Conference called remaking american political history. Welcome. Thank you for attending our session on this beautiful friday afternoon. I will have to compete with the outdoors. And hopefully will convince you that you have made the right choice hanging out with us to talk about media and biographies in political history. Between the four of us we have written at least 17 biographies, it might be more than that, i was losing count because Randy Roberts had written so many, more than half of our total number. We have a lot of experience in this genre, we have been drawn to it and have an affinity for it in some way or another. Let me introduce the panelists. As i introduce each of you, if you could spend a minute or two telling the audience, what was it that drew you to biography . What is it that you love about the genre . First we have larry, professor in the graduate acting program in the New York University of the arts with an affiliate in the graduate musical theater writing program. He particularly interested in the history of broadway and comedy, and has written the biography of Richard Rogers and several other books. His most recent is a documentary film, Sammy Davis Jr. i gotta be me. What has drawn you to biography . I maybe a little different from the rest of the panel. My venue is entertainment. In entertainment, you are dealing with a public persona of performers, what they sang, danced, acted, and what happened behind the curtain is fascinating as you try to make sense out of what a performer did publicly with what were his or her motivations in the context of the time. What trends and taste changed. Particularly in american entertainment to make them in or out of favor. I have always been interested in that dialectic between on and off stage and hopefully when we talk more about Sammy Davis Jr, thats more persuasive. Thank you. John is a professor at the History Department at the university of missouri, columbia. Hes interested in religious history, particularly methodism. He was also on my committee when i took my comprehensive exams and when i wrote my dissertation. So im glad im asking you the questions this time. He has written biographies on jim and Tammy Faye Bakers evangelical empire. Can you tell us about it . Thank you emily, and thank you for putting this together. Do you still owe me a paper . No i dont think of myself as a biographer and never thought of myself that way. In my mind i dont research or write any differently than when i do biographies versus anything else. I think the advantage that biographies have is that it lends itself to a good story well told. You can reach a broad audience with the story that has a lot of human drama. Thats not a bad thing. I think that is what drew me to writing what turns out to be biographies. Emily said i wrote a book a few years ago on a guy who i think is endlessly fascinating, important, and nobody read it. And i sat back after doing that and i thought this is a lot of work. If im going to do this, im gonna write about topics i care about and i think are important. And one that will also draw an audience. Thats when i did the jim and Tammy Faye Baker biography. I think your mic is off. Yes i think your mic is off. [indiscernible] oh so i need to start over . Thank you. And Randy Roberts is the professor at the History Department at purdue university, he is particularly interested in africanamerican in sports history. Hes written biographies of mike tyson, john wayne, charles lindbergh, joe lewis, jack dempsey, ronald reagan, joe namath, a team biography of the pittsburgh steelers. His most recent biographical works as blood brothers, the fatal friendship of malcolm x and muhammad ali, and a season in the sun, the rise of Mickey Mantle. Could you tell us about your interest in this genre . This is perfect for me, political history and biography, popular culture. I have seen myself as working at the intersection between political history, political culture, and popular culture. I wrote about performers, like you. Actors, athletes. But ive never been interested in writing a book about an athlete who was just an athlete, or an actor who was just an actor, somehow they have to engage in a wider political culture, like john wayne or muhammad ali, they clearly became iconic, and you could tell their politics, if i talk to someone about john wayne, their attitudes on john wayne will usually tell me a great deal about their politics. Or their attitudes on muhammad ali will do the same thing. I brought a quote, thinking about how i could tie these things together, how can i tie politics, this is a political conference, with biography and popular culture. So i found a boxing quote i wanted to read to you. It was two ton tony, before he fought joe lewis, he fought in feldman on George Washingtons birthday. Hes trying to build up the fight, and he wants to Say Something about American History, something about american politics. To engage with the crucial questions of his day. This is the quote. And possibly this quote is true, it came from a journalist, we will see. Hes trying to Say Something about george washington, and build up the fight at the same time. He said, its high time the south came to know and love washington as we know and love him north of the equator. Why cant we forget the civil war and its petty grudges . Washington may have freed the slaves, but he also invented the lightning rod. Let the north and south clasp the hand of friendship on old hickorys birthday and try to get there early. So anyone who could conflate washington, abraham lincoln, andrew jackson, and Benjamin Franklin is truly the sage of orange, new jersey. And i have more on biography but maybe we can get to it as we go along. And i am emily raymond, a professor in the History Department at virginia commonwealth university. My area of focus, up until now, has been hollywood in politics. Ive written biographies on charlton heston, and black celebrities in the Civil Rights