Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on LATE SHOW: Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker, on On their public reputation versus what they actually thought.
2. 00:09
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Miss Parker, I must confess that I have always admired your cruelty. It has such precision. Like a surgeon who moonlights as an assassin.
3. 00:17
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   And I've always admired your sentences, Mr. Wilde. They arrive wearing better clothes than most people.
4. 00:22
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How kind. Though I suspect we are both here to discuss the uncomfortable fact that the public mistook our performances for our souls.
5. 00:29
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Oh, the public. They wanted me to be permanently hung over and permanently heartbroken. I obliged in print. What did they want from you?
6. 00:38
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Paradoxes at breakfast. Epigrams at tea. They wanted me to be infinitely amusing and never serious, as though depth and surface could not coexist in the same man. I gave them the surface because the surface was exquisite.
7. 00:51
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   And because the surface paid better.
8. 00:53
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Well, naturally. One must eat. Although I preferred to dine. But you, my dear, you built yourself into a legend of one-liners and gin. Was any of it true?
9. 01:02
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   The gin was true. The rest was a job application. I was a woman trying to get paid to write, which in New York in the twenties meant being twice as sharp and half as sober as the men. So I sharpened.
10. 01:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And they loved you for it.
11. 01:15
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They loved the act. Me they tolerated. There's a difference.
12. 01:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I know the difference rather well. After my trials, the public decided I had been posing all along. They could not reconcile the aesthete with the prisoner. As though suffering were somehow beneath my brand.
13. 01:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You wrote De Profundis in prison. That's not exactly light comedy.
14. 01:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No one read it for decades. They preferred to remember me in a velvet coat holding a sunflower. The serious Oscar, the one who wept and prayed and reconsidered everything, was not box office.
15. 01:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I wrote serious things too. Stories about women with no money and fewer choices. But people wanted Dorothy Parker the wisecracker, not Dorothy Parker the socialist who went to Spain during the war.
16. 01:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You went to Spain?
17. 01:56
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Nineteen thirty-seven. Helped with anti-fascist propaganda. Not a lot of laughs. Turns out war isn't great material for Vanity Fair.
18. 02:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How terribly inconvenient for your reputation. Did they forgive you for caring?
19. 02:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They ignored it. Much easier. They wanted me at the Algonquin, not at a typewriter writing about dead children in Madrid. So I became what they wanted. A performing seal with a hangover.
20. 02:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I became a performing peacock. The difference is I rather enjoyed it. Until I didn't.
21. 02:25
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    When did you stop enjoying it?
22. 02:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The moment I realized that my cleverness had become a trap. People came to me expecting fireworks, and I could not disappoint them even when I wished to speak plainly. Sincerity became impossible. It looked like another pose.
23. 02:39
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    God, yes. I tried to write a sincere poem once. Someone said it sounded like I was being sarcastic. I wasn't.
24. 02:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The public gives you a role and then insists you never leave the stage. I wanted to be many things. A poet, yes. A playwright. A critic of society. But they wanted me to be a curiosity.
25. 02:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    A wind-up toy in a drawing room.
26. 02:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. And when the mechanism broke, when I was tried and imprisoned, they were offended. Not because of what I had done, but because I had stopped being amusing.
27. 03:08
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the unforgivable part. Letting the mask slip. I drank myself sideways for years and they thought it was charming. The second I got sober and political, I was a scold.
28. 03:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did you regret the reputation? The creation you made of yourself?
29. 03:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Some days. It got me in rooms I wouldn't have entered otherwise. It got me published. But it also meant nobody took me seriously when I wanted them to. What about you?
30. 03:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I regret nothing about the art. The essays, the plays, the novel. I stand by all of it. But I regret that people thought the art was easy because I made it look easy. They thought I was frivolous because I refused to be dull.
31. 03:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    There's that thing where if you're funny, people assume you're shallow. Like suffering and wit can't live in the same person.
32. 03:51
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Exactly. I was accused of superficiality by people who had no depth to offer in exchange. My work was about beauty, yes, but also about the soul's relationship to beauty. That is not a small subject.
33. 04:03
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    My work was about being a woman with a brain in a world that didn't want you to have one. I made jokes so they wouldn't throw me out of the room. But the jokes were the point. They weren't decoration.
34. 04:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The jokes were the weapon.
35. 04:15
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And the shield.
36. 04:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    We armed ourselves with language because we had nothing else. I had no money, no title, only words. And words, it turns out, are enough to build a reputation and destroy a life.
37. 04:26
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You're talking about the trial.
38. 04:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I am talking about the fact that everything I said was used against me. My own wit became evidence of my corruption. They read my words aloud in court as though beauty itself were criminal.
39. 04:37
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the thing about a public reputation. You don't own it. They do. And they'll use it however they want.
40. 04:43
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I thought I was in control. I thought if I were brilliant enough, charming enough, I would be untouchable. I was wrong.
41. 04:50
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Nobody's untouchable. I thought if I were funny enough, they'd let me say anything. Turns out there are limits. Especially if you're a woman, especially if you're political.
42. 05:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Were you blacklisted?
43. 05:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Informally. Hollywood decided I was a red. My name became difficult. Suddenly nobody was returning calls.
44. 05:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How did you bear it?
45. 05:11
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I drank. I got a dog. I kept writing, though nobody much wanted it. How did you bear prison?
46. 05:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I wrote. What else could I do? I wrote a letter fifty thousand words long to the man I loved and who destroyed me. I tried to make sense of what had happened. I failed, of course. Some things make no sense.
47. 05:28
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did it help? The writing?
48. 05:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It gave me something to do besides despair. That is not nothing. But it did not restore my reputation. That died in prison. I died in prison, in a sense. The man who emerged was not the man who went in.
49. 05:41
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You were only out a few years after.
50. 05:43
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Three years. Exile, poverty, illness. I was unrecognizable. Not because of age, but because the public could not see me anymore. I had become invisible. The ultimate humiliation for a man who lived to be seen.
51. 05:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I lived too long. That was my version. Outlasted my own legend. By the end I was that woman who used to be Dorothy Parker.
52. 06:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Used to be. What a terrible phrase.
53. 06:07
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The worst. But maybe that's the price. You build a reputation and it becomes a monument. And then you have to live in its shadow.
54. 06:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Or die in it. I think I preferred dying. At least it was conclusive.
55. 06:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Typical. You'd rather have a tragic ending than a long, messy fade.
56. 06:23
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear Miss Parker, I would rather have written the ending myself. But we do not get to choose these things. We only get to choose the words.
57. 06:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And we chose well, I think. Even if nobody knew what we were really saying.
58. 06:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They will. Eventually. When we are safely dead and no longer inconvenient.
59. 06:38
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    We're already dead.
60. 06:40
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then perhaps they are finally ready to listen.