568: Human Spectacle
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In October 2003, a guy was brought into the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Dr. Joel 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 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 Centers 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. But 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 that was filming him without his consent, 24 hours a day, which, you know, 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 broadcast 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, 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 has broadcast to billions of people around the globe. His wife, his best friend, everybody around him is an actor. Everybody knows it's 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. On the contrary, I think it's just when people are becoming psychotic, perhaps if you've seen the 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 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 Minds.

In one case in the book, a patient, super smart guy, an academic, very altruistic, believed 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 monies 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, you know, bettered 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 invent 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, yeah, an interesting way of putting it. It is kind of fantastical. And heartbreaking. It is.

Part of him knows he made it up, but he can't grasp the whole reality. He does not remember. At one point, he suggests that he told his best friends, this is what I'm going to do. You're 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. Gold 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 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 in 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. From WBEC Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. I am the eggplant. 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 Denpa Shonen. And one of its segments in particular got the attention of one of our producers, Stephanie Fu. She put this story together a few years back. Today's show is a rerun. 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 out in his career. His name is Nasubi. Nasubi means eggplant in Japanese, a 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. That wipes the grin off his face.

It wasn't just my personal sort of shame or sort of 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 as 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. Nasibi screams, are you for real? Nasibi 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 two to three hundred 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. 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 won a bag of rice. When the postman dropped it off, it was like Christmas. Nasibi danced like a madman. Yay! I got a prize!

Were you trying to be a good performer and be funny when you were doing that or was it just really genuine joy? Well, initially, of course, I was there as a performer and I wanted to be a comedian. But somewhere in the middle,

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 low trepidation as it started to vanish, and then it ran out, and...

the only food substitute that I had been able to win in 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. It's very impressive.

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 Nasabi was first shut in the room, it was an instant hit. Nasabi 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, Nasubi'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 Nasubi 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 U.S., Game of Thrones usually has around 9 million viewers. Nasibi had 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 Nasibi 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?

I mean, 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 has finally come to a close and people are really uncertain about their futures. You know, I think people just tended to watch the show and say, you know, I got it bad, but look at poor Naspi, you know, he's got it worse.

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 today would think it was funny that there was a guy naked in a room somewhere. Nasobi 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 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, Nasibi 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 you 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 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? There's a phrase, Yamato Damashii, the Japanese spirit, which is just that you 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.

Nassiby did finally win $10,000 worth of prizes. It took him almost an entire year, but at last he'd completed the challenge. When he reached his goal, producers didn't tell him anything about it. Instead, they snuck into his apartment in the middle of the night, put a blindfold on him, took him out to a car, gave him clothes,

Nasibi 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 I've 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'd recreated his little apartment, complete with the magazines, the stuff seal, the postcards, exactly how he'd 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 didn't know that humans could be that cruel.

Did you feel like you were going insane? If anything, the opposite of insane. I lost all energy. It's like somebody had just 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 had reached the end. I was finished.

I 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 part.

the last section of it. Why did you do it? What 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 continued. 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. Nasubi continued his writing routine for four more months. And then the final episode aired. Picture it. The producers sneak into Nasubi'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. Nasabi, congratulations on your goal! Nasabi looks horrified.

Two television hosts cautiously approach him and talk to him like a baby, telling him congratulations. "Ojamashimasu!" "Ojamashimasu!" Nasabi says, frightened, "My house fell down, and there's all these people here." "It's finally over," presses the host. "You're finished." Nasabi should be happy, but he looks thoroughly weirded out. Remember, Nasabi didn't even know he was being broadcast.

The producers told him that it was an experiment, that they didn't know if he'd ever make 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 a 24-hour livestream of his actions. They tell him his diaries were published and are bestsellers. Clips from him enjoying a specific brand of ramen turned into commercials and endorsement deals. He was on the cover of magazines. Then they play a bunch of clips from the show. Nasibi 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 me for 15 months. And, you know, to be honest, I thought, you know, what the hell's, where is my country coming to? I mean, I was, you know, very happy that, you know, my journey was not for nothing. But it's still weird. I felt like I was in a different place.

