There are three nevers to getting older in Hollywood. Never audition first thing in the morning. Never try to play a character half your age. And, even if your leading man is prettier than you are, never, never let ’em see you sweat.LAUREN HUTTON
There are three nevers in fashion design. Never confuse fad with fashion. Never forget it’s your name on every label. And, when showing your lines to the press,
never let ’em see you sweat.DONNA KARAN
I think there’s three nevers to being a winning coach. Never let the press pick your starting quarterback.Never take a last-place team lightly.
And, really, no matter what the score,
never let ’em see you sweat.DON REEVES
The Dry Idea commercials were among the most popular television ads of the era. By the mid–1990s, the series was retired and Gillette ultimately let its trademark for the slogan expire. Happily, those famous ads are still available for viewing. To see them, simply go to the neverisms menu of my website—www.drmardy.com—and select the “YouTube Neverisms” link.
A few years after the Dry Idea slogan first aired, another classic saying made its appearance on the pop-culture scene:
Never bring a knife to a gunfight.
This warning about being inadequately prepared for an upcoming conflict is so popular in America that it would be easy to think it has its origins in Wild West shootouts. The evidence suggests, however, that the expression was not used before 1987. So what happened in that year? The answer might surprise you.
In June of 1987, Paramount Pictures released The Untouchables, a Prohibition-era crime drama starring Kevin Costner as the famed FBI G-man Eliot Ness, and Sean Connery as an Irish-American Chicago beat cop named Jim Malone. With a screenplay by David Mamet and an all-star cast that included Robert De Niro as Capone and Andy Garcia as a rookie cop just out of the Police Academy, the film was one of the top-grossing movies of the year (it also won Connery an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role). In a scene early in the movie, as Ness and Malone discuss how to capture Capone, the street-smart Chicago cop played by Connery urges what might be called an overpowering strategy:You wanna get Capone? Here’s how you get ’im. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the “Chicago” way! And that’s how you get Capone.
Later in the film, one of Capone’s henchmen breaks into Malone’s apartment and sneaks up behind him with an open switchblade knife in hand. Malone swings around, points a shotgun at the intruder, and says, “Isn’t that just like a wop? Brings a knife to a gunfight.” Within months of the film’s release, the saying “Never bring a knife to a gunfight” began to appear all around the country. And while we don’t know the identity of the original author, it seems fairly certain that the inspiration for the saying came from that memorable scene.
While the actual words about bringing a knife to a gunfight were first uttered in The Untouchables, the underlying idea behind the saying appeared six years earlier in another famous Hollywood film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Released in 1981, the film contains one of the most famous sight gags in cinematic history. As Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) makes his way through a crowded marketplace in search of his missing love interest (Karen Allen), he is confronted by a menacing Arab warrior who brazenly threatens him with a scimitar. The situation looks grim, and Indiana appears to be stopped in his tracks by the knife-wielding adversary. How will he extricate himself from this dangerous predicament? The intrepid anthropologist, who looks a bit weary from his many recent adventures, looks over at his opponent, wipes his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and then pulls out a revolver from under his shirttail, shooting his opponent dead. The scene still elicits howls of laughter, decades after the film was released, and no matter how many times it has been viewed.
Many fans of that famous Raiders of the Lost Ark scene do not know, however, that the notion of bringing a knife to a gunfight was reprised in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). In this film, the aging anthropologist teams up with a young and headstrong sidekick, Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf). There is a lot of age-related banter between the costars, but perhaps the most memorable occurs when the two men are seated in a bar and are approached by a couple of menacing KGB agents. As the agents begin to make their move, Mutt clicks open a switchblade knife. When the two agents draw their guns, Indy whips out his pistol and shoots both men. And as he does, he says to Mutt, “Nice try, kid, but it looks like you brought a knife to a gunfight.”
Below you will find a number of additional neverisms that are so widespread and so deeply embedded in popular culture that they deserve to be called classics:
Never speak ill of the dead.
Never sweat the small stuff.
Never judge by appearances.
Never take “no” for an answer.
Never mix business with pleasure.
Never throw good money after bad.
Never spend money before you have it.
Never answer a question before it’s asked.
Never believe everything you hear, and
believe only half of what you see.
In the remainder of the chapter, I’ll present more neverisms that have also achieved a classic status. You’ll find many familiar quotations in the pages to follow. If you have a favorite that doesn’t appear in this chapter, there’s a good chance it will show up in another place in the book.
Never give up. Never give in. Never give out.
If there were a Hall of Fame for admonitions, these three would be among the first to gain admittance. Each one is closely associated with Winston Churchill, who used all of them—and whose very life personified them. (For Churchill’s most famous use of never give in, see the beginning of the multiple neverisms chapter.)
The most celebrated of the three, though, would have to be never give up. It was already a fairly popular saying in the early 1800s, when it was adopted as a motto by Martin F. Tupper, a young Englishman studying at Oxford. In 1838, Tupper wrote Proverbial Philosophy, a book of inspirational prose and poetry. Over the next decade, in expanded and revised editions, it became one of England’s bestselling books. Often described as one of Queen Victoria’s favorite books, it contained Tupper’s most famous poem, “Never Give Up!” A stirring tribute to the traits of persistence and perseverance, especially when tested by adversity, the poem became hugely popular in Europe as well as in America, where it was often reproduced without mention of the author’s name (a common practice at the time). Here is the final stanza:Never give up! If adversity presses,Providence wisely has mingled the cup,And the best counsel, in all your distresses,Is the stout watchword of Never give up!