- Leonard Zelig: I'm 12 years old. I run into a Synagogue. I ask the Rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life... But, he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don't understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me six hundred dollars for Hebrew lessons.
- The Narrator: To the Ku Klux Klan, Zelig, a Jew who was able to transform himself into a Negro or Indian, was a triple threat.
- Leonard Zelig: I have an interesting case. I'm treating two sets of Siamese twins with split personalities. I'm getting paid by eight people.
- Leonard Zelig: [in a hypnotic trance] My brother beat me. My sister beat my brother. My father beat my sister and my brother and me. My mother beat my father and my sister and me and my brother. The neighbors beat our family. The people down the block beat the neighbors and our family.
- Leonard Zelig: But I've never flown before in my life, and it shows exactly what you can do, if you're a total psychotic!
- The Narrator: Who was this Leonard Zelig that seemed to create such diverse impressions everywhere? All that was known of him was that he was the son of a Yiddish actor named Morris Zelig, whose performance as Puck in the Orthodox version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was coolly received. The Elder Zelig's second marriage is marked by constant violent quarreling. So much so that although the family lives over a bowling alley, it is the bowling alley that complains of noise. As a boy, Leonard is frequently bullied by anti-Semites. His parents, who never take his part and blame him for everything, side with the anti-Semites. They punish him often by locking him in a dark closet. When they are really angry, they get into the closet with him. On his deathbed, Morris Zelig tells his son that life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering and the only advice he gives him is to save string.
- [Zelig thinks he's a psychiatrist]
- Leonard Zelig: I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women.
- Bruno Bettelheim: The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. Now I myself felt his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist.
- Leonard Zelig: [while under hypnosis] Your cooking is terrible. Your pancakes - they're - I dump them in the garbage when you're not looking. And the jokes you try and tell when - when you think you're amusing, they're long and pointless, there's no end to them.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: I see. And what else?
- Leonard Zelig: I wanna go to bed with you.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: Oh, that surprises me. I didn't think you liked me very much.
- Leonard Zelig: I love you.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: You do?
- Leonard Zelig: You're very sweet, 'cause you're - you're not as clever as you think you are. You're all mixed up, and nervous, and you're the worst cook. Those pancakes. Oh, I love you. I wanna take care of you. No more pancakes.
- The Narrator: That Zelig could be responsible for the behavior of each of the personalities he assumed means dozens of lawsuits. He is sued for bigamy, adultery, automobile accidents, plagiarism, household damages, negligence, property damages, and performing unnecessary dental extractions.
- House-Painting Victim: He painted my house a disgusting color. He said he was a painter. I couldn't believe the results. Then he disappeared.
- Leonard Zelig: And to the, to the gentleman who's appendix I took out, I... I'm, I don't know what to say, if it's any consolation I... I may still have it somewhere around the house.
- [Leonard Zelig is apologizing on radio to all the people he misrepresented himself to]
- Leonard Zelig: My deepest apology goes to the Trochman family in Detroit. I... I never delivered a baby before in my life, and I... I just thought that ice tongs was the way to do it.
- Zelig's Wife: He married me up at the First Church of Harlem. He told me he was the brother of Duke Ellington.
- Wrist Victim: He was the guy who smashed my car up. It was brand new. Then he backed-up over my mother's wrist. She's elderly... and uses her wrist a lot.
- Leonard Zelig: I would like to apologize to everyone. I... I'm awfully sorry for, for marrying all those women. It just, I don't know, it just seemed like the thing to do.
- Leonard Zelig: I love baseball. You know, it doesn't have to mean anything. It's just very beautiful to watch.
- The Narrator: Chicago, Illinois, that same year. There is a private party at a speakeasy on the South Side. People from the most respectable walks of life dance and drink bathtub gin.
- The Narrator: The year is 1928. America, enjoying a decade of unequalled prosperity, has gone wild. The Jazz Age, it is called. The rhythms are syncopated, the morals are looser, the liquor is cheaper, when you can get it.
- The Narrator: Fresh stories roll off the press every day about Zelig and his puzzling condition. Although the doctors claim to have the situation in hand, no two can agree on a diagnosis.
- Glandular Diagnosis Doctor: I'm convinced that it's glandular in nature and although there's no evidence now of any misfunction, I'm sure that further tests will show a problem in the secretions.
- Mexican Food Doctor: I'm certain it's something he picked up from eating Mexican food.
- Saul Bellow - Contemporary Interviews: He was, of course, very amusing, but at the same time touched a nerve in people, perhaps in a way in which they would prefer not to be touched.
