“I also really like the word bedizen,” Trebek says.
In those first fall weeks of 1985, a public that grows with each Nielsen sweep discerns only two areas of even potential competitive vulnerability in Ms. Julie Smith of Los Angeles. One has to do with animals. Julie is simply unable to respond to clues about animals. In her fourth slot, categories in Double Jeopardy include Marsupials and Zoological Songs, and an eidetic pharmacist from Westwood pushes Julie all the way to Final Jeopardy before she crushes him with a bold bet on Eva Braun’s shoe size.
In her fifth slot (and what is, according to the game’s publicized rules, to be her last—if a winner, she’ll be retired as a five-time champion), Julie goes up against a spectacularly fat Berkeley mailman who claims to be a co-founder of the California chapter of MENSA. The third contestant is a neurasthenic (but gorgeous—Alex keeps straightening his tie) Fullerton stenographer who wipes her lips compulsively on the sleeve of her blouse. The stenographer quickly accumulates a negative score, and becomes hysterically anxious during the second commercial break, convinced by the skunked, vengeful, and whispering mailman that she will have to pay “JEOPARDY!” the nine hundred dollars she’s down before they will let her leave the set. Faye dashes out during Off-Air; the woman cannot seem to be reassured. She keeps looking wildly at the exits as Faye runs offstage and the red lights light.
A bell initiates Double Jeopardy. Julie, refusing to meet the audience’s eye, begins pausing a bit before she reponds to Alex. She leaves openings. Only the mailman capitalizes. Julie stays ahead of him. Faye watches the stenographer, who is clearly keeping it together only through enormous exercise of will. The mailman closes on Julie. Julie assumes a look of distaste and runs the board for several minutes, down to the very last answer, Ancient Rome For A Thousand: author of De Oratore who was executed by Octavian in 43 B.C. Julie’s finger hovers over the buzzer; she looks to the stenographer. The mailman’s eyes are closed in data-search. The stenographer’s head snaps up. She looks wildly at Julie and buzzes in with Who is Tully. There is a silence. Trebek looks at his index card. He shakes his head. The stenographer goes to –$1,900 and seems to suffer something resembling a petit mal seizure.
Faye watches Julie Smith buzz in now and whisper into her mike that, though Alex was doubtless looking for the question Who is Cicero, in point of fact one Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 B.C., was known variously as both Cicero and Tully. Just as Augustus’s less-common appellation is Octavian, she points out, indicating the card in the host’s hand. Trebek looks at the card. Faye flies to the Resource Room. The verdict takes only seconds. The stenographer gets the credit and the cash. Out of the emotional red, she hugs Julie on-camera. The mailman fingers his lapels. Julie smiles a really magnificent smile. Alex, generally moved, declaims briefly on the spirit of good clean competition he’s proud to have witnessed here today. Final Jeopardy sees Julie effect the utter annihilation of the mailman, who is under the impression that the first literature in India was written by Kipling. The slot pulls down a sixty-five share. Hardly anyone notices Julie’s and the stenographer’s exchange of phone numbers as the bongos play. Faye gets a tongue-lashing from Muffy deMott on the inestimable importance of researching all possible questions to a given answer. The shot of Julie buzzing in with the correction makes the “Newsmakers” column of Newsweek.
That night Merv Griffin’s executive assistant calls an emergency policy meeting of the whole staff. MGE’s best minds take counsel. Alex and Faye are invited to sit in. Faye calls downstairs for coffee and Cokes and Merv’s special seltzer.
Griffin murmurs to his right-hand man. His man has a shiny face and a black toupee. The man nods, rises:
“Can’t let her go. Too good. Too hot. She’s become the whole show. Look at these figures.” He brandishes figures.
“Rules, though,” says the director. “Five slots, retire undefeated, come back for Champion’s Tourney in April. Annual event. Tradition. Art Flemming. Fairness to whole contestant pool. An ethics type of thing.”
Griffin whispers into his shiny man’s ear. Again the man rises.
“Balls,” the shiny man says to the director. “The girl’s magic. Figures do not lie. The Triscuit people have offered to double the price on thirty-second spots, long as she stays.” He smiles with his mouth but not his eyes, Faye sees. “Shoot, Janet, we could just call this the Julia Smith Show and still make mints.”
