Drunk History (2013) s01e05 Episode Script

San Francisco

Mary Ellen Pleasant is the mother of civil rights in California.
Here's my money.
Here's $30,000 so you can buy guns and stuff.
Mark twain gets his start as Mark Twain.
But he's telling some [Bleep.]
drunk riverboat captain story.
Yeah.
It gets that dirty in the frog jumping world.
The next time we see Patty Hearst, she's got a machine gun at a bank, and she's like, my new name is Tania.
Get the [Bleep.]
down.
San Francisco was built on, like, thieves and whores, and this is a place where the freaks and weirdoes come where they feel they can be accepted.
And that is where some of them can be.
The Gold Rush was a bunch of poor men running to where they could get money, um, getting money where he can.
And it still is.
Like, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, you know? It's like the new [Bleep.]
.
Like, oh, let's [Bleep.]
make a gold mine on that.
It's not titties and ass, but it's a whole 'nother angle of that dangle.
City by the bay.
I really want a drink.
Hello.
Today, we're gonna talk about Mary Ellen Pleasant, the mother of civil rights in California.
Mary Ellen Pleasant was a light-skinned black woman.
She was a slave until one day a planter bought her out of slavery and made her a free woman.
So when she went to California, she pretended that she was a white woman.
Now, first off, she was a chef.
And people are coming in and she's cooking for them.
And people love her.
People had started bidding for her to be their personal chef.
And she was like, you know what, [Bleep.]
all that.
I'm gonna open my own restaurant.
She was head bitch in charge.
She had made some [Bleep.]
happen.
She had made [Bleep.]
happen for, like, black people getting jobs.
So as a white woman, she started opening restaurants.
She had laundries.
She had boarding houses.
She started getting black people hired for positions they'd never normally be hired for at that time.
This woman was a renaissance woman.
In the late 1850s, Mary Ellen Pleasant is making a ton of [Bleep.]
money in California.
But she said, even though I'm kinda, like, light-skinned and I get along with everybody and everybody thinks I'm white and I could live a very comfortable life if I wanted to pfft! Pfft! [Bleep.]
that.
She took that money and she started doing some [Bleep.]
.
During this time, she'd been actively freeing slaves.
She said, you know what, James Brown.
John Brown.
John Brown, a famous abolitionist, who was a white man You know, he's trying to free slaves.
Here's my money.
Here's $30,000 so you can buy guns and stuff.
They buy land in Canada because they're gonna open a home and farm so that these freed slaves can go live.
John brown gets caught, and they find a letter on him that says something like, hey, I'm in support of you and I'm gonna keep being in support of you.
Just make some [Bleep.]
happen.
And instead of M.
E.
P.
, it looked like W.
E.
P.
So it was published everywhere.
Everybody be on the lookout for some dick named W.
E.
P.
Where was I at, historically? At that time, she was in love with a man named Thomas Bell.
He was a Scotsman.
He was a businessman.
And she loved him.
That is that was not me farting.
That's the chair.
And they had businesses together, meaning laundries, and blah, blah, blah, and bull[Bleep.]
.
And together, they amassed a fortune of $30 million.
Which, like, nowadays is like a batrillion gillion a-dollars.
In, like, one of the "censuseses," she outted herself as a black woman.
When the love of her life, Thomas Bell, died, people started talking about her badly.
They what's it called? They "dismissinated" her.
They "shenamenanated" her.
They her.
No, but really.
And they said terrible things.
She eats babies.
She steals babies.
She does this, she's a whore, she's a whore madam.
She's a this, she's a that.
That's when they gave her the name "Mammy.
" And they called her "Mammy Pleasant.
" The [Bleep.]
's that about? And you know what, in the end, she made money like a true American, and she fought for people's freedom and rights like a true the most American.
She did exactly what she wanted to do and said "I'd rather be a corpse than a coward.
" I'm free, I want y'all to be free, and I want me to be free.
[Bleep.]
you, [Bleep.]
you, [Bleep.]
you.
And P.
S.
I count 'cause I'm a mother[Bleep.]
person, dickfaces.
There's some park in San Francisco that is dedicated to her, and she haunts it.
Now, why would she haunt something that pays tribute to her? 'Cause it's the smallest mother[Bleep.]
park in San Francisco.
That's an angry ghost.
I don't know if she's angry.
Can ghosts be angry? They're already dead.
What are they pissed off about? That they're dead.
Yeah, I guess it depends what you feel about things.
Again, that wasn't me farting.
Mark twain starts taking on, like, the local politicians and police force.
