what we drive.
(47:24):
On today's season finale, we asked the question, when it's
time to trade in the fastcar 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 shit ton of baby
(47:44):
stuff in the backseat. Thanks for listening. You can find
Car Show with a few more Malcolm cameos, Wherever you
like to listen,
Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revision's 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 Pushkin Plus.
For those who just can't get enough. We're giving every
episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus We've created
(00:38):
many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents. And
of course you'll never hear any ads. Subscribe to Pushkin
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 walk
to a restaurant on Peachtree Street in Midtown, not far
from their apartment.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
They were going out for the evening and they were
going to go to to see The Canterbury Tales, a
movie at the Atlanta Art Theater, which was located at
the corner of Peachtree and Thirteenth Street.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
So I'm standing in front of the side of the
theater with Michael Rose, executive vice president of the Atlanta
History Center.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And so they had gone to the Woman's Club prior
to going to the movie and just cutting across the
So she was so yeah, So they simply came out
of the Woman's Club and we're going to cross the street.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
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, 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.
(02:13):
People in Atlanta called her are Peggy Mitchell and her
husband leave the Atlanta Women's Club cross Peachtree mid Block
and as they do, an off duty taxi driver named
Hugh Gravit comes barreling around the bend. His car is
heading right for the couple.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
They were maybe about halfway across. That's when they see
the car. He heads one direction, she heads the other door.
But it's kind of like the driver I think saw
him first. So Veer's in the other direction, which is
right at her right.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So Gravit is speeding. He's going at least fifty miles
an hour down a curving two lane street in the
middle of a crowded city. If the driver's going fifty
miles an hour in a car from that era, of
fifty miles an hour is like going seventy today, it's
like it's nuts. Gravit hits Mitchell drags her several yards
(03:14):
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 after the accident, she
dies August sixteenth, nineteen forty nine. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
(03:36):
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, And in this episode, I want
to offer up a thought experiment. Margaret Mitchell died in
(04:00):
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
(04:20):
out as a journalist, living in a first floor apartment
in midtown Atlanta with her husband John marsh.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
It's where Margaret ended up writing most of Gone.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
With the wends, Jessica van Landide of the Historic Oakland Foundation,
is showing us around.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
She's working and she's writing, and she reaggravates an ankle injury,
and she's pretty much what we would consider bed written.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
She's 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
the book.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Somebody invites her to kind of come along to the
luncheon and they are all kind of offering their books,
and it 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, she you know, that probably did
for her what it might do for any of us
(05:42):
is the scout leaves and she runs home, and she
starts gathering up all of her manuscript.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Mitchell takes her draft of Gone with the Wind over
to the Scout's 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 when she if her house burns down,
does she lose her book?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Yes, yeah, she gives, she gives.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Does she give her only copy to the guy from McMillan, Yes,
Oh my god, this is caused me so much anxiety
and the.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Story gives gets on the train and loves it immediately.
At that point, she kind of realized that what she
had done and was like, oh no, I can I
have it back? And he's, you know, too late. He wanted,
he wanted the story.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
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 a dashing rep Butler. The book wins the Politzer Prize.
By the way, if you want to know how Southerners
really felt about black people, you should read Gone with
(06:58):
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, bigger than
Star Wars, including what, for generations of moviegoers is the
most memorable of Hollywood lines.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
You go whees, I go watch that do frankly might hear?
Speaker 6 (07:24):
I don't give a damn.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
The last words RTT Butler says 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.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
Three hundred thousand people lined Peachtree Street to watch the
motorcade come in from the Candler Airfield carrying the stars
Clark Gable, Vivian Lee, Olivia de Havilin.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Gary Palmertz, who wrote Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, A
Wonderful History of Atlanta counts. The Gone with the Win
movie premiere in Atlanta in nineteen thirty nine as one
of the signature moments in the city's history.
