Part Two: Frank Fay, The Fascist Who invented Stand Up Comedy

In Part 2 Frank Fay finds love and creates the most toxic Hollywood romance of all time. Then he breaks Nazi and holds a fascist rally in New York City less than a year after the end of WW2. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Hello everyone and welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is a podcast about the worst people in all of history and I'm Robert Evans, doing my best NPR voice. That's brilliant. Did that work? It made me uncomfortable, frankly. It makes me uncomfortable, yeah.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  I liked it.

• 0:23Robert Evans?

  Yep. Speaking of NPR, you know who's better than NPR?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I mean, lots of folks.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  Well, Anderson. Anderson and our guest today, Andrew T. Yeah. I don't have a particular problem with NPR. I don't know, I don't really listen to NPR, but I assume they're valuable, right? They're still good? I don't think we have beef with NPR. Did they do something horrible? I don't know.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  They are valuable relative to the media landscape in America. But they are not like a net value to the world, probably. They're like, like all things that are, that are good in America, quote unquote, good. They're kind of like center right namby pambyism, but what are you gonna do?

• 1:09Robert Evans?

  They've got, I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure they've got their problems. I think they're like basically the only thing that equivocates to local news in a lot of ways, right?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17Robert Evans?

  That still exists that isn't like owned by Sinclair. So it's one of those things where like, there should be better things than NPR performing the similar role, but we are where we are, right? So I'm not gonna shit on NPR for that.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30Robert Evans?

  What I am gonna shit on is our topic for today's episode. Frank Faye, the man who invented standup comedy. And before I get into that, I want to plug a fundraiser that we are, we are doing here at Behind the Bastards to help out the Portland Defense Fund. This is a bail fund. It started out, I mean, its earlier iterations started out to help people who had been arrested in the 2020 protests. They still do help protesters, but their primary job is people get arrested, they're usually homeless and indigent, they are usually people with no resources. And the defense fund doesn't just help them get bailed out. And often this is, people need like literally like a hundred bucks. They just don't have. Number one, when people are accused of crimes, if they're

• 2:15Robert Evans?

  out of jail while they are fighting the charges, their odds of not going to prison are vastly higher. The Defense Fund helps basically everybody. They do not provide bail funds to people who are accused of domestic violence for, you know, some reasons that should, are probably obvious to people. But they help a lot of people who like literally no one else is looking out for it. That's what the Portland Defense Fund is, and we're trying to raise money for them because they are out of it. If you go to, if you just type in donorboxdefensefundpdx into Google, it will take you to the Defense Fund fundraiser.

• 2:52Robert Evans?

  That's donorboxdefensefundpdx. And another way you can help is you can Venmo them at at DefenseFundPDx. So, you know, please send some money, help them out. I donate every year. They're a 501(c), so it's like a tax you can, you know, write it off too. Like, it's an actual charitable organization. They're legit. I know the people who run it. Please help them out.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 3:26Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. Dude wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Flushable, plastic-free dude wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin but tough enough for methods of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, dude wipes

• 4:11Robert Evans?

  are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battle's there. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats, from individually wrapped singles to 48-count big daddies. Don't let skids be your lasting legacy. Grab a dude wipe and destroy the evidence. Dude wipes, best clean, pants down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 4:33Robert Evans?

  All right, let's talk about a real piece of shit. Are you ready to talk about a piece of shit, Andrew?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  We talked about a good thing for 10, 15 seconds?

• 4:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, 15 seconds of a good thing that helps a lot of people who literally no one else is looking out for in the entire world because the homeless are, again, the vast majority of people who get arrested and not Frank Faye, although he is, he's like a rich homeless person, right? One of the things about Frank is that he refuses to have a house or an apartment. For most of his life, he only lives in nice hotels. So like, not really homeless, but like, literally doesn't have a home, right? He's just, he's just staying in nice hotels because that's the kind of life he prefers to live. And it makes sense based on his backstory, right? He like, he never has a stable place, right? Like, he and his family are like, living on the road, right?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:22Robert Evans?

  So, in the late 19 teens, when Frank Faye is establishing himself as the biggest name in vaudeville and the biggest name in like, live performing in New York City, another person exists. There's two people in the world at this point in time, and one of them is a young girl named Ruby Stevens. And while Frank is kind of making his name for himself, Ruby is living through one of the worst childhoods I have ever read about, right? Ruby had been born in 1907, so she's quite a bit younger than Frank Faye. And she was the fifth child of Catherine Anne and Byron Stevens. Both families seem to have come from some degree of like, privilege. It's unclear to me how, if they were like, rich,

• 6:06Robert Evans?

  or it's just because they've been in America from like, almost Mayflower days or right around then, right? So they're like, old America, and they know their pedigree, but I don't think, I don't know how much money they actually have. It's a little, that part's a little unclear to me. It may have been that like, they used to be more blue bloody, and they just, they just kind of ran out of money. That happens a lot. But it seemed like she was on track for a more normal life until in 1911, when she is four, a drunk passenger falls off the streetcar she's on with her pregnant mother. And he like, pulls her mother down, basically, and she goes into early labor after falling off the streetcar, and dies from sepsis, right? So just a horrible freak streetcar accident. Like, really?

• 6:53Robert Evans?

  Pretty fucked up. So that's traumatic, right? You know, watching this happen as a four year old and then being without your mom and her dad. This is 1907 or 11. Her dad had been a drinker and boy, having your wife and unborn kid die in a streetcar accident does not make you slow down the drinking in 1911.

• 7:16Robert Evans?

  So he takes what I think we can all agree is an understandable, healthy reaction and becomes a destructive alcoholic and abandons his family to dig the Panama Canal, right?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:28Robert Evans?

  Tale as old as time. We've all been there once or twice, right? You know?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:32Robert Evans?

  That's where you and I met, Andrew, digging the Panama Canal. And they kept yelling at us, there's already a canal. Stop digging holes. But we said, fuck you, you know? I won't do what you tell me.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  I mean, you were really, you had your, you had your mindset on Canal 2.

• 7:46Robert Evans?

  And Canal 2. Electric Boogaloo.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Very admirable.

• 7:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We're gonna make it even bigger and we're gonna kill even more guys from fucking malaria.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Malaria 2.

• 7:58Robert Evans?

  So he goes to the Panama Canal and like everyone who goes to dig in the Panama Canal, he dies horribly, almost immediately, right? That's, that's what digging the Panama Canal is. If you are signing up to die from a mosquito or get drowned in fucking, uh, like wet concrete, right?

• 8:18Robert Evans?

  If you want to learn more about that sort of thing, uh, listen to, wait, is it the Panama Canal or was it the Hoover Dam and the song, The Highwayman? One of the two. Either way, listen to the song, The Highwayman by The Highwayman.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Listen, just think of any major work.

• 8:32Robert Evans?

  Oh, he was a dam builder. He was a dam builder. Yeah, sorry.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Okay. Including modern times though.

• 8:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Uh, it's made by a crime against humanity. There's no way to do it without committing a crime against humanity.

• 8:44Robert Evans?

  You're gonna have to kill a certain number, shitload of people, right?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:50Robert Evans?

  So, uh, yeah, he leaves Ruby, enters siblings orphaned, but he abandons them before he orphans them, so it's fine. So she grows up in a series of foster situations. She is separated from her siblings right away. She is bullied horribly as a little girl because she's an orphan and little kids are fucking psychopaths. To quote another great standup comedian, Donald Glover, they're little Hitlers, right? They're like, oh, look, a little girl who lost her whole family, let's kick her. Yeah. So Ruby comes to hate school, not surprising. The one thing she has going for her is that one of her older sisters, who's a young adult, or I think she's, I actually think she's probably 16 or 17, but that's as good as being

• 9:32Robert Evans?

  an adult in this day and age, was a vaudeville dancer, right? And so Ruby gets really interested in entertainment and her sister helps her kind of get into theater. She drops out of school at age 14 and starts working. And again, you're basically an adult at 14 at this socioeconomic level, right? This is not just the US. You're legally an adult in a lot of Europe at this point in time. And by age 16, she is a chorus girl in a nightclub. So there's, you have to assume some like people taking physical advantage of her. We would, we call this pedophilia today. I think that's fair to call it then, but also that's not what people would have seen it as, right? They would see her as an adult, right?

• 10:16Robert Evans?

  Not to say that that's not still fucked up. That's just the way things were back then. This is 1923, when she starts working as a chorus girl in a nightclub. So she is getting started in her showbiz career while Frank Faye is kind of like, he is like near the peak of his fame and prestige, right? Like he is selling out. This is right before he has his 10 week run at the Palace. So he hasn't like, he hasn't quite hit his peak yet, but he's rising to his peak, right? And so at the time she is starting as a chorus girl, she would see him as like one of the big, this is one of the major stars, right? In her field. This is the guy. This is the guy. He's got a lot of power. He's, you know, she doesn't want to be exactly doing what he's doing, right?

