(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
JOHNNY OLSON: A fortune in fabulous prizes
may go to these people tonight
if they know when The Price is Right.
And now, here's the ultimate: a three-wheeled car!
(CHEERING)
It's the Dale,
a whole new concept in automotive design,
a three-wheeled chassis with a high-impact
plastic resistant Rosen body, top speed of 85 miles per hour.
For comfort and economy, it's the Dale
by Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation.
NEWS ANCHOR #1: ...a rough-talking promoter
named Elizabeth Carmichael.
She's president and prime mover behind the Dale.
NEWS ANCHOR #2: The miracle is in the mileage,
a promise of 70 per precious gallon.
ELIZABETH GERALDINE CARMICHAEL: We've taken a total concept,
integrated it, and built a whole new means of transportation.
MALE VOICE: Mrs. Carmichael is no pessimist.
REPORTER #1: Think you're going to be able to take on GM?
We're gonna whip GM.
A couple of nights ago, on the television show
The Price is Right,
the grand prize was a three-wheeled Dale automobile.
That embarrassing show was taped several months ago
when the Dale was getting reams of publicity.
But is the Dale all it's been cracked up to be?
Now state officials tell us
that Mrs. Carmichael's fingerprints
match those of a notorious conman.
Mrs. Elizabeth Carmichael
is actually Mr. Jerry Dean Michael.
And the secret life of Jerry Michael
is the stuff of wildly imaginative adventure novels.
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
There's so much to say about my father. I...
How long you got?
SUSAN STRYKER: She lived as a man for a long time,
but that doesn't mean that she wasn't trans.
CANDI MICHAEL: My father was my hero.
CHARLES RICHARD BARRETT: I'll tell you what.
There was so much cloak and dagger going on.
It was a difficult life. That's all.
(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS)
CARMICHAEL: The very first piece of literature I can ever remember moving me
was about in the... third grade, maybe,
a teacher reading a little thing.
It was the story of a spider who leaped from a windowsill
and failed to reach the side
where it was trying to string its web,
then climbed back up and leaped again,
climbed back up and leaped again.
And the moral of the story is if you first don't succeed,
try and try again.
That's the first thing that I can remember
being impressed by in literature.
-(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS) -(CRICKETS CHIRPING)
It's so hard to explain to people
because Liz is like two people to me.
The first part of the transition
was just calling Daddy "Jerry."
And it took several years, but eventually Jerry
became Aunt Jerry, then Aunt Liz, and then Mother.
This is a course of over probably three years.
So from that point on,
my father, Jerry Dean Michael,
became my mother, Elizabeth Geraldine Carmichael.
♪ (PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CANDI: Jerry Dean Michael was born a farm boy,
but was too smart for his own good.
(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS)
CARMICHAEL: I was born on a dirt farm, very poor.
I did occasionally get to go to the movies.
Here I saw people driving fancy cars
and living in fancy buildings.
(GUNSHOTS)
And somewhere about 15 years of age,
I realized that there was a better way to live
than on a dirt farm.
(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS OFF)
(MUSIC CONCLUDES)
It was a brick home.
Probably one of the nicer ones around.
(CHUCKLES)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
♪ ("BABY COUNT TEN" BY THE BELL SISTERS PLAYING) ♪
♪ One ♪
♪ Baby, count one ♪
♪ While you're having fun With someone else ♪
♪ Don't come around ♪
CARL ZUKUNFT:
♪ Two ♪
♪ Baby, count two ♪
♪ But when you're all through With your romance ♪
♪ Leave me alone ♪
♪ Ten... ♪
ZUKUNFT: Three or four cars may have passed us
the whole time we was walking ten miles.
♪ But when you've the yen To count me in ♪
♪ Count me out ♪
ZUKUNFT: He said, "Aw, we're just unlucky."
♪ Count me out ♪
♪ One, two, three, four, five Six, seven, eight, nine ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
(LAUGHTER)
(SIREN WAILING)
KENNETH YERYAR :
(CROWD CLAMORING)
YERYAR :
When Jerry was young,
he had a couple marriages before he met my mother,
and was always going out for adventures,
whether they'd be business or just mischief in general.
FBI NARRATOR: FBI case file: Jerry Dean Michael.
1946 to 1958.
Kenneth Paul Wolf advised that he is a one-time friend
of the subject, Jerry Dean Michael,
as they both grew up together in Jasonville, Indiana.
Wolf advised that in 1946, he enlisted in the army
and came in contact with Jerry Dean Michael.
Wolf advised that he and the subject
were shipped overseas to Germany.
WAR VIDEO NARRATOR: The problem now is future peace.
That is your job in Germany.
FBI NARRATOR: The next time he had occasion to see the subject
was in 1948.
At that time, the subject was married
to a German girl by the name of Marga.
Marga advised that she married Jerry Dean Michael
during his military service in Germany
and has two children by him.
