In October 2003, a guy was brought into the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital
in New York City.
Dr. Joe Gold was the chief attending psychiatrist that day in SON.
He felt that his life was essentially a reality show that he's been recorded for years
that everyone in his life was an actor reading from a script and he came to New York essentially
to test this hypothesis.
He thought that maybe 9-11 was faked just to get a reaction out of him on reality TV.
And if he came to New York and if the World Trade Center's were still standing, he would
know that that was in fact the case.
If in fact they had been destroyed then he would admit that perhaps he was delusional.
The ones he got to New York, instead of visiting the Twin Towers, he walked into the United
Nations and asked for asylum.
A asylum from a TV show.
So he was filming him without his consent 24 hours a day which is how he ended up in Bellevue.
Dr. Gold didn't think much of this.
People show up at Bellevue with lots of weird delusions all the time.
And then a few months later another guy walks in with the same idea that he was being filmed
24-7 and broadcasted around the world.
And the second guy, like the first one, mentioned a film.
The 1998 movie The Truman Show.
Both of them named The Truman Show by name.
The day said, my life is like The Truman Show.
Truman is played by Jim Carrey.
He's filmed all day, every day, on a program that has broadcasts to billions of people around
the globe.
His wife is best friend, everybody around him is an actor.
Everybody knows this is a TV show but him.
Until one day he starts to see clues that make him suspicious.
And just to be clear, you're not saying that The Truman Show necessarily triggered this.
Like people watch The Truman Show and suddenly something in their brain snaps.
Yeah, exactly.
But in the country, I think it's just when people are becoming psychotic, perhaps if you
see the movie and that's kicking around your head, you might say, yes, is what's happening
to me.
If your psychosis includes both paranoia and a sense that you are very, very important
what psychiatrists call grandiosity.
30 years ago, you might think that the CIA or the KGB is watching you all the time.
These days you have another possible explanation, reality TV.
A few months later, a third patient showed up with the same delusion and a few months
after that, a fourth.
Dr. Gold started calling it The Truman Show delusion.
He's just written a book about it with his brother Ian called Suspicious Mines.
In one case in the book, a patient, super smart guy, an academic, very altruistic.
I believe that he was part of an elaborate game show and the world was watching him and
betting on everything that he did.
And this was a really fun thing that everyone would be doing online and the money he's collected
would go to charities all over the world and that every single human being on earth would
be given some amount of money and the world would be better for it.
One of the things that he included in his delusion you write in your book is that he has the
thought that he actually was the mastermind who created this game show that he was on
and that he controlled it and he knew the rules when he had originally created the show.
But somehow he had forgotten that and all the rules which is so interesting because of
course it's true.
Like he did in the game show and the only fact that he's missing is that it's not real.
It's all in his own head.
That's an interesting way of putting it.
It is kind of fantastical.
And heartbreaking.
It is.
Like part of him knows he made it up but he can't grasp the whole way.
He does not remember.
At one point he suggests that he told his best friends this is what I'm going to do.
You are going to run the show but you will now hypnotize me and I will forget what we're
talking about now so we can do this really good deed for humanity.
Some of these patients respond to treatment, some don't.
Same as with other delusions and psychoses.
Dr. Goldz says that if they do come back to reality.
Some feel great relief if they've been persecuted.
It's quite embarrassing if you think about it every moment of your life.
I mean when you're in the shower literally everything is filmed.
So they feel quite good about it at the same time.
There's a certain sadness that they're not particularly important.
Do they miss being the most famous person on the world?
No question there are some who feel that that's a huge loss.
At the same time I think they return to the notion that they're mentally ill which in
and of itself is an unfortunate and sad thing.
Psychosis aside, I think all this illustrates clearly there's a downside and an upside
to being on stage for the whole world to see a human spectacle against your will.
And today on our program we have people who became just that.
They haven't experienced so few of us have that we all get to see from afar.
They are on display for everybody and not because they chose it.
What that feels like, the positive parts and the negative side and the real life reality
the whole thing.
From WBEZ Chicago it's this American life.
I'm our glass.
Stay with us.
Aquan, I am the eggplant, kuku kachub.
In the TV genre that's devoted to pure human spectacle, reality TV, you know people fight
drunkenly in hot tubs, they eat live spiders for money.
But none of that can hold a candle to this show.
A show that aired in Japan all the way back in 1998.
It was called susunu denpash shonen and one of its segments in particular got the attention
of one of our producers Stephanie Foo.
She put this story together a few years back today show as a rerun.
The segment is called Sweep Steaks Life.
It starts the way a lot of these shows do with a bunch of people at an audition.
One guy beats out everyone else.
He's 22 years old, a comedian just starting out in his career.
His name is Nassabi.
Nassabi!
Nassabi means eggplant in Japanese, an nickname he got because he is a long face.
The producers tell him they have a unique idea for a show, something they've never tried
before.
It may or may not air, but if it does, he'll be the star.
He'll be famous.
The producers blindfold him, put him in a car and take him to a small apartment.
Then they tell him to take his clothes off.
