The Way I Heard It

by Mike Rowe

  We’ll never know, sadly. But what I do know is that, way back in 1997, a producer named Tom Frank was looking for a game show host, and my tape must have made an impression.

  “This is the worst demo tape I’ve ever seen,” he said. “There’s nothing on there but mistakes and outtakes.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I try to manage expectations.”

  “Mission accomplished,” he said. “It made me wonder if you were stable.”

  “You’ll have to hire me to find out,” I said.

  “Would you like to hear about the project first?”

  “Please,” I said. “The anticipation is killing me.”

  Tom Frank talked fast, sounding like all producers do when they explain an idea they’ve explained a thousand times to a thousand people they’ll never talk to again. “The show’s called No Relation. The fX Channel has just bought forty episodes.”

  “What’s The fX Channel?” I asked. “Did FOX lose a vowel?”

  Tom Frank ignored the question. “The show works like this: On each episode, a celebrity panel attempts to determine which member of a family of five is not related to the other four. In round one, celebrities question the contestants individually. In round two, they question the family together and compare their notes. They make their best guess. Then the impostor reveals him or herself and brings out the actual family member that they’ve been impersonating.”

  “Are there fabulous prizes?”

  “Depends on how many celebrities are fooled. If none of them guess correctly, the impostor gets a thousand bucks and the family gets an all-expenses-paid trip to Mexico. What do you think?”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “it sounds like To Tell the Truth.”

  “Yeah, well… there’s no such thing as a new idea. But this is a very big deal for the network.”

  It sounded like a guaranteed failure, which was precisely what I was looking for. It’s what I always looked for in those days: a few months of steady work, followed by a quick cancellation, followed by a few months of premature retirement. Perfect. Travis McGee 101.

  “I’m your man,” I said. “When do I start?”

  “I’m not offering you the job,” Tom Frank said. “I’m offering you an audition. Tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m.”

  “Great. What do game show hosts wear nowadays?”

  “Wear a sport coat. Slacks. Button-down shirt. No tie.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if you just gave me the job now?” I asked.

  “Honestly, I’m not even sure I should give you the address.”

  He did, though, and I arrived ten minutes early the next morning at an office building in Burbank. A pretty receptionist handed me a script and led me to a conference room where a dozen other guys were pacing around, memorizing the same words, muttering to themselves in the same practiced baritones. Button-down shirts, slacks, and sport coats. No ties. We looked like mannequins recently escaped from the same haberdashery.

  One guy in particular was a composite of every game show host I’d ever seen. He had white teeth and a suspicious tan and seemed so supremely confident that I wondered if he had already gotten the gig. He reminded me of a very young Dick Clark—who was, for my money, the best game show host ever. I loved the way Clark leaned against the podium while explaining the rules on The $25,000 Pyramid. Not a care in the world. As the stakes increased, he didn’t get ramped up—he got more laid back. Dick Clark hosted like Perry Como sang: warm, genuine, with a touch of insouciance. How would Dick Clark have handled No Relation?

  I was the last to be called. On a mock stage, three “celebrities” sat on a sofa. Their name tags read “Tom Hanks,” “Julia Roberts,” “Shelley Long.” Five production assistants, who also had name tags, were sitting in folding chairs across from them. They were “The Johnsons.” At the far end of the room, there was a video camera, a large monitor, and a partition. Behind the camera, in front of the partition, a small group of people huddled and conferred: the suits. Tom Frank was among them.

  We bantered for a moment. Then Frank said “Action!,” and I immediately went off script, channeling my inner Dick Clark.

  “Hello, everyone, and welcome to No Relation. It’s nice to see you all again. I’m Mike Rowe, and these are the Johnsons. Well, at least four of them are. One of them is actually an impostor who has assumed the identity of the missing Johnson, who is bound and gagged in the trunk of my car. I’m kidding! The missing Johnson is backstage and will remain there as our celebrity judges question the real Johnsons and try to find out which one of them is… No Relation! Before we begin, let’s meet our celebrity judges.”