Speaker 6 (08:07):
You know, Mitchell came from an old Atlanta family. Her
two grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy. This was all
in her, the history of Atlanta, the history of the South.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Ah thee alike.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
It's felt a very great thing for Georgia.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
And the South to see our.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
Old confederates to come back to us. I felt that
way on this week, and I would factly given the
rev Yale.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
And nine.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Ten years past. Her fame only grows until one August night,
while crossing Peachtree Street 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 trunk. One of the iron laws of celebrity is
(09:14):
that what happens to the famous matters more than what
happens to the rest 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
(09:35):
something that people ignored, or made tasteless jokes about, or
looked away in horror.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
Word of Rock Hudson's death, of course, spread very quickly
today through the Hollywood community. Paul Dandridge of our System.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Hudson's death changed all that Hollywood stars rallied to the cause.
Congress passed a bill allocating hundreds of millions of dollars
to AIDS research.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
The word, of course from mister Hudson's people, is that
he does not want flowers. He would rather see the
donation center, the American Federation for AIDS Research. That was
the organization that he helped out.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
That wouldn't have happened if Hudson was a minor character actor.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
He was a professional, He was a gentleman, He was
a kind man. The things being said by many people.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
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
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,
(10:40):
and that puzzle deserves its own what if experiment. In
nineteen thirty seven, the legendary Hollywood mogul David O. Selznik
(11:00):
released A Star Is Born. I'm almost certain Margaret Mitchell
saw it. Everybody did. It was a big hit. David O.
Selznik would go on to be the producer who brought
Gom with the Win to the big screen. But there
is no other connection between Margaret Mitchell and A Star
is Born? Except what if there was? What if one
(11:22):
of those stories bled into another? That's the 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 it
hard capean It's so hard.
Speaker 7 (11:44):
Core the mean land.
Speaker 6 (11:47):
See you.
Speaker 7 (11:50):
He's just read then?
Speaker 6 (11:50):
Now, Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
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 and before that,
Judy Garland and James may 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
(12:19):
comes to Hollywood in search, of course, a fame and fortune.
She happens to catch the eye of a big star
named Norman may He gets her 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 Mayine falls. Here's the nineteen thirty
(12:44):
seven version with Frederick Marsh as Norman Mayine. Does Becky
Lester live here?
Speaker 5 (12:49):
Yes, I got a package for him. I'll signed for it.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So who are you?
Speaker 7 (12:53):
I'm her husband?
Speaker 5 (12:54):
Oh sure, I'm right here, mister.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Lester, mister Lester, Oh my god. In Hollywood slang, the
husband of a star actress is called a handbag. Norman
Mayne becomes a handbag. When Norman Mane is at his lowest,
Vicki offers to sacrifice her own career in order to
save his. When Norman realizes that, he swims out into
(13:19):
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 a day, takes
amphetamines by the fistful gambols away his salary at the
Clover Club in Hollywood, writes mannic endless memos to his
(13:43):
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, and of course Margaret
Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. But back in nineteen thirty seven,
(14:04):
he was preoccupied with A Star Is Born.
Speaker 8 (14:07):
My notion was to tell in terms of a rising star,
in order to have the Cinderella element with their path
crossing that of a falling star, to get the tragedy
of the of the X Star.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
This is an interview with Salznick from the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
And we created this more or less as we went along.
We started without anything more than than a vague idea
of where we were going, and it was really a
relatively easy script to write. I can say this that
ninety five percent of the dialogue in that picture was
(14:49):
actually straight out of life and was straight reportage, so
to speak.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
A Star Is Born is a movie on one level
about alcohol. Maybe that's too reductive, but the whole plot
hinges on the fact that the star character, Norman Maine,
cannot control his drinking Salesnick is rumored to have based
Norman May on the comedian Frank Faye, who was notorious
in Hollywood as a miserable drunk, but Selznick could have
(15:16):
just as easily based the character on his own brother,
Myron Selznick, one of the biggest agents in Hollywood and
a huge alcoholic. 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.
(15:38):
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 no shortage of addiction case studies
in Hollywood in those years, so in a Star is born.
Norman Maine marries Vicki, and as her career soars, his
drinking gets worse. When Vicki wins an oscar, he crashes
(16:00):
the stage. I mean, can you imagine an angry husband
crashing the stage at the Oscars?
Speaker 6 (16:05):
Now?
