The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (23 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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Of course even the highest-scoring psychopath would score zero on some of the items on Bob’s checklist. What jolted me was my own strange craving as a journalist and also as a now-qualified psychopath-spotter to see Al Dunlap in
absolute
terms.
 
 
I mulled over what Adam had said to me:
“We all do it. We wait for the gems. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness
.
”
We had both assumed that journalists do this instinctively. We have an inherent understanding of what makes a good interview moment and the last thing on our minds is whether it is a manifestation of a cataloged mental disorder.
But I suddenly wondered, what if some of us journalists go about it in the opposite way? What if some of us have grasped that sufferers of certain mental disorders make the most electrifying interviewees and have devised clever, covert, Bob Hare–like methods of identifying them?
And so in the days that followed I asked around. I asked editors and guest bookers and TV producers.
And that’s how I came to hear about a woman named Charlotte Scott.
 
 
Charlotte lives in a lovely, quite idyllic, old, low-beamed cottage in Kent. Her ten-week-old baby snored gently in the corner of the room. She was on maternity leave, but even so, she said, her TV-PRODUCING days were behind her. She was out now and she’d never go back.
She was at one time, she said, an idealist. She’d wanted to get into crusading journalism but somehow ended up working as an assistant producer on a British shopping channel, Bid-Up TV—“My glittering career,” she sighed—and eventually made a leap up to mainstream TV as a guest booker for
Jerry Springer
, then
Trisha
, and then
Jeremy Kyle
—three television programs where members of extended families mired in drama and tragedy yell at one another before a studio audience. She thought her old friends who poked fun at her career path were snobs. This was journalism for the people. And anyway, important social issues were raised on the shows every day: Drugs. Incest. Adultery. Cross-dressing. That sort of thing. She began hanging out more with her fellow guest bookers than her old university friends.
 
 
“What did your job entail?” I asked her.
“We had a hotline,” Charlotte explained. “Families in crisis who want to be on TV called the hotline. My job was to call them back, repeatedly, over a matter of weeks, even if they’d changed their minds and decided not to do the show. There had to be a show. You had to keep going.”
Lots of jobs involve relentlessly calling people back. It is soul destroying—“Honestly, it was awful,” Charlotte said, “I mean, I’d been to university”—but not unusual.
At first all the tragedy she had to listen to over the phone would grind her down. But you need to be hard and focused to be a good researcher so she devised ways to detach herself from her potential interviewees’ misery.
“We started to laugh at these people,” she explained. “All day long. It was the only way we could cope. Then in the evening we would go to a bar and scream with laughter some more.”
“What kind of jokes did you make about them?” I asked her.
“If they had a speech impediment, that would be brilliant,” she said. “We put them on loudspeaker and gathered round and laughed and laughed.”
And sure enough, Charlotte soon began to “feel removed from the person on the other end of the phone.”
Plenty of people dehumanize others—find ways to eradicate empathy and remorse from their day jobs—so they can perform their jobs better. That’s presumably why medical students tend to throw human cadavers at each other for a joke, and so on.
 
The thing that made Charlotte truly unusual was the brainwave she came up with one day. It had dawned on her from early on in her career that, yes, the shows’ best guests were the ones who were mad in certain ways. And one day she realized that there was a brilliantly straightforward way of seeking them out. Her method was far more rudimentary than the Bob Hare Checklist, but just as effective for her requirements. It was this: “I’d ask them what medication they were on. They’d give me a list. Then I’d go to a medical website to see what [the medications] were for. And I’d assess if they were too mad to come onto the show or just mad enough.”
“Just mad enough?” I asked.
“Just mad enough,” said Charlotte.
“What constituted
too
mad?” I asked.
“Schizophrenia,” said Charlotte. “Schizophrenia was a no-no. So were psychotic episodes. If they’re on lithium for psychosis, we probably wouldn’t have had them on. We wouldn’t want them to come on and then go off and
kill
themselves.” Charlotte paused. “Although if the story was
awesome
—and by awesome I mean a far-reaching mega family argument that’s going to make a really charged show—they would have to be pretty mad to be stopped.”
“So what constituted ‘just mad enough’?” I asked.
“Prozac,” said Charlotte. “Prozac’s the perfect drug. They’re upset. I say, ‘Why are you upset?’ ‘I’m upset because my husband’s cheating on me, so I went to the doctor and he gave me Prozac.’ Perfect! I know she’s not THAT depressed, but she’s depressed enough to go to a doctor and so she’s probably angry and upset.”
“Did you get disappointed on the occasions you found they were on no drug at all?” I asked Charlotte. “If they were on no drug at all, did that mean they probably weren’t mad enough to be entertaining?”
“Exactly,” said Charlotte. “It was better if they were on something like Prozac. If they were on no drug at all, that probably meant they weren’t mad enough.”
 
 
And that was Charlotte’s secret trick. She said she didn’t stop to consider
why
some sorts of madness were better than others: “I just knew on an innate level who would make good television. We all did.
Big Brother
.
The X Factor
.
American Idol
.
Wife Swap
. . .
Wife Swap
is particularly bad because you’re monkeying with people’s families, with their
children
. You’ve got some loop-the-loop stranger yelling at someone’s
children
. The producers spend three weeks with them, pick the bits that are mad enough, ignore the bits that aren’t mad enough, and then leave.”
 
