The Answer Is..., page 7
In addition to hosting, I produced Jeopardy! for the first three years. I made one significant change after the first season, which we’ve kept up all these years. That first season, contestants could ring in immediately when they saw the clue. It caused a lot of confusion among viewers at home. They would be watching and they’d see a contestant’s light come on, but I would call on another contestant because their light had come on first and had gone off before the camera turned from the clue to the contestants. It drove the audience nuts. So I changed that. Now, a contestant cannot ring in until after I’ve read the clue in its entirety. An unintended benefit was that it gave viewers a better experience of playing along. A lot of people play at home with ballpoint pens or something similar as buzzers, and that change made it easier for them to read ahead and beat the on-air contestants. I’m often asked what’s the secret to ringing in first. It’s simple: Know as much as you can about the categories and clues. The more you know, the faster your thumb is.
September 10, 1984: the first time viewers saw me walk out to Johnny Gilbert’s introduction.
The first gameboard.
The first clue selected.
We had a very tight budget during those seasons I produced. This was before computers. The writers typed their questions on three-by-five index cards on IBM Selectrics. For a few years, the category cards at the top of the gameboard were printed. Someone would have to change them between rounds. It wasn’t as antiquated as when Art Fleming hosted the show in the sixties, and you’d sometimes see a hand coming into the camera frame and pulling the cards. But it was close. For our gameboard, I finally found an affordable used chyron machine from CBS Television, and we started using that to run it. So I had to use a lot of ingenuity. I enjoyed it for the same reason I enjoy fixing things around the house. I’m a problem solver.
Through the ensuing years, under new producers, especially Harry Friedman, who has just left the show after twenty years at the helm, Jeopardy! has made a conscious effort to stay ahead of the curve. We were the first game or quiz show to broadcast in high definition. With the hiring of the Clue Crew, we introduced a whole new way of presenting clues from locations all around the world. We started tournaments honoring teachers and students. Stars from the entertainment and political worlds, including two presidents, made appearances on the show, all in an attempt for us to stay fresh and relevant with the times.
But in the early years, putting the show together wasn’t the only challenge. We also struggled getting people to watch. Even though Jeopardy! was supposed to be packaged with Wheel, it wasn’t always. For example, initially Wheel was on at 7:00 p.m. in Los Angeles and Jeopardy! wouldn’t come on until midnight.
Handwriting on a computer screen was an innovative idea, but it took some time for the technology to catch up. (Those answers are supposed to read “What Is Texas?” and “What Is Martin Luther King Jr. Day?”)
King World, the show’s distributor, was very concerned. Michael King came to me after we’d been on the air for three or four weeks.
“The show’s too tough,” he said. “The material is too difficult. The audience can’t relate to it. That’s why the ratings are not taking off.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You gotta trust me.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll soften up all the material.”
Now keep in mind, we had already taped two months of programming. The next time I saw Michael, I said, “Did you notice that the material got a lot easier?”
“Yeah!” he said. “Thank you so much for doing that. It’s playing a lot better now.”
I hadn’t done a damn thing. The shows were already taped. They were in the bag. I just lied to him.
What Is… “A TIME FOR TONY”?
Back in those early days of Jeopardy!, when I was both hosting and producing the show, I used to answer all the mail. I’d send a response to everything, the fan letters as well as the hate mail. One day, Merv Griffin saw me doing this and said, “You know how I handle the nasty mail?” He grabbed a letter, balled it up, and threw it into the wastebasket.
I still take the input we receive from viewers very seriously—some might even say too seriously. If someone writes to criticize either me or the show, I probably spend way too much time and energy pondering their complaints and worrying about my performance. While I am no longer able to respond to every letter or email or comment on social media, I still try to answer as many as I can.
Merv was actually a very warm man. He had the unique ability to draw you in and make you feel like whatever you were saying was the only thing that mattered to him in that moment. He was not laid-back. He wasn’t cool. He was excited and engaged. That’s why he was such a great talk show host. He especially loved storytellers. That’s why he frequently had the two Orsons on his show—Orson Bean and Orson Welles. They knew how to tell great stories. It’s a lost art these days, when we only seem to have the attention span for sound bites.
With Merv Griffin.
The few times I spent with Merv were very special, but we didn’t have much of a relationship. He left Jeopardy! alone completely. He involved himself the first year or two in the design and colors of the set. And he did guest star with me on an episode of The Golden Girls that was shot on our set. But that was it. He never got involved in the material. His ex-wife, Julann, had originally come up with the idea for the show. As the story goes, shortly after the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, Merv was trying to come up with an idea for a new game show. Julann suggested giving the contestants the answers.
“That’s what put people in jail!” Merv said.
Julann then gave him an example of how it would work. I have heard two different stories about what she suggested as the first Jeopardy! clue. One version has her saying, “The answer is 5,280,” and Merv asking, “How many feet are in a mile?” The other version has her saying, “79 Wistful Vista,” and him asking, “Where did Fibber McGee and Molly live?” Whichever one it was, it convinced Merv to pursue the idea. And that’s how Jeopardy! came to be.
