Introduction
You often wonder how ordinary success hides extraordinary secrets. The public face of television entertainment conceals a much darker reality of clandestine government operations. You face a world where creating game shows and executing political assassinations exist within the same daily routine.
Chuck Barris presents the shocking claim that he worked as a CIA hitman while producing hit television shows. You will discover how a master of daytime television navigated a dual existence of network boardrooms and global murder. The narrative exposes the psychological disintegration that occurs when fame and espionage collide.
You must ask yourself several unsettling questions as you read this account.
- How does a television producer transition into an agency assassin?
- What toll does a secret double life exact on the human mind?
- Can you ever escape the violent obligations of state-sanctioned murder?
1. Recruitment and Early Missions
Constant critical lambasting and media attacks drive public figures into chronic paranoia and isolation. Accusations from strangers that television shows pander to evil passions lead the author to become paranoid, introverted, angry, and depressed. You eventually turn into a hermit who wears disguises in public.
Barris lived as a recluse in a four-room apartment in Beverly Hills called his hobbit-hole, relying on his housekeeper and secretary for groceries, mail, and chores.
CIA recruitment and background
The Central Intelligence Agency recruits college graduates through discreet classified advertisements in university newspapers. You respond to an advertisement in a New York University weekly newspaper for a college graduate free to travel. This leads to an interview at the North American Center for the Arts where a recruiter reveals he works for the CIA.
Barris answers an ad with the headline COLLEGE GRADUATE: FREE TO TRAVEL in The Washington Square News and goes to an interview on Washington Square South. Thirty-three years old was Barris's age in 1963 during his CIA interview.
Civil rights missions
Civil rights marches require unconventional logistical support such as renting fleets of portable toilets. During the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, operatives are tasked with renting flatbed trucks across Alabama to haul portable outhouses to keep the march route sanitary.
Barris and a surly black priest named Father Raymond Chester rented eleven trucks from Hertz and Avis offices across Alabama while being pursued by the Ku Klux Klan. Fifty miles long was the length of the march from Selma to Montgomery. Eleven trucks was the number of toilet trucks Barris and Father Chester commandeered.
Assassination missions
Clandestine operatives are assembled in foreign countries to plan political assassinations under questionable security arrangements. The CIA assigns agents to travel to Mexico City to eliminate a foreign political figure, relying on compromised local informants and professional operatives with shifting allegiances.
Jim Byrd leads a hit team consisting of Jimmy Brazioni, Roberto Soledad, and Manuel Benitez in Mexico City to assassinate Salvador Panagra Renda. One hundred and forty dollars was the amount Manuel Benitez was paid by a contact to betray the assassination plan.
Fictional authority figures can be deployed behind the scenes to frighten participants into compliance and eliminate profanity. To stop contestants from using foul language, the producer creates an intimidating actor posing as a strict federal official who threatens immediate arrest and imprisonment under broadcast regulations.
Barris hired an actor named Peter Jenks to pose as an FCC official who warned contestants that making lewd remarks would lead to immediate handcuffing and federal prison booking. One year in prison or a ten-thousand-dollar fine were the penalties threatened by the fake FCC official under edict number three-sixty-four of the Broadcast Act.
- Introduce a stern fake official to address performers before taping.
- Warn participants that lewd remarks violate federal law and carry fines or imprisonment.
- Threaten immediate arrest, handcuffing, and booking to deter inappropriate behavior.
2. Television Empire and Espionage
As television production expands into a massive corporate empire, overseas assassinations exact a severe psychological toll on operatives.
Television Production
Moving a daytime television show into prime time requires transforming mundane local prizes into exotic, romantic dream dates. Faced with a seventy-two-hour deadline to find a prime-time replacement for a failing network show, you realize you need to send winning couples to major international locations rather than local venues. You utilize chaperones to maintain Standards and Practices Department compliance.
Jim Byrd suggested sending winning couples to romantic international cities like Paris, Rome, and Hong Kong instead of California nightclubs. This discussion led to the creation of the first game show on prime-time television.
The Newlywed Game relied on simple questions testing how well spouses knew each other. The format generated high dramatic tension and humor through spontaneous answers during every whoopee session.
When your production company briefly upgraded the prizes to luxurious items, competing couples lost their sense of humor. They began hitting each other on the head with thick cardboard answer cards.
Forty percent of Newlywed Game couples never celebrated their tenth anniversaries. Within two years, your company produced eleven half-hours of weekly national television programming, raising your net worth to five million dollars.
CIA Operations
A CIA operative's first solo assassination assignment requires strict adherence to contact protocols and immediate asset recovery. You travel to London under the cover of chaperoning a Dating Game couple, meet an intelligence contact at a designated restaurant sequence, and retrieve microfilm concealed in a Polaroid film box. Then you eliminate the delivery boy before extraction.
In May 1967, you met a contact in Shepherds Marketplace, obtained microfilm hidden in a film box, and shot the courier at a church courtyard. You smuggled the microfilm back to New York hidden inside your body.