Wipes the grand office face.
It wasn't just my personal shame or issues about nudity per se.
My dad is a cop.
When I first announced that for my career choice was going to be comedy, he was not thrilled.
We had to go through some things to get him around to the idea.
He said the one thing that I must never do in public is strip.
Oh no.
So there I was.
And then this guilt towards I was breaking the promise to my father is publicly as possible.
But he strips.
He grabs a pillow, holds it over his groin and looks around the room.
There's no chair in the room, no bed, just a coffee table, and magazines, tons of magazines.
The producers tell him that from now on, if he wants food, clothes, he will have to win
them by entering sweepstakes in those magazines.
They give him postcards to send in for prize drawings.
He'll be freed from the apartment after he wins 1 million yen or $10,000 worth of
prizes.
Until then, he isn't allowed any outside contact with the world.
He can't call his family, he can't talk to friends.
And oh, they tell him, don't forget to put tapes in this little camera here every two
hours and record yourself.
We'll come pick up the tapes once a day.
Then they say, all right, later, Nassabi screams, are you for real?
Nassabi says he'd signed no contract.
But he didn't have anything better to do, so he sat down and wrote.
And soon was entering 2-300 contests a day.
And while he waited for prizes to arrive, he had no food.
Nassabi got frighteningly thin very quickly.
You could see the sharp angles of his collarbones.
So this, yeah, what do you think?
Well, starvation is a good word for it.
The staff got together and would give me basically a very simple little bread each day.
So I had bread and water, essentially, for the first two weeks.
But then as soon as the results started to come in, then that stopped and everything
shifted over entirely to the things that I could win through sweepstakes.
After two weeks, he finally won some sugary drinks.
A few days after that, he went a bag of rice.
When the postman dropped it off, it was like Christmas.
Nassabi danced like a madman.
Where you trying to be a good performer and be funny when you were doing that, was it just
really genuine joy?
At the size of an archive.
Well, initially, of course, I was there as a performer and I wanted to be a comedian.
But somewhere in the middle, you know, the whole business of staying alive became my full-time
occupation.
So I think what you saw, if you saw any dancing, it was really just a human being expressing
great joy.
So he danced for this package of rice.
But then he stopped short.
He realized he didn't own a pot to cook the rice in.
But after a couple days of failed attempts, he figured out that if he put some rice in
an empty drink container and left it near his single gas burner, it eventually turned
into a kind of porridge.
And I could eat delicious rice every day.
I remember how good that felt.
And then there was the slow trepidation.
It started to vanish and then it ran out.
And the only food substitute that I had been able to win in my sweepstakes was dog food.
You know, after, let's say, six weeks of eating dog food, when then I was able to get more
rice and it arrived, I really felt a kind of special kind of joy at being able to sort
of return to humanity in a sense and taste delicious rice again every day.
Back then, there was a kind of sweepstakes mania in Japan.
The country was in the middle of a terrible recession and someone would whether one could
subsist entirely on their winnings.
And so when sweepstakes life debuted, almost immediately after Nassabi was first shut in
the room, it was an instant hit.
Nassabi had no idea.
He didn't even know he was on TV.
He believed what the producers had told him that he'd record some videotapes and maybe
someday it would end up on the air.
On television, Nassabi's groin was hidden by a purple cartoon eggplant that floated around
as he moved.
Everything he did was accentuated with ridiculous, boring, boring sound effects and puffy rainbow
letters floated above his head.
But these effects popped up just as often when Nassabi was despondent.
The show took every chance to poke fun at him, whether he was muttering to himself, dancing
around or doing terrible headstands.
You know, the dumb stuff you do when you think no one's watching.
That's what people were.
For context, in the US, Game of Thrones usually has around 9 million viewers.
Nassabi had 16 million.
In a country less than half the size of ours, people thought Nassabi was the funniest
comedy act they'd ever seen.
And I have to admit, as a viewer, once in a while when Nassabi got something really awesome
in the mail, I couldn't help it.
I laughed too.
Even though I knew how much he was suffering, I couldn't help it.
Because unfiltered joy is contagious, though as a foreigner watching Sweepstakes life, most
of the time when the studio audience cracked up, I felt sick.
I thought, what could possibly be funny about this?
I mean, that was maybe a time when Japan was going through some things and they needed
to sort of do that.
Roughly 50 years of prosperity has finally come to a close and people really uncertain
about their futures.
I think people just tended to watch the show and say, I got it bad, but look at Pornaspi,
he's got it worth.
Now there's a lot more awareness of the weak and of people who need extra support.
And I don't think the average Japanese would think it was funny, that there was a guy
naked in a room somewhere.
Nasabe 100s of prizes, but many of them were useless to him.
Spice girls tickets, for example, or a TV with no cable or a bicycle.
He sent away for clothes, but never won anything he could wear.
He was naked the entire time he was in that room for the entire show.
And as the weeks went by, then months, Nasabe started to look less and less sane.
He grew a beard, his hair was wild, and he started talking differently, slower.
He'd make really creepy faces into the camera.