But his show, his baby, was Wheel of Fortune. He took a great deal of pleasure—and was good at it—in coming up with the word puzzles for Wheel. But he had no interest whatsoever in Jeopardy! That was Bob Murphy’s bailiwick.
Merv and Bob had been best friends as kids growing up in Northern California. Bob became successful in the real estate business, and Merv asked him to join his company. Bob eventually became president of Merv Griffin Enterprises.
Bob and I got to be best friends over the years. He’s Matthew’s godfather. In the early days of Jeopardy!, people would constantly challenge us to trivia games. There was a party one night hosted by the King brothers in which they decided they wanted to challenge Bob and me. Eight people got together on one team against the two of us. And we beat ’em. We beat ’em badly. I maintain we won because we made the perfect team. We complemented each other. Bob knew all that could be known, and I knew all the rest.
One fact about Merv that some people don’t know: he wrote the Jeopardy! theme song. It’s called “Think!”—though Merv originally wrote it as a lullaby for his son entitled “A Time for Tony.” Every time that song airs, Merv—and, since his death in 2007, his estate—gets a royalty. Even when, say, Paul Shaffer would play it when I made an entrance as a guest on David Letterman’s show, Merv would get a check. Shortly before he died, Merv admitted that the little Jeopardy! think music had earned him close to $80 million—more than $3 million a year for twenty-four years, plus little extras here and there when it’s used outside of the show.
People ask me, “Do you ever get tired of hearing it?” No, it’s just part of the show. I’m used to it. Granted, I don’t go around humming it. But I enjoy it when it’s played at a baseball game when a manager goes to the mound to make a pitching change, or when the referees at an NFL game are going to the video replay. It’s part of Americana. It’s something people recognize immediately. Same thing if somebody says, “Hey, you didn’t phrase that in the form of a question.” Everybody in the room knows exactly what the reference is.
The Answer Is… ANOTHER LESSON IN HUMILITY
In the early years of Jeopardy!, in order to help grow the show’s audience I did PR trips around the country. Pat Sajak, Vanna White, and I would go out on the road together because we were pitching Wheel and Jeopardy! as a package deal. Mostly we’d visit local morning shows. I didn’t mind it. I’m gregarious enough that I could roll with the punches with the local anchors. I remember going on Oprah’s show in Chicago back when it was on in the morning. (Before long, King World would sign her to a syndication deal too.) One time, the three of us were guests on Sally Jesse Raphael’s show in St. Louis. She asked us who our showbiz heroes were. Pat said somebody like Walter Cronkite.
“What about you, Alex?” Sally asked.
“Arnold Stang,” I said. Stang was a comic actor who was popular in the forties and fifties. The audience was totally clueless and utterly silent. But Pat laughed. He was probably the only one in the room who knew who Arnold Stang was. Now, take a break from this book and go look him up.
Another thing I did to help build the show’s popularity was go on the road for our very first contestant searches. We still do them to this day. The contestant department travels from city to city. They bring a group of hopefuls into a conference room and give them a fifty-question test. Then they pick up those tests and go grade them. During that time, the applicants don’t have much to do but wait. So in those early years, I would occasionally come along and surprise the groups and take questions.
One time in New York, I did that. A few minutes into the question-and-answer period, a guy at the back of the room raised his hand.
“Yes, sir?” I asked.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
All of the people around him kind of gave him a strange look.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Well,” he explained, “I was just walking by outside the hotel, and I saw this sign that said ‘Jeopardy! Testing.’ So I thought I’d come in. I have never heard of the show, and I don’t know who you are.” Then he started apologizing.
“Don’t apologize,” I told him. “You don’t have to apologize. There are a lot of people out there who don’t watch television. And I don’t take it personally that they are not familiar with the show. I hope that they will look in and discover us, but it’s okay. You don’t have to say, ‘I’m sorry’ for not knowing who I am.”
It was another lesson in humility, just in case I hadn’t been sufficiently humbled by my encounter all those years before with Her Majesty the Queen. I still don’t know if the guy passed the test.
The Answer Is… GIVING BACK
Around 1984, the Ethiopian famine was in the news, and they were showing all those terrible photos and film clips on television about the suffering that was going on. A friend of mine, the actress Carol Lawrence, was doing some public-service announcements about the crisis for the humanitarian organization World Vision. I called her up and said, “Is there anything I can do to help, Carol? Don’t hesitate to ask or tell them about me.”
Within a couple of weeks I got a phone call from World Vision. They said, “We got your message and would like you to join us and help out.”
They started sending me all over the world. In the more than thirty years I’ve been involved with the organization, I’ve made more than a dozen international trips—most of them to Africa. I’ve been to Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa. When I first went to Africa, I immediately felt at a visceral level, This is home. This is where I come from. I belong here. I feel that every time I go there. I know that’s where civilization began, and I feel it in my gut. You don’t have to tell me. There’s just something about it. I stand in Africa and I say, “I’m home.”
