Book Review & Analysis: The Secret Life Of a Satanist by Blanche Barton

The Secret Life Of a Satanist:

The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey

by Blanche Barton

Back in the 1980s, there were two books my friends had that they would leave out for people to see. One was The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell. The other was The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey. Nobody took these books seriously. They were just for show and as far as I know, no one from back then ever used the former book to build any bombs although I do know a couple people who took the book’s advice and tried smoking banana peels. Don’t bother. The bombs don’t work and neither do the banana peels. Regarding the latter book, I also don’t know anybody who read it who became a Satanist, although I do know some who got into Wicca but that had nothing to do with The Satanic Bible. In fact, I’d say The Satanic Bible amounted to little more than bathroom reading. If you dug into the pile of dirty magazines stashed under some guys’ sinks you might find a copy and having a good read while doing what all humans do at the end point of their digestive systems.

Believe it or not, some people really do care about the biography of the Church of Satan’s founding father. The Secret Life Of a Satanist by Blanche Barton theoretically fulfills that need. There are better sources for legitimate information though.

This authorized biography starts out with lies and half truths about Anton LaVey’s ancestry and childhood. He was born in the 1930s to parents he claimed to be of Romani and Jewish heritage, having grandparents who emigrated from Transylvania, Romania. They were actually exclusively Ukrainian Jews according to immigration records. There isn’t a whole lot said about his upbringing except that he got bullied by his classmates and, according to him, it was because he was hung like a horse and they were jealous. Reading between the lines, I get more of a sense that they beat him up for acting like he was better than everybody else. Guys who carry the biggest baseball bats don’t ordinarily talk about it and those that do are usually just insecure. In any case, this pobrecito had a lonely childhood. In his teenage years, he had a striking appearance, not exactly handsome, but striking and photogenic. He liked wearing zoot suits and I can imagine people used to tell him he looked like the Devil which is something he probably took a little too close to heart.

The story gets interesting as he learns to play the organ, lives the life of a carny, and works for the Clyde Beatty circus as a lion tamer. I’m a real sucker for stories about carnies and circuses, but then I was sad to learn from other sources that the Clyde Beatty circus has no records of LaVey ever having been employed by them. The same can be said for other jobs he claimed to have had like being a crime scene photographer for the San Francisco police department, a psychic detective, and an organ player for the San Francisco ballet. Regardless of his dishonesty, LaVey says one significant thing about being a psychic investigator: people willingly want to be deceived. People sincerely want to believe their house is haunted when in reality the eerie moaning sound they hear is nothing but wind blowing through a small crack in an attic window. This insight is all you need to know to understand where Anton LaVey was coming from.

The book continues on with more lies. LaVey tells stories about a love affair with Marilyn Monroe, something which has been denied by people who knew both LaVey and Monroe. He claims to have had an affair with Jayne Mansfield which is a half truth. LaVey says she was in love with him but others say she thought he was a dork and she liked to tease him so she could laugh behind his back. Oh the cruelty of women. The interesting part of this story is that LaVey claims to have accidentally killed her. He says he put a curse on her jealous husband and then while cutting a clipping out of a newspaper, he accidentally cut through a photograph of her on the other side. The slice went through her neck and then she died in a car crash. You can believe that if you want, but beliefs aren’t facts. Besides, autopsy reports show that Jayne Mansfield’s head was not severed from her body in the car crash as many people believe. That was simply a rumor that spread after she died.

In Barton’s version of the founding of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the 1960s. LaVey was making a living by giving lectures about dark subjects in the living room of his house which he painted black and kept a pet lion in. Since this attracted all kinds of eccentrics he came up with the idea of starting the world’s first Satanic church and began performing rituals involving pentagrams and nude women on altars for audiences. The media got excited about all this and drew the attention of hippies and other counter culturalists who LaVey despised. He also attracted a few people who were more sincere and possibly more clever than he was; when they challenged his leadership, he was unable to maintain control over the church and excommunicated them. Many went on to form their own cults and LaVey wrote them off as fakes. In reality, this exposed his weakness as a leader so he became a recluse and had minimal contact with other Satanists throughout the rest of his life. His daughter Zeena Schreck says he did little else at this time in his life besides lying around in his living room and barking out orders to his wife who kept the Church of Satan running mostly on her own. She divorced him in the 1980s which drove LaVey into bankruptcy. I guess his curses and spells couldn’t prevent that from happening.

