The Conservative Wheelman The ‘Wheel of Fortune’ host and Hillary-teasing tweeter talks about his political education and American exceptionalism.By Kyle Peterson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-conservative-wheelman-1443218583
The previous week Mr. Sajak had sent this to his 80,000 Twitter followers: “Exciting breakthrough near: Climate scientists close to perfecting giant thermostat to regulate earth’s temperature!” Two days before that, he’d taken to the social-media website to say: “It’s not that the government does everything poorly; it’s just that when it does something poorly, it keeps doing it.”
Fans of “Wheel of Fortune” are familiar with Mr. Sajak’s wit—his repartee with contestants and banter with alphabetic wonderwoman Vanna White. But on Twitter the one-liners come spiked with something else: conservatism. “My overall philosophy about politics and show business,” Mr. Sajak tells me in his dressing room at Sony Pictures Studios, “is even a game-show host has as much right as anyone to babble about anything he wants to.”
In other words, Hillary Clinton jokes are fair game, so long as he makes them off the air. “My only objection is the bait and switch,” Mr. Sajak says. “It just kills me when someone’s on a talk show to promote a movie, and I’ve got to sit through saving the whales first. I like whales as much as the next guy—especially filleted. They’re really tasty.”
The 68-year-old Mr. Sajak, who has worked in Hollywood for more than three decades, says he doesn’t have a conservative coming-out story, that there was no specific moment he announced his political leanings by hoisting the Jolly Roger (as a conservative at Harvard once put it). “It’s funny, I don’t really get any grief about it,” Mr. Sajak says of his politics. “Look, I’m in a really good position, because what are they going to do to me?”
He doesn’t say that in a puffed-up way, more as a simple acknowledgment that whatever his troubles, job security isn’t among them. Mr. Sajak began hosting “Wheel of Fortune” in 1981. He has conducted the show, using napkin math, through roughly 8,000 episodes, and Nielsen reports that nearly 10 million people tune in each day. The show has spawned dozens of foreign spin offs, whose format—the multicolored wheel, the rectangular puzzle board, the comely letter-turner—is immediately recognizable, even if the mystery phrases are in Arabic, Hebrew or Georgian.
“Sesame Street” once paid tribute to Mr. Sajak in a pig-themed parody called “Squeal of Fortune.” Billy Joel sang about the show in 1989 in his headline-spitting No. 1 hit “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” wedging “Wheel of Fortune” right between “Russians in Afghanistan” and “Sally Ride.”
Yet Mr. Sajak seems slightly mystified by his own success. “If I went in to pitch this show today, the pitch would last about 12 seconds,” he says. “I would say, ‘OK we’re going to play hangman. Here’s the show: “R.” “No.” ’ And the guy would go, ‘Excuse me? That’s the show?’ ”
Part of what grounds him is his upbringing. He was born Pat Sajdak, to a working-class Polish-American family in southwest Chicago, and he seems to carry a bit of that experience with him. For one thing, in a sushi-with-caviar town, Mr. Sajak still loves White Castle sliders and says the secret is to get them from the grill to your mouth as quickly as possible—before the grease congeals. More seriously, when he’s asked about his hard work on the show, he thinks back to his father, who made a living unpacking trucks on a loading dock. “I laugh when people say to me, ‘How do you do this for 30 years?’ ” Mr. Sajak says. “This is easy: Ask my father how he did that for 30 years.”
Mr. Sajak grew up listening to Art Linkletter and idolized Jack Paar, whose caricature, drawn by Al Hirschfeld, hangs in his dressing room. “From about 11 or 12, I sort of knew what I wanted to do,” he says. During college he landed a gig at WEDC radio, doing a five-minute, hourly newscast—a “rip-and-read,” pulled off the wire—from midnight to 6 a.m. Only when he showed up the first night did he discover that all the show’s programming, aside from his news, was in Spanish.
He left college in 1968 to join the Army. “I was getting a little bored with school,” he says. “The draft was still going strong, and I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to join, and I might have a little more say in terms of what I do.’ So it turned out I was wrong on that.” After a stint as a finance clerk outside Saigon, he managed a transfer to Armed Forces Radio, where he hosted a morning show called the “Dawnbuster.” “Part of the format was yelling ‘Good Morning Vietnam,’ ” he says. (The DJ portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie by that title served a few years before Mr. Sajak.) “If you didn’t pay attention to the fact that our commercials were for ‘Keep your M16 clean,’ it sounded just like a stateside station.”
After returning home, he hopped around trying to break into broadcasting, working at a TV station here, a Howard Johnson motel there, before landing as a weatherman in Los Angeles, where his antics caught the eye of Merv Griffin, the creator of “Wheel of Fortune.” One day Mr. Sajak went on air with a Band-Aid on his face, which he moved to a different spot every time the camera cut away. During a test taping for “Wheel,” he made a pun about a prize that one of the contestants chose. “Somebody bought a baker’s rack,” Mr. Sajak tells me, “and I said—it’s like an infantile joke—I said, ‘They use that to torture bakers.’ Merv thought that was brilliant comedy.”
Although Mr. Sajak was skeptical when offered the hosting job, he decided to give “Wheel” a spin. “It was finishing third in its time period behind ‘Price is Right’ on CBS and ‘Love Boat’ reruns on ABC,” Mr. Sajak says. “My thinking was, I’ll do the show for a year or two, I’ll get a little national credibility, and it’ll go away and I’ll move on to something else.”
