stars prior to working on TCA together. I had hung out with them and worked with them in high-pressure situations. None were close friends, but I liked them all and thought I knew them a bit. But sixteen hours a day with TV cameras all around, doing pointless fake corporate tasks outside one’s skill set with Clay Aiken (the guy who came in second on American Idol years ago), and no one worries about the whole world watching (with the exception of anyone who has a job, someone to talk to, a nice view out the window or a solitaire program). You’re happy if you don’t swallow your own tongue.
The secret truth of The Celebrity Apprentice is that it isn’t very hard. The tasks are nothing. Makeup starts just after five a.m. and the show goes to about ten p.m., but you spend most of that time doing nothing. Anyone who isn’t in show business could accomplish everything the show called for and have time left over to do their laundry, cook their supper and post pictures of their animal companion on Facebook. The Celebrity Apprentice is easy like junior high is easy. All the arithmetic, the creative writing and the history are super simple, but like junior high, you do that easy work surrounded by people who are full-tilt hormone-raging bugnutty. Everyone is panicked, desperate, yelling, swearing, attacking, backstabbing, failing to get laid and acting crazy. With all this drama, any sane person just wants to do more algebra. The Celebrity Apprentice is junior high with a better brand of acne cover-up.
Like all desperate celebrities, I’ve been on more than one reality show. I also did Dancing with the Stars. I was amazed to find out that The Celebrity Apprentice was more honest and straightforward than DWTS. The idea of DWTS is pretty beautiful: half-assed show folk who aren’t dancers are teamed up with great dancers, and cameras video them while they learn to dance. How well can people learn to do something outside their ken? It’s a beautiful idea. Dance is a joyous celebration of humanity, so it should be an uplifting, inspiring show to watch and even more beautiful to be on.
Well, I loved being around Kym Johnson, my DWTS dancing partner. Kym was a delight. She oozed professional skill and joy. I loved working on the dancing. I love practicing things I’m not good at, and it was an easy schedule. But I hated the time that was spent with the production trying to get young ambitious Mormon women to cry. Guys behind the cameras would say mean things at attractive young men and women and washed-up celebrities about how it would ruin their lives if they didn’t win. The producers were hoping to capture some “good TV.” A young wannabe art filmmaker would take me into my “confessional” and ask me to talk about how upset I was going to be if I was the first one voted off—the biggest failure possible in reality. I was the most incompetent and I was off the show as quickly as anyone could be. I found out how I’d feel. The answer was fine. Others danced better than me, but no one danced with more joy. And being on that show for one round made me a lot of money in ticket sales to the Penn & Teller show. If I’d stayed on longer, I would have made much more money—but I’m paid more than I ever expected anyway so that failure is pretty easy to take. It didn’t take food out of my children’s mouths. A twenty-four-year-old film student with a notebook would ask me (me, a guy who worked in the carny) things like, “Is Dancing with the Stars the hardest you’ve ever worked? Is it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” I’d explain that anyone who has a job, any job, or spent any time looking for a job outside show business had worked harder that day than anyone on any celebrity reality show (I specify “celebrity” because it seems those frozen ass crab fishermen work pretty hard). If you fix cars, sell cars, drive cars, practice medicine, take medicine, sell medicine, give pedicures, give blow jobs or work at a KFC, you worked harder today than any celebrity on any reality show ever has. Every time I was asked the “how hard are you working” question on Dancing with the Stars, I gave them that answer. They didn’t ever use that answer on the show. They have to pretend it’s hard work. It isn’t.
The Celebrity Apprentice is more honest, in that creepy kind of way that the guy who admits he’s a racist is more honest. It doesn’t pretend to be about something beautiful like dance. I think business is beautiful, but The Celebrity Apprentice has nothing to do with business. No actual business skills are tested. It’s not even a real game about fake business. I can tell you the rules of chess (I know the rules well enough to lose to anyone). I can’t tell you the rules to The Celebrity Apprentice. No one can tell you the rules of The Celebrity Apprentice. No one. Donald Trump just does what he wants, which is mostly pontificating to people who are sucking up to him, while the network people try to manipulate him into making the highest-rated show they can. Trump can’t be manipulated, so the show isn’t even fair in that way. Annie Duke, the poker genius, and TCA veteran, said to me, “It’s a pretend game, about pretend business, where you get pretend fired.” Donald Trump couldn’t fire me. I work for Penn & Teller and he’s never owned any part of us. Trump tried to book Penn & Teller once in Vegas at one of his casinos, but we were priced out of his budget. He can’t fire us from the Rio, because he doesn’t own any of Caesars.