Working alongside a local intelligence agent named Keeler in West Berlin, you conduct prolonged stakeouts of a political target. A wet operation demands meticulous local surveillance and seamless coordination with foreign intelligence assets.
In October 1973, you and Keeler intercepted anti-American trade unionist Hans Colbert in West Berlin. You eliminated him inside a vehicle, and obliterated the evidence with gasoline and explosives at a construction site.
The operation to kidnap, eliminate, and incinerate Hans Colbert lasted seventeen minutes. The stakeout conducted outside the target's address lasted forty-three hours.
Business Management
Rapid expansion from a small creative company into a multifaceted business enterprise inevitably destroys early camaraderie and informal honor systems. As Chuck Barris Productions grew into Barris Industries producing numerous weekly network hours, the loose and affectionate work culture atrophied. Bureaucratic entities known as Bandits replaced the old atmosphere with impersonal corporate memos, requisitions, and strict administrative edicts.
Life magazine published a major feature story describing the chaotic, hippie-like atmosphere of the production offices before the company transformed into a cold corporation.
By 1969, you produced twenty-five half-hours a week of national television programming. Your net worth reached eight million dollars by 1966.
Psychological Reflections
The psychological dissociation required to maintain a double life as a television executive and a professional killer leads operatives toward isolation and severe instability.
The thrill of committing murders with impunity and the egoistic sense of omnipotence eventually eroded your stability. You mirrored the fate of fellow operatives who sought out espionage to recapture wartime exhilaration.
Sigfried Keeler confessed to you that he joined espionage to recreate the thrilling exhilaration of killing he first experienced during World War II, shortly before committing suicide. You intended to sustain your double life for thirteen years, despite spending approximately twenty thousand dollars over the years on abortions and related expenses.
3. The Gong Show and Covert Exits
Embracing unmitigated television chaos provides a brief reprieve before the crushing weight of contract killings forces a final retirement.
Covert Operations
Assassinating two targets simultaneously vastly increases operational risks and the probability of failure. You receive your first doubleheader assignment to eliminate dual-agent Harry Kirby and veteran KGB officer Colonel Yuri Slasky in Paris.
Missions promised extensive surveillance teams and backup, but in reality, agents were left entirely on their own with minimal intelligence and high exposure to enemy counter-surveillance.
Barris stalks 75-year-old Colonel Yuri Slasky and Harry Kirby at the 53 avenue Montaigne address of Kirby's apartment house on the rue des Saints-Peres in Paris, ultimately shooting Slasky 3 times in the chest with a 22-caliber Ruger automatic and silencer, and Kirby in the face and chest before escaping.
Television Career
A television format that fails as a conventional talent show can succeed brilliantly by embracing the lunatic fringe of exceptionally untalented performers. After failing to find enough exceptional talent on the streets for a standard talent program, you realize you can flip the premise to feature overwhelmingly bad acts, kooks, and oddballs.
The show relies on a balance where the dreadful acts are occasionally punctuated by a genuinely good performance to keep the perspective intact. Barris sells The Gong Show to NBC after realizing that featuring unmitigated bad acts, such as the Unknown Comic, creates a smash hit.
You follow specific rules to keep the chaotic format running smoothly:
- feature 7 or 8 acts per half-hour show alongside a host and 3 celebrity judges;
- allow judges to smash a mallet against an immense Korean gong to dismiss awful acts posthaste;
- rate surviving acts on a zero-to-ten basis by each of the 3 judges.
Flouting network bureaucratic memos by incorporating rebellious crew members into the broadcast creates an unpredictable, chaotic live-television dynamic. When NBC management issues terse memos forbidding stagehands from appearing as performers, you deliberately escalate the defiance.
You conspire with grips and electricians to play bumbling characters like Father Ed or Gian-carlo Miweenie, driving network executives to rely heavily on Maalox.
During a chaotic taping weekend of 10 Gong Show episodes, Jaye P. Morgan exposes her breasts on coast-to-coast TV, Gian-carlo Miweenie asks for $460 to buy a Gucci attache case, and a stagehand's unscripted blunder leads to the Unicycle Kid being blasted off-stage with a mammoth fire extinguisher.
Personal Life
Unresolved personal obsessions and toxic relationships can culminate in abrupt tragedy, leaving a permanent psychological scar. You endure a tumultuous, volatile romance with Lucy Sue Glopp, marked by constant breakups, begging at her door, and mutual hostility.
Lucy Sue Glopp leaves for Hong Kong to marry an electronics millionaire when blood tests for a marriage license are valid for only 30 days.
Her flight hits a Greek military training plane over Athens International Airport, killing all 163 people on board.
Decline and Retirement
Attempting to transition a campy, chaotic television format into a serious message-driven feature film leads to immediate commercial and critical failure. You write, direct, and star in The Gong Show Movie as a final hurrah after committing to stop doing television.