At one point, he won some toys and he started talking to them.
He took a stuff seal for a walk around the apartment.
An action figure became his sensei and he got life advice from it.
And if right now you are sitting there thinking, how in God's good name is this possible?
Why was this allowed?
Impresonment, solitary confinement, starvation.
Watching I thought this is a reality TV show, it's a psychological experiment made public.
This is a story about a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was
The only thing I really have to say is that I said I do it and I do what I say that was it the only reason I kept asking him but wait really why?
The conversation is not going to be good.
The conversation is not going to be good.
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I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I'm going to go home.
I didn't know that humans could be that cruel.
Did you feel like you were going insane?
Did you feel like you were going insane?
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't feel like you were going insane.
I didn't want to talk.
I didn't want to breathe.
I didn't want to move a muscle.
I had reached the end.
I was just finished.
I told the producer that I wouldn't do what I refused.
And we went back and forth for quite a while, actually.
But in the end, Kudos to his skills and negotiator.
I did give in and do the last section of it.
Why did you do it?
But did he say that actually convinced you to do it?
The producer said that actually convinced you to do it.
The producer said that actually convinced you to do it.
The producer said that actually convinced you to do it.
The producer said that actually convinced you to do it.
The producer said that actually convinced you to do it.
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Unsurprisingly, Nassabi left the show with some scars.
He had a lot of trouble holding a conversation for six months.
And he felt sweaty and uncomfortable in clothes for a year.
And his role didn't help his comedy career like he'd hoped.
He was mostly offered roles that required him to be goofy and naked.
He's a delist celebrity now and has the dwindling bank account to match.
And talking to him, it felt like he's really worked hard to turn that tremor into a
positive story he tells himself.
He even says he's thankful for the experience.
It was, I don't want to overstate it, but it was kind of meditative in a way.
I had a lot of time to think about my life and a lot of time to think about a lot of stuff.
That certainly is a very zen way to look at it.
Well, I mean, it's 10-some years since I finished, since I did my job.
And after that, everything has been much easier and much better.
I'm able to deal with things.
I see things happening or I see situations around myself.
And I think that's nothing like what I went through in that room.
And people still remember him.
That's more than one could say from most of the other denpashonen characters.
None of them lasted as long as Nassabi, or became as famous.
The show ended in a very different way.
Or became as famous.
The show ended in 2002, after its ratings began to drop.
I came out of the whole thing, you know, in a sense, with the very best of possible results.
A lot of people, you know, were not so fortunate.
They were terrible things that happened related to the show.
One contestant on denpashonen almost died of dehydration while trying to hitchhike across Africa.
People were starved until they completed various challenges.
Another man was forced to go into a gay club in Australia and offer condoms to men until he was assaulted.
The video cuts out, but you can hear him scream.
And the mastermind behind all this?
The producer of the show, the guy who convinced Nassabi to keep going in Korea.
His name was Toshio Tsuchiya.
Back in the 90s, he was considered the king of Japanese reality TV.
Last year, 14 years after sweepstakes life ended.
Tsuchiya called Nassabi, who wasn't thrilled to hear from him at first.
I had some, you know, mixed feelings about him, a little resentment maybe.
Yeah, I kept my distance for a very long time.
And then, actually, just last year, he got in touch with me.
Apparently, it sort of came to his attention that maybe he had, you know, put people through maybe more than they deserved.
And so he invited me to dinner and he spent the evening sort of explaining what, why he did what he did.
And apologizing.
I think we, yeah, I think we pretty much came to terms and I welcome the opportunity to work with him again, certainly.
Wow, he would work with him again. That's really shocking.
And what was his reason for putting you through what he did?
He wanted something that would move people.
And you don't get that out of just sort of somebody, you know, playing around.
He wanted to see something real.
He wanted to see, he wanted to pull miracles out of people and he wanted to, it was done for the purpose of getting a miracle on film.
And that seemed to me like, well, I'll be honest.
It sounds like something an evil puppet master would say.
So, I had to. I talked to Toshio Tsuchiya on the phone.
He's a round middle aged guy, bleached platinum blonde hair.
He confirmed that he reached out to Nassabi.
And that when they met, Nassabi told him very honestly how painful his experience on the show was.
Tsuchiya says he listened and was moved. But he says he wasn't sorry.
About Nassabi, about any of the segments he produced for Den Pashonen, about any of the contestants, not the slightest.
I use the same interpreter for our interview that I use for Nassabi's.
Here's Tsuchiya.
I was enthralled by their struggle.
I was thrilled by their personal struggles, struggled.
So, I was watching them succeed.
I have no regrets about anything I do with that show.
Nassabi said that you apologized to him when you guys talked.
Is that correct or no?
Well, I put him through a lot.
I'm not...
If you say that you have a sports team and you have a coach who runs his players through very difficult maneuvers.
At the end of the day, he made a pattern on the back and said, you know, sorry for putting you through such a rough struggle.
It wasn't me expressing that I shouldn't have done the project.
Tsuchiya has a lot of lofty ideas of what the show is trying to accomplish.
