Girl With Curious Hair Read online

  “What is August.”

  The sun gets higher; the blood goes out of the blue water.

  The women move down to stay in the waves’ reach.

  “The ocean looks like a big blue dog to me, sometimes,” Faye says, looking. Julie puts an arm around Faye’s bare shoulders.

  ‘We loved her like a daughter,’ said “JEOPARDY!” public relations coordinator Muffy deMott. ‘We’ll be sorry to see her go. Nobody’s ever influenced a game show like Ms. Smith influenced “JEOPARDY!” ’

  —Article, Variety, 13 March 1988.

  Weak waves hang, snap, slide. White fingers spill onto the beach and melt into the sand. Faye can see dark sand lighten beneath them as the water inside gets tugged back out with the retreating tide.

  The beach settles and hisses as it pales. Faye is looking at the side of Julie Smith’s face. Julie has the best skin Faye’s ever seen on anyone anywhere. It’s not just that it’s so clear it’s flawed, or that here in low sun off water it’s the color of a good blush wine; it has the texture of something truly alive, an elastic softness, like a ripe sheath, a pod. It is vulnerable and has depth. It’s stretched shiny and tight only over Julie’s high curved cheekbones; the bones make her cheeks hollow, her eyes deep-set. The outlines of her face are like clefs, almost Slavic. Everything about her is sort of permeable: even the slim dark gap between her two front teeth seems a kind of slot, some recessive invitation. Julie has used the teeth and their gap to stimulate Faye with a gentle deftness Faye would not have believed.

  Julie has looked up. “Why, though?”

  Faye looks blankly, shakes her head.

  “Poetry, you were talking about.” Julie smiles, touching Faye’s cheek.

  Faye lights a cigarette in the wind. “I’ve just never liked it. It beats around bushes. Even when I like it, it’s nothing more than a really oblique way of saying the obvious, it seems like.”

  Julie grins. Her front teeth have a gap. “Olé,” she says. “But consider how very, very few of us have the equipment to deal with the obvious.”

  Faye laughs. She wets a finger and makes a scoreboard mark in the air. They both laugh. An anomalous wave breaks big in the surf. Faye’s finger tastes like smoke and salt.

  Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek and Bert Convy sit around, in slacks and loosened neckties, in the Merv Griffin Entertainment executive lounge, in the morning, watching a tape of last year’s World Series. On the lounge’s giant screen a batter flails at a low pitch.

  “That was low,” Trebek says.

  Bert Convy, who is soaking his contact lenses, squints at the replay.

  Trebek sits up straight. “Name the best low-ball hitter of all time.”

  “Joe Pepitone,” Sajak says without hesitation.

  Trebek looks incredulous. “Joe Pepitone?”

  “Willie Stargell was a great low-ball hitter,” says Convy. The other two men ignore him.

  “Reggie Jackson was great,” Sajak muses.

  “Still is,” Trebek says, looking absently at his nails.

  A game show host has a fairly easy professional life. All five of a week’s slots can be shot in one long day. Usually one hard week a month is spent on performance work at the studio. The rest of the host’s time is his own. Bert Convy makes the rounds of car shows and mall openings and “Love Boat” episodes and is a millionaire several times over. Pat Sajak plays phenomenal racquetball, and gardens, and is learning his third language by mail. Alex, known in the industry as the most dedicated host since Bill Cullen, is to be seen lurking almost daily in some area of the MGE facility, reading, throat-clearing, grooming, worrying.

  There’s a hit. Sajak throws a can of soda at the screen. Trebek and Convy laugh.

  Sajak looks over at Bert Convy. “How’s that tooth, Bert?”

  Convy’s hand strays to his mouth. “Still discolored,” he says grimly.

  Trebek looks up. “You’ve got a discolored tooth?”

  Convy feels at a bared canine. “A temporary thing. Already clearing up.” He narrows his eyes at Alex Trebek. “Just don’t tell Merv about it.”

  Trebek looks around, as if to see who Convy is talking to. “Me? This guy right here? Do I look like that sort of person?”

  “You look like a game show host.”

  Trebek smiles broadly. “Probably because of my perfect and beautiful and flawless teeth.”

  “Bastard,” mutters Convy.

  Sajak tells them both to pipe down.

