by Kitty Kelley

Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, has just published her 13th book, and first memoir, Finding My Father: His Century-long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow. We recently discussed the new work.

You’ve written many books (including You Just Don’t Understand, You’re Wearing THAT?, You Were Always Mom’s Favorite!, and You’re the Only One I Can Tell) about how people express/hide themselves through language. How did the commercial success of those books enhance or detract from your position in academia?

My colleagues at Georgetown and in my discipline have been uniformly supportive of me and my academic, as well as my general-audience, writing. I feel I should add “kunnahurra,” which is how my mother pronounced the Yiddish expression one says to avoid jinxing good fortune.

How did writing this book about the father you adored affect you?

My father was the parent I felt an affinity for, the one I thought understood me. But when I was a child, he was rarely home. The strongest presence I felt in the house was his absence. The hours upon hours I spent talking to him about his life after he retired — I have 200 cassette tapes! — began to make up for that deep sense of longing. He also gave me mountains of written words: journals he kept before he married; letters he saved and copies of letters he wrote; and memories he wrote down for me, especially about his childhood in Warsaw (where he was born into a Hasidic family in 1908), but also about his life after he came to the U.S. in 1920. These all helped me see how his life was affected by and reflected the cataclysmic events of the 20th century: how WWI affected Warsaw’s Jews, immigration, the Depression, and anti-Semitism in both Poland and the U.S. between the wars.

My father’s father died of tuberculosis when he was very young — he never knew his father — so [my father] quit high school at 14 to support his mother and sister. Yet he became a lawyer, established the largest workers’ compensation firm in New York City, and ran for congress. Until I was in junior high, my father worked as a cutter in a coat factory. After that, my father was a partner in his own law firm. I always knew these outlines but had no idea how or why it happened that way, what it all meant, day to day, how he felt about it, or why it took him 30 years from passing the bar until he could support his family through law. Figuring it out gave me a clearer sense of how I was shaped by history, too.

Why do you think your father chose you to write his memoir rather than one of your two sisters? And has publication of this book affected your relationships within your family?

It was a no-brainer. I was already a published writer, having gotten a love of language and of writing from him. And my adoration was obvious. My sister Mimi once said, “I love Daddy, too, but I don’t think he’s God!” She and my sister Naomi have always been part of this project. I checked memories with them, and whenever I found something surprising, I’d share it with them. Our memories differ, of course. Naomi is six years older than Mimi and eight years older than me, so she had our father to herself when she was small. Naomi, like me, tended to idealize him and be critical of our mother. Mimi has been an invaluable reality check. She’ll point out when I’m judging our mother too harshly and letting our father off the hook.

As an immigrant from WWI Warsaw, your father did not have an easy life. His father died young; his mother sounds like a harridan; and he worked at over 60 jobs to support her and himself and his family. Yet he lived to be 98. To what besides good genes do you attribute his longevity?

Good luck. His and mine.

You discovered a secret relationship of your father’s and entitled one chapter “The Hidden Letters” after finding correspondence that he had secreted away for decades. Please describe.

Ah, yes, the woman I call Helen. She wasn’t a secret, but the fact that he’d saved her letters was. Both my parents spoke openly and casually about my mother’s “rival.” My father once said, “Your mother wasn’t my girlfriend. Helen was my girlfriend.” So why did he marry my mother and not his girlfriend? When he told me he’d saved Helen’s letters but didn’t know where they were, I longed to find them, to figure that out. I eventually did find them — along with copies of many letters he wrote to her! Reading their correspondence, I fell in love with Helen myself. I saw that my father’s relationship with her was romantic in a way his relationship with my mother wasn’t. And I was able to piece together the dramatic events that led to his marrying my mother. I felt I’d solved a mystery and learned a lot about relationships between women and men at the time, especially the fraught role played by virginity!

Your father was a communist, an atheist, and a Zionist. Can you say a bit about each and explain how each weaves into the other?

