1506: The Maury Povich Olive Lady

Speaker: I have to warn you, this is a really off the beaten path episode, but please, indulge me, I just hope you find it as interesting as I did. It all started one night while scrolling TikTok. That's when I watched This short clip. What's the matter? I don't want no olives. What? I don't want no olives near me. There are no olives here. There are no olives here. Enough! Olives? Please! No olives! Wait a second. Wait a second. This is a clip from the Maury Povich show. You've probably seen it too, but in case you haven't, this episode features a woman named Sally. Sally is terrified. She's holding on to Maury Povich's arm so tight. You can see that he's in physical pain. My God, you're holding onto my hand and you're going to pull it off. Sally's eyes are shut tight because she fears what's about to happen. Why olives? Because they remind me of dead people. Why do they remind you of dead people? Sally said it's because olives remind her of dead people. She continued to stammer incoherently. Mary, you won't let go of me. The host, Maury Povich, seems compassionate and understanding. But that was just a ploy, because we all know what's about to happen next. A woman comes out from backstage with the biggest damn glass jar of green olives I've ever seen. Sally books it. A cameraman chases her backstage. Then, backstage, a production person tackles Sally and tries to hold her down. Sally is terrified. This video has almost 17 million views on TikTok. It went viral because it's genuinely funny. I don't know why it's funny. It just is, you know? Maybe there's something about watching other people suffer that tickles our funny bone. But is it funny because it could be real? Or is it funny because Sally may be an over the top actress? I have to admit, I don't TikTok like most people. Most people would just swipe up to the next video, but not me. I got stuck. I only watched one TikTok video that night, and it was Sally's olive video. The rest of the time, I spent searching for Sally to find out if she was a real person. So join me as I go down this rabbit hole in my search for Sally, the olive lady from the Maury show. I'm Javier Leyva, and this is Pretend, stories about real people pretending to be someone else. At first, I found Sally's video hysterical. Seriously, who's afraid of olives? How silly is that? But then I remembered that irrational phobias are actually a real thing. In fact, someone really close to me has gone through exposure therapy and I lived through this kind of fear. So it's hard to understand from the outside, but I can tell you from experience, it's really real. I don't think my family member is making it up. Now I'm starting to feel like an asshole for finding Salig's video funny. Maybe she really does have a phobia of olives. I found a video of a doctor who explained it best. Now, I know you're wondering whether or not that's real. Can people really be scared of olives? Well, the answer is yes, you can. You see, this is a type of specific phobia. Now, the thing is, there's no specific name for having a fear of olives, but because a olive is a type of fruit, you can classify this as a type of fructophobia, which is the fear of fruit. So, is it possible that Sally has a fear of fruit? But I still have a hard time believing this is real. You see, this isn't the first time Maury Povich has had a phobia show. He's done this kind of thing before. Today, we're going to meet a group of completely sane adults. They're normal people, but they literally fall to pieces when they are confronted with things like itsy bitsy spiders, children's Halloween masks, Even tiny green olives, they are all suffering from paralyzing phobias. Here's a clip of a woman afraid of cats. Really, cats. Pee Pee was petrified, I mean terrified, over little kitty cats. No, no, no, no, don't do that. Wait a minute! No! Don't do that! No, no, no, no! Just like Sally, she took off at first sight. What is going on, Kimberly? But I didn't have any, I don't have any spiders here. Go get a spider. Do you have to? Huh? Do you have to? Yeah, we have to do that. This is all part of the deal, because I think you have to, I think Gary will say But for some reason, none of these videos hit quite the same way. As Sally's clip, what is it about the woman afraid of olives that makes it so memorable? Well, it turns out that Sally's fear of olives stemmed from a childhood incident. Sally, Sally, black olives or green olives? Any. Any? I don't care. Doesn't matter. Okay. Why olives? Because they remind me of dead people. Why do they remind you of dead people? Because my grandpa sat up in his coffin and looked at me when he died. And so he looked up at you when he died? With green eyes. With green eyes? With a plaque in him. How old were you when this happened? Seven. Seven. And you really believe that your grandfather came right up out of his coffin and he had green eyes? He did. And