• 10:58Robert Evans?

  But like she, she would see him as someone to look up to because of the level of success that he's had. He can do something for her. He can make her career, right? Obviously. So, you know, there's a number of things that are potentially, we can see unhealthy about the dynamic that's going to form, although it's not going to go where you'd expect it to. For a while, Ruby was stuck at the middle rung of her field. She makes, she's a good dancer. She, she's constantly working, right? And in order to make extra cash, she moonlights as a dance instructor for gay and lesbian speakeasies, which is pretty cool. Like what, this is, by the way, Ruby becomes Barbara Stanwyck. This is her initial name. Cool with the gays, which is nice, you know, given this period of time.

• 11:40Robert Evans?

  She initially becomes acquainted with Frank Faye in the mid 1920s, probably right around the time he has that big 10 week stand at the palace, thanks to her friendship with a guy named Oscar Levant. And Oscar Levant is a pianist who had performed many times with Faye and become one of his friends. In the mid and late 20s, she starts doing better and better, right? She gets recognized, she starts getting acting gigs, and by kind of like the mid 20s, she is performing in Broadway shows. And because she is now becoming a star in her own right, she's kind of a small star now, while Frank's a big one, but you need a better name than Ruby, whatever the fuck her last name was, because it's forgettable, right? So she picks the stage name Barbara Stanwyck.

• 12:23Robert Evans?

  Now, she falls in love first with one of her co-stars, a man with the incredible name Rex Cherryman. The two break up in early 1928, and there's kind of a will they, won't they thing going on for a while, maybe they'll get back together. But then he dies of sepsis during a sea trip to Europe to perform, because that's just how people died back then. Yeah. You know? That's a, that's just what went down. Yeah, yeah, sepsis, I hardly know sis. So he's dead as shit, she's sad as shit, and then Levant tries to cheer his friend up by introducing her to his other friend Frank Faye, thinking the two would hit it off. They did not. In fact, they seemed to hate each other at first, and in Ruby's case at least.

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  This is with good reason, because Frank is immediately attracted to Barbara Stanwyck, who, she's like, young at this point, right? Like, she's like, just barely 20, something like that? What the fuck? What is this? 1928, she was born in 1907, so she's 21 years old, right? And he's in his, he's almost 40. So there's quite a bit of an age gap between the two of them, but it's also less weird at this period of time and in this industry. Anyway, like, he immediately has a crush on her, right? But he doesn't want to like, admit that and flirt with her, and she, she, she thinks he's attractive, but he starts by negging her, right? Like, he's an early practitioner of negging.

• 13:50Robert Evans?

  And I'm gonna quote from Victoria Williams's book here. After Faye's show at the Palladium, Levant brought Barbara and Walda, which is one of her friends and colleagues backstage. They entered Faye's dressing room as he was removing his makeup. He was charming and beguiling. He announced he was hungry and that as soon as he finished taking off his makeup, he was going to a restaurant where he said they serve the best food in town. "They really know how to serve food in this place," Faye went on. "A little table in a quiet corner, soft music." And it's like he's kind of setting her up. Barbara was ready to accept the invitation when the dressing room door opened and in walked a beautiful woman who said, "Are you ready for dinner, Frank? Be with you right away," Faye said as he put on his coat. He turned to his guests and said, "You must try this place. The food is really delicious." And he like sets this up. He's like really making her think that they're going to go out together.

• 14:35Robert Evans?

  He's talking about it like that. And he has set it up with this other lady ahead of time, knowing he was going to meet her and knowing that Levant is trying to hook them up. He'd probably, he'd seen her on stage, so he knew that he was into her. He sets this up specifically to pull the rug out from under her because he's an asshole, right? Yeah. He's such a dick. And in fact, as he leaves with this other lady, he stops and turns back to Barbara and says, "You should come back and see me again sometime." And then goes off on a date with this other woman. Now, this is a transparent ploy. He's trying to make her like desperate. He's trying to like, you know, it's obvious what he's trying to do, right? Right. And Barbara doesn't bite, right?

• 15:19Robert Evans?

  In fact, she doesn't do anything. She doesn't call him. She doesn't like approach him again. Although she doesn't do anything to avoid future contact with him either, right? Like she, she doesn't do either of those things. So, you know, she's, she's not like falling for it, but she's also not being like, fuck this guy entirely. Right. It's not working, but it's not not working. Right. And I think this is part of what attracts Frank is that she doesn't fall for the bait. And so he calls her directly a few days later and is like, "Hey, do you want to meet me for dinner?" Right? So she kind of wins. And this is, I love Barbara Stanwyck. She says, "Thank you. Yes, absolutely. That sounds great. I'll meet you at, you know, whatever restaurant at whatever time," right? And they set up a date and she stands his ass up.

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  So you can see there's an degree to which it sounds like these two might be kind of made for each other, right?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty good, actually.

• 16:14Robert Evans?

  So she expects him to call her after this and be pissed off, right? That's kind of what she had been hoping. But Faye, again, he takes things in stride and he maintains radio silence. So neither calls the other for two weeks. And then Barbara talks to their mutual friend Levant and is like, hey, could you call Frank and invite him to dinner? And I'm gonna show up at the dinner, but you don't need to tell him that. So Frank asks his friend, who else is gonna be there? And Levant doesn't lie. And he's like, well, Barbara Stanwyck's gonna be there. And so as soon as Frank hears that, he hatches places, yeah, I'll be there. We'll all have a dinner together. And then he no-shows again. So at this point, Barbara might have been, it seems to be veering towards fuck this guy.

• 16:58Robert Evans?

  But then, for the next two weeks, wherever she shows up for dinner, or lunch, or at like a bar, or whatever, whenever she shows up to like, watch a performance, he's there. He's always there, everywhere she winds up going. And he's always there with a different, beautiful woman, right? No matter where she goes, there's Frank Faye and he's always on a date. And she doesn't learn this until later, but Frank, he's got a lot of connections and he's a lot of money. He's been both, I think, probably paying people to stalk her and also just like, talking to other people he knows to like, figure out where she's going and scheduling dates with random women for the sole purpose of like, making her watch him make out with other people.

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  So they're not in a relationship, and this is already one of the most toxic relationships I've ever heard of.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess this is juicy. It's so bonkers.

• 17:53Robert Evans?

  It's so nuts. And like, Barbara is the good guy in this, but she's definitely, there's some toxicity coming from her here too, right? So after a couple of weeks, he shows up at a fancy restaurant, when Stanwyck and Levant are about to have dinner, I think with a couple of mutual friends, and he sits down at the table. And he and Barbara immediately start insulting each other, right? They just start going- To town at each other, you know, like letting out all of this like frustration over this last couple of weeks of fucking around. And eventually their friend Levant, who has judged the vibe properly stops them. It's like, you two obviously want to fuck. Will you just do it already and stop with this bullshit? Like, I know you both, like, you're clearly into each other and you're just both toxic psychos?

• 18:37Robert Evans?

  Stop it. Just get laid, you know? And it works. Levant, like, he called it. They're like, yeah, you know what? Fuck it. Why not? Let's do it. So they start dating, right? They start going out. They start, you know, uh, banging the nasties, you know, bumping uglies. Yeah. Tweedling the diddle. What, Sophie? Sophie, you can't say sex or fucked on a podcast. We'll get arrested. That's true.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Robert.

• 19:03Robert Evans?

  That is true. The code, there's a haze code? What the fuck is it called? Yeah, yeah. So, so they start noodling the whirlpool, uh, so to speak. They start dating and she falls head over heels in love with Frank, right? Uh, very, very quickly, you know, once they're actually, they drop the pretense and start seeing each other. And he seems to fall in love as well. They are, they are both obsessed with each other. And in Barbara's case, she's obsessed with him enough to the point that like, she is willing to give up her career. And she at this point is fairly big, right? Like she is, she is now a major name on a marquee. She's getting some pretty juicy, she's not quite a leading lady yet, but she's getting some really juicy, like Broadway roles, right?

• 19:47Robert Evans?

  And she tells openly, like, I'm willing to kind of give up my career in order to be like a full-time wife, right? And that made sense because she's obviously very good. She's very dedicated to her career. You have to think in terms of making sense of this, this is a girl who lost her entire family very young and has never had one, has never had that kind of emotional stability. Um, yes. So she, I think, and that's what, that's what her biographer writes. It's basically, she is desperate for that kind of stability at this point. It matters more to her than this career that she's got.

• 20:20Robert Evans?