My father already identified as all three when he came to the U.S. at 12. He was influenced by the Bolshevik revolution through his mother’s youngest sister. Only six years older than my father, Magda was like a big sister he looked up to. Like many young people in every generation, she and her friends saw poverty and injustice and wanted to build a better world. Communism promised that would come when workers of the world unite and saw religion as a barrier to that solidarity. So atheism and communism went together. My father became disillusioned with communism but became an ever-more passionate supporter of Israel as he saw what happened to the members of his family who were still in Poland at the start of WWII. He remained a devout atheist with a deep and proud Jewish identity. When he was old, I asked, “Do you feel more Polish or American?” He replied, “I feel like a Jew.”

What advice would you give to your students about writing a memoir, particularly those who, unlike you, don’t have the advantage of hours and hours of taped interviews?

Talk to anyone you can find who knew your family or lived through similar times. Follow every trail wherever it takes you — to other people you can talk to, any documents you can find, and the infinite pathways now available on the internet. And write your own memories down for the next generation!

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Eric Burns writes books with long titles. His first, Broadcast Blues: Dispatches from the Twenty-Year War between a Television Reporter and His Medium, written in 1993, was a memoir of sorts. As an Emmy-winning correspondent for NBC News who later spent 10 years at Fox News before being fired, Burns knows the highs and lows of broadcasting. He’s since indicated that Fox is not a crucible of credibility, but rather “a cult.”

In 2006, he wrote his fourth book, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism, and his eighth, Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Television’s Conquest of America in the Fifties, in 2010. Now, he’s publishing his 15th book, having tempered his tendency for unwieldly titles: 1957: The Year that Launched the American Future. Its bright red cover features the front of the Edsel, the Ford Motor Company’s catastrophe that Burns describes as “the car with the vagina in the grille.”

No question that 1957 was a big year. Russia won the space race with Sputnik, and President Eisenhower expanded the U.S. with the Interstate Highway Act, an idea he adopted from Germany after experiencing the ease and efficiency of the Autobahn. Highways give rise to suburbs, big cars, and a new way of life.

In 1957, Americans were introduced to the Mafia by watching the McClellan Rackets Committee hearings on television. TV also introduced Elvis the Pelvis, Little Richard, and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, as well as Joe McCarthy, Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, Floyd Patterson, Billy Graham, and Ayn Rand. The hero of the 50s — hands down — was Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine and refused to file a patent to profit from his discovery.

Burns divides his book into five parts, the most important being on race, the cutting issue of our times then and now. In 1957, the country was rocked by the Supreme Court decision known as Brown v. Board of Education, which stated that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. “What happened next resulted in some of the most bitterly poignant tales to emerge…from the tenth circle of hell known as Southern racism.”

Burns recounts the trauma of nine African American students trying to enroll at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Even decades later, it’s painful to read about white adults spitting race-laden epithets in the faces of the young Black students. Within a week of their enrollment, Congress voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such piece of legislation to be approved since 1875, during the Southern revolts against Reconstruction.

But before the vote could be taken, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond began filibustering on the floor of the U.S. Senate, raging against the legislation. He held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes, earning himself an ignoble place in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest filibuster in American history. Burns reports the incident in detail but fails to mention that the feral racist had a Black daughter, having impregnated his family’s 16-year-old maid when he was 22.

For those who have not discovered The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 by William Manchester and just want a cursory gulp of 1957, Burns’ book will suffice; it offers more narrative than an almanac. But be prepared for sentences in need of a stop sign. In a chapter excoriating Ayn Rand, Burns writes:

“The kind of philosopher who so despises Rand, on the other hand, is usually an esoteric sort, like the fellow about whom I recently read who was watching a football game on television when it struck him that, in order to score, Team A has to cross Football Team B’s half of the field, thus sanctifying ‘the property-seizing principle’ of imperialism.”

And, when extolling the 1957 horror film “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” he writes:

“Fowler goes on to say that the critics who condescended to review the film, invariably snickering at its simple-minded dialogue and plot devices, not to mention its almost comical special effects, had no idea what the movie was really about and rejected the concept of teenage angst as being just a laughable rite of passage, totally ignorant that the sort of angst that was swelling around them would birth a generation of intensely political angry and aware kids whose minds and hearts would affect the world.”