ever since then, you've been scared of olives. Her dead grandfather sat up in his coffin and looked at her with olive eyes? Yeesh. So I looked up Sally on Google. I got nothing. The show doesn't even list her last name. I read through the YouTube comments, hoping to find someone who said, hey, that's my aunt Sally. She really is afraid of olives. But no luck. Then I got a wild hair up my butt and decided to call Maury Povich himself. Maybe he could fess up and tell me that this was all an elaborate hoax for the TV show. Maury's manager wrote back to me and said, Hi Javier, Maury Povich is retired and trying to do the Johnny Carson. I guess what he means by the Johnny Carson is that Maury Povich is retired and out of the public life after his long career in show business. Well, that's too bad. I never take no for an answer. Maybe, just maybe, I can find someone who worked on the show during the time period that Sally the Olive Lady episode came out. So I started digging. Sally was a guest star on The Maury Show in the episode titled I'm Terrified of Spiders, Lizards, and the Olives. Which aired on October 1st, 2000. I went on IMDb and looked for the crew members who worked during that time period. And guess what? I hit the jackpot. Well, sort of. His name is Anthony Freyer. And boy, did he give me more information than I even bargained for. I'm Anthony Freyer and I'm a former Top Show producer. Produced a Maury was Sally a paid actress? The answer to that is after the break, Anthony Freyer produced 259 episodes of the Maury Povi Show from 1992 to 1997. He also worked on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show and later with Queen Latifah. Do you remember this episode that I'm talking about? I think I was around for the peach lady who was afraid of peaches. like it. It's a, you do the same five shows over and over again. You just label it differently and make it look differently, but it's all the same stuff. Anthony Frere doesn't remember the Olive episode. Maybe it happened right after his time. So I can't tell you conclusively that Sally is real. However, Anthony was able to shed some light into the tactics and policies of the Maury show. And this is where this unusual episode gets even more obscure. We're about to learn how these talk shows work. And I found it quite fascinating and I don't even like talk shows, by the way, the psychological manipulation used on these shows is appalling. It's like a train wreck. And I just couldn't look away. My question was, it's like, Are these guests real? Was it real the whole time or was it real some of the time? No, it would have been a major offense and we would have been fired if we had paid guests to come on. Everyone got, they got their round trip ticket to New York. They got 50 to eat for the night before the show. They were only there for two days. No one was paid very rarely. I don't know. I think I paid LaToya Jackson, but that was all like, All their celebrities and we needed her to snitch on her brother. And sometimes you're willing to pay for a story like that when it came to a celebrity, but like normal everyday people was, they were not paid. I got accused of it once when I worked at Sally, uh, just very competitive nature, very mean spirited producer there who. I don't fucking care. I'll just name her Sally Ann Salsano, who created the Jersey Shore. She was very cutthroat. I always said she'd kill her own mother if she needed to, in order to have a show. And I got accused of paying my guests. And I thought to myself, I don't get paid enough to pay guests. Like where would I get that money? That would come from you guys, because I'm certainly not going to pay a guest. I anticipated that was going to be your answer. So I was thinking if the guests aren't paid and if the guests aren't actors, do you think that maybe they're like hamming it up for the cameras or maybe making their story seem a little bit bigger and more dramatic than it really is? Do you think there's some of that going on? That's a multi layered question, but certainly There are lots of tactics, right? I always say I'm going to go to hell for this, but I would do a show on Tourette's kids with Tourette's for instance. And you just knew that if you fed them Coca Cola and gave them donuts, they would get hyperactive and then their coprolalia would increase, right? And then you might curse around them a little bit and get them all going and get riled up. So like those things would certainly happen. And I also think like you're not a good producer if you don't know how to produce a guest and that's part of your job is not just to find the guest, write the script, brief the host, like all that stuff. The other part is the morning of the show, you're working with the clients to deliver what you want them to deliver and what you're asking them to do is take a blip in their life, right? And we're asking to amplify and focus on that moment in the 3 or 