Wet Clothes/Dry Martini (1946, 1947)

Bapopik at AOL.COM Bapopik at AOL.COM
Sat Sep 6 05:39:36 UTC 2003


   From Ancestry.com.  Perhaps the LOS ANGELES TIMES will have something,
when ProQuest reaches the 1930s and 1940s.


   14 January 1946, BERKSHIRE EVENING EAGLE (Pittsfield, Berkshire, Mass.),
pg. 10, col. 7:
_Benchley at Sea_
   On the whole, his (Bob Benchley's) remarks were too evanescent for
quotation.  He didn't originate "I've got to get out of these wet clothes and into a
dry Martini."  That was printed by an obscure California columnist and picked
up by a movie press agent, who attributed it to Benchley, to Benchley's
indignation.  One remark that he unquestionably did make was recorded during the
war.  He came out of a night club one evening and, tapping a uniformed figure on
the shoulder, said, "Get me a cab."  The uniformed figure turned around
furiously and informed him that he was not a doorman but a rear admiral.  "O.K.,"
said Benchley.  "Get me a battleship."--_The New Yorker_.

   3 September 1947, TIMES-RECORDER (Zanesville, Ohio), pg. 11?, col. 4:
_Benchley Remembered_  (By columnist Earl WIlson--ed.)
(...)  I reminded him that day (1944--ed.), in his big suite at the Royalton,
of his famous line, "I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry
martini."
   "I didn't say it," he said.  "Somebody else did."
   He'd merely repeated it and somebody gave him credit, he said--and I think
now how much bigger he was than the guys who are always yelling to you that
was THEIR gag, Mr. Columnist.



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