(DOOR OPENS)
Jerry Dean Michael was charged
with desertion of his wife, Marga, and their children
with a penal sum of 1,000 dollars.
The subject entered a plea of guilty,
receiving one to three years at Indiana Reformatory
plus court costs be paid by Marga
and the subject's mother.
The sentence was suspended and the subject was released
on his own recognizance.
Jerry Dean Michael married Juanita Haseman in 1954,
and her father paid the down payment
on their first apartment.
-(KNOCKING ON DOOR) -The subject appeared to be a smooth talker
and sold knitting machines which he built with the promise
that he would by the products the customer produced.
(PHONE RINGS, BEEPS)
AUTOMATED VOICE: The number you are trying to reach
has been disconnected.
FBI NARRATOR: Juanita Haseman advised that she and the subject
changed residences twenty-one times
in the three years of their marriage,
and they resided in the states of New York,
California, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, and Florida.
(KNOCKING ON DOOR)
Juanita's father described the subject as "no-good,
always attempting some unethical means
of shortcutting to success."
(KNOCKING ON DOOR)
In the spring of 1956,
Juanita had finally had enough of this marriage
and left the subject.
Juanita had two children by Jerry Dean Michael,
but he has never seen the youngest child.
The subject Jerry Dean Michael operated a small newspaper
over a local grocery store.
The subject did not enjoy a very good reputation
-in the community. -(GRUMBLING)
FBI NARRATOR: The newspaper had been unsuccessful,
and no paper was continued after the subject
left the small town of Elnora.
The subject changed residences frequently,
commenting that it was cheaper than paying rent.
Jerry Dean Michael worked for United Vacuum Cleaners in 1957.
The subject was an excellent salesman
and had a good mechanical knowledge
of vacuum cleaners and sewing machines.
The subject was fired,
as he was pocketing down payments made by customers.
Jerry Dean Michael considered himself a soldier of fortune,
divulging that he was going to Cuba
to join the revolutionaries,
and expressed other ideas which were considered wild
by anyone hearing them.
Jerry Dean Michael once told an acquaintance
that he hauled guns for distribution
to Castro's troops,
and that he was put in jail in Cuba by Batista
and freed by Castro's revolutionary forces.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
The subject said he returned to the United States
by fishing vessel
and swam ashore at Bakers Hollow, Florida.
Mrs. Betty Sweet stated she met Jerry Dean Michael
in Linton, Indiana, during the spring of 1958,
and after acquaintance of approximately four weeks,
married the subject,
and thereafter lived with him for a period of two months,
during which time she conceived a child.
She related the subject was continually involved
in trouble with law enforcement,
and she therefore separated from him
in August of 1958.
She stated the child, a girl, was born,
and the subject has never seen her.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
BARRETT: Vivian met Jerry when she was 16
at Pam's, where she worked.
And she probably flirted with him,
to be quite honest, you know.
She, uh, had a wit about her, and she was very intelligent.
She could talk you into things...
(CHUCKLING) ...if she really wanted to.
She was beautiful. She was a really pretty woman.
Guys were always looking at her, you know, including Jerry.
He was, to me, an old man
because I'm 14 years old
and he took an interest in my sister,
which I didn't care for
because that's my buddy he's messing with. (LAUGHS)
And that changed later.
Jerry was really kind of suave, I guess.
Easygoing, always smiling.
Uh, I mean, you talk to him for a few minutes,
and all of a sudden, you've got a friend.
Vivian's older than I am, but we were the same age.
We were only a year apart, roughly.
And we plotted and we schemed about things,
and we were very tight.
I remember the day that her and Jerry left.
And that upset me, really upset me.
She came to me and she said,
"Richard, I'm gonna tell you something."
She says, "I love Jerry...
and I'm gonna leave with him."
And I said, "Okay. What's going on?"
She says, "Well, we're gonna get married.
We're going to California.
You gotta promise me, Richard,
that you can't tell Mom and Dad."
I said, "Oh. Are you sure?"
She says, "I'll be fine."
She says, "He loves me. We're leaving."
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Well, I'm crying.
(CRICKETS CHIRPING)
Gets toward late at night, and my dad comes home.
He's mad.
He gets me out of bed, and he says, "Where is she?"
He said, "Is she running around with that guy?"
I said, "I don't know."
I said, "I haven't seen her since school."
And I'm trying to lie as best I can.
Bottom line, she left, and I... I just could not believe it.
It was-- I was torn up.
And my dad was abusive, he was bad.
Jerry offered Vivian a way out.
I mean, uh...
man, she gets to leave
and start her own real life, you know, and she did.
♪ (MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
They complemented each other.
There was something in their psyche
that both of them clicked, and they did.
They knew what the others were thinking.
A year later, my sister, Vivian, said she was pregnant.
She said, "I don't know what to do."
And Mom said, "Well, there's a house next door.
