138: The Real Thing

Ira Glass

Jug Burkett is a businessman in Dallas, a Vietnam vet. And about 10 years ago, he was in charge of a campaign that was trying to build a memorial to honor Vietnam vets from Texas. It wasn't easy.

Ira Glass

So Mr. Burkett started doing research so he could prove to people that most Vietnam vets are not bums. They have jobs. They didn't go crazy in the war. They're leading utterly normal lives.

Ira Glass

Mr. Burkett is not the kind of man who sits by and idly watches things go to hell. He took action.

Ira Glass

We live in a world full of people faking this thing and that. And it turns out that spotting a fake Vietnam vet is one of the easier lies to get to the bottom of. Mr. Burkett started routinely checking the bona fides of anybody in the news who claimed to have served in the war. He claims that he's found hundreds of fakers. He discovered some famous people fibbing about their service records to buff up their public images, like actor Brian Dennehy. He found defendants in murder cases claiming to be war heroes hoping to beat the rap, or alternately, claiming that war made them crazy and they can't be held responsible. He found big public events misreported.

Ira Glass

And often, what's amazing about these cases is the outrageousness of the lies. VA officials and career officers who fabricated and exaggerated among people who could easily catch them out. A soldier who is quoted extensively in the book, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, a history of the battle of Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley.

Ira Glass

That's because the person who has to convince people that he is the real thing is going to do a much more aggressive job of being the real thing than the person who actually is the real thing.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, The Real Thing, stories of people drawn to some idea, some picture, some thing that they just want to be. Some people doing it innocently, some less innocently, and how easy it is to slip from one to the other. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Act One of our program today, My Life With the Thrill Kill Cult, in which a woman, as part of her job, starts hanging around with some gang members and slowly finds herself changing the way she dresses, changing the way she talks, changing her cigarette brand to theirs. Act Two, Black Like Me, a story of hockey and basketball and what it means to be really black. Act Three, Drawl, what's it mean to talk like a real southerner, and why one multimillion dollar industry can't seem to figure it out. Act Four, Real Love, an illustration from Sandra Loh of the rule that if it seems too good to be true, well, maybe it isn't. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. Act One of our show today is the story of somebody who tried to get closer to the real thing and tried, and why in the end it did not go too well. Kelly McEvers was a newspaper writer here in Chicago and started to get interested in stories that she was hearing about girl gang members. Now, she was somebody who did not know much about the gang world. But she got an assignment and tried to get closer to the real thing.

Ira Glass

Kelly McEvers.

[MUSIC- "I AM A CLICHE" BY X-RAY SPEX]

Ira Glass

Act Two, Black Like Me. Well, our program today is about what happens when you try to turn yourself into the real thing, some notion of the real thing, an idea which is always a kind of fiction, a kind of cliche. Glenn Loury is a professor at Boston University. He's written a fair amount about black people trying to define what it is to be a real black person. He does not like the idea of cultural uniformity. I remember him once actually defending the notion that if a black person likes Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, then that is still a black thing to do, because a black person is doing it. He rejects a kind of rigid cultural conformity, as I say. But recently he had this experience with his son.

Ira Glass

John Simpkins grew up in Lexington, South Carolina, a small town in a segregated black neighborhood. It was tightly knit. On his block, six of the houses were relatives. But when he went away to college at Harvard, he found that other black students had a very different picture of what it meant to be black in America.

Ira Glass

Glenn Loury and John Simpkins. Coming up, a man calls Robert De Niro chicken to his face. Well, not really to his face, but it's still kind of interesting. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of different kinds of people to tackle that theme with a variety of different kinds of stories. Today's program, The Real Thing, stories of people trying to live up to some ideal, or refusing to. We have arrived at Act Three of our program.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Drawl. There are tens of millions of real Southerners in this country. They shop. They live among us. They look just like you and me, my friend. But one industry does not seem to notice the reality. Writer Mark Schone is a Southern expatriate who has noticed.

Mark Schone

My wife and I, since we'd been in lock-down with each other, oh, these past nine years, have developed a bit of shorthand. If one of us says something the other has heard so many times before that tears of boredom flow, the victim has a right to protest. The victim says, "That's on the tape." As in, that's on your tape-- the list of stories and obsessions you've rewound so often I could sing along with them in my sleep.