Speaker 5 (16:05):
I want to make a speech, gentlemen of the Academy
and fellow suckers. I got one of those ones for
a best performance. They don't mean a thing. People get
him every year. What I want is a special award,
something nobody else can get.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
After that performance, Norman Mayne checks into a sanatorium, cleans
himself up. Then he goes to the racetrack, orders a
ginger ale, and runs into his old publicist Libby, who
taunts him.
Speaker 8 (16:35):
I don't feel sorry for you.
Speaker 5 (16:37):
You've fixed yourself nice and comfortable.
Speaker 6 (16:39):
You can live off your wife. Now she'll buy your
drinks and put up with you, even though nobody else will.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Norman takes a swing at Libby, a glancing blow. Libby
swings back Norman's on the floor, humiliated for you. I'm
Norman may Well, that's not my pall.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
I don't bother to toasts him out.
Speaker 6 (16:56):
He's harmless, all add mister Levy, if you'll go let
him go what you eat to We can't fight any
better than he can act.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Norman shaken, brushes himself off, picks up his hat, walks
painfully over to the bar, and falls off the wagon.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
Give me a Scotch double. Leave the bottle here.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
I'm going to read what happens next. After Norman's epic
drinking pinge, we see Norman's cars speeding along the Malabu Road.
We see Norman at the wheel, very drunk and singing
should 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
(17:39):
right side 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.
(18:00):
We see Norman 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,
(18:24):
and in nineteen thirty seven it would have stunned American audiences.
Automobiles were really on your generation old 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
(18:46):
just ended 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.
(19:07):
In nineteen thirty nine, American Medical Association put out guidelines
on drunk driving and said that the threshold for 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 ninety
(19:27):
nine percent of you listening to this podcast 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.
Speaker 9 (19:43):
Yeah, it was. It was just passivity throughout the system.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I called up Baron Lerner, who teaches at NYU Medical School.
He wrote a fascinating history of drunk driving called One
for the Road.
Speaker 9 (19:54):
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 thee at least the ones who were
devoted to public safety were from frustrated that there was
no prosecution.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Well, it's more than that word you use right now
as 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 of an
accident that happens because the driver is under the influence
of alcohol is somehow unintentional that you can't hold the
(20:31):
driver responsible in a kind of moral sense for their
actions while they were drunk, which is really weird to
me because implicit in that is an acknowledgment 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
(20:52):
that we're not going to hold you responsible for it. Yeah,
it's weird.
Speaker 9 (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. Sort of bad luck for the drunk
(21:40):
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 your pocket.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
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 starring a
young Carrie Grant as a bon vivon named George. Grant
and his wife Marian played by Constance Bennett, are a young,
rich couple who spend all their time dancing and drinking.
(22:33):
After another of partying, they take a drive much too fast.
They crashed the car. George and Marian both die and
become ghosts. Stranded on earth because they've done nothing to
(22:56):
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 another car crash, and Topper's take
home lesson is that he needs to keep living it up.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Well, I won't go back why I won't do it,
won't do what? I won't go back to the routine.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
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 Carry Grant's character wants 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
(23:47):
A Star is Born. Drunk drivers do not live happily
ever after. In A Star is Born, drunk drivers face
consequences for their actions. Actually, let me rephrase that A
Star Is Born is almost a tragedy where drunk drivers
face consequences for their actions. That scene I read to
you earlier, or Norman Mayane drunkenly crashes into another car
(24:11):
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. Salsnick 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. Salsnick turns to two
(24:34):
would be screenwriters on his staff, Bud Schulberg and Ring
Lardner junior. Schaalberg is twenty two at the time and
working as a script reader, and 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. Salznick doesn't care. Lardner and
(24:55):
Sholberg look over the third act of A Star is
Born and writes Selznick a memo one type written sheet
about the movie's internal logic and what it demands. Quote.
Her proposed sacrifice, overheard by Norman, offers no great temptation
to him because there is no possibility of a comeback
(25:16):
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 to find a
way out. Selznik is convinced. On November sixth, he writes
his production supervisor, would you please advise the necessary departments
(25:36):
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 four days.
Turns out he's been arrested for drunken driving, crashing his
car into a tree, and assaulting a police officer. The
judge gives him a tongue lashing.
