Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
by Chuck Barris
Hyperion/Miramax Books

If you're at least 27 years old, you may recall television producer and personality Chuck Barris's arguably most outrageous creation, "The Gong Show" (1976-1980), in which a parade of no-talent contestants found novel ways to embarrass themselves on national television. A panel of bizarre celebrity judges (Wasn't Rip Taylor frightening? And what about that Phyllis Diller?) would either wield an oversized mallet and gong the shameless contestants right out of the game, or score the finished performances on a scale of 1 to 10. Barris played the unflappably cheerful host. The show was cheesy and garish, a celebration of tastelessness that Barris was forced to defend against the frowning paternalism of network censors. His memoir, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography," recounts not only his days as one of the most prodigious peddlers of proto-reality television (he was also the creator of "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game"), but his double life as a CIA hit man for Cold War America. Needless to say, Barris is yanking our collective chain.

"Confessions" is two stories in parallel, one a generic tale of espionage, the other a Hollywood tell-all. His story begins in 1963. "I was thirty-three years old, a modern-day Willy Loman sauntering aimlessly into oblivion." Depressed and unemployed, Barris answers an anonymous want ad and a few hours later is shaking hands with a man who readily introduces himself as a recruiter for the Central Intelligence Agency. A few weeks pass, about which Barris notes, "there's no need to detail my step-by-step indoctrination into the CIA," and he's graduating from Langley, a straight-A student with a major in counterintelligence. He is quickly sent on assignment. In Alabama he infiltrates a civil rights march; then he's dispatched to Mexico City, France, Russia, etc. Years later, while chaperoning winning contestants of "The Dating Game" on a prize trip to London, he takes the opportunity to track down and assassinate a key enemy of the state.

But all this covert, counterintelligence activity simply prompts the question: What would the CIA want with a self-loathing neurotic who has no detectable skills or military training and is incapable of holding down a job for more than a few months at a time?

Were Barris's television career not actually recorded and witnessed by millions of viewers, that aspect of his life would be about as hard to swallow as his CIA claims. He broadly recounts the toll fame exacted on his privacy: "Taunted wherever I went by strangers shouting, 'Gong!' ... I took to wearing sunglasses, a fake beard, and a Phillies baseball hat wherever I went." But he doesn't sufficiently explain how he made all his early network connections, or what exactly a journey through the Hollywood machine entails. He makes it all sound rather effortless, this cruise to the top of the show-biz pyramid. It's as if one day Barris is brainstorming a couple of nutty game show premises, and the next he's got programming execs dropping 75K in his lap for development purposes.

Written in 1982 (it's been reissued in conjunction with Miramax's film based on the book) Barris's memoir has a rather dusty, gauche colloquialism. He refers to breasts as "kazoos" and calls those people he hates (there are many) "fartbiters" — whatever that means. He provides in unflinching detail the number of women — "horrendous, pea-brained things, either dried-up or obese" — who eagerly spread their legs for him. These "broads" creep out of the woodwork, one worse than the other. To varying degrees they are conniving, cleavage-baring home wreckers, out for money or fame and too stupid to hide their true intentions.

Meanwhile, his outlandish reverie of running around the globe killing enemies of the free world reads like a satire of the spy novel genre. He makes sketchy allusions to stolen microfilm, sleek firearms, grouchy Russians and beautiful but mysterious female spies. There is a passage, though, that speaks volumes about Barris' desperate need to concoct such a far-fetched tale and present it as truth. Being a killer held the promise of "omnipotent powers, outrageous confidence, and a superhuman ego. I was larger than life, bigger than the biggest man. If I didn't like you, I could actually kill you, with anonymity and impunity."

What more could a man, racked with the worst failings of humanity, ask for? If you skip over these sub-chapters, or simply endure them as the embarrassingly transparent ramblings of a terribly unfulfilled man, then "Confessions" is a sporadically entertaining though ultimately heavy-handed chronicle of one man's slide into the icky plush of fame.

— Alison Burke (aki74@aol.com)