Burns goes on to say that the film became “the Edsel of motion pictures.” The same might be said of his book, minus the vagina.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Carole Ione grew up in a world of beautiful Black women of various shades, where marriages crumbled, fathers fell by the wayside, and mothers forged ahead with careers and the “occasional” man. As a 10-year-old sitting at the piano listening to her mother sing Calypso songs, Ione, as she now calls herself, “learned early on from those lyrics that soldiers and sailors could be trouble — you might never see them again.”

Ione’s only paladins were women: her great-aunt, Sistonie, a physician and member of Washington’s Black aristocracy; her grandmother, Be-Be, a former Broadway chorus dancer who ran the best restaurant in Saratoga Springs, drawing celebrities like Cab Calloway, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters; and her mother, Leighla, who carved a career writing mysteries. Ironically, the biggest mystery hid behind the stone wall of secrets that kept the women estranged and incapable of bonding as a family.

At the age of 19, against fierce objections, Ione married a white Frenchman. In 1956, they moved to his home in Alsace, where everyone in the textile-manufacturing town was white and spoke a German dialect called Elsässerditsch. That part of France, the Haut-Rhin, was scorned by Parisians as the exterieur, so its denizens tried to be “more French than the French,” Ione writes. As a Black American woman, she became a freakish curiosity, stared at in the streets:

“I realize now that it was exactly that depressing feeling of being thought inferior to the society I lived in that I had hoped to escape by marrying…[I longed] to assuage the painful and confusing aspects of blackness.”

Soon, she and her husband moved back to New York, where they occupied separate bedrooms and led separate lives as he encouraged a philosophy of free love. Ione began an affair with a married alcoholic man many years her junior, followed by an even more unconventional relationship with a woman painter who lived in a loft on Canal Street:

“I had begun to understand that I was — like most people, I thought — not simply heterosexual but sexual, and from then on I would resist any labels on my sexuality.”

After her divorce, she married “a gay man living as a heterosexual” with whom she had three children. But after 13 years “of no love for me,” she again divorced. Ione received no succor from her mother or grandmother, only a “frosty politeness.” Both blamed her for leaving her husband and becoming like them: a single mother.

Feeling betrayed and desperate for a sense of belonging, Ione sought to explore the lives of her family, a word she italicizes as if it’s exotic and foreign. The result, published in 1991 when she was 54, was Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color, a rich reverie of superb writing — half memoir, half biography — nine years in the making that probes the tortured bonds of mothers and daughters and the journey of one girl through a gnarled thicket of secrets.

With bracing honesty and eloquence, Ione documents in Pride of Family the alienation she felt within her own community, where a pernicious line of color had segregated her since childhood:

If you’re white, you’re all right.
If you’re brown, stick around.
If you’re black, get back.

When she found her maternal grandfather late in life, she asked him about his mother, and he said that she, Ione’s great-grandmother, was good-looking. “She was fair. Very light skin — and she had good hair.” That one word — hair — is freighted for Black women, and Ione was particularly sensitive about it as her mother and grandmother were light-skinned beauties with straight, silky hair:

“Mine was fuzzy, woolly, nappy…everything I didn’t want it to be…my hair was bad…not in the worst degrees of ‘bad’ — for there are degrees — but ‘bad’ nonetheless. Did this make my mother and grandmother love me less, did it create a subtle distance between us?”

That distance narrowed when Ione discovered the diary of her great-grandmother, Frances “Frank” Anne Rollin (1845-1902), and unearthed many family secrets. Rollin also gave Ione, a writer, a feeling of pride for her foremother, a 19th-century activist who was the first known African American biographer. In 1868, Rollin wrote The Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany under the name Frank A. Rollin.