  We pretended to play for twenty minutes or so. At first, I was put off by the fact that Tom Hanks had a Mohawk and Julia Roberts looked like my grandmother. The Johnson family was also confusing: the parents were white, the daughter was Asian, the son was black, and the grandmother appeared to be Hispanic—a configuration that added new layers of complexity to the show’s central question but spoke well of the production company’s commitment to diversity in the workplace. Nevertheless, I worked through, guiding the conversation, making mild, mostly tasteful jokes, and trying not to look too hard at “Shelley Long”—who looked and sounded just like Shelley Long, which I found to be doubly distracting. We were rolling along pretty well when Tom Frank said “Cut!” and walked toward me.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Is that your lucky jacket?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I said. “I borrowed it from a friend.”

  The coat I was wearing belonged to my high school friend Chuck, on whose couch I’d been crashing in Hollywood. It was electric blue with a slight bias toward periwinkle.

  “Does your friend work for the circus?”

  “Worse,” I said. “He sings barbershop.” At which point a really weird thing happened. A shocking thing. Dick Clark stepped out from behind a partition and said, “Hello.”

  Every so often, the universe behaves in ways that leave me mute. This was one such occasion. Had I just conjured Dick Clark out of thin air? Was I seeing some sort of phantom? A ghost? It sure felt that way. One minute, I had been channeling Dick Clark. Now he was here, and I couldn’t quite square it.

  “That was great! Really nice work.”

  I was speechless. Gobsmacked. Flabbergasted.

  “By the way,” the ghost said, “I’m Dick Clark.”

  “That is correct!” I replied, as if I were hosting a game show.

  It really was him.

  Dick Clark laughed in a completely warm, genuine way. “Welcome to my production company. Thanks for coming by! You’re a natural. I’ve seen some of your work. But tell me, have you hosted a game show before?”

  “No, I haven’t. But I’ve done a lot of live television.” I was hoping he didn’t know that I had been thrown out of the home shopping industry.

  “Tom tells me you were thrown out of the home shopping industry,” Dick Clark said. “What happened?”

  I cleared my throat and glanced at Tom, who was clearly enjoying the moment. “There was a mutual consensus that my skills were… inconsistent with the expectations of that particular genre.”

  Dick Clark laughed again. “I bet you have some great stories!”

  “One or two,” I said as another suit stepped out from behind the partition. “Mike, this is Rich Ross. He calls the shots over at fX.”

  Rich Ross looked a lot younger than I would have expected.

  “Hi, Mike,” he said. “We’re big fans over at the network. We’d love to see you again.”

  Dick Clark nodded in agreement.

  “Can you come back in a few days?” Ross asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Then Dick Clark stepped closer to me and lowered his voice. “Can I give you some advice?” he asked.

  I thought he was going to comment on Chuck’s jacket. That, or tell me to stick to the script. But he didn’t. Instead he imparted a secret—a treasured bit of advice that was so obvious and so go
od I was certain the moment I heard it, I’d never forget it.

  I was wrong about that, of course. But it’s nice to feel certain every now and again.…

  CHARLIE’S BIG BREAK

  Charlie knew he had a hit the moment he picked up the guitar. The tune seemed to write itself. The words tumbled out of his mouth as though he had known them all his life. Like every other aspiring musician who had come to Los Angeles with stars in his eyes, Charlie needed a break—a chance to show everyone just who he was and what he was capable of.

  Now, finally, that chance had come.

  Seated across from him were two major players in the music biz: the Legendary Drummer, who’d befriended him a few weeks earlier, and the Legendary Producer—a man credited with shaping the “California Sound.” Either man could have made Charlie famous—literally overnight.

