America knew Chuck Barris as a genius of game-show TV. But did he really carry out assassinations for the CIA, as he claims? Ryan Gilbey finds out.
When preparing for lunch with Chuck Barris, a man who has written candidly about his secret life as a CIA assassin, some apprehension is to be expected. On the e-mail he sent his publicist, Barris had promised: "I'll take the writer." Take? As in "take out"? "He means he'll pay," the publicist explained.
Of course. Generous guy. He was probably just having a rough day when he wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: "The front of the silencer broke teeth as it went in . . . The man's eyes remained surprised while the back of his head splattered against the wall of the church."
Nasty. But it isn't Barris's 30-odd alleged assassinations that have led strangers to harangue him in the street, or driven newspapers to rail against his behaviour ("Life is cruel enough without Chuck Barris constantly around," the Albuquerque Tribune wrote in 1979). Those hostile reactions were prompted by his legitimate occupation as the creator and sometime host of dozens of blithely lowbrow game shows broadcast on US television in the 1960s and 1970s. The best of those will be familiar from their diluted British versions. The Dating Game, Barris's first hit back in 1965, was almost kept from the airwaves forever by its unambiguous exchanges (Her: "What would I like most about you?" Him: "My cock"). Today we know it as cosy old Blind Date.
Another smash, The Newlywed Game, in which freshly married couples snitched on each other's peccadilloes, was de-fanged by the time it reached the UK as Mr & Mrs.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine a plausible British equivalent to Chuck Barris, free of sleaze or arrogance. Even that CIA business, if you can believe it, had something innocently aspirational about it. Completing his first execution, he writes, "was fun. It was more than fun. It was living". With George Clooney's demented movie version of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind opening here next week, Barris is hot again for the first time since the 1970s.
He is 73 now, with lively white hair and twinkling eyes. He meets me at Manhattan's plush Friar's Club, where the walls are crammed with framed photographs: Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Onassis, Hedy Lamarr. But not Barris.
"They used to have a picture of me on the wall, before they had any other photos up," he recalls. "Half the people demanded they take it down. In the end, someone stole it."
Barris's TV career began when he spied an opportunity to shake up 1960s schedules, which were filled with makeshift game shows. "I thought spontaneity was the key," he says. "My shows were simple half-hour entertainments. The Newlywed Game: that was four couples, eight questions and a refrigerator. All I hoped was that I could stop a person's fork once or twice in every show. That's the moment when you're eating your dinner, you raise your fork to your mouth and something you see or hear on TV halts you mid-mouthful."
Once The Dating Game took off, Barris didn't leave the US airwaves for 15 years. Between 1965 and 1970, his personal fortune rocketed to over $8 million. All he had to do was conjure up some zany idea or another and the TV networks would shower him with cash.
Not everyone was convinced that this was money well spent. "The day that The Dating Game went on air, the headline in the Chicago Tribune was 'Daytime Television Hits All-Time Low'." He lets the words ring in the air. "I think I just became the guy they love to hate."
Barris's reign ended in 1980. Several of his shows were axed and a movie version of The Gong Show died on its opening weekend. He installed himself in a New York hotel, intending to spend a month writing the bitterness and anger out of his system. In the end, he stayed there for two and a half years. He had his belongings couriered over from his home in Los Angeles and immersed himself in what would become Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
The book is, by any standards, a fork-stopper. Intertwined with a comprehensive account of how Barris became the King Midas of disposable TV is a darker narrative that reveals him fraternising with femmes fatales, hitmen and CIA brass in such exotic locations as Berlin, Mexico City and Henley-on-Thames.
"I decided not to ask him what was true," George Clooney tells me. "Ultimately, that question doesn't have much to do with anything. It's more a case of why someone as successful as Chuck Barris would write that stuff."
The movie is peppered with scenes of Barris, played by Sam Rockwell, fretting that he is "a lesser person". The CIA fantasy, if that is what it is, bestows upon him the purpose and gravitas missing from his life.
"I was finally doing something . . . meaningful," he writes, as the corpses pile up.
In person, Barris neither confirms nor denies the book's authenticity, but the CIA had other ideas. "They said: 'We make it a practice not to say who is or isn't in the CIA. But in this case we'll make an exception. Chuck Barris is not'."
He laughs himself silly.
We head back to his Upper East Side home, a spectacular penthouse apartment. Clooney has signed a Confessions poster hanging near the hat-stand. His inscription reads: "It's your year." A note in Rockwell's hand says: "There's no one I'd rather play. Don't kill anybody."
Barris's second wife, Mary, makes us tea while he peruses a review of the movie faxed in from his birthplace, Philadelphia. It's a positive notice, but he is niggled by a sentence that refers to his "deluded sense of his own charm". He also finds the word "nebbish" in the review.
"It means low-life," he grimaces.
"No it doesn't," says Mary. "It means nerdy."
She must be useful when it comes to assuaging his inferiority complex.
Barris might well be wondering if the bad press could ease off: in the past few years, he has weathered lung cancer, a divorce and the tragic loss of his adult daughter.
What his detractors may have missed is that he was always an anthropologist at heart. It can be no coincidence that he worships the films of Mike Leigh. Both men specialise in quantifying the foibles of ordinary folk. And Barris knows when he has gone too far. He once pulled one of his own shows, Three's Company, from transmission. The pitch was: who knows a husband better, his wife or his secretary?
At the end of the afternoon, Barris walks me down to street level. "If you stick in the business of being creative," he warns me, toughening slightly, "you get hurt. But if you're not prepared to get hurt like that, life can be pretty boring. I think I'm going to keep on going." - (Guardian Service)
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is released on Friday