Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.
— James Matthew Barrie
WHEN WE RETURNED TO California from Australia, Mark was restless. By then, 1998, Eco-Challenge was running like a well-oiled machine. We had an experienced crew, sponsors renewed contracts, and new ones signed on every year. Mark needed a new mountain to climb—a fresh project to lift off. For months, he’d been looking for that next sign. Our friend Yolanda, who lived across the street from our Topanga Canyon home, provided just that.
Yolanda’s friend from England had telephoned, mentioning Charlie Parsons, an English television producer who had launched a television show in Sweden called Expedition Robinson. Yolanda’s friend had recently attended a party at Charlie’s place—and the producer mentioned that he was a fan of Eco-Challenge and wanted to meet Mark. The timing of her call was fortuitous: we were in the midst of packing up our belongings in Topanga Canyon and moving to Malibu.
As the success of Eco-Challenge had grown, and as we entertained more and more friends, family, crew, and co-workers at home, it had become obvious that we were outgrowing the Topanga Canyon house. We’d moved in six years before, when I was pregnant with James. Now we had two kids, many out-of-town guests, and a new image as successful entrepreneurs. The remoteness I’d once found charming now made me cut off from the rest of the world.
One week when Mark was away, torrential rains caused flash floods; the creek that ran in front of our house overflowed. I looked out from my second-floor balcony to see a river rushing down the street washing away street signs, trash cans and everything else in its way. I glanced over to my neighbor Yolanda, also upstairs on her balcony, holding her baby.
“Get out the kayaks!” she yelled over.
“Looks like Venice!” I yelled back. “All we need are the singing boatmen.”
We laughed, but between the nonstop natural disasters and Mark traveling so much, I felt unsafe here in the canyon with two small children. I wanted to move back to civilization. In fact, I wanted to move up in civilization—to Malibu.
“Di, you’re joking,” Mark responded when I first broached the idea. “We’re doing quite a lot better financially, but the last time I checked our last name isn’t Spielberg.”
“If we live rich, honey, we’ll get richer,” I said. Living in Malibu, I pointed out, would open up doors to meeting more “people in the industry.” In Topanga, we lived on a dead end street next to a preschool.
Mark wasn’t convinced. A Malibu home wasn’t cheap; he didn’t think it was necessary.
The next night, I whipped up lobster diavolo for dinner. I’d been working on my sales pitch all day. After dinner, and another glass of Cabernet, I presented him with a list of pros and cons of moving to Malibu. The list of cons was very short. Yes, the prices were steep. However, there were many pros. For example, James was getting carsick every time we drove up the winding road through Topanga Canyon, so moving to Malibu would mean a lot less time cleaning up vomit. And while nearer to civilization, Malibu was also near to nature—in front of the ocean, and surrounded by verdant hills. Most important, it was a good neighborhood to meet people in the entertainment industry.
A few dinners later, my persuasiveness prevailed, and he put me in charge of finding a Malibu house—if I could find one in our price range. It took months, but I did—a lovely, three-story ocean-view home with lots of land in the back that would be perfect for a pool.
It was very sad packing up the Topanga house, our first house, where we’d created so many memories: Mark’s mom planting rosebushes in the garden … Cameron’s and James’s first birthday parties … hellaciously fun soirees and barbeques with family and friends, and more. My emotional attachment to the place is probably why it took me years to sell that house.
I’d hardly finished unpacking the boxes in our new Malibu home, when Mark walked into the kitchen that one evening in May while I was making eggplant parmesan, announcing that Morocco was a go. James’s encounter with the hissing camel notwithstanding, those three months we spent living in our palace in Marrakesh—with our visits to the souk, our dinners under the stars, and the thrill of seeing Eco-Challenge hit heights we’d never dreamed possible—marked the high point of my relationship with Mark. By then, it seemed as if nothing could stop us once we had an idea in our heads. We felt golden. And our marriage seemed invincible.
