Revisionist History - Star Struck

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

A legendary Hollywood mogul, a famous author, a fatal drunk driving accident, and a brilliant bit of screenwriting, left on the cutting room floor. Revisionist History engages in a pop culture what-if experiment about the 1937 version of A Star is Born.  If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello, Revisionist 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.fm. One summer night in 1949, 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. They were going out for the evening and they were going to go to see The Canterbury Tales, a movie at the Atlanta Art Theater, which was located at the corner of Peachtree and 13th Street. I'm standing in front of the side of the theater with Michael Rose, Executive Vice President of the Atlanta History Center. And so they had gone to the Women's Club prior to going to the movie. And just cutting across the street.

So she was, so yeah. So they simply came out of the Women's Club and were going to cross the street. 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 wanted to stand for.

Beauty, wit, nostalgia. People in Atlanta called her R. 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 Gravett comes barreling

around the bend. His car is heading right for the couple. They were maybe about halfway across. That's when they see the car. He heads one direction, she heads the other direction. It's kind of like the driver, I think, saw him first, so veers in the other direction, which is right at her. Right?

Yes. Gravitt is speeding. He's going at least 50 miles an hour down a curving two-lane street in the middle of a crowded city. If the driver's going 50 miles an hour in a car from that era, 50 miles an hour is like going 70 today. It's like, it's nuts. Gravitt 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 16th, 1949. 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 an accident. Margaret Mitchell started out as a journalist, living in a first-floor apartment in Midtown Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh. It's where Margaret ended up writing most of Gone with the Winds. Jessica Van Landyte of the Historic Oakland Foundation is showing us around. She's working, she's writing, and she re-aggravates an ankle injury, and she's pretty much what we'd consider bedridden, right? 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 writing the book. Then one day, she attends a lunch for a visiting editor from New York, from the Macmillan Publishing House. He's come to Atlanta on a scouting trip. Somebody invites her to kind of come along to the luncheon, and they are all kind of offering their books. And there was a little bit of a snide remark made about her, you know, something along the lines of, well, Margaret, I don't know why you're here. You don't have anything to give them anyway. And 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. Mitchell takes her draft of Gone with the Wind over to the Scouts 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? Yes, yeah.

And when she gives... Does she give her only copy to the guy from Macmillan? Yes. Oh my God. This is like causing me so much anxiety. And the story goes, 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, can I, can I have it back?

And he's, you know, it's too late. He wanted, he wanted the story. Mitchell's manuscript survives and becomes an instant bestseller, a sweeping gothic historical bodice ripper about a Southern beauty, Scarlett O'Hara, her travails through the Civil War, her epic love affair with the dashing Rhett Butler. The book wins the Pulitzer 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 Leigh, 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. Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. The last words Rhett 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.

300,000 people lined Peachtree Street to watch the motorcade come in from the Candler Airfield, carrying the stars, Clark Gable, Vivian Leigh, Olivia de Havilland. Gary Pomerantz, who wrote Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, A Wonderful History of Atlanta, counts the Gone with the Wind movie premiere in Atlanta in 1939 as one of the signature moments in the city's history. 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. 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. I feel like it's been a very great thing for Georgia and the South to see our old Confederacy come back to us. I felt that way all this week, and I was practically given the rebel yell tonight. Ten years pass. 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 Gravett, who is speeding, and who, it turns out, had spent the afternoon getting drunk. 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 1985 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. Word of Rock Hudson's death, of course, spread very quickly today through the Hollywood community. Paul Dandridge of our sister... 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. The word, of course, from Mr. Hudson's people is that he does not want flowers. He would rather see donations sent to the American Federation for AIDS Research. That was the organization that he helped found. That wouldn't have happened if Hudson was a minor character actor. He was a professional. He was a gentle man. He was a kind man. The thing's being said by many people. Margaret Mitchell in her day was a hundred times more famous than Rock Hudson was in 1985.

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 1937, the legendary Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick released A Star is Born. I'm almost certain Margaret Mitchell saw it. Everybody did. It was a big hit. David O. Selznick would go on to be the producer who brought Gone with the Wind 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 2018, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, which was a massive critical and commercial success. Ain't it hard keeping it so hardcore? Is that me? That's you.