Why don't you come over and see if I can get that house
and you can be here for the baby being born."
So they moved in there.
Jerry had a very endearing, charismatic personality.
When Jerry made a friend, they were friends for life.
BARRETT: I just followed him like a puppy dog...
(CHUCKLING) ...'cause he was so cool.
We did a lot of...
I guess you'd call them illegal things.
At the time, it was just an adventure.
I learned things from Jerry.
I learned how to create any kind of identities.
It used to not be difficult to change your identification.
BARRETT: You take certain emblems
off of different things.
You can laminate it if you want.
Back then, we didn't have fancy equipment.
But you know what? It worked.
You are now a graduate of Yale University.
You have a pilot's license. You're a full-time pilot.
He'd gotten that new check writer.
You can put in any amount and just hit it,
and it embosses it, makes it look real.
And then just a signature, and then you've got the ID
that you're an employee at that company.
He'd always got money, and it was easy money,
and, um, like...
And I thought, "Man.
Doesn't get any better than this.
-Sixteen years old..." -(ENGINE REVS)
...got me a Lincoln, and living good.
(LAUGHS)
(BOTTLES CLINK)
He would always tell me, "It's so much easier
to get 75,000 out of somebody
than it is to get a twenty-dollar bill.
The people that think about twenty-dollar bills earned it.
And some of these other people didn't."
And he said, "They wanna give it away
and I'm here to take it away."
(KNOCKING ON DOOR)
We got in trouble for it.
(SMASHING)
We had gotten arrested, and we were in the courtroom.
And he leans over to me and he says,
"Did this make the papers?"
And I said, "Yeah. It did."
He says, uh, "Front page?"
And I said, "No, no.
A little blurb down here on the back page or whatever."
He says, "Get me a copy of that."
I said, "Okay."
It seemed to please him.
I said, "Are you worried about going to jail for a long time?"
And he says, "Don't worry about it.
Everything's fine."
And I was afraid that I was gonna go in jail with him.
They tried to identify who all the other people were.
ATTORNEY: Did anyone else help you commit these crimes?
BARRETT: And he would not open his mouth.
He always protected me.
He will protect you to the bitter end.
And he'll take the heat because he says,
"I can handle the heat."
It was that little cat smile,
and I knew that he was in charge.
That judge was not in charge.
That prosecutor over there was not in charge.
Jerry was. That was his courtroom.
This was not a challenge to him because these people
were not on his intellect level.
He was having fun.
And when he'd wink at me, I knew it.
I said, "Son of a gun, he's got it.
He's confident."
Matter of fact, I think he got out of it.
So he-- He's just Jerry, you know.
What can I say? He was cool.
(HAMMERING)
Before I was born,
Jerry actually owned a newspaper,
a very small newspaper.
My father told me that it was his partner's idea
to start making fake money.
Jerry said that the money never looked right,
and it was Vivian's idea
to stain the paper using coffee and tea,
and it made it look very realistic.
(TYPEWRITER KEYS CLACKING)
FBI NARRATOR: From February 9th, 1961, to May 15th, 1961,
Jerry Dean Michael photographed and printed
a series of bogus Federal Reserve Notes
in five, ten, and twenty-dollar denominations.
The subject used the fictitious business
of Los Angeles Distributing Company
as a front for his counterfeiting activities
located above David Eisner's Monarch Frozen Food Company.
(BUZZER)
Once Jerry Dean Michael printed the bogus notes,
he turned them over to Eisner, who, in turn,
passed them in the West Los Angeles area
with the assistance of Ralph Wheeler,
an employee of Eisner's.
Wheeler's girlfriend, Elizabeth Harper Colton,
also assisted Wheeler in passing some of the notes.
(LAUGHTER)
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
The first break in the case came
when certain Federal Reserve Notes
were traced to defendant David Eisner.
Jerry Dean Michael was taken into custody
by Secret Service agents on August 4th, 1961,
at his Granada Hills home.
Jerry Dean Michael, described as
a highly intelligent and cunning criminal,
refused to cooperate with Secret Service agents.
The federal grand jury on August 30th, 1961,
returned an indictment charging Jerry Dean Michael
with conspiracy and possession of counterfeit currency.
On September 18th, 1961, the subject failed to appear
in US District Court in Los Angeles
for arraignment and plea to the indictment.
A bench warrant for the subject's arrest
was issued the same day.
A search of Jerry Dean Michael's home
disclosed a large number of library books
dealing with various phases of criminal law.
The subject was intent upon following a criminal career
and would probably not be easy to locate.
CANDI: My parents, they were released on bail, and ran.
I believe Vivian was pregnant at the time with me.
That's what started the run for his life or for his freedom.
♪ (MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
The FBI was actively pursuing Jerry and Vivian
for the counterfeiting.
And it was just part of life.
As a child,
we rarely lived in one place for more than two months.