That biography is little known today, but the biographer lives on, having been recently embraced by Biographers International Organization (BIO), which established the Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for African American Biography, providing a $2,000 fellowship for a writer working on a life story of an African American figure or someone whose story provides a significant contribution to the Black experience.

Ione, now 83 and living in Kingston, New York, is thrilled by the fellowship. “It’s a dream coming true through the centuries,” she told BIO. “There was a line in [Frank’s] diary in which she said she wanted to ‘make her mark in literature,’ and now [I feel] it’s finally happened.”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Pam Fessler, an award-winning journalist with National Public Radio, covers poverty, philanthropy, and voting issues. Prior to her 27 years at NPR, Fessler was a senior writer at Congressional Quarterly. She holds a master’s degree in public administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Carville’s Cure: Leprosy, Stigma, and the Fight for Justice is her first book.

We’re experiencing a national pandemic with covid-19. Do you see any similarities between this and what occurred with leprosy 100 years ago?

Definitely. I wrote the book before the pandemic, but I’ve been struck by all of the parallels. As with the current coronavirus outbreak, the threat of leprosy was used to demonize certain groups of people, especially Asian immigrants. Now, we have talk of the “China virus” and “Kung flu.” Then, there was “Oriental leprosy” and “leprous hordes of Asia” threatening the nation’s health, even though most patients at the turn of the century were native born. Disease has often been used as a weapon against those we consider “others,” and that doesn’t seem to have changed.

The other thing that hasn’t changed is how ignorance about a disease can open the way for misinformation, allowing people to respond to their fears rather than the science. People didn’t know at the turn of the century how leprosy — also called Hansen’s disease — was spread and that it was only mildly contagious.

They reacted instead to common myths about leprosy as depicted in the Bible and elsewhere. The disease was seen as a sign of sin and moral inferiority, so victims became social outcasts rather than people to be treated and cured. Without good information and leadership, people let their biases guide their response — even if it’s ultimately harmful — as many are doing today with covid-19.

Until 1999, the U.S. ran a leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, where people with leprosy were confined against their will and deprived of such basic rights as voting, marrying, and keeping custody of their children. They were even strongly encouraged to change their names. Please explain why people with a bacterial disease that affected only five percent of the population were so shunned.

I think it was for the reasons mentioned above, that the misperception of leprosy as a moral disease was so ingrained. People with serious cases of the disease could also be repulsive to look at, so others preferred that they be hidden away. Added to that was a general fear that immigrants were bringing exotic diseases into the country, and the public wanted the government to do something about it. No one knew at the time that 95 percent of humans were naturally immune to leprosy. Some doctors suspected that was the case, but their voices were drowned out by public (and media) hysteria.

The solution was to send the patients far away and isolate them from the rest of society, in the hope that the disease would disappear with them. But the strategy backfired. The possibility of being confined for life scared anyone who thought they might have the disease from seeking treatment. Instead, they hid their ailment and continued to live in their communities until the disease got so bad, they suffered permanent damage to their limbs and organs. If they were going to infect anyone else, they had probably done so long before they were diagnosed and sent away.

Why do you think leprosy carried a greater stigma than syphilis, tuberculosis, and other far more contagious and dangerous diseases? And still does to this day?

It wasn’t only the Bible that shaped attitudes toward leprosy (and, ironically, scholars now believe that what’s called “leprosy” in the Bible was actually some other skin ailment). One of the most popular books in the late 1800s was Ben-Hur, which described in great detail the horrible fate of Ben-Hur’s mother and sister, who both had leprosy. Also, around this time, the famous Catholic priest Father Damien died of leprosy after working with patients at a colony in Hawaii, feeding widespread fear that the disease was highly contagious. In fact, he was one of the few healthcare workers to ever die of the disease. In its 100-year history, not one worker at Carville contracted leprosy.

Even though syphilis, tuberculosis, and other diseases were far more contagious and dangerous, the families of those sent to Carville often told friends that they had gone away because they had TB or mental breakdowns, or even had died — because anything was preferable to admitting someone had leprosy! Even today, about half the patients admitted to the National Hansen’s Disease Program say they contemplated suicide when they learned they had leprosy, even though it’s easily cured. Patients still suffer more from the stigma than from the germ.