“Julie,” says Faye.
“Absolutely.”
Griffin whispers up at his man.
“Need Merv mention we should all see substantial salary and benefit incentives at work here?” says the shiny man, flipping a watch fob. “A chance here to be industry heroes. Heroines. MGE a Camelot. You, all of you, knights.” Looks around. “Scratch that. Queens. Entertainment Amazons.”
“You don’t get rid of a sixty share without a fight,” says Dee, who’s seated next to Faye, sipping at what looks to Faye a little too much like water. The director whispers something in Muffy deMott’s ear.
There’s a silence. Griffin rises to stand with his man. “I’ve seen the tapes, and I’m impressed as I’ve never been impressed before. She’s like some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force that some in the industry have spent their whole lives trying to locate and focus.” This is Merv Griffin saying this. Eyes around the table are lowered. “What is that force?” Merv asks quietly. Looks around. He and his man sit back down.
Alex goes to the door to relieve a winded gofer of refreshments.
Griffin whispers and the shiny man rises. “Merv posits that this force, ladies, gentleman, is the capacity of facts to transcend their internal factual limitations and become, in and of themselves, meaning, feeling. This girl not only kicks facts in the ass. This girl informs trivia with import. She makes it human, something with the power to emote, evoke, induce, cathart. She gives the game the simultaneous transparency and mystery all of us in the industry have groped for, for decades. A sort of union of contestantorial head, heart, gut, buzzer finger. She is, or can become, the game show incarnate. She is mystery.”
“What, like a cult thing?” Alex Trebek asks, opening a can of soda at arm’s length.
Merv Griffin gives Trebek a cold stare.
Merv’s man’s face gleams. “See that window?” he says. “That’s where the rules go. Out the window.” Feels at his nose. “Does your conscientious entertainer retain—and here I say think about all the implications of ‘retention,’ here”—looking at Janet—“I mean does he cling blindly to rules for their own sake when the very goal and purpose and idea of those rules walks right in off the street and into the hearts of every Triscuit consumer in the free world?”
“Safe to say not,” Dee says drily.
The man: “So here’s the scoop. She stays till she’s bumped. We cannot and will not give her any help on-air. Off-air she gets anything within what Merv defines as reason. We get her to play a little ball, go easy on the board when strategy allows, give the other players a bit of a shot. We tell her we want to play ball. DeMott here is one of our carrots.”
Muffy deMott wipes her mouth on a commissary napkin. “I’m a carrot?”
“If the girl plays ball, then you, deMott, you start in on helping the kid shelter her income. Tell her we’ll give her shelter under MGE. Take her from the seventy bracket to something more like a twenty. Kapisch? She’s got to play ball, with a carrot like that.”
“She sends all her money to a hospital her brother’s in,” Faye says softly, next to her mother.
“Hospital?” Merv Griffin asks. “What hospital?”
Faye looks at Griffin. “All she told me was her brother was in Arizona in a hospital because he has trouble living in the world.”
“The world?” Griffin asks. He looks at his man.
Griffin’s man touches his wig carefully, looks at Muffy. “Get on that, deMott,” he says. “This hospitalized brother thing. If it’s good P.R., see that it’s P.’d. Take the girl aside. Fil
l her in. Tell her about the rules and the window. Tell her she’s here as long as she can hang.” A significant pause. “Tell her Merv might want to do lunch, at some point.”
Muffy looks at Faye. “All right.”
Merv Griffin glances at his watch. Everyone is instantly up. Papers are shuffled.
“Dee,” Merv says from his chair, absently fingering a canine tooth. “You and your daughter stay for a moment, please.”
Idaho, Coins, Truffaut, Patron Saints, Historical Cocktails, Animals, Winter Sports, 1879, The French Revolution, Botanical Songs, The Talmud, ‘Nuts to You.’
One contestant, slot two-eighty-seven, 4 December 1986, is a bespectacled teenage boy with a smear of acne and a shallow chest in a faded Mozart T-shirt; he claims on-air to have revised the Western solar calendar into complete isomorphism with the atomic clocks at the U.S. Bureau of Time Measurement in Washington. He eyes Julie beadily. Any and all of his winnings, he says, will go toward realizing his father’s fantasy. His father’s fantasy turns out to be a spa, in the back yard of the family’s Orange County home, with an elephant on permanent duty at either side of the spa, spouting.
