All the Freaking Way to the Bank

Join Chuck Barris and see the Weird is what the ad campaign says, and the finger of Barris, as Uncle Sam, is pointing at you. No longer just a daytime television producer with a couple of game shows to his credit, Barris has become a significant packager of American popular culture, and his specialty is that part of the culture that has traditionally been kept hidden: bawdy sex, lowbrow comedy, side-show freaks and downright lunatic crazies.

There are now five Barris shows on the air, providing more than eight hours a week of programing in most major markets. And all of them are stages on which genuine American characters (continued on page 238)Chuck Barris(continued from page 138) can strut and play their moment with little inhibition. The tone is deliberately lowbrow--naughty, silly, voyeuristic-- and the players are encouraged to let loose with their wildest fantasies.

Barris believes that everybody has an act, everybody can write a song, everybody can tell a story. You don't have to be classy to be entertaining--you can be sexy instead. You can be spontaneous and outrageous. You can be weird. You can talk about your intimate secrets. You can be creepy. On a Barris show, the prizes are small and the game is never taken seriously--the whole point is to watch the people balance precariously on the edge of bad taste.

You can get on a Chuck Barris show in any number of ways. You can act like a swinging single--sell sexual fantasy and try to be cute (The Dating Game). You can argue with your newlywed spouse--bicker over the intimate sexual details of your married life (The Newlywed Game). You can think up any act at all, of any description, that can be good, bad, creepy, weird, crazy--anything but boring (The Gong Show). If you are a woman, you can parade around onstage in a bathing suit, do some sort of simple talent number, jiggle your tits and ass and allow an m.c. to make fun of you (The $1.98 Beauty Show). You can play the jealous, competitive secretary vs. the housewife (Three's a Crowd).

Some say television has sunk to new depths with Chuck Barris Productions. The Gong Show and The $1.98 Beauty Show feature people who don't understand that they are being humiliated, and The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game are devoted almost entirely to questions about sex. The $1.98 Beauty Show is by far the most lurid American show on television--its late producer Gene Banks called it a peep show--and it certainly shows enough tits and ass to excite many a man. The show gets away with peddling raunchy sex by making fun of it; that way, the audience can have its cake and pretend it's never eaten.

Barris responds to criticism of Gong and $1.98 by saying that both shows are "an outrageous piece of rubbish," not to be taken seriously. But they aren't so easily shrugged off. For one thing, there is big money to be made from selling them. Not long ago, Forbes published a glowing account of Barris' financial success, reporting that the stock of Chuck Barris Productions has skyrocketed. In addition to his five current shows, there are four in development, plus a movie. All of the shows are financed and produced by Barris' company and most are shown in the seven-to-eight-p.m. primetime local-access slot. The shows are syndicated, which means Barris sells them directly to local television stations instead of to a network. That way, he owns the reruns and is not at the mercy of cancellations. According to Forbes, Barris increased the earnings of his corporation by 2500 percent in only four years; his own stock is now worth $22,000,000.

•

But there's more to Barris' shows than money and nonsense, though that extra ingredient is hard to define. A case can be made for the notion that he's reviving an ancient art form. Low comedy has existed for as long as there have been unsophisticated people trying to be funny, and Barris has simply drawn it out of circuses, fraternities and barrooms, out of skit nights and campfires, and has plopped it right smack onto the stage of the Seventies--national television.

Although the origins of low comedy are complex and intriguing--they go back to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Aristophanes--Barris isn't interested in them. Oddly (considering his complex attitude toward his success), it doesn't make him happy to consider that he might be marketing a peculiarly Americanized form of comedy that was slicked up for vaudeville and is now returned to its grass-roots origins. What he does consider is the nagging feeling that he's up to his ears in rubbish. He's having fun building his pop-culture empire, but why doesn't he use his talents to do something better? He is an energetic, cute 50-year-old man who has an ex-wife, a 17-year-old daughter who lives with him, a girlfriend named Red and more money than he can possibly spend. Why doesn't he drop all this silly television programing and start to play out his wildest dream? Why doesn't he rent a cottage somewhere on the beach, far from Hollywood, and write something that is really good? Why doesn't he write the great American novel?

