Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Major and the Minor,’ With an Unexpected Come-on)

Mr. Osborne (played by Robert Benchley) (to Ginger Rogers, dripping wet from a rainstorm): “Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”— The Major and the Minor (1942), screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, directed by Billy Wilder

For many years, I had been under the impression that this famous witticism from humorist Robert Benchley had originated from an incident when he was thrown into a pool fully dressed, only to emerge, with admirable aplomb, with this uproarious response. 

That would have been a spectacular example of having presence of mind, particularly from the famously inebriated Benchley, but who knows? Maybe he could have done it.

Only now, all this time, I may have been wrong.

At one point, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations misattributed the line to Alexander Woolcott, Benchley’s fellow Algonquin Table wit. But over the years popular opinion swung toward Benchley, who in the 1930s largely turned away from the extended wry essays that had gained his reputation to more remunerative appearances in Hollywood shorts or (as here, in Wilder’s first directorial effort) featured roles in major films.

When I caught The Major and the Minor again, after too many years to count, on Turner Classic Movies, I thought that Wilder and collaborator Charles Brackett had fed Benchley’s words to him, knowing that those familiar with the humorist would guffaw when they encountered the line again in a different context. 

Well, not quite. In a note quoted in a 1985 article by Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times, Wilder recalled:

“We gave the joke to Robert Benchley . . . under the impression that he had originated it. When it came to the shooting, he modestly disclaimed credit for this now classic line, informing me that it had actually, indubitably and in fact been said by his friend [actor] Charles Butterworth.”

There’s more to the story than that. Maybe…

Butterworth did indeed say a slight variation on the line, onscreen—like Benchley—while playing a kind of butler, to Charles Winninger, his employer, in a comparatively little-remembered 1937 comedy called Every Day’s a Holiday. And it likely would have been even less remembered had its screenwriter not been Mae West. 

The movie’s failure—and its subsequent lack of TV viewings over the years—would account for why most film aficionados would recall Benchley rather than Butterworth saying the line. But did West come up with it on her own?

The jury’s still out. Ralph Keyes, for instance, responding to that possibility raised by Barnaby Conrad, told the author of The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic that the saucy female star was “a notorious credit hog who hated to share billing with anyone, no matter how many of her lines they may have written.”

There you have it, for now. But whenever you hear that line, just remember: what remains lost in the mists of memory remains clear and bright on celluloid, where it exists to cheer future comedy fans just as much as those who needed to hear the merry line so badly in wartime America.