The Coral Gables Times

WHY DIDN'T I SAY THAT?

The great comebacks—read them and laugh BY BENNETT CERF HOW MANY OF THE BEST remembered gems of wit and repartee actually were coined by the glittering souls to whom they are attributed? I frequently have seen the same classic lines credited to a half dozen different celebrities. In one version, Max Beerbohm said something devastating to H. G. Wells. In another, Dorothy Parker delivered the same bon mot to Hedda Hopper. This spring, so help me, Marilyn Monroe, according to one imaginative columnist, whispered it to Joe Di Maggio! Any honest celebrity who subscribes to a clipping service will admit he hears some of his cleverest punch lines for the first time when he reads that he has delivered them. Nor does this cause him to complain! If the lines are good enough, he simply adds them to his repertoire forthwith—and modestly accepts the credit for them. Some of the most widely quoted bons mots of all time arose from Oscar Wilde's feud with James McNeill Whistler. Near the very top is Whistler's "Oscar has been invited to all the best homes of England—once." Another time, Wilde approved a sally of Whistler's and admitted, "I wish I had said that." Whistler's famous rejoinder was, "You will, Oscar, you will." Wilde's last years were marked by tragedy. When he lay dying, apparently in a coma, his Parisian landlord expressed his concern to the one old friend who appeared at the bedside. "Who is going to put up the money for the poor devil's funeral?" he queried. The friend shrugged his shoulders. Wilde's eyelids flickered, and he said feebly, "I fear, gentlemen, that I am dying beyond my means." Another proverbial wit was Will Rogers. His humor was straight to the point—but never malicious. When he starred in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies, he directed many of his sallies at the famous beauties Mr. Ziegfeld assembled for his annual extravaganza. "In every town we play," observed Rogers, "some millionaire comes along and marries one of those wonderful chorus girls Flo Ziegfeld worked so hard to find. Some of them don't come back to the show for three or four weeks! . . . They're so beautiful," he sighed later. "It's sad to think that twenty years from now they'll all be five years older." "Is the field of humor overcrowded?" Will Rogers once was asked. He replied, "Only when Congress is in session." At an elaborate, white-tie-and-tails banquet he told the assemblage, "I think it might be better if more people worked for their dinners and fewer dressed for them." If Dorothy Parker originated only thirty percent of the things she has been given credit for, her place among the country's brightest wits is assured. Returning from England one summer, she explained that she had devoted the better part of her time to sliding up and down barristers. A drunk on the boat developed an unrequited passion for her. Miss P. referred to him as "a rhinestone in the rough." At the captain's dinner, her pursuer assured her, "I simply cannot bear fools." "Apparently," snapped Miss Parker, "your mother did not have the same difficulty." Once, when she entered the dining room alongside a beautiful and catty lady playwright, the playwright stepped aside, saying sweetly, "Age before beauty." "Pearls before swine," responded Dorothy Parker, just as sweetly, and swept into as hearty a dinner as ever she ate. In the White Plains, N.Y., courthouse the distinguished lawyer, Joseph H. Choate, once drew a local opponent who tried to sway the jury by advocating they "disregard the Chesterfieldian urbanity of the expensive lawyer from Fifth Avenue." Choate's riposte, one of the most widely quoted in legal lore, was that his "Chesterfieldian urbanity" might be decidedly preferable to his opponent's "Westchesterfieldian suburbanity." Another of the most widely quoted wits of our time was playwright George S. Kaufman. Kaufman traced his ancestry back to Sir Roderick Kaufman, who, he claimed, went on the crusades—as a spy. A spurious gold-mine promoter once assured him his property was so rich there was no necessity to dig for the gold; it lay around right on the surface. "What?" grumbled Kaufman. "You mean I'd have to stoop over to pick it up?" When informed that an associate's daughter at Vassar had eloped, Kaufman remarked, "Ah! She put the heart before the course!" This very month, I've come across a dozen pithy lines I wish I had said myself. Probably every reader of this article has made observations just as penetrating or, alas, thought of them too late on the way home from the occasion where they would have made him famous! But who was around to record them? Hear these: Cynical octogenarian Somerset Maugham: Now that I've grown old, I realize that for most of us it is not enough to have achieved personal success. One's best friends must also have failed. Bruce Barton: A star salesman needs more than charm and perseverance. He needs imagination. Let me remind you that the stinger of a bee is only three one-hundredths of an inch long. The rest of the twelve inches is pure imagination. Carl Sandburg: Advice is what the old give the young when they no longer can set a bad example. Jack Benny: Give me my golf clubs, the fresh air, and a beautiful girl, and you can keep the golf clubs and the fresh air. Harry Truman: One of our troubles today stems from the fact that too many adults and not enough children believe in Santa Claus. John Mason Brown: The mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working the minute you're born and never stops until you're called upon to make a few remarks in public. Groucho Marx: The hardest place to tell the difference between chicken and veal is in a drugstore's tuna fish sandwich. Sholem Aleichem: If somebody tells you you have ears like a donkey, pay no attention. But if two people tell you, buy a saddle. William Inge: Flattery is like perfume. The idea is to smell it, not swallow it. Robert Penn Warren: Poets are terribly sensitive people, and one of the things they are most sensitive about is cash. Gov. Edmund Muskie: An economist is a man who tells you what to do with your money after you've done something else with it. Satchel Page: Never look back. Something may be gaining on you. Chester Bowles: No army is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Jean Domergue, French writer: The world belongs to women. When a man is born, people ask how his mother is. When he gets married, people exclaim, "Isn't the bride sweet!" When he is dead, people ask, "How much did he leave her?" Mrs. Pat Campbell (when a reporter asked: "Why do you suppose women are so lacking in humor?"): "God did it on purpose—so that we may love you men instead of laughing at you." The quick and witty comebacks of the late George Bernard Shaw have often been printed. I once witnessed one of his sharpest. We were walking along Piccadilly at his usual gallop when suddenly a man came up to him and said, "Oh, Mr. Shaw. I would like so much to meet you. My name is Rothschild." Shaw never stopped. "Good-bye, Mr. Rothschild," he said. Why didn't I say that!

12 Suburbia Today, July 1961