The first half of this biography is a somewhat interesting story even if it buried under a half ton of bullshit. The second half isn’t so much of a biography as it is Anton LaVey making an awkward attempt at explaining his “philosophy”. I use the word “philosophy” loosely because there is no structure or well-thought out stances in it. It is more a rambling collection of thoughts and ideas that don’t add up to anything definite.

LaVey had some odd ideas. He believed trapezoids could be used to bring demons into our dimension from who knows where. These demons are like the monsters in H.P. Lovecraft stories. Never mind that Lovecraft wrote fiction and never tried to convince anybody otherwise. LaVey talked about what kinds of music and movies are sufficiently satanic for him. I’m not sure how Irving Berlin or Cole Porter were satanic; I guess he heard something there that the rest of us don’t. Although he believed in right wing politics, authoritarianism, and eugenics, he also didn’t like racism, censorship, or homophobia. Science fiction movies and TV shows are meant to program people to live in outer space and in the future, people will mostly have social and sexual relationships with androids. Isn’t this a somewhat accurate prediction of AI? Despite being a quasi-fascist ideologue, LaVey shared some views with counter-culturalists like a hatred of TV, a dislike of consumer culture and the soulless, mechanical lifestyles of mainstream Americans who do little more than work, sleep, and then go to work again. How any of this is a satanic philosophy, I don’t know. It’s just satanic because it’s what he thought and that’s all there is to it.

Speaking of androids and soullessness, Anton LaVey’s main hobby, aside from performing satanic rituals, was building androids which the rest of us would call “mannequins”. He talked about himself as if he was a modern incarnation of Michelangelo sculpting statues in his basement. But really he was just a guy making mannequins and dressing them up. He put all his androids on display in a speakeasy scene in his cellar. I admit it might be an interesting installment piece to see, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it. I guess these androids make a good substitute for the friends he didn’t have. At least they wouldn’t challenge his authority or talk back when he was being a dick the way real people would. Female mannequins never say no either so he could always get what he wanted from them. You’d think a guy who claimed to be the John Holmes of the San Francisco occult scene would have had a better sex life than that.

LaVey admits near the end of the book that he is nostalgic, particularly for the years prior to World War II. The way I see him now is that as a kid, he was fascinated by the world of adults and probably fantasized about what he would do when he came of age. Then he suffered an unremarkable adolescence in the blandly conformist restraint of the 1950s, invented a fabulist biography to cover it up, tried to get in on the counter-culture scene of the 1960s by starting a satanic cult but didn’t approve of the kinds of people he attracted. So he dropped out of society to be a solitary king in the castle of his house, a replica of the life he imagined adults having when he was a child, never growing up and ruling over a court of mannequins while peddling Church of Satan merchandise to pay the rent. Anton LaVey reminds me a lot of Jean des Esseintes, the eccentric aesthete in J.K. Huysmans’ novel Against Nature who can’t handle living among the nobodies of the real world and so retreats into the isolation of his chateau. I find a certain kind of appeal in living that way but it is undercut by a certain kind of cowardice and social incompetence too.

Anton LaVey always said that being satanic meant embracing the role of adversary. I’m not sure what he was adverse to or why he rejected it. It can’t simply be Christianity. Although he pointed out some of the hypocrisy in its followers, like the way Christians go to burlesque shows on Saturday night and then show up at church on Sunday, he didn’t display enough of an understanding of Christian theology to truly be against it. Was he an adversary to the entire world? That’s just too vague to be valid. His attitude was like a blind, knee jerk reaction to life without any depth of understanding behind it. LaVey tried to make himself look menacing and powerful, but he sounded more like a sloppy drunk sitting next to me in a bar, babbling about whatever came into his mind. Since I admit I like hearing from and reading about weird people, some of this is amusing but none of it is anything I can take seriously. The Secret Life Of a Satanist didn’t convince me to join the Church of Satan or any other cult. I’ve always thought Anton Szandor LaVey was a dork and this biography further confirmed that opinion. He’s like a strange guy at a party that takes his own oddity seriously when in reality, people just like having him around for the freaky kicks.