Speaker 5 (25:58):
You've come pretty low, haven't you. There isn'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 the power to inflict ye
have for injury on emicent people. I think we'd better
deny you that barber a while. Nither days the set
of jail.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
But then Norman's beloved comes running up to the front
of the courtroom.
Speaker 6 (26:21):
Please wait, I'm his wife.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Yes, I recognize him as Lester.
Speaker 6 (26:27):
Please, Judge, I promise you this won't happen again.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
I'll be responsible for him.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
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 hits a tree,
where the law makes a half hearted attempt to hold
(26:56):
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 moral defeat.
It's the ultimate sacrifice for the woman he loves. David O.
(27:21):
Selznick 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 Dorothy Parker's original
subversive version had made it to the big screen. The
(27:50):
driver who hit Margaret Mitchell, Hugh Gravit spends two years
in prison on manslaughter charges. Then he moves to a
small town outside Atlanta. He was still living there decades
later when the journalist Gary Pomerantz tracked him down.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
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, and he
smiled and said good morning.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
They sat outside in his yard and talked for a
few hours.
Speaker 6 (28:28):
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 could have imagined. And again he must have said three,
(28:49):
four or five times, I'd rather it had been me
instead of her.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Do you think he was drinking?
Speaker 6 (28:56):
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 wasn't to him. Alcohol wasn't a part of this.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Alcohol wasn't a part of this. That's what's so strange
about going back through the accounts of markeat Mitchell's death
the fact that his drinking might have been the reason
he was speeding, somehow didn't seem to occur to many people.
A police officer at the scene later testified that he
had smelled alcohol on Gravit's breath. Gravit himself did not
(29:33):
deny that he had been drinking, but no one gave
him a breathalyzer. For goodness sake, the man had over
twenty previous traffic citations. Gravit stood for half an hour
at 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. He's a reckless menace. His license
(29:56):
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 editorial in the Atlanta Journal
in nineteen forty nine read quote for Gravit as a person,
we have the utmost sympathy. He surely did not intend
(30:18):
to kill anyone, and tragedy will haunt him as long
as he lives. It was an accident, wasn't it? These
things happen.
Speaker 9 (30:28):
Here's a beloved author, I mean the author have gone
with the wind like beloved. Not especially in Atlanta. People
were man and frustrated that she died, But there was
also sympathy for the driver.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
This is Baron Lerner again, author of One for the Road.
Speaker 9 (30:43):
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, what's going on here? Like the tables are reversed.
He was completely at fault, speeding, probably drinking, and yet
(31:04):
in an odd way, Mitchell partly becomes the blame.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Lerner said. The detail from this whole story that stays
with him is that Gravitt and his wife came to
Grady Hospital with flowers for Mitchell as she lay in
a coma.
Speaker 9 (31:20):
It was seen at the time like, i''re really sorry
this happened. We want to give you some flowers that
make it better. There was unbelievable tolerance of an activity
that shouldn't have been tolerated.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
It isn't just that he brought flowers. There's an article
in one of the local newspapers where a reporter goes
to visit Gravit in jail and finds him praying a
Bible opened to the Book of Samuel on his bed.
Gravit tells the reporter, I wanted to go to her funeral,
but that was impossible, And then Gravit says, God knows
it was an accident.
Speaker 9 (31:52):
People also after the fact were saying, with no justification
at all, well, Margaret Mitchell would have forgiven him right.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
How did they know right?
Speaker 9 (32:03):
But that was the nature of the entity at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
It would be the nineteen cents, seventies 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 what movies do at their best. The shocking
sight of a drunk man struggling to realize he's just
(32:30):
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 Gravit hits
the country's most beloved author, America would have been ready
to say the man who greens down Peachtree is not
a victim. He's a criminal. But we'll never know, of course,
(32:51):
because David O. Selznick never gave the film the ending
it deserved. Incidentally, Ardner and Schulberg write in their memo
to Selznick, whether or not you show them mangled bodies,
the death of two innocent people as a step in
the downfall of A Star seems a little callous. Sure,
(33:15):
let us instead have the blind drunk Norman Mayne hid
a tree and be rescued in court by his wife.