The problem seems to be that Barris has always followed his instincts rather than his intellect and, consequently, he has gone in the direction of commercial hits. He wrote Palisades Park, a hit bubble-gum rock-'n'-roll song, in the Sixties; he wrote You and Me, Babe, a best-selling sentimental novel; he started out in television with a successful game show (The Dating Game). Like many of the people who go on his shows, he is seduced by popular notions, quick entertainment and the belief that he should live life as if it were constantly fun.

His office on Sunset Boulevard is, in fact, like a playpen. Everyone wears jeans and funny buttons on his shirt and works in a room that is plastered with photos and drawings with comic captions, circus posters and other bits of pop-culture detritus.

Mike Metzger, who is in charge of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game now that Barris has moved on to other shows, says that Barris always insisted that if work isn't fun, you shouldn't do it. In the old days, when the network was paying for dream vacations for newlyweds, employees were always taking off to chaperone winners in Africa, Acapulco and Aspen. "We would work 12 weeks at a time," Metzger says, "and then take off six to travel and write our novels or do whatever we wanted. It was fun." Now he looks at his calendar, which is scheduled, with few breaks, for the next two years. "It's OK now, too," he says. "There's the challenge." He means the challenge of getting rich.

It was over a year ago when I talked with Barris; now he is refusing interviews with the press (his PR man shouted at me, "This company is hot! Chuck Barris Productions is a glamor stock! If Barris says he doesn't want to do interviews, we don't ask him why!"). Nevertheless, in many ways, Barris is as wide open and "out there" as the people he puts on his shows. And maybe, like them, he is just a little deluded.

It was important to him for me to understand that he started out in daytime television and the game-show business solely because he had ambitions to become president of ABC. He sees himself as an impulsive, slightly uncouth hustler who ran full tilt into the muck of television only because he knew there was a fortune to be made with a single idea. Barris isn't apologetic about his shows. Kids love them and he's proud of that. Also, the people who get on them usually have a terrific time. What he wonders is why he seems to be stuck--stuck in a pop-art form that he understands but does not admire. Stuck in a form that cannot go anywhere or transcend itself--a form he can push, shove and pummel but that can only explode or end up in parody.

"You don't know," he told me, "but writers are my heroes. I'd like to think I'm capable of writing something really good. My house in Malibu has bookshelves filled with Faulkner, Stendhal, Proust; I read the New York Times Book Review every Sunday from cover to cover.

"What," he said, looking me straight in the eye, "did you think of my book?"

He was talking about You and Me, Babe, a slimly disguised account of his marriage and divorce, a book that Barris promoted with $90,000 of his company's money and that did, indeed, become a best seller. It is a simple-minded tale with a moral. In it, Barris tells the story of a character called Tommy, an energetic, cute and cocky kid from Philadelphia--a smart person who could never stay put long enough to graduate from college. Tommy woos and wins his wife--called Sammy--solely because he wants her money. (In real life, Barris' ex-wife, Lynn Levy, is the daughter of Leon Levy, one of the founders and major stockholders of CBS, and Blanche Paley, sister of CBS' current board chairman.) Three days before the wedding, however, Sammy's father disinherits her for marrying Tommy, whom he calls an opportunist, and Tommy runs away to get his bearings. Finally, he decides that he has been fooling himself--he is in love, after all--and races home just in time for the wedding.

After that, the two of them live out a newlywed dream. Tommy gets a job selling TelePrompTers all over the U. S. He and his bride drive to a TV station, drop off the equipment, tell the station manager to play with it and go back the next day to pick it up. They go to a park, to the seashore, to a swimming pool, to the countryside and lie around doing nothing but talking, reading and making love. When Tommy is finally fired from the job after a year, he and Sammy are unwilling to give up their romantic journey. They take their savings and go to Europe, a trip marred only by Tommy's inability to write the great novel that he thought he had in him.