You ruin the film by trying to inject a serious cinematic message into the final two-thirds, causing the project to close just 3 days after its Friday opening.
The Albuquerque Tribune publishes the succinct review stating that life is cruel enough without Chuck Barris constantly around, following a 40-day shoot, 5 months of editing, and a grueling 32-day promotional tour visiting 30 cities.
The psychological toll of contract killings eventually forces an operative to sever ties with covert agencies permanently. You undertake one final assignment in New York to eliminate a target named Mario Moretti at the Plaza Hotel before retiring completely from the CIA.
You track Mario Moretti to room 1632 of the Plaza Hotel on the 16th floor and push him out the sixteenth-floor window into the alley, later submitting your resignation at Ferrara's Restaurant in Little Italy.
4. Reclusion and the Final Hunt
Reclusion in New York
You live as a recluse in Suite 711 of the Parker Hotel. Supportive hotel staff manage your calls and accommodate your eccentricities.
Gracie, the hotel maid, smuggles whiskey into tea when you have the flu. She also retrieves your thrown-away tobacco pouches and steals flowers for your windowsills.
The CIA's Request
Robert Lawrence Puxton III visits you at your hotel wearing banker's gray and a white carnation. He explains that a high-level agency mole has compromised multiple operatives and killed Jim Byrd.
Puxton reveals that your mission in Paris to kill Kirby and Slasky was actually a trap set by the CIA mole feeding information to Major Kasilov at Moscow Center. You survived only because you reached the targets first, whereas the original plan was for you to be eliminated.
Reconnections
Penny Pacino visits you in New York while on her way to Wimbledon. Thirty-five-year-old Penny brings fifty-one-year-old you a Walker Percy quotation and discusses the pretensions of Hollywood during vulnerable conversations about aging.
The Elimination of the Mole
Confronting former associates from espionage days can lead to lethal encounters under the pretext of resuming personal connections.
You arrive in Boston on August 7, 1981, to see Patricia Watson, whom you eventually identify as the agency mole and shoot. You meet Patricia Watson at the Union Oyster House, go to her apartment, and shoot her after discovering a cocked automatic in her chair.
You use an AMT 380 backup gun strapped to your ankle to kill thirty-one-year-old Watson after verifying her betrayal and finding a weapon prepared for you. You shoot Watson twice in her apartment after spotting a cocked automatic hidden between her seat cushion and armrest, one hour passing before you meet Puxton at the Ritz-Carlton bar.
Marriage and New Beginnings
Major life transitions like marriage can occur amidst underlying paranoia and unresolved threats from the past.
You wake up singing at six on your wedding day, heading to a noon ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel that includes a one-hour wedding party. You spot a Walther PKB held by someone with a gold pinky ring during your wedding exit at the Beverly Hills Hotel, maintaining your anxiety over potential assassins in the crowd.
New Creative Ideas
While fleeing a suspected assassin after your wedding, you develop the idea for Wanted! in the back of a limousine. You conceptualize a television show where viewers help track down actors playing fugitives for a cash reward of one hundred thousand dollars.
You can develop television concepts from real criminal cases:
- Dramatize a crime such as a murder, embezzlement, or spy case in a half-hour program.
- Send the key actor playing the villain out to a specific region of the country with a bounty on their head.
- Freeze-frame the final shot of the villain, superimpose a wanted poster with the reward amount, and provide clues on television.
10 Key Ideas
- Chuck Barris claimed to live a dual existence as a successful daytime television producer and a clandestine CIA hitman.
- The Central Intelligence Agency recruited Barris through a classified advertisement in a New York University weekly newspaper.
- Operating in foreign countries, Barris participated in missions that included renting portable toilet trucks during civil rights marches and assassinating political figures like Salvador Panagra Renda.
- As television production expanded into a massive corporate empire, overseas assassinations exacted a severe psychological toll on operatives like Barris and Sigfried Keeler.
- Shifting daytime television strategies, Barris created hit prime-time game shows such as The Newlywed Game by sending winning couples to romantic international locations.
- Embracing unmitigated television chaos and featuring overwhelmingly bad acts, kooks, and oddballs allowed Barris to turn The Gong Show into a smash hit on NBC.
- After undertaking a doubleheader assignment in Paris to eliminate dual-agent Harry Kirby and Colonel Yuri Slasky, Barris eventually faced personal tragedy when Lucy Sue Glopp died in a plane crash over Athens.
- The psychological weight of contract killings forced Barris to sever ties with covert agencies permanently after eliminating Mario Moretti at the Plaza Hotel.
- Living as a recluse in New York, Barris was visited by Robert Lawrence Puxton III, who revealed that a high-level agency mole had compromised multiple operatives and killed Jim Byrd.
- Confronting Patricia Watson in Boston and identifying her as the agency mole, Barris shot her before marrying and subsequently conceptualizing the television show Wanted! in the back of a limousine.