  Now Frank is an alcoholic. This is, should not be surprising to anyone. It's not an uncommon situation for a, a major performer today. And it certainly was not back then. They start their relationship when he's sober, right? He had, I mean, he's, he's an alcoholic because he had been, he had gone sober because it was causing him problems. Right? Even during the height of his time at the palace, he misses shows semi regularly. They'll have to cancel suddenly because he's like too sick from getting fucked up. So during one of their, their initial dates, like no one at the table is allowed to drink whenever they show up with a group because Frank isn't drinking. Right? And that's the kind of, you know, guy he is, is like, no one else at the table can be drinking. If I'm not drinking.

• 21:05Robert Evans?

  And, you know, this is one of those things also, he's, he's got an entourage. So whenever they're like hanging out or traveling around, it's never just Frank or Frank and Barbara. It's Frank and Barbara and his personal barber and his manicurist and his songwriter and his pianist and his composer and his tailor and his secretary. Like he literally travels with these people, most of the places that he goes. Now he's sober initially, but he periodically will fall off the wagon. And when he does, he will go on days long binges, hours or days, an hours long is a short one. Sometimes he'll be drinking for days, but all of his binges in the same way, with him staggering to St.

• 21:49Robert Evans?

  Patrick's Cathedral to confess his sins. For an idea of how committed a drunk this guy was when he was drinking, I want to read you the text of a poem that he kept on him at all times while traveling. "The wonderful love of a beautiful maid and the staunch true love of a man, the love of a baby unafraid, which hath existed since life began. But the greatest love, the love of love transcending even that of a mother, is the tender, the passionate, the infinite love of one drunken bum for another." Pretty good poem.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Snaps.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it kinda hit. So Barbara would have been aware, number one, there's stories about this guy's drinking, right? He's been arrested a bunch of times. He's been in tons of fights. He is a fame, he is famous in the twenties for being an out of control alcoholic. That's not easy, right?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Like, you could buy cocaine at the store.

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, you could buy cocaine at the store. And this guy's a famous alcoholic. That's like being a famous beer lover in Wisconsin, right?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:52Robert Evans?

  You know, like, we don't have the technology to be an alcoholic the way this man is now. This guy is a Quint from Jaws level drinker.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  So it's like having a coke problem at Studio 54. It's like.

• 23:04Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's like, it's like the fucking bathroom attendant at CBGB's being like, hey, man, I think you might be doing too much blow. Like, yeah. It's like John Delorean sitting you down about your coke problem.

• 23:17Robert Evans?

  So Barbara would have been aware that this 37 year old man she'd started seeing at 21 had a checkered past. For one thing, he'd already been divorced three times. His first marriage was to a fellow vaudeville star, and it seems to have ended two years after the marriage due to infidelity because he cheats on her a bunch. Probably one of the people he cheats on her with is his second wife, who divorces him after two months. That's a bad marriage due to, again, rampant infidelity. Within three months of their divorce being made official, Frank is jailed for refusing to pay alimony. So his third marriage is his first wife, who he marries again, and he makes her quit

• 23:59Robert Evans?

  her, because she's also like a performer. He makes her quit her career in entertainment after they get married for the second time. And then the two split up again immediately because, again, he cheats on her constantly. So not a good husband. And it's not just the cheating. He also has a tendency to get crazy drunk, fly off the handle, and beat the shit out of his partners. He is very physically abusive. He is, again, noted as being a wife beater in the twenties, when like.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  If, as long as you're just like slapping her, that's not even considered spousal abuse back then, right? Like, he is abusive for the era. Like, Right. Guys who are putting their wives in the hospital are sitting them down and being like, man, you gotta cool it. You know, like, that's the level of bad husband this man is. The time, the time really puts a, a lens on it. It's just like, oh, man. Yeah, like Jonathan Wifebeater, the man who coined the Wifebeater shirt, sitting this guy down and talking to him. Talking to him, like, he's, he's a shitty husband. And even outside of, and again, he's, he's not just beating women. He, he assaults everybody. He loves assaulting people. He particularly is abusive to women, but this is just also generally a physically violent man, right?

• 25:14Robert Evans?

  Like, I think we've established that. Now, he's not a stable guy. He's been, he's been arrested. He's, he's one of the first drunk drivers. He's getting, it's not even illegal to have a drink. You can have a cocktail in your hand, drinking in the twenties. And he's getting arrested for drunk driving. It's nuts how drunk a driver this guy is.

• 25:35Robert Evans?

  He had also already, again, at the height of, right at this period of time, there's weeks where he's making 300 grand in a week in modern money. He's already declared bankruptcy several times, you know, some of that's the alimony, right? Some of that's because he refuses to buy a home or live anywhere but luxury hotels, right? Barbara knows all of this. That is important to note, right? I'm not, again, the abuse that he is going to do over the course of the relationship. I'm not saying that that's, I'm not mitigating that at all, but she is aware of all of this when she starts the relationship, right? Like, she does go into this with her eyes open. Obviously, she's very young, you know? There's a power imbalance here, but she's heard of him, right? This, none of this is a mystery.

• 26:19Robert Evans?

  She also knows that he gambles uncontrollably when he's on a bender, which is another reason for all of the bankruptcies. For whatever reason, in spite of all of this, Barbara Stanwyck really does fall for this guy. And I think, again, a lot of it is that he does give her this sense of emotional stability, that she's got a center to her world, right? She's never had a home in the sense of another person that she belongs with before. And that's just, I mean, that's the most intoxicating thing in the world, really, right? I, I, I think we can all understand that, especially if you're someone who's never had that. Like, she will do anything to, to, to keep this in her life. So they get engaged. And then they almost immediately get unengaged.

• 27:02Robert Evans?

  And I'm going to quote from an article on Stanwick, published by Meredith Grau here. "When the duo argued, they argued tooth and nail and hammer. It was during one of their many pointless but explosive arguments that they temporarily broke up. Faye took a trip to St. Louis on a two-month engagement, and Barbara devoted herself to burlesque, evaded friends, and became a near ghost. Burlesque would end..." And that burlesque is a show, right? Like, it's not burlesque, that's like an actual play. "Burlesque would end its Broadway run as a local triumph on July 14th, but not before Faye would fake a breakdown just to drag Barbara to his feigned bedside and pop the question." So, that's a summary of what happened. It actually makes things sound up less fucked up than they were. So, here's the whole story. So, they break up, right? She goes off and is a huge success.

• 27:47Robert Evans?

  This is like, it's a Book of Mormon-level hit. This is the biggest thing on Broadway. She's on Broadway for months, then she's touring around the country. She's the leading lady in this show. This is a huge fucking deal, right? And Faye is continuing to perform, but like, he is, they're separated, and he just starts calling her almost every night, talking about how he's, he's filled with grief, he can't stand it, he thinks he's going to kill himself, and he always is drunk. He's, he's fallen off the wagon, he's telling her, like, "I, I can't stop drinking, I'm destroying myself because you're not here anymore," right? Like, "I can't stand to, to be without you." And one night, one of Frank's, one of their mutual friends calls Barbara, and he's like, "Hey, man, Frank is, I've never even seen him like this."

• 28:32Robert Evans?

  Like, he is so drunk, right? And in such a bad way, he can't work, he can't even sleep anymore, right? Like, "You, we gotta do something, he's gonna die," you know? Like, like, this guy frames it as like, "This is deathly serious. We had, you, you gotta help me do something to save Frank." So, she's like, "Is he on the phone? Like, can, can he come to the phone now?" And their friend puts Frank on the phone. And Frank gets on the phone, and he just sounds ruined, right? Just absolutely, like, barely can talk drunk. He tells her his heart's broken, that like, he's just ready to die because he can't live without her. And Barbara's resolve crumbles, and she tells him, "If you can sober up, I'll get engaged to you again."

• 29:17Robert Evans?

  The next moment, as soon as she says this, his voice changes. He sounds sober because he hasn't been drunk at all this whole time. All been fake. Every one of these calls, he's been faking it, right? He never fell off the wagon, at least as far as we know. And he's immediately just sobers his voice up and says, all right, well, in that case, why don't you get on a train tomorrow and we'll get engaged? You know, take a train to me and we'll get engaged and we'll get married right away.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ, man.

• 29:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Just the mm. That's the good, toxic, abusive relationship stuff. We love to see it. We don't love to see it.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And you know, what a, what a performance.

• 29:54Robert Evans?

  It is a great, I mean, look, man, he's not a bad actor.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  The, just the switch. God, that's so fucked up.

• 30:01Robert Evans?

  Bad husband, bad fiance, bad person, sure, but not a bad actor. You know who else will lie about destroying themselves with alcohol in order to get married to Barbara Stanwyck? I don't know, probably Blue Apron. I doubt Lasik would, but Blue Apron might. Here's ads. This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two.

• 30:45Robert Evans?

  No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  It is unknown if Dovato is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Dovato without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Dovato if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Dovato and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 31:31Robert Evans?