  The dynamics of the connection between Faye Goddard and Julie Smith tend, those around them find, to resist clear articulation. Faye is twenty-six and has worked Research on the “JEOPARDY!” staff for the past forty months. Julie is twenty, has foster parents in La Jolla, and has retained her “JEOPARDY!” championship through over seven hundred market-dominating slots.

  Forty months ago, game-show production mogul Merv Griffin decided to bring the popular game “JEOPARDY!” back from syndicated oblivion, to retire Art Flemming in favor of the waxily handsome, fairly distinguished, and prenominately dedicated Alex Trebek, the former model who’d made his bones in the game show industry hosting the short-lived “High Rollers” for Barris/NBC. Dee Goddard, who’d written for shows as old as “Truth or Consequences” and “Name That Tune,” had worked Promotion/Distribution on “The Joker’s Wild,” and had finally produced the commercially shaky but critically acclaimed “Gambit,” was hired by MGE as the new “JEOPARDY!” ’s production executive. A period of disordered tension followed Griffin’s decision to name Janet Lerner Goddard—forty-eight, winner of two Clios, but also the wife of Dee’s former husband—as director of the revised show; and in fact Dee is persuaded to stay only when Merv Griffin’s executive assistant puts in a personal call to New York, where Faye Goddard, having left Bryn Mawr in 1982 with a degree in library science, is doing an editorial stint at Puzzle magazine. Merv’s right-hand man offers to put Faye on staff at “JEOPARDY!” as Category-/Question-researcher.

  Faye works for her mother.

  Summer, 1985, Faye has been on the “JEOPARDY!” team maybe four months when a soft-spoken and weirdly pretty young woman comes in off the freeway with a dirty jeans jacket, a backpack, and a Times classified ad detailing an MGE contestant search. The girl says she wants “JEOPARDY!”; she’s been told she has a head for data. Faye interviews her and is mildly intrigued. The girl gets a solid but by no means spectacular score on a CBE general knowledge quiz, this particular version of which turns out to feature an important zoology section. Julie Smith barely makes it into an audition round.

  In a taped audition round, flanked by a swarthy Shriner from Encino and a twig-thin Redding librarian with a towering blond wig, Julie takes the game by a wide margin, but has trouble speaking clearly into her microphone, as well as difficulty with the quirky and distinctive “JEOPARDY!” inversion by which the host “asks” the answer and a contestant supplies the appropriate question. Faye gives Julie an audition score of three out of five. Usually only fives and fours are to be called back. But Alex Trebek, who spends at least part of his free time haunting audition rounds, likes the girl, even after she turns down his invitation for a cola at the MGE commissary; and Dee Goddard and Muffy deMott pick Julie out for special mention from among eighteen other prospectives on the audition tape; and no one on the staff of a program still in its stressful initial struggle to break back into a respectable market share has anything against hauntingly attractive young female contestants. Etc. Julie Smith is called back for insertion into the contestant rotation sometime in early September 1985.

  “JEOPARDY!” slots forty-six through forty-nine are shot on 17 September. Ms. Julie Smith of Los Angeles first appears in the forty-sixth slot. No one can quite remember who the reigning champion was at that time.

  Palindromes, Musical Astrology, The Eighteenth Century, Famous Edwards, The Bible, Fashion History, States of Mind, Sports Without Balls.

  Julie runs the board in both rounds. Every question. Never been done before, ev
en under Flemming. The other two contestants, slack and gray, have to be helped off-stage. Julie wins $22,500, every buck on the board, in half an hour. She earns no more in this first match only because a flustered Alex Trebek declares the Final Jeopardy wagering round moot, Julie Smith having no incentive to bet any of her winnings against opponents’ scores of $0 and –$400, respectively. A wide-eyed and grinning Trebek doffs a pretend cap to a blank-faced Julie as electric bongos rattle to the running of the closing credits.

  Ten minutes later Faye Goddard locates a missing Julie Smith in a remote section of the contestants’ dressing area. (Returning contestants are required to change clothes between each slot, conducing to the illusion that they’ve “come back again tomorrow.”) It’s time for “JEOPARDY!” slot forty-seven. A crown to defend and all that. Julie sits staring at herself in a harsh makeup mirror framed with glowing bulbs, her face loose and expressionless. She has trouble reacting to stimuli. Faye has to get her a wet cloth and talk her through dressing and practically carry her upstairs to the set.

