Some guys live for the Super Bowl. Others for the Daytona 500. Or the World Series.
Me? This is the week I've been waiting for – the final days of the two week-long Tournament of Champions on Jeopardy! which will conclude Friday night. (The exclamation mark is part of the show’s official name but I’ll drop it for the rest of this tale.) The best of the best Jeopardy champions of the last three decades are going head to head and the winner will take home a million bucks.
I’ve never been much of a jock or sports fan but I’ve been crazy about Jeopardy since it debuted in 1964 when I was 12. The show was hosted by Art Fleming back then. I was (and proudly remain) a nerd. As a boy, I read every volume of the World Book Encyclopedia cover-to-cover. For fun. So I knew a lot of the questions. (Jeopardy contestants are given the answers. They have to come up with the correct questions.)
I wrote away to be a contestant and received a nice letter informing me I was too young but thanking me for my interest. That version of the show disappeared sometime in the seventies.
But, one hot summer Sunday night in 1985, I was flipping through the channels and, lo and behold, there it was again – a reincarnated Jeopardy, hosted by Alex Trebek. Better yet, there was a commercial announcing that local tryouts were to be held the very next weekend in New Haven, a mere 45 minutes from my Connecticut home. I called first thing Monday and booked a slot.
Hundreds of wannabe contestants showed up for the tryout, which was held in an auditorium on the Yale campus and consisted of a 55-question general knowledge test. Most of my fellow contenders appeared to be Yalies. I assumed I was doomed. But luck was with me. Once the tests were graded, I was among the top 15 scorers invited to the stage to play a practice game using old-fashioned board game “clickers” to ring in.
The contestant coordinator informed the group he was aware that, between us, we had a lot of information inside our heads. That’s why we were invited to stay. He said that what he was really looking for at that point were contestants with personality. I knew then that I was golden because New Englanders tend to be reserved, making them come across as having no discernible personality whatsoever, so I turned on my country boy Missouri charm and, sure enough, was told I’d be getting a call.
The call came a few weeks later inviting me to a taping in LA two weeks hence, on a Monday. The coordinator said five shows were taped in one day and, since I was coming all the way from the east coast, he would be sure I was among the first three of that week’s contestants in case I won and went on to win four additional shows – there was a max of five wins per contestant back then – so I wouldn’t have to fly home then fly back.
My wife was pregnant and we had a two-year-old, so it was decided I’d fly to LA by myself.
The night before I was to leave our toddler, in his high chair, began crying during dinner. I took a clown that was affixed by a suction cup to the chair’s tray, stuck it in the middle of my forehead and finished the meal. He was so amused by the sight of daddy with a clown sticking out of his head that he forget whatever he was fussing about.
A few hours later my wife informed me I had a perfectly circular two-inch purple hickey in the middle of my forehead. The suction cup had broken some capillaries, releasing blood that formed the hickey. I said I was sure it would go away.
But it didn’t. I woke up in the middle of the night to find my wife holding a flashlight, examining the hickey. “It’s getting worse,” she said sadly.
The next morning the spot was, if anything, an even darker, nastier shade of purple. My wife went to a drugstore and bought a brand of make-up called “Erase” to disguise it and laid it on thick. By the time I arrived in LA, got to my hotel and washed the make-up off, the hickey was black.
Monday afternoon I presented myself at the Sony Studios and learned I was to be a contestant on the first of the five shows that were be taped that day.
The make-up artist thought it was hilarious when I told him the story of my hickey which, he hoped but wasn’t sure, he could disguise with enough pancake make-up so it wouldn’t show. He called Alex over and told him the story. Alex, too, thought it was hilarious and asked if I would be willing to talk about it during the “get acquainted with the contestant” section of the show. I said no but if I went on to be a five-time winner I’d be happy to discuss it during my final appearance.
During commercial breaks, the make-up artist lightly powdered the faces of Alex and the other two contestants. He applied pancake make-up to my forehead with a trowel as if he was laying bricks – make-up that melted under the hot studio lights and ran down my face in rivulets.
