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 and saw him. 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 911 was faked just to get a reaction out of him on reality tv. And if he came to New York and if World Trade Centers were still standing, he would know that was in fact the case. If, in fact they had been destroyed, then he would admit that perhaps he was delusional.
Then once he got to New York, instead of visiting the Twin Towers, he walked into the United nations and asked for asylum. Asylum from a TV show. I was filming him 1,010, 24 hours a day, which, you know, is how he ended up in Bellevue. Dr.
Goad 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 247 and broadcast around the world. And the second guide dog, the first one mentioned film, the 1998 movie the Truman Show.
Both of them named the Truman Show. You know, by name. They 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 is broadcast to billions of people around the globe. His wife and best friend. Everybody around him is an actor. Everybody notices a TV show with him until one day he starts to seek 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 the brain snaps? Yeah, exactly. On the contrary, I think it's just when people are becoming psychotic.
Perhaps if you've seen a movie and that's kicking around your head, you might say, yes, this is what's happening to me. If your psychosis includes both paranoia and a sense that you are very, very important, what psychiatrist called grandiosity. Thirty 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 doctor goes started finding the Truman show delusion. He's written a book about it with his brother Ian called Suspicious Minds.
In one case, in the book Patient, super smart guy, an academic, very altruistic. Believed he was part of an elaborate game show and the world was watching him and betting on everything they did. And this was a really fun thing that everyone would be doing online, and monies collected would go to charities all over the world, and every single human being on earth would be given some amount of money and the would be better for it. One of the things that he included in his delusion to write 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 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 inherit 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, but he can't grasp. At one point he's just 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. But Dr. Walt 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, when you're in the shower, literally everything's 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 in 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 of itself is an unfortunate, sad thing. Psychosis aside, I think all this illustrates so clearly.
You know, 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 have an experience, you know, 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 of the whole thing. For WBC Chicago, it's this American Life on our class. Stay with us, Naquan.
I am the eggplant Cuckoo Kachub. And 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 was called Susanoo Den Hashonen. And one of its segments in particular got the attention of one of our producers, Stephanie Fu. The segment is called Sweepstakes 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 on his career. His name is Nasubi. Nasubi.
Nasubi means eggplant in Japanese, a nickname he got because he has 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. That wipes the grin off his face. It wasn't just my personal sort of shame or issues about nudity, per se.
My dad is a cop, and when I first announced that for, you know, my career choice was going to be comedy, he was not thrilled. And we had to go through some things to get him around to the idea. He said, you know, 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. It is publicly possible, but he strips, he grabs a pillow, hold 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 doesn't allow 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, alright.
Later, Nasopi screams, are you for real? Nasopi says he signed no contract, but he didn't have anything better to do. So he sat down and wrote. And soon was entering two to 300 contests a day.
And while he waited for prizes to arrive, he had no food. Nasibi got frighteningly thin very quickly. You could see the sharp angles of his collarbones. 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 things that I could win through sweepstakes. After two weeks, he finally won some sugary drinks.
A few days after that, he won a bag of rice. When the postman ducked it off, it was like Christmas. Naspi, dance like a madman. Were you trying to be a good performer and be funny when you were doing that, or was it just truly genuine joy?
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 this slow trepidation as it started to vanish, and then it ran out.
And the only food substitute that I had been able to win in a sweepstakes was dog food. You know, after, let's say six weeks of eating dog food, when 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. Back then, there was a kind of sweepstakes mania in Japan. The country was in the middle of a terrible recession, and some wondered whether one could subsist entirely on their winnings.
And so when sweepstakes life debuted, almost immediately after Nasibi was first shot in the room, it was. It was an instant hit. Nasopi 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, Nasopi's groin was hidden by a purple cartoon eggplant that floated around as he moved. Everything he did was accentuated with ridiculous boing, boing sound effects, and puffy rainbow letters floated above his head. But these effects popped up just as often when Nasi 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, except people were. For context, in the US, Game of Thrones usually has around 9 million viewers. Nasibi hit 16 million. In a country less than half the size of ours, people thought Nasibi was the funniest comedy act they'd ever seen.
And I have to admit, as a viewer, once in a while, when Nasui 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. His 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? That was maybe a time when, you know, Japan was going through some things and they needed to sort of do that. Roughly 50 years of prosperity, it's finally come to a close, and people were really uncertain about their futures. You know, I think people just tended to watch the show and say, you know, I got bad.