Movement called star is for freedom. I did not think of myself is going into the biography genre. I wanted to write about charlton heston, this was my dissertation topic. When he was the president of the National Rifle association but i also knew he had been involved in democratic administrations and the Civil Rights Movement before he came to the gun cause and supporting republican candidates. I was fascinated about his evolution, and what that said about american political culture. I started with that. In my next book i had no intention of it being a biography. It was just going to generally be about celebrities in the Civil Rights Movement. But the more i looked at it, the more it became very clear that there were about six who were really leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement and they deserve to be recognized as the earliest, most consistent, most effective celebrity supporters. I decided to turn it into a group biography with this leading six at the forefront. Now my next book is going to be a dual biography. Ive come to really love the genre, because its a great way to look at these fascinating people in american political culture, and the dynamic they bring to making change, in particular. That is my spiel. I guess one thing to point out, is that biography has a lot more variety than people think. A lot of people think its a book about one person. But randys book, blood brothers, is about malcolm x and muhammad ali and their relationship. The book on ptl is about jim and tammy faye, and stars for freedom is a group biography. It does not have to be about one person. What i wanted to ask you all, what other ways can there be more variety to biography than might first meet the eye . Can i pitch in . I am the closest. Two quick things. Im also a documentarian. Half of my work has been nonfiction publications and half my work has been filled. Obviously on film if youre doing Sammy Davis Jr, you have a whole different canvas to work on. And you can use performances in juxtaposition to other performances as a way of creating tension. The other thing, i worked on a companion book to another sixhour documentary series i did called make them laugh, the funny business of america. It was essentially American Comedy from chaplan to Sarah Silverman was the most recent. The director and i realized that if you are going to do a film i did a companion book and wrote the documentary episodes. But if you were going to go ok, heres American Comedy, lets start in 1906 with charlie chapman, buster keaton, mae west, your first hour would entirely be silent, blackandwhite, and people would stop watching. That forced us to rethink about the taxonomy we wanted to create in terms of ganging biographical figures together. We realized in america there were six great comedic archetypes, situation comedies, geeks and nerds, wiseguys, political satire. Physical comedians. Each generation turned out their own version in a way that really reflected the demographics of america. One way to do that was an episode with the wiseguys. Its groucho, but not the marx brothers, and red fox who took on that tradition and eddie murphy who took on that tradition. There was a way of rethinking categories and group biography that would give it more spark, rather than simply doing things chronologically. They were chronologically in a completely different rubric. Its a really interesting way to bring variety to the genre. Any other thoughts . What was the question . Theres more variety to biography than i think we first think of. People think its about one person and you chronologically go through their life. Thats the formula. What other formulas have you tried and worked . I think the dual biography is an interesting approach. It is certainly the one that i used with muhammad ali and malcolm x, and the book that i wrote with johnny smith on blood brothers. The number of the books i have done, have been not a full biography but looking at a person at a particular time. A crucial time in their life. I have done the full biography, and if you do someone like john wayne, a persons life is not interesting all the time. Its a fact. Its not crucial at one time. To take one segment, what you think might be the most crucial period, and dig deeper. Tell us a wider story then you could if you did the full beginning to end biography is a way to approach it. And thats what you did with Mickey Mantles biography. Its the rise of Mickey Mantle. Before 1956. He was a failure if he could have been a failure. A failure in terms of expectations, he came up to the yankees into spring training. He was hitting the ball over the moon when they were playing during the daytime. If you can hit the ball over the moon during the day. And everyone said yogi berra and all of the players on the team said hes going to be the next to demaggio. The next babe ruth, the next lou gehrigs. Everyone expected him to perform immediately like garrick, dimaggio, bruce. They were great, but mickey would show signs of brilliance, greatness, but he would get injured, he would not hit in the clutch. Fans by 55 they were bullying him, he was solitary, mad, uncommunicative. In 1956 then he has a breakout season where he wins the triple crown and becomes the Mickey Mantle of legend. And that is where you end the book. To the extent, i think what ive done with biographies is more group biography. The recent to do biography is to pull interesting people out when they are interesting. There are times when jim and tammy are the most interesting people in the room but other times when they are not. The one advantage of biography is that it allows you to to weave a narrative thats interesting. But its not just to tell the story of someones life, its to make larger points, if you will. To draw out a story that transcends them, even if they are at the center of it for a large part of the time. One of the most common critiques i have heard about biographies is that its one person from that