  Faye is in the engineer’s booth, trying to communicate to her mother her doubts about whether the strange new champion can make it through another televised round, when Janet Goddard calmly directs her attention to the monitor. Julie is eating slot forty-seven and spitting it out in little pieces. Lady Bird Johnson’s real first name turns out to be Claudia. The Florida city that produces more Havana cigars than all of Cuba is revealed to be Tampa. Julie’s finger abuses the buzzer. She is on Alex’s answers with the appropriate questions before he can even end-punctuate his clues. The first-round board is taken. Janet cuts to commercial. Julie sits at her little desk, staring out at a hushed studio audience.

  Faye and Dee watch Julie as the red lights light and Trebek’s face falls into the worn creases of a professional smile. Something happens to Julie Smith when the red lights light. Just a something. The girl who gets a three-score and who stares with no expression is gone. Every concavity in that person now looks to have come convex. The camera lingers on her. It seems to ogle. Often Julie appears on-screen while Trebek is still reading a clue. Her face, on-screen, gives off an odd lambent UHF flicker; her expression, brightly serene, radiates a sort of oneness with the board’s data.

  Trebek manipulates the knot of his tie. Faye knows he feels the something, the odd, focused flux in the game’s flow. The studio audience gasps and whispers as Julie supplies the Latin name for the common radish.

  “No one knows the Latin word for radish,” Faye says to Dee. “That’s one of those deadly ones I put in on purpose in every game.”

  The other two contestants’ postures deteriorate. Someone in the audience loudly calls Julie’s name.

  Trebek, who has never before had an audience get away from him, gets more and more flustered. He uses forty expensive seconds relating a tired anecdote involving a Dodgers game he saw with Tom Brokaw. The audience hoots impatiently for the game to continue.

  “Bad feeling, here,” Faye whispers. Dee ignores her, bends to the monitor.

  Janet signals Alex for a break. Moist and upstaged, Alex promises America that he’ll be right back, that he’s eager to inquire on-air about the tremendous Ms. Smith and the even more tremendous personal sacrifices she must have made to have absorbed so much data at such a tender age.

  “JEOPARDY!” breaks for a Triscuit advertisement. Faye and Dee stare at the monitor in horror. The studio audience is transfixed as Julie Smith’s face crumples like a Kleenex in a pocket. She begins silently to weep. Tears move down the clefs of her cheeks and drip into her mike, where for some reason they hiss faintly. Janet, in the booth, is at a loss. Faye is sent for a cold compress but can’t make the set in time. The lights light. America watches Julie Smith murder every question on the Double Jeopardy board, her face and vinyl jacket slickered with tears. Trebek, suddenly and cucumbrously cool, pretends he notices nothing, though he never asks (and never in hundreds of slots does he ask) Julie Smith any of the promised personal questions.

  The game unfolds. Faye watched a new, third Julie respond to answer after answer. Julie’s face dries, hardens. She is looking at Trebek with eyes narrowed to the width of paper cuts.

  In Final Jeopardy, her opponents again cashless, Julie coolly overrides Trebek’s moot-motion and bets her entire twenty-two-five on the fact that the first part of Peking Man discovered was a parenthesis-shaped fragment of mandible. She ends with $45,000. Alex pretends to genuflect. The audience applauds. There are bongos. And in a closing moment that Faye Goddard owns, captured in a bright glossy that hangs over her iron desk, Julie Smith, on television, calmly and deliberately gives Alex Trebek the finger.

  A nation goes wild. The switchboards at MGE and NBC begin jangled two-day symphonies. Pat Sajak sends three-dozen long-stemmed reds to Julie’s dressing table. The market share for the last segment of “JEOPARDY!” slot forty-seven is a fifty—on a par with Super Bowls and assassinations. This is 17 September 1985.

  “My favorite word,” says Alex Trebek, “is moist. It is my favorite word, especially when used in combination with my second-favorite word, which is induce.” He looks at the doctor. “I’m just associating. Is it OK if I just associate?”

  Alex Trebek’s psychiatrist says nothing.

  “A dream,” says Trebek. “I have this recurring dream where I’m standing outside the window of a restaurant, watching a chef flip pancakes. Except it turns out they’re not pancakes—they’re faces. I’m watching a guy in a chef’s hat flip faces with a spatula.”

  The psychiatrist makes a church steeple with his fingers and contemplates the steeple.