Unsurprisingly, Nasibi 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 D-list celebrity now, and has the 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 to look at it. Well, I mean, it's, you know, it's 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 mean, obviously, 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 for most of the other Denpa shounen characters.

None of them lasted as long as Nasibi, 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 Denpa Shonen 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 Nasibi 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 Nasobi, who wasn't thrilled to hear from him at first. I had some, you know, let's say 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. 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 pretty much came to terms and I welcome the opportunity to work with him again, certainly. Wow, you 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 Nasibi, and that when they met, Nasibi 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 Nasibi, about any of the segments he produced for Denpa Shonen, about any of the contestants, not in the slightest. I use the same interpreter for our interview that I use for Nasibi's. Here's Tsuchiya. 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 to that show.

Nasibi 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, Natsumi had been sort of brought to a state where he was at such an elemental part of sort of his existence that

It's weird to think about.

But the fact of the matter is, what Tsuchiya is saying is true. Denpa Shonin did really capture humanity in a rare way. Hungry, starving, alone, unaware that he was being watched, Nasabi 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 Nasubi'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. It's 1,700 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 on our show when we first broadcast this story years ago. We're rewriting the story today because Nassib'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, cloverleafs are sunk in a vast meadow. What one man tries to document, how things really are. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This is American Life from Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's 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 Act 2 of our program, Act 2. I always feel like somebody's watching me. We've talked a lot in today's program so far about reality TV. And of course, what makes reality TV entertaining is very, very simple, and that is editing.

Editing. If they just set up cameras and showed you all 24 hours in anybody's day, 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. 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 squirmed out of bed and reached for his clothes. The scientist wrote, 7.01 a.m. 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, taking pages of notes on the littlest things they did or said. 6.33 p.m. 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. 11.06 a.m.

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 a.m. 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 a field, or 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. 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 Oskaloosans 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 Oskaloosa 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. 8.24 a.m. This made a wonderful, hollow, ringing noise, so he proceeded to hit the flagpole again.

8:25 a.m. 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 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 a January 1951 letter. 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 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 Oskaloosa 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 and 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 Burch, 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 its 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, a biography of Roger Parker. You can find his work at arielsabar.com. That's right, 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. Mitzi 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 what we were doing. 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 Neufeld. And he said, guess what?

What? What? I got you on the Ed Sullivan Show, and we let out a scream because that was the show. The ultimate. Bigger. 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 the piece of material that we selected for the Ed Sullivan Show. And?

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 skyrode it over Hollywood. We're on the Ed Sullivan Show. Yoo-hoo! Yeah. And we were on our way. Woo!

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 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 shined 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. Is that the word? 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, a 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. Exactly. 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 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. So we used 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, Ed Sullivan. He was sitting in a chair getting made up, and I looked at the man who could make our entire careers happen.

So he said, what you did in dress rehearsal, first of all, I don't get the blah, blah, blahs. 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?

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 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 going to put that first girl that comes in... In the first sketch. Mm-hmm. We'll put her in the second sketch, but then you do the other girl that you did in the third sketch in the second sketch. And then that's what you end with, okay? And that's what you end with. Now, we went, uh, okay, 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... What did he say? If 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 granny glasses. And he said... Give us a coke glove. Give us a coke glove. 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 to laugh and he said, no, give us a coke glove. And he pointed to the machine. The coke machine. And I said, oh, yeah, well, come in. It's all yours. And he said...

Can you give me a dime? Ten cent. And I said, oh, I got to buy you the Coke as well. Okay. 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 a 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 napkins.

All we thought about was, I wish this kid would go so we could work on our act. Get out of here. We haven't put the first character in the third sketch and the second in the... 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 was 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.

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? The guy with the pen, the one who drew the pictures, that, of course, was John Lennon. And this was February 9th, 1964, the first time a U.S. 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 to 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. Yeah, I mean, I heard about Sinatra at the Paramount. You know, people were screaming. But this, I never heard or saw such bedlam in my life. Now, when they're finished, the screams keep going on. Okay.