standpoint it might feel like it does not have the same intellectual heft as opposed to voting patterns of a certain time. How do you respond to that critique . That it is just one person . Its tough to make that a generic statement, because people become interesting in different times forward. We look back on people certainly in the theater when we did the broadway documentary, there were people who were fascinating in their time and lost to history, like ethel waters, a great africanamerican performer, the most highly paid entertainer in new york city, and mae west who was arrested and sent to rikers for violating decency acts, and they faded away. Then the world changes in their stories are interesting again. Because they have what, a great biography has what i call velcro. You can move forward and it will pick up a life in a way, and when we worked on the Sammy Davis Jr documentary, it was shocking to me, as somebody who knew him, he was a venn diagram. He was the man who knew on one level he knew ethel waters and bill waterson. Archie bunker, and eddie cantor. These intersection of lives was tremendous. His life was revelatory of when he lived. Thats what we always look for. Sammy davis jr was one of the most challenging subjects i ever came across. He was contradictory, and someone i really had to wrestle with to try to figure out how to characterize him. The way you do it in the film, by giving him these different categories, activist, entertainer. Singer, impressionist, hipster. We tried to categorize the chronology of his life in the guises that he took on, or felt that he had to take on, for us to thrust upon him in his life. I think entertainment is like sports. You are choosing what songs you are singing, what plays you will act in. Those have tremendous external circumstances. You hit the ball out of the ballpark or you dont. You are looking at these things going on simultaneously but as a performer you are looking at the choices they make. What are they choosing to portray. What are they choosing to be about. That is such a vacuum of the time in which they live. We have footage of sammy davis when he was five years old, tap dancing. And three months before he died, tap dancing. Within that bracket you can accomplish a lot if you are clever. I would say the jim and Tammy Faye Baker book is not just about jim and tammy faye, right . No. Its not. Its about the entire organization and events. And to the weightyness of biography, if your sources are good, i dont see how it would suffer in comparison to other nonfiction writing. If your sources are good, you can tell a rich story. Your political history is often the history of the aggregate. Biographys history is individuals. But theres excitement to biography, joy to it. If i could tell one story of a biographer i like, a guy by the name of Richard Holmes, has anyone heard of him . He was an english biographer of the romantic period. He did a thick book on shelley, a two volume biography on coal rich did a thick book on shelley. He wrote a book about Robert Louis Stevenson, before he became famous with kidnapped, dr. Jekyll, and treasure island, and all those books. He read this book, and Robert Louis Stevenson took a donkey through the appellation region of france. He was intrigued by the book by the biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, who was moving to his midtolate 20s. He had not written anything great, he had scottish, strict calvinist parents, when are you going to get a job . When are you going to do something with your life . And maybe Richard Holmes felt the same way, is there a life in poetry . All of the angst a 19yearold would have. Robert Louis Stevenson was going through a love problem, relationship problem, maybe holmes was, i dont know. But he decided to reproduce the trip, sans donkey. But with a very stylish hat. He starts off sleeping under the stars, he crosses over a bridge to a place called langonia. A small little village. Its dusk, he can smell garlic in the crush fruit from the stalls, children are coming out and playing. People are taking walks. And he has this overwhelming urge, premonition, that he is going to meet Robert Louis Stevenson. He is serious. This is the 1960s, what else brought that on i dont know. But he has this premonition, he starts pacing the streets and looking into the cafes, the saloons, the hotels, hes looking for him. Hes by the river, the bridge, and then he sees another bridge. Its a bridge that is crumbled, ivycovered, does not span the river anymore, washed out, that is the bridge that Robert Louis Stevenson came in through. It acts as a metaphor for what we do as a biographer. We are trying to reach those subjects, trying to talk with the subjects, we are interrogating people who are no longer alive in many cases. We talked to friends if they are recently departed or still around, we read the sources. It becomes an allconsuming conversation with people, but sometimes im not sure it is a one my conversation. Maybe you people will see other biographers, every biographer ive spoken to something coincidentally has happened. Some documents show up, they seem to stumble across something. It shouldnt happen, but it does happen. There may be a twoway conversation. You are shaking your head one of the things about 70 davis junior in particular, is about when he died in 89, he left the biggest, he owed more money to the irs than any individual in American History at that point. Meaning all of his stuff was locked up. This was pbs, lawyers, heirs, whatever. Finally his adoptive son said he had two storage lockers in burbank, do you want to see them . So we got on the flight right now, we will be there in six hours, dont go anywhere. Sure enough, sammy was a packrat, no pun intended, kept everything. He had all of this stuff which was like el dorado for us. We were doing all of that, then we were flying to interview las vegas for jerry lewis. Im sure you know this, but if you have gone