There was always the fear that they were found.
I grew up all over the United States,
from California to Florida,
as high up as Chicago, Illinois, and, well,
down at the tip of Florida was the farthest we went south.
But usually, we stuck around the Sun Belt,
is what my father called it.
We all had last names which were made up.
You look at old newspaper clippings about deaths,
preferably deaths of children.
Then you write to the Bureau of Vital Statistics.
You get that dead child's birth certificate.
That is now your identification.
We didn't attend school so there'd be no paper trail.
Vivian taught our letters,
and our father, Jerry, taught us how to write.
We might have had a strange family,
but we were a tight-knit family.
My brother Brian was very precocious.
Is that the nice way to say "a horrible little brat"?
(LAUGHS)
Always, like my father, running off for adventures.
My sister Wendy was the quiet one,
never caused any trouble,
just pretty much tried to stay invisible.
And then my sister Shawn was the princess of the family.
I think it's 'cause she came along
at a better time in life.
And then there's my youngest brother, Michael.
Oh, he was a handful as a child.
MICHAEL MICHAEL: I enjoyed being on the road.
We-- I got to see things that I know, you know,
a lot of people never get to see in their lifetime.
We stopped at all kinds of places,
like, uh, trading posts and truck stops,
and I've got those memories, you know?
CANDI: There was this newspaper called the Free Press.
They would put in coded ads.
And there'd be words.
"The red horse is still available."
Or, "If you're still interested in the Impala, call Ted."
This was how they would find people.
For the longest time, I never understood
how extended family members would find us.
We were moving every couple weeks,
or we didn't have an address.
Next thing you know,
there's a relative meeting you in a state park.
It's because somebody had placed an ad,
and that was the response.
BARRETT: They floated in and out.
They'd be here, and then they wouldn't.
The FBI or somebody was always coming back
and wanting information on 'em.
-CANDI: One of the signs... -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
...if somebody had tapped your phone,
which means listening in on private conversations,
was you heard this unusual clicking on the other end.
(STATIC AND CLICKING)
In my house, when you heard that clicking,
it means they found you.
And come nightfall, we were sneaking into the car
and gone off to another town.
To you, waking up and having your mother make breakfast
and your father going off to work
might be a normal thing.
To me, a normal thing was just getting used to a house
and finally getting friends,
and then sneaking off in the middle of the night,
the kids piling in the car and winding up
sleeping in the car on the side of the road,
10 hours later, in another state.
That was normal life.
BARRETT: He had those kids trained so well
that if there was a conflict, something happened,
they were to immediately drop what they had.
If they were riding their bicycle,
just leave it in the street.
Leave everything.
The police could be knocking on the next-door house...
-♪ (SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪ -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
...and we would be gone before they ever got to ours.
Just gone.
One of the times we were being chased,
we were in Indiana.
This is the middle of the night.
We're on a dirt track that's no longer used as a road.
Jerry was driving.
All of a sudden, he said, "Someone's following us."
My sister and I are turning,
we're looking out the back window.
There was a car following us.
Jerry started driving like a maniac...
turning corners on two wheels,
going probably 80 miles an hour on city streets.
We did get away, but that was a terrifying experience.
Growing up, we were either devastatingly trash poor
or we lived quite comfortably in very nice houses.
I don't know how to describe it.
He would make a business out of basically nothing.
He could.
(MONKEYS CHITTERING)
CANDI: When I was very young, my father had a pet store.
My father specialized in exotic pets.
My father would bring some of the pets home
so they weren't left in the store overnight.
Not only do you have a houseful of rambunctious children,
you've got monkeys climbing up the drapes.
It's no wonder my mother was so stressed.
Jerry couldn't do anything on a small basis.
Buying fish from South America was too expensive,
so they decided to breed their own fish.
He said if you had a little fish that didn't cost anything,
and they reproduce so fast,
then you just needed a thousand aquariums.
CANDI: My father would go and pitch people
to flood their basements
and turn their basements into hatcheries for tropical fish.
So he had a constant supply of healthy tropical fish,
grown right here in the United States of America.
And son of a gun, it made money.
(CHUCKLES)
CANDI: I remember this home Jacuzzi thing,
where they designed this machine
that kind of looked like a sewing machine.
It sat on the edge of your bathtub
and would make the water in your bathtub swirl around.
And I remember being excited, thinking,
"Oh, we're going to be normal.
We're gonna stay in house, everything's gonna be fine,
because they just came up with this great idea,
and everything is gonna be wonderful."
And two months later, we're sneaking out the back door
and on the run again.
And then I remember a year later,
seeing these machines that my father designed
being advertised on television.
AD NARRATOR #1: A perfect way to relax
-is with a Jacuzzi whirlpool bath. -(APPLAUSE)
It really upset me at the time, and I was thinking,
"That could've been us if my father wasn't a criminal."
♪ (SLOW PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Jerry had a connection through some of the old Detroit friends.
