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