But if we're lying in the queen size at night watching TV and chance on some misbegotten soup of dropped R's and fake I's that's supposed to be a Southern accent, my tape starts jumping. It must be heard. I must blurt, "Foghorn Leghorn. Foghorn Leghorn."

My wife says, "Tape," and we change the channel.

For me, all that is cornball about movie Southern accents, all that is fake, is embodied by that would-be mac daddy of the barnyard, the animated chicken known as Foghorn Leghorn. He was conceived as a parody of the genteel Old South cliches from movies like Gone With the Wind. He was a preening dandy and a fool for the ladies.

Mark Schone

The late, legendary Mel Blanc didn't try and do an actual Southern accent.

Mark Schone

He was spread thin being a martian and a putty tat and a tweety bird. And this was a satire starring a big white rooster. It wasn't about sounding real. 60 years later, though, actors are still speaking Foghorn, and they think it is real.

I'm an authority on Southern accents because I'm a typical, rootless, modern Southerner, meaning I was born outside the South, just like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, and moved as a kid with my Midwestern parents to a brand new subdivision chopped out of the swamp in Southeastern Virginia. A babysitter taught me what y'all meant when I was seven years old. In high school, my rebellion against my liberal college professor dad was to hang out with drug-dealing rednecks. I whimpered in the backseat with a beer clenched between my thighs as they drove the back roads at 100 miles per hour, swerving through the swamp fog, their eyes closed and giggling. But as long as they looked and talked like Allen Collins of Lynyrd Skynyrd, as long as they had that mean, feral glamour, I thought they were cool. I talked like them on purpose. It thrilled me when a guy on my school bus grunted, "Groundhog? My mama don't eat it but my daddy do."

I went to college 1,000 miles away in Nashville and heard a stronger, twangier accent than the coastal burr I grew up with. And I moved to Georgia for a few more years of seasoning. By the time I left the South, I had a pretty good grasp of the range of regional dialects. And I knew that the movies had them all comically wrong. I would argue that nearly every vowel that comes out of nearly every actor's mouth is wrong. But for outsiders, here are the easiest problems to spot. Let's take Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate.

Mark Schone

Well, maybe that's too easy. How about someone who has never actually turned down a script, like Dan Aykroyd. He played the son in Driving Miss Daisy.

Mark Schone

Leaving aside all the other things wrong with this way-Foghorn soundbite, very few white people in the South still drop their R's. They say "Here," not "Heeya." A linguist at the University of Georgia told me, "If you want to find somebody with that old plantation accent, you're talking about people 75 years old."

A friend in Atlanta was more emphatic. "Those people are dead. Before they died, they were rich. Or they lived in the coastal or Piedmont areas of the South. Up in the hills, they always said their R's. And now, in the age of seven hours of TV a day and the air conditioner and the massive influx of interlopers like me and Newt and Dick, nearly every white devil in the South has followed suit, especially white devils under 50. We say R.

Lesson two.

Mark Schone

There are two kinds of I's. The I sound in a word like "life," or "like," or "night," or "nice," is different from the I in "five," or "ride," or "time." Real Southerners make a distinction between the I's. My experience in three states over 20 years was that they said "life," and they said "time." "Lifetime," not "laff-tahm." Not many people said, "laff," or "lahck." If they did, they were considered hillbillies. And in fact, they almost always really did hail from Appalachia or maybe a piney wood town in East Texas. But in the movies, even a kid from a fine, old, big-columned Alabama home-- like Forrest Gump-- says, "Laff is lack a box of chocolates."

Mark Schone

Lesson three, the South is really big. People from Savannah and the coal fields and the Bayou don't talk the same. And they're not usually in the same room, unless they're on vacation in Florida, which is another part of the South. But in the movies, people with radically different accents turn out to be mother and daughter or lifelong neighbors. Listen to the way Dolly Parton, Sally Fields, and Julia Roberts pronounce "color" in Steel Magnolias. Fields is supposed to be Roberts' mother.

Mark Schone

Once upon a time, I couldn't figure out why the actors and directors in LA and New York couldn't spend any time listening to actual Southerners talk. Because if they did, they'd learn very quickly how far the film dialect had drifted from reality. But after I moved to New York, I realized that I was just living amid hicks again. This time they were urban hicks, and the world outside their hollow was one big movie set.

The South was a movie. If you went there, you spoke a language invented by a British woman named Vivien Leigh, also known as Scarlett or Blanche, with an assist by New Jersey's Rod Steiger as the racist sheriff, and San Francisco's Mel Blanc as that uppity chicken. The South was a cartoon.