Look at poor Natsuki. You know, he's got it worse now. There's a lot more awareness of the week and of people who, you know, need extra support. I don't think that.
I don't think the average Japanese today would think it was funny that there was a guy, you know, naked in a room somewhere. Nasmy won hundreds 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 worn 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, Nasmy 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 stuffed 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?
Imprisonment, solitary confinement, starvation, watching, I thought, this isn't a reality TV show. It's a psychological experiment made public. Plus boing boings, of course. Was there anything preventing me from backing out at that point?
Like, was the door locked? No, there was no lock on the door. And producers later asked me, so why didn't you escape? I was naked, so I would have had to go outside naked and seek help.
But I don't think that's what kept me in there. The only thing I really have to say is that I said I'd do it and I do what I say that was it the only reason I kept asking him, but wait, really, why? The Japanese spirit, which is just to sort of stick through you endure things, you know, when you're given something, whether it's easy or whether it's hard, you just really do, you know, you're obliged to follow it through. Nasuki did finally win $10,000 worth of prizes.
It took him almost an entire year, but at last he completed the challenge. When he reached his goal, producers didn't tell him anything about it. Instead, he snuck into his apartment in the middle of the night, put a blindfold on him, took him out to a car, gave him clothes. Natsui seemed to think this was a good thing.
He was laughing, giggling. But when he took the blindfold off, he found out he'd been taken to Korea. When I got off on the other side in Korea, I took off the mask and they said, congratulations, you've achieved your $10,000. This is your reward.
You get to have a trip in Korea. So I got to do a little sightseeing that day, and I thought, wow, that was a long thing. Boy, what would I been through? But then at the end of the day, they took me back to my room, and there was the exact same room set up in the exact same way.
They recreated his little apartment, complete with the magazines, the stuff seal, the postcards exactly how he left it, except in Korea. And they told him, great, now all you have to do is start over and win your airfare back home. This was just like somebody just had pulled the floor out from under me and I just fell. I.
I didn't know that humans could be that cruel. Did you feel like you were going insane? If anything, the opposite of insane. I It's.
It's. I lost all energy. Like somebody who just like sucked the life out of me. I didn't want to talk, I didn't want to breathe.
I didn't want to move a muscle. I was. I had reached the end. I was just.
I was finished. He told the producer that I wouldn't do it. I refused. And we went back and forth for quite a while, actually.
But in the end, kudos to his skill as a negotiator. I did give in and do the last. The last section of it. Why did you do it?
Did he say that actually convinced you to do it? Well, it was just. I got exhausted, if anything. I mean, he wasn't leaving.
I couldn't just sort of get up and storm out. I had made no preparations for being in Korea. And it just. So at the end I just said, yeah, whatever.
And so I continue. After all, he was naked with no money in another country. If you watch the clip, the producers just tell him he's trapped. Show him looking shocked and cut away.
The studio audience laughs. Natsu continued his writing routine for four more months. And then the final episode aired. The producers sneak into Natsu's room and blindfold him again, dress him, drive him to another location.
They release him in yet another bare room. And he sighs and instinctively takes off all his clothes. Then suddenly, all four of the walls around him fall down. That's him screaming.
Turns out he is on stage in a huge studio in Japan, in front of an enormous audience. Nasubi, congratulations on your goal. Naspi looks horrified. Two television hosts cautiously approach him and talk to him like a baby, telling him, congratulations.
Naspi says, frightened. My house fell down and there's all these people here. It's finally over, presses the host. You're finished.
Naspi should be happy, but he looks thoroughly weirded out. Remember, Natsuya didn't even know who was being broadcast. The producers told him that it was an experiment, but they didn't know he'd ever made it on air. So he's blown away when they tell him about the TV show.
That a secret camera in his apartment once even broadcast the 24 hour livestream of his actions. They tell him his diaries were published and the bestsellers clips from him enjoying a specific brand of ramen turned into commercials and endorsement deals. He was on the COVID of magazines. Then they play a bunch of clips from the show.
Masubi blinks. He says, did I do that? That was me. And so I sat there realizing that this new sort of life was you.
Know, I was no longer just a nobody. I was. The entire nation had been watching for 15 months. And, you know, to be honest, I thought, you know, what the hell?