4 minutes we're going to give you on TV, right? So yeah, so in some sense they're forced to do that. So that's what I thought too, that maybe there's some coaching involved. Like you don't just like book a guest and hope that they perform right. You have to get them in that space is what you're saying. Sure. We just don't throw people on. We were live to tape. So 44 minutes, 28 seconds, two and a half minute commercial to 32 commercials. Right? So we didn't have a lot of time to just have people talk and then me go in and edit and get what I wanted. You got to, I mean, you got to bring out the jar of olives and she needs to react and run down the hallway, which as a mental health professional, I would say that is more damaging and more entertaining. That's not really how we do exposure therapy. Yes, you heard right. Anthony frayer post reality talk show career transitioned into the mental health arena. Yes, the guy who induced Tourette's on a kid is now helping people overcome trauma and other woes. I'm the clinical director, owner of the Zoho Center for Mental Health Counseling, New York City. That is a sharp turn from the Maury Povich show, right? Not really, but. So explain that. That was curiosities. I worked with dysfunctional people all the time. It's not a far stretch that I'm working with people with mental health issues. And I'm talking about people who work there. You're not even talking about the guests. Not even talking about the guests. What an interesting person that I found. You're like on both sides of this world, right? So how does, how do you as a mental health professional now reflect back on your Maury Povich days? Were you guys helping these people who had this traumatic event in their life or this trauma or fear? How do you grapple with that now? I have to remember that I was in a different role. And I definitely was never a producer who like. I was never a producer who took advantage of people. My guests always knew what they were in for and they were always, people used to ask me all the time, you're the only producer I know who never didn't have a show. Like you always, your show always came through, your people always came through. And I was like, because I never lied to anybody. My guests never felt unsafe with me because they knew exactly why they were coming on. They knew exactly that I needed them to, what I needed them to do. And they became a part, uh, like they were in on it, right? Like they, they, they knew that I was like, look, are you going to be able to cry when you're telling you this story? Because otherwise people are going to watch Ricky Lake instead. Like they knew they were going to come on and have to give me a hundred percent of themselves. And it became a collaborative effort with me and my, with me and my, my guests. So they never did anything. I never tricked anyone. I never did any of that stuff. They were, you're saying they were in on it. So like even this. And not in on it, but like, they knew why they were there. It's no secret, right? A hundred percent. They, of course they knew why they were there. And then, yeah, the morning of you, you start to work with them and you start to get them into that place. So moving into mental health is not really that different, right? When I'm, I'm working with someone on trauma, like I'm taking a piece of their life, I'm bringing it into the room and we are, Focusing on all of the components of that trauma. What happened that day? Give me all the details. I want to know everything. And then we need to process like the same exact thing we're doing in TV. I don't know. I think shows like Mori showcases the worst that this country has to offer. Let's pray Anthony set aside the theatrics and has focused on the wellbeing of his patients. I never wanted to be a TV producer. I was in school to be a psychologist. I was actually a psychologist. Sophomore at NYU when I got hired at Maury and their only requirement for hiring me was that I did not want to work in television and they just needed someone to answer phones and they didn't want anyone who wanted to be in television to do it because they kept losing their receptionist because they kept wanting to get promoted and all that kind of stuff. So I got bored answering phones. I would literally hear producers be like, I'm looking for Amazon women who like dating little people. And I'm like, I have a few minutes on my hand. I can make some phone calls for you. And yeah, I ended up getting promoted four times in less than a year. I was the youngest. Daytime nominated television producer at age 20. And I was still a junior in college getting a degree in technology. By the way, I'm very surprised by that. I'm shocked that was a requirement. I'm really not. I don't, I think there are very few people that I've worked with who had a degree in TV. Everyone had a degree in something else. It really was about your personality, your ability to, um, to be a