You just read that now? Yeah. It's pretty good. That version of A Star is Born was actually the movie's fourth go-round. A version was made in 1976 with Chris Christopherson and Barbra Streisand. And before that, Judy Garland and James Mason starred in a 1954 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, of fame and fortune. She happens to catch the eye of a big star named Norman Maine. He gets her cast in one of his movies. She changes her name to Vicki Lester, becomes a huge sensation. It's Cinderella, only with a twist. As the starlet rises, Norman Maine falls. Here's the 1937 version with Frederick March as Norman Maine. Does Vicki Lester live here? Yes, I got a package for him. I'll sign for it. Who are you? I'm her husband. Oh, sure.

Sign right here, Mr. Lester. Mr. Lester. Oh, my God. In Hollywood slang, the husband of a star actress is called a handbag. Norman Maine becomes a handbag. When Norman Maine 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. Selznick.

Selznick was a whirlwind, a brilliant talker, a legendary Lothario. He smoked four to five packs of cigarettes a day, takes amphetamines by the fistful, gambles away his salary at the Clover Club in Hollywood, writes manic, endless memos to his underlings at three in the morning. Starting in the 1930s,

Selznick 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 1937, he was preoccupied with A Star is Born. My notion was to tell this in terms of a rising star in order to have the Cinderella element with her path crossing that of a rising star in order to have the Cinderella element, with her path crossing that of a falling star to get the tragedy of the X-Star. This is an interview with Selznick from the 1950s.

And we created this more or less as we went along. We started without anything more than a vague idea of where we were going, and it was really a relatively easy script to write. I can say this, that 95% of the dialogue in that picture was actually straight out of life and was straight reportage, so to speak. A Star is Born is a movie on one level about alcohol. picture was actually straight out of life and was straight reportage, so to speak. 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. Selznick is rumored to have based Norman Maine on the comedian Frank Fay, 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? Now 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 them every year. What I want's a special award, something nobody else can get. After that performance, Norman Maine 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. I don't feel sorry for you. You fixed yourself nice and comfortable. You can live off your wife now. She'll buy you drinks and put up with you even though nobody else will. Norman takes a swing at Libby, a glancing blow. Libby swings back. Norman's on the floor, humiliated.

I'm Norman, man. Oh, that's not my fault. I don't bother to talk to him out. He's harmless. All right,ated. Norman, shaken, brushes himself off, picks up his hat, walks painfully over to the bar, and falls off the wagon. Give me a scotch. Double. Leave the bottle here. I'm going to read what happens next after Norman's epic drinking binge. We see Norman's car speeding along the Malibu road. We see Norman at the wheel, very drunk and singing, she'll 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 1937, it would have stunned American audiences. Automobiles were really only a 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 1937 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 1930s 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 1939, the American Medical Association put out guidelines on drunk driving and said that the threshold for criminal conviction should be 0.15. Understand that right now, most American states have a threshold of half that. 0.15 is wasted.

I'm going to guess that 99% of you listening to this podcast have never blown.15. 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. Yeah, it was just passivity throughout the system. I called up Baron Lerner, who teaches at NYU Medical School. He wrote a fascinating history of drunk driving

called One for the Road. So 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, at least the ones who were devoted to public safety, were frustrated that there was no prosecution. Well, it's more than that word you use right now is 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 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 acknowledgement that they are impaired. So it's not like we're 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. 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 1930s, 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 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 have happened. 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 drinks at the bar and wanted to get home safe. Well, that's actually wrong. It is like putting a gun in your pocket. If you want to get a sense of how strange attitudes were towards drunk driving in the late 1930s, you should watch Topper. Topper was a big hit in the summer of 1937, a comedy starring a young Cary Grant as a bon vivant named George.

Grant and his wife Marion, played by Constance Bennett, are a young rich couple who spend all their time dancing and drinking. After a night of partying, they take a drive much too fast. They crash their car. George and Marion 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, Marion, and Topper, have another car crash. And Topper's take-home lesson is that he needs to keep living it up. Topper perfectly captures the spirit of the times.

The country is in the midst of the Depression. A movie was supposed to be an escape. Cary Grant's character wants his friend Topper to drink away his troubles, which is what audiences wanted in 1937. 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, where Norman Maine 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. Selznick was notorious for demanding multiple rewrites of his films, and he was unhappy with a third act of Dorothy Parker's script, the one that had the car crash scene. Selznick turns to two would-be screenwriters on his staff, Bud Schulberg and Ring Lardner Jr. Schulberg is 22 at the time and working as a script reader, and Lardner is 21 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. Selznick doesn't care.