I admit, the natives played along. They scammed the hicks by selling more and more preposterous stories about white columns and crazy aunts in the attic. They cooked up as much Gothic kitsch as the market would bear. A guy from St. Louis renamed himself Tennessee and made a mint. It was a great racket, but it meant that Southerners never really saw themselves on screen. They still don't.

Mark Schone

It was the remake of Cape Fear that gave me my moment of clarity. I hunkered in a Manhattan multiplex awestruck. Robert De Niro was trying to impersonate a dirt-eating psycho. And yes, it was nuts. But not the way De Niro intended.

Mark Schone

New York mook was bumping uglies with Cajun and Carolina. It was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I rolled in it like a happy doggy with something dead.

Mark Schone

When it was over and the credits drifted past, I locked onto the one that read Dialect Coach. Now I knew. After that, every time Foghorn turned up in a movie, I'd check to see who his dialect coach was. Every Southern ex-pat I knew came out of Cape Fear going, "Huh?" But the man who taught De Niro to sound like an Appalachian Springsteen was so proud he bragged about it. I would see his ads in the showbiz trade papers and get all twitchy. "To Robert De Niro, congratulations, Sam Chwat."

Mark Schone

I dropped in on Chwat at his Manhattan offices, where boxes of celebrity junk spilled onto the floor. He was born and raised in Brooklyn speaking Yiddish, and he's never lived more than an hour from Grand Central. But he has a Masters in speech and 20 years of experience in accents. At first, he specialized in removing them. Then he started doing implants.

Mark Schone

His Southern accent was every bit as convincing. He told me he had a whole posse of relatives down in Savannah who taught him the local lingo. He demonstrated.

Mark Schone

Which is Hollywood Southern in a nutshell. It's the way people in movies talk, not people in real life. I told Chwat I'd never met anyone who spoke with the thing he was calling a Southern accent. I pointed out that the people who drop their R's were not the same people as the ones who said, "Lack," and now the R-less people were almost extinct anyway. He defended himself. He backpedaled. And often, he stayed silent. He told me I had a sensitive ear. But it doesn't take a sensitive ear. Listen to this clip from one of his star clients.

Mark Schone

That's Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias. A linguist will tell you that a middle-class 20-something in that town, in that recent year, would say her R's. She'd say, "whether" and "your," and "matter." A linguist told me that. But Chwat has bought into the cartoon so completely, he thinks Roberts herself used to talk that way when she was growing up in suburban Atlanta. He claims that back before she was a star, when he helped her get rid of her Southern accent, here were the things he had to fix.

Mark Schone

Except, of course, she didn't talk that way. If you want confirmation, all you have to do is ask someone who knew her then.

Mark Schone

I asked Richard Epps, a guidance counselor at her Smyrna, Georgia high school, who doesn't talk that way either.

Mark Schone

And that's why Roberts sounds so fake when she drops them in Steel Magnolias. Because she's never done it before. I guess what happened is that when she showed up on set with her own real, suburban drawl, it wasn't close enough to the cartoon for the powers that be, and they sent for Chwat. It's like something out of the movie Hollywood Shuffle, some white guy telling a black actor, "Um, can you make that blacker?"

One reason Hollywood can't get Southern right is that Southern won't hold still. The real South is changing. Real Southerners go to malls and eat at The Olive Garden. The media tells them that the way they speak is either quaint or a symptom of Gomer-dom. So if they're the slightest bit upwardly mobile, they try not to sound too you-know-what.

Sometimes Hollywood does make a semi-honest effort to keep it real. Robert De Niro listened to real people speak for his role in Cape Fear. He sent his personal assistant into a Southern prison to tape interviews with inmates of the same age, criminal record, and hillbilly bona fides as his character in the script. He picked a tape he liked and labored with Sam Chwat for weeks to perfect his imitation. Sometimes, however, the will, the intent, the technique is flawless, and the flesh still fails.

Mark Schone

Some actors just can't do accents.

Ira Glass

Writer Mark Schone is a reporter living among the Yankees in New York City, hoping not to run into a certain actor.

