Trebek, still in the game
As he fights cancer and his memoir is published, the beloved host of ‘Jeopardy!’ pushes on
One morning a few weeks ago, Alex Trebek woke up in agony, struggling to move. He had barely slept during the night, but he dragged himself out of bed and got dressed for work.
A small production crew had set up a studio in his Los Angeles home so he could tape introductions to old episodes of “Jeopardy!,” the quiz show he has hosted for more than three decades.
He hadn’t recorded a new show since the pandemic halted production in March. Normally, Trebek hosts five episodes a day, two days a week, from July to April — so there was new material to air through the first three months of the shutdown. Now that the stockpile had run out, producers decided to resurrect popular episodes from years past.
As he climbed the stairs, he had to stop to rest. Then he got in front of the camera, and something shifted.
“Oddly enough, when we started taping I suddenly started to regain my strength,” he said in a phone interview a couple of days later. “It’s the strangest thing. It is some kind of an elixir.”
For the next hour and a half, Trebek narrated introductions for 20 episodes, including the first game of “Jeopardy!” he hosted, from 1984. He also taped promotional videos and recorded a health update for fans who have been following his struggle with advanced pancreatic cancer
Trebek, who turned 80 Wednesday, has never been one to ignore hard facts. He plans to keep making the show for as long as he can, but he worries that his performance is declining, that he’s slurring his words and messing up clues. “It’s a quality program, and I think I do a good job hosting it, and when I start slipping, I’ll stop hosting,” he said.
After some encouraging news from doctors last year, Trebek’s prognosis has worsened. If his current course of cancer treatment fails, he said, he plans to stop treatment.
“Yesterday morning my wife came to me and said, ‘How are you feeling?’ And I said, ‘I feel like I want to die.’ It was that bad,” he said. “There comes a time where you have to make a decision as to whether you want to continue with such a low quality of life or whether you want to just ease yourself into the next level. It doesn’t bother me in the least.”
‘It’s a show about right and wrong’
In an entertainment and media ecosystem that often feels ephemeral, vapid and divorced from reality, Trebek represents something timeless. With his cerebral bearing and aura of quiet, impartial authority, he embodies ideals that feel endangered: the pursuit of knowledge, and the inherent value of facts. He is a game show host and a smooth-talking, quick-witted entertainer, yes, but he’s also, in a way, an arbiter of truth.
“It’s not a show about good and evil, but it’s a show about right and wrong, and the bracing certainty that he expresses is so rare in our muddled lives,” said New Yorker staff writer and CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin, a longtime “Jeopardy!” fan and a five-time clue on the show.
It bothers Trebek that facts no longer provide common ground; that a shared narrative about current events has fractured into ideological media bubbles, in which information has given way to hyperbole and reflexive opinion.
“There’s a certain comfort that comes from knowing a fact,” Trebek said. “The sun is up in the sky. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to change that. You can’t say, ‘The sun’s not up there, there’s no sky.’ There is reality, and there’s nothing wrong with accepting reality. It’s when you try to distort reality, to maneuver it into accommodating your particular point of view, your particular bigotry, your particular whatever — that’s when you run into problems.”
Since March, Trebek has been quarantined with his wife, Jean. He’s occupied himself with projects around the house. He has also kept busy with his memoir, “The Answer Is …: Reflections on My Life,” which Simon & Schuster released Tuesday.
When I asked him why he decided to publish a book now, after turning down offers in the past, he was direct. “They offered me a good deal of money,” he said, adding that “it wasn’t John Bolton-type money” and that he was donating it to charity. (Bolton received an advance of $2 million for his recent
White House memoir.)
Trebek also realized that others would tell their own versions of his life. He and his publisher learned that an unauthorized biography, by writer Lisa Rogak, was scheduled to appear this month. Another “Jeopardy!” book about the history of the show is due out this fall. Trebek realized this could be his last chance to define his legacy: “I want you to hear it from me,” he said.
There are no shocking revelations in his memoir, but there are a few surprises. Trebek swears, a lot. He was so unruly as a boy that he almost got expelled from boarding school. He has a half brother he didn’t know about until he was in his 40s. In the early 1970s, he accidentally ate four or five hash brownies at a party in Malibu and woke up at the host’s house three days later. His favorite animal is the musk ox. His favorite drink is low-fat milk or, if he’s feeling frisky, which he isn’t often lately, chardonnay.
