Giving ‘ . . . Into a Dry Martini’ Another Stir

In his revised edition of “Billy Wilder in Hollywood” (Limelight), Hollywood historian Maurice Zolotow purports, once and for all, to establish the true authorship of the imperishable line sometimes quoted as “Get me out of this wet suit and into a dry martini.”

Back in the 1970s I wrote here that the line was often attributed erroneously to Alexander Woollcott, the New York actor-critic; even the traditionally reliable Bartlett’s attributed it to Woollcott (by way of Reader’s Digest), quoting it as “I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.”

According to Woollcott champions, “Smart Aleck” is supposed to have said these words to his valet after being caught in a rainstorm. The line was also attributed to Woollcott in a Wall Street Journal ad for Beefeater’s Gin.

I was inundated by letters from readers insisting that the author was the wit, actor and essayist Robert Benchley. Once a line of such felicity is immortalized in the press, it has a life of its own.

The common attribution to Benchley came from a confusing association. The line was spoken by Benchley in the movie “The Major and the Minor,” when Ginger Rogers, as a young woman trying to make a living in New York by giving shampoos to people in their homes, arrives at his door dripping wet from a rainstorm.

He says, according to Zolotow, “No matter what the weather is, I always say--why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”

Of course that line has a sexist thrust. It was followed by ogling and groping, and Miss Rogers dumped her hot shampoo over Benchley’s head and fled.

Zolotow says that Wilder, director of the film, told him that screenwriter Charles Brackett had contributed the line to the movie, admitting that he had heard the fey actor Charles Butterworth say it at a party.

I liked the Butterworth theory, since the line seems to fit exactly his whimsical humor, but I preferred another version--that Butterworth had said it after falling into the swimming pool at the Garden of Allah, in Hollywood. There’s something really neat about that picture. No reason why Brackett couldn’t have been there and helped fish him out.

“The Major and the Minor” was Wilder’s first film. Ginger Rogers’ character is from a small town in Iowa; disenchanted with New York, she goes home by train, posing as a 12-year-old to avoid paying full fare. On the train she captivates Ray Milland, an Army major. It was a triumph of acting and directing that the 1942 audiences accepted the voluptuous Miss Rogers as a 12-year-old girl and the suave Milland, then in his mid-30s, as her suitor. Wilder said, “We had here the first American film about pedophilia.” (I suspect that audiences didn’t buy Ginger as a 12-year-old, knowing that beneath that middy beat the breast of a sexually mature woman.)

Meanwhile, I find in my files a forgotten letter providing evidence that the line predates “The Major and the Minor,” and though it was spoken by Butterworth, it was not his line.

“I heard the line in an earlier film the other night,” wrote Jimmie Hicks of Hollywood. “I saw the Mae West film ‘Every Day’s a Holiday” (1937) and in it Charles Butterworth, who plays a kind of butler, delivers the line to Charles Winninger, his employer. The author of that screenplay was Mae West herself. So maybe she originated the line.”

I must take Hicks’ word for the presence of the line in that movie, but according to Halliwell’s Film Guide the film was released in 1937--five years before “The Major and the Minor,” it was written by Mae West, and Butterworth and Winninger both played in it.

And Mae West certainly was clever enough to have invented the line. Mae West was such a good screenwriter that she could afford to give lines like that away to other members of the cast. There would be enough left over for her.

But do you think this evidence will cause any change in the legend, perpetuated by now in thousands of books, magazine articles and newspaper columns, that Benchley was the author?

Not a chance.

Might as well try to persuade them that Benchley didn’t say, “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.”