[MUSIC- "SOUTHERN ACCENTS" BY JOHNNY CASH]

Ira Glass

Act Four, Real Love. There's the real thing when it comes to your idea of what job you want, what house you want, what person you want to fall in love with. And until you find the real thing that you seek, life is the same story over and over and over again, either played as comedy or as tragedy. A story of missing the real thing yet again. In one of our live shows, Los Angeles writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh tells what happened to her when she signed up for a computer dating service. A folder arrived with a name and some vital stats.

Sandra Tsing Loh

Robert Blair, 37, single. I look in his folder and I can't believe it. My mouth goes dry. For one thing, unlike what you'd expect from a dating service, Robert Blair is really, really attractive. No, I mean really. Straight nose, clean jaw line, smoldering blue eyes. We are talking Ralph Fiennes. Ralph Fiennes has basically donned a crew neck sweater and is living among us in the Southland.

[LAUGHTER]

I turn the page. Robert Blair is an architect by profession. Time has been spent in Italy. Interests include opera, foreign movies, badminton. Marital status-- never. My heart is pounding. My eyes are tearing up. Oh my god, I'm thinking. Oh my god. And this panic is starting to seize me. Not just the primary panic of having found the perfect man, but the secondary panic of knowing that other women are looking at this perfect man, and then the tertiary panic of realizing that I'm feeling this panic.

And when you feel panic, dates don't tend to go well. Somehow the panic invades your face causing these contortions to happen in the middle of some casual comment like, would you like some half-and-half? Equal? Your face will split open and this demon, this [DEMON VOICE], will come out. And in that instant, you have done it, that terrible, unthinkable thing. You have pierced the dating membrane, that is, the membrane that covers all dating people and keeps them safe from each other.

As illustration, take Phillip, a perfect Los Feliz bachelor I was privileged to date a few times. You know the type-- successful 36-year-old film editor, or something. Great haircut, zippy Hugo Boss jacket. You know, one of those smart, funny, presentable men who form that eerie, hollow-eyed, Children of the Corn phalanx across our fair city. Any-hoo, like others of his ilk, the perfect Phillip package was coated with this impenetrable dating membrane. To wit, you were supposed to see Phillip once a week at most, twice a month more typically. But you were never to contact him in between as though he were some sort of undercover spy. To phone him at work was to trigger that bomb thing.

Any-hoo, Phillip kept trying to train me in the new system. And I knew that I should get with it. I knew that it was the law of Dating-land and that if I didn't follow it, I would lose my all-important Dating-land citizenship. I wouldn't be allowed to go out on any more meaningless, un-fun dates such as these.

So Phillip would smile suavely the next morning, handing me my delicious, warm, fresh, pumpkin muffin to-go. "Call you in 10 days or so?"

"10 days? That's almost two weeks," I'd stab at in alarm, eyes wide. Picture last night's mascara gone spookily raccoon-y.

"I'm out of town," he'd enunciate, as you do when telling a large, wattled, eager Labrador to sit but she cannot quite remember how.

He repeated the command, "I'm out of town. Out of town. In 10 days or so, I will call you. OK? I'll call you. Really." Oh, I remember the drill. Dutifully, I repeated the phrases he had taught me, unnatural as Arabic.

"Well, have a great time. Jeez, I've got a busy week too. Call me whenever. It is no problem at all." But once I got going, I just couldn't stop, so, "there's a phone. You call me. I won't call. No, no, no." Delivery became so broad, so garish, so Jo Anne Worley-like that like a rare stag in the woods, my perfect bachelor would be spooked. And after 10 days or so, Phillip did not call again.

But I'm not going to make that mistake tonight, oh no. For once in my life, things are going to be different. For once in my life, I'm going to be silent. The forest green door opens and there stands Robert Blair. Crisp white linen, pressed khakis, tortoise-shell rims. Oh my god, I think, feeling the force of gravity buckling my knees.

"Hello," is all I say, "Robert." With perfect manners, Robert Blair shows me around his perfect place. We are talking coved ceilings, Mexican Paver tile, totally redone hardwood floors, muted track lighting, Sub-Zero fridge, even a utility sunroom with a pull-out ironing board. You can almost hear a choir of angels singing.

"Sandra," Robert says behind me, "would you like some champagne?" [SQUEAK]

[LAUGHTER]

And there stands Robert Blair with two gleaming flutes of champagne and an Italian, hand-painted, ceramic plate upon which he's arranged Gorgonzola cheese, grapes, and English water crackers in a perfect fan.

[LAUGHTER]

I am home, I find myself thinking. I am home.