"I was having fun," Barris told me, openly blending his own history with that of Tommy. "It was a great time, living out of a station wagon, bumming around Europe, even though we were always broke. I was happy even when we came back and I was just about to go to Caracas with USIA. Then the payola scandal hit and a job came through at ABC, working as a watchdog for Dick Clark's American Bandstand. I'd read The New York Times on the train down to Philadelphia, talk to all the pretty girls on the show--it wasn't a great job, but I was enjoying it."

Barris is still trying to find out what went wrong. He told me that he got ambitious--that he started "ingratiating" himself with television people, and then had to prove that he could do something on his own. He schemed, he hustled and, finally, he borrowed $20,000 from his stepfather to produce a pilot of The Dating Game.

In the book, Tommy's relationship with his wife goes downhill when his career starts to rise. He becomes King of the Game Shows, and along with the money come the problems. The problems, however, are vague. As always, Barris is most convincing about fantasy.

"Who would have dreamed," he wrote in the voice of Tommy, "that we would never have to stand in line at a bank, or a supermarket, or a box office? We would never have to keep a bank balance, or know when the rent was due, or how much our insurance premiums were. Someone would do it for us. Someone would make our appointments, wash our cars, cut our lawns, buy our anniversary presents and send out our Christmas cards, get-well telegrams and sympathy notes... . We would never have to take a bus or a taxi, if we didn't want to, because someone would always be there to pick us up and deliver us. We would never have to refill our refrigerators, our liquor cabinets or our ice-cube trays."

At the end of the book, Tommy and his wife finally separate for good. Barris defends Tommy as a guy who is guilty only of callousness and ambition and is hurt deeply when his wife finally betrays him. But he lets her have the last words:

"You used to be sweet, Tommy. Sweet, and sensitive, and gentle. You used to love life, and you used to love to live. You had your values all in the right places. You had ideals, scruples, honor, and respect for yourself and for others. But no more. Now you're a tense, taut machine that has to perform... . You're selfish, self-indulgent, self-centered, self-serving, self, self, self."

I wanted to answer Barris' question about his book honestly, but first I wanted to know if it were all true. "Some things I changed," he said shyly, "but I was basically writing about myself."

"The story of your marriage is true?"

"Yes," he said. "That character is me."

"Well," I said, "I wasn't impressed with the writing, but I did think the book was a good read, on a simple level, and some of the scenes were wonderfully timed. Just putting an entire novel together is a feat in itself--I'm impressed with people who get a beginning, middle and end."

"That's what I think of the book," Barris replied eagerly. "I wanted to make it a good read, I wanted it to be a best seller, I wrote it in imitation of Love Story--especially the first half."

"Why did you set out to imitate something?"

"I don't know. I wish I knew. And why did I try to imitate a book that I don't think is really very good?" He looked distraught. "I hope I'm capable of moving on," he said, turning away from me. "I think I am, but it's hard to pull yourself out of thinking commercial. It's a lifestyle. And, like you say, I'm like the people who go on my shows. I'm from Philadelphia and that's the most retarded area in the whole country, the most repressed. I laugh at what Philadelphians laugh at. I like farting jokes, I like funny hats. I'm commercial and I know it. I even went on a game show when I was in college."

"You did?"

"I wanted to impress a girl, and so I got three other guys and we sang Your Cheatin' Heart. Two weeks later, I asked her to marry me."

"Well," I said, considering his problem, "can you have serious writing ambitions and still be absorbed in pop culture--TV, rock 'n' roll, sentimental novels?"

"I'm working now because I'm enjoying it," Barris replied. "I enjoy making money, although that has got to stop, and it's exciting when suddenly you've got a show that is hot. I was mobbed when I went to New York recently. I was mobbed by kids in Central Park. The police had to come and rescue me--I couldn't move. That stuff is heady, but, of course, it has to stop. You pay your dues and then you gotta move on."

