The Lady and the Dale

[EtheltoTillie]

New documentary in four parts. A crazy tale documenting the Dale car, its creator, a trans woman who also had a background as a con artist. 

[meep.meep]

I watched!  It's interesting.  I don't remember hearing anything about the Dale even though I was around then.

[EtheltoTillie]

2 hours ago, meep.meep said:

I watched!  It's interesting.  I don't remember hearing anything about the Dale even though I was around then.

Same. I was around then and remember the gas crisis but not this car. 

[biakbiak]

I was a little too young but I swear I have seen the clip of It being on the Price of Right.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

I spent the entire first hour thinking that just when you thought you'd gotten the whole story, there was another twist. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. I'm glad his daughter and his brother in law were interviewed so that we got a more personal side to the story.

Candi brought up how difficult it was to be trans in the 70s and mentioned Liz getting hormones from a veterinarian to self-transition at home, which reminded me how old some of Liz's former classmates were at the beginning of the episode, which prompted me to do a little googling. Liz was born in 1928. Imagine being trans in the 40s and 50s.

The things that Candi mentioned about being on the run, constantly moving, ads in the Free Press, etc. reminded me of Running on Empty.

[Guest]

I instantly hated the reporter from Los Angeles and that hatred was confirmed after Episode Three where he bragged how he repeatedly called Liz "he" from the witness stand. Turns out, the reporter is Tucker Carlson's father so the old "apple not falling far from the tree" thing applies. I'm confident that if hadn't he thought Liz was "a man" when they first met that there would be no story for him to pursue. Fuck that guy.

Liz was a badass. I'm glad she ran.

I'm also annoyed that I have to wait another week to get another episode. 

[geekgirl921]

On 2/6/2021 at 1:31 PM, Giant Misfit said:

I instantly hated the reporter from Los Angeles and that hatred was confirmed after Episode Three where he bragged how he repeatedly called Liz "he" from the witness stand. Turns out, the reporter is Tucker Carlson's father so the old "apple not falling far from the tree" thing applies. I'm confident that if hadn't he thought Liz was "a man" when they first met that there would be no story for him to pursue. Fuck that guy.

Liz was a badass. I'm glad she ran.

I'm also annoyed that I have to wait another week to get another episode. 

Yes, that was exactly my thought. At least Tucker came by being a jerk honestly!

[EtheltoTillie]

This was a great episode. Whatever Geri’s foibles she was affected by anti trans prejudice. Something was hinky with that jury substitution. Tucker Carlson’s dad—what a piece of work. 

[blixie]

I know it's the reality but it's just so gross how relentless everyone is to take Liz down because she's trans, like the Austin reporter wasn't totally sold on the "she's breaking the selling roses rules" without the hints that her gender was in question. And all these years later is still misgendering her, something bizarrely that Carlson seems to do less in present day interviews?

I am sad but not surprised that she was the only glue holding the family together and finally in this final episode we do hear about the fall out of life lead on the fringes, running from the law. I deeply truly hate fucking Ayn Rand and everything she has to say about anything, and the irony is Rand would never have engaged with underdogs the way Liz perpetually did. I understand her anti-government/libertarian impulses were surely influenced by her very existence being litigated constantly,  but I think there was a huge disconnect from how Liz lived her life, with such compassion all while insisting she only cared about herself and making money.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, blixie said:

like the Austin reporter wasn't totally sold on the "she's breaking the selling roses rules" without the hints that her gender was in question.

That fucking guy. I think he said that was his "best job ever" because he got the opportunity to wreck a trans person's life. Did anyone catch his name? By the time he was revealed as a scumbag, I'd already forgotten it.

Really appreciated the mash up of the elder Carlson with the younger Carlson. Why are these two pieces of shit so obsessed on how someone else lives their life? Oh, I know. It's the cruelty. It's always the cruelty with them. 

I'm glad Liz lived life on her own terms. It speaks volumes for her character that those who worked for her seemed very "ride or die." 