TCA pretends to be about raising money for charity. That’s true, but only so far. If I had not taken time off from the Penn & Teller show to do The Celebrity Apprentice— if Teller and I had just done our show, gotten usual pay—I could have donated four times the amount of money that Trump had pledged to give my charity if I won the whole damn shooting match. Opportunity Village, “my” charity that helps intellectually disabled adults to enter society, got a lot of attention because I was on The Celebrity Apprentice, and that does count for something. And when I was “fired,” my real bosses at Caesars, who own the Rio and the Penn & Teller Theater, said, “Oh, you wanted a quarter million for Opportunity Village? We don’t have to do some jive TV show; we’ll just write a check.” They wrote the full winning amount to Opportunity Village and everyone was happy. But The Celebrity Apprentice people are honest. They don’t pretend it’s about something beautiful, and they don’t pretend it’s fair. It’s venal people clawing at stupid, soulless shit in front of the modern-day Scrooge McDuck in order to stay famous.
The producers of TCA are a couple of really groovy women whom I grew to know a little and like a lot. They wanted the show to be honest, and they kept it honest. I didn’t watch the show, but I didn’t hear about any edits that were really disingenuous. They had to tell a story, and stories are never real, but they showed a view of the show that was certainly as accurate as the one you’re reading now. I never saw them lie, or push someone to get the reaction they wanted. They just let it happen with integrity and honesty. For one “task,” Donald Trump asked us to create a Macy’s store display and print ads for his new fragrance. Is there anyone who wants to smell like Donald Trump? Mr. Trump thinks so, so we were asked to create advertising. Instead of the usual twenty grand that the show would give to the winning “team leader’s” charity, Donald floated the promise that if he “loved” our promotional material, he would give one hundred thousand dollars to his “loved” one’s charity. Five times the amount that was arbitrarily assigned to this “task.” In other words, if Trump got an ad that he could actually use for his stink-pretty juice, he would pay about twenty percent of what he would have to pay in the free market to hire a professional to do the job properly. Trump was willing to donate one-fifth of what the campaign would be worth to charity. I got fired for coming up with the slogan “You Earned It.” They thought that slogan was “pompous.” My slogan for a perfume with Donald’s picture on it called “Success” was deemed pompous. Wow. The problem was my audience, I think. “You Earned It” isn’t good for the Trumps. It should have been “You Inherited It.” I would have won. I also helped with some of the parts of the campaign they liked, but the team chose my slogan, so not having a slogan would have been better than having one they don’t like. The game theory is to do as little as possible. Not the way I live my life, but it’s not my game, it’s Trump’s.
TCA gets the coin on both sides: they get NBC to pay for the show and they get the corporations to pay for the “challenges.”
Trump stays rich in real estate and stays kinda sorta famous for his “brand.” Trump is obsessed with his brand and that’s all you really need to know. Trump is on a game on TV where my showbiz peers, if they want to play the game, have to suck up to him, and I sucked up to him. I’d sit and smile and listen, because I promised the producers I would do my best. The boardrooms went long and I was there to spend about twenty-two hours, over six weeks listening to Trump do his monologues. He’d talk about Occupy Wall Street and global warming while he was deciding whom to pretend to fire from his pretend business. Bill Gates is fighting polio, and polio and I don’t suck up to him, but I was on TV with Donald Trump, so I did my job. I wasn’t even going to say anything about Trump’s hair. I live in a glass house. I’ve always had ugly, out-of-style hair. Trump’s hair is a lot better than mine— but as I sat there for hours half listening to Donald carry on, it struck me exactly what his hair looked like. It looks like cotton candy made of piss. That revelation came to me, and I had to type it here. But my hair is worse.