At halftime, I was in last place. But, by the end of Double Jeopardy, I was leading with $6,700 – as much as the other two players combined. The champion had earned $5,000. The other challenger had $1,700.
While I’ve always had a head for useless information, I’ve never pretended to be good at math. I can’t even handle basic arithmetic – that’s why I became a writer in the first place. I figured the champion would wager $5,000, so I did, too. It never occurred to me I could have wagered $3,301 and, if we both came up with the correct Final Jeopardy question and he bet his whole wad, still have won.
It didn’t matter. The Final Jeopardy category was “Pop Music.” The answer was, “Written as ‘Moritat,’ this song has been in the Billboard Top 40 longer and more often than any other song.”
If I had once known but forgotten the correct question, that would have been a tragedy. But I never knew it in the first place. I stood there like a zombie. The 30 seconds during which I could see out of the corner of my eye my fellow contestants writing down their answers as the Jeopardy theme song played was the longest 30 seconds of my life.
The correct question turned out to be the title of a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. It was originally entitled “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” and was written for their musical drama, “Die Dreigroschenoper," which premiered in Berlin in 1928. It debuted in America as "The Threepenny Opera."
"Opera" flopped in New York in 1933 after just 12 performances, due in large part to an awkward German-to-English translation of Moritat’s lyrics, that went something like this:
And the shark it has teeth
And it wears them in the face.
And Macheath, he has a knife
But the knife can’t be seen.
It wasn’t until 1954, when lyricist Marc Blitzstein re-translated the lyrics for a new production, that the song became a bona-fide hit.
Oh the shark has … pretty teeth dear
And he shows them … pearly white.
Just a jack-knife, has Macheath dear
And he keeps it … out of sight.
That was the translation Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra used to record their versions of the song that, as of 1985, had remained atop the Billboard charts longer than any other pop song.
The champion, a fiftyish schoolteacher from Brooklyn, knew the correct question, which was, of course, “Mack the Knife.” I didn’t. Nor did the other challenger, who wagered everything. I finished second. Alex told me as he was shaking my hand during the closing credits that he knew I wouldn’t know “Mack the Knife’s” origins – I was too young to have seen “Threepenny Opera” during its 1950s Broadway run.
My brother, who is 16 years older, had made me promise to call when I was finished taping and tell him everything. He knew the correct question instantly. He said he and his wife had seen “The Threepenny Opera” when they were dating in the mid-1950s. I wanted to jump through the phone and strangle him.
I took the red-eye back to JFK that night and was sure everyone at the airport and on the plane was looking at me, which they probably were because I was wearing approximately an inch-thick load of pancake make-up that barely concealed the hickey.
Later that week I received a call from a marketing manager at Hartford-based Heublein which was, at the time, America’s second largest wine and spirits marketer. I had been trying to get a meeting with Heublein for years. She invited me to come up and pitch the Harvey’s Bristol Cream business the very next day.
Before the meeting started, I knew I had to explain the hickey on my forehead, which hadn’t faded one iota, so I told her the story, and how, earlier that week, I had appeared on Jeopardy.
She loved the tale and gave me one project for Harvey’s … which evolved into two … then four more. Soon I started working for additional Heublein brands including Smirnoff, Finlandia, Famous Grouse, Club Cocktails, Paul Masson, Lancers and Inglenook wines and others. Heublein quickly became my agency’s largest client and the work I did for them helped win work from other big companies. My first Heublein client and her husband are good friends to this very day. So, even though I lost on Jeopardy, I won the business that made my career.
I found a VHS tape of my Jeopardy appearance as we were packing our Connecticut house last fall in preparation for our move to Florida. I’ve played it for a couple of friends but have to leave the room during the final 30 seconds of the show.
Do I wish I had won Jeopardy? Of course. If I had, I might have gone on to win four more games. I might even be competing right now because this year’s tournament features champions from three decades.
But I didn’t. So I’m not.
But, as Chance the Gardener, Peter Sellers' character in Being There (1979, screenplay by Jerzy Kozinski, directed by Hal Ashby, co-starring Shirley McClaine, Melvyn Douglas and Jack Warden and for which Sellers earned an Oscar nomination) put it so well, I like to watch.
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