Wet Clothes/Dry Martini (1946, 1947)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

   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.