The bistro Robert takes me to is a delightful, intimate place aglow with little candles. "You like opera," I say.

"Yes," he says, "I do."

"I've heard Madame Butterfly is coming to the music center. I saw something about it in the Los Angeles Times."

"Really," he says, "Did you?"

"Maybe we could--" no. Too early. Retract. "It's just such a great opera is all. I love it. I love opera."

"Butterfly is alright," he says, "for a warhorse. Americans certainly insist on their favorites. I sometimes think if I'm forced to sit through another Boheme, I'll scream."

"Yes, I know what you mean. The opera world is all so exhausting, isn't it?"

His smoldering blue eyes meet mine, lock. "Yes, my dear," he says. "Exhausting." What does that mean?

[LAUGHTER]

I think, wait a minute. Whoa, relax, breathe. The guy works a 10-hour day. He went to the trouble of laying out English water crackers for you in that perfect fan. It's not that he's not having fun. It's just that he's really, really tired. And now I remember this happy thing. OK, this is really good. In Robert's kitchen was this really, really fancy cappuccino maker, because cappuccino was his habit. That's what he called it. "My habit." And I think, that's what Robert Blair needs after dinner. Some caffeine, a lift.

But the thing is, we can't have it here. We can't have it in this restaurant, even though it's an Italian restaurant and espresso machines keep whirring, whirring, whirring around us. Because to prolong the date, to kick things to that higher level, we need to move to a new venue to do a new activity. My god, it's barely 8:20 and the guy is all yawning and looking at his watch and going--

"Cappuccino," I say brightly. "I guess you make a mean cup of it, huh?"

"Well," he says, but then that slightly closed expression crosses his face. He pushes up his glasses. "Well, no."

"But your machine," I say, "in your kitchen."

"It doesn't work," he says abruptly.

"It doesn't work?"

"No, it is not that it does not work. It is just that it needs a new filter, a new water filter."

"You don't just use the filtered water from the white Brita jug thing in your Sub-Zero fridge?"

"Well, you could. But it is just not good."

"Well, I could go for some cappuccino," I forge on, hacking through the dense, rubbery foliage with my scimitar. "And you must be missing it if you can't make it at home. I know I miss things when I can't make them at home. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] I've got a great idea. Why don't we go to a great cappuccino bar I know just a short walk from here on La Brea?" Clutching his arm, my hand like a pinion, I see myself reflected in Robert Blair's perfect tortoise-shell glasses. My mascara is raccoony, hair a fright wig. I have come to my date dressed like a hyena, and I cannot stop talking.

[LAUGHTER]

"It was fun," Robert Blair says, giving me a quick peck on the cheek at the door. "Sorry about having to bail early. It's just that I'm really, really tired. But thank you." The forest green door shuts behind him, locks. There are footfalls. A moment later, a light goes on upstairs.

That moment, I realize that Robert Blair is completely happy behind that curtain, alone in the perfect palace he took such great pains in showing me. He is probably leaping about in boyish stockinged feet on his perfectly appointed couches, loveseats, and pillows, throwing his arms up, jubilant, free of the burden of me. It makes me furious. I begin to shake at the iron rods of the locked gate, shake them with all my might.

"I am not done with this evening," I yell. "I am not done. You don't even have to talk to me. We don't even have to see each other again. But I want that cup of cappuccino. And I want it, uh, frothy!" But there was no answer. After a moment, ever so distantly behind double panes of glass, I hear it-- the rattle of a paper, pop open of a cork, and inevitably, the gentle murmurings of CNN.

Ira Glass

Writer Sandra Tsing Loh. Her one-woman show, Aliens in America, runs at the Tiffany Theatre in Los Angeles through October.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Starlee Kine, and Sylvia Lemus.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Today we say a temporary goodbye to Sylvia Lemus, who talked her way into a position here not long after she first appeared on our program in January of 1998 on her 18th birthday, talking about her Mexican mother's expectations of her and her expectations of herself. She's now off to college to pursue the life that she talked about pursuing back then. We wish her the best. We send her off with love. We expect to hear from her soon on these airwaves.

If you would like to buy a cassette of this program, or that one, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. You know, you can listen to most of our programs for free on the Internet, www.thisamericanlife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister who runs the site.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who may have sidled up to you on a school bus years ago and said--

Mark Schone

Groundhog? My mama don't eat it, but my daddy do.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Mark Schone

It's good with gravy.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.