Barris has, of course, moved on since we had that long conversation more than a year ago, but not in the direction of writing anything that will one day go up on his bookshelf along with Tolstoy and Faulkner. The full-page ad in Variety last year read: Chuck Barris productions. Supplying one thousand two hundred and forty-eight half-hours for television, plus a motion picture in 1979-80. The ad listed five shows on the air and four in development: How's Your Mother-in-Law?, Chuck Barris Hour Talkshow, Dollar a Second and The Divorce Game. The fifth project was a motion picture called The Gong Show Movie, directed by Robert Downey and written by Downey and Barris. Downey is an avant-garde film maker of the Andy Warhol school who has given us Putney Swope. Barris' PR man also told me that Barris is using a hiatus in the production of Gong and $1.98 to work on a novel. Is it ambitious? He doesn't know and Barris won't say.

"To be frank," Barris said during that luncheon conversation a year ago, "before The Gong Show hit, I had decided to try to write a good book. I rented a studio in the Writers and Artists Building in Beverly Hills and went there each day, but I was having a hard time of it. I spent most of my time in cafés or walking on the beach. When The Gong Show took off, I sent back my advance, which was $100,000."

"And you don't know what the problem was?" I asked.

"No. I took a writing course at UCLA but gave it up--they can't teach you how to write. The book just wasn't going well."

"What was the problem?"

"I don't know."

"I think there are characters parading through your life who are certainly worthy of a novel," I said.

"I know," he said. "I know. Sometimes I ask them why they come down to the studio, put on their bathing suit or their tutu and do whatever they do, and their answers just amaze me. I am simply amazed."

"Have you ever talked for more than a few minutes with any of them?"

Barris looked at his watch. "My God," he said, "I'm late, I've got to go!"

•

And so I found myself on the eighth floor of Barris' new office building, trying to understand the success of game / people shows firsthand. I sat with Mike Metzger and Steve Friedman behind a long table in a small room, where they audition couples for The Newlywed Game. Metzger and Friedman are both enthusiastic guys who spring out of their seats from time to time to do comic impersonations.

What Barris taught them before he handed over the reins has to do with the selection of contestants, they said. He taught them to give up the safe, "white-bread" types and go for those who were likable but at least a little different. What they are looking for in the couples who parade before them is a real emotion, couples who are so uninhibited and out there that a good question can spark a real-life minidrama.

"It's a borderline show," said Metzger. "Everyone asks us where we find people who are willing to be so honest and revealing; but the fact is that we work very hard at it. We're looking for a spontaneous eruption of feeling, and the amazing thing is that we get it. The only other show to get real emotions to happen spontaneously on the air was Candid Camera, and it had to keep the cameras hidden."

And, unlike Candid Camera, people try to get on Barris' shows. Take, for example, Mike and Sheila. Mike was very fat, dressed in a three-piece green suit, and Sheila was short, pregnant and had her hair in a Farrah Fawcett cut. They live in Fresno and had driven 200 miles to Hollywood because they were "the outgoing type" and their friends had dared them to get on The Newlywed Game. I'd been watching them as they filled out their questionnaires before the audition and they certainly were cute--they laughed affectionately at each other's jokes and were continuously fondling each other's hands. They had been married for four months, were 19 and 20 years old and knew exactly what they were getting into. They'd watched The Newlywed Game since they were nine and they'd seen it get more and more bawdy. They knew they would have to argue about things such as whether or not her boobs were big enough for him or whether they made love at night or in the morning; in fact, they'd practiced the questions and answers at home. Whenever the question was about sex, Mike said, they planned to say that they loved it and wanted more. He laughed a little too loudly. Sheila looked at me and said, "Really, though, he wants it more than I do." Then she giggled and grabbed Mike by the neck and kissed him on the cheek.