  Charlie stroked the neck of his acoustic guitar, took a deep breath, and began to play. And really, it could not have gone better. The Legendary Producer nodded in time with the music. The Legendary Drummer hummed along in harmony. It was the kind of audition every performer dreams of giving, and when the song came to an end, Charlie knew he was a few steps closer to stardom. The Legendary Drummer said, “Hell, yeah!” The Legendary Producer said, “Damn. Let’s make an album.”

  And so they did.

  Over the next few weeks, Charlie recorded four original songs. With the help of the Legendary Drummer and two of his Legendary Bandmates, Charlie found the magic every famous musician tries to capture in the studio. But the Legendary Producer had issues with some of the lyrics. He wanted something “softer.” Something more “relatable.”

  Like any true artist, Charlie was not inclined to compromise his work. He pushed back. He had something important to say, damn it, and no producer, however legendary, was going to boss him around. Really, who did the guy think he was? These were Charlie’s songs, and Charlie would sing them the way he wanted!

  Long story short, Charlie blew it. He alienated the very people he needed most. The Legendary Producer stopped taking his calls. The Legendary Drummer went back to being a rock star.

  Charlie took it hard and, by all accounts, handled the rejection quite badly. One day, after weeks of being ignored, he confronted the Legendary Drummer at his home on Sunset Boulevard. He’d brought a gift along: a single bullet.

  “What’s this for?” the Legendary Drummer asked.

  “It’s for you,” said Charlie. “Every time you look at it, I want you to think how nice it is that your kids are still safe.”

  That did it. The Legendary Drummer was not one to take a threat lightly—especially one directed toward his family. Charlie should have known that. And so the Legendary Drummer beat Charlie—beat him like the drums he pummeled for a living. Then he threw Charlie to the floor and beat him some more. He beat Charlie until Charlie wept like a baby. But the hardest blow had yet to fall.

  One year later, a broke, unemployed Charlie was killing time in a record shop. There he saw a poster of the Legendary Drummer, playing onstage with his Legendary Brothers. They had a new single out, “Bluebirds over the Mountains,” a cover of an old rockabilly song.

  “Jesus,” said Charlie, “what a bunch of hacks. They don’t even write their own songs anymore.”

  The B-side, however, was an original: “Never Learn Not to Love,” it was called. Charlie was curious, naturally. He shoplifted the record, and later that night—seconds after dropping the needle on the vinyl—he dropped his beer on the floor and collapsed onto the sofa in a stupefied rage. They had changed the title. They had altered a few of the lyrics. But the rest was identical! It was the same song that he had auditioned with—only now it was being sung by the Legendary Drummer: Dennis Wilson.

  No one can say if having his song stolen by the Beach Boys pushed Charlie over the edge. But no one can deny that in the months that followed, Charlie paid a visit to the home of that Legendary Producer—a man named Terry Melcher. Melcher then moved to Malibu, which was good news for him but not so good for the new residents of his old home. Those people were all murdered in the most brutal fashion imaginable. Thus began a killing spree that led to the trial of the century and eventually brought Charlie the fame that he had so desperately sought.

  For whatever it’s worth, Charlie’s audition song had originally been called “Cease to Exist”—which Charlie stubbornly refused to do. Long after his Legendary Drummer and his Legendary Producer had shuffled off their mortal coils, Charlie sat rotting in his jail cell, waiting for the big break that never seemed to come—until it finally did, forty-six years later. A really big break that finally rid the world of a mass murderer named… Charles Manson.

  * * *

  “Never Learn Not to Love.” See what the Beach Boys did there? With the judicious deployment of a single double negative, Manson’s “Cease to Exist” suddenly sounds a lot less deranged and much more like a Zen koan. That’s how Dick Clark’s advice had struck me, back when I was auditioning to host No Relation:

  “Next time, don’t say hello to everyone.”

  I was confounded: What did that mean? My expression conveyed my confusion.