“God am I tired,” Alex intones to Faye over a soda and handkerchief at the third commercial break. Past Alex, Faye sees Julie, at her little desk, looking out at the studio audience. People in the audience vie for her attention.
The boy’s hopes for elephants are dashed in Final Jeopardy. He claims shrilly that the Islamic week specifies no particular sabbath.
“Friday,” Julie whispers.
Alex cues bongos, asks the audience to consider the fact that Californians never (“never,” he emphasizes) seem to face east.
“Just the facts on the brother who can’t live in the world is all I want,” Merv Griffin says, pushing at his cuticles with a paper clip. Dee makes soft sounds of assent.
“The kid’s autistic,” Faye says. “I can’t really see why you’d want data on a damaged person.”
Merv continues to address himself to Dee. “What’s wrong with him exactly. Are there different degrees of autisticness. Can he talk. What’s his prognosis. Would he excite pathos. Does he look too much like the girl. And et cetera.”
“We want total data on Smith’s brother,” iterates the gleaming face of Merv’s man.
“Why?”
Dee looks at the empty glass in her hand.
“The potential point,” Merv murmurs, “is can the brother do with a datum what she can do with a datum.” He switches the paper clip to his left hand. “Does the fact that he has, as Faye here put it, trouble being in the world, together with what have to be impressive genetics, by association,” he smiles, “add up to mystery status? Game-show incarnation?” He works a cuticle. “Can he do what she can do?”
“Imagine the possibilities,” says the shiny man. “We’re looking way down the road on this thing. A climax type of deal, right? Antigone-thing. If she’s going to get bumped sometime, we obviously want a bumper with the same kind of draw. The brother’s expensive hospitalization at the sister’s selfless expense is already great P.R.”
“Is he mystery, I want to know,” says Merv.
“He’s austistic,” Faye says, staring bug-eyed. “Meaning they’re like trying to teach him just to talk coherently. How not to go into convulsions whenever somebody looks at him. You’re thinking about maybe trying to put him on the air?”
Merv’s man stands at the dark office window. “Imagine sustaining the mystery beyond the individual girl herself, is what Merv means. The mystery of total data, that mystery made a sort of antic, ontic self-perpetuation. We’re talking fact sustaining feeling, right through the change that inevitably attends all feeling, Faye.”
“We’re thinking perpetuation, is what we’re thinking,” says Merv. “Every thumb over at Triscuit is up, on this one.”
Dee’s posture keeps deteriorating as they stand there.
“Remember, ladies,” Merv’s man says from the window. “You’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the precipitate.” He guffaws. Griffin slaps his knee.
Nine months later Faye is back in the office of Griffin’s man. The man has different hair. He says:
“I say two words to you, Faye. I say F.C.C., and I say separate apartments. We do not I repeat not need even a whiff of scandal. We do not need a “Sixty-Four-Thousand-Dollar-Question”–type-scandal kind of deal. Am I right? So I say to you F.C.C., and separate pads.
“You do good research, Faye. We treasure you here. I’ve personally heard Merv use the word treasure in connection with your name.”
“I don’t give her any answers,” Faye says. The man nods vigorously.
Faye looks at the man. “She doesn’t need them.”
“All I’m saying to you is let’s make our dirty linen a private matter,” says the shiny man. “Treasure or no. So I say keep your lovely glass apartment, that I hear so much about.”
That first year, ratings slip a bit, as they always do. They level out at incredible. MGE stock splits three times in nine months. Alex buys a car so expensive he’s worried about driving it. He takes the bus to work. Dee and the cue-card lady acquire property in the canyons. Faye explores IRAs with the help of Muffy deMott. Julie moves to a bungalow in Burbank, continues to live on fruit and seeds, and sends everything after her minimal, post-shelter taxes to the Palo Verde Psychiatric Hospital in Tucson. She turns down a People cover. Faye explains to the People people that Julie is basically a private person.