Why did the federal government assume the expense of maintaining a national leprosarium? The 350-acre facility in Carville has since been turned over to the state of Louisiana, but has there ever been another such facility in America?

There was growing pressure on the federal government to open a leprosarium in the early 1900s so patients would have somewhere to go — and could also be locked away. States at the time didn’t know what to do with people who had leprosy, which led to bizarre and tragic results. A young Syrian immigrant in West Virginia, who was diagnosed with the disease in 1906, headed to New York so he could return home. He was apprehended by authorities on the way and locked in a boxcar of a train, but no state would allow him to either get off or cross their borders. He ended up being shuttled from one state to another and finally dumped off in West Virginia, where he soon died.

Not long after, a man named John Early was diagnosed with leprosy in Washington, DC, and confined in a tent on the banks of the Potomac because authorities didn’t know what to do with him. Hundreds of people came to catch sight of the man who would become known as the nation’s “most famous leper.” Early ended up imprisoned on and off for years.

He finally forced the government to act by escaping and emerging at a fancy Washington hotel to announce that a “leper” had been mingling with important people, including the vice president of the United States, who lived at the hotel. That very same day, members of Congress introduced legislation to create a national leprosarium. Early’s story — covered by newspapers across the country — is one of my favorites in the book.

You write that, at the age of 78, your father-in-law called your husband to reveal a “family secret.” Please elaborate on that secret and how the phone call affected you.

My father-in-law called one night to tell us something he’d kept a secret for more than 60 years. When he was a teenager in New York, he came home from school one day to find that public-health officials had come and taken his father away because he had leprosy. My father-in-law never saw or talked to his father again and wasn’t sure where he had been taken, other than to “some hospital” down South. His mother had also told him never to tell anyone that his father had leprosy because the stigma was so great it could ruin the family.

As an elderly man, my father-in-law decided he needed to unburden himself of this secret. His revelation led us to discover that the federal government ran a leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, where his father and other Americans had been confined — often against their wills and until they died — simply because they were ill.

When we took my father-in-law down to visit Carville, I realized his story was one of many. Thousands of families had been torn apart and lives destroyed because of this much-misunderstood disease. I also realized that what happened at Carville was not only tragic, but amazing because of the way the patients ultimately fought to regain their freedom and rights. That’s when I decided to write this book.

Why were Catholics, more than any other religious denomination, so involved in caring for those with leprosy?

In the case of Carville, it was because the government couldn’t find anyone else willing to do the job. When it was initially the Louisiana Leper Home, the state brought patients to this remote site and basically left them to fend for themselves. Eventually, the Daughters of Charity sisters were recruited to go there and provide nursing care. When the federal government took over in 1921, the U.S. Public Health Service decided to keep the sisters on to care for the patients, noting that it would be difficult to get public-health nurses to work with leprosy patients because it might destroy their chances of getting jobs elsewhere. That’s how pervasive the stigma and ignorance about the disease were at the time.

I think there is a religious aspect, too. Some of the sisters saw it as their mission to care for both the patients’ bodies and their souls. There were complaints from some of the Protestant patients — especially John Early — that the sisters (who he called “nun-nurses”) were trying to convert everyone to Catholicism. An investigation uncovered some proselytizing, but the federal government decided to keep the sisters on because, again, they had little choice. The Daughters of Charity turned out to be incredible caregivers, as well as strong patient allies.

In the book, you reprint a photo of “Patient No. 746,” Stanley Stein, kissing the actress Tallulah Bankhead. Please explain the importance of Stein, born Sidney Levyson, and his relationship to the actress.

To me, Stanley Stein is the key character, and heart, of Carville’s Cure. He arrived at the hospital in 1931 as a young, ambitious man whose life was unexpectedly derailed by this disease. He was appalled by what he found at Carville: listless and apathetic patients resigned to their fate. Stein was determined to change that.