On the way back from Morocco, we stopped in England and met up with Charlie Parsons. An animated intellectual with a firecracker wit, Charlie invited us to his country home, where he showed us videos of his adventure show. Over dinner, we discussed licensing the concept of Expedition Robinson and developing a new “adventure reality show.”
As we discussed the program, Mark got that same look in his eyes that he’d had seven years before after reading the article about the Raid. The whole flight back we batted around how to make a modern-day Lord of the Flies take off as a popular show in the States. From then on, we lived, breathed, and dreamed about this new TV program that was then only on the blackboard of our minds; we went to bed talking about it, and then we woke up and talked about it some more.
The program we envisioned took the concept of Expedition Robinson to new extremes. Contestants would be marooned on a remote, unknown island in an exotic locale, competing for food and shelter—and a prize of $1 million.
Ideas were further refined: the contestants would be divided into two “tribes,” who would face daunting challenges and competitions over the course of 39 days—winning rewards such as matches or sandwiches, or “immunity,” which could temporarily protect them from being eliminated from the show. Each episode would close with a gathering called the “Tribal Council,” during which the losing team had to vote one of their members off the island—and their torch would be dramatically snuffed out.
Expedition Robinson had fared well in Sweden, but for the U.S., it needed a catchier title.
For weeks we jotted down lists of possible titles: Marooned … Stranded … Tribal Wars … Island Fever. None of them sounded quite right.
One evening after I put the kids to bed, Mark and I were in the family room brainstorming over wine. “It’s got to be short and simple,” I said, looking at that day’s list of rejected titles. Then, I got it. “Survivor!”
Mark’s eyes lit up. “I like it! But what about Survivors, since there are multiple contestants?”
I stood my ground. “If there is only one person left at the end, it’s got to be singular: Survivor.”
“You’re right, Di!” Mark smiled his little-kid grin and tipped his wineglass to mine. “Here’s to Survivor!”
From there, we began working on the pitch. “Put more passion into it, Mark,” I’d say when he ran through a practice presentation. “Talk slower. Enunciate. And lighten up, honey. It will be harder to reject it if they like you.”
Mark tested pitches at our dinner parties, subtly working his new idea into casual conversations.
“So what are you working on, Mark?” someone would innocently ask.
“Well, I have an idea for a show about real-life castaways …” and he’d be off and running. Afterward, we reviewed reactions from the guests—what got them excited, what made them nod off. Finally, when Mark could recite it sideways and backward in his sleep, the pitch was perfected. We thought.
First, Mark presented the idea for Survivor to Discovery Channel—and was shocked to have it immediately shot down. Then he hit up NBC; once again it was nixed. We went through the presentation. I worried that he was coming off too brusque, so we tried to lighten it up before he pitched ABC. Another no.
CBS gave it a thumbs-down as well. Even Fox wouldn’t go for it. UPN at least liked the concept, but they didn’t have the budget to get it to fly. The concept was too radical and costly for studios to take a risk. Network executives laughed and rolled their eyes.
“We need to visualize it more clearly,” I suggested. “Imagine seeing Survivor advertised on billboards and displayed on magazine covers. Imagine seeing it as an advertising banner being pulled by a plane.” I tried to stay optimistic and keep Mark’s spirits uplifted as well. But it appeared we’d hit the wall: there was no major network left to pitch to. “Something good will happen,” I said over and over. “Somebody will buy Survivor.”
A few weeks later, Mark burst into the house, beaming. Ghen Maynard in the CBS drama division had invited Mark in for a second pitch. We entertained Ghen at our home on Deerhead; I cooked a four-course dinner, whipping up my Italian specialties. I constantly reminded Mark of the importance of building relationships.
At that time, CBS was third in the ratings race. ABC had the country’s number one hit, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?—the most-watched show in the U.S. three nights a week. NBC had ER, Friends, and Frasier. The heavy hitter at CBS, 60 Minutes, was number eight.