And when he talks about them, you do get the sense that it was intended to be a sort of psychological experiment.
The whole project was trying to reach at some very elemental, simple humanity.
You see, Nassabi had been sort of brought to a state where he was such an elemental part of his existence.
He danced without realizing he had ever danced.
And he danced on a regular basis.
The modern individual is sort of shackled by convention and expectation and all these other things that we wear from day to day.
And I wanted to see them drop some of that to see this simple humanity and then to see actual gratefulness.
It's weird to think about.
But the fact of the matter is, what Tsuchiya is saying is true.
Anpa Shonen did really capture humanity in a rare way.
Hungry starving alone, unaware that he was being watched.
Nassabi was totally innocent and totally animal.
Of course, it's cruel to bring a human being to that point.
And it takes a special kind of cruelty to take someone at their most vulnerable and add wacky sound effects to their suffering.
A couple weeks into Nassabi's challenge before he won any solid food when he was hungriest.
Delivery men came to the door bearing ramen and stir-fried vegetables.
At 1700 yen altogether, the man said.
I don't have any money, Nassabi replied.
Sorry, my mistake. The delivery man said.
And left.
Nassabi sat there, his head hung.
A contestant in a real life hunger game.
A common lingering in the air.
Stephanie Fu is one of the producers on our show when we first broadcast this story years ago.
We're running the story today because Nassabi's story has been turned into a full-length documentary called The Contestant.
And seeing him do all this naked is even more intense than hearing about it.
You can find the film next week on Hulu or search hulu.com slash The Contestant.
Coming up, we go to Orlando, a highway corvory, Sir Sunk and a vast meadow.
But one man tries to document how things really are.
That's in a minute.
Chicago Public Radio.
When a program continues.
It's American Life, my real class.
Each week in a program, of course, which is a theme.
Bring you different kinds of stories on that theme today show.
Human spectacle.
We have stories of people who go on display in front of others.
Lots and lots of others.
Even though they are not so crazy about doing that.
We've arrived at two of our program act two.
I always feel like somebody's watching me.
And that is editing.
Editing.
If they just set up cameras and showed you all 24 hours in anybody's day,
you know, how interesting could that possibly be?
Well, here is a story of somebody trying just that.
A story of everyday people being treated as human spectacle
and being treated that way precisely because of their everydayness.
R.L. Sabar explains.
Here's how it worked.
On a Tuesday morning in the spring of 1949, a seven-year-old boy named Raymond Birch
was fast asleep in his bed.
His mother walked into his bedroom and said,
Raymond, time to get up for school.
When the boy opened his eyes, he saw a scientist
with a clipboard and timer standing in the corner of his room.
The scientist, a stranger to the boy, just stared.
Didn't say a word.
The boy squirmed out of bed and reached for his clothes.
The scientist wrote, 7-0-1-am.
Raymond picked up a sock.
In the late 1940s and early 50s,
scientists followed kids in houses,
school yards and streets across the town of Ascalusa,
Kansas, taking pages of notes on the littlest things they did or said.
6.33 pm.
Bradley walked deliberately to wear his sister sat playing with the puppy
and hit her on the head twice just as hard as he could hit.
His sister looked very surprised and annoyed.
11-06-am.
Fred skidded on the floor so that he fell with his body partially under the swing.
He yelled, Whoops!
And then lay still since he saw the swing coming back over him.
11-37-am.
Margaret's mother asked,
Why can't you play with your dolls and let that go?
Margaret kept on painting the pillars before,
neither looking at her mother nor answering her.
All of this was happening under the watch of a university of Kansas psychologist
named Roger Barker, who was bent on taking his field in a radically new direction.
Because psychology was still struggling in those days to be taken seriously as a science,
most of Barker's colleagues imitated other kinds of scientists doing lots of experiments in labs.
But none of this made sense to Barker.
Humans didn't live in laboratories. They lived in the real world.
And that's where Barker wanted to study them.
In the wild, the way a botanist looked at flowers in the field
where a primatologist tracked apes through a forest.
So when the University of Kansas called in 1947 and asked Barker if he wanted to chair its psychology department,
Barker said, I'll take the job, but on one condition,
you find me a small town.
A dean at the school said he knew just the place.
Oscar Luce, population 725.
When Roger Barker first drove up into the hills of northeastern Kansas to see Oscar Luce,
he must have been beside himself. The place was in Norman Rockwell painting.
Not too rich, not too poor, sturdy families in modest houses.
It was the picture of Middle America.
Barker wanted to study what he called the naturally occurring behavior of free-ranging persons.
And to do that, he told his field workers to become part of the scenery, visible and friendly, but not obtrusive.
The last thing we want to do, he said, is give people the guinea pig feeling.
Barker took his own advice and moved his entire family to Oscar Luce.
They settled in a beat-up house near the town square, joined the Presbyterian Church,
and became active in the town's social and civic organizations.
And that left Barker just as exposed as the Oscar Luce since he planned to put under his microscope.