- Calvin Turner - Contemporary Interviews: About this time, you know, the music usually gets started. And the band started dra-dra-dra playin', and I looked, and here's a colored guy, a colored boy playin' trumpet. Man, he was playin' back! Then, I looked at the guy and said "Well, my goodness. He looks just like that gangster, but the gangster was white and this guy is black." So I don't know what's - I don't know what's happenin'.
- The Narrator: A closed meeting of doctors listens as Dr. Fletcher describes Zelig as "a human chameleon." Like the lizard that is endowed by nature with a marvelous protective device that enables it to change color and blend in with its immediate surrounding, Zelig, too, protects himself by becoming whoever he is around.
- Freshman #1: What's brown and white and yellow and has four eyes?
- Freshman #2: Leonard Zelig at the League of Nations.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: Tell me why you assume the characteristics of the person you're with.
- Leonard Zelig: It's safe.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: What do you mean? What do you mean, "safe"?
- Leonard Zelig: Safe to - to be like the others.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: You want to be safe?
- Leonard Zelig: I wanna be liked.
- Leonard Zelig: I'm due back in town. I - I have this masturbation class, you know. If I'm not there, they start without me.
- Bricktop - Contemporary Interviews: Cole Porter was fascinated by Leonard, and he once wrote a line in a song, uh, "You're the tops, you're Leonard Zelig." But then he couldn't find anything to rhyme with "Zelig."
- Older Dr. Fletcher - Contemporary Interviews: If I could have him alone and feel my way and be innovative and creative, I felt that I could change his life, if I only had the chance.
- Leonard Zelig: I gotta get back to town soon. You know, I teach a course at the psychiatric institute in masturbation and...
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: I see.
- Leonard Zelig: I'm a doctor, you know, and I...
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: I see. Guilt-related masturbation.
- Leonard Zelig: No, no, no, no. Not guilt-related. I - I teach advanced.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: Who are you?
- Leonard Zelig: What do you mean, who am I? I don't know. These are tough questions.
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: Leonard Zelig.
- Leonard Zelig: Yes, definitely. Who is he?
- Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher: You.
- Leonard Zelig: No. I'm nobody. I'm nothing.
- Leonard Zelig: You have to be your own person and make your own moral choices, even when they do require real courage, otherwise you're like a robot, or a lizard.
- Susan Sontag - Contemporary Interviews: I don't know if you could call it a triumph of psychotherapy. It seems more like a triumph of aesthetic instincts,
- Universal Newsreel Announcer: Dr. Eudora Nesbit Fletcher, the hero, or should we say heroine, of the hour. The beautiful and brilliant psychiatrist never lost faith in her conviction that Leonard Zelig, the human chameleon, was suffering from a mental disorder.
- Universal Newsreel Announcer: Dr. Fletcher is again honored by the greatest city in the world, as she gets to christen her first ship. Quite a success story for a little girl from the backwoods.
- John Morton Blum - Contemporary Interviews: He was the kind of man who preferred watching baseball to reading Moby Dick. And that got him off on the wrong foot, or so the legend goes.
- Universal Newsreel Announcer: The patient and his healer have become fast friends in the process, and enjoy one another's company even when she's not working on him. The result of maintaining a courageous minority opinion is a resounding success for psychiatry. Who says women are just good for sewing?
- Saul Bellow - Contemporary Interviews: Although he wanted to be loved, craved to be loved, there was also something in him that desired immersion in the mass and anonymity, and fascism offered Zelig that kind of opportunity. So that he could make something anonymous of himself by belonging to this vast movement.
- Universal Newsreel Announcer: Forgiving multitudes flock to see him as he sits by the side of his plucky bride-to-be.
- Saul Bellow - Contemporary Interviews: The thing was paradoxical, because what enabled him to perform this astounding feat was his ability to transform himself. Therefore, his sickness was also at the root of his salvation, and I think it's interesting to view the thing that way, that it was his very disorder that made a hero of him.
- Irving Howe - Contemporary Interviews: When I think about it, it seems to me that his story reflected a lot of the Jewish experience in America, the great urge to push in and to find one's place and then to assimilate into the culture. I mean, he wanted to assimilate like crazy.
- Carter Dean: It was really absurd in a way. I mean, he had this curious quirk, this strange characteristic, and for a time, everyone loved him, and then people stopped loving him, and then he did this stunt, you know, with the airplane, and then everybody loved him again, and that was what the '20s were like. And, you know, when you think about it, has America changed so much? I don't think so.
- John Morton Blum - Contemporary Interviews: the Freudians had a ball. They could interpret him in any way they pleased. It was all symbolism, but there were no two intellectuals who agreed about what it meant.