He's a [Bleep.]
America's most wanted.
I love Mark Twain.
He started in San Francisco.
He came to the city and became a kind of a, uh, ambassador.
San Francisco is an excellent place to discover who you are and who you want to be.
Ahh! Hello, America! Ga-zoom! I'm just a guy that likes to wear ladies' lingerie.
Hello.
My name is Derrick Beckles.
And today we're gonna talk about Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain.
Wow.
Samuel Clemens he was from Missouri.
He grows up along, like, the Mississippi.
In his heart, he wanted to be a writer.
And it wasn't going well.
"Mark Twain!" Is what the riverboat captain would scream.
He was like, oh, that's clever.
So when he goes out west, he starts writing under the pseudonym of Mark Twain, which nobody in the west understands what the [Bleep.]
that is.
When he's writing under this name, I guess maybe he feels a bit more emboldened.
He's got a bit of a name for himself, but he pisses off the wrong people.
The person who he wrote about was not pleased.
Well, he was just like, ooh, you wrote something about me.
You wrote something about me in the newspaper.
And, uh ha! Okay, where am I right now? I don't remember where I am right now.
Not co not cool.
I'm gonna challenge you to a duel.
I'm gonna blow your [Bleep.]
head off.
Meet me on the street, 3:00.
And Mark Twain's like, all right, let's do this thing.
Oh, you can't duel in Nevada.
So he was, like, breaking federal law.
So he went to San Francisco.
He was a master provocateur.
He starts taking on, like, the local politicians and police force.
He would just, like, take jabs at them in his writing for local newspapers and [Bleep.]
.
He was just like, pfft.
Okay, what do I do next? Mark twain [Bleep.]
up.
He is straight up a [Bleep.]
America's most wanted.
And he goes out to the middle of [Bleep.]
nowhere and hangs out at the local [Bleep.]
watering hole, saloon.
There's a guy who's hanging out there who constantly spins yarns.
Oh, I got a story, my name's Ben coon, and I got a little story for you.
They're like, [Bleep.]
I don't wanna hear it.
I don't wanna hear it no more.
I know what I'm talking about.
I know what I'm talking about! There's Mark Twain sitting at the back of the bar.
Uh, I'll [Bleep.]
listen.
Ben coon's like, finally.
Somebody's gonna [Bleep.]
listen to my bull[Bleep.]
.
So he's like, okay, here's the deal.
There's these two dudes are pitting frogs against each other in a leaping contest.
So everybody else is just like, God damn it, I've heard this [Bleep.]
story 100 times.
And one man sabotages the other man's leaping frog by feeding him lead-filled buckshot so that the opponent's frog can't jump as high.
Yeah.
It gets that dirty in the frog jumping world.
Anyways, Mark Twain's just like, this is an awesome [Bleep.]
story.
Yes! I'm gonna write about this [Bleep.]
.
Mark twain goes back to his typewriter or whatever the [Bleep.]
his computer And goes, brrrrr.
I'm gonna transcribe this in this dulled-down, everyman's storytelling.
Bang! That story gets picked up and becomes a [Bleep.]
huge hit.
And it's described as "story of the day!" Mark twain has hit the [Bleep.]
.
What he's done is ama-zing.
So it becomes the story of the day and it just, like, spreads to every newspaper, and Mark Twain gets his start as Mark Twain.
But he's telling some [Bleep.]
drunk riverboat captain story of a [Bleep.]
frog filled with lead, and blah, blah.
His signature becomes this dumbed-down vernacular.
He like laments, oh, I'm only known for this frog story.
But that was his jump this frog story was his jumping off point.
He became this, like, sloe gin Porch Storytelling Patriarch.
And I think the Mark Twain that became the Mark Twain was like the liberace that became the liberace.
Then all of a sudden she opened the door and they all came pouring in.
And they're like, ahh! And they beat up the math teacher, strangle her.
Well, San Francisco's interesting because it's history, there's cool people, there's beauty, there's architecture, there's art and hills and water.
It's like New York but on the water.
It's really nice.
I say we have the actual Tequila.
Yes, that is chilling.
With the orange juice that we just squeezed.
I say we put that in there after we do a quick shot.
I never do shots.
I always sip it.
I should just do a shot, right? Well, hello.
Today, we're going to talk about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
So Patty Hearst is descended from William Randolph Hearst.
He is a very wealthy man.
And her dad is Randolph Hearst.
But essentially, they own all of the media.
And so, you know, she's from that kind of The people who made the country.