salesman, to, to be creative. I set off to find out if the olive lady from the Mori show was real. And what I learned was that this stuff is likely not fake. In fact, it's terrifyingly real. You were describing how you would, you were very successful in getting your guests and, and having a show that actually performed well. Can you think of a time when you had a guest where it didn't, you weren't able to coach them properly? And they were not cooperative or did that ever happen? No, I was really not to toot my own horn. I was really good at what I did. I definitely had, I know your show is called pretend. So I can tell this story. The people back in the nineties, I'm a gay identified male, right? It was not the nicest of times to be living in the nineties. So TV in a lot of ways was like an escape and it was a great place to work. I don't know if you remember the Jenny Jones show. Now, which of these ways would you choose to reveal your secret crush on someone? Would you tell that person that you're gay and you hope he is on national television? In 1995, a man named Scott Amador went on the Jenny Jones talk show to reveal his crush to a woman. On a straight man named Jonathan Schmitz. John's backstage, he can't hear us. Um, how bad's the crush? Tell me about the first time you met him. Where was he? Um, basically, well, he was under a car, working on her brake line. Yeah, and that was your first time? What was your first impression? Um, well, I only saw the lower half of him. You have fantasies about him? I've had a couple, yeah. Let's have John come out here and see who has the crush on him. Here's John. Thank you. Jonathan Schmitz comes from backstage. He's smiling, but he's highly suspicious. Guess what? It's Scott that has the crush on you. You lied to me. Schmitz is visibly uncomfortable. Can you tell us what your status is? Are you involved with anybody or? Um, no, but I am, uh, definitely a heterosexual, I guess you could say. Three days after the men appeared on The Jenny Jones Show, Schmitz bought a 12 gauge shotgun, drove to Amador's home, and killed him. The Amador family sued the Jenny Jones show for a wrongful death, but the show was ultimately found not liable. Scott Amador's death was not an act. Anthony Frayer says that he also produced same sex crush episodes. But he says that his approach was a bit different. The reason why none of my same sex crush, crush people never killed anyone is because they, again, all knew what they were coming in for. There was never a surprise. And I know at the Jenny Jones show, there was, they just didn't tell them what they were coming on for. I always gave people the possibilities, right? I was always like, Hey, someone has a crush on you. Could be a guy, could be a girl, could be a unicorn, could be a drag queen, could be whatever. If you have a problem with any of those things, tell me now. And if they were like, yeah, if it's a fucking faggot, blah, blah, blah, I'm not going to, you know, and I'd be like, okay, I'll keep you in mind. I'll call you back. And I never would. I wouldn't use people like that on a show. I want people who are going to have fun. Fun because I want to have fun. My job's already hard. So I want to have a fun time. So I, I produced this same sex crush show. And when one of the women showed up, it was clear that she might not have been a woman or not have been born a woman. And at the time we weren't as woke as we are now. We were even for a gay producer. I was like, Ooh, this is too much. And I can't do this to the guy because that's not. One of the options I had given him, so I had to go back to the guy and I was just like, Hey, there's like an issue, you know, is this going to be a problem if it ends up being a trans woman? And he was just a cool guy. He was just like, no, I'll have fun with it. Don't worry about it. And I could tell by his demeanor that he was not going to be a jerk about it. He wasn't going to shame her. He wasn't going to do any of that stuff. And then I had to go and have a conversation. You know, how to talk to the woman and say, Hey, is there something you didn't tell me? And let's have that conversation now, because this could be potentially dangerous for you, dangerous for us. Just not a cool thing. We'll just, it's fine. We just won't tape your segment. We'll send you home. But it turns out we ended up doing the segment anyway, and it was all good. What really gets me about this whole thing is that Maury Povich used to be a serious journalist. He anchored the news in very big TV markets. You know, that's where he met his wife, newswoman, Connie Chung. Then his career took a less serious turn when he took a job hosting the tabloid television show, A Current Affair. Maury had come from A Current Affair and Maury still had a moral compass. I'm sure he still does today, but like at that time it was a little bit different. We weren't even allowed to do paternity tests with him. He