Among other things, he got permission to start a patient newspaper, the Star, which grew over time from a few mimeographed pages of patient gossip to an internationally known publication that led the fight for the rights of leprosy patients around the world. Articles written by patients questioned government policy and chronicled the latest scientific and medical developments. It pushed to eliminate use of the words “leper” and “leprosy” — in favor of Hansen’s disease — to counter the stigma of the disease.

Stein was not only hardworking and smart, but extremely astute at using people to advance the patients’ cause. He recruited celebrities, including Broadway star Tallulah Bankhead, to broadcast the patients’ message to the world. Stein even had Bankhead getting all of her show-business friends to subscribe to the Star, which grew to have more than 80,000 subscribers in 150 countries.

Stein had other allies, too, including one of the Daughters of Charity, Sister Catherine Sullivan, who encouraged his advocacy and was frequently heard to say, “Mercy is no substitute for justice.” If for no other reason, people should read this book to learn about Stanley Stein.

How is Carville, Louisiana, connected to James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager? Why was that particular place selected for a national leprosarium?

Carville is a tiny hamlet in a remote area of southern Louisiana along the Mississippi River, 20 miles southeast of Baton Rouge. The town was named after James Carville’s grandfather, who was the postmaster and ran the general store. Over time, the hospital — which had many names, including U.S. Public Hospital No. 66 — became known simply as Carville.

The federal facility dominated the small community, and James Carville says it provided employment for many residents and a source of pride. He thinks its presence helped shape the person he is today by exposing him to doctors and researchers who came there from around the world. James Carville says residents used to brag that the town had more doctors per capita than Rochester, Minnesota, home of the famous Mayo Clinic.

The site was selected for the national leprosarium because the federal government couldn’t find any other community willing to accept it. The remote, mosquito-infested property was not well suited for caring for sick people, but it was removed from populated areas — which is what a fearful public demanded. Still, Louisiana officials told neighbors at first that the old plantation was going to be turned into an ostrich farm so they wouldn’t resist creation of the state’s new “leper home.” James Carville’s grandfather was a 10-year-old boy who watched the first patients arrive by river barge in 1894 and realized that no ostriches were coming.

How does your book differ from others on the subject, such as The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molakai by John Tayman, and Stanley Stein’s Alone No Longer: The Story of a Man Who Refused to Be One of the Living Dead?

Tayman’s book tells the story of a leprosy colony established in Hawaii in the mid-1800s. There are many similarities in how the patients were treated there and at Carville and the injustices they faced. The difference is that the Carville leprosarium was run by the federal government, and patients came from around the country throughout the 20th century. Carville’s Cure tells the story of the tragedy of how people with leprosy were treated in the United States, but also how they fought back to regain their rights, freedom, and respect.

Carville became a major medical-research facility where the cure for leprosy was discovered, another integral part of the story. Stanley Stein’s memoir provides many wonderful details about the patient crusade he helped to launch, but Carville’s Cure tells much more about what led up to that campaign and what happened after. My family’s personal story is also woven throughout the book.

What’s your next book?

Ha! I told anyone who asked that the one thing I learned writing this book is that you have to be extremely passionate about the topic or you’re not going to finish the job. I promised my father-in-law before he died that I would write this book because I felt so strongly about the need to tell this story. I saw how the Carville experience had shaped and destroyed so many lives. I’m not sure I’ll ever find another topic quite so compelling, but who knows?

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

The category is: Farewell Books.

The answer is: “This memoir lists a philosophy of life, rather than the usual puff quotes from impressive names, on its back cover.”

The question is: “What is Alex Trebek’s The Answer Is…?”

The tone of Trebek’s new book is conversational and follows the “Jeopardy!” format. But while the front cover shows a photo of the silver-haired host, the back takes your breath away. Superimposed on sunny yellow are four simple sentences:

I believe in the will to live.
believe in the power of positivity.
I believe in optimism.
I believe in hope.