  “When you looked into the lens,” he said, “your first words were ‘Hello, everyone.’ That’s probably not the best way to say hello.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. And when you said, ‘It’s nice to see you all again,’ that’s also a mistake.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. People don’t see themselves as part of a crowd, Mike. They see themselves as individuals. They want a personal connection with someone they can trust. Your job is to be that person. That’s what a good host does. He becomes a guest in the viewer’s home.”

  I realized just then that I was still shaking Dick Clark’s hand, even though he had stopped shaking mine. I let his go, and he put it on my shoulder.

  “When you talk to the camera, Mike, don’t think about everybody. Think about one person. Someone you know. Someone you like. Talk to them. And if you say, ‘It’s nice to see you again,’ make damn sure you mean it.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Clark. I’ll do that.”

  “You can call me Dick,” he said. “All my friends do.”

  The next day, Tom Frank called me back—it had come down to me and that one other guy—the young kid with the white teeth and the suspicious tan.

  Maybe it was Chuck’s lucky blue jacket. Maybe they flipped a coin. I don’t know, but in the end I was chosen to host No Relation. We shot forty episodes that summer, on the same stage as The Price Is Right. I shared a dressing room with Bob Barker. (Not at the same time, naturally.) We might have shot another season, but No Relation was canceled, just as I had predicted. Thanks to a revolving door of dim-witted celebrities who lacked the wherewithal to root out impostors, I wound up giving away our entire allotment of grand prizes before the first ten episodes had even aired. Tom Frank was beside himself. To this day, he refers to the show as Hola, Acapulco!, which was where all our contestants ended up going.

  I sometimes wonder if No Relation would have been a hit if Dick Clark had hosted as well as produced it. I bet he could have steered those dim-witted celebrities in the right direction. He was, after all, a master broadcaster. A host who was really a guest. A guest who’d come to me as a ghost. A ghost on my television who always seemed happy to see me—even though I knew he could not.

  As for Tom Frank—he might not be the biggest name in town, but he’s done okay. So, too, has the kid with the white teeth and the suspicious tan—a kid named Ryan who missed out on No Relation and wound up saddled with a steady gig he can’t seem to escape, on a show called American Idol.

  BOBBY BRINGS HOME THE BACON

  At the Grammy Awards, Britney Spears forgot to thank the pig. No one called her on it, but looking back, the facts are clear: without that pig, Britney would have never sold a hundred million albums. No way. Likewise, Steven Spielberg would have never gotten Jurassic Park to the big screen, and Neil Armstrong
would never have walked on the moon. Yet none of these people ever acknowledged the pig. Bobby, on the other hand? He thought about that pig every day. Why wouldn’t he? Thanks to the pig, Bobby died with a net worth of $3.2 billion and a product that had changed… everything.

  Fundamentally, Bobby was a tinkerer and risk taker. But not necessarily in that order. When he was twelve, he built a box kite, strapped it to his back, and dove off the roof of Grinnell College in Iowa—just to see if he could fly. Turned out he could. For about thirty seconds.

  There was also the time he took a propeller, welded it to the back of his sled, and hooked it up to an engine from an old washing machine. Turned out, motorized sleds don’t fly, either. But they do go faster than normal sleds. Much faster.

  Bobby was a tinkerer, you see. A risk taker. But not necessarily in that order. And not just as a boy. When he was twenty-one, he volunteered to procure the guest of honor for a fraternity luau. Under the light of a harvest moon, low and fat in the Iowa sky, the young physics major regarded his options, grunting and rooting around in the muddy pigpen. There were so many to choose from. The farmer wouldn’t miss just one swine… would he?

  Not twelve hours later, the guest of honor was turning slowly over an open fire, roasting to a crispy golden brown with an apple wedged in its mouth. By all accounts, it was a very successful luau—but the next day, a moral hangover weighed heavily upon Bobby. What had he been thinking? The pig had not been his to take—yet he had taken it. As the son of a preacher, he should have known better. And so Bobby returned to the burgled pigpen, confessed his crime to the farmer, and offered to compensate him.