[blixie]

Quote

It speaks volumes for her character that those who worked for her seemed very "ride or die." 

Yes my favorite moment was when one of the guys who worked at the car company was asked by Liz on the stand if he'd still work for her today even knowing how much of her schtick with them was all show little go, and he was like HELL YEAH we all would go back and work for her. Liz at the very least had to believe her own bullshit so so did everyone else.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

While she clearly did criminal things, the dogged investigations seemed motivated by certain people's obsessions with her being trans, not the crimes themselves. As the 20th Century Motors attorney pointed out, lots of businesses get away with blatantly lying and are never prosecuted.

I wasn't surprised that the family drifted apart after her death. I was more surprised that they were all continued to work together for the 18 months that she was in prison but not a single one of them paid any of the bills to the point where their property was about to be foreclosed. What the hell?

I'm glad that they included some trans history. I had no idea about some of the people that were mentioned.

2 hours ago, Giant Misfit said:

That fucking guy. I think he said that was his "best job ever" because he got the opportunity to wreck a trans person's life. Did anyone catch his name? By the time he was revealed as a scumbag, I'd already forgotten it.

Mark Lisheron said he moved his family to Austin to take the best reporting job he ever had with the Austin American Statesman. After he found out about the Dale stuff from an assistant DA in LA, he said it was the biggest thrill he's ever had and that he was pumping his fist because he had the story of the year.

[Angeleyes]

Liz was complex and there were so many layers to her. She was ambitious and gregarious, but at the same time there was so much unrealized potential partly because she was unwilling to take the safe/legal route to follow through on her ideas and because of all the restrictions society placed on her. 
 

When I first started watching this show I never remembered hearing about her story because I was too young. I realized after seeing the Unsolved Mysteries clip that I did see that episode when it aired, but of course the story there was limited and characterized with the angle of finding a criminal. All of the reporters gleefully capitalizing on her story was just disgusting. 

Edited February 15, 2021 by Angeleyes

[Guest]

3 hours ago, ElectricBoogaloo said:

Mark Lisheron

Thanks, EB. I found his Twitter account. My initial assessment of him remains unchanged: scumbag. (It's also hysterical that no one engages with any of this tweets.)

[For Cereals]

7 hours ago, Giant Misfit said:

Really appreciated the mash up of the elder Carlson with the younger Carlson. Why are these two pieces of shit so obsessed on how someone else lives their life? Oh, I know. It's the cruelty. It's always the cruelty with them. 

Dad is appropriately named....

[EtheltoTillie]

I found the last episode fascinating, and the whole series was good.  that's all I've got.

[JaneDigby]

I just finished the whole series. Overall it was good - the cutout animation wore out its welcome early on for me but it was either that or talking heads for 4 hours. I don't remember this story at the time, I wasn't exactly at tv news watching age, though I remember Renee Richards. 

Liz Carmichael was a fascinating person. A reviewer said that being trans may have been the most honest thing Carmichael ever did, and I agree. Liz's love of fraud was literally lifelong so I'm not all that surprised that some would question whether she was "pretending to be a woman" as part of a grift. I think Liz was truly trans. I think she was also a con artist, exploiter, rotten parent, narcissist and petty cult leader. 

Every time someone would say Liz was a good parent, I would say out loud "except to her first 5 kids." When the Candi or Michael (naming him Michael Michael should be cause for a jail term, btw) would talk about how awesome life was on the run I had to call BS. I've know plenty of people who moved frequently during their childhoods and it was stressful for them. And they didn't have the police chasing them. I don't doubt that there was a genuine bond between Vivian and Liz but Liz was always in charge. 

It annoyed me that the doc went too easy, imo, on the Dale fraud. Liz lied her ass off in every public proclamation and raised money off those lies. If you're going to build 75,000 cars you need an assembly plant and suppliers, etc. Six months out Liz had none of that. If you accept that Liz just thought she could make it happen through force of will, well, so did the Fyre Festival guy. 