would not allow it. But sometime around 1998, the Maury Povich producers changed hands. Studio USA took over the production of the show from Paramount Television. Studios USA was the parent company for Sally Just Raffael and the Jerry Springer show, so they had a different feel. They no longer could use the name The Maury Povich Show, so they dropped The Povich. And that's when it became the trashy show we all have come to love, the Maury show. When you're paid 27 million, all of a sudden you're doing, this is my baby daddy. And that became a staple of his new show. Maury Povich was a serious journalist. He's married to a serious journalist. One of my favorite people. Yeah, and, and it's so surprising, and I was wondering what made that turn, and money does go a long way. Absolutely. In the case of four year old Brandon, Gary, you are not. But in all fairness, the new Maury show had some standards. Not a lot of standards, but, you know, it had some. For example, fights. Like the one you see on the Jerry Springer show. Holy. Those were not tolerated on Maury. Right. He would have stopped it more. He would have stopped the show and not allowed us to. Yeah, that was his famous line. He would stop it and say, this is my show. It was very famous. Between you and me and the rest of the world, did he hate it? Did he enjoy the show or did he just hate it? I think there were times he hated it. I think there were times he loved it. The thing is that they're human beings. They have their good days. They're bad days. Maury and I fought like cats and dogs many times. And we also loved each other like crazy. Right. I know you didn't produce the olive show, but it's an example, right? So people who have phobias, and so you come up with the idea and now you've got to find these people, right? Sure. Yeah. How the hell do you find people who are afraid of olives? There were a couple of different avenues. Look, like, depending, like, we, I had a relationship with Guinness World Book of Records, so I always had access to people like the tallest woman in the world, Sandy Allen, who, like, ended up becoming a friend of mine. There's ways that you can find these sensationalized guests. That was fairly easy. You'd put out a question on the air, like, hey, if you're afraid of strange objects, call 1 800 blah blah blah blah blah, right? And people would call, and we would get thousands of calls that you'd have to, you're, this is what we had interns for, and, and you had, you know, Entire teams of people just transcribing these things. So we had the added pressure of your guests had to look good and you couldn't just say, text me a picture of what you look like now. You couldn't say, email me a picture. You had a FedEx account number again, four days, produce a show sometimes three days, produce a show. And you had to say like, Hey, take a Polaroid. If you remember what a Polaroid was, take a Polaroid. Put it in the FedEx, overnight it to me, and then if you looked good enough, or I could dress you up, think I see you, what I think you might look like with makeup on, that would determine where you placed on the show, whether you were like first, second, third, or not at all. And if you didn't have teeth and it was a great story, I brought you in two days early, got your teeth, and then I spent the morning of a show teaching you how to say Mississippi without a lisp for hours and hours. So there was a lot of work that went into it. Sometimes a lot of times we would. We would get newspapers delivered every morning. So you'd be in at 6 a. m. and you're reading whatever. I was in charge of Missouri and Vermont, whatever. I had my states, other people had other states, and you just poured through newspapers and you would look for stories. And then you'd go to a morning meeting and say, Hey, this baby was found in a freezer in Kentucky. You want to do this? And you might be on a plane a half hour later. Like. Trying to go get a story and my favorite when I needed to get ahold of someone and I didn't have their phone number, you know, you could still call 411 for someone's phone number, but if it was unlisted, you could still get the operator to maybe help you get a phone number to a neighbor. And then you would sometimes call a neighbor and say, Hey, do you mind go knocking on the door, telling, giving them my number, or tell them I'm trying to get ahold of them. But if all of that failed, but you had an address, uh, you would call up a pizzeria and send a pizza pie to their house, or, and just ask the delivery person to write a note. That's a call Maury or call Anthony at Maury or whatever. So yeah, like they were, I feel like I could produce six shows a day with the amount of resources I was telling a friend the other day, I was like, we produced, I was like, do you know how like the Apollo, they say that they managed to get to the moon with the amount of technology that's like in a phone, maybe less, right? That's