Hugh Gravitt and Norman Mayne were both tests of our
tolerance for drunk driving, and in both cases, society looked
at their behavior and shrugged ring. Lardner Junior and Bud
Schulberg rewrote another scene in David O. Selznick's A Star
(33:39):
Is Born, the very last scene in the movie. For
the story to work, Vicky Lester somehow needed to reconcile
her own rise with her husband's fall. How should she
do that? Lardner and Schilberg's solution was simple, a single line.
We see Vicky Lester at the moment of her greatest
professional triumph at the premiere of the movie. She has
(34:02):
just start in with her new found professional freedom. A
reporter puts a microphone in front.
Speaker 6 (34:07):
Of her ms left.
Speaker 7 (34:14):
This microphone is on an international hooker throughout the world.
Speaker 5 (34:18):
Your fans are hoping that you will say a few words.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
To 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.
Speaker 5 (34:38):
Hello, everybody, this is missus Norman Maine.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Frankly, my dear you know the rest Revisionist History is
(35:12):
produced by Elouise Linton, Leeman Gestu and Jacob Smith, with
Tolly Emlin and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Bartner.
Our executive producer is Miila Bell. Original scoring by Luis Karra,
mastering by Flon Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact
checking by Keishaw Williams. Special thanks to the screenwriter Charles Randolph,
(35:35):
also close friend of mine who is a big help
in framing this episode, with Mike Berbiglia, Virginia Huffern and
Angus Fletcher and Baron Lerner, who joined me for our
live show on the Star's Board, and also our live
show producer Kate Downer.
Speaker 7 (35:51):
I'm Malcolm Glava, revisionist history listeners. This is Eddie Alterman,
(36:12):
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 haller. We crossed
test a four hundred and twenty nine horsepower German suv,
a beautiful Swedish luxury wagon, and the dreaded Mini van.
(36:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
So all I have right now is a twenty fourteen
BMWX one And.
Speaker 7 (36:50):
Now most people would say that's perfectly sufficient, but I
wouldn't say that.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
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 that now, I mean, this
(37:17):
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. Car seats are just ginormous.
Speaker 7 (37:25):
They're huge. Yeah, they're fortress like.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
They were just like so yeah, so I clearly what
I have right now is insufficient.
Speaker 7 (37:35):
That's me and Malcolm Gladwell a couple of months ago,
talking shop, just like we always seem 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.
(37:56):
I heard the dulcet tones. Malcolm introduced himself as a reader,
which I could hardly believe because I was at that
very moment breaking apart an 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
(38:18):
and thought all cars were yellow with a light on top.
But this Canadian kid impressed me. He was talking torque
curves and limited slip differentials. 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.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Altamon hits the brakes firmly, smoothly, easily. We'd come to
a halt.
Speaker 7 (38:45):
Throng was open. But now it was my chance to
return the favor. Malcolm needed my guidance. He needed to know.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
How do I effectively move around a young family and
all the stuff that comes with it.
Speaker 7 (39:02):
Malcolm had just become a 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. So I had a
(39:25):
pairachute in there. And by parachute, I mean pack my
stuff into a mini van in Detroit and drive six
hundred miles east to meet Malcolm in Hudson, New York,
home to the Pushkin offices, and together we would go
on a quest to find Malcolm macarr for the pastoral
life with a child, maybe even two eventually. There's a
(39:45):
great PGA heroic mind. He says, having one kid is
like having a dog. Having two kids is like having
a zoo. 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,
(40:05):
you need your car seat for the plane and for
the cab and all that, and you need your stroller,
and there's just so much stuff. It's like packing a
small army.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
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 creamium line six, and it has
the hydraulic steering. It's got like old school. The steering
on this car is so beautiful. And every time I
get into any other car, regardless of the price, I
(40:35):
don't think it steers as well as my as my
ex one. So I'm resigned to the fact I'm surrendering.
Speaker 7 (40:41):
So that's a hard thing to give up, for sure.
But you know, deciding which way to go for a
people mover, for a family car, for you know, something
that has a lot of space, it's really sort of
a deep psychological question.