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• 32:16Robert Evans?

  Every time. Dude Wipes in a good World War II novel: two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two. So stop Stalin, grab a pack of Dude Wipes and wipe the slate clean. Dude Wipes: Best Clean Pants Down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 32:35Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back. Which sponsor do you think would lie about destroying their body and brain with alcohol in order to keep Barbara Stanwyck in love with them?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, obviously, any of the mattress ones.

• 32:46Robert Evans?

  Any of the mattress, oh my god. Casper, yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:50Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Sock?

• 32:51Robert Evans?

  Casper actually would kill themselves drinking in order to make Barbara Stanwyck regret dumping them.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  That's right. It's not a lie. It's a way of life.

• 33:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's just how Casper rolls, you know? That's why they're a ghost. They already did it.

• 33:06Robert Evans?

  So, he's just lied to her. The way it was, it's written in the biography Williams wrote, Barbara is kind of aware that he must have been lying, but I don't know if she is or isn't. I don't know if she gets fooled by this initially. Whatever is the case, she takes a train to him, they get engaged again, and they get married. Right? I, maybe she was aware, but it just, she just was in love with this guy and she just needed this in her life, right? I really, I think that's probably what's going on here, you know?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I think from the outside of a lot of, like, toxic relationships too. It is just like this thing where it's like a little bit yes, a little bit no. Like, you feel like, it feels like people kind of know, but like can't bring themselves to really confront it, and that's how it is.

• 33:51Robert Evans?

  No, and like also with all of these toxic relationships and with all of these celebrity relationships and shit that are so, seem so poisonous, there's gotta be good stuff here too, right? There's something she's getting that she loves and there are good times, right? And there's aspects of him, again, there's a reason why he's so charming and beloved, right? Like he is, there's, she's getting something out of this. And I'm not saying that to like blame her on it or something, but like you have to assume this is not, we're not like, it's not just bad stuff, right? It never is. Otherwise, why, why would she be so committed to this, right? That's the way abusive relation and just toxic, even when it's not abusive and it's just like codependent or stuff. There is, there's always

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  something there that keeps one or both people coming back, right? So she finishes the current run of her touring show and then she retires. Well, she actually gets sick right at the end of it, but either way, she finishes burlesque and she retires. Now, this is not a full retirement, right? It means that she no longer has an independent career. Faye is touring on his own, like he's doing, you know, the Frank Faye show, basically. And she starts performing as part of his shows, right? Now, she makes a lot of money doing this. She is independently getting paid and she is getting paid very well. The equivalent of probably, probably a million or more a year, right? Or somewhere in that, like at least high six figures. She's,

• 35:18Robert Evans?

  she's making very good money, right? But what she's also doing is she has clearly, I think, I don't know if it's that he asked her to play second fiddle to his ambition, or she was just immediately willing to. It's probably a little bit of both, right? That he wanted her. But also, I don't think it's entirely that because he is actually really supportive of her having a career. I do think her attempting to quit is largely Just her really wanting to commit to the relationship? I think that's a big part of it because of some of the stuff that's gonna happen next. So this is a little more complicated, right? I don't wanna, it's not just him being like, I can't stand to have her be a big star, or I can't stand to have her have a life outside of me.

• 35:59Robert Evans?

  She is really motivated by the idea of dedicating herself fully to this relationship. That is part of what's happening here. As the twenties are kind of starting to come to an end, Frank is looking out at the entertainment landscape and he's a smart guy and he's an innovative guy. He understands, he's got good instincts, right? And he sees that vaudeville's days are numbered, right? This is not going to be, it's already starting to fade. He can kind of see there's not as much money coming in, there's not as much audience. There's more entertainment out there, right? Like vaudeville's days are kind of over. And he can see that the traveling variety acts and these big stage productions that,

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  cost a lot of money and involve a lot of people that have dominated entertainment all his life, are not going to be around forever. You know, the radio is a bigger thing, moving pictures are increasingly significant. And, you know, we're coming to the end of the roaring twenties. So the bottom's about to fall out of the economy, which is going to make those big productions, those big, huge touring shows and these big elaborate stage shows, a lot harder to afford, both for the people putting them on and for people to buy tickets to, right? Right. So he makes a bold decision, right before the depression hits, to break up with his production company. He like breaks a contract to leave them. And this is the number one vaudeville production company. They have the ability to blacklist him from like the industry almost, right?

• 37:25Robert Evans?

  They don't do this, but that's the thing he's risking. He takes a major risk to leave them because he sees that like the bottom's about to fall out and he wants to get into something that he can make work in this new era. So he starts performing totally independently with a skeleton crew of, you know, some stagehands and a couple other, you know, entertainers and his wife. And they're doing longer and longer sets. And now he is being up there for something that is like a Netflix, you know, special or like a full hour type deal. Like he's doing full stand-up routines effectively, you know, and something that's very close to a modern sense. And he, again, he's a major pioneer. He starts doing something that's kind of... Weird Al adjacent, or like Tom Lehrer adjacent?

• 38:10Robert Evans?

  If you've Tom Lehrer, who just died, the greatest musical comedian of all time. One of also, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, also invented the Jell-O shot. Incredible man, Tom Lehrer. Yes, inventor of the Jell-O shot, so that he could smuggle alcohol into like army gatherings. Amazing man. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So, and he's not the only, there's another musical comedian right around the same time, who's also an influence on like Tom Lehrer and, and, you know, later guys. But he is one of the first like musical parody artists. And it's interesting, the way he does this is a little, is, it's not the same as what like Lehrer and Al are doing. It's really interesting.

• 38:53Robert Evans?

  He, um, he'll start with a popular song and he'll get his musicians to start playing like Tea for Two. That's one of his big bits, which is like, you've heard of Tea for Two. At this point, it's like a hit song. It's like the Call Me Maybe of its day, or the Wet Ass Pussy of its day, right? Yep, those are the two songs. Those are the two songs, the only two I've heard of.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 39:15Robert Evans?

  What? It is kind of like Wet Ass Pussy, because it's smutty, right? Like it is about, it's smutty for the day, right? Because it's like about a date, right? So, uh, every couple of lines, he'll start playing the song and he'll start singing it, and then he'll stop after like a line, and he'll break down what doesn't make sense or is secretly absurd in the song. Right. Here's a recent example. He's cinema sensing this fucker. He's cinema sensing it, yes, exactly, exactly. Tea for two and two for tea. Ain't that rich? Here's a guy that has enough tea for two, so he's gonna have tea for two. I notice he doesn't say a word about sugar. Comedy was easy to, anyway, whatever. I assume lots of it's in the delivery, but you see what he's doing.

• 39:57Robert Evans?

  He's going through the lyrics of this song, and then he's like riffing on it, right? He's like making fun of bits about it. Um, and I think that's interesting because it's the, the type of bit that this is, is so modern. You brought up Cinemasens because like initially it was like, oh, he's like kind of a prototom layer or Weird Al. But honestly, because they're actually doing full parody songs, a better comparison is like modern YouTube videos where like not just songs, but like, like the red letter, stuff Red Letter Media got famous for doing, where you're like break down a movie, you're like going through like a whole movie or old, and you're like breaking it down piece by piece and talking in granular detail about like, what of this movie or video game or whatever doesn't make sense. Like, is like the analog

• 40:38Robert Evans?

  version of like, most of YouTube's big creators are doing now, right? I think that's such, so interesting to me, right? Like, he is just like reflexively a very innovative entertainer.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's genuinely so odd. But also, it is like, I don't, like, because the source material is so old, it's so funny to hear how corny even the like jab is.

• 41:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's tea for two. Like, how many jokes can you make about that shit, man?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's his like fucking hour and a half long video breaking down why the Phantom Menace sucks is tea for two. So.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  No sugar, eh?

• 41:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no sugar, huh?

• 41:21Robert Evans?

  So yeah, that's a very creative idea. And again, you gotta think of how weird it would be in the 1929 to hear like, oh yeah, this guy's gonna come on stage and sing a popular song. And instead, he's like making fun of the song. Like the idea that like, you wanna hear this guy make fun of a song slowly? Like, that's, that's a weird ask in this period of time. But it works. This is like one of his most popular bits. And again, he's like, he's just, he's just moving from success to success at this point, up to kind of like the start of the Great Depression. And right, really, right before the Great Depression, I think we're like in 29 here, like right before things really fall off a cliff, Hollywood starts calling his wife, right? Because Barbara, she's made a big name for herself, even though

• 42:02Robert Evans?

  she's technically quote unquote retired. Everyone knows who Barbara Stanwyck is. And these, you know, we're now in the talkie era. Hollywood is looking for new leading ladies and people, you know, there's talent scouts who go out to Broadway. They've seen her. A lot of studios are calling and she turns them all down. Like she's getting like, we will make you a movie star. Like, we want to give you like picture deals, like, like there's money for you here. And she's like, nah, my husband likes it over here. He doesn't want to live in California and my marriage comes first. And she just says no, over and over again, to all of these major studio agents, like fucking studio heads are trying to beat down her door. And she won't do it. She's not at all tempted because that's not what her husband wants to do. Right?