Where's my country coming to me? And I was, you know, very happy that, you know, my journey was not for nothing, but it's still Weir. Unsurprisingly, Nazvi left the show with some scars. He had a lot of trouble holding the 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 hoped. He was mostly offered roles that required him to be goofy and naked. He's a D list celebrity now and has a dwindling bank account to match. In talking to him, it felt like he's really worked hard to turn that traumatic experience 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. You know, 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. Look at it. Well, I mean, it's, you know, 10 some years since I finished, since I did that project. And after that, everything has been much easier and much better.
You know, I'm able to deal with things. I see things happening or I see situations around myself, and I think that's. That's nothing. But I went through and ended up in that room.
And people still remember him. That's more than one could say. For most of the other Denbigh Shonen characters. None of them last as long as Nasby 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 Denpechenon almost died of dehydration while trying to hitchhike across Africa. Some 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 Nasui 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 Natsui, who wasn't thrilled to hear from him at first. I had some, you know, let's say, mixed feelings about him. The resentment maybe. Yeah, I kept my distance for a very long time.
And then actually just last year, he got in touch with me and 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 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, you know, wow. He would work with him again. That's really.
That's 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.
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 confirms that he reached out to Natsume and that when they met, Natsumi told him very honestly how painful his experience in the show was. Tsuchiya says he listened and was moved.
But he says he wasn't sorry about Nasopi, about any of the segments produced for Dendo Shonen, about any of the contestants, not in the slightest. I use the same interpreter for RNA view that I use for Nasopi's. Here's Tuchiya. I was enthralled by their struggle.
I was thrilled by their personal struggle. So I was watching them succeed. I have no regrets about anything I do with that show. Natsubi 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 may pat him on the back and say, 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 was trying to accomplish, and when he talks about them, you do get the sense that it was in fact intended to be a sort of psychological experiment. The whole project was trying to reach at some very elemental, simple humanity. You see, Natsmi had been sort of brought to a state where he was such an elemental part of his existence that 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 the simple humanity and then to see actual gratefulness. It's weird to think about, but the fact of the matter is, what Cuji is saying is true.
Denpashonen did really capture humanity in a rare way. What you don't ever really see. Even on the craziest American reality TV shows, Hungry, Starving, Alone, unaware that he was being watched. Nasty 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 Nasu's challenge, before he won any solid food, when he was hungriest, a delivery man came to the door bearing ramen and stir fried vegetables and 1700 yen altogether. The man said, I don't have any money.
Nasubi replied, sorry, my mistake. The delivery man said, and left. Nasubi sat there, his head hung, a contestant in a real life hunger Game, the smell of ramen lingering in the air. Stephanie Fu is one of the producers of our program Going Up.
We go to a land where highway core beliefs are sunk in a vast meadow where one man tries to document how things really are. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This American Life memorabilia class C300 program, of course, which is a theme. We can 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. We've talked about today's program so far about reality tv. And of course what makes reality TV entertaining is very simple and that is editing. Editing.
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 me trying just that. A story of everyday people being treated as human spectacle and being treated by precisely because of their everydayness.
Ariel 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 swarmed out of bed and reached for his clothes. The scientist wrote, 7:01am Raymond picked up a sock.
In the late 1940s and early 50s, scientists followed kids in houses, schoolyards and streets across the town of Oskaloosa, Kansas City, taking pages of notes on the littlest things they did or sad. 6:33pm Bradley walked deliberately to where 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. 11:06am Fred skidded on the floor so that he fell with his body partially into the swing.
He yelled whoops. And then lay still since he saw the swing coming back over him. 11:37am 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 primatologists 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 Find me a small town.
The dean of the school setting you just the place. Oskaloosa, population 725 When Roger Barker first drove up into the hills of northeastern Kansas to see Oskaloosa, he must have been beside himself. The place was a Norman Rockwell painting. Not too rich, not too poor, sturdy families and 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 Oskaloosa. 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 Oskaloosa he's meant 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 Oskaloosa was to document a day in the life of an ordinary boy. Barker didn't have hypothesis about the boy or about 7 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 Burch woke up that morning to find a scientist standing over him. On that Tuesday, April 26, 1949, eight researchers, kicking 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 muffle 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. 8:24am this made a wonderful hollow, ringing noise, so he proceeded to hit the flagpole again.