Jerry came to the house. He brought a friend with him.
And he was a concert pianist.
And we had a piano there,
and he played that piano like, my gosh,
I didn't know that old piano could sound that good.
But he had a problem with his hands.
After he played for 30 minutes or so, his hands would freeze.
They would seize up and, and, and all that.
And he made a comment, something about that, uh...
"They're not good for pianos,
but I could break somebody in half.
They still work."
(KNUCKLES CRACK)
INTERVIEWER:
-Yeah. -INTERVIEWER: Yeah?
Yeah.
I'm gonna tell you something.
To this day, I'm still cautious
about what I say about these people.
They don't play games, okay?
I don't know how to say this.
(SIGHS)
Don't go there, 'cause these guys will hurt you.
(PHONE RINGING)
BARRETT: Jerry called me.
He said, "You're gonna hear some things.
Don't worry about it. We're okay."
And that was the end of conversation.
I didn't know what it was.
♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
-(CRASH) -(TIRES SQUEAL)
(ELECTRICITY CRACKLES)
♪ (SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
(GUNSHOTS)
♪ (SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
But he's still alive.
(CHUCKLES)
(TAPE REWINDING)
(CRASH)
And the only way he could do it to get rid of them,
and hopefully get rid of the FBI
and everybody else that was starting to come in...
well, he shot up his car, I guess.
(GUNSHOTS)
And away he went.
After that, he went underground for a little while.
(PHONE RINGING)
He would call me later.
"I don't have any money. I need some cash."
I said, "Jerry, someday you gotta give me some money
to put in the bank for you
so that I don't have to take it out of my savings account
'cause I take it away from my family."
"I'd really appreciate it, Richard,
if you would just forget that and give me some money.
Vivian will be by."
What do you do? I owe him.
He kept me from going to jail. He did me a--
He protected me. I owe him.
My wife did not like that. (LAUGHS)
When Vivian... (SIGHS)
Each time that she came and left,
it didn't change anything.
She was my sister, and I would do anything for her.
In all that time, you would think
that they would get tired of all this.
'Cause I would sit there, and I'd be driving her
to Cincinnati that one time in the middle of the night,
three o'clock in the morning, and I gotta be at work in,
you know, like at five or six in the morning,
so I gotta get back home.
And I go down there, and I says, "You know,"
I said, "This is really bad."
I said, "What are you guys gonna do one of these days?
Are you ever coming back to a normal life and all that?"
And she said, "No." She said, "This is normal.
This is a normal life."
(CRICKETS CHIRPING)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
CANDI: On this one particular day,
my father, Jerry, took me for a car ride
and we got stuck in traffic.
The traffic was backed up
because there was a Christmas parade going on.
And I wanted to go meet Santa Claus.
My father told me that there was no such thing as Santa,
and I was devastated.
And I think to cheer me up, he said,
"Would you like me to be your mommy?"
And I was thrilled about it.
Vivian was not a happy mother.
I think there was just too many bad things
that happened in her life right at the time I was born
that somewhere in her mind she might've blamed me for it.
So having my daddy as my mommy was a wonderful thing to me.
I thought my daddy was doing it for me.
I didn't realize that my daddy was unhappy being a man.
When my father, Jerry, told my mother, Vivian,
that he wanted to be a woman,
that led to the first separation.
♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CARMICHAEL: Dear Vivian,
I don't know when or how my problem started.
Some authorities believe
there's a chromosomal imbalance in people,
and others say environmental conditioning,
while others... (SIGHS) ...feel it's a glandular misinformation.
Whatever the cause,
there have been signposts along the way
ever since I can remember
that indicated I was not what I could have been
in the sex department.
And that wasn't because I didn't try.
I guess I'm not sure that I had some sort of...
(CHUCKLING) ...youth screw loose.
I'm not a man anymore,
at least not in the sexual sense,
if I ever was.
As I got to know you,
I found you to be truly worthy of deep love
and a lasting respect and admiration.
Even with the irritants, the arguments,
the recriminations, and the hard words,
the love has continued on stronger than ever.
As I grow older, and hopefully wiser,
I have come to realize that love is pretty important.
The passion is gone.
Like the ocean, the wind and waves have died down
and left a placid surface,
but the underlying current
goes on strong and stable and everlasting.
As funny as it sounds,
I'd walk through the fire for you and the kids.
I'd give up my food and clothing and my bed,
and yes, even my life.
(KNOCKING ON DOOR)
BARRETT: My sister, Vivian, called me and said that,
"We're coming by.
And I don't want you to be surprised or shocked,
but there's a lot changing. A lot."
She said, um...
"Jerry's changing."
♪ ( SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
When they pulled up and Jerry got out,
he looked like a man in drag,
and I thought, "Okay, well, wow."
(LAUGHING) "Quite a change. She was right."
So I went out in the garage out there,
and I said, "Jerry, I think I know
why you want to become Elizabeth.
Because you can hide." (CHUCKLES)
And he said, "No." He said, "That's not it."
He said, "I've always had this feeling that, um,
I didn't belong in this body, and...
I just thought that, uh, I should be a woman."
(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS)
CARMICHAEL: (ON TAPE) I know it's right for me.
I used to go behind the bushes with my two female cousins
and put their dresses on with them.
(LAUGHTER)
When I was 18 in Germany, I used to go to out-of-town taverns
and walk back with my trousers off.
It felt good. The wind made me feel like I was wearing a dress.
(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS)
BARRETT: And he says, "Liz is a good name."
'Cause he-- he liked Elizabeth Taylor.
He thought Elizabeth Taylor was the epitome of woman.
She had jewelry, she had friends,
and she had power.
And he liked all those things.
And that's where that came from, as far as I know.
STRYKER: In previous decades, uh,
it was often harder to transition as a young person.
So it was not uncommon at all
for people who had transgender feelings
to not be able to figure out how to do what they wanted to do
until they were older.
How did you actually find somebody
who would, like, give you hormones
or perform surgery?
That wasn't a well-known process.
Like, how do you, like, actually do this?
So it doesn't surprise me at all that Liz Carmichael
didn't figure out how to transition
until she was in her 40s.
There was no... "Daddy disappeared,
and all of a sudden, Liz was there." It wasn't that.
It was a true transition that all of us were familiar with,
and we were all part of.
My father would lock himself in the bedroom,
-and you could hear him talking. -I play tennis with my right...
CANDI: He was talking into his tape recorder,
practicing being a woman.
Possibly, had I, uh, tried when I was younger...
Because there wasn't all this money
to go to specialty surgeons and so forth
to start the transition,
my father was self-transitioning,
giving himself his own hormone injections.
(WATER BUBBLING)
In breeding fish, you learn
that if you put certain hormones in the water,
it would cause the fish to spawn.
So Jerry would get hormones through veterinarians.
STRYKER: There were a lot of barriers to accessing, uh,
transition-related medical services before the 1990s.
If you had children, you know, they might say,
"Oh, you know, you're already a parent,
and we can't do that to the children."
If you were married, they might require you
to be divorced before you could transition.
Vivian was a pretty strong supporter.
Vivian taught Jerry how to wear makeup,
taught Jerry how to wear clothing.
When Jerry was first trying to dress as a woman
and going out into public, they'd go to a nightclub
as just friends or sister-in-laws.
And you've got to admire Vivian for doing that.
STRYKER: It can be difficult for a trans person
to visually reproduce
what cisgender versions of manhood and womanhood look like
after you're well into adulthood.
You might be more visually perceivable as trans,
which could then have consequences
for how you're able to support yourself
and how safe you are in public.
♪ (MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I remember going shopping and being a little nervous,
and this was-- these were test runs--
and deliberately walking up and saying "Mommy, Mommy,"
so that people around wouldn't think it was--
something was fishy.
"Mommy, Brian's hitting me!
Make Brian stop! Mommy, Mommy!"
You know, and doing it on purpose
and it-- it helped, and it helped us, too,
calling her "Mommy."
BARRETT: I said, "Well, um, how do the kids feel about it?"
And they said, "We've got two moms now.
We have two mothers."
He says, "And moms are the best."
And that's what he said. Isn't that nice?
CANDI: And we were all fine with it
because she was a great mom.
BARRETT: She was ahead of her time
because she knew the pain if somebody was at a restaurant
and they said something to her, making a snide remark or a joke,
she would get up and go over, and she'd say,
"You're very rude."
Wasn't mean. "You're a very rude person."
And she was big enough, probably, to intimidate 'em.
(LAUGHS)
But that's the way Liz was.
Liz came to my house to stay with Vivian and the children.
There was a gentleman there in the house
that was watching Liz.
And they carried on a little flirty conversation,
and she immediately responded to that
because it warmed her up.
I said, "Do you know what? You're amazing."
And that's what I told her. Truly amazing.
♪ (MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Once I accepted the fact that she was a woman...
it started to make sense.
Having a transgender person in our family,
uh, it definitely did change my viewpoint and so forth
because it became acceptable to me,
because I understood them now.
I understood from personal experience now
what happened here.
And here was my six-foot macho man,
and now my six-foot... (LAUGHS) ...feminine woman.
Yeah. I understand it. I get it.
She's family.
STRYKER: If you're not being the person
that you understand yourself to be,
you don't often follow that sort of normative life path.
If you feel resentful that society is organized
in a way that is, like, really not good for you as a person,
if you feel that interacting with people and institutions
and the public and the government,
um, is something that,
at every step, it invalidates who you are as a person,
maybe you're resentful about that,
and maybe you, you know, engage in more so-called,
you know, "antisocial" behavior
out of those unresolved feelings
that are based on your, your transness.