Anton LaVey claimed P.T. Barnum as an influence and so I will leave you with two paraphrases from that iconic American con man. People don’t mind being ripped off if they have fun in the process of being cheated. There’s a sucker born every minute. And that’s all you need to know to understand Anton LaVey.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes

Terra Nostra

by Carlos Fuentes

      In literary and historical studies, we hear a lot about post-colonialism. We hear far less about pre-colonialism and what led colonialists down their destructive paths towards the domination of their conquered territories. In his monumental novel Terra Nostra, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes tackles this subject, taking into account a myriad of byways, sidestreams, and subplots that all feed into this massive literary undertaking.

This is one of those densely written novels that immediately confuses the reader with layers of symbolism, non-linear narrative, characters that appear in multiple times and places without any clear explanation as to whether they are the same or not, shifting time frames, dream sequences inside of dream sequences, multiple characters with the same name, improbable anachronisms, and so much more. I could write an entire essay alone on all the things in this story that are deliberately meant to throw the audience off track. Fuentes repeatedly pulls the magic carpet out from under your ass so you find yourself tumbling through the air into disorienting labyrinths of prose without giving you many clues as to how to get out or where you will be if you ever do.

The best way to approach this monster of a novel is go straight into its heart and summarize thmain character Felipe el Senor. Please note that this summary does not go in the order in it follows in the narrative. He is the king of Castile in Spain and successor to his father, also named Felipe. The kingdom is a feudal estate so that the king is entitled to everything produced by the peasants. The king is also entitled to have sex with any bride on the night of their wedding. This is what happens when the elder Felipe rapes a peasant girl named Celestina before she can consummate her marriage with her husband. This sets all of Felipe el Senor’s life into motion. The younger Felipe inherits not only his father’s kingdom, but also his father’s syphilis which is called “the French disease” throughout the novel. Felipe thinks of his father as a disgrace so he becomes preoccupied with ending the familial dynasty by not having any children thereby not having a son to put on the throne when he dies according to the law of primogeniture. Felipe el Senor also turns to religion and theology to purify himself in order to get closer to the Christian God.

As Felipe el Senor is coming of age, he runs off to a beach where he has a chance encounter with four subjects if his feudal estate. All of them have utopian dreams. Celestina, the same woman who was raped by Felipe’s father, dreams of a world where carnality is not considered sinful and dirty. The monk Simon wants to live where there is no sickness or disease. Ludovico is a student who wants to see a world without religion. Pedro is an old man who is building a boat to sail off to another land. In this, the foundations are laid for exploring the attitudinal themes current on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that led to the impulse of colonialism. Felipe tells them to forget their dreams because he can bring paradise to his home in Spain. They go through the villages, telling everyone no matter their age, race, gender, religion, or class status that utopia has arrived and takes them to his castle. They indulge in a massive orgy complete with food and wine. Then Felipe tells his four friends to leave and has his knights slaughter everybody partying in the castle. This passage is derived directly from alchemical symbolism and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Felipe’s motivation for this mass murder is that he wants to prove to his father that he can be powerful enough to be king.

In the first third of the novel, another plot element that gets introduced is that of the Three Bastards. When Felipe takes a deer hunting party to the hills near a beach, presumably the same beach where he previously met his four utopianist friends, three identical men wash up on the shore. Each has a red cross permanently marked on their back and each also has twelve toes. They are also accompanied by three green-glassed bottles with rolled up parchments inside of them. We learn more about the Three Bastards, who they are and what they represent, later in the third section.

As mentioned previously. Felipe turns to mystical Christianity to cleanse himself of the filth of existence. His initial impulse is to invade Flanders, hire a mercenary army of Teutonic knights, and slaughter a heretical sect called the Adamites. We later learn that this cult was founded by Ludovico and Celestina and boasted the painter Hieronymous Bosch as a member. After the Adamites are killed, the Teutons celebrate by ransacking a church, getting drunk, fornicating, pissing, shitting, and vomiting all over the floor. This is the first of Felipe’s existential crises because he sees first hand that you can not rid the world of filth by killing people you deem to be unclean. The second component of his crisis is that he meets Ludovico in the church who explains the Adamite philosophy to him. Sex can not be sinful because it was not sinful in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Therefore, Heaven can be reached by living the way Adam and Eve lived before she ate the fruit. Remember that Felipe has sexual hang ups due to the impurity of his syphilitic body and his desire to end the Castilian dynasty by not producing a son to be crown prince. He usually lives a life of celibacy.

