Goodbye to my Dear Friend John Barbour

The world has lost a legend

I had finished, and was just about to publish, a new Substack when I got the news about John Barbour yesterday. Knowing John, he would have loved having a tribute written about him. I don’t expect the national news to mention it, but they should. Right now, he obviously takes precedence in my thoughts. John was very anal and impatient about things like people not replying instantly to emails. I think he was the only one other than me that grew annoyed with unduly delayed responses from people. So he would approve of me getting this out there quickly. He was a true larger than life character, and his many accomplishments need to be celebrated. People have told me that he viewed me as another son. I joked that I was his lowly #2 son. We never had a real disagreement, or a cross word with each other. He was proud to be called the Godfather of Reality TV. Recognizing that I am unworthy to do so, I hope I was able to do his memory justice.

For those who are interested, Jeff Rense, who was also a close friend of John’s, and featured him as a guest for many years on his show, and I will be dedicating a show tonight to John. You can listen live at 10 pm eastern here: https://www.renseradio.com/listenlive.php

I was deeply saddened to learn that my good friend John Barbour passed away yesterday. He had turned 93 last month, so it seems odd to say that it shocked me. But it did. He had the heart of a lion and the enthusiasm of a teenager. I would have bet money on him living to be 100. Unfortunately, we have little control over those things.

Taken 7-8 years ago. Attorney Brian Lloyd, John and me. I am the only one still living

For those of you who don’t know, John will always be remembered as the creator and host of the television show Real People. It was the number one rated show on television circa 1980. I watched it, and my wife (who I had not yet met) attended a live recording of it in 1979. After we started dating, she asked me to videotape the rerun, and we would look for her and her sister in the crowd. They were huge fans. John loved hearing that. He was thrilled to know that people were interested in his work. He was delighted people remembered him. The title of his hit show was absolutely appropriate, because he was interested in average, everyday people. Real people. Even though he worked with some of the biggest names in show business, it was the server, the hotel clerk, who fascinated him most. Like me, he was a populist. He thought that the lives of the common riffraff mattered. Real People was his love letter to them. It remains his legacy. How many of us get to leave behind that kind of legacy?

John and I became acquainted, in the early days of Facebook, when I commented on something he wrote, and he replied very promptly, with great politeness. He habitually replied to everyone. In my mind, he was a genuine celebrity, but he certainly didn’t carry himself like one. Once he realized how connected I was to JFK assassination research, we really bonded. In addition to being a show business legend, John was the first and only person to interview Jim Garrison in the years after the Clay Shaw trial. He combined two keen interests of mine; the entertainment world and the JFK assassination. I don’t know why he was so impressed with me, but I grew accustomed to him saying that I was the greatest writer in America. That’s quite a compliment, especially coming from the guy who was Frank Sinatra’s personal writer for several years. He used to tell me, “Donald, you’re much more talented than Joe Rogan. You should have millions of followers on YouTube.” He was great for the ego.

John grew up in circumstances that didn’t suggest future fame and fortune. His parents were extremely flawed, to put it kindly. He particularly resented his mother, and what he called her “parade of uncles” that passed through the house. His father abandoned him, and his mother gave no indication that she loved him. But he was an intelligent and determined young fellow, and ran away from home at 15. I don’t want to give away too much of his compelling life story. You can read all about it yourself in his spellbinding memoir Your Mother’s Not a Virgin!: The Bumpy Life and Times of the Canadian Dropout Who Changed the Face of American TV! The exclamation points were entirely appropriate, as they advertised John’s expressiveness. It was one of the great honors of my life to write the Foreword. John had first asked his friend Neil Simon, who proceeded to die. Then he asked Tim Conway, who became incapacitated and unable to do it. Then he asked me, joking, “Are you sure you want to chance it?”

The publisher wasn’t good to either one of us. He misspelled my name in the Foreword. This was especially unforgiveable, since he published two of my own books. He didn’t promote the book at all. John hired two publicists, but they just couldn’t generate the buzz his memoir unquestionably deserved. I tried as well to contact both KNBC television, where he was the first on air film critic in the country, and worked alongside the likes of Tom Snyder and Tom Brokaw, and LA Weekly, the magazine where he was employed as a movie reviewer for years. They didn’t respond to either of his publicists, so they certainly weren’t going to respond to me. He should have been interviewed on the Today show, where he’d sat down and talked with Jane Pauley at the height of his television career. He handled the lack of interest very well, but I suspected he was deeply hurt underneath the surface. He underestimated the impact of his JFK assassination research, on an industry that ridiculed such things.