through any scrapbook and you have yellowed paper, it leaves detritus on the ground. After two days in this storage locker, the floor was like a tickertape parade. There was so much of this on the floor and all of a sudden i was picking stuff up and there was this card. It said seros, which was where he made his big break. It was the kind of thing you find on a table. , i opened it up and these were his notes the night he saw semi davis junior. In the next day we took it and we were able to say to jerry lewis, have you seen this in 68 years . No i havent. And that allowed him to talk about it, i remember it like it was yesterday. Jerry lewis came in and he gave me this advice and it changed my life. This Golden Ticket was just lying there. And it showed us the way to go forward. Sammy made it happen. A twoway conversation. Another theme we wanted to talk about was the use of media as source material. And as evidence. So i want to talk about the kind of media you consulted, and what insights they gave you. Do you want to start, john . Sure. One of the fun things about doing the project was that i got to speak to living people. Which i have never done. I did get my comeuppance, sometimes you find out the living are less cooperative thanthe dead and what they will and wont tell you. The other fun thing was the range of the newspaper sources, trial transcripts. I learned that good trial transcripts, a good prosecutor does half your work for you. More than half, because they can compel people to say under oath things that they do not want to say. Trial transcripts and video. In this case, jim and tammy lived their lives on the screen, so to speak. It is similar to your story, over 20,000 hours of their Television Show was in the hands of a private collector, and i started trying to find this. At one point, the guy called me up and offered to sell me 20,000 hours of videotape he had in four tractortrailers. It ended up going to the assemblies of god archives in springfield, missouri, and i got to use it there, which was obviously a much better home for it, but i am not sure how to address your question. The range of sources, and a lot of them were media. Again, it was one of the great things about working on this. You work with people who have lived their life in the public eye, they leave a big footprint. There is a lot to work with. Did you watch all 20,000 hours . No, i couldnt, and it is probably good that i didnt, because it is seven hours, 24 hours a day. Some of it from the 1970s and 1960s was on a variety of different film medias, including two inch quadruplex tape, and the archive could only afford to digitize a few hundred hours at a time. I think i only ended up with 300 to 400 hours in the end. They let me select what to digitize out of the collection, as far as we can tell, but the vast majority of it still sits there, slowly decomposing. Randy, one of the things about your blood brothers book, you talk about how muhammad ali and malcolm xhad a strong relationship that was underappreciated and in some cases, it was actually in the public eye. You went back to old media sources, can you talk about that . Yes. It was and wasnt in the public eye. Here you have muhammad ali, before he is muhammad ali, when he is cassius clay, and he wants to become the heavyweight champion of the world. He meets malcolm x. , and he is influenced by malcolm x. And you can see him start to embrace the nation of islam. If the word gets out that he is a black muslim, that he is a member of the nation of islam, he is probably never going to get a chance to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. He is going to be toxic at that time. Boxing is going through a period boxing is going through a period that has all sorts of problems. They do not need a champion who is aligned with a movement that in the 1960s was considered a hate movement. It wasnt, but thats how americans viewed it at the time. Johnny smith and i, we worked on it together, we were able to find an incredible amount of material on malcolm giving speeches and muhammad ali giving speeches, and one of the things we were able to construct, we would watch malcolm Say Something, use a metaphor or a story. Shortly afterwards, you would see muhammad ali using the same story, the same metaphor or example. The great thing about muhammad ali, he was a wonderful person, if you told him something, if you told him a story, the next day he would tell the story, tell it again, and soon you would think he was the origin of the story. He would tell it better than anyone else would tell it. He was great at telling stories. Using that medium. Was good. And john wayne, there were roughly 200 films that he made, and you could see him progress, his art progress, his character progress. That iconic individual, how it evolved over time. I have one more story and it is an interview story for the john wayne book. Again, it was a serendipitous moment. I tried to get an interview with a woman by the name of mary st. John, who was john waynes personal secretary his entire career. She had never really been interviewed by anybody. She was living in kansas city at that time, right outside of kansas city, and she said oh, i dont know, i dont know anything more than anybody else knows, ok. Can we come out and talk to you . Ok, sure. We show up at 9 30 in the morning and i start asking questions, and she said no, no. I do not want to answer questions. Let me just talk. Let me just tell you, tell us a story. It was like therapy. Clearly she was in love with john wayne not romantic, she just admired the guy, nothing salacious. She was on every set with him, she was his personal secretary, she went on every set. And you have actors that are performing in the movies on set, then you have people behind this set, hairdressers and makeup people who have nothing to do all day long except gossip. So she knew every gossip, who was sleeping with who in hollywood at this time, what was going on, it was