It must have dawned on 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. Okay. 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 at stake here. 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 a 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 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 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 You, the next thing on the Ed Sullivan show that night was a guy in a tux.

doing a card trick. We do the trick with one, two, three, four red spot cards. Now from these four red spot cards, I take them in my right hand,

My right hand is, of course, always the hand with the thumb on the left side. Now, in this hand... 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 chin They call it Two-Ton Tessie Two-Ton Tessie from Nashville, Tennessee Yes, they call it

Frank Gorshin comes on with 10 minutes of impersonations. Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn. The far-fetched conceit of his act doesn't seem quite so far-fetched 40 years later. Well, it's election year, and once again, a lot of the 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 in just a short time, the stars will be running the country.

He imagines a meeting of the U.S. Senate where character actor Broderick Crawford is vice president and people like Marlon Brando are senators. Today we're going to discuss whether or not there's so many changes made to the presidential party system and everybody feels that I'm going to raise your hand and say aye. Opposed, no. Right. The law is as you have it. Ten-four. Mr. Chairman, for years now, year after year after year, there have been just two major parties. One at Frank Sinatra's house and the other one at Dean Martin's. Just two years after this, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. Do anything.

This is the artful Dodger from the musical Oliver, played here by an 18-year-old Davy 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 Monkees, the made-for-TV knockoff of the Beatles. 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 daze, 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. Oh. We take you to Hollywood at a very tense moment in the career of a young, aspiring actress, the office of McCall and Brill.

Miss Tidy, would you come into my office right away, please? Yes, sir. Neat, neat, neat, neat. Everything nice and neat. That's neat. Hello, sir. Miss Tidy, I am having a terrible time trying to find a young actress to 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, sir. I'll send them in. Just one at a time, Miss Tidy. 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'm really not interested. You know, I have a little talent. No, I just wish... And a method actor. Then and only then can the true justification of the motivation of our inside urgency henceforth find 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 were there 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 Ed would call us over. Because that's what makes 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? It wasn't that 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. No, we knew. Into 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. But that night, we felt so bad. And Frank Gorshin was nice enough to take us to Downey's. Sardi's. Sardi's. 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 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. Miss Tidy, send in the next young lady, please. Yeah, we're getting laughs. Hi, Sarah, I'm the next young lady's mother. My little girl is waiting outside, you know. She used to be one of the Beatles. Well, what happened? Somebody stepped on her. That was funny. You ad-libbed that.

You know something, Mitch? We were a hit. No, you know what comes to mind? 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 wincing. 20 years ago, Sgt. Pepper taught the band Somewhere in the black mining hills of Dakota There lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon

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. They have a daughter, who they love.

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, wasn't 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 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... Mitzi. Mitzi. Mitzi. I said to Mitzi, let's go to Florida. Did you call me Dixie? I think I may have missed you. Who's Dixie? No, nobody. No, I mean, you're... What, do you have a girlfriend after all? No, there's no Dixie. All right, never mind. Who's that slut? Okay. Dixie. Forget the Dixie. What am I doing in this relationship? Anyway, I said to Mitzi, we have to go.

David Siegel, he's a reporter for The New York Times. We 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 unforgettable

Today's program was produced by Stephanie Fu and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Ben Calhoun, Sean Cole, Hana Chafi-Waltz, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robin Simeon, Alyssa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder. Production help from Lily Sullivan. Seth Lind is our director of operations. Research help for today's show from Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Music help from Damian Gray from Rob Geddes. Additional help on today's rerun from Michael Kamate, Catherine Raimondo, and Safiya Riddle.

Stephanie Fu, who produced this episode and 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 Vandertorn, and Sarah Bromer. Our website, where you can listen to over 800 episodes of our show for absolutely free, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.com.

And as always, we're a program's co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatia. 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 with more stories of This American Life. Enjoy the spectacle

Got to enjoy the spectacle, enjoy the spectacle.