Years before I became what he described as “one of my few close friends,” I watched his first JFK documentary, The Garrison Tapes. It was an important companion piece to Oliver Stone’s JFK, although Stone never gave John the satisfaction of telling him that personally. Not that many years ago, at one of the yearly assassination conferences in Dallas, someone video recorded Stone lauding John for it, along with his fantastic The American Media and the Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which is in my view the best documentary about the subject ever produced. I first met John in person when he came to Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club to promote and screen the film at American University, site of JFK’s timeless “peace” speech. It didn’t draw as many students as we’d hoped, but John was brilliant. He always acted like he was performing for millions, as he once did on The Tonight Show, even when he wasn’t. He was the same way, on podcasts big and small. You always got his best effort.

Meeting him in person, John impressed me with his intensity, his excessive punctuality, his great self-discipline, and the youthful spring in his step. He was short in stature, but you didn’t notice it. He had a big personality, and seemed like a giant. I also discovered that he was a notorious check grabber. He always insisted on paying the tab. He took me to Ruth’s Chris steakhouse. That was way out of my economic ballpark, so it was a real delight to experience it. A few years ago, he came back to D.C., to speak and screen his documentary on William Pepper, the lawyer most noted for defending both James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan. The crowd was even more disappointing than the previous time, but John remained his chipper self, bubbling with joy as he posed for photos with a handful of female coeds. He treated me to another meal, and as I watched him interact with everyone, it struck me that a compelling reality show could be created by just following him around with a camera.

John’s favorite restaurant was Maggiano’s. If you met him in his home city of Las Vegas, you were going to be treated to a meal at Maggiano’s. Ironically, I was at Maggiano’s yesterday, with my wife and kids, to celebrate Mother’s Day. I mentioned John several times during the meal. Because it was his favorite restaurant. Because they always piped in nonstop Frank Sinatra music. I am worried about my 88 year old sister’s faulty memory, and I compared her to John, saying, “I wish she could be like John Barbour- he’s 93 and sharp as a tack.” Then, late last night, his son Christopher emailed me the sad news. I hope Christopher, and his mother Sarita, know just how much John loved them. He was constantly boasting about Christopher and his phenomenal golfing prowess as a youngster. He also said he was one of only three geniuses he had met in his life. He bragged that Sarita was beautiful enough to have rebuffed the interests of Sinatra himself. He called her the best dancer he ever saw.

John was the first guest on my first podcast, on the old TFR network. As I told him, who else could it be? Then he was the first guest on my rather short lived “The Donald Jeffries Show.” Finally, he was the first guest on “I Protest” when we switched over to Rokfin. For a while, he insisted on us doing interviews together. I appeared with him on more podcasts than I can remember. One weakness John had was an inability to really share a stage. So I would take a back seat, and mostly listen to him talk. Which was fine. I respected him so much that it didn’t matter. And he would inevitably say something really flattering about me. He would mix in Hollywood stories with JFK assassination stuff, and make sure to mention Sarita and Christopher. He dropped the “F” bomb regularly, even though he claimed he didn’t curse. John hated “fucking amateurs,” which in his eyes was much of the entertainment business, including podcasts. I was thankful he spared me his cutting, poisonous barbs.

Just as his son Christopher was one of only three geniuses John ever met (the other two were Jim Garrison and Buckminster Fuller), Lauren Bacall was one of only three “cunts” he ever met. I hate that word, but that’s how he described it. Another was his Real People co-host Sarah Purcell, and I’ve forgotten the third. As someone who is very opinionated, I reveled in John’s extreme assessments of famous people. He hated Dean Martin’s producer, because after hitting on Sarita and being rejected, he banned John from any future celebrity roasts. Except for the one honoring John’s close friend Redd Foxx. John told this story on Coast to Coast, and it got him banned thereafter. Foxx wanted John to appear on his roast, and when the producer said no, Foxx said, “Well, then, you better get yourself another n****r.” I thought it was terribly unfair to ban him for sharing a humorous anecdote. John wasn’t racist in any sense of the word. It didn’t stop him from telling the story again, including on my podcast. I never banned him.