  “I think I’m just tired,” says Trebek. “I think I’m just bone weary. I continue to worry about my smile. That it’s starting to maybe be a tired smile. Which is not an inviting smile, which is professionally worrying.” He clears his throat. “And it’s the worry I think that’s making me tired in the first place. It’s like a vicious smiling-circle.”

  “This girl you work with,” says the doctor.

  “And Convy reveals today that he’s getting a discolored tooth,” Trebek says. “Tell me that augurs well, why don’t you.”

  “This contestant you talk about all the time.”

  “She lost,” Trebek says, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “She lost yesterday. Don’t you read papers, ever? She lost to her own brother, after Janet and Merv’s exec snuck the damaged little bastard in with a rigged five audition and a board just crawling with animal questions.”

  The psychiatrist hikes his eyebrows a little. They are black and angled, almost hinged.

  “Queer story behind that,” Trebek says, manipulating a broad bright cufflink to produce lines of reflected window-light on the ceiling’s tile. “I got it about fourth-hand, but still. Parents abandoned the children, as kids. There was the girl and her brother, Lunt. Can you imagine a champion named Lunt? Lunt was autistic. Autistic to where this was like a mannequin of a kid instead of a kid. Muffy said Faye said the girl used to carry him around like a suitcase. Then finally he and the girl got abandoned out in the middle of nowhere somewhere. By the parents. Grisly. She got adopted and the brother was institutionalized. In a state institution. This hopelessly autistic kid, who it turns out he’s got the whole LaPlace’s Data Guide memorized. They were both forced to somehow memorize this thing, as kids. And I thought I had a rotten childhood, boy.” Trebek shakes his head. “But he got put away, and the girl got adopted by some people in La Jolla who were not, from the sense I get, princes among men. She ran away. She got on the show. She kicked ass. She was fair and a good sport and took no crapola. She used her prize money to pay these staggering bills for Lunt’s autism. Moved him to a private hospital in the desert that was supposed to specialize in sort of… yanking people outside themselves. Into the world.” Trebek clears his throat.

  “And I guess they yanked him OK,” he says, “at least to where he could talk. Though he still hides his head under his arm whenever things get tense. Plus he’s weird-loo
king. And but he comes and bumps her off with this torrent of zoology data.” Trebek plays with the cufflink. “And she’s gone.”

  “You said in our last hour together that you thought you loved her.”

  “She’s a lesbian,” Trebek says wearily. “She’s a lesbian through and through. I think she’s one of those political lesbians. You know the kind? The kind with the anger? She looks at men like they’re unsightly stains on the air. Plus she’s involved with our ditz of a head researcher, which if you don’t think the F.C.C. took a dim view of that little liaison you’ve got another.…”

  “Free-associate,” orders the doctor.

  “Image association?”

  “I have no problem with that.”

  “I invited the girl for coffee, or a Tab, years ago, right at the start, in the commissary, and she gave me this haunting, moisture-inducing look. Then tells me she could never imbibe caffeine with a man who wore a digital watch. The hell she says. She gave me the finger on national television. She’s practically got a crewcut. Sometimes she looks like a vampire. Once, in the contestant booth—the contestant booth is where we keep all the contestants for all the slots—once one of the lights in the booth was flickering, they’re fluorescent lights—and she said to get her the hell out of that booth, that flickering fluorescence made her feel like she was in a nightmare. And there was a sort of nightmary quality to that light, I remember. It was like there was a pulse in the neon. Like blood. Everybody in the booth got nervous.” Trebek strokes his mustache. “Odd girl. Something odd about her. When she smiled things got bright, too focused. It took the fun out of it, somehow.

  “I love her, I think,” Trebek says. “She has a way with a piece of data. To see her with an answer… Is there such a thing as an intellectual caress? I think of us together: seas part, stars shine spotlights.…”

  “And this researcher she’s involved with?”

  “Nice enough girl. A thick, friendly girl. Not fantastically bright. A little emotional. Has this adoration-versus-loathing thing with her mother.” Trebek ponders. “My opinion: Faye is the sort of girl who’s constantly surfing on her emotions. You know? Not really in control of where they take her, but not quite ever wiping out, yet, either. A psychic surfer. But scary-looking, for so young. These black, bulging, buggy eyes. Perfectly round and black. Impressive breasts, though.”