Star Struck

00:00:15
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

00:01:15
Speaker 2: 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.

00:01:28
Speaker 1: So I'm standing in front of the side of the theater with Michael Rose, executive vice president of the Atlanta History Center.

00:01:36
Speaker 2: 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.

00:01:51
Speaker 1: 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. 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.

00:02:35
Speaker 2: 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.

00:02:52
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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 a car accident, but I want you to consider an alternate version of events, a version where we would never have called what happened to her accident. Margaret Mitchell started out as a journalist, living in a first floor apartment in midtown Atlanta with her husband John marsh.

00:04:27
Speaker 3: It's where Margaret ended up writing most of Gone.

00:04:30
Speaker 1: With the wends, Jessica van Landide of the Historic Oakland Foundation, is showing us around.

00:04:36
Speaker 3: She's working and she's writing, and she reaggravates an ankle injury, and she's pretty much what we would consider bed written.

00:04:44
Speaker 4: Right.

00:04:44
Speaker 3: 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 up kind of a little writing desk and she starts the book.

00:05:11
Speaker 1: 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.

00:05:20
Speaker 3: 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 is the scout leaves and she runs home, and she starts gathering up all of her manuscript.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: 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?

00:06:11
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, she gives, she gives.

00:06:14
Speaker 1: Does she give her only copy to the guy from McMillan, Yes, Oh my god, this is caused me so much anxiety and the.

00:06:21
Speaker 3: 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.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:07:19
Speaker 5: You go whees, I go watch that do frankly might hear?

00:07:24
Speaker 6: I don't give a damn.

00:07:30
Speaker 1: 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.

00:07:42
Speaker 6: 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.

00:07:54
Speaker 1: 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.

00:08:07
Speaker 6: 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.

00:08:20
Speaker 1: 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.

00:08:34
Speaker 3: Ah thee alike.

00:08:36
Speaker 4: It's felt a very great thing for Georgia.

00:08:38
Speaker 6: And the South to see our.

00:08:40
Speaker 4: Old confederates to come back to us. I felt that way on this week, and I would factly given the rev Yale.

00:08:47
Speaker 5: And nine.

00:08:50
Speaker 1: 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 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 something that people ignored, or made tasteless jokes about, or looked away in horror.

00:09:41
Speaker 5: Word of Rock Hudson's death, of course, spread very quickly today through the Hollywood community. Paul Dandridge of our System.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: 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.

00:09:56
Speaker 4: 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.

00:10:05
Speaker 1: That wouldn't have happened if Hudson was a minor character actor.

00:10:09
Speaker 4: He was a professional, He was a gentleman, He was a kind man. The things being said by many people.

00:10:14
Speaker 1: 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, and that puzzle deserves its own what if experiment. In nineteen thirty seven, the legendary Hollywood mogul David O. Selznik 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 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.

00:11:44
Speaker 7: Core the mean land.

00:11:47
Speaker 6: See you.

00:11:50
Speaker 7: He's just read then?

00:11:50
Speaker 6: Now, Yeah, it's pretty good.

00:11:56
Speaker 1: 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 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 seven version with Frederick Marsh as Norman Mayine. Does Becky Lester live here?

00:12:49
Speaker 5: Yes, I got a package for him. I'll signed for it.

00:12:51
Speaker 1: So who are you?

00:12:53
Speaker 7: I'm her husband?

00:12:54
Speaker 5: Oh sure, I'm right here, mister.

00:12:57
Speaker 1: 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 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 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, he was preoccupied with A Star Is Born.

00:14:07
Speaker 8: 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.

00:14:24
Speaker 1: This is an interview with Salznick from the nineteen fifties.

00:14:28
Speaker 8: 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 actually straight out of life and was straight reportage, so to speak.

00:14:54
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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 the stage. I mean, can you imagine an angry husband crashing the stage at the Oscars?

00:16:05
Speaker 6: Now?

00:16:05
Speaker 5: 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.

00:16:21
Speaker 1: 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.

00:16:35
Speaker 8: I don't feel sorry for you.

00:16:37
Speaker 5: You've fixed yourself nice and comfortable.

00:16:39
Speaker 6: You can live off your wife. Now she'll buy your drinks and put up with you, even though nobody else will.

00:16:45
Speaker 1: 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.

00:16:54
Speaker 5: I don't bother to toasts him out.

00:16:56
Speaker 6: 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.

00:17:02
Speaker 1: Norman shaken, brushes himself off, picks up his hat, walks painfully over to the bar, and falls off the wagon.

00:17:10
Speaker 5: Give me a Scotch double. Leave the bottle here.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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.

00:19:43
Speaker 9: Yeah, it was. It was just passivity throughout the system.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: I called up Baron Lerner, who teaches at NYU Medical School. He wrote a fascinating history of drunk driving called One for the Road.

00:19:54
Speaker 9: 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.

00:20:11
Speaker 1: 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 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 that we're not going to hold you responsible for it. Yeah, it's weird.

00:20:57
Speaker 9: 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 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 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.

00:22:09
Speaker 1: 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. 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 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.