Before Mike and Sheila went for their audition, they were treated to a briefing. To get the couples used to making noise, laughing and talking about whatever comes into their heads--especially sex--all of them are briefed by a very hip, fast-rapping comic. He's best at ad libs and imitations, so his routine isn't as good in print as it is in person; but he's also very informative about what Barris Productions thinks they should do to be entertaining:

"OK, folks, two things are going to get you on the show tonight--one thing is money and the other is Tylenol with codeine. No, seriously, the only thing that will get you on is talk. And when I say talk, I don't mean complete your sentences, I'm talking chapters of novels, get into it. Even more important than that are those reactions. The Newlywed Game is the number-one game show on TV because of [he makes funny noises, weird gestures, guttural gasps] those interactions. This is not the time to be embarrassed or shy--'Six times in the bathtub, Mary? I thought it was only five!' Go as crazy in there as you want, but watch your language. Bitch, horny and Jesus are out [imitating a jive-talking black guy]--'Eh, man, I got me a horny bitch. Jesus, that bitch, she's----' [Here he sniffs an imaginary line of cocaine] This is Hollywood! We're tired of those words. They're boring. Cock is OK. [Shouts and screams of laughter]

"OK, couple of impressions here before you go in. Adam to Eve [he stands with his legs apart and looks down at his cock] : 'Stand back, honey, I don't know how big this thing's gonna get!' [More laughter and some hoots and whistles]

"Do you know how clams make love? [Holds his hands, palms flat, together in front of the audience. Then he opens his fingers just a little and says in a low, guttural voice] 'Wanna fuck?'"

"Couple number two," said the kid playing m.c. for the run-through auditions. He had Bob Eubanks' voice down exactly.

"Sheila, would you say that your husband is numb, grouchy or aggressive when he wakes up in the morning?"

"Well," said Sheila, taking a deep breath, "I'd say"--she paused and looked beguilingly at the m.c., who, unfortunately, wasn't judging her performance at all--"that he's definitely numb." She was thinking of a story to tell, but the m.c. moved on:

"Mike? What did you say to that?"

Mike was silently making expressions of disgust, since his answer was "aggressive." He leaned forward in his chair as if he were about to do something rash, but he was still shy in front of an audience. "Numb?" he finally said. "Numb? Then how come you're always telling me that I'm such a sex maniac?"

"At night, Mike, at night." Sheila responded immediately this time. "Don't you remember all those mornings you wouldn't even speak to me? I had to get up and bring you a cup of coffee before you'd let go of the pillow you put over your head?" She paused and Mike didn't say anything. "Or was that because you're so ugly?"

Finally, Mike got into it. "But what about after my cup of coffee? What about then? Then I feel like getting ... some ... and you run into the bathroom to fix your hair so your boss will like you at work."

"Mike," Sheila said, "I have to go in the bathroom to throw up." [She patted her stomach to indicate she was pregnant and everyone laughed]

Metzger and Friedman were making notations on the six couples, including Sheila and Mike, who were auditioning in this run-through. When the game was over and the couples were leaving, they both handed all their notes over to an assistant.

"Not one of them?" I asked.

"Nope."

"What about Mike and Sheila?"

"Eh," Metzger said and shrugged.

"Dull," Friedman said. "She was trying hard, but nothing special."

"They didn't fight right?" I asked.

"The bottom line," Metzger said, "is that we just didn't like them."

After the auditions, Metzger and Friedman, David the "briefer" and the kid who was playing m.c. tossed one-liners at one another as if they never tired of turning their jobs into playtime. But I couldn't write down the jokes, so I asked them about what they'd learned from sitting in judgment of so many types of Americans over the past decade.

"Our biggest problem," said Metzger, "is the guys. We've found out that guys from 18 to maybe 23 are of no value whatsoever. We have a hard time getting them for The Dating Game. They don't know who they are, where they're going, where they've been, why they are on this planet."

Metzger got out of his chair and impersonated a bachelor on The Dating Game, swinging his arms like an ape and stalking over to the benches where the tryouts sit.

"Hey, girls, heh heh. Here I am, let's have it."

"Then," he said, "they're asked a question."

"Huh? Well, er ..." His body crumpled, his face puckered and he made macho body movements. But nothing came out of his mouth.

"The guys turn into turnips."

"Luckily," Friedman said, "about the age of 25, things begin to change. About that age, men finally begin to say, 'Hey, this is who I am and it's OK.'"

"What about taste?" I asked. "Can a couple ever get too raunchy for you?"

Friedman held his stomach and groaned. Metzger held his nose and made gagging sounds.

"Agh."

"Yuk."

"Do you remember the dead mice?"