• 42:49Robert Evans?

  Now, eventually, uh, the head of a major studio or an agent for a major studio, figures out how to wear her down, which is they go to Frank and they're like, hey, we want to sign you and your wife. You know, you each get a one picture deal, basically, right? We want to try you both out. And to be fair, it's kind of a no brainer. I'm sure they're not not interested in Frank because he's the one of the biggest performers of the day. It's a pretty, it's pretty obvious from like a studio position. Well, these are two of the most famous, popular people on stage. Let's see if they could be movie stars, right? Invite them both. And they agree, right? I think it's just a matter of the money is so good and, you know, vaudeville's kind of falling apart.

• 43:30Robert Evans?

  And yeah, they both decide, all right, let's give it a try. And it's when they move to Hollywood that the problems really start. And they start with Barbara because she is a horrible auditioner. She's terrible at auditioning. She doesn't know how to really like do it. And so she is supposed to be in this Frank Capra film and she goes in for the audition and she bombs it. And Capra's like, Frank Capra calls her a porcupine, which is some weird ass 20 sexism. I don't fully understand what that's supposed to mean. But it's like an insult for a woman. I don't understand why, but he calls her a porcupine. And this is actually one of Frank's very few good moments and very few, like really actually surprisingly supportive partner moments.

• 44:15Robert Evans?

  So the studio that Capra was working with, that, that she has this deal with, and she's bombed this audition. He, he calls. Frank Capra, like he gets him on the phone personally because he's a star and he can do that. And he's like, look, I know you saw my wife. I know you didn't like the live performance. I need to show you a test screening of her. And I think it was her doing some lines from burlesque or something like that. Because like, if you didn't think she'd, she must have just bombed the audition because she's great. Like, trust me, she's great. And Frank is such a big name that Capra is like, okay, I'll do it. And he watches this test, Frank Faye brings over this test screening and as soon as Capra actually sees her performing on stage,

• 44:56Robert Evans?

  he's like, oh my God, I'm a fucking idiot. This woman is one of the most talented actors of her generation, of any generation. And he casts her immediately. And that's actually like a really good, like, that's why I'm saying like, he's not anti her having a career, weirdly enough. This is gonna cause problems for them later, but like, he is really supportive at the start. She gets her movie career started because he, he goes to the mat after she bombs an audition and make sure she gets the job. So that's one good thing that Frank Faye ever did in his fucking life. Uh, there you go. Now, this is not a Barbara Stanwyck podcast and I'm not gonna do, uh, but I'm not gonna talk in detail about it. Leave a comment or write in if you want Robert's Barbara Stanwyck podcast.

• 45:41Robert Evans?

  Well, she did murder those children, but in her defense, those kids were coming right for her, you know? Who did it? Who amongst us hasn't killed a couple of kids, right? You know, it happens. It happens. So, um, by the mid 30s, Barbara Stanwyck, as soon as she, she gets this movie, she's in this, she's a huge hit. She's just immediately a massive star. Her career is skyrockets from, from there on up. By the mid 30s, she's one of the leading ladies in pre-war Hollywood. She is just massive. She's, she's fucking great. She's really good at this. It becomes clear to everybody. And she is just like on a rocket ship to success from here on out, right? That's, that's the Barbara Stanwyck story. Things go less well for Frank Faye after this point in time.

• 46:26Robert Evans?

  His first movie, because they get this one-picture deal, each get a picture. His first movie does pretty well. It's a modest success. But afterwards, he just doesn't catch on as an actor. He's just not, for whatever reason, I don't know why, maybe he's picking bad scripts or whatever. It just doesn't work out for him, right? And the start, it doesn't help that the start of his career trying to be an actor coincides with the Great Depression really hitting, which wipes out a lot of the money that had made his old career possible. So there's not as much money in touring or doing the kind of shows he'd been doing. And movies, you know, are more economical. They make more, because you pay to put them on once and then you keep making money from them, right?

• 47:07Robert Evans?

  So like, yeah, it's better a business to be in, but he's just not doing well in it. And eventually, the offers kind of just slow to a trickle and stop coming in, while Barbara Stanwyck becomes a fucking household name. And I'm going to quote from an article by the, in the New York Times. "As her star began to shine, Faye's dimmed. He drank, was relentlessly abusive towards her and the child, Dion, they'd adopted. However, not only did she stick by Faye, but she also put his faltering career first. She insisted on introducing herself as Mrs. Frank Faye. We have to wonder what in her needed to stick by Faye way past the obvious expiration date of the marriage? A determination to rebut the Hollywood gossip's prophesying divorce? A stick-to-your-man philosophy?

• 47:51Robert Evans?

  Her fear of going out in society? An inability to have sustained friendships with other women? Yes, yes, yes, yes. And also gratitude to Frank for having supported her career at a crucial time. But still, her life was actually in danger because of his violent nature, as was that of little Dion, about whom, it must be said, she didn't seem much concerned." So. He's getting increasingly, he had kinda kept himself on a leash. He is off the chain, he's drinking more, he is beating the shit out, he's beating their kid to, Right. To the extent that like, again, her life is in danger being with this man. That's how out of control he is, kind of at his worst. Right. This isn't consistent, but when he hits rock bottom, that's how bad this is, right?

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  Um, now again, as the New York Times, this is her obituary noted, she's not a great mom. She's not like, she's not necessarily putting the kid first. So she's not a hero here, but Frank is definitely the villain. And his physical abuse of Barbara did escalate to the point where again, she could've, could've killed her and she does eventually dump his ass in 1935. And at this point, when she leaves him, it seems like he's probably heading towards an early grave, right? He is increasingly, you know, he's not making money, he's not getting work, he's able to tour some, he can do, but it's like not the way he had been living and he can't like, Right.

• 49:15Robert Evans?

  He hasn't been reining in his expenses, so he is broke, like he's constantly going broke, he's gambling what he makes and yeah, it looks like this is kinda the end, right? And again, if this had been the end, we wouldn't do a Behind the Bastards on this guy because like he's a dick, he's an abusive husband, but like that's just not, not really the bastard story yet, like there's not enough of the evil. It's not newsworthy, exactly, yeah. If we did an episode on every famous person who was like abusive to their spouse. Yeah. Like, that's just a different show, not to minimize that, but it's a different show. We're getting to like the wild act of bastardery here, like that's, that's what's coming next. So. It gets worse than this, folks. It gets a lot worse.

• 49:59Robert Evans?

  So a big part of why Frank had failed in Hollywood, you know, I said, it's not entirely clear to me why, I forgot I had written this part because there is one really clear reason, which is that he's super anti-Semitic and the heads of most of the major Hollywood studios at this point are Jewish guys, right? And. It's the kind of thing, if his movies had been runaway hits, they probably would have ignored that because they do for other guys, right? Because that's Hollywood. Still do. We all know about Mel Gibson, right? Yeah. But again, the fact that he's a famous anti Semite and that his movies aren't doing great, like, is a big part of what destroys him in Hollywood. And it's very funny to me, there's a quote from one of his peers, Milt Joseph Berg,

• 50:43Robert Evans?

  who is, you know, a Jewish comedian, who said of him, quote, "In a business known for its lack of bigotry," he was a bigot, "this was no secret, but widely known and well substantiated." Right? So he is just like, that's a big part of like, why he can't get shit working for him in Hollywood. And then, the FDR years kickoff, right? And Frank starts getting increasingly political. He hates FDR. He calls him a communist. He starts going on these loud rants about the Jewish bankers that he believes are behind all of the country's problems and behind, it's weird, like, so the Jewish bankers caused the depression and also are behind FDR, who's Yeah. got, pulled us out of it. What's going on? Anyway, whatever, he's, he's, he's

• 51:26Robert Evans?

  losing his mind on alcohol here, too. As his old, famous friends increasingly step away from him because he is just, he's made himself into a pariah. It's bad for your career to be associated with Frank at this point. He finds a new friend with someone who understands him, Father Charles Coughlin. Now, we've talked about this guy before on the podcast. Coughlin is a Catholic priest with a far-right radio show, who is, he is a fascist, he is a proto-Nazi, he is one of the guys who's trying to get the US to go fascist, right? He's probably the most, he is the fucking, he's like Bill O'Reilly mixed with Tucker Carlson, you know, like, he is super influential as a fascist media

• 52:08Robert Evans?

  figure. Coughlin also believed that Jewish bankers were behind every evil in the country. He referred to the New Deal as "the Jew deal," and as a result, he and Frank get along famously. Yeah, like, oh yeah, there's a match made in heaven right here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Dope. Now, you know who else gets along famously with Father Charles Coughlin? And I probably shouldn't say that. Here's ads.