Of the big three, CBS had the oldest viewer demographic, and was sometimes called GBS, for “Geriatric Broadcasting System.” In one interview, CBS president Les Moonves said that the network’s constant hurdle was convincing advertisers “that a 50-year-old viewer is as valuable as an 18-year-old.” One of his ideas to boost the network’s standing was to offer more “original summer programming.”
In other words, CBS needed a hit—one that would rope in younger viewers.
The night before the most important meeting of his life, Mark said he was more nervous than he’d ever been about any presentation. That night, I massaged his temples, neck, and scalp, giving him positive affirmations while he was in a relaxed state.
“You can do this,” I told him. “Mark, you can pull this off.”
The day that Mark went off to pitch, he brought along a visual aid: a mock issue of Newsweek displaying the hit show Survivor on the cover. This time, Ghen loved what he heard, and brought in Les Moonves.
Two hours later, the phone rang. “Di! It’s a go with CBS! We’re on!”
That was the spring of 1999; six months later, after the deal was sealed, we hadn’t even assembled the first crew of castaways, and only had a vague idea about the destination—Borneo. But the media went nuts the minute CBS announced Survivor as part of its summer 2000 lineup.
“A Star is Borneo,” announced a headline in Time. “Gilligan for Real?” asked a headline in The Washington Post. “Fantasy Island or Terror in Paradise?” pondered another. “Darwinism” and “survival of the fittest” were dominant themes in the entertainment previews. “[The show will be] like The Real World,” described one writer, “but with a greater potential for cannibalism.” We scored dozens of high-profile articles—and it wasn’t even a series yet. It wouldn’t air for another eight months!
The pre-publicity spilled over: newspapers like The New York Times that had previously ignored us were suddenly writing long pieces about Eco-Challenge Argentina, scheduled to kick off that November. We could hardly keep our minds on the event as we flew to South America. The day we landed in the country famous for gauchos, steak, wine, and tango, USA Today ran an item that CBS was looking for castaways. Thousands applied.
We first flew to Buenos Aires, the cosmopolitan Argentine capital known as the Paris of South America, and renowned for its European-style architecture and tangoing in the streets. From there, we boarded a small plane heading south toward the jagged Andes, the longest—and second-highest—mountain range in the world. Our destination was Bariloche. Resembling a cross between Aspen and a Swiss village, it lies in the heart of Patagonia, as the Pacific-stretching section of the mountain range rumbling across South America is known. Swept with alpine air, the chalet-dotted town was built around a sparkling blue lake and framed by snowcapped peaks. We took up residence in a beautiful wooden house overlooking the lake, not far from the ski resort that served as Eco-Challenge headquarters.
The pre-race days were the typical whirlwind of last-minute course checks, but we worked in frequent trips to Pampa Linda, an alpine lodge, where we rode horses along trails and feasted on Argentinean barbeques. For this Eco-Challenge, we’d put together a program with a Malibu travel agency for a pre-race adventure trip, sort of an “Eco-Challenge Lite.” Before the race, noncompetitors could get a taste of the course and some of the rigors the actual competitors would soon face—from whitewater rafting to mountain climbing.
Wanting to take in the sights, I signed up—starting with river rafting, a sport I’d never tried before. We donned helmets and set off along Class III and IV rapids, dangerous to maneuver due to boiling eddies, high waves, and dangerous rocks, not to mention the waterfalls that capsized nearly every raft that went down them—except ours. My raft mates managed to fall out along the way; to my surprise, I was the only one who wasn’t tipped out and into the icy mountain waters.
After the river-rafting adventure, Mark suggested that I sign up for another organized trip, this one involving ascending 11,600 feet to the top of Mount Tronador. Our group climbed atop horses and started off, crossing a swollen river that was so deep the animals were almost submerged, barely able to see over the water. We rode the equines upwards for three hours, and as I took in the sweeping views of the meadows below and the serrated mountains beyond, I was delighted that Mark had convinced me to come. Then the horses stopped. Gