Why Is Mason Reese Crying?

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Hey everybody.

It's been a few months since our last check-in episode and since then we've been hard at work on a new season of Heavyweight.

There will be four new episodes coming out, some funny, some sad, plus some bonus content like the check-ins, which we think you'll really enjoy.

The first new episode launches next week,

but today I thought I'd share a story I made way back in 2015 for a then little-known podcast called Reply All.

These were the early days of Gimlet, and I was in the middle of developing what would eventually become heavyweight.

And in a lot of ways, the story that I'm about to play for you would form a kind of blueprint for heavyweight.

And like many heavyweight stories, it began with a personal obsession, a hunger for answers, and a need to insinuate myself into the personal lives of strangers.

One stranger in particular.

Without further ado, from the Gimlet Media Vaults, here is,

Why is Mason Reese Crying?

Right after this very important message from our sponsor.

If as a child, I'd been told of a future world where there dwelled a magical TV that could play anything I wanted, an infinite television jukebox that I could watch all night without ever having the remote pride from my hands, I'd say, you must be describing Utopia.

And this is where I find myself.

Wednesday night, 2.30 a.m., Utopia.

And now this all-time heavyweight championship fight ready to go.

There's the bell and here's Guy Labo.

There are things from my childhood that I've seen on YouTube that I thought I'd go to my deathbed without ever getting to revisit.

Like the fake boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano that special effects wizards put together in 1970 to determine who was the greatest fighter of all time.

Off the ropes again.

A good body rally by Marciano.

I often turn to it long after I should be in bed.

Muhammad Ali seemed to draw gasps of breath

Our bookshelves are where we project our tastes, where we announce to our dinner guests that, of course, we enjoy Faulkner, the golden age of comics, and the essays of Montaigne.

But if our bookshelves are where we telegraph a version of who we want to be, then our YouTube search histories, culled from late hours punching away at whiskey-soaked keyboards, are what we really are.

The self that is led by desire rather than decorum.

Clay will show our lockdown and Marciano down for a freight count.

He appears all right.

He will take the mandatory eight count.

It looked like a right to the jaw.

After watching Ali and Marciano for a couple rounds, I think, wasn't there a song about Muhammad Ali I'd once heard?

Muhammad,

the black Superman.

And then, Superman makes me think, of course, of David Lee Roth, heroically bounding around in leather spats and fishnet bikini underwear.

And so I seek out his haunting isolated vocal tracks that make jump sound like an acapella spiritual intended to rouse the faithful to action.

The clip recalls a time when Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli reigned as the Kim and Kanye of their day.

Eddie played guitar and Valerie starred in One Day at a Time, a sitcom in which a mustachioed leather-vested janitor named Schneider allowed himself into her family's apartment whenever he pleased.

Hey, sex symbol, how you doing with the quarterback?

I hope you're not letting him score any touchdowns.

You know!

Schneider, will you keep your nose out of this?

This is Julie's problem.

Even though we can see almost anything we want on YouTube, there's something about the endless possibility that can cause anxiety.

And so we just circle back to the clips that deliver the dopamine of childhood nostalgia.

We all have that sweet spot, and for me, it's the early 70s when my first memories of being alive were beginning to form.

And the figure who most perfectly evokes this time, the 10-letter late-night search term I inevitably keep coming back to more than any other, is Mason Reese.

People kept telling my mother, I look like a munchkin.

Well, this is what a munchkin looks like.

In the 70s, Mason Reese was an advertising phenomenon who appeared in dozens of commercials for everything from Dunkin' Donuts

to raisin bran.

This seal's got a lot, a lot of delicious raisins.

And the Underwood chicken spread ad.

Chucky Peep.

With this adorable spoonerism that became a 1970s catchphrase.

Like I told her, Mom, you push underwood is like having a bonus board.

Lately, I've been trying to explain Mason Reese, and I keep coming up short on analogies.

He was like the Wendy's Where's the Beef Lady, I say, or Mikey from Life Cereal.

But it isn't quite true.

While they were limited to one product and one memorable slogan, Mason advertised everything.

And he went from being a TV commercial star to being a star star.

When he walked down the street, people asked for locks of his signature red hair and blessings for their babies.

One mother even named her twins after him, calling one Mason and the other Reese.

When I bring him up to my mother to see if she remembers, she says, wasn't he the little boy who was so homely he was cute?

How come every lady doesn't use ivory stone?

There was something uncanny about Mason Reese.

Because of his precocity, he didn't quite track as a child, and some people even thought he was a little person dressed in children's clothing, who, after a day's shoot, sparked up a stogie and poured himself a bourbon.

The little old man's sad-eyed face, the Prince-Valiant haircut, the scrunchie voice that sounds as though spoken underwater in a tub of buttermilk, the hair that only seemed to grow so bright red in the 70s.

Mason Reese is as synonymous with childhood as the memory of sitting in a wet bathing suit on the hot vinyl backseat of my father's Pontiac while listening to an AM radio blare, American Pie.

His face is the smell of my grandmother's kitchen, of crayons, comic books.

Except in the past year, new Mason Reese videos began to appear.

Things from TV I don't recall ever having seen.

It was as though my very desire was somehow having an incantatory effect, summoning deeper cuts from the past.

Mason on afternoon talk show, The Mike Douglas Show, tap dancing to singing in the rain,

introducing Leonard Nimoy and hamming it up like an old pro.

Please join me in rocking one of my favorites, Leonard Nimoy.

And then there's this.

It's just not right.

A man that old and an eight-year-old boy.

An ABC sitcom pilot simply called Mason, where he plays a friendless child genius who brings home a 35-year-old man in safari shorts he met while wandering the streets of New York.

But for all we know, he's a pervert.

Oh, I don't think Mason leans that way.

Well, you wouldn't even let him sleep over.

What kind of a companion for a kid?

But amidst this trove of new material, I found something else.

And he's doing something, I understand,

that you especially like, a song that you especially are fond of.

Yes.

In this clip, Mason is co-hosting the Mike Douglas Show, and Harry Chapin is being introduced.

Do you want to tell us

what the song is, or do you know?

I don't.

I mean,

is it that song?

You know what it is.

No, I don't want that song.

Why, Mason?

Why does it?

You're not putting on that song.

Why?

Because you're just not.

Now, he's very touched by that song.

But maybe.

Mason, seated on his mini director's chair, just can't take it and drops the facade of the precocious TV broadcaster and collapses his face into his hands and weeps.

I know what song it is.

Oh, you know what song it is?

Well, maybe we ought to bring the guy with the worms back.

Come on, pal.

Oh, come on over here.

Come on over here and sit with Uncle Mike while this is.

You gonna be all right?

This song is very touching, and as you can see, and Mason's very touched by by it.

Is it okay?

It's called Cats in the Cradle.

Harry Chapin.

Harry Chapin.

This is for my kids and for Mason.

Thank you.

And as Harry Chapin sings the quintessential song of complicated father-son love,

Mason cries inconsolably.

And he was talking for a new it, and as he grew, he'd say, I'm gonna be like you, Dad.

You know, I'm gonna be like you.

And the cats in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue, and the man in the room.

When you're coming home, dad, I don't know when, but we'll get together then, slim.

You know, we'll have a good time then.

YouTube is a cultural repository, but it's full of fragments, broken and left over, like Roman ruins.

Was there something that took place before the Harry Chapin introduction?

Something that was happening just outside the frame, offstage and unseen?

There wasn't much context to be gotten from YouTube commenters either.

most of whom were just mean, saying things like, what the hell is that red-haired thing?

Wow, he was more horrifying than I even remember.

I hated this ugly twerp when I was a kid.

But there was this one thing, and when I first discovered it, I couldn't believe it was true.

Looking more closely at the user account, the person uploading these new videos, I noticed the name was Mason Rees.

I now had many questions.

Why would Mason Reese upload a video of himself crying?

Myself crying as a child, should such footage exist, would be the kind of thing I'd probably never even show my closest friends, let alone the whole world.

Why was Mason doing just that?

And why did he post the videos now?

40 years later.

These were questions I couldn't answer by just tweaking my search terms by adding more tabs to the browser window.

What I wanted most wasn't to expand the frame, but to pass right through it entirely.

In short, I wanted the real world.

Now, how long have you been acting in commercials?

Well, since I'm seven now, I've been acting three years.

That would mean you started when you were about four.

I'm at home.

What we were hoping to do was to actually look at some of the clips with you.

Yeah, I don't mind doing it.

Yeah, that's very interesting.

Yeah.

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So I've started rolling.

Do you want to

Mason lives in a modest two-room apartment on New York's Upper West Side.

When he greets me and my producer Chris at the door, I'm surprised by how little he is.

The haircut's almost the same.

I don't know who that could be calling, bro.

The red hair, the eyes,

the expressions.

It's all there.

Looking at him is intense, like seeing an old friend.

Every now and then, by the way, we might hear a fire engine or something go by by because we're running.

That's New York.

That's New York, baby.

That's exactly right.

It's just living in Manhattan.

Mason seats us in his living room, which is a shrine to his child star.

There's a photo of him co-hosting a telethon with Henry Winkler, a 1973 Clio Award for Best Actor in a Commercial, and a photograph of himself jogging in Central Park with Andy Warhol and Grace Jones.

And

looking around, like you've got all of this, you've got all these photos of yourself as a kid and a lot of memorabilia.

In some ways, do you feel this responsibility to that kid in a way?

Or do you feel like you're

I'm going to interrupt you quickly?

All of these pictures that you see of me with the Batmobile and Peter Lupus from Mission Impossible and Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner and all these, you know, cover of TV guy.

Cover of TV guy and the book I published when I was seven.

That's what I have in my living room.

Yeah.

In my bedroom, there's not one picture.

Uh-huh.

Why is that?

Because that's where I'm an adult.

That's, you know what I'm saying?

And to me, that's very important.

I'm a 50-year-old man.

That's my private area.

This is my public area.

Yeah.

And in private, this is not who I am.

But is this here for like for us or is this here for you?

Both.

Both.

Because

it's a great reminder to me of what I've accomplished in my life.

Mason Rees is 50, but he doesn't look it.

He doesn't look it in the way his Pomeranian doesn't look his age, or any age, because a Pomeranian is what it is, and Mason Rees is Mason Rees, and the world seizes on all those who are singular, unique, those who are what they are, and the world celebrates them the best it knows how.

by nailing them to a crucifix, by sticking them in front of a camera, to hawk-fried dough and canned meat spread.

Mason hasn't made a commercial since his teens, but his life seems pretty okay.

In the intervening years, he's opened a few bars and even runs his own entertainment company, Borgesmoord Productions.

And why did he post the videos now, 40 years later?

Mainly, he explains to me, because a friend of his put together a DVD of Mason Reese's greatest hits, and he thought he might as well share it with people who might be interested.

Chris sets up a laptop on the coffee table.

What we were hoping to do was to actually look at some of the clips with you.

Yeah, I don't mind doing it.

Yeah, that's very interesting.

Yeah.

We start off with perhaps the greatest hit of them all: the Underwood Deviled Ham Commercial.

Cranberry sauce and lettuce on chicken spread.

Christy Pilippa and applesauce on this one.

Even made a nifty sus tomato salad, like I told her.

Mom, you pulse Underwood is like having a Borgeschmoord.

So the whole Borgeschmoord thing at the end,

I mean, that ended up being the money shot, as they call it.

You know, that was it.

That was the big one.

It wasn't a mistake.

It was planned, but it...

It was?

Yeah, and I'll tell you how.

So,

Andy Doyle, who was the ad exec for the company, came up to me and he said, Mason,

we would like you to mispronounce the word Schmorgesport.

That's interesting.

And I said, well, but Andy, you know, I know what the real word is, and I don't want America to think that I'm not smart enough to know the real word.

So what he did was he went and he got a yellow pad of paper and he wrote down all these words that sounded like schmorgesport.

And I picked out Borgesmort.

So Andy looks at me and goes, Mason,

you are really incredible.

You're not going to believe this.

Borgeschmort is schmorgesboard in Swedish.

But it's not.

Right.

Schmorgesboard is Swedish.

So he lied to me.

So the bottom line is the ad exec lied to a six and a half-year-old kid.

And that commercial literally launched my career.

That's what made people like Dick Havitt and Mike Douglas and all the others,

you know, call me on the phone and say, hey, this kid is something a little different, you know, and we want a piece of him.

So, yeah.

Let's take a look at another ad.

Ah, Duncan Donuts.

Dunkin' donuts.

All right.

People kept telling my mother, I look like a munchkin.

Well.

Yeah, that was one commercial that I actually kind of regret doing.

Why?

Well,

let's watch it.

Yeah.

And you'll, then I'll, at the tagline, I'll tell you why.

The big bunch basket or the great big super bunch basket.

Tell me, do I look like a munchkin?

The only reason why I'm not particularly fond of that commercial was the fact that the tagline was, don't tell me I look like a munchkin.

Well, what do you think happened?

Every fucking place I went,

you know, oh, that's the munchkin.

Yeah.

For a year, that was just abuse after abuse after abuse.

Do you want to just take a look at the Harry Chapin?

No.

I'd rather not.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it was, I'll tell the story behind it.

Okay.

You know, for some reason, and I, to this day, I don't know what the reason is, because my father and I were very close.

That song, Cats in the Cradle, has a really hard effect on me.

So people always say to me, Oh, did you have a strange relationship with your father?

Was he always away?

And the answer was no.

My dad was always around.

So I never really understood why I identified with the song, other than the fact that I was a sensitive kid.

And

Harry was on the Mike Douglas show.

I was the co-host.

And I asked him, are you going to be sending Cats in the Cradle?

And he said, no, they asked me to do another one of my newer songs.

Oh, okay.

So

I was not prepared for him to do that.

And at the age of seven,

I wasn't able to, you know, figure out, well, did he lie to me?

And that's what I must have been thinking, you know, as a young kid.

And I literally just broke down and fell apart.

Because you had been lied to or because

the song was going to be played.

Yes, because the song's going to be played.