incredible. And i took her to lunch, she kept talking, took her to dinner, she kept talking. The first interview lasted close to 17 hours. It was all material that i had not it allowed me to see john wayne in a different way. I am rambling, i am sorry. I want to pose this to the rest of my panelists. We interview people who work with people, we interviewed jerry lewis, but billy crystal, who not only went on to impersonate sammy davis on television, but actually opened for him for many years. They had this backstage knowledge. I find the people you interview, it is important to go in there knowing that you may know more about them than they do, and not necessarily to say oh, this is the horses mouth, as it were, so therefore i will hear everything unfiltered. Sometimes, the more you throw stuff out, the more you contradict them, you get more interesting stuff out of them. Do you sometimes find that your best interviews are people that are not used to being interviewed . If you interview celebrities you ask questions i remember when i dealt with jack dempsey. I would ask him a question and it would remind him of another question, and he would never answer the question, but give me a stock answer he heard many times before. They give you their persona. But like a makeup artist, they are not used to being interviewed. Sometimes i think you get better stories. Do you find that . Sometimes. I also think if you have some sort of documentation you can present them with. I did american masters on richard rodgers, who had two daughters that were very successful in their own right. He had written something in his biography that said if i kept working with larry heart into the 1940s, i would have ended up being crazy or being an alcoholic, or both. And in fact, we know that he was both. I read that quote to his daughter what do you make of him writing that in his autobiography . She said well, he did become both. The fact that he could write that he wasnt when he actually was, and we had to put him in a drink tank before he opened a big show in 1954, block, blah, blah. If you have something they wrote or said earlier, it can pose a disjunction. You want to create some sort of improvisation out of people, because that is when the best stuff comes out. So the key is when you interview somebody, really do your homework. Know what you are looking for. Bringing pictures sometimes helps, going to an actual location and seeing what they think about it, what they remember, or contradicting them with something that somebody else has said and have their reaction, so that way they are not arguing with you, they are arguing with the person that you brought in the quote about, so it is not confrontational. Peoples perceptions have changed, and whose experiences would be interpreted differently now, they will tell a different story than maybe they told 30 years ago. What i have in mind is, one of the best interviews i had for the ptl book was jessica hahn. She had told her story in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. But that was a way different time than her story would be looked at, especially post metoo movement. It offered an entirely different take from all of this evidence, interviews and videos i had of her from 30 years ago. It is wonderful to dive back into the story 30 years later in an entirely different context. And someone who had lived thinking about that for 30 years, and someone who is thinking about how it changed. Another thing that all of our subjects have in common is that they all seem to bring something new to the media landscape. Something exciting or something different, something revolutionary. Could you all talk a little bit about what that is . Our work on it or the subject we have written about . The subject you have written about. I think she is quite modest about it, she appears quite wonderfully in our documentary and is able to contexualize sammys contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, when he was pushed out of the spotlight after he died for complex reasons. Harry did not speak to us did you speak to harry . I tried. Yeah. If you are doing sammy davis, junior and talking about someone for whom the spotlight was breakfast, lunch and dinner. So it is like your 20,000 hours of videotape, we had almost too much material. But in a visual documentary, which hopefully you will get to see, if you know you have something in the bag, we had some performances that if we did not know we had them, we did not know that we could license them, digitize, and show them, we would have to write about something else. You do not want jesse jackson, quincy jones or whoever to say oh, there is a night in 1972 in chicago, i will never forget it, we have to have that footage. We have the footage of his groundbreaking performance on all in the family. We were able to build our interviews back from that, but again, i am talking about documentary biography, which is a visual and auditory medium. I would say that sammy davis, jr. , john wayne, muhammad ali, sometimes you deal with people who are in embarrassment of riches, and the question is what to leave on the cutting room floor, whether it is a book or a documentary. And it is harder when you are writing about a performance than when you can just show it. As far as media source material for me and how sammy davis, junior brought something new to the media landscape, i think the most valuable thing for me was his appearances on variety shows, which in and of themselves do not sound that exciting, because they are usually just a few minutes and they are kind of in and out, but he in the 1950s was on at least this is what i could count 47 different variety show appearances. By seeing a number of them they are not all available but by seeing a number of them, i was able to realize that he brought something really new to television. Most Network Programming was very stereotypical in the way that it showed africanamerican on television programs, like a