8:25am he went around and around and around the pole, hitting it with the 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 campus as a stable of psychology courses he fought, and into the hands of artists, novelists and laymen interested in the cultural scene. We will evil become a sort of classic and be in demand for a long time, he wrote in a January 1951 letters.
But One Boy's Day never took off, and by April 1959 Barker, crestfallen, asked Harper and Rowe to ship him the 70 remainders languishing in his warehouse. Part of the trouble was simply the book's premise. In its defined first sentence, Barker calls the book a scientific document. But other scientists had a hard time seeing that the book was just a TikTok 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's encountering only raw data. How can one evaluate such materials without a theoretical framework? In other words, what does it mean?
Barker lived in Oslo Lusa 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 after more than $9 million and untold thousands of hours of video watching, the researchers found that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks a fire shower of stress, multitasking and mutual nitdigging.
One guy in particular who's not a big fan of these studies, Raymond Burch. The boy. I tracked him down a few years ago. His real name is G.
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 it's 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 the Outsider, a biography of Roger Barker, available as an Amazon Kindle single I'm the center of attention and the Walls inside of my bed factory. The big break. So in this story, a 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. Mitch McCall 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 that changed their lives.
We were sitting at home and, I don't know, 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.
That was our manager, Mace Neufeld. And he said, guess what? What? I got you on the Ed Sullivan Show.
And we let out a scream because that was the show, the ultimate bidder. If you 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 a piece of material that we selected and 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 told everybody. In fact, I think I Skyrote it over Hollywood. We're on the Ed Sullivan Show. Yahoo.
Yeah. And we were on our way. This wasn't just a shot of 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 were both big musical theater stars. But to Charlie Mintzy, the biggest deal of all was the guy they'd already met. We were just. We were in awe of Frank Gorshin, a 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 should shine his shoes.
And I was so in awe. So we get to New York and we go to rehearsal by taxi. And there's thousands of people in the streets clamoring. And the streets are cordoned off.
And I looked at Mitzi and I said, my God, all this for Frank? Caution. They were given the worst dressing room in the building on the top floor, the space they shared with a 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 deal. We didn't know that the dress rehearsal was something that was looked at very carefully by all the executives and they have an audience we didn't know.
We were like coming down in our bathrobes with hair curlers. And we go through our act and when we get to the 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.
So we have to go, and here we are. And Mitzi, by the way, blah, blah, blah. So then we schlep upstairs to our dressing room and we hear in the loudspeaker, McCall and Brill. Mr.
Sullivan's office, please. McCall and Brill. So we go down and we go into Mr. Sullivan's office and there he was, he had Sullivan.
He was sitting in a chair getting made up. And I looked at the man who could make our entire careers. So he said, what you did in dress rehearsal, first of all, I don't get the blah, blah, blah. I said, 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're doing is too sophisticated for this audience.
And I went, what? Cause I hadn't seen the Sullivan show in my life. And he said, well, there's gonna 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 it?
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 gonna 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.
That's what you end with. Now we went, oh, 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'd been fine tuning for weeks.
They might have freaked out, but they didn't have time. The curtain was going up in an hour. We were In a daze. We didn't really know what he said.
Should we put the first. We take the first girl and put it in the third. 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 Kool cloth. Here's a Ku clu. 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 Ku kluve. And he pointed to the machine, the Coke machine. And I said, oh, yeah, we'll come in.
It's yours. And he said, can you give me a dime? 10 cent? And I said, oh, I gotta buy you the cork 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 his pocket 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 his own napkins. All we thought about was, I wish this kid would go so we could work on our act.
We had to put the first character in the third character in 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. Tonight, live from New York, the show's about to begin. All the performers gathered in 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 about to see Tomorrow I'm.
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 gonna be on the Ed Sullivan Show. And he said, and guess what? You're gonna be with the Beatles.
And we said, who? I'll pretend that I'm using the lips. I am the same. 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 20ft away, thought so too.
Honest to God. My head 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 mean, I heard.
Heard about Sinatra at the Paramount, you know, people were whispering. But this, I never heard or saw such bedlam in my life. Now when they're finished, the screams keep going. It must have dawned on you at that moment, or was it before, that this was a cultural phenomenon just off the chart.