how I feel. We produce talk shows. We were able in the nineties to produce. Shows with about that much technology. And then imagine what we could do today with all the resources that we have. That's nuts coming from the TV world and as a podcaster who tries to get guests is very impressive. So I can't even imagine how many hours a day you work just to pull these off. Yeah. 18 hour days easy. I used to think, wow, they treat us so well. My office is so great. I have a sofa bed. I have an entertainment center. Because they didn't want you to leave. Because you don't leave. And when I retired from TV, I remember I had owned my apartment for like eight years and I retired from TV and I had some time on my hands and I was at home and I'm like, this apartment doesn't get light. I need to sell it. And I'm like, why did it take me eight years to realize that this apartment doesn't have light? Because for eight years, I had never been in my apartment during the day. I would leave before the sun would come up, and I'd come home way after the sun went down. So I had no idea that my apartment was in the bright apartment. So I sold it. My last question was going to be, why did you leave television? But I think you've answered that. Listen, I, at the end of the day, the last show I produced was Queen Latifah. I adore her. She is one of my favorite people in the world. Probably out of all of them, she was the youngest in terms of having been on, but probably the one who had it the most together, who can put it together and do what you needed her to do. I wish I could work with her every day. Dana was amazing, but the executive producers were the best. People from Jenny Jones and from Ellen. And at the end of the day, I, I just could not, I knew that the next level for me was to become like an executive of sorts. And you, and I did not want to be them. I did not want to be them. They were very abusive and I just felt like this is the end of the road. I want to leave on a high note. Anthony fair still has one foot in show business. He says he helped on the podcast, bad things, the Blackstone sisters. I just, my, my philosophy in life is if I'm not having a good time, don't do it. So I'm still having a good time owning this mental health clinic. I love teaching at NYU, love my students, but, but yeah, I love everything I'm doing and soon to retire, hopefully. Let me tell you, Anthony, I thought this was going to be like a little bonus episode, I. It's so enjoyed this interview. This was so much better. You were such more candid than I expected. I, I was really expecting, yeah, sorry. I'm, I can't talk about that or like, I thought you were just going to like, torpedo each of my questions. So, No, it's so funny you say that because for a long time there, a bit of a gag, there's like a gag order on you because you signed contracts that say you, you know, That you won't talk about things and all that stuff, but that's only until the show is no longer in production. And interestingly enough, and I'll tell you a really funny story. I, cause this is when you leave TV, you lose an identity and you forget that you don't have as much power that you used to. As you did when you were a television producer, like you dropped names. I'm like, Oh, I'm calling on behalf of Oprah. Like I need to get into this club and they, it doesn't matter. Like you can just do anything. So I had a producer mentality for a very long time. And to this day, part of why I'm successful is because I don't take no for an answer. There is no for an answer. Like when you want something, you get it done. There's no, and I think that you and I share that same philosophy. I'm trying to get ahold of somebody right now. For a series that I'm working on. Yeah. And if they say no to me, that's a really soft yes. Because yeah, if you really wanna say no to me, don't pick up the phone. Yep. Don't respond to an email. But if you respond, no, I know I got you on the hook. I just have to reel you in and, and I never take no for an answer. That's, I think that's part of my success too, is that the way I get. You got it, right? There's, this is what I, I always, I could tell when new producers would be hired, I'm like, yeah, they're not going to be part of our family. They're not going to last here very long. They're just not. So that's it for today's episode. That was a weird one. Yes, I must admit. But I found it thoroughly fascinating. I hope you did too. Tell me what you think about it. Lighter episodes like this. Do you want me to throw some of these in every now and then shoot me an email Javier at pretend radio. org, or you could send me a message on social media, Tik TOK, Instagram, Facebook, or the Facebook group. I'd love to hear what you think of the show. And I make this for you. Today's episode was written by me, Javier Leyva, and it was edited by Poonath Chinoy with the podcast pundits. All right. Talk to you next week. Yeah. Yeah.