By the time he got his big break in the entertainment business, his political outlook was already well-formed. Growing up in Chicago, Mr. Sajak says, he had been apolitical—the city didn’t offer much in the way of civics lessons. “I swear to you, when I was young I thought Mayor Daley was mayor for life,” he says. “I didn’t know there were elections.” What awakened his political instincts, when he was about 18, was Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign—and the hysteria of Herblock, the Washington Post’s syndicated editorial cartoonist.
In Goldwater’s speech accepting the GOP nomination, he thundered the now-famous line: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Mr. Sajak recalls seeing a Herblock cartoon showing two robbers yelling those words while fleeing the scene of their crime. “It seemed awfully unfair to me,” he says, “and I starting paying attention to Goldwater and actually rather liked him.”
These days Herblockian hysteria runs rampant—especially online. “I love when people say, ‘They want you to explain a tweet,’ ” Mr. Sajak says. “You see what it says? That’s what it says. Make of it what you will.”
What is it that stirs the Twitter trolls? First there is Mr. Sajak’s skepticism that climate change is a dire crisis necessitating massive government intervention. “Climate and weather are two different things—unless it follows the narrative,” he says. “They’re happy to point at weather phenomena that fit the narrative. And if you point at one that doesn’t, then you’re just being stupid.”
Next there is his insufficient self-flagellation for American history, particularly regarding race relations. “In 150 years we went from institutionalized slavery to having a black president,” says Mr. Sajak, who in Chicago attended a majority-black public high school. “The shame that we’re supposed to feel about that—I understand that impulse. But what we really should be feeling is the pride.”
Which leads us to American exceptionalism, which Mr. Sajak isn’t shy about proclaiming. “The Wright brothers, what was it, 1903, they got about 20 feet in the air and went about 180 feet. Sixty-six years later we put a man on the moon and brought him back,” he says. “Oh, and in the meantime we won two world wars and fought a great depression.”
Occasionally the political bleeds into the show business. In a “Wheel” episode last year, one that demonstrates how Internet discourse works, Mr. Sajak kidded a male contestant during introductions: “You’re engaged—some woman has agreed to marry you!” The man clarified: “Some gentleman.” Mr. Sajak handled the misstep deftly: “Oh, I’m sorry—wrong again. I had a 50-50 shot.” Everyone laughed, the show went on, and when it initially aired there was nary a peep. “Summer comes, reruns, and it runs. A gay group got it, posted it: ‘This guy, look, he’s antigay,’ ” Mr. Sajak says. The exchange with the show contestant “was not only benign, it was endearing,” he says. “But they just come down on you.”
Another example: Mr. Sajak has commented that as Americans lose their common culture, it becomes difficult to find puzzles that are fair to everyone. And it isn’t simply that the generation gap, say, regarding popular music, has widened. “We rarely do books anymore,” he tells me, “because fewer and fewer people read them.”
In a show last year during college week, the puzzle was “Mythological Hero Achilles.” Every letter had been turned, so the full phrase was visible. But instead of pronouncing it Uh-kill-ees, the contestant in the Indiana University shirt said A-chill-iss. “Going to commercial,” Mr. Sajak recalls, “he leans over and he says, ‘Well I’m a business major.’ ” (The guy still won, taking home $11,700.)
“The great irony of our time: That device you’ve got sitting in front of you”—he means my iPhone on the table, recording the interview—“there is nothing in the history of mankind that you can’t find out about in 15 seconds if you pick that up. And yet we know less about things,” he says. “There’s less information floating around in our heads. It’s all in the devices.”
In addition to his hosting duties—“Wheel” tapes four days a month, six episodes a day—Mr. Sajak serves as a trustee of Hillsdale College, a proudly traditional liberal-arts school where you can bet students know how to pronounce not only Achilles but Thersites and Astyanax, too. About a decade ago, after he had joined the board of trustees, Mr. Sajak himself began working through Hillsdale’s core curriculum. “Here I am,” he says, “I’m the vice chairman of the board of Hillsdale College, and I’m a college dropout.”
The professors recorded their lectures for him, and Mr. Sajak sent in his homework. “That was the hardest I worked in a long time,” he says. He finished what he calls “the good stuff,” meaning, for instance, Dostoevsky and the Federalist. But then the science textbooks thudded onto his desk. “You know what, I don’t need a degree,” he recalls thinking. “I’m not going to try to figure out protoplasm at this point in my life.”
Mr. Sajak says he is encouraged by the Republican candidates on offer for 2016. “You could come up probably with 15 combinations of a ticket that I could be pretty excited about,” he says. Does he, as a man of show business, have any advice that might be useful for a GOP candidate? “You can tell when the consultant has told him how he’s supposed to stand, and how he’s supposed to move his hand, and how he’s supposed to gesture,” Mr. Sajak says. “I hate to talk about Reagan—I mean, I adored him—but sometimes our party gets lost in ‘Where’s the next Reagan?’ There is none. But he did have this ability to either be genuine or certainly seem genuine.”
Which prompts a question: What’s next for Pat Sajak? “Next will be death,” he says. “I mean, not anytime soon. But that’ll be the next big thing you’ll see about me in the paper: ‘Pat Sajak, who hosted Wheel of Fortune . . .’ ” He acts as if posing the “what’s next” question to a 68-year-old is ludicrous. “People ask that,” he says, “like I’m getting ready to go off Broadway or something.”
Well there’s always the path taken not so long ago by another Goldwaterite in Hollywood. Maybe I ought to spell it out:
P_T
S_J_K
F_R
G_V_RN_R.
Mr. Sajak, would you like to buy a vowel?
Mr. Peterson is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.
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