‘What is a marmoset?’
Trebek’s full name is George Alexander Trebek, but when he was growing up in Sudbury, Ontario, everyone called him Sonny, to set him apart from his father, George Terebeychuk, who emigrated from Ukraine in the late 1920s and worked as a pastry chef in a hotel kitchen.
As a boy, Alex was a daredevil and a class clown, picking fights with bullies, jumping off a balcony with a makeshift parachute, falling through the ice of a frozen river. He went to military college and dropped out,
then attended the University of Ottawa, where he majored in philosophy and studied the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. While still in school, he landed a job as a radio announcer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where he worked for 12 years. In the early 1970s, he got his first big break in American television, as the host of a game show, “The Wizard of Odds.” For the next decade, he cycled through one game show gig after another.
In1984, Trebek got the job that made his name, with the help of “I Love Lucy” star Lucille Ball, who encouraged producer Merv Griffin to hire him.
Expectations were staggering from the start. Trebek was filling the role of the popular original host, Art Fleming, who starred on “Jeopardy!” from 1964 until 1975.
On his first episode hosting the reboot, Trebek — sporting a luxuriant mustache and pale pink pocket square — strides out and bellows, “Let us play ‘Jeopardy!’ ” then flies through clue categories like “Lakes and Rivers,” “Inventions,” “Animals” and “Foreign Cuisine.”
The mechanics of the game have endured: Trebek reads a clue, and the contestants answer in the form of a question: “What is 1790?” “Who was Benjamin Harrison?” “What is the
Sun King?” “What is a marmoset?”
Six years later, the show was drawing an average nightly audience of more than 15 million on nearly 200 stations, and Trebek had established himself. When he got small roles in movies and TV shows like “Rain Man,” “Golden Girls” and “Cheers,” he always played himself.
Even in today’s fragmented media landscape, “Jeopardy!” continues to have broad appeal, pulling in an average weekly audience of 24 million viewers.
‘You can tell that that’s what he’s living for’
Pre-pandemic, when “Jeopardy!” and everything else was still getting made, Trebek would wake up at 5:15 a.m. and arrive at the Sony lot at 6:30. At 7:30, he would go over the 305 clues for that day’s shows, making notations, diacritical marks and pronunciation notes. If a clue seemed too hard, he told the writers to drop it.
“I’ll say, ‘Nobody’s going to get this.’ And they usually take my suggestions, because I view myself as every man,” Trebek said.
Sometimes the writers keep esoteric clues in anyway. Almost invariably, the contestants are stumped. “We get this horrible dead-fish look from him,” said the show’s co-head writer Billy Wisse. “We know we’re going to hear about it at the next meeting.”
Over the course of his career, Trebek has survived a car crash, two heart attacks and brain surgery for blood clots. But the show’s producers and writers were stunned when he told them he had pancreatic cancer.
“It was a gut punch,” said Harry Friedman, who began producing “Jeopardy!” around 20 years ago and retired this year. “He had really not been feeling great, but in typical Alex fashion, he wasn’t complaining about it.”
Trebek’s colleagues sometimes feared he was pushing himself too hard.
“I’ve observed morning meetings where he looks so exhausted and clearly in pain, and I think, we’re going to tape five shows in an hour and a half? There’s no way,” said executive producer Mike Richards.
One morning last year, early in his treatment, Trebek felt so sick that he lay down on the floor of his dressing room, sobbing from the pain. Producers suggested canceling the rest of the day’s tapings, but Trebek insisted on hosting all five episodes. When he walked onto the stage and greeted the audience, he felt focused, like himself.
“Once I introduce him on that stage, he is Alex Trebek,” said longtime “Jeopardy!” announcer Johnny Gilbert. “You can tell that that’s what he’s living for.”
Trebek can’t explain how he summons himself in those moments. Part of it must come from knowing that millions of people are watching.
“They’ve got their ballpoint pens, and they’re clicking away, seeing if they can click in faster than the contestants,” Trebek said. “And if they come up with a few correct responses, by gosh, that makes them feel good, because they know the people on that screen are bright. They’ve been tested. And look at that, I beat them on three consecutive clues. Holy smokes. I should try out for ‘Jeopardy!’ ”