I have approached many numerous firms,
asking them for any kind of work that they had to offer
over a period of eight months.
The same response,
"We can't hire anybody of your caliber.
We don't want any of your people working for us."
So what else was I supposed to do when you get damn hungry?
If you're living in any kind of non-normative gender role,
you know, publicly,
the employment discrimination, the housing discrimination,
the kinds of police violence that gets directed at you,
the criminalization of your life,
the psychiatrization of your life,
uh, it puts you in a very vulnerable
and marginal position,
where sometimes, like, your only options then, uh,
are criminal ones because, you know, you wanna eat,
you know, need a place to sleep,
and how are you gonna get that money?
If that's what's in front of you,
like, that's what you do.
♪ (MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CANDI: Liz could not get a job
for anyone, and this was-- she was freshly a woman,
and not an attractive woman,
and she just could not get a job.
Sam Schlisman, my favorite person of all time.
Old man Sam. Liz loved Sam.
Sam gave her a job in real estate.
Sam fixed her car so she could take customers
out to see land and put a phone and--
a phone in her car!
These things were outrageously expensive back then.
That was Sam.
And then she got a job at a marketing company.
LOU LINDSTROM: Sam Schlisman and Liz Carmichael
worked at USMI.
(PHONES RINGING)
It was a cutting-edge company involved in sales and marketing,
uh, goods and services.
Home inventors would come in with ideas,
and this company was supposed to tell them all the things
they needed to do, how to get your patents
and how to go about marketing and getting investors.
LINDSTROM: There were rumors about Liz at that time
because her appearance, she was six feet two,
two hundred and twenty pounds or whatever, a muscular person,
well-groomed.
She wore a lot of pancake makeup.
That was the number one thing that I noticed.
This thick pancake makeup all the time.
CARMICHAEL: (ON TAPE)
LINDSTROM: People were pretty professional,
she was pretty professional, and she was, like,
treated like one of the guys.
She was, uh, a powerful salesperson.
A company like this might hire a hundred people,
and maybe one person would sell something
and the other ninety-nine wouldn't.
She was always one of those one out of a hundred people
that could sell anything.
Elizabeth Carmichael would never have gotten to see the Dale
if she hadn't been working at her position at USMI.
CANDI: One day, she came home, talking about this car,
this three-wheeled car.
And she showed us pictures of it.
I'm looking at it, just thinking,
"It's a dune buggy.
No one's gonna drive this thing."
But this was just going to be the answer
to America's gas problem.
-(MACHINE GUN FIRE) -(EXPLOSION)
NEWS ANCHOR #3: Good evening.
The Middle East War produced developments
all over the world today.
The oil-producing countries of the Arab world
decided to use their oil as a political weapon.
They will reduce oil production by five percent a month
until the Israelis withdraw from occupied territories.
REPORTER #2: Prices for Arab oils are going up,
a huge increase voted in an overnight meeting
without even consulting Western buyers.
NEWS ANCHOR #4: By next summer,
the shortage will be far more serious
than it was this past summer.
Why didn't they come out and tell us there was no gas?
Gasoline shortages are spreading across the country.
DRIVER: I've been here since 4:30 this morning.
It's ridiculous, waiting on line here.
REPORTER #3: What sort of things do people say to you
when they come in to buy a car nowadays?
Gas mileage, that's the number one topic.
How many miles to a gallon would this get?
CANDI: Well, in an era where cars were getting
eight to twelve miles to the gallon,
this car supposedly got 70 miles to the gallon.
Hello again. Here we are
with the most unique show in the United States.
The name of it's What's the Big Idea?
But our big ideas are really inventions.
We have a very unusual inventor with us,
a successful inventor.
Dale Clifft, I welcome you to the Big Idea show.
RICHARD SMITH: Dale liked to work on just about anything
that would stir his imagination.
His first love, I believe, was the two-stroke motor,
and of course, that brought him to the motorcycles.
He had a way of almost doubling their horsepower.
He would ride his back and forth to work
on quite a number of occasions,
and it dawned on him that he couldn't ride it
during the wintertime when it was raining.
He started thinking about a way around that,
and that wound up being the start
of the Dale automobile.
It was a vehicle that was welded together
out of half-inch electrical conduit.
He'd take the front wheel off his motorcycle
and attach it to the back end of this vehicle,
with two wheels on front,
and that way, very quickly, he could use his motorcycle
to power this vehicle.
That really worked out quite well.
My field is-- is energy and energy-related inventions.
HOST: That's your background?
That's the reason I gotta have one of your future Dale automobiles,
is that 100 miles per gallon.
I don't think we can quite do that on the Dale.
-(CHUCKLING) -Seventy-five, maybe.
SMITH: The Dale automobile became quite a hit
locally around town,
you know, because Dale drove it every chance that he got.