But I'm sure part of my mind was, well, why would Harry say no?

I literally just broke down into hysterics.

And nobody understood why, except me, my parents, and probably Harry.

You know, it was a 90-minute show back then.

And there was probably a good 30 minutes left of the show.

And I refused to come back.

And I just went down into the commissary, which was in the basement of the building, and I sat there and I had a soda or something.

And,

you know, I just refused.

I didn't want to go back anymore.

A lot of Mason's stories involve his being lied to by adults, which is sad.

But what was it about Cats in the Cradle in particular?

A song to make cry, if anyone, neglectful dads, not little boys.

Is it possible

in a way it was as though,

like,

it was sort of like you singing the song to yourself.

This is not rocky.

You're both a child and an adult.

I didn't have a childhood.

All of the stereotypical things that kids do and did, I didn't do.

I mean

I never went to a prom.

I never played sports.

I never took extracurricular after-school activities.

Did I sacrifice anything?

I know you didn't ask that,

but that's a logical question.

Well, I don't know.

Did I?

I don't think so.

I often tell people that when you've written an elephant in the Barnum and Bailey Circus,

been an NBC correspondent for the news, piloted the Goodyear Blimp.

I wasn't in the Goodyear Blimp, I flew the Goodyear Blimp.

When you've gotten to do all the things that I did,

algebra is pretty fucking boring.

I'm in very unique circumstances.

My mother and father, every day of my life,

said I love you to me.

And every day of my life

would give me a kiss and a hug and just tell me that they love me.

And like my mom called me this morning and she wanted me to, I was with her yesterday for three hours, literally like vacuuming the floor and cutting her toenails.

Oi, you know, that's not what a son wants to do to a 90-year-old mother, but I was doing it because I'm a nice boy.

I just thought, just in light of what you were saying, if we could just watch the one with your, where your mother sure,

yeah,

yeah, here you go.

When did you first discover, Mrs.

Reese, that this young man was a bit precocious?

My mom was a good-looking broad.

She's a beautiful woman.

He was born April 11th.

I'd say April 12th.

He is, to say the least, an unusual child.

How do you and he get along?

Fabulously.

We yell, we fight, but we love each other a lot.

I want to bring his father out.

Okay, Mason?

Do you want to bring your dad out?

Billy Reese.

Will Bill Reese please stand?

Will you sit here, please?

Yeah, tell me about his reading habits.

He reads at what level?

Between 10th and 11th grade.

Oh, that's incredible.

Does he attend a public school?

He attends a Montessori Method School.

Why do you think you're welling up?

Allows him to progress pretty much at his own pace.

Well, again, you know,

I mean,

to some extent,

because my mom and dad probably still loved each other at this point in our lives.

You know, things were a lot simpler, maybe, for me.

My parents had not divorced yet.

My two brothers and my sister and I were all very close.

We still all kind of lived together for the most part.

So, yeah, I think that a lot of it

harkens back to a simpler time.

More carefree, perhaps.

Even though I had a job to do, it was still more carefree, because I was a kid, and a lot of responsibilities had not been put on my head yet.

You know, it's funny.

My mom doesn't understand YouTube.

You know, I mean, she kinda gets it, but doesn't really fully understand it.

I showed her this clip, and I jokingly said to her, but maybe it was true, I said, that's probably the last time you ever kissed dad.

Well,

and I do love my dad.

When you're a kid, you cry because you feel lied to, because life is unfair and you don't understand anything.

And then as an adult, you cry because life still isn't fair, but you do understand it.

You cry because you do understand it.

By 1977, Mason's dad would begin spending more and more time at the company he started, and eventually he'd convert part of his office into a living space where he could spend nights.

In his early teens, around the time the commercial offers started to dry up, Mason's parents would divorce and Mason would move into the office with his dad.

At 8.30 in the morning, when employees began to show up, Mason would sometimes still still be lounging around in his t-shirt and underwear.

We're going to visit more with the Reese's following this.

We'll be right back.

At one point, while watching the videos, Mason tells me that he realizes the commenters can be mean.

Oh my god, what a freak.

He was so ugly.

What kind of talent did this kid have?

He says, quoting them.

I'd be a liar if I said it didn't affect me.

When When I ask him why he hasn't disabled the comments for his videos, he seems genuinely surprised that you could do such a thing.

He pauses to consider it.

But as of today, he still hasn't done it, and I don't think he ever will.

It would mean not being able to receive any of the nice comments.

Like this one.

Hey Mason, thank you for these.

They would not have been the 70s.

Without you.

This episode was produced for Reply All by me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Chris Neary, Tim Howard, Sruthi Penamenani, PJ Vogt, and Alex Goldman.

It was edited by Alex Bloomberg.

John DeLore and Bobby Lord mix the episode.

We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Heavyweight.

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