The alternative version of Christian practice causes Felipe to return to his partially built castle and meditate in his private chapel on a painting of Jesus and his disciples that anachronistically moves around like a television screen. Felipe explores alternate interpretations of the New Testament like the possibility that Mary was promiscuous and her cuckolded husband Joseph made up the story of the virgin birth to hide his disgrace. Another idea is that Jesus escaped crucifixion by having another man substituted for him on the cross at Calvary. These ideas come from Gnostic Christianity, a heretical theology that gets examined in other parts of the book. Felipe doesn’t believe in these theories, but they cause him to consider that there might be different ways to interpret the Bible and it also causes a theological rupture for him too. His mind is steeped in Augustinian thought so he believes both that getting close to God means cleansing oneself of the filth of existence and that the eternal represents divine purity and perfection while the temporal and ever changing world represents impurity which is evil. Whatever doesn’t change is eternal and divine therefore the only things in the world that don’t change are death and literature. Since the medieval Bible manuscript he owns doesn’t change, he erroneously believes that the written word is eternal and perfect. Whatever dies stays dead, so death is also eternal and perfect. He has realized that killing heretics does not cleanse the world of filth and evil, so he turns inward, building a castle with a private chapel where he will isolate himself from his kingdom and the rest of world. The chapel contains a necropolis housing the relics of his dead ancestors and stands as a monument to eternal death which he thinks of as perfection and divine purity.

All is not well in the necropolis-castle. Felipe’s wife Isabella is sexually frustrated so she brings a homunculus to life in a mandrake root and tries to create a golem using body parts she steals from the necropolis reliquary. Meanwhile, two monks who live in the castle tower use their religious practices as a cover for secretly pursuing their passions for art and astronomy, again indicating the coming of the Renaissance. The peasantry, due to their rotten living conditions, begin discussion on rebelling against the king. And in the middle of all this is Guzman, Felipe el Senor’s chief advisor, who despises both the king and the peasants yet plans to play the two sides off against each other to exert his own power. Felipe falls further into crisis as he begins to doubt the accuracy of the Bible and could possibly be losing his mind due to syphilis. By the end of the third section, it is obvious that Felipe’s desire to get close to God is little more than a massive ego trip. He feels no remorse for killing innocent people be they heretics, Jews, Muslims, or peasants and grows more and more into obsessive self-absorbtion as a quest to reach God by separating himself from the world. His attempt at redemption has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with escapism into a fantasy world that negates all that exists.

In the second section, a story is told by one of the Bastards, known as the Pilgim, about a journey to a new world across the sea. He gets on board a ship with Pedro, the elderly ship builder introduced earlier in the novel who dreams of sailing away to a new land. They use the planet Venus as a navigational guide since it appears in the western sky every dawn. This is a subtle hint of the Pilgrim’s identity since the indigenous Azteco-Toltec people associated Venus with their returning sun god Quetzalcoatl. If you are familiar with the mythology and Mexican history, you can already see where this is leading.

The ship gets caught in a whirlpool and sucked down to the bottom of the ocean. This is obviously symbolic of a passage through a birth canal. They land on the shore of what is now Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico. Pedro, a symbol of the Old World, gets killed while the Pilgrim is welcomed into a community of indigenous people who treat him as a hero meant to replace their elderly dying chieftain. That chieftain is kept inside a basket that just might resemble a cradle, but in any case, he gives the Pilgrim some clues as to his true identity and what he must do to fulfill his destiny. Before going off on a series of adventures and encounters, the Pilgrim meets with a young witch whose physical appearance links her to Celestina. On their first meeting, she is a young woman who promises him love if he pursues her into the interior of the New World, Eros in pursuit of Thanatos. Along the way he encounters monsters who we later learn represent his dark side which he must incorporate into his being. This involves Quetzalcoatl’s alter ego the Smoking Mirror. Mirrors, self-reflection, and death are closely linked throughout the whole novel.

The second time the Pilgrim encounters Celestina, she is on top of a pyramid where various rituals are performed including a human sacrifice in which the victim’s heart is cut out of his living body. At this point Celestina has aged into maturity and takes on the aspect of a goddess who devours all the filth brought to her by the community for the sake of disposal. Again, she gives further information and instructions to the Pilgrim.

The third time he meets with Celestina, the Pilgrim is being hailed by the Aztec people in the city of Mexica as their god Quetzalcoatl who is prophesied to return and bring peace to their empire. They give the Pilgrim access to everything in the city but he rejects all of it for Celestina who appears for the final time. This time she is an old hag and tells him he can only receive her love temporarily before he is sacrificially killed.