Lardner and Schulberg look over the third act of A Star is Born and write Selznick a memo, one typewritten 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 bum and probably a jailbird.

His suicide would still be that of a hopeless drunk trying to find a way out. Selznick is convinced. On November 6th, 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. 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 an irresponsible drunk driving about the streets with the power to inflict death or injury on innocent people. I think we'd better deny you that power for a while. 90 days in the city jail. But then Norman's beloved comes running up to the front of the courtroom. Please wait. I'm his wife. Yes, I recognize you, Ms. Lester.

Please, Judge. I promise you this won't happen again. I'll be responsible for him. 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 1937 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 Gravitt, 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. The door opened, and there stood Hugh Gravitt. you, grab it. He was 71 years old and he was gaunt, reed thin, cloudy eyes, not moving well, smoking a cigarette. And he smiled and said, good morning. They sat outside in his yard and talked for a few hours. 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. Do you think he was drinking? Well, he told me he was drinking. I don't know the amount. Obviously, this is 42 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.

Alcohol wasn't a part of this. Alcohol wasn't a part of this. That's what's so strange about going back through the accounts of Margaret 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 Gravett's breath. Gravett himself did not deny that he'd been drinking, but no one gave him a breathalyzer. For goodness sake, the man had over 20 previous traffic citations. Gravett stood for half an hour at the scene

before anyone even talked to him. After his arrest, a picture of Gravett 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 1949 read, quote, For Gravitt 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. Here's a beloved author. I mean, the author of Gone with the Wind,

like beloved, not especially in Atlanta. People were mad and frustrated that she died. But there was also sympathy for the driver. This is Baron Lerner again, author of One for the Road. 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 to blame. Lerner said the detail from this whole story that stays with him is that Gravett and his wife came to Grady Hospital with flowers from Mitchell as she lay in a coma. It was seen at the time like it was, we're really sorry this happened. We want to give you some flowers to make it better. There was unbelievable tolerance of an activity that shouldn't have been tolerated. It isn't just that he brought flowers. There's an article in one of the local newspapers where a reporter goes to visit Gravitt in jail and finds him praying,

a Bible open to the book of Samuel on his bed. Gravitt tells the reporter, I wanted to go to her funeral, but that was impossible. And then Gravitt says, God knows, it was an accident. People also, after the fact, were saying, with no justification at all, well, Margaret Mitchell would have forgiven him, right? How do they know, right? But that was the nature of the entity at the time.

It would be the 1970s and 1980s 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 Gravett 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, Lardner and Schulberg write in their memo to Selznick, whether or not you show the 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 Maine hit a tree and be rescued in court by his wife. Hugh Gravett and Norman Maine were both tests of our tolerance for drunk driving, and in both cases, society looked at their behavior and shrugged. Ringlardner Jr. 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, Vicki Lester somehow needed to reconcile her own rise with her husband's fall.

How should she do that? Lardner and Chilberg's solution was simple. A single line. We see Vicki Lester at the moment of her greatest professional triumph, at the premiere of the movie she has just starred in with her newfound professional freedom. A reporter puts a microphone in front of her. Ms. Lester. This microphone is on an international hookup. Throughout the world, your fans are hoping that you will say a few words to them.

There's a dramatic pause. The music swells. Vicki 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. Hello, everybody. This is Mrs. Norman Maine. Frankly, my dear, you know the rest.

Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lehman Gistu, and Jacob Smith, with Tali Emlin and Harrison Vijay Choy. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Original scoring by Louise Guerra, mastering by Flan Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact-checking by Keisha Williams.

Special thanks to the screenwriter Charles Randolph, also a close friend of mine, who was a big help in framing this episode, and Mike Birbiglia, Virginia Heffernan, Angus Fletcher, and Baron Lerner, who joined me for our live show on Star is Born, and also our live show producer, Kate Downey. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Hey, 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 hauler. We cross-test a 429-horsepower German SUV, a beautiful Swedish luxury wagon, and the dreaded minivan. Malcolm's choice may surprise you, or not. You'll just have to listen to find out. Here's a clip from the episode, Car Shopping with Malcolm Gladwell.