I know I’m forgetting some things. John left me so much to remember. His show biz anecdotes. Cary Grant attempting to pick him up on Hollywood Boulevard, when he was a young studio mail clerk. The photo of the lovely Joan Blondell, which the boys posted in the mail room, where she wasn’t wearing any panties. I asked him to expound on this, in no small measure because I think Joan was one of the hottest actresses in film history. But he seemed unsure of the details. Did she pose like that on purpose? How did the picture end up on the mail room wall? His battles with producer George Schlatter, especially how he sabotaged Jim Garrison’s appearance. It irks me that Schlatter still lives on, at age 96. One thing John said really stayed with me. He talked about how disillusioning it was to discover that so many mothers were willing to sleep with him to get their child on television. John also claimed that he could count the women he slept with on one hand, and have fingers left over.

Unlike any elderly person I have ever known, John was always looking forward, planning for the future. I’m sorry that he never got to do the one man stage show he often talked about. He loved Mark Twain, and I think envisioned it being like Hal Holbrook’s one man show. He had an idea that we should write a book called Myth America together, exposing all the popular myths about our country. I thought it was a great title. John believed it would be perfect light reading material for vacations, and pictured it selling out in airport book stores. But we never got together on it. John was always moving, like a whirling dervish, even as he entered his nineties. To the best of my knowledge, he was still golfing regularly into this year. At 92. In the tremendous Nevada heat. He was a huge hockey fan, and a key player on a team of celebrities. I’m so glad he was able to see the Vegas Golden Knights win the Stanley Cup in 2023. Hockey, show business, and the JFK assassination. What an intoxicating combination.

As a man of faith, I am very sorry that John maintained his agnosticism (which he also called atheism at times) until the end, as far as I know. He was scarred by a childhood that left him feeling insecure and unloved. I remember the first time I posted a Mother’s Day tribute on Facebook, he told me, “Donald, you’re lucky. Some of us didn’t have a mother that loved them.” Because of his upbringing, John was a complex mixture. He loved to quote my line from the Foreword of Your Mother’s Not a Virgin!, where I called his story “David Copperfield goes to Hollywood.” So there was a dark cynicism in there, born out of an unhappy childhood, but it was submerged beneath a gracious optimism about life in general. John loved to laugh, and I can’t imagine him crying. He was a loner who was fascinated by people. A man who resisted the temptations of Hollywood, but could be easily swayed by flattery from a pretty face. I can’t picture him ever going to therapy, but he would have intrigued any therapist.

It was unfortunate, but not surprising to learn how the world of show business seems to have turned its back on John after he began asking questions about the JFK assassination. This was a man who had Dick Gregory and Neil Simon writing liner notes for his comedy albums. John was a rising standup comic, who went on to write screenplays for television shows like Gomer Pyle, USMC and My Mother the Car. If you read his book, you’ll see just how many aborted talk shows he had. One featured a young Bryant Gumbel as his sidekick. He interviewed Muhammad Ali, and Ronald Reagan, and Bob Hope. So you can easily understand how I felt to have him call me, a community college dropout who was a blue collar worker for 15 years, and became a hopeless Thought Criminal, one of his best friends. He always made me feel special, and his tireless optimism left you thinking that big break really was just around the corner. He was still planning, and doing, right up until the end. He was truly inspiring.

The vast majority of people lose their energy, and their enthusiasm, by the time they’re in their 30s. Some never even have much energy or enthusiasm. John Barbour was the most enthusiastic person I’ve ever known. And his energy was an unstoppable force. He always said “I never give advice,” but he did. And he would gently chastise me by saying, “You never listen to a damn thing I tell you.” John thought that I should have been a big name, and he always treated me like I was. I never could have envisioned someone who’d led the exciting life he had ever becoming my friend. I had to pinch myself whenever he’d call me. Urge me to order the #7 sandwich at Jersey Mike’s, “THE best sandwich in the world.” John loved Frank Capra, just like me. He learned to love Huey Long, and would declare the chapter on him alone was worth the price for Survival of the Richest. John left an impact on me, but unlike most of us, he left an impact on the world. To use his favorite term, his life was truly FANtastic.