This whole second section is heavy in mythological symbolism, alternate time dimensions that pop into the narrative occasionally, and parallels with other themes in the first and third sections of the book. One example is that the Pilgrim on his journey purifies himself, eliminating his filth, and eventually rejects the world’s wealth to be in solitude with his goddess in a way that parallels the crisis of faith suffered by Felipe el Senor. As we learn in the third section of the novel, the elder King Felipe is actually the Pilgrim’s father and his mother is Celestina. Recall how Felipe rapes Celestina at the beginning of the story. The cycles of death, birth, and return are constant throughout this whole book.

In the third section, the trajectory of Felipe el Senor’s life and ascetic rejection of the world continues. The story of the Three Bastards takes on more prominence. One of them , Don Juan, arrives and seduces Felipe’s wife, Queen Isabella and then moves on to all the other women in the castle, namely nuns and duennas. The second Bastard, the Idiot Prince, marries a dwarf and the two of them retreat into a relic filled coffin because he can’t handle the complexities of life. The Pilgrim tells his story to Felipe, who doesn’t believe it, but it inspires Guzman and others to build a ship and sail off to New Spain which we now know as Latin America. Before leaving, Guzman leads a failed peasant rebellion against the King and then takes the peasants who lost the battle overseas to colonize the Americas.

But then there is the backstory of the Three Bastards who are all sons of the elder King Felipe and the brothers of the younger Felipe el Senor. They are raised as wanderers by Celestina and Ludovico. All three boys represent different characteristics of Castilian Spanish society. Also, some characters speculate that the Three Bastards are actually all the same person since no one ever sees the three of them together.

That carries over into another theme. While living in a Jewish village, Ludovico gets a job translating between Hebrew and Spanish. While working with the rabbi, he begins studying the cabbala. The rabbi goes into a long discourse on numerology. These long passages can be a challenge for those of us who are not inclined towards mysticism, but the important part that applies to the rest of the novel is the first three numbers. Number one represents totality but also solitude. Number two is a factor of conflict because two individual entities can not synthesize into one. Therefore three is necessary to unify one and two , holding them together in a trinity. This goes on until number 24 or so, but the explanation of the first three numbers plays out throughout the entire novel. Whether this has symbolic meaning or if it is simply a narrative device is debatable.

Lastly, the colonization project of New Spain and the settlers’ return to Spain is given marginal literary space. Colonialism turns out to be a disaster for both the Spainish and the indigenous people who live in the colonies. But despite the extreme length of this text, the colonialism really emphasizes what the novel is all about. Before leaving for the New World, Spanish society was in a state of crisis as it transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. They were emerging from feudalism, religious backwardness and hypocrisy, poverty, disease, and a desire for impossible utopias to be reached into democracy, economic mercantilism, science, rationalism, and social justice. Fuentes demonstrates how this flux in social changes was transferred over to the colonies of Latin America, a traumatic birth for a new society that left it in a mess that only replicated and exacerbated the failures of the Old World.

Felipe el Senor does not believe any of this is happening because it is not written in a book. Aside from depicting the conditions that lead to the troubled birth of Latin America, this novel forces you to ask the epistemological question of how we can know what we know with certainty. Memory and the written word are imperfect and inaccurate, so how can we be certain of anything if we rely on these to make judgments about truth? Fuentes plays a sly trick when he has one character say that the Jews had preserved Greek scientific manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages and yet, all the historians I have read say it was the Muslims who preserved those ancient Greek writings. But what if those historians were wrong? Fuentes forces us to confront the limitations of our own ability to know.

There is so much more that you could spend a decade or two explaining all the different ideas contained in Terra Nostra. Another point that Fuentes makes is that one lifetime is not long enough to reach completion as a human being. Is he suggesting reincarnation? Maybe. But one idea I get from that thought is that since we can only experience one life within our lifetime, through the lives contained in books we can have access to an infinite number of other lives lived either in fiction or reality. Even if the written text is inaccurate, those fragmentary understandings can still help us to live more than once, at least vicariously. Terra Nostra is not a book for everyone, but if you’re up for the challenge it’s worth the effort.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris

Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind:

  