These declarations, powerful and poignant, command attention because the quiz-show host is battling stage-four pancreatic cancer, although he objects to the word “battling”: “It suggests there are only two outcomes: winning or losing,” he writes. “If you don’t get well, you are a ‘loser.’ If you have decided to stop treatment, you have ‘given up.’ That’s nonsense.”

Here, Trebek, who has hosted “Jeopardy!” for 36 years, discloses his decision to discontinue chemotherapy beyond his current regimen. No surprise, then, to learn his strategy for wagering in Final Jeopardy mirrors one of General George Patton’s favorite quotes: “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”

Audacity, audacity, always audacity.

Trebek doesn’t shy away from the cost his cancer has exacted on his mind and body since he was diagnosed in 2019.

“[Y]ou get hit with shock waves — whether pain or unpredicted surges of depression or just debilitating moments of agony, weakness. I don’t have much stamina anymore…Just pain and fatigue and, well, different kinds of agony. Each day brings a new set of challenges.

“The chemo has caused sores inside my mouth that make it difficult for me to enunciate. One treatment turned my skin dark brown, and caused my hair to fall out.” He admits to wearing a hairpiece since 2017 and says he likes the look.

A consummate showman, Trebek manages to continue hosting with brio, despite chemotherapy, and that fact amazes even him:

“It’s the strangest thing…there are days when I’m just a basket case before we tape. I can barely walk to the production meeting. But when…I get on stage, it all changes suddenly. I’m myself again. I feel good.”

His book is an aperçu of short takes on his life, which he acknowledges has been “all good stuff.” No adolescent traumas. No adult catastrophes. Even his divorce was amicable. Born in Sudbury, Ontario, he emigrated from Canada to California in 1973 to begin his climb in American television, which included hosting a variety of game shows that rarely lasted more than 13 weeks.

Then came “Jeopardy!,” followed by syndication, national recognition, and an annual salary of $10 million. During this career rise, Trebek met his second wife, Jean, “my soul mate.” They have two children together.

Readers also learn that Trebek loves luxury cars. He bought his first Bentley (a 1956 Mulliner Park Ward Convertible) for $34,000 — and sold it for $54,000 to finance his divorce. He claims to have since shaken his car addiction: “I am past the age where I need a car to impress people.”

Still, he includes a jazzy photo of himself in his first Jaguar (a 1956 XK140 roadster) and with a red 1971 Italia Spyder, which he sold — and which was later auctioned by Sotheby’s for $179,200. He now drives a Dodge Ram 1500.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he writes of the truck. “I’m no redneck. I don’t have a gun rack in it. I have a wine rack.”

As you’d expect from someone in the entertainment industry, Trebek drops a few names — Rudolf Nureyev, Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Philip — but no startling anecdotes. He writes that, whenever he is asked which famous people he’d most like to see on the show, he responds: “Ava Gardner, because she was so beautiful. Mark Twain, because he was so bright. And Ava Gardner again, just because she’s Ava Gardner.”

A bit of fanboy peeks through his polish, too, on the subject of Ava’s third husband, Frank Sinatra, who sent Trebek a typewritten thank-you note in 1987 when “Jeopardy!” created a category devoted entirely to the singer. Trebek framed the note and hung it in his office, saying it was one of “the highlights of my life.”

He pays tribute to several “Jeopardy!” contestants in his memoir, including the biggest all-time winner, who appeared for 16 weeks, won 74 straight games, and walked away with more than $2.52 million.

The answer is: “This player failed to respond ‘H&R Block’ when asked to name the firm whose 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.”

The question is: “Who is Ken Jennings?” (He’d incorrectly responded, “What is FedEx?”)

Toward the end of Trebek’s book, the categories get more serious:

“What is…Toughness?”
“What is…The will to survive?”
“What is…Getting your affairs in order?”
“The answer is…Life.”

Trebek assures us that he wants to continue living but, when the time comes, he’ll depart with dignity. “I’m not afraid of dying…I’ve lived a good, full life and I’m nearing the end of it. I know that.”

Godspeed, Alex.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books