You'll be watching us, a local mother told the researchers one day, but don't forget, we'll be watching you.
One of the first things Barker wanted to do in Oscar Luce was to document a day in the life of an ordinary boy.
Barker didn't have a hypothesis about the boy or about seven-year-olds. He wasn't testing for anything in particular.
He wanted only to show the world that following a kid for a day could produce a ton of interesting data.
Scientists could later break down that data in an infinite number of ways, depending on their interests and the goals of their research.
Which was how Little Raymond Birch woke up that morning to find a scientist standing over him.
On that Tuesday, April 26, 1949, eight researchers, taking turns like runners in a relay race, followed Raymond for 13 hours straight.
The book that came out of it, One Boy's Day, was 435 pages long.
It had an entry for nearly every minute of Raymond's day.
The researchers tried to record not just Raymond's words and movements, but also his perceptions, motives and feelings.
They noted that Raymond mumbled with a mouthful of toast at breakfast.
They followed him as he walked with his mom to her job at the county clerk's office and looked on as he drew a picture of a cowboy with a long beard.
They watched Raymond find a baseball bat in the grass and pick it up.
Oh boy, he said, according to their notes. He tossed a stone in the air and swung, but accidentally clipped a flagpole.
824 AM. This made a wonderful, hollow, ringing noise, so he proceeded to hit the flagpole again.
825 AM. He went around and around and around the pole, hitting it with a bat as he did so, until he became so dizzy that he fell down, bat and all.
Even before the book about Raymond's day was published, Barker felt it was destined for greatness.
It would find its way onto campuses as a staple of psychology courses, he thought, and into the hands of artists, novelists and laymen interested in the cultural scene.
We believe it will become a sort of classic and be in demand for a long time, he wrote in the January 1951 letter.
But one boy's day never took off, and by April 1959 Barker, Crestfallen, asked Harper and Roe to ship him the 70 Remainters languishing in his warehouse.
Part of the trouble was simply the book's premise. In its defiant first sentence Barker calls the book a scientific document, but other scientists had a hard time seeing that.
The book was just a tick-tock chronology of Raymond's day, there wasn't any theory or analysis, and this annoyed many of the reviewers in serious academic journals.
One reviewer wrote, the reader is struck by the fact that he is encountering only raw data. How can one evaluate such materials without a theoretical framework?
In other words, what does it mean?
Barker lived in oscarlos of the rest of his life, but he abandoned his day in the life studies after just a few years.
There were more revealing and less labor-intensive ways he discovered to study human beings in their natural habitats.
Today, field studies of naturally occurring behavior are no more common in psychology than they were in Barker's time.
The costs and logistics are just too staggering. One rare but recent Barker-like effort was conducted by UCLA's Center on the Everyday Life of Families.
Researchers there embedded in the homes of 32 middle-class families in Los Angeles for a week and videotaped nearly every waking minute.
But the ratio of cost and effort to interesting results remains as lopsided today as it was in Barker's time.
The New York Times reported that, quote, after more than $9 million dollars in untold thousands of hours of video watching, the researchers found that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like.
A fire shower of stress, multitasking, and mutual nitpicking.
One guy in particular who's not a big fan of these studies? Raymond Birch, the boy.
I tracked him down a few years ago. His real name is Gary Morgan, and he's now a retired utility worker in his early 70s, living in Pennsylvania.
Roger Barker autographed Gary's copy of One Boy's Day and personally inscribed it, calling Gary its, quote, real author.
But Gary's yet to get past his first pages.
I have to say, why is this interesting, he told me? There's nothing happening in this book as far as I can tell. What is it going to tell them that I was standing there chewing on my fingernails?
Ariel Sabar is the author of several books including the outsider, the biography of Roger Barker. You can find his work at arealsubar.com
Back to the big break. So in this story, comedy act takes to the stage for the biggest show of their lives, and it is a spectacle, though not the one they had in mind. David Siegel tells the story.
Mitsimakal and Charlie Brill were a sketch comedy act back in the early 1960s, playing small clubs around the country, mostly in Los Angeles where they lived. They were married, they still are actually, and they were struggling.
Then one day they got a phone call to change their lives.
We were sitting at home and starving starving.
Oh, no, we weren't starving. Yes, I was starving. Well, you were hungry that day.
Oh, was that it? Yeah, and the phone rang and it was our manager, Mace Newfield. And he said, guess what? What? I got you on the Ed Sullivan show and we let out a screen because that was the show.
The ultimate. Bigger. If you've got a shot on Ed Sullivan, you had a shot at Stardom. Yes.
We were just so thrilled and immediately we started to work on the piece of material that we selected for the Ed Sullivan show.
And we rehearsed and rehearsed and we fine tuned it. We ran down to the horn in Santa Monica. We broke it in. It got a lovely, lovely reaction.
And we had we told everybody, in fact, I think I sky-wrote it over Hollywood. We're on the Ed Sullivan show.
Yeah. And we were on our way.
This wasn't just a shot at greatness. This was a chance to meet a few of their idols who'd be on the show that night too.
