Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Change my twenties? My dear Miss Parker, one might as well ask a butterfly to reconsider the cocoon. I spent that glorious decade becoming myself, which is the only occupation worth pursuing at any age.
2. 00:14
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Of course you did. I spent mine becoming a wisecrack with a drinking problem. Same thing, really, except your cocoon had better upholstery.
3. 00:22
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I was at Oxford, enchanting dons and collecting blue china. I wore my hair long and my ambitions longer. Every moment was a performance, and the audience was always appreciative.
4. 00:34
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I was at Vanity Fair, enchanting exactly nobody and collecting rejection slips. Though I did manage to get fired, which takes a certain panache when you're writing theatre reviews.
5. 00:44
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You were dismissed for being too clever, I trust?
6. 00:48
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I said Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. They said it was cruel. I said it was accurate. We agreed to disagree, and I agreed to leave.
7. 00:57
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, but cruelty in service of truth is merely criticism. I myself was never cruel, only truthful, and if people mistook one for the other, that was their failure of perception, not mine.
8. 01:11
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Right. And I'm sure Lord Alfred Douglas would frame it exactly that way.
9. 01:15
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Bosie was not my twenties, he was my thirties. By then I had already committed all my interesting mistakes. The point is that I would not alter a single one. To regret one's past is to arrest one's development.
10. 01:31
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    To regret one's past is to have been paying attention. I'd change plenty. I'd drink less, for starters, though that's like saying I'd breathe less. It was the atmosphere.
11. 01:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I drank absinthe and conversed with geniuses. Or perhaps I conversed with absinthe and drank with geniuses. The sequence has grown pleasantly vague.
12. 01:52
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I drank gin and conversed with Robert Benchley, which amounts to the same thing. But I'd have written more. I spent too much time at the Algonquin being amusing when I should have been home being a writer.
13. 02:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But you were writing, surely? The wit, the verse, those little daggers you call short stories?
14. 02:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I was writing captions. I was writing quips for ten dollars a column. I was being Dorothy Parker when I should have been becoming a serious person.
15. 02:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Serious people are invariably dull. I made it my life's work to avoid seriousness, and I succeeded magnificently until seriousness came for me in the form of a courtroom.
16. 02:29
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's rather my point, Oscar. You spent your twenties being decorative. Beautiful effort, really. But did any of it prepare you for what came after?
17. 02:37
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    One cannot prepare for catastrophe. One can only be sufficiently oneself that catastrophe, when it arrives, finds someone worth destroying. I was worth it.
18. 02:49
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Modest, too.
19. 02:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Modesty is for those who have something to be modest about. I had genius, beauty, and the love of London society. Why should I have spent that time preparing for prison? Should I have taken up carpentry?
20. 03:03
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You should have learned when to shut up. That's what I'd tell my twenty-five-year-old self: Dottie, darling, not every thought needs airing.
21. 03:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Every thought of mine needed airing. They were exotic birds that would have died in captivity.
22. 03:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Mine were carrier pigeons with bombs attached. I'd have saved myself three divorces and a reputation if I'd just written them down and burned the paper.
23. 03:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Three divorces? I had only the one wife, and she, poor thing, was ornamental. Rather like wallpaper with opinions.
24. 03:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I had Alan Campbell twice. Married him, divorced him, married him again like a woman testing whether a stove is still hot.
25. 03:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And was it?
26. 03:40
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It was an inferno, Oscar. But in my twenties I was still single and convinced I was unlovable, which at least had the virtue of being partly true.
27. 03:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I was convinced I was irresistible, which turned out to be entirely true and absolutely fatal. Perhaps you had the better delusion.
28. 03:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Perhaps we both should have spent less time at parties and more time learning to be alone. I couldn't stand my own company. Still can't, if I'm honest.
29. 04:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I adored my own company. I was my favorite companion. The problem was that I required an audience to appreciate the performance, and audiences are so dreadfully inconsistent.
30. 04:17
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They turn on you the minute you stop being amusing. I learned that at twenty-three when I tried to kill myself and everyone treated it like a publicity stunt.
31. 04:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah. Yes. Well. That is rather different from collecting blue china, isn't it?
32. 04:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Just slightly. But we're supposed to be talking about what we'd change, not cataloging our greatest hits of self-destruction.
33. 04:37
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I would change nothing about the aesthetic achievements. The poetry, the plays I began plotting, the construction of Oscar Wilde as a work of art. But I might have been kinder to Constance. She deserved someone capable of loving her properly.
34. 04:54
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's unexpectedly decent of you.
35. 04:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I contain multitudes, Miss Parker. Mostly wit and regret, but other things as well.
36. 05:03
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I'd have been kinder to myself. Not funnier, God knows I was already insufferable. Just kinder. I spent my twenties convinced I had to earn the right to exist by being entertaining.
37. 05:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    As did I. Perhaps that is the occupational hazard of being born with a tongue sharper than our skin is thick.
38. 05:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You know what I really regret? I regret believing that being clever was the same as being happy. I built my whole personality around the mot juste when what I needed was a good therapist and a nap.
39. 05:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Therapists had not yet been invented in my twenties, thank heaven. We had only confession, which I avoided, and absinthe, which I did not.
40. 05:42
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They'd been invented by mine, but going to one would have meant admitting something was wrong, and I was too busy pretending everything was material.
41. 05:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Everything is material, darling. The tragedy is that we are both the artist and the clay.
42. 05:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And the kiln. Don't forget we're also the kiln.
43. 05:58
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    So what would you truly change? If you could whisper advice to young Dorothy, sitting at that typewriter, what would you tell her?
44. 06:06
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I'd tell her that nobody ever died of being less amusing at dinner parties, but plenty of people died of trying too hard to be loved by strangers. I'd tell her to save her best lines for the page, not for applause.
45. 06:18
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Sound advice, though I doubt either of us would have taken it.
46. 06:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Of course not. We were too busy being ourselves, which is another way of saying we were too busy being terrified.
47. 06:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Terror with excellent tailoring, in my case.
48. 06:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Terror with a flask in my purse, in mine. What about you? What do you whisper to young Oscar at Oxford with his sunflowers and his apostle spoons?
49. 06:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I tell him that love is not a performance, and that beauty is not a defense. I tell him that the world will not always find him charming, and that he should learn the difference between being admired and being seen.
50. 06:52
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's good advice.
51. 06:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Terrible advice. He would ignore it completely. He is young and beautiful and the world has not yet taught him about consequences.
52. 07:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the trouble with being young. You think wit is armor when it's really just gift wrap on a very fragile package.
53. 07:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Beautifully put. You see? This is why you should not have changed a thing about your twenties. They made you this.
54. 07:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    This, Oscar, is exactly the problem.
55. 07:18
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then we are both magnificent disasters, and I propose we toast to that rather than regret it.
56. 07:25
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I'd drink to that, but I'm trying to cut back. Ask me again in five minutes.