Speaker 8 (40:57):
It is.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
I now, I'm a child, as I'm sure all every
member of my generation is. I'm a child of the
station wagon. Yeah, I'm sure you were. I was what
was what were your family wagons?
Speaker 4 (41:09):
Uh?
Speaker 7 (41:10):
Ultomobile custom Cruiser. Uh that was the biggie with the
slide 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. So unsafe. And
(41:30):
my mom never got a minivan.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Our car growing up, our family wagon was a in
the beginning was a Poujo four O four.
Speaker 7 (41:38):
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 then the minivan market itself got destroyed by
(41:59):
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
wagon to the minivan to the suv. Which one is
best for you? For me?
Speaker 1 (42:15):
So we have what we have a we have a
representative of each class. Yes, we have a no I'm
not committing to these particular cars. I'm we're just trying
to choose the class.
Speaker 7 (42:25):
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 categorical approach,
positioning his options not as specific cars that might be
too depressing, but in the abstract the question is cautiously broad.
(42:49):
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 he partake of the
other options in the marketplace, the minivan or the suv.
We have three vehicles for you to check out.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Okay, okay.
Speaker 7 (43:09):
The first is the Kia Carnival. Oh do you know
what that is?
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (43:14):
I do.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
I have been looking at them online really.
Speaker 7 (43:20):
Furtively.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
For furtively, Well, I like the idea that it doesn't
it's a minivan that doesn't look like a minivan, which
is you.
Speaker 7 (43:29):
Know, but it's all minivan. I mean, you're gonna see.
I can't wait for your experience with it and your reaction.
The second is the wagon, the thing the minivan killed.
The wagon that we have is a Volvo V ninety
cross Country.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Ah, so this is the jacked up one.
Speaker 6 (43:49):
Yes.
Speaker 7 (43:49):
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
pretty good for getting kids stuff in there, because it's
(44:10):
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
de facto family car for many, but the one we're
(44:31):
going to drive today blurs the line between family car
and granite bowl. Eyede. It's the Mercedes AMG G L
E fifty three, and it is very red, very fast,
and very very expensive.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
I'll give you my pre ranking of what I believe
a priori what I believe my preferences will be. The
one I'm most dubious of is the overpowered suv. It's
mostly for kind of like symbolic sociological reasons perfect. I
don't want to be the jackass in the amg AMG Right.
(45:10):
I briefly had 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 be the jackass in the box I understand that,
so I worry that jackass factor high. Also, I have
run a foul of the police so many times up here,
(45:30):
and the temptation to speed in this thing is going
to be, I'm guessing overwhelming. Second, I think I'm quite
drawn to station Megans. They have great symbolic meaning 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 B six or V eight in it.
(45:53):
And then I think I'm probably most enthusiastic about the
prospect of a Miniat.
Speaker 7 (45:58):
Interesting because the sort of underlying thing here is that
we're going from the emotional to the rational. We're going
from you know, this crazy steroidal Mercedes. It's all jacked
up and it's got like, you know, nightclub lighting and everything,
and it's red through the more rational station wagon, where
(46:22):
the cargo package is a little bit more sane and
makes a little bit more sense. It's all ower to
the ground, but it's still fun to drive to the
completely rational, which is the one box minivan. Not fun.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
I have no kind of status anxiety about driving a miniman.
Speaker 7 (46:39):
Well here's a really interesting point, and Dan Neil from
the Wall Street Journal makes it all the time. He says,
minivans are simples of virility. Sports cars are not minivans.
Mean you've had kids, you've reproduced?
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Yes, yes they do.
Speaker 8 (46:56):
Yes.
Speaker 7 (46:59):
So that's our baseline. That's those are your pre existing biases.
And you think you're a minivanman, I think I might
be a minivanman. Yeah. I'm Eddie Alterman, and this is
Car Show, my podcast about why we drive what we drive.
(47:24):
On today's season finale, we asked the question, when it's
time to trade in the fastcar 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 shit ton of baby
(47:44):
stuff in the backseat. Thanks for listening. You can find
Car Show with a few more Malcolm cameos, Wherever you
like to listen,
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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