sitcom. But on these variety shows, he could come out and be himself and joke around and have a familiar relationship and a semiintimate relationship with the white people on the show that really showed an integration that you just werent seeing on Network Programming. That is how americans got to know sammy davis, junior. Most people do not go to nightclubs, they saw him on tv. He became so familiar and beloved, that is one of the reasons he was able to be a very effective civil rights activist. So without his constant variety show t presence, without that i think it would have been a lot different. But daniels says in the documentary that him being embraced by a white performers, in some cases literally, was like a hand reaching out to an entire community. Based on knowing that we have that footage to show, we interviewed a number of black critics and professors who grew up during that time, and they said to me some of the most revelatory things we have on camera you have no idea if you were an africanamerican family in detroit, atlanta, or new orleans, you would call each other up on the phone and they, oh my god, sammy is on the eddie cantor show, and everyone in the community would gather around, because it was so rare in the 1950s, because it was so rare to see a black individual on a network Television Show. So when you find it is important to stretch the canvas a little bit and say, i like his performance. He sings really well here. I wonder what black audiences felt about that in 1954 and get that context as well. To know that he was on was not enough. You have to see it, and steve allen does too, mop his brow, and they are like friends. It is very effective from that standpoint. John, what about jim and tammy . What did jim bring that was new to the media in the 1970s and 1980s . One way to describe it, the story has three layers to it. Most peoples entry points to the story was the sex and money scandal in the late 1980s. But one of the things you can do in telling that story is jump back earlier. Why were these people celebrities . Why did anyone care about that point . There were a few revelations, the first one in the early 1960s, 1970s, baker created a new kind of christian talk show. He and tammy were smalltime pentecostalists, in the south, and they would watch Johnny Carson in the. 1960s. They would say, why cant someone do that, but christian . So his first innovation was creating this new format, the christian talk show that looked initially a lot like the tonight show with Johnny Carson, it later looked like oprah, it was innovative and something new. The second was in the late 1970s, they figured out, because the small uhf station they were broadcasting in charlotte from was owned by ted turner, and they watched ted turner put his station up on satellite. They, in effect, created the first private Satellite Television network a year before espn went on the air. And it was innovative and dramatically expanded their audience, and it also produced a tremendous amount of money. And that led to the third innovation, which was really their undoing as well. Baker wanted to create a christian disneyland, and so he built heritage usa. In 1986, they had 6 million visitors. It was the third biggest theme park after disneyland and disney world. So they have all of these innovations, a lot of them, and they revolve around media, the talkshow and the Satellite Network. And this is kind of what built them up to the point where the sex and money scandal mattered. But that is the entry point for most people. The service you can do is sort of pulling it back and telling that story that leads up to that. Then i think the third layer is to further step back and say, why does any of this matter . What does this say about American Culture and American Religion . Did other evangelicals pattern themselves after him, with the Satellite Network and the Television Shows . Yes, they did. Actually, he was with Pat Robertson before he launched his own ministry and help create the 700 club, then he was in Southern California and helps create the trinity broadcasting network. There were many competitors and people doing more or less the same thing. But as all of this is sort of developing and swirling around, they are one of the people at the center of the story. And they are just fun. I mean, tammy is endlessly engaging. Everybody loves tammy. That is what i found out doing the book. She was someone that just, everyone loved her. She continues to have this enduring following and presence. They are discussing doing a Broadway Musical about her. I think christian shadow it has one. Kristen chenowith has one. I did a special on this, and it ended up being the best rated program for the station in a year. It pulled in the most viewers. Because of you. And dont you say in your book that they sort of created, in a way, the first reality show . They are on tv so much . They did. Yeah. Their show was originally two hours a day. They did it unscripted. Jim refused to script anything. The production people, and i talked to many of them, never knew what was going to happen next. And viewers tuned in because they love that. Sometimes it was sloppy and ridiculous, but it was always unpredictable and fun. People tuned in just to see what would happen next. And that was part of the undoing as well, the unscripted nature and how he started selling shares to heritage usa in a way that no one had approved in yeah, exactly. Jim said anything and everything on television. When he finally went to trial, prosecutors were able to do is pull out the pieces he wanted. They were things he had said, and they were inappropriate and they were fraudulent, but he had said just about everything. If you wanted to find him saying anything on any topic, you could find it. Because he was on for hours on end . What about muhammad ali . What did he bring to the table . We had a stereotypical type of athlete, the Mickey Mantle type of athlete. Very few words,