People like Tessie O'Shea, Georgia Brown, who were both big musical theater stars. But to Charlie and Mitzi, the biggest deal of all was a guy they'd already met.
We were just we were in all of Frank Gorshin. Great, great, great impressionist and the riddler on Batman. We had probably done maybe something with Frank Gorshin.
I think it was something for Frank Gorshin. I just shined his shoes and I'm so in awe.
So we get to New York and we we we got a rehearsal by taxi and and there's thousands of people in the streets clamoring and and the streets are cordoned off. And they're there. Yeah, cordoned.
And I looked at Mitzi and I said, my God, all this for Frank Gorshin.
They were given the worst dressing room in the building on the top floor. The space they shared with the soda machine, but they didn't care. They were both 26 years old and they were about to go national. But first, it was time for a dress rehearsal.
Here's the here's the deal. We didn't know that the dress rehearsal was something that was looked at very careful.
By all the executives and they have an audience, we didn't know we were like coming down in our bath robes with hair curlers and we go through our act.
And when we get to a punchline instead of doing the punchline, we go blah, blah, blah.
Because we don't want to reveal the punchline. We want the band to laugh and we don't want, you know, it was a secret our punchline.
And here we are and Mitzi, by the way, blah, blah, blah. So then we schlep upstairs to our dressing room and we and we hear in the loudspeaker.
Mark Holland, bro, Mr. Sullivan's office, please. McCall and bro.
So we go down and we go into Mr. Sullivan's office and there he was. He was sitting on a chair getting made up.
And I looked at the man who couldn't make our entire careers. So he said, what you did in dress rehearsal.
First of all, I don't get the blah, blah, blah. Is that I'm not getting that. And we said, no, Mr. Sullivan.
Those are our punchlines and we want them to be fresh. And he said, oh, well, I wish you would let us in on them for the dress rehearsal.
And he said, and the piece of material you are doing is too sophisticated for this audience. And I went, what?
Because I had seen the Sullivan show all my life. And he said, well, there's going to be mostly 14, 15, 16 year old girls in the audience tonight and kids.
And it never occurred to me to say, why? What is there what are we doing like a circus show? And he said, so show me your entire act.
And because we were so new and eager to please, we stood there in the office and showed Mr. Sullivan our entire nightclub act.
Anything we had ever worked on.
Which was like 25, 30 minutes of sketches.
Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, sketches.
And he said, okay, here's the deal. We're going to put that first girl that comes in in the first sketch.
We'll put her in the second sketch. But then you do the other girl that you did in the third sketch. And then that's what you end with.
And that's what you end with. Now, we went, uh, okay.
They went back upstairs in something close to a panic. Basically, they had just been told to write a new act right then and there.
Instead of the routine, they've been fine tuning for weeks. They might have freaked out, but they didn't have time.
The curtain's going up in an hour.
We were in the days. We didn't really know what he said. Should we put the first, what did he say?
First girl and put it in the thirds and shit. And then there was a knock on the door. The door was open, but there was a knock.
And there's this guy standing there with funny hair and grainy glasses. And he said, give us a cool, cool, cool.
And I looked at Mitzi and I said, this guy wants a glove or something. I'm not sure what he wants. And he started a laugh and he said, no, give us a cool, cool.
And he pointed to the machine, the coke machine. And I said, oh, yeah, well, come in. It's your yours. And he said, can you give me a dime?
Tencent. And I said, oh, I got to buy you the coke as well. Okay. And what do you think we're made out of money, kid? Yeah.
The worst part was that this guy seemed to want to just hang out. So he helped himself to a seat on the sofa.
While he's talking to us, he takes out of his pocket in napkin and a pen and he's drawing me. He's looking at me and he's drawing me. That's nice.
And he did some pictures of me and Mitzi on just on napkins. All we thought about was, I wish this kid would go so we can work on our own.
We haven't put the first character in the third sketch and the second and he left. And we looked at each other and said, okay, now, what are we doing?
All right. McCall and Brill. McCall and Brill on stage for the show.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Good night. Live from New York.
The show is about to begin. All the performers gathered in the wings waiting for their turn. Finally, Ed Sullivan came out and announced the first act.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles.
We were on the Ed Sullivan show with the Beatles.
Close your eyes and bow to the sick of the day.
We didn't realize that's what the crowds were for because to be very honest, we didn't really know who the Beatles were.
Actually, our manager, when he called us and said, you're going to be on the Ed Sullivan show and he said, and guess what?
You're going to be with the Beatles. And we said, who?
I'll pretend that I'm using the lips. I am using the lips.
The guy with the pen, the one who drew the pictures, that, of course, was John Lennon.
And this was February 9, 1964. The first time a US audience had laid eyes on the Beatles.
Years later, Lennon said he thought the kids that night had lost their minds.
Charlie, watching from 20 feet away, thought so too.
Honest of God, my hand to God, I tell you we couldn't hear them. The screams. All through what they did were so loud.
I never got a chance to hear what they sound like. Who's singing?
This was something different. I heard about Sinatra at the Paramount.