• 52:35Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  It is unknown if Dovato is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Dovato without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Dovato if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Dovato and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or plant pregnancy.

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872. History's full of dirty players. Don't let your butt be one of them. You know what bastards and buttholes both have in common? They're full of [BLEEP]. But with Dude Wipes, your butt doesn't have to be. Don't let dry TP dictate your aftermath. Dude Wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Dude Wipes are the perfect poop time partner in crime at home or on the go. Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for methods of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, Dude Wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles here. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats:

• 54:19Robert Evans?

  individually wrapped singles, eight-count pocket packs, and 48-count Big Daddies. So the wipe can match the crime... every time. Dude Wipes in a good World War II novel: two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two. So stop Stalin, grab a pack of Dude Wipes, and wipe the slate clean. Dude Wipes: Best Clean Pants Down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 54:45Robert Evans?

  And we're back. I don't know why I make that like, that like, sound every, I just, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm vamping.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's the post, you know, you, you just got yourself out of the ad. We, we just all diligently listened to the ads, bought the thing, and now you're decompressing. Got to do it.

• 55:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And now we're decompressing and we're hearing about his friendship with Charles Coughlin, right? And, and just kind of his, this is him, this is him spinning out, right? In the late 30s, Cliff Nesteroff writes, quote, "Faye struggled in film and radio for the next 10 years after his divorce from, from Barbara. His appearances were spotty and mostly unsuccessful. He had made too many enemies and few cared to help him out." Maurice Zolletto wrote that "the self-destructive pattern has hampered his career. At various times, he has been a vaudeville MC, nightclub comic, radio star and motion picture hero. Faye has been successful in all of these. He has also been a failure in all of these. Faye has been washed up more times than any other big time star." You know, and that's, that's kind of like the state of his career at this point.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:48Robert Evans?

  For an idea of like, what a famous dick this guy is at this point, I probably should have put this up earlier, but it's very funny. People at Hollywood start telling a joke. This is kind of like, while he's still married to Barbara Stanwyck, which Hollywood actor has the biggest prick? And the answer is Barbara Stanwyck, right? Like, that, that, that's how people are talking about him, right? His, his career is over.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:10Robert Evans?

  So by the start of the World War II, he is in particularly bad odor because, you know, he's basically a Nazi and we're going to war with those people, right? He is on the side of the America firsters. He loves Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin. So this is not, nothing's, it just seems like he's completely fucking doomed. But just as all seems lost, and he is as washed up as washed up can get, in 1944, he gets thrown a fucking life preserver, right? And it's thrown by the most esteemed director in Broadway history, Antoinette Perry, who is looking to put together the cast for a new play, Harvey. You ever seen the movie Harvey with Jimmy Stewart? Yep.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  I have not, actually.

• 56:57Robert Evans?

  It's a great film, holds up.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:59Robert Evans?

  Weirdly enough, it's filmed in like the 50s. It's written before then, right? He's doing the stage version in the 40s about like mental health. Like, the plot is like, the guy played by Jimmy Stewart, I forget what his fucking name is, the character, but the main character is this like, rich kid. He's like the oldest son of like a wealthy family. And he sees a giant talking rabbit.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:23Robert Evans?

  And he's constantly talking with it. It follows him around. They're always at the bar drinking together. Character's name is Elwood, by the way. Elwood, Elwood, you're right, Elwood. Elwood Dowd, I think, something like that. And his high society family and friends are trying to have him institutionalized, right? Because he's clearly crazy, right? So they're trying to like, get him in a mental asylum, basically, for being crazy and seeing this rabbit. And weirdly enough, it still holds up as a good depiction of mental illness. Because like, the message of it ultimately is that like, actually, Elwood's fine. And like, everyone just needs to understand that he's just different from other people, but he's happy. He's not hurting anybody, he's not in any danger. He just sees a rabbit and that's okay, you know?

• 58:05Robert Evans?

  Like, it's actually got like, a really modern message about like, neurodiversity and just like, like, the Jimmy Stewart version of this movie holds the fuck up. It's a great fucking film. And he's a good actor. You should watch Harvey. I mean, he's fucking Jimmy Stewart. Great actor, weirdly enough, great bomber pilot, retired as a general in the air force, flew like 50 missions in World War II. Jimmy Stewart, quite a life.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  I'm surprised.

• 58:31Robert Evans?

  You didn't know that?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I don't think I did.

• 58:34Robert Evans?

  He's George Bailey. Jimmy Stewart during World War II was a bomber pilot, flew missions over Western Europe, did the most dangerous job that existed in the American Army. Like, he flew way more missions than he needed to. It's crazy.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  As you just said that, I must have asked the same question on a previous episode of Behind the Bastards, because that just flooded me with deja vu.

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  Weirdly enough, Jimmy Stewart, great actor, killed thousands. Like, like, literally killed thousands of people. Um, fun guy. Anyway, so, uh, this is before the Jimmy Stewart version. This is like the play. It starts off as a play. The screenplay actually wins a Pulitzer Prize, right? So this is a great screenplay and Antoinette Perry is casting. The very first time this is going to be on Broadway. And she decides that not only is Frank Faye a good fit for the play, but she wants him to play the star. He's going to be Elwood, right? Um, and this is a huge deal. I had said Antoinette Perry is like the most famous director in Broadway history. Antoinette, the shortened version of Antoinette is Tony. The Tony Awards are named for this woman.

• 59:43Robert Evans?

  That's, that's who this is, right? So if she decides this washed up anti Semite is who I want as my leading man, that's who's going to be her leading man, right? And she's very good at what she does. You know, he's a piece of shit. I'm not happy that he gets this job that reinvigorates his career, but he's really good. Like, he headlines 1,800 performances. That's, that's like for years. This show is on Broadway and then touring. It's a massive fucking hit and it turns, it makes him rich again, and it turns him into a star again. And so by the very end of World War II, he has gotten a second chance at stardom. Like the kind of second chance that nobody gets. When you are as down and out as he is,

• 1:00:28Robert Evans?

  to wind up being the biggest name on Broadway again after a fall like that, it's nuts. Um, yeah. Now, what would you do if you were disgraced for being a massive bigot and an abusive spouse? And went broke and had your career destroyed? And then suddenly become rich and famous again? You know, you'd think probably just kind of try to enjoy it. You know, rebuild your career, keep quiet, chill out. Maybe learn something about yourself, grow. Learn something, be a better person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. That's what anyone would do. He takes a slightly different tactic. He understands that now that he's famous again, he's got influence and prestige and people listen to him.

• 1:01:11Robert Evans?

  He needs to speak up for the downtrodden, you know? The people that no one else is going to bat for, right? You know, the people that just, just have no one else looking out for them, that, that only he. Can really, you know, defend and protect. And obviously- This is really noble. In 1945- Yeah. 46, there's no one who needs protecting more than Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain.

• 1:01:40Robert Evans?

  Now Franco isn't in any real danger as World War II ends. Obviously, he's fine. Anti-communism immediately is how the US pivots. So he's not, no, no, it's coming for Franco. But what makes Faye angry, what makes him want to speak out in defense of Francisco Franco is that, so the Union for Theater Workers, for actors, and I think basically everybody who's working in the theater at this point is called Actors Equity. I don't think it's just actors. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But anyway, the SAG for theater workers- For theater. It may still be, I don't know a lot about the theater. Whatever it is today, Actors Equity is the union for theater actors, right? Yes. And so a number of members of Actors Equity, this isn't an official Actors Equity

• 1:02:21Robert Evans?

  thing, but a lot of people with Actors Equity in late 1945, held a rally to raise money for a group called Spanish Refugee Appeal. Now, the Spanish Civil War had ended long ago, right? Franco is well in charge. And what the Refugee Appeal is, number one, they're raising money to support leftists and political dissidents who have had to flee Spain. And they are also begging publicly and trying to get other governments to pressure Franco to stop arresting, torturing, and murdering leftists, right? There's specifically, a big part of it is they are attacking the Catholic Church and trying to shame them because the Catholic Church is actively hunting down and helping to murder leftists, right? Anarchists and the like.

• 1:03:04Robert Evans?

  So they're unhappy about that and trying to stop it. Nesterhoff writes, quote, "Faye was furious. He said their criticism was an attack on Catholicism as a whole. Faye demanded Actors Equity investigate each anti-Franco member for un-American activity. The House Committee on Un-American Activities acted on Faye's suggestion and the actors were vetted. The New York Times reported that Faye held no brief against any member of Actors Equity for political beliefs. He resented, however, that Equity members should be- Party to rallies that condemn religious groups. Equity president Bert Littel objected to the political investigation. Equity members have a wide latitude of interests and beliefs that they may practice and advocate as private citizens. Actors Equity stood by Brooke Starling, Melina and Osato, those are the people organizing this rally.