So all I have right now is a 2014 BMW X1. And now most people would say that's perfectly sufficient, but I wouldn't say that. You would not say that. I have tried it on a airport run for a holiday with my new plus one, so three of us. And I had totally underestimated the amount of stuff that now, I mean, this is not, in the last 10 years, the amount of stuff must have doubled that you're required to carry with you. And the seats, the car seats are just ginormous.

They're huge. Yeah, they're- They're fortress-like. They're fortress-like. So yeah, so I clearly, what I have right now is insufficient. 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 read car magazines.

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. Altamont hits the brakes firmly, smoothly, easily. We come to a halt. Throttle's open. But now it was my chance to return the favor. Malcolm needed my guidance. He needed to know, how do I effectively move around a young family and all the stuff that comes with it?

Malcolm had just become a father and couldn't decide what kind of car to get for his family. His small, first-generation BMW X1 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 X1 isn't going to cut it. So I had to parachute in there. And by parachute, I mean pack my stuff into a minivan in Detroit and drive 600 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 a car for the pastoral life with a child, maybe even two eventually. There's a great P.J. O'Rourke line. He says,

having one kid is like having a dog. Having two kids is like having a zoo. Yes, that'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. Here's my worry. My worries are as follows. I'm totally spoiled by that.

I love this car to death, my X1. Yeah. It has that beautiful, creamy inline six, and it has the hydraulic steering. It's got like old school. The steering on this car is so beautiful. Every time I get into any other car, regardless of the price, I don't think it steers as well as my X1.

So I resign to the fact I'm surrendering. 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. It is. Now, I'm a child of, as I'm sure every member of my generation is, I'm a child of the station wagon. Yeah. As I'm sure you were.

I was. Wait, what were your family wagons? Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser. Uh-huh. That was the biggie with the slide-out tailgate. I love that. And the rear-facing third row where you could put the window down and inhale the exhaust and you could make faces at the serial killers behind you.

It's so unsafe. And my mom never got a minivan. Our car growing up, our family wagon in the beginning was a Peugeot 404. 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. Yeah. The evolution of the family car from the station wagon to the minivan to the SUV. Which one is best for you? For me. So we have what? We have a representative of each class. Yes, we have a new. So I'm not committing to these particular cars. We're just trying to choose the class. 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. Okay. Okay, the first is the Kia Carnival. Oh, yes. Do you know what that is?

Yes, I do. I have been looking at them online. Really? Yeah. Furtively? Furtively. Well, I like the idea that it doesn't, it's a minivan that doesn't look like a minivan,

which is, you know. But it's all minivan. I mean, you're going to see. I can't wait for your experience with it all right and your reaction the second is the wagon the thing the minivan killed the wagon that we have is a volvo v90 cross-country ah so this is the jacked up one yes yeah they're all sort of jacked up they all want to be su 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 kid stuff in there because it's longer, it's generally wider, and 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 heel. 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 bolide. It's the Mercedes-AMG GLE 53, and it is very red, very fast, and very, very expensive. 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. Mostly for kind of like symbolic sociological reasons. Perfect.

I don't want to be the jackass in the AMG, the GLE AMG, right? I briefly had a Boxster, which was the most beautiful drive I've ever had. And I got rid of it because I was the jackass in the Boxster. I didn't want to be the jackass in the Boxster. I understand that. So I worry that. Jackass factor high.

Also, I have run afoul 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 wagons. They have great symbolic meaning for me. I think they're immensely practical. I'm a little dubious of these newfangled Volvos. I wouldn't mind something that was just a proper V6 or V8 in it. And then I think I'm probably most enthusiastic

about the prospect of a minivan. Interesting. Because the sort of underlying thing here is that we're going from the emotional to the rational. We're going from this crazy steroidal Mercedes that'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 lower to the ground, but it's still fun to drive to the completely rational, which is the one box minivan, not fun. I have no kind of status anxiety about driving a minivan. Well, here's a really interesting point.

And Dan Neal from the Wall Street Journal makes it all the time. He says, minivans are symbols of virility. Sports cars are not. Minivans mean you've had kids, you've reproduced. Yes, they do yes they do so that's our baseline that's those are your your pre-existing biases uh and you think you're a minivan man i think i might be a minivan man 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 ask the question,

when it's time to trade in the fast car 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 back seat. Thanks for listening. You can find Car Show with a few more Malcolm cameos wherever you like to listen.