At 19, Patty Hearst was living in Berkeley in this nice apartment that her parents are paying for.
So they're sitting at home, and she's reading in her bathrobe with her fiancé.
And then there's, like, a knock at the door.
No.
Cutie, it's okay, it's okay.
It's fake.
They didn't have dogs.
Quiet! Quiet, quiet, quiet! She opens the door.
Like, oh, can we help you? Oh, we ran out of gas money.
Blah, blah, blah.
And then all of a sudden, they all came pouring in.
And they're like, ahh! And they beat up the math teacher, strangle her, and take her captive.
Bring her in a van over to their headquarters.
She's blindfolded.
She's gagged.
I don't know if she's gagged.
She's definitely blindfolded.
They put her in this closet.
It's like the size of a closet.
And she doesn't know what's happening, really.
So it's 57 days she's in this room.
So finally, one day, they let her get out of the closet, and they take off her blindfold.
And she looks out and she sees all the people.
She's like, oh, my God, you're so beautiful.
Oh, who are these peo Like, you guys like you're my mommy.
This is essentially what Stockholm Syndrome is.
That was the Symbionese Liberation Army.
"Symbionese" is not a word.
It's they kinda made it up.
They're not the brightest people in the world.
Now your name's Tania.
And this is your new life.
And she's like Okay.
And then they do a photo shoot, and she put the beret on and a machine gun, and she's, like, all with the S.
L.
A.
So she started recording these audio tapes and sending them to her parents.
Mom, dad, I'm okay.
But I need you to feed every poor person.
That ends up being like 300,000.
$300 million.
They're already stupid.
Like, they could not count.
And the Hearsts are like, we don't have that much money.
We'll give you $3 million.
Whatever, dude.
I mean, can you imagine? So they started all these like, um, food kinda trucks on the corners of San Francisco, and they would start, like, distributing foods.
And then they said they wanted even more.
Mom, dad, there was no beef or lamb.
That's not the kinda food that you should be giving to poor people.
That food sucked.
Meanwhile, everyone's, like, worried about her.
Her family is freaking out.
So they're just like, what the [Bleep.]
is happening? And they're dressed in black, and they're saying, we don't know what happened to Patty.
What's gonna happen? And then she's like, mom, take off that dumb black dress.
It's not helping anything.
You're embarrassing us.
Like, I'm not dead.
I'm alive.
And I feel that what you're doing is wrong, being a rich person.
And I'm here to be part of the people of the people people.
Basically, what happens is they decide I forgot to pee.
Let me interrupt.
- Good.
- No, I wanna do a Do a jell-o shot with Come here Lydia.
- Dave.
- Derek.
- Derek.
- No, that's Dave.
So what do I've never done a jell-o shot.
Put your finger in it.
You just give it a little stir so everything goes down smooth.
- Okay.
- More than that.
You have, like, woman hands.
Give your finger a lick, shake it up.
Shake it up, then do it.
That's good, isn't it? Isn't it good? It's kind of a bad decision with your life Bad decision.
But it's efficient.
- This does not taste good.
- No.
It tastes a little good.
The next time we see her, she's got a machine gun at a bank, and she's like, my new name is Tania, get the [Bleep.]
down.
And so she's like, doing this, like You know, like, threatening everybody in the bank.
And she's kinda into it.
It's in the news.
And her parents own the newspaper.
So it's like it's everywhere.
People are like, Patty Hearst.
Where is she? What's happening? This is like all that the news is talking about.
What's happening with Patty Hearst? And so this bank robbery is the first time that she has, like, been out in the public.
And they don't catch her.
And then, all of a sudden, in L.
A.
, there's a shooting.
And the police are all there.
They start shooting.
The whole house is just like becomes flames.
And everyone thinks Patty Hearst is in the house.
Well, here's what happens.
Patty's still alive and she's with this couple, watching it in a hotel in Anaheim.
Hi, Blanche.
Come here.
So people people start What was I saying? She moves to San Francisco, and she just starts, like, living her life, going grocery shopping, doing whatever.
Then all of a sudden, one day, like, on a errand, Patty Hearst gets spotted.
Someone recognizes her.
And when she comes into jail, she's gotta say what her profession is.
And she says "urban guerilla.
" They sentence her to 35 years in jail.
And then after 22 months, Carter commuted her.
When she comes out of prison, she is like, I'm so excited, I'm about to go on vacation.
She's, like, a great example of a really rich person who could've just, like, stayed an idiot and who was like, now I understand, like What it's like.
She was really attractive.
- I have to get some water.
- Okay.

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