People were with scream. But this, I never heard or saw such a bedlam in my life.
Now, when they're finished, the screams keep going on.
It must have done in you at that moment or was it before that this was a cultural phenomenon, just off the charts.
I really need to be rigorously honest right now. No, it didn't.
No. Well, think about it. Think it over. All right, I'll think it over. No.
It never occurred. We were too nervous of what we were going to do.
Please. I mean, I knew they were a hit.
But you know what? We hadn't gone on yet. I wanted to know that we were going to be fabulous.
Our careers were it's safe here.
73 million Americans watched the Ed Sullivan show that night, about 40% of the entire country.
Or, nearly, when that many people come together, it's for the last episode of a long-running TV series, or for playoff games, teams they already know.
Not for show that turns the stage over to an act that nobody's heard of.
Arguably, Mitzi and Charlie have the single greatest break in the history of show business.
People forget this was an hour-long program, with the Beatles playing a few songs at the beginning, and then a few songs toward the end.
In between, there were six different acts, from Vodville, from Broadway, from the circus, from everything rock was about to bulldoze aside.
It was basically the future, sharing a bill with the doomed.
Which is why, after Beatles finished singing, she loves you.
The next thing on the Ed Sullivan show that night was a guy in a tux doing a car trick.
We do the take-but-one, two, three, four red spot cars.
From these four red spot cars, I take in my right hand. My right hand is always the head on the left side.
Now, in this hand...
There's an acrobatic novelty act. There's Tessio Shea, a very large woman in a sequin gown, playing a banjo, doing her signature tune, Two-Tun Tessie from Tennessee.
Baby, Tennis on a double chin, they call it Two-Tun Tessie, two-tun Tessie from Nashville, can I see a signal?
Frank Orson comes on with ten minutes of impersonations. Dean Martin, Bert Lamkaster, Anthony Quinn.
The far-fetched conceit of his act doesn't seem quite so far-fetched forty years later.
Well, it's election year and once again, a lot of Hollywood stars will be out campaigning for the candidates of both parties.
Well, a funny thing occurred to me, what if these stars should suddenly decide to run for these offices themselves?
They'd have no trouble getting votes because of their popularity, and just a short time, the stars will be running the country.
He imagines a meeting of the U.S. Senate, where a character actor, Roderick Crawford, is Vice President, and people like Marlon Brando, are senators.
When I were in the discuss, when did not this, when he changed the made the President a party system?
And what if he was letting me raise a red say, I oppose no right the laws of eyes, I have to turn four!
Listen, Sam, and...
The year is now, after the year, after the year, there have been just two major parties.
One at Frank's and after the House, and the other one at Dean Martin's.
Just two years after this, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California.
I do anything for you, Tia.
This is the artful dodger from the musical Oliver, played here by an 18-year-old Davey Jones.
When he heard the screams that evening, he thought, and this is a quote, I'd like a little bit of this action.
Two years later, he was cast as a member of the monkeys, the made for TV knockoff of the Beatles.
Yes, I do anything, anything for you.
Mitzi and Charlie were slated for what was probably the worst slot on the show.
They were the last act before the Beatles returned for the final songs.
We were in a days, but we heard them introduce us.
We walked out, now the screams came on because they wanted the Beatles.
That's when I said I thought I heard, get them off.
Yes, did you hear that?
I think I said it.
No, we take you to Hollywood at a very tense moment in the career of a young, aspiring actress,
the office of McCall and Real.
Miss Tidey, would you come into my office right away, please?
Yes, sir.
Everything nice and neat. That's neat. How long, sir?
Tidey, I am having a terrible time trying to find a young actress, the star in my next motion picture.
Yes, sir.
Now are the young ladies outside, ready to be interviewed?
Yes, sir, they're neatly waiting outside, so I'll send them in.
Just one at a time, Miss Tidey.
The premise here is that Charlie is a director, casting a movie, and Mitzi is his secretary,
and then a bunch of different women auditioning for the role.
She plays an aspiring starlet.
Hi, sir.
You might not remember me, but I was Miss Palm Springs back in 1956.
A stage mom.
Sir, if you're not interested in her, maybe you could be interested in me.
Well, I really know.
You know, I have a little talent.
No, I just wish we had a great things coming up, Rosette.
And a method actor.
That an only then can the true justification of the motivation of our inside urgency,
henceforth, on the infinitismal need of our outward action.
Dig.
Did you notice the dead silence after she says dig?
In a room that only 30 minutes earlier had been filled with the noise that scared the cops.
That's a lot of silence.
So you were up there for what?
How long do you think two minutes or something like that?
It was two years.
Two years.
We would have for two years.
We started at 24.
We didn't know what we were doing.
We didn't know if we finished the act or didn't finish the act, but the band leader had the punchline
and he played ta-da.
And now you want to see a couple of Jews standing there so nervous looking to see if they
had to call us over.
Because that's what makes you.
Did he call us over?
No.
But I think I saw it.
No.
Get off.
We were looking at each other saying did he motion to us?
It wasn't that emotion.
No.