It quickly gets to the point where Julie can’t go out anywhere without some sort of disguise. Faye helps her select a mustache and explains to her about not too much glue.
Extrapolation from LAX Airport flight-plan data yields a scenario in which Merv Griffin’s shiny man, “JEOPARDY!” director Janet Goddard, and a Mr. Mel Goddard, who works subsidiary rights at Screen Gems, board the shiny man’s new Piper Cub on the afternoon of 17 September 1987, fly nonstop to Tucson, Arizona, and enjoy a three-day stay among flying ants and black spiders and unimaginable traffic and several sizzling, carbonated summer monsoons.
Dethroning Ms. Smith after 700-plus victories last night was one ‘Mr. Lunt’ of Arizona, a young man whose habit of hiding his head under his arm at crucial moments detracted not at all from the virtuosity with which he worked a buzzer and board that had, for years, been the champion’s own.
—Article, Variety, 13 March 1988.
WHAT NEXT FOR SMITH?
—Headline, Variety, 14 March 1988.
Los Angeles at noon today in 1987 is really hot. A mailman in mailman shorts and wool knee socks sits eating his lunch in the black guts of an open mailbox. Air shimmers over the concrete like fuel. Sunglasses ride every face in sight.
Faye and Julie are walking around west L.A. Faye wears a bathing suit and rubber thongs. Her thongs squeak and slap.
“You did what?” Faye says. “You did what for a living before you saw our ad?”
“A psychology professor at UCLA was doing tests on the output of human saliva in response to different stimuli. I was a professional subject.”
“You were a professional salivator?”
“It paid me, Faye. I was seventeen. I’d had to hitch from La Jolla. I had no money, no place to stay. I ate seeds.”
“What, he’d like ring bells or wave chocolate at you and see if you’d drool?”
Julie laughs, gap-toothed, in mustache and sunglasses, her short spiked hair hidden under a safari hat. “Not exactly.”
“So what, then?”
Faye’s thongs squeak and slap.
“Your shoes sound like sex,” Julie says.
“Don’t think even one day doesn’t go by,” says veteran reference-book sales representative P. Craig Lunt in the office of the game-show production mogul who’s looking studiously down, manipulating a plastic disk, trying to get a BB in the mouth of a clown.
Dee Goddard and Muffy deMott sit in Dee’s office, overlooking the freeway, today, at noon, in the air-conditioni
ng, with a pitcher of martinis, watching the “All New Newlywed Game.”
“It’s the ‘All New Newlywed Game’!” says the television.
“Weak show,” says Dee. “All they do on this show is humiliate newlyweds. A series of low gags.”
“I like this show,” Muffy says, reaching for the pitcher that’s refrigerating in front of the air-conditioner. “It’s people’s own fault if they’re going to let Bob Eubanks embarrass them on national daytime just for a drier or a skimobile.”
“Cheap show. Mel got a look at their books once. A really… a really chintzy operation.” Dee jiggles a lemon twist.
Bob Eubanks’ head fills the screen.
“Jesus will you look at the size of the head on that guy.”
“Youthful-looking, though,” Muffy muses. “He never seems to age. I wonder how he does it.”
“He’s traded his soul for his face. He worships bright knives. He makes sacrifices to dark masters on behalf of his face.”
Muffy looks at Dee.
“A special grand prize chosen just for you,” says the television.
Dee leans forward. “Will you just look at that head. His forehead simply dominates the whole shot. They must need a special lens.”
“I sort of like him. He’s sort of funny.”
“I’m just glad he’s on the inside of the set, and I’m on the outside, and I can turn him off whenever I want.”
Muffy holds her drink up to the window’s light and looks at it. “And of course you never lie there awake in the dark considering the possibility that it’s the other way around.”
Dee crosses her ankles under her chair. “Dear child, we are in this business precisely to make sure that that is not a possibility.”
They both laugh.
“You hear stories, though,” Muffy says. “About these lonely or somehow disturbed people who’ve had only the TV all their lives, their parents or whomever started them right off by plunking them down in front of the set, and as they get older the TV comes to be their whole emotional world, it’s all they have, and it becomes in a way their whole way of defining themselves as existents, with a distinct identity, that they’re outside the set, and everything else is inside the set.” She sips.