"Tell me, tell me."

"Well, we couldn't believe it. One couple was here answering a question--something like 'Who's neater, you or your wife?' The guy says something to his wife about the dead mice. Well, it turned out that the dead mice were dirty tampons that the girl threw on the floor beside their bed. No kidding. There were about 20 of them lying around, the guy said, all over the place, and they gathered dust and turned gray. Dead mice was what the couple called them."

•

But I didn't realize just how far Barris had strayed from the usual game-show fare until I went to a Gong Show audition and got to know some of the contestants. The auditions are held in a cavernous rehearsal hall that Barris rents in Hollywood, and the very first person I met when I went there was Ann Thompson--a 76-year-old lady dressed in white gloves and a powder-blue suit. She sat primly in the hall outside the audition room, waiting her turn before Barris, smiling serenely as nervous magicians, torch singers and Phyllis Diller housewives fluttered anxiously around her. We chatted about how difficult it was to be old and alone in America and she told me about the Lafayette Ball-room in Long Beach, where she went every Friday night to dance and meet men. "I'm not so popular anymore," she said. "The men who are my age are all taken up by the women with money."

When she was called for her audition, I followed her into the studio and heard her tell Barris that she wanted to accompany herself on the piano. But he was strumming his electric guitar quietly and grooving with his own thoughts and didn't seem to listen. Finally, he looked up and smiled and said, "Princess Ann? Hey--you look wonderful. You've got a song you're gonna sing, right? OK, let's take it all by yourself, solo."

The pianist gave her a ten-second intro and she walked to the center of the lines that marked off the make-believe stage and sang "B-l-o-o-o m-o-o-on" in a quavery old lady's voice, very off key. When she was finished, Barris said, "Terrific. You want to be called Princess Ann, right?"

"Well," Ann said shyly, "I thought it was kind of cute."

"It's perfect," Barris replied. "Just perfect."

Then he closed his eyes, bent his knees and seemed to get lost in a casual but very loud rock-'n'-roll riff that he improvised on his guitar. Finally, he strummed a major chord, opened his eyes, looked at Ann and said with a sweeping gesture of one arm: "You, my dear lady, are a Golden Gong Show Act."

Ann beamed with happiness. "Oh, Mr. Barris," she said, "thank you, thank you."

When Ann and I were out in the hall outside the studio once again, she dabbed at her eyes, which were misty, and confided, "I figure maybe I should have been a singer. But I never really had the chance. Isn't that a shame?"

I called her the next day to ask if I could go to Long Beach and interview her. Even though her audition had been successful, she was very upset about The Gong Show. "I watched the show on TV," she said, "and I don't see why they choose some of those acts. They could have got better ones, I know they could."

"Well, some of them are supposed to be bad," I said. "You're supposed to laugh at them."

"I don't understand it," she said. Rather than analyze the show right then, I suggested that since it was her night to go to the Lafayette Ballroom, perhaps we could go together.

"What's the matter?" she snapped. "Are you interested in dancing with old men?"

At eight p.m., I arrived in Long Beach. Very quickly, I began to think that maybe Ann was more than I had bargained for. The address she had given me was that of a stately old brick Catholic church and it was dark and securely locked. When I found a phone book and dialed her number, it rang and rang.

The next morning, however, she answered my call.

"Oh, I'm sorry I gave you that address," she said quickly. "But I always give people that number. You see, I don't like brown cars."

"Brown cars?"

"They always say, 'Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'am, we'll help you, ma'am,' and they never do. It's the CIA, I guess." She sighed. "They come and get you."

•

I heard from many people about the high that happens just before all the acts and contestants on a Barris show perform in front of a live audience--about the energy that builds in the room where the newlyweds, the swinging singles, the crazy ladies, the showbiz hopefuls, the models and the prostitutes wait for their moment on national television. I decided to see this chemical reaction for myself--at a Saturday rehearsal and taping of The Gong Show.

It begins at nine in the morning and ends at 11 that night. Five shows are taped and except for actual rehearsals with Barris, all of the acts are forbidden to leave the waiting room. They sit at long tables, drinking Cokes, sipping coffee, eating sandwiches and doughnuts and talking.