An Unauthorized Autobiography

by Chuck Barris

      If you were around in the 1970s, you might remember a television program called The Gong Show. Maybe you remember it even if you don’t want to. It was a variety show and a talent contest for people with no talent and often no taste either. They had a celebrity panel of three judges who had to endure an entire performance. If the people on stage were intolerably bad, one of the judges would bang a gong to end it. The performers were immediately disqualified. There were very few contestants who ever made it through a whole set. But it was all in tne name of fun and it WAS fun at least for certain people. In my eight year old brain it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. My mother didn’t agree, but then again she never liked The Three Stooges either. That made it all the more exciting. The producer and host of the show was an awkward little guy who wore a hat with its brim pulled down over his eyes. His name was Chuck Barris and after The Gong Show got canceled after three years, he wrote an autobiography in which he claimed to secretly be a hitman for the CIA. It was called Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography. Yes, that’s right, this autobiography is unauthorized. You’ve heard of an unauthorized biography, but an unauthorized autobiography? That title itself should be a recognizable indication that something is a little off about this book.

In the opening chapter, Barris is going off on an assignment to rub someone out in New York City. He puts on a fake beard and moustache to hide his identity. As he sits in a coffee shop eating breakfast, a woman recognizes him as a celebrity and strikes up a conversation. She easily sees through his disguise and offers him a blowjob, free of charge no less. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the story and I’m not talking about the blowjob part. Barris, as an author, intends to deceive his audience, but he also sets the audience up to see through his deception the same way the fan in the restaurant does.

And there is deception all the way through the book. If you’re prone to playing drinking games I have one to propose. Read this book and every time Barris gets himself out of a tight fix through deception or outright lies, take a shot of your favorite venom. You probably won’t make it through 20 or 30 pages before the room is spinning like a tilt-a-whirl amusement park ride or you are lying on the bathroom floor because it’s convenient to be next to the toilet so you don’t have to stumble too far the next time you hurl your hamburger dinner. Next time you’ll remember to go easy on the hot sauce. A case in point is where Barris has a problem with guests on a game show using less than acceptable language during live filming. He hires an actor to pretend he’s a government agent from the FCC and to lecture the guests before each show about the legal consequences of broadcasting obscenity on TV. Problem solved. The contestants clean up their act and almost everything else goes right. Well, maybe not everything.

Chuck Barris says very little about his childhood as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia, an interesting omission for an autobiography. He does write about how he failed with the female students he chased after during college If he’s luckless in love, he’s luckier in his career. He doesn’t have a smooth ride there either, but eventually he pitches the idea for a game show to a television producer and things begin to fall into place. Some people might remember The Dating Game, where a single woman would interview three male contestants hidden from her view and then choose the one who best suits her desire for a date. Barris would go on to produce another hit game show called The Newlywed Game in which newly married couples would be quizzed on how well they knew their partners. Of course it was the 70s so a lot of the questions were loaded with sexual innuendos. More importantly, the contestants often had IQ’s that were lower than the average yearly temperature of Boston. It is lowbrow entertainment in its finest form. These shows were popular because Barris had his finger on the pulse of American pop culture in the 1970s. And that wasn’t such a good thing.

But no matter how successful Barris’s career as a TV producer is, something always goes wrong. For example, on an early set of The Dating Game, he tries to change up the show’s formula by having three chimpanzees sitting in the chairs reserved for the bachelor contestants. Off stage actors would answer the questions asked by the bachelorette with the joke being the expected shock on her face when she gets introduced to the three representatives of the hominid taxonomic family. The filming is a bit of a disaster because one of the apes plays with his genitals while the one next to him begins dismantling the chair he is sitting in and throwing its pieces into the audience. The passages about Barris’s TV shows are full of hilarious anecdotes like this.

Another side of his autobiography is the perpetual flux of his failing love life. There is no shortage of groupies, but none of them are appealing as people. When he meets women he is attracted to, the relationships always fail. There are two women who float in and out of the narrative. One is Penny Pacino, a redhead who spends a lot of her life pursuing him as a husband. The other is Patricia Watson, a commanding officer in the CIA.