• 1:03:48Robert Evans?

  Rather than expel them from his union, Littel censured Frank Fay for conduct prejudicial to the association or its membership. So he gets Congress to investigate these people for trying to raise money for fucking refugees and beg Franco and the church to stop having people murdered. And he gets them fucking investigated and to the credit of Actors Equity and the union head, they go after Frank. And they're like, no, no, no, you're the one being, they're allowed to do this privately on their own. Yeah. You are trying to destroy their, fuck you, man. Yeah. So this, you know, he gets in trouble over this. Uh, and it, it's, it's a bad look, especially in 1945.

• 1:04:32Robert Evans?

  But the fact that the union refuses to back Frank's play doesn't mean no one supported him. There's a lot of right wing and fat, just outright fascist Americans who have been kind of biting their tongues all of World War II. And are really, they're frustrated that we're allied with the USSR. They're frustrated that we're fighting the fascists, you know, they're, they're real bummed about all of this stuff. And by the end of the war, they've been having to keep quiet for so long that they just are, are filled to the brim with anger at what side the US picked in this. There's also a lot of American Francoists who love, you know, what, what Frank is saying about their favorite dictator who's still alive.

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  And these guys start, fascists being the same in every era, immediately mass mailing death threats to Actors Equity. And to the guys at Actors Equity, like to the people who had done this rally that Frank had called out, right? It's a very modern thing. This right wing celebrity starts complaining about a thing he doesn't like and his fans start threatening to murder people on his behalf, right? Same as it ever was.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty standard, standard stuff.

• 1:05:38Robert Evans?

  Right. One journalist at the time wrote, "Under the guise of being deeply pained over the comments about the Catholic Church, these organs of native fascism have been blowing the familiar tunes in all their repulsive cacophony. They say that the issue is religion, but they are no more concerned with religion than were their political masters, the cutthroats of Berlin. Consider Frank Fay himself, the main attraction in the current whoop-de-doo. His antisemitism is well-known, and his numerous brawls on that account are common gossip."

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Robert Evans?

  Pretty good.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Robert Evans?

  Pretty well-written. Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  God, imagine, imagine a contemporary.

• 1:06:10Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Like journalist being that good.

• 1:06:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's unfortunately hard to.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Robert Evans?

  So, we can look back on this and say, obviously, like, that's what's happening, right? Like, obviously, this is like a fair description of what he's doing.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:30Robert Evans?

  But like a lot of fascists, Frank was convinced that he was right, and that the rest of the world secretly agreed with him. So, drunk on his newfound fame and enraged with frustration at how World War II had ended, he decided to hold a rally in January of 1946, celebrating fascism in all of its guises. Now, that's a bold move in January 1946. But Frank had that special kind of brain damage that God only gives to men who get too famous for standing in front of a crowd and telling jokes. So he figured, there's no way this is gonna backfire on me, right? My career collapsed once because I'm an abusive,

• 1:07:14Robert Evans?

  bigoted asshole, but it won't happen again.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  How could it? It never does.

• 1:07:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Robert Evans?

  Now, if you're a fascist, looking to hold a rally in New York City, there's only one group of assholes who suck hard enough to say yes, especially in January of 1946. And those assholes are Madison Square Garden.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  I mean, also, also, you know, it, that's a tried and true place for a, we, we Nazi rally. We love it there.

• 1:07:45Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, this is, this is, this is, this is completely.

• 1:07:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:07:55Robert Evans?

  Please don't sue us again.

• 1:07:58Robert Evans?

  Can we make that joke, Sophie? Are we allowed to?

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:08:01Robert Evans?

  Maybe we'll bleep it.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Robert Evans?

  So Madison Square Garden agrees to host the event, which he calls the Friends of Frank Faye. Let's talk about who those friends are, shall we? Organizing work is handled by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, which is nice to see their work in hand in hand, you know?

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Yup.

• 1:08:20Robert Evans?

  I like, it's, it's one of those, I've been so bummed when they had their falling out. It's just good to see, you know? Two long-term friends can really come back. Hood and hand, hood and hand, right?

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  This is like some shit. This is like from that fucking Wolfenstein game.

• 1:08:34Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, it is. Like, the KKK and the American Nazi Party are like your stagehands and like handling like advertising and shit.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Who, who's speaking? Who's speaking? Tell me.

• 1:08:47Robert Evans?

  Oh, who's, Sophie, so many assholes. Now, I should note here that the last big Nazi rally in American history, right before World War II, had been held by the German-American Bund in Madison Square Garden, you know, and involved a bunch of Nazis doing a big rally. Again, Madison Square Garden loves hosting Nazi events, or at least did back then. I'm sure everything's fine in the company now. Provenant speakers at this event included Nazi propagandist Laura Ingalls. And no, I want to be clear here, I'm not talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  Little House of Pray Lady.

• 1:09:25Robert Evans?

  Different person.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  But also, didn't she also kinda suck?

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  She's also very right-wing, but she's not speaking at this event. They just have very similar names. Laura Ingalls was an award-winning female pilot. She's like one of the first, like, great female pilots. She is like very groundbreaking in that. And then she winds up serving two years in prison because she worked as an unpaid agent of the Nazi government while speaking at America First gatherings and didn't disclose that she was a paid agent of a foreign power. That's what happens to her prior to this. So anyway, I should also note, as a fun fact, because I was- Like, I just saw Laura Ingalls, because I'm reading like, old contemporary news articles. Like, Laura Ingalls, is this the little house on the prairie? And so I like, I type into Google, as I do sometimes, was Laura Ingalls a Nazi?

• 1:10:12Robert Evans?

  And obviously, now when you Google, the first thing you get is their fucking AI summary. This is what the AI summary says. "No, Laura Ingalls, the aviator, not the author, was not a Nazi. However, she was a Nazi sympathizer and was convicted of acting as a paid agent for Nazi Germany." And like, so why are you saying she's not a Nazi? "She was paid for act, she was, she went to prison for failing to register as an agent for the German government for speaking at Nazi rallies." We can't call her a Nazi? Really? Google Gemini?

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  But the AI said so.

• 1:10:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I'm gonna call her a Nazi.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  She's a Nazi.

• 1:10:49Robert Evans?

  If you go to jail for advocating for the Nazi government secretly, without, like, and taking their money. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Technically not a Nazi.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  She's a fucking Nazi.

• 1:11:02Robert Evans?

  She's a fucking Nazi.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  These tech bros think this is the sum, the pinnacle of intelligence.

• 1:11:08Robert Evans?

  This is what's going to take us to the stars. Fucking AI bullshit. Now, another guest at this event was KKK member Joseph Camp. And of course, Camp's spelled with a K. Camp, if you haven't heard of him, was one of the chief authors of antisemitic propaganda in the United States. At this period of time, he is a massive, like, Jewish world conspiracy author guy. There's a picture Sophie's gonna show you from contemporary reporting on the event, who introduces us to another guy at this event, who happened to look just like Walt. Like, a lot of these guys look exactly like Walt Disney. Like, look at this Walt Disney-looking motherfucker, with this fucking pencil mustache, like...

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Legit wild.

• 1:11:51Robert Evans?

  All Walt Disney-looking motherfuckers. And the caption from this, I think this is from the Post article, "Another friend of Faye, John Geist, notorious antisemite and distributor of Rath Skeller pamphlets back in the Yorktown days."

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  I like that "friend" is in quotes.

• 1:12:05Robert Evans?

  Friend, yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 1:12:08Robert Evans?

  Now, there's quite a lot of reporting, Rath Skeller, you know what, I should've looked that up. Let's look that up right now. Let's do it right now.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  I will say... I forgot what punk venue is called the Wrath Skeller, but I hope they're not. I hope it wasn't that kind of punk.

• 1:12:23Robert Evans?

  Well, Wikipedia is telling me that it's a name for a kind of restaurant in German speaking countries.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Uh, oh, maybe it was that kind of punk bar.

• 1:12:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe it is that guy that, yeah, maybe it's just like a name for a beer garden. Yeah. Uh, yeah, that's, that's, that's my guess, my best guess.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Uh, yikes. All right.

• 1:12:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Cool. Um, cool guy.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Most importantly, cool.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  And moving on.

• 1:12:50Robert Evans?