Her final "business" was the worst, for me. She had her own little trailer park Rajneeshpuram complete with homeless people bussed in from other cities. Yes, she gave them a home and food. Great. She also exploited them like the teenagers in the old selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door scam. Liz needed followers.

It isn't a revelation that the press is exploitive so I'm not shocked by that. Grossed out but not shocked.

I want someone to get the whole story about the hold-out juror and the fur coat. Was she really sick? Was that her fur coat? 

So, a good story. Liz wasted on talents on fraud. Her bravest act - to be her true self - got lost in the con.

[Pop Tart]

On 2/18/2021 at 8:49 AM, JaneDigby said:

It annoyed me that the doc went too easy, imo, on the Dale fraud. Liz lied her ass off in every public proclamation and raised money off those lies. If you're going to build 75,000 cars you need an assembly plant and suppliers, etc. Six months out Liz had none of that. If you accept that Liz just thought she could make it happen through force of will, well, so did the Fyre Festival guy. 

Her final "business" was the worst, for me. She had her own little trailer park Rajneeshpuram complete with homeless people bussed in from other cities. Yes, she gave them a home and food. Great. She also exploited them like the teenagers in the old selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door scam. Liz needed followers.

She didn't seem to make any money off either fraud, at least not great gobs of it, just what it took to run a household and support her family. The people who worked with her on the Dale said she put every bit of money back into the work, paid them better than they would have been paid elsewhere, etc. The same seemed to be true with the flower business. She and her family were living in trailers in a dreary little piece of land, not living high off the sweat of the guys who worked for them. And I would totally believe that what money she made was being put right back into that business too to provide those homes and food for the workers.

But all that said, I think your last sentence may be what she wanted more than anything else. The grifting, scheming, doing business, whatever you want to call it was to keep her family and what followers she could gather. 

This is what makes her so fascinating. She isn't just another oligarch making more money than anyone could ever possibly spend and then spending it in grossly ostentatious ways. She wanted her family to stay close, she liked having people depend on her. She liked being the one who was the smart one running things. And those are traits that would generally be seen as good. So why did she go about it in such bent ways?

I'm very curious about the juror in the fur coat too. The whole story surrounding her seemed to be more urban myth, or stories that have morphed over time, and had lots of suspicions and suppositions that I'm not sure were based on real things. And really conspiracy theories from both sides. Fur coat was a payoff from Liz to make sure she was a not guilty verdict and the getting sick and then getting mysteriously replaced so that the prosecution could get their guilty verdict? Both right? Both wrong? Little snippets of each are true and false? 

It was a good doc for how well it demonstrated the complications that people bring to stories. Both of the male reporters were doing their jobs in investigating and reporting on fraud. I can still find them creepy and loathsome because of how they seemed to take much glee in the fact that they were outing this trans woman and using her gender "fraud" to titillate and shock. There were extremely high levels of transphobia coming through from both, especially Tucker Carlson's dad. Yuck. 

 

[Not4Me]

This left me conflicted. On one hand her trans-identity was mercilessly used to demonize her her crimes well beyond her money laundering schemes (the fact that Dick Carlson equated her with serial killer Jeffrey Dahlmer shows what a piece of shit he is).

On the other hand, Geri was a criminal with delusions of grandeur (which explains the Ayn Rand/Trump narcissistic tendencies I saw) and she left behind 10 kids, 5 of which she ran out on. And she constantly put her family in such exhaustive danger. And Vivian was really no better, she appeared to be a lost soul with a doomed future. I get that she cared for her much of her later family and took in many people on the fringes of society, but what a price to pay.

Ultimately I wouldn’t consider her an antihero, just a deeply flawed person with wasted potential. And a fascinating story maker! 

I personally loved much of the now historical archival footage of that era that was presented, it gave a richer understanding of how fundamentally disenfranchised trans people were on a legal standpoint depending on the varying levels of transition & subsequent privacy they could achieve.