About four in the afternoon, a professional comic waved me over to his table and whispered, "It's about to begin." I asked him how he knew and he nodded toward a musician who had started to warm up his soprano sax. "It always starts this way," he said, and he gestured at all the tables full of expectant people, ready to burst like a champagne cork into national stardom. "The real musicians begin to jam and then it gets very wild."

Sure enough, the sax man started improvising quietly and a young country singer went over with his guitar. The two of them started working together, some more guitars and a clarinet pulled up chairs and everyone stopped talking. The musicians were really hot. Finally, a bubbly middle-aged woman with a large star pasted on her forehead and an auto-harp in her arms shouted, "Let's get this thing going!" and she started strumming until the musicians picked up her tune. Within minutes, everyone in the room was singing and clapping to a rousing, happy, slightly hysterical rendition of Goody, Goody. A few girlish housewife types began to dance and they were joined by some black kids who were in a singing group at UCLA and knew their disco. Showbiz! It was the kind of moment they had all lived out a hundred times before, in their wildest dreams.

Then I recognized Ron DeVoe doing a high-energy jig off in a corner of the room. DeVoe had been pointed out to me as "the resident loony," but I was told that he had calmed down considerably since he first came onto the show; he was no longer going up to people and making faces at them. When I talked with Ron earlier, he told me that The Gong Show had changed his life. He was still living in a halfway house, but he had a job now--he was a member of AFTRA--and Barris Productions paid him more than $200 a week. He calls up every Friday to see if they want him and if they do, he goes down for a taping. Once, he had to get made up like a girl and wear a tutu and he was so freaked out by the experience that he can't remember whether or not he was gonged; but, generally, he likes to do whatever they dream up.

"I'm not acting like an asshole anymore," he told me. "People are recognizing me on the streets. I'm Ron DeVoe, star of The Gong Show."

Ron's dance got wilder and wilder and while everyone was clapping faster and faster, he moved toward the center of the room and was joined by a couple of black kids and a senior citizen dressed up as a bee. The guy with the sax was really wailing, and when they broke into When the Saints Go Marching In, the crowd started to cook like a party organizer's dream.

Not only does Chuck Barris have a novel, I said to myself, he has a movie.

•

"'Rolling out the freaks'?" Barris said over breakfast at the Polo Lounge--the scene of all his early-morning appointments. "I know what you're talking about, of course I do. We're counting on a lot of people who misunderstand their own talent. Look, there are four types of acts that get gonged.

"First, there is a group of people who don't believe they're being laughed at. They're too dumb or too blocked.

"Second, there are some people who just want to belittle themselves in a masochistic way. Punish themselves. They think they're worthless. I'm not sure about this category, but I think there's something like that going on.

"Three, there's another group that is simply not sure of what they're doing. They're insulated in their homes and get a misconception of what their value is. Their families tell them to do it, or their friends do. They think they are talented and creative and they get befuddled out there on the stage.

"Four, there are people who know what The Gong Show is and expect to be laughed at. They understand what we're doing."

"You don't have any doubts," I said, "about the ethics of humiliating people who misunderstand their talent?"

"Anyone who takes The Gong Show seriously really has a problem and ought to go examine himself," he said. "The Gong Show is a light, entertaining, outrageous approach to talent. The name says it all. We don't take ourselves seriously. We know we're not a class show; we're not a class contribution to variety. If they think they're at Carnegie Hall, or at the Met, then that's their problem."

"You couldn't at least warn the crazies that they will probably be gonged?"

"How do we know who we should warn? Also, if we didn't have the crazies, we wouldn't have a show. No one would watch an ordinary amateur hour, the talent isn't that good. The show-business stories of people breaking through are just a bonus; the heart of our show is the crazies. Who am I to say that someone shouldn't go on the show if he wants to? I've seen people gonged and somehow the whole experience has given them all sorts of confidence."

"But we all have to protect crazy people from themselves, to some extent."

