Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE LATE SHOW: Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker, on On a piece of gossip about themselves they let stand because the truth was worse.
2. 00:10
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You know, Dorothy, there is nothing quite so exquisite as being thoroughly misunderstood by the public. It gives one such latitude.
3. 00:17
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Latitude. That's one word for it. I prefer 'breathing room between drinks.'
4. 00:21
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Quite. Though I must confess, there was a particular rumor about me that circulated for years—perfectly scandalous, utterly untrue—and I never once troubled to correct it.
5. 00:31
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Let me guess. Someone said you were sincere about something.
6. 00:34
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Worse. They said I had been expelled from Oxford for idleness and general indifference to my studies. The truth, I'm afraid, was that I'd been sent down temporarily for returning late from a trip to Greece. Greece, Dorothy! I had been communing with beauty, with the very soul of civilization.
7. 00:50
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   And you let them think you were just lazy.
8. 00:52
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I did. Because the actual story required that I explain I'd stayed longer because I was sketching ruins and had simply lost track of the calendar. It made me sound… earnest. Sincere, as you say. Like some dreadful undergraduate who actually cared.
9. 01:07
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   God forbid anyone think you gave a damn about anything. That would've ruined the whole act.
10. 01:12
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It wasn't an act, it was an aesthetic position. Caring deeply about beauty while appearing not to care at all—that's the entire pose. One must never let sincerity show. It's too revealing.
11. 01:24
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You know what? I get that. After I got fired from Vanity Fair—and I did get fired, let's be clear—everyone said it was because I was drunk at my desk.
12. 01:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And you weren't?
13. 01:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Oh, I was. But that's not why they canned me. I got fired because I wrote a nasty review of a show starring Billie Burke, and Billie Burke happened to be married to Florenz Ziegfeld, and Ziegfeld was a big advertiser. My editor, Frank Crowninshield, had to let me go.
14. 01:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah. The eternal battle between art and commerce, decided as always in favor of the man with the checkbook.
15. 01:54
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Right. But here's the thing. If I'd said, 'I was fired for telling the truth about a powerful man's wife,' I would've sounded like some noble crusader. A martyr for honest criticism.
16. 02:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And you preferred to sound like a lush.
17. 02:08
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I preferred to sound like someone who didn't care enough to be careful. Someone who was doomed by her own appetites, not by the petty corruption of magazine publishing. Because one of those stories makes me tragic and the other makes me a scold.
18. 02:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Tragedy has such better lines than virtue, doesn't it? When the Marquess of Queensberry left that card at my club—'To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite,' misspelled, naturally, the man was barely literate—everyone assumed I would ignore it. That I would rise above.
19. 02:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    But you sued him for libel instead.
20. 02:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I did. Disastrously, as it turned out. But before the trial, there were rumors. People said I was suing because my pride couldn't bear an insult, because I was vain, because I was reckless. They said I was drunk on my own fame.
21. 02:50
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And the truth?
22. 02:51
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The truth was that Bosie—Lord Alfred Douglas—insisted I sue. He wanted to destroy his father, and I was the weapon he chose. I loved him too much to refuse, and I was too weak to see that I was being used. That I was already ruined before I set foot in court.
23. 03:05
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So you let people think you were arrogant instead of letting them know you were pathetic.
24. 03:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Pathetic. Yes. That's the word, isn't it? Arrogance, at least, has a kind of grandeur. It suggests one is the author of one's own destruction. But to admit I was merely… besotted, manipulated by a spoiled boy who loved chaos more than he ever loved me? That would have been unbearable.
25. 03:24
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You know what they said about me and Alan Campbell? That I married him because I was desperate. Old maid, closing in on forty, needed a husband before the music stopped.
26. 03:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How unkind.
27. 03:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I let them say it. But the truth was I married him because I was suicidal and I thought having someone around might keep me from finishing the job. He was younger, he was good-looking, he didn't ask too many questions. It was basically hiring a very attractive nurse.
28. 03:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear, that's rather darker than I expected, even from you.
29. 03:53
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, what was I supposed to do? Tell everyone, 'Oh, don't worry, I married him to prevent my own suicide'? They'd have locked me up. Or worse, they'd have been sympathetic.
30. 04:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And sympathy is the one thing neither of us could tolerate. It requires that one be seen as a victim, and victims are so desperately uninteresting.
31. 04:11
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Exactly. Better to be the villain of your own story than the sad sack of someone else's.
32. 04:15
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Though I wonder sometimes if we were villains, or merely cowards. It takes a certain courage to tell the truth, especially when the truth is humiliating.
33. 04:23
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Courage. Jesus, Oscar, we're writers. We deal in surfaces. The truth is for people who don't have to make a living being clever.
34. 04:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps. But I did tell the truth once, you know. In De Profundis, my letter to Bosie from prison. I told him exactly what he'd done to me, how he'd ruined me, how I'd loved him anyway. I was completely sincere.
35. 04:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And?
36. 04:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And he never read it. Or rather, he read it years later and said I'd exaggerated. That I'd always been prone to melodrama. He didn't believe me even when I was telling the truth.
37. 04:53
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, that's the problem with being a liar. Eventually people stop listening even when you're being honest.
38. 04:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    We weren't liars, Dorothy. We simply understood that the truth is not a fixed thing. It's a matter of presentation, of aesthetic judgment. Some truths are too ugly to be useful.
39. 05:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's a fancy way of saying we were chickenshit.
40. 05:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    If you like. Though I prefer to think we were discriminating. We chose the gossip that best reflected who we wished to be, rather than who we were. That's not cowardice, that's art.
41. 05:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Art. Sure. That's what I'll tell myself next time someone asks why I never corrected the record about anything.
42. 05:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Do you regret it? Letting them believe the wrong things?
43. 05:29
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Not particularly. The wrong things were more interesting. And at least they were mine. I picked them, you know? That counts for something.
44. 05:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes. Yes, I think it does. We may not have controlled the truth, but we controlled the lie. And in the end, that's a kind of authorship, isn't it?
45. 05:47
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    If you say so. I just know I'd rather be remembered for being a drunk than for being a sap who married a man to keep from jumping out a window.
46. 05:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And I'd rather be remembered as arrogant than as the fool who couldn't say no to a beautiful boy. So here we are. Two legends, built on gossip we let stand because the alternative was admitting we were human.
47. 06:05
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Human. God, what a terrible thing to be.
48. 06:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Quite. Much better to be a rumor.