00:23:19
Speaker 5: Well, I won't go back why I won't do it, won't do what? I won't go back to the routine.

00:23:25
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

00:25:58
Speaker 5: 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.

00:26:17
Speaker 1: But then Norman's beloved comes running up to the front of the courtroom.

00:26:21
Speaker 6: Please wait, I'm his wife.

00:26:24
Speaker 5: Yes, I recognize him as Lester.

00:26:27
Speaker 6: Please, Judge, I promise you this won't happen again.

00:26:32
Speaker 5: I'll be responsible for him.

00:26:35
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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 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.

00:28:05
Speaker 6: 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.

00:28:25
Speaker 1: They sat outside in his yard and talked for a few hours.

00:28:28
Speaker 6: 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, four or five times, I'd rather it had been me instead of her.

00:28:53
Speaker 1: Do you think he was drinking?

00:28:56
Speaker 6: 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.

00:29:13
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 to kill anyone, and tragedy will haunt him as long as he lives. It was an accident, wasn't it? These things happen.

00:30:28
Speaker 9: 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.

00:30:40
Speaker 1: This is Baron Lerner again, author of One for the Road.

00:30:43
Speaker 9: 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 in an odd way, Mitchell partly becomes the blame.

00:31:10
Speaker 1: 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.

00:31:20
Speaker 9: 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.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: 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.

00:31:52
Speaker 9: People also after the fact were saying, with no justification at all, well, Margaret Mitchell would have forgiven him right.

00:32:01
Speaker 1: How did they know right?

00:32:03
Speaker 9: But that was the nature of the entity at the time.

00:32:07
Speaker 1: 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 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, 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, 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 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 just start in with her new found professional freedom. A reporter puts a microphone in front.

00:34:07
Speaker 6: Of her ms left.

00:34:14
Speaker 7: This microphone is on an international hooker throughout the world.

00:34:18
Speaker 5: Your fans are hoping that you will say a few words.

00:34:19
Speaker 1: 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.

00:34:38
Speaker 5: Hello, everybody, this is missus Norman Maine.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: Frankly, my dear you know the rest Revisionist History is 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, 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.

00:35:51
Speaker 7: I'm Malcolm Glava, revisionist history listeners. This is Eddie Alterman, host of one of Pushkin's newest shows, Car Show. On our season one finale, Malcolm and I go car shopping for what's affectionately known as a family haller. We crossed test a four hundred and twenty nine horsepower German suv, a beautiful Swedish luxury wagon, and the dreaded Mini van. 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.

00:36:43
Speaker 1: So all I have right now is a twenty fourteen BMWX one And.

00:36:50
Speaker 7: Now most people would say that's perfectly sufficient, but I wouldn't say that.

00:36:54
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:37:25
Speaker 7: They're huge. Yeah, they're fortress like.

00:37:28
Speaker 1: They were just like so yeah, so I clearly what I have right now is insufficient.

00:37:35
Speaker 7: 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. 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 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.

00:38:40
Speaker 1: Altamon hits the brakes firmly, smoothly, easily. We'd come to a halt.

00:38:45
Speaker 7: Throng was open. But now it was my chance to return the favor. Malcolm needed my guidance. He needed to know.

00:38:55
Speaker 1: How do I effectively move around a young family and all the stuff that comes with it.

00:39:02
Speaker 7: 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 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 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, 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.

00:40:13
Speaker 1: 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 don't think it steers as well as my as my ex one. So I'm resigned to the fact I'm surrendering.

00:40:41
Speaker 7: 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.

00:40:57
Speaker 8: It is.

00:40:58
Speaker 1: 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?

00:41:09
Speaker 4: Uh?

00:41:10
Speaker 7: 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 my mom never got a minivan.

00:41:32
Speaker 1: Our car growing up, our family wagon was a in the beginning was a Poujo four O four.

00:41:38
Speaker 7: 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 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?

00:42:15
Speaker 1: 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.

00:42:25
Speaker 7: 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. 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.

00:43:09
Speaker 1: Okay, okay.

00:43:09
Speaker 7: The first is the Kia Carnival. Oh do you know what that is?

00:43:14
Speaker 1: Yes?

00:43:14
Speaker 5: I do.

00:43:14
Speaker 1: I have been looking at them online really.

00:43:20
Speaker 7: Furtively.

00:43:21
Speaker 1: 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.

00:43:29
Speaker 7: 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.

00:43:47
Speaker 1: Ah, so this is the jacked up one.

00:43:49
Speaker 6: Yes.

00:43:49
Speaker 7: 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 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 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.

00:44:46
Speaker 1: 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. 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, 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. And then I think I'm probably most enthusiastic about the prospect of a Miniat.

00:45:58
Speaker 7: 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 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.

00:46:34
Speaker 1: I have no kind of status anxiety about driving a miniman.

00:46:39
Speaker 7: 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?

00:46:55
Speaker 1: Yes, yes they do.

00:46:56
Speaker 8: Yes.

00:46:59
Speaker 7: 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. 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 stuff in the backseat. Thanks for listening. You can find Car Show with a few more Malcolm cameos, Wherever you like to listen,