So one evening, he and his wife went to a restaurant,
and they were enjoying themselves dinner
when a man approached them.
He knew somebody who could actually produce the automobile.
This particular person set up the meeting with Liz.
LINDSTROM: If she had an appointment,
you could depend on her being there.
If Liz is there, the client walks in,
the client might not walk out for five hours
because Liz had a way of getting engaged with the clients
and getting excited about their product.
SMITH: After that meeting, Dale signed some contracts
and that's where it all got started.
CARMICHAEL: (ON TAPE) So I bought that car from Dale Clifft
and kind of in honor of him, uh, I named it after him.
But there's no connection. He doesn't work for the company.
He walked in the door one day.
And I said, "Hey, Dale, what do we name this damn car?"
And then I said, "Hell, we'll name it the Dale."
LINDSTROM: I think that's where Liz's genius was.
She saw the importance of the moment,
she jumped on it, and, uh, started running with this idea.
That was the big deal, you know.
Seventy miles to the gallon, really?
This could end the gas crisis.
CARMICHAEL: General Motors? I'll kick the shit out of them.
(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS)
CANDI: She started a company.
LINDSTROM: Twentieth Century Motor Car Company.
They rented offices on the first floor of our building.
CANDI: She brought Sam along,
and she would always bounce ideas off of Sam.
(TAPE RECORDER CLICKS)
CARMICHAEL: (ON TAPE) And the tests we wanted to make then
that we had never documented were stability tests,
what the car would do
when making all the turns at high speeds.
AD NARRATOR #2: The Dale is taking these turns at 55 miles per hour,
no sway, no tipping,
and no feeling of loss of control.
CANDI: To this day, I don't know how she did it.
I don't know how she came from this vinyl-coated,
tubed metal dune buggy into the gorgeous Dale.
It just seemed like last week, this was just a thought,
and now all of a sudden, it is a full-blown company
with an office on Ventura Boulevard.
For those not familiar with Ventura Boulevard,
this is the high-rent district.
I thought that this would change our lives.
There'd be no more sleeping in cars on the side of the road.
No more getting up in the middle of the night
to move to another town,
no more high-speed car chases on public roads.
I thought this was the beginning of a real life
where we could be a normal family,
because this was real.
But my secret self was wondering
when it was going to end,
when they were going to find out
that my mother was really my father
who was in trouble with the law.
♪ (SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
COLIN DANGAARD: This was an underdog.
LESLIE KENDALL: The Americans were ready for her.
GERRY MCGUINNESS: People were all putting in 50, 60 hours.
CARMICHAEL: My full intention and expectation
is to become the biggest automobile manufacturer
in the world.
DANGAARD: This was a woman who had everything against her.
GREG LEAS: I don't know if it's real or not.
One person ever looked under the hood? We did.
DENNIS SMITH: There were some bribes involved.
DICK CARLSON: State of California issued an order.
DENNIS: There was something off from the moment he met her.
NEWS ANCHOR #5: This woman was going to revolutionize the auto industry.
CARMICHAEL: We are at war with the big three.
CARLSON: Nobody had ever known this person.
So who the hell was she?
CARMICHAEL: Protecting our industrial secret.
LEAS: They were afraid of spies from the big three. It was scary.
MCGUINNESS: These were mobsters.
CARMICHAEL: It's a situation of David fighting Goliath.
(GUN SHOT)
♪ ("TIP TOE TO THE GAS PUMPS" BY TINY TIM PLAYING) ♪
♪ Mr. Gasoline Man Please give me some gas ♪
♪ My tank is almost empty So fill it fast ♪
♪ If you will just fill her up I promise you this ♪
♪ I'll put a tulip in your hair And blow you a kiss ♪
♪ Let's tiptoe to the gas pump Fill her up ♪
♪ Give me all you've got 'Till I scream I've had enough ♪
♪ Everybody clap your hands And sing in harmony ♪
♪ Come tiptoe to the gas pump With me ♪
♪ Put a tiger in my tank Please don't delay ♪
♪ I've been waiting in this line Since early yesterday ♪
♪ So Mr. Gasoline Man Fill her to the brim ♪
♪ So I'll have enough gas To go through this line again ♪
♪ Let's tiptoe to the gas pumps With me ♪
ELIZABETH CARMICHAEL: I'm going to fill one hell
of an important gap in the car market.
SPEAKER: It looked like a spaceship.
It sounded good.
SPEAKER: I couldn't believe that it was real.
CARMICHAEL: There are thousands of people
writing to cheer me on.
SPEAKER 2: People were flocking to make deposits.
SPEAKER 3: She had stacks of cash,
and next to it, a revolver.
(DINGS)
When you're in a pool of sharks, you're gonna get bit.
SPEAKER 4: Three guys walk in...
They're afraid of spies.
SPEAKER 4: Something is wrong.
SPEAKER 5: Who the hell was she?