It wasn't.
Did you have a sense at the time that it had gone well or gone poorly?
No.
No.
We knew.
No.
We knew.
Into the toilet.
Yeah.
But see, they didn't have this expression, man, but we sucked.
And that was in fact the worst three minutes of their lives.
They bombed so bad that when they came off stage, people wouldn't look at them.
Mitzi's mom dodged their call.
The biggest terror was that we didn't want to go home.
We just didn't want to go home.
We did not want to go back to Los Angeles.
But that night we felt so bad.
And Frank Gorshin was nice enough to take us to Downies.
Sardies.
Sardies.
And we had a drink and he said, don't worry.
It's not the end of your lives and we said, oh my god.
It was such a fiasco that in 40 years, neither of them have actually seen their performance.
Until now, watching a tape of it, the first thing Charlie noticed was that they actually did get a couple laughs.
It made me quite ill.
Ms. Tidey sent in the next young lady, please.
Yeah, we're getting laughs.
Hi, there.
I'm the next young lady's mother.
My little girl is waiting outside.
You know, she used to be one of the Beatles.
Oh, what happened?
Somebody stepped on her.
That was funny.
You had lived that.
You know something that we were a hit.
No, you know what comes to you.
We were a hit.
Look at us.
Cute.
You know what?
There's something wrong with you.
It was pathetic.
The problem, they both say, is that they had to rearrange their act for 14-year-olds in a hurry, the day of the broadcast.
They're still convinced that if they'd been invited on the show any other night, things would have been different.
As it happened, they were treated back home, where their agent didn't call for six long months.
From then on, they'd wince every time they heard the Beatles.
Imagine that.
They had the rest of the 60s ahead of them.
They were in for a lot of winceeing.
On a red ball, the sun will have you known.
There were 20 years ago today, and Sergeant Pepper talked about it.
Somewhere in the black mind, the hills off the code of their left, a young boy named Mariah Carequan.
But Mitzi and Charlie regrouped, and recovered, and they had long and fine careers.
Through the 60s and 70s, they played nightclubs and Vegas, and they were on television a lot.
Goofy stuff, like the Gong show.
But great programs too, like the Tonight Show, which they were on four times.
Mitzi later wrote for sitcoms, like Alf.
Charlie eventually landed a leading role on a detective show called Silk Stockings, which ran on the USA Network for nine years.
They have a daughter, whom they adore.
No knock on Alf.
But it gradually dawned on Mitzi and Charlie.
That on February 9th, 1964, they were part of something seismic.
We were in the midst of greatness.
Yeah.
We didn't know it.
People would come up to us and say,
what's it you who thought was on the Beatles show, and we said, yes, yes, waiting for them to say,
boy did you suck, and they went, oh my god, you're famous.
Mitzi and Charlie are retired now.
Meanwhile, the Beatles have split up.
Hell, wings have split up.
But four decades after they flamed out in front of nearly half the country,
Mitzi and Charlie are still together, still standing, and still refining the act.
I said to Dixie, I said to Mitzi, let's go to the floor.
Did you call me Dixie?
I think I made it.
Who's Dixie?
No, nobody.
No, I mean, what do you have a girlfriend after all?
No, there's no Dixie.
All right, never mind.
Who's that slas in there?
Okay, Dixie.
Forget the Dixie.
What am I doing in this relationship?
Anyway, I said to Mitzi, we have to go to the floor.
David Siegel is a reporter for The New York Times.
We've first ran this story back in 2005.
Since then, Charlie and Mitzi are still going strong.
This year, they're celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary.
And all I gotta do is enjoy the spectacle.
Make sure that it's on, forget it all.
No ladies, programmers produced by Stephanie Foon, myself with Alex Bloomberg,
Ben Calhoun, Sean Cole, Hannah Chaffee Waltz,
or a cany-miki meek Jonathan Benheavard, Brian Reed,
Robyn Semyon, Elisah Ship, and Nancy Updike.
Our senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder,
production help from Willie Sullivan.
Seth Linde is our director of operations.
Research help for today's show from Michelle Harris and Julie Beer,
Music help from Damien Gray from Rob Gettis.
Additional help on today's rerun.
Michael Comete, Catherine Raymondo, and Safia Riddle.
Stephanie Foon, who produced this episode,
did so many great stories for our show, came out with a book,
a couple years ago, after she left our show called,
What My Bones Know.
Special thanks today to Cara Francis, Christine VanderTorne,
and Sarah Brommer.
Our website, we've been listening to over 800 episodes
of our show for absolutely free,
thisamericanlife.org.
This American Life is the book of the public radio stations
by PRX, the public radio exchange.
And as always, we're a program's co-founder, Mr. Troy Melatia.
You know, at the beginning of this program,
when we started this American life together,
even then, you already wanted to disavow
any responsibility for what happens here each week.
You told me back then.
This is what I'm going to do.
You are going to run the show,
but you will now hypnotize me, and I will forget.
I'm Eric Glass.
Back next week, there's more stories of this American Life.
Enjoy this spectacle.