  So there's a lot of reporting left to read through from this event. You can find a lot of articles written about it at the time, and much of it is quite funny. The New York Daily News, who is pretty positive about this event, titles their coverage, 19,000 Fay friends jam garden to cheer anti-red speeches. Now, first off, the actual number is more like 11,000, and a lot of those are protesters who are there to like jeer and try to disrupt the event too. Um, the Daily News was happy to carry water for Fay and included a segment in their review titled, "Deny Racial Bias." Dr. Emmanuel Josephson, who said he was of Jewish extraction, brought down the house with his attack on communism, labor unions, Karl Marx, Harold Lasky, the New Deal, the

• 1:13:33Robert Evans?

  State Department, the OPA, and the more deadly of the Roosevelt species. So it's not anti-Semitic, they've got a Jewish guy. Great. Now, the New York Post, not my favorite publication today, but was a much better publication back then, right? And their reporting on this is actually pretty good, right? They are unsparing about how racist this was. Quote, "After praising Equity as the finest organization ever put together, Fay said, 'There is a certain little group coming into Equity, coming not through the stage door, but through the,' and here his words slurred, and he may have said either 'south' or 'back' door. They have nothing to offer you but the bad breath of Marx. They put on some plays to capture your youth, and for God's sake, watch your children.

• 1:14:16Robert Evans?

  We didn't have that when we were kids, but we've got it now." A Post reporter later asked Fay what plays he was referring to, and he denied he had made the statement quoted. Later, coming upon the Post reporter again, he warned him to be careful about the quotation because his address had been recorded. Very much watered, like, "I didn't say that. What do you mean I said that there are plays trying to reach out to you? I didn't say that at all, when we recorded it, so don't you dare lie." To continue, as Faye went along, the clock silently slid past the 1 a.m. mark, and spectators by the score literally were sleeping in their chairs. McNabo, too, who's one of the other hosts, too, constantly reminded the audience that every word uttered at the meeting was being recorded, and that woe and libel suits awaited those newspapers that printed stories

• 1:14:58Robert Evans?

  written with smear-dripping pins. They don't sue anybody, right? Yeah. Like, because again, all of the racism is there. This is just a horrible, it's a Nazi rally. He holds a Nazi rally in 1946, and this backfires in every way possible, right? This does finally destroy his career.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  He finally doesn't work again?

• 1:15:19Robert Evans?

  No, he never works again. There are, like, one of the jokes, I forget exactly who says this, but it's another famous comedian who is like, I saw him walking, like, holding his own hand down Lovers Lane, that's how lonely he is at the end of his life. He dies in Santa Monica in 1961 at the age of 69, and is ostensibly unloved and unmourned. Yeah, yeah, that he gets to live in a nice part of the world and longer, although not that long. For a hardcore alcoholic, it's not doing bad. Now, I read a lot of George Burns, who's a famous comedian, like, talking about Faye for this column, and Burns is a

• 1:16:02Robert Evans?

  guy who talks a lot about, like, Faye's talents and what he was good at, but Burns also talks about, like, all the things that sucked about him, right? And so here's, in this episode, here's a quote from George Burns on Faye at late in life. "Faye hated Jews, but he was very religious. He used to eat at the Brown Derby, and I used to watch. Just before his food came, I would sit down and start to mention people that are dead. I'd say, 'Tom Fitzpatrick isn't with us anymore.' He'd bless him and say a prayer. I'd mention five or six more people, and when his food got cold, I'd leave." And so that's, that's how Burns gets some revenge on him is he'll just like hang out whatever he's eating and like sit down and talk about all the people who have died recently. So that because he knows he's got to like do a little, just to ruin his meal.

• 1:16:47Robert Evans?

  It's a kind of petty, we should all seek to embody.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  But it's also like such a bizarre interaction because it's like, you hate this guy because he is an unreformed anti semi.

• 1:16:57Robert Evans?

  Absolutely.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  But you're still doing banter with him.

• 1:17:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but you're doing it to fuck up his day, you know?

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, no, I know, but, but it's just like a thing where they still have the type of relationship where there's banter?

• 1:17:11Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  I find that, I mean, listen, I guess, I guess we're just too polarized now, but it's, it's very weird. It's been a minute since I've just had a little joke with a Nazi is what I'm saying.

• 1:17:23Robert Evans?

  Well, and that's, you know, one of the many things we like about you, Andrew T.

• 1:17:28Robert Evans?

  And that is my general best practices is don't, don't joke around with the Nazis. Don't socialize with Nazis. Don't argue with Nazis. Don't debate them. There are some things you should do to Nazis, but we can't talk about that on the podcast in the current political climate.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  So yeah, nothing is being advocated.

• 1:17:45Robert Evans?

  You, you know, anyway, um, how do you feel about this guy coming in?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I, I, it's, this is, this is interesting because it is like, I, I mean, as I said in, in part one, it is like shocking to me. Cause you know what it is, is because I was born in a time, you know, like you, I think we're talking about this, where we had come out of perceiving the, the standup that the seventies, the like, you know, the Carlin's and Kaufman's of the world had kind of left, left at our doorstep.

• 1:18:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Um, made standup seem.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  To the extent that it was political, did not seem like, like, I guess what I mean is like, to me, from my perception, stand-up has taken a big right-wing like turn in my lifetime.

• 1:18:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  And it is interesting to learn that this may simply be reverting to the mean.

• 1:18:46Robert Evans?

  Well, it's at least, I think it's more accurate to say there have always been those kinds of guys in comedy because, you know, Milton Berle, we're talking about how a lot of people hated him. He was not personally super well-loved and, you know, his career is destroyed in large part due to how much of a bigot he is. But this has always been there and it's always been like significant. Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, right. I think what it is, is that there has always been a, an audience that craves this type of guy.

• 1:19:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  And we see it now. This is, this is the, you know, well, there's honestly probably all of the top podcasts besides you have that audience.

• 1:19:29Robert Evans?

  That's not entirely true, but it's not like as far off as it would be nice if it were, right?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like, like there was a massive audience for, I mean, even just like speaking comedic terms, as we've talked a couple of times, for punching down. Like, there is a huge audience.

• 1:19:46Robert Evans?

  That's a place to punch, sure.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  There's an appetite for it, yeah. And although, of course, you know, if you're really gonna strike down, you wanna, you wanna do an elbow down, I think.

• 1:19:56Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  People, punching is, is not as efficient.

• 1:20:00Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. And just, you know, try to find someone shorter than you. That's always the easiest person to hit.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm saying this constantly.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  But like, like, so, so I think that's it. It's just that, that there's always been this audience and the perception that like comedy spoke truth to power, as it were, is like really just the fabrication it's, it's capable of, but it doesn't do it, you know, inherently. Comedy is more about just making fun of the people you hate.

• 1:20:32Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  And sometimes those people deserve it.

• 1:20:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Frank Faye being a great example, right?

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Oh, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, yes, fucking illuminating.

• 1:20:46Robert Evans?

  Fucking illuminating and illuminated fucking. Wait, no, that doesn't work. Anyway.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52Robert Evans?

  Podcast. Do you got anything to plug?

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, I do a podcast called Yo, Is This Racist? We have a premium show that's much more fun called Yo, Can We Live? Where we don't talk about racism.

• 1:21:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, that's it. I don't know.

• 1:21:06Robert Evans?

  Great. Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  It's I.

• 1:21:09Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Ever killed anybody?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Uh, you know what? Not that I know of.

• 1:21:14Robert Evans?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  No, I've never done it.

• 1:21:16Robert Evans?

  We always ask that at the end of these episodes.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:19Robert Evans?

  We ask actually every single guest. We've just had to edit out all of the other times we've done it because every other person who's guested on this show has admitted to a murder. That's a fun Behind the Bastards fact, folks.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Sometimes there's sometimes there's just a long pause and even that's incriminating.

• 1:21:35Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. You gotta be able to say no right away.

• 1:21:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, prosecutors, please arrest and prosecute all of our former guests for murder. Except for Andrew T., you know, innocent. Andrew Innocent T.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Andrew T. Innocent.

• 1:21:52Robert Evans?

  Yep. Well, Sophie's not speaking up, so this must be okay for me to say. Anyway, that's about it for us here today at Behind the Bastards. Ladies, gentlemen, thems, and other pronouns, types of people, go have a good weekend or have a bad weekend. It's pretty bad times right now, but I hope your weekend's good.

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  Just on the podcast.

• 1:22:17Robert Evans?

  Unless you're bad. No, Sophie. Why? Why? Why end a podcast? Podcasts don't need to end. We can just keep going. We can keep vent.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

• 1:22:53Robert Evans?

  Dude wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for messes of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, Dude Wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battle's there. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats, from individually wrapped singles to 48-count Big Daddies. Don't let skids be your lasting legacy. Grab a Dude Wipe and destroy the evidence. Dude Wipes: Best Clean, Hands Down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 1:23:25Speaker 05

  Honestly, honestly. Honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP. PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:24:26Speaker 07

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at bkfsea.com.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.