In Ethiopia, a mother asks me to take her child.
Once in Ethiopia, I was helping distribute food and blankets and pots and pans to families who had registered to receive help from World Vision. There was one woman who had not registered. She wasn’t on the list. She was in tears and gave me her baby.
“Take my baby,” she said. “You look after my baby.” She meant permanently. She was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep her baby alive.
There have been a lot of experiences like that with World Vision. I was in Thailand visiting an orphanage run by a priest and some nuns. There were two sections. There was an indoor section with a lot of cots where the babies were pretty sick. And there was a large outdoor playpen for toddlers who were relatively healthy. While the sister-nurse was taking me around explaining what was going on, one of the toddlers—this nude little boy—came up to my side and raised his arms. I picked him up, and I carried him around while I took the tour. At the end of the tour, I went to put him down and he started to cry. I tried to calm him down, but he was inconsolable.
“What’s wrong?” I asked the sister-nurse. “What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “They have so little physical contact with human beings that once you pick them up they don’t want to let go. They feel so loved and warm. They don’t want to lose that.”
When I heard that, I started to cry myself.
In Mozambique, I ran into another little boy. He was wearing a loincloth. He had a hoop made of wire, about the size of a bicycle wheel, and a stick with a little crook in it. He would work his wheel with the stick, and just push it along. That was his toy.
In Ethiopia for World Vision. I was much younger then, and could even manage to smile while helping distribute sixty-pound bags of grain.
In Bangladesh, there was a mother of two. There was never a husband around. She was seated working in a cardboard box that was four-by-four feet. She had a two-year-old next to her and a younger infant on her chest. Her job was to smash boulders the size of a cantaloupe and break them down into much smaller pieces. Then they would use that as gravel on the road.
I thought, My God, she’s smashing these rocks and that two-year-old is sitting nearby. A small piece of stone could fly and hit that kid in the eye.
She had one pan and one sari. That was it. That’s all she owned.
When you go through experiences like these over the years and you see man’s inhumanity to man and how much suffering is out there, it affects you. You can’t stand by passively and just say, “Well, it’s not going to bother me. I’m okay. I’m going back to LA.” You want to do something. You want to help. So I continued to help World Vision, both financially and with my time.
Then one day my accountant came to me, and he asked, “Do you like the way the government is spending your tax money?”
“No,” I said.
“Would you like to have more say in it?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you and Jean form a charitable foundation,” he said, “and that way you can decide where your monies are spent.”
So we did. It just changed my philosophy completely. Now instead of giving small amounts to a hundred different charities a year, I’m able to give away larger chunks, and help so many more people than before.
We’ve contributed a lot of money to my alma mater, the University of Ottawa. They were creating an alumni building and they needed money to finish it. They asked if I would help; we did, and they wound up naming it after me. We’ve supported Fordham University, our son’s alma mater, as well as the National Geographic Society. The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, whose geography bee I hosted for fifteen years, was on the verge of going belly up until we gave them some financial help. We also contribute here locally to a charity in the valley, Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission, for people who are homeless. They’re building an eighty-bed facility in North Hollywood.
A cause that I have recently taken to heart through World Vision is helping Northern Kenya deal with the problem of female circumcision. A lot of the villages marry off their girls at a very young age, twelve and thirteen, and they circumcise them. We are trying to get them to change that, and we have constructed a boarding school for girls. The girls can leave home and live there, so they don’t have to worry about being circumcised. They don’t have to be married off. They are getting an education. And they are thriving.
We also adopted Kabaleka, a village in Zambia. It has about seventeen hundred residents. They used to get all their water from one well that animals drank from. Which meant that animals also defecated right there. It wasn’t healthy for the people. And they had a two-room thatch hut as a school. So we adopted the village, and they built a new school made of blocks and mortar, with a big room for computers—even though they had no computers and they had no electricity. They built a medical facility, and they built three houses for teachers and medical personnel. And they drilled wells throughout the village.
It’s always good to receive a gift.
Collecting water in Africa is the responsibility of women and girls. Here, Emily takes her turn drawing water from the first of eight wells we drilled in Kabaleka.
A few years ago, they asked us to come and see what had been accomplished. So Jeanie, the kids, and I went. We were greeted warmly, and they were singing. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, except “Trebek-ie! Trebek-ie!” They had a lovely banquet for us. They gave me a rooster. They gave me a goat. I realized I was going to have trouble getting them home, so I gave those away before we left.
Because it was such a success, the Zambian government was impressed and they brought in electricity from about a mile away. Since then, we have expanded the school and the medical facility, and they have built another home for the workers. Now pregnant women can go to the clinic and get a lot of prenatal childcare, ensuring they can give birth to healthier babies. Our names are tacked above some doorway. That’s nice to know.