 
Reality TV is littered with the corpses of people who turned out to be the wrong sort of mad. Take the especially sad tale of a Texas woman named Kellie McGee. Her sister Deleese was to be a contestant on ABC’s
Extreme Makeover
. Deleese was not an attractive woman: she had crooked teeth, a slightly deformed jaw, etc. Still, she had a tactful and considerate family, people like her sister Kellie, who always told her she was pretty. But she knew in her heart she wasn’t and so she applied for
Extreme Makeover
, dreaming of what the show promised—a “Cinderella-like” makeover to “transform the life and destiny” of a different “ugly duckling” each week. Deleese was, to her delight, chosen, and the family was flown to L.A. for the surgical procedure and the taping.
A section of the show always involves the ugly duckling’s family telling the camera, pre–Cinderella transformation, just how ugly she is. The point of it is that when she finally emerges Cinderella-like from the makeover, her journey will be more epic and emotional. We’ll see the stunned and joyful looks in the eyes of the family members who had been embarrassed by the ugliness but are awed by the beauty. Everyone goes home empowered.
With Deleese’s family, though, there was a problem. They’d grown so used to diplomatically protecting her feelings, the insults didn’t come easy. They had to be coached by the program makers. Eventually, they admitted, yes, Deleese
was
ugly: “I never believed my son would marry such an ugly woman,” Deleese’s mother-in-law agreed to say. Kellie, too, was coached to reveal how embarrassed she’d felt growing up with such an ugly sister. The boys all laughed at her and ridiculed her. And so on.
Deleese was in the next room, listening to it all on a monitor, looking increasingly shocked. Still, it would be fine: she’d get her Cinderella-like makeover. She would be beautiful.
A few hours later—just before Deleese was due to go under the surgeon’s knife—a producer came in to tell her she had been axed. The production manager had done the math and realized her recovery time wouldn’t fit with the program’s budgeted schedule.
Deleese burst into tears. “How can I go home as ugly as I left?” she cried. “I was supposed to come home
pretty
!”
The producer shrugged apologetically.
 
 
The family all flew back to Texas, and everything spiraled. Too many things that should have remained unsaid had now been said. Deleese sank into a depression.
“My family, who had never said anything before, said things that made me realize, ‘Yes, I was right and everyone did think I looked like a freak,’ ” she later explained in her lawsuit against ABC. Finally Kellie, who suffered from bipolar disorder, felt so guilty about her part in the mess that she took an overdose of pills and alcohol and died.
 
 
You might think that Charlotte, over in England, with her ostensibly foolproof secret medication-listing trick, would be immune to inadvertently booking guests who were the wrong sort of mad. But you would be mistaken.
“We once had a show called ‘My Boyfriend Is Too Vain,’ ” she said. “I pushed the vain boyfriend for the details of his vanity. Push push push. He drinks bodybuilder shakes all the time. He does the whole Charles Atlas. We put him on. Everyone laughs at him. Couple of days later he calls me up and while he’s on the phone to me, he slices open his wrists. He has severe body dysmorphic disorder, of course. I had to stay on the phone with him while we waited for the ambulance to arrive.” Charlotte shuddered. “It was awful,” she said.
 
 
As I left Charlotte’s house that afternoon and drove back to London, I thought, “Well, at least I haven’t done anything as bad as the things Charlotte has done.”
8.
 
THE MADNESS OF DAVID SHAYLER
 
O
ne morning in early July 2005, Rachel North, who works in advertising, got on the Piccadilly line tube in Finsbury Park, North London. It was, she later told me, the most rammed carriage she had ever been on.
“More and more people were pushing on,” she said, “and I was standing there thinking, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and then the train trundled off, and it went for about forty-five seconds, and then there was”—Rachel paused—“an explosion. I was about seven or eight feet away from it. I felt this huge power smashing me to the floor. And everything went dark. You could hear the brakes screaming and clattering. It was like being on an out-of-control fairground ride but in the dark. And it was hot. You couldn’t breathe. The air was thick with smoke. And I was suddenly very wet. I was on the floor and there were people lying on top of me. And then the screaming started.”
Three years earlier, in 2002, Rachel had been violently attacked by a stranger in her home. She wrote an article about it for
Marie Claire
magazine. That’s what she was doing the moment the bomb exploded: standing on a packed tube train reading the just-published
Marie Claire
article about the violent attack. As she lay on the ground, she thought, “Not again.”
 
 
They evacuated the train. Rachel was one of the last people off.
“As I climbed out into the tunnel, I did a quick sweep behind me and I did see some of what had happened, and yes, that has remained with me, because I still worry whether I should have stayed and helped, but it was so dark. I saw bent metal. There were people on the floor. There was . . . I won’t say what I saw.”
“How many people died in your carriage?” I asked Rachel.
“Twenty-six people,” she said.
 
 
Rachel was walking wounded. She had a piece of metal embedded in her wrist deep enough for her to see the bone, but that was about it. The carriage had been so packed, the people closest to the bomber had taken most of the force of the blast.

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