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. Okay.
It never occurred. We were too nervous of what we were gonna 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 gonna be fabulous. Our careers weren't crazy. 73 million Americans watched the Ed Sullivan show that night.
About 40% of the entire country. Ordinarily, 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 had the single greatest break in the history of show business. People forget this was an hour long program with Beatles playing a few songs at the beginning and then a few songs toward the end.
In between, there were six different acts. From vaudeville, 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 the Beatles finished singing she Loves yous, the next thing on the Ed Sullivan show that night was a guy in a tux doing a card trick. We do the ticket.
One, two, three, four red spot cards. Now, from these four red spot cards, I'm picking my right hand. My right hand is of course always a heavy thumb on the left side. Now, in this head there's an acrobatic novelty act.
There's Tessie o', Shea, a very large woman in a sequined gown playing a banjo, doing her signature tune, Two Ton Tessie from Tennessee. They play tennis on a double chins. They call it Two Ton Tessie. Two Ton Tessie.
Relational tennis. Frank Gorshen comes on with ten minutes of impersonations. Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn. The far fetched conceit of his act doesn't seem quite so far fetched.
Four years later, while selection year once again a lot of the Hollywood stars will be out campaigning for the candidates of both parties. Well, funny thing, Kirby. What if these stars should suddenly decide to run to these offices themselves? They'd have trouble getting both because of their popularity.
In just a short time the stars will be running the country. He imagines the meeting of the US Senate where character actor Roderick Crawford is vice President and people like Marlon Brando are senators. Mr. Chairman, the years now, year after year after year, there have been just two major parties.
One influencer Apple House and the Olive Mountains. Just two years after this. Ronald Reagan is a governor's California. I'd do anything for you, dear.
Anything. This is the Artful Dodger from the musical Oliver played here by 18 year old Davy Jones. When he heard the screams that even 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 name for TV knockoff of Beatles. Yes, I do anything, anything, anything for you. Mitzi and Charlie were slated for what was probably the worst slot in the show. They were the last act before the Beatles returned for the final songs.
We were in a daze where 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. Now we take you to Hollywood at a very tense moment in the career of a young aspiring actress. The office of McCall and Brill. Ms.
Tidy, would you come to my office right away please? Yes, sir. Neat, neat, neat, neat. Everything nice and neat.
That's neat. Heidi, I am having a terrible time trying to find a young actress to star my next motion picture. Yes, sir. Now, are the young ladies outside ready to be in the view?
Yes, sir, they're neatly waiting outside, sir. I'll send them in. Just one at a time this time. The premise here is that Charlie is a director cast in the movie and Mitzi is his secretary.
And then a bunch of different women auditioning for the role she plays in the Spartan Starlet. Hi, sir. You might not remember me, but I was in Palm springs back in 1956, sir. If you're not interested in her, maybe you'd better be interested in me.
You know, I have a little talent. Cause everything's coming out roses. And a method actor. Then and only then can the true justification of the motivation of our inside urgency henceforth on the infinitesimal 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 a 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 it 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 Mr. Sullivan call us over? Because that's what made you.
Did he call us over? No. Yeah, but I think I saw. No, no.
We were looking at each other saying, did he motion to us? There wasn't a motion. No, it wasn't. Get off.
Did you have a sense at the time that it had gone well or gone poorly? No, no, we knew. We been to the toilet. Yeah, but see, they didn't have this expression then.
But we sucked. It 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 that night. We felt so bad.
And Frank Gorshins was nice enough to take us to Downey's Sardis. Sardis. And we had a drink. And he said, don't worry, this is not the end of your lives.
And we said, oh my God. It was such a fiasco that in four 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.
My little girl was waiting outside. You know, she used to be one of the Beatles. What happened? Somebody stepped on her.
That was funny. You ad lib that. You know something? That we were a hit.
No, you know what? 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 retreated 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 fun. But Mitzi and Charlie regrouped and recovered and they had long and fine careers through the 60s and 70s. They played nightclubs in 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 9, 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 said, was it you that 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 retired now. Meanwhile, the Beatles have split up. Hell Wings have split up. With 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, I said to Mitzi, let's go to jail. Who's Dixie? No, nobody. No, I mean her.
Well, you have a girlfriend. Okay, forget the Dixie. What am I doing in this relationship anyway? David Siegel.