"How do you know I'm not crazy? Sometimes I wonder if I am, jumping up and down like an idiot on The Gong Show, when I could be writing a good screenplay."

"Come on. I mean the people in categories one, two and three."

"I received a letter yesterday from a woman who begged me not to put her sister on the show. She accused me of exploiting her, of all sorts of horrible things. But I saw her sister and I know she is having the time of her life preparing for the show. It's probably the most exciting thing that's ever happened to her. Why should I keep her off the show just because she embarrasses her family?"

Barris gets impatient talking about other people. "What I want to know," he said, "is why I'm not walking away from the show."

"Why aren't you?"

"I don't know."

He put his head in his hands and stared down into the depths of his melon. He ran his fingers through his tousled curly hair and looked up to find two men standing over him. They were ad salesmen who said they also had an appointment with him for breakfast. He apologized and said that his secretary didn't usually make those mistakes--book two appointments for one meal--but I said I had just one more question to ask him, so the admen smiled and retired to the lobby.

"I just want to be sure," I said to Barris, "of your attitude toward the people who are humiliated by the gong. If you like those crazies, why don't you warn them?"

"Who am I," he said, "to tell those people what to do? In their context, they may not be humiliated. They may be delighted, overjoyed, excited, happy. How can I make a character analysis that's clever enough to know if someone will be humiliated or not by being gonged? I know some of them take The Gong Show seriously. I've seen them. But that's their problem. If they can't make a judgment about The Gong Show, they probably can't make a judgment about very many other things in life."

•

If Barris is any bellwether, television will continue to heat up emotionally. Which mother-in-law is the least obnoxious? Which divorced couple can argue the best? On Three's a Crowd, a perfect Barris moment happened when a secretary said that everyone in the office knew that the wife made terrible spaghetti. The wife grabbed the scarf wrapped around the secretary's neck and tried to strangle her.

These shows, though they are so personal as to be slightly creepy, are not exploitive. After all, we've just passed through the Seventies. The people who get on television want to flaunt their sexuality, make naughty public statements, be funny, outrageous, spunky. Barris is simply in tune with the times.

But the question that still sticks in my throat after exploring Barris' mini-kingdom is the one that I keep asking but never get an answer to. What about the crazies?

Perhaps I should give the last word on this subject to a woman who was gonged and hurt. She is a beautiful Korean immigrant who doesn't speak English very well, but she learned very quickly about using and being used.

Myung Soon looked gorgeous onstage, in a long, filmy dress and black hair that hung down below her waist. She looked like a pro but sang completely off key and out of sync with the orchestra. After she was gonged, a Barris employee went up to her and asked if she were OK. She smiled politely and said yes, but I could see her face and knew differently.

In her apartment in Bellflower, California, three days later, she told me that she thought she had been used. A regular in the bar where she works as a cocktail waitress had encouraged her to go onto The Gong Show. He gave her a telephone number to call and said to use his name.

"He tell me he was doing me big favor," Myung said, "but I know now it was nothing. That number was in the newspaper. But still I think I am going to win. The one thing I have a deep relationship with is music and I know I can sing." She made me some tea, lit a joint and put on a record of Misty Blue. She stood in her living room, closed her eyes and belted out the torch song in a full, throaty voice that was mostly in the right key.

When the song ended, she said to me, "I couldn't do it with orchestra. I guess I couldn't hear it without a voice. But Chuck Barris, he didn't care. I told him something was wrong at rehearsal, but he said, 'You're perfect. You're just perfect.' Now I think he use me. He use my beauty, maybe. Maybe he want to get laugh. I feel very bad."

"You were using him to become a singer," I said. "He was using you to entertain his audience. I am using you for my story."

"When you grow up in Korea," Myung replied, "you learn that everything about America is so big and so good. I want to come here all my life, but now I think maybe people are not nice. Now I am talking to you and what will you say? If you don't like something about me, will you write it down? All I can say is that if there is something about me that you don't like, I'm sorry. I know I'm a good person. I hope you don't use me for laugh in your story."

"On a Barris show, the whole point is to watch people balance precariously on the edge of bad taste."