Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Oscar Wilde sits down with Dorothy Parker for ROAST NIGHT. The subject — On a person they loved but could not keep.
2. 00:10
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I must confess, Miss Parker, that I find the topic of tonight rather... indelicate. We are asked to discuss persons we loved but could not keep, as though one were cataloguing lost umbrellas.
3. 00:20
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Oh, I've lost plenty of umbrellas too. Usually left them in the coat check at the Algonquin. At least umbrellas don't write you letters afterward.
4. 00:28
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Letters! Yes, I wrote the most extraordinary letters to Lord Alfred Douglas. Bosie, we called him. Each one a small work of art, really. I poured my soul onto the page in prose that would have made Keats weep with envy.
5. 00:40
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   And did he keep them?
6. 00:41
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   He kept them, certainly. Though I rather wish he hadn't. They were used against me at trial, you see. Nothing quite so humiliating as having one's most passionate declarations read aloud by a prosecuting attorney with all the tenderness of a tax collector.
7. 00:54
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I never wrote anything down I wouldn't want read in court. That's what whiskey was for. The things I said to Eddie Parker, I don't remember, and he's probably grateful.
8. 01:03
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, but Bosie was beautiful. Catastrophically beautiful. Golden-haired, with that aristocratic petulance that suggested both angel and demon. He was twenty-one when we met, and I was already nearing forty, married, successful, insufferably pleased with myself.
9. 01:18
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   The pretty ones are always trouble.
10. 01:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear woman, the pretty ones are the only ones worth having trouble with. Ugliness is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness. Bosie was Dorian Gray made flesh, if Dorian had possessed a vicious temper and an unlimited allowance.
11. 01:31
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I fell for a writer. Charles MacArthur. He could make me laugh, which is the only magic trick I've ever believed in. He sent me a bowl of daisies once with a note that said, 'I wish they were emeralds.' I kept the note.
12. 01:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did you keep him?
13. 01:45
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    He married Helen Hayes. Apparently she was better at the whole domestic goddess routine. I burned toast and wrote poems about burning toast.
14. 01:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Domesticity is the enemy of art, Mrs. Parker. I learned that rather too late. I had a wife, Constance, who was perfectly lovely, two sons, a house in Chelsea. And yet I could not stop myself from pursuing what was wild and golden and entirely unsuitable.
15. 02:07
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Your wife didn't take it well, I imagine.
16. 02:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    She changed her name after the trial. Changed the children's names. Became someone else entirely, as though Oscar Wilde had been a fever dream she'd recovered from. One cannot blame her, really. I destroyed everything I touched, including her.
17. 02:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least you admit it. Most men act like they're the victims when they blow up their own lives.
18. 02:28
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, I was a victim, too. Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was a brute who hated me for corrupting his son. As though Bosie needed any corrupting! The boy was already quite accomplished in that department.
19. 02:38
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So why couldn't you keep him? Because of prison?
20. 02:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Because he was fundamentally unkeepable. Even before the trial, before Reading Gaol, before my entire world collapsed into scandal and ruin. Bosie loved being loved, you see, but he didn't particularly enjoy the obligation of loving back. He wanted adoration, worship, constant entertainment. I was a resource to be depleted.
21. 03:00
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They say you reunited with him after prison.
22. 03:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    For a few months, yes. In Naples. It was a disaster, naturally. One cannot go back to Eden after the Fall. We were both different people by then—I was broken, he was bored. My friends begged me not to see him. They said he would destroy what little remained of my reputation.
23. 03:17
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    But you went anyway.
24. 03:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I went anyway. Because hope is more stubborn than pride, and considerably more foolish. I thought perhaps love might be salvaged from the wreckage. Instead, I learned that love cannot survive when one person has been annihilated and the other has suffered nothing more than inconvenience.
25. 03:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Charles didn't annihilate me. He just married somebody else. That's almost worse, isn't it? At least your story has opera in it. Mine was just sad and small and ordinary.
26. 03:45
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    There is nothing ordinary about heartbreak, Mrs. Parker. Each one is exquisitely particular in its agony.
27. 03:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I tried to kill myself three times, you know. Once over a man, twice over... well, still probably over men, if we're being honest. Pills mostly. I wasn't very good at it.
28. 04:02
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I died slowly in a cheap Paris hotel, penniless and friendless, while Bosie went on to marry a woman and denounce everything we'd been to each other. I'm not certain which of us suffered the more elegant conclusion.
29. 04:13
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least you wrote De Profundis. Got the last word in. All I got was a few bitter poems and a drinking problem.
30. 04:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    De Profundis was meant to be a love letter, you know. A fifty-thousand-word reproach, yes, but a love letter nonetheless. Only a great love could produce such magnificent anger. I told Bosie that he had been both the supreme tragedy and the supreme romance of my life.
31. 04:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did he care?
32. 04:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Not in the slightest. He sued to have parts of it suppressed. Called my account of our relationship fiction. Which was rather rich, considering that he'd turned our entire affair into fiction the moment it became socially inconvenient.
33. 04:47
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Men are good at that. Making you feel crazy for remembering things accurately.
34. 04:51
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But why did you love this MacArthur person, if I may ask? Surely you, with your acid wit and devastating intelligence, could have chosen someone less... absent?
35. 05:00
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Because he didn't want me to be less. He thought my meanness was funny. Most men want you soft and quiet, or at least apologetic. Charlie laughed.
36. 05:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Laughter is its own seduction, isn't it? Bosie had the most marvelous laugh. Utterly unselfconscious, like a child's. Of course, he also had a child's cruelty and a child's selfishness, but one focuses on what one wishes to see.
37. 05:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I wrote that thing, you know. 'Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.' I was wearing glasses when I met Charlie. He made passes anyway.
38. 05:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet he chose someone else in the end.
39. 05:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    He chose someone who could give him a normal life. Dinner parties without incident. A wife who didn't show up drunk to opening nights. I was the funny, dangerous girl. Helen Hayes was the one you married.
40. 05:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I was the funny, dangerous man, I suppose. Constance was the one you married. Bosie was the one who destroyed you. It's rather a familiar pattern, isn't it? We choose the people who confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves.
41. 05:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Or maybe we just choose the people who make us feel alive, and sometimes those people are also the ones who kill us. Slowly or otherwise.
42. 06:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Do you regret him? Your MacArthur?
43. 06:07
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Every damn day. And not at all. How about you? Do you regret Bosie?
44. 06:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I regret nothing about loving him. I regret a great deal about how I loved him. I regret sacrificing everyone else's happiness for his whims. I regret the lawsuit, the trial, the spectacular public immolation of my entire existence. But the love itself? That was the realest thing in my rather decorative life.
45. 06:29
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the hell of it, isn't it? The worst decisions make the best stories. And we're both storytellers.
46. 06:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Indeed. Though I do wish the ending had been somewhat different. Perhaps one where I didn't die alone in a grotty hotel room, converting to Catholicism because I'd run out of other dramatic gestures.
47. 06:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I outlived all my best material. Died at seventy-three in a residential hotel, mostly forgotten, definitely drunk. The New Yorker didn't even run a proper obituary. Just a little mention. Years earlier, I'd been their best writer.
48. 06:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But we're here now, aren't we? Discussing the people we loved and lost, and somehow we're both still witty, still sharp, still refusing to be boring even in retrospect. Perhaps that's immortality enough.
49. 07:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Or perhaps we're just two dead people who never learned when to shut up. Either way, the drinks are free and nobody's married to Helen Hayes, so I'll take it.
50. 07:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    To loves we couldn't keep, then. May they haunt someone else for a change.
51. 07:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I'll drink to that. Hell, I'll drink to anything.