Barris gets tapped to work undercover as an assassin by the world’s most notorious intelligence agency. He gets assigned to work under Jim Byrd, his senior officer, mentor, and friend. Together they spend time drinking, talking about life in the agency, planning assassinations, and carrying them out. Barris goes on assignment in Mexico City, London, Paris, and New York all for the purpose of permanently ending the careers of rival spies. Later he gets tracked down for a revenge killing by a KGB agent and the whole story climaxes when they learn there is a mole in the upper ranks of the CIA, one who is responsible for the death of Jim Byrd. An interesting piece of foreshadowing occurs when Barris accidentally tells someone where Jim Byrd will be during a sabbatical. Loose lips sink ships as the World War II navy propaganda posters used to say, warning sailors not to give details to friendly strangers while on shore leave. What Barris says about Jim Byrd has deadly consequences.

So how should you interpret this unauthorized autobiography? Start by accepting that almost everything in it is fiction. While Barris’s career as a businessman and game show producer are verifiable, most of the rest of it isn’t. There are obvious clues that his employment in the CIA is fake. He does things that an effective intelligence agency would never allow like having meetings with other operatives in bars and restaurants where company planning is discussed openly or assassinating people in crowded public areas like the plaza in front of a museum in Mexico City or a busy shopping street in Paris. The idea of sending a recognizable public figure on these missions is absurd as well. Other clues are more subtle, like how he meets with the man who assassinated Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende by gunshot. Only, in reality, Allende died after falling out a window. Was he pushed or was it an accident? It doesn’t matter here. What matters is that he didn’t die of a bullet wound. When it comes to the CIA story, Barris is just spinning a yarn to see what he can get away with. He seems to be dropping hints, winking at you, and elbowing you in the ribs throughout the whole book to see if you are in on the joke. Like the fake facial hair he wears in the opening chapter, he expects you to be perceptive enough to see through his disguise. If you don’t, that’s your problem.

A quick biographical check on Chuck Barris reveals something else. During the two decades this book takes place, spanning 1960 to 1980, he was married twice, something which is never mentioned in this autobiography. He did marry a redhead but her name wasn’t Penny Pacino, as stated in the story, and he didn’t marry her until ten years after this book was published. So the story of his frustrated love life and eventual marriage to Penny can’t be taken any more seriously than the CIA story.

Despite all his trickery, Barris does confront us with an ironic truth that can be found in his personality. Throughout the book, he privately struggles with depression, issues of self-worth, and a low self esteem. Despite his success in television, he is haunted by a dark shadow since nothing ever goes as planned even when things are working out for the best. The entertainment establishment isn’t accepting of him either, thinking of him as a troublemaker and an annoyance. His game shows work on the premise that people are happy to make fools of themselves in public if it means they get a chance to be on TV. Barris has an enormous contempt for his game show contestants and for a lot of his audience as well. The Gong Show, in all its trashiness, can be seen as a middle finger in the face of the industry that tolerated him as long as he made money for them, but scathingly put him down behind his back. This book reveals Barris as being pummeled into depression by the negativity that goes with fame and being hailed as the King of Schlock. He is like a successful CEO who looks in the mirror and sees Charlie Brown staring back. In the midst of all the fiction, Barris reveals a candid portrayal of the most sensitive parts of his mind, an irony that goes far in making this project work on a literary level. You get a sense of how a man riddled with anxiety reacts to others by being cranky, condescending, and snarky. The story about being a CIA assassin can thereby be read as a compensation fantasy where he gets lauded by the agency for being successful and in control of his assignments. Besides, the other agents are suave, courageous, intelligent, and urbane. They aren’t like the nitwits Barris has to work with in television or the fans of his game shows, the kinds of people who laugh at jokes about people farting while 69ing. While he wanted to be proud of his life, he had some misgivings. After all, his legacy is that he initiated a long string of TV shows where ordinary people act like idiots for entertainment stretching from The Morton Downey Show, Geraldo, The Jerry Springer Show, and Fear Factor onwards into the abysmal slime pit of reality shows that amount to little more than junk food for the mind.

When read as a straight up work of fiction, Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind is worth your time. It’s a combination of autobiographical realism and a traditional spy thriller complete with plot hooks, plot twists, and a surprise ending. Then it’s held together with the psychological insights of a quality character study with Chuck Barris playing the protagonist’s role as Chuck Barris. And if you’re not convinced that it’s all fiction, keep in mind that in 1982, the year of publication, the author is on record saying that this book is fiction when he appeared on TV talk shows to promote it. Some people believe that Barris really was a CIA assassin. Some have accused him of being mentally ill and delusional. Still others have claimed this book is a hoax. I think they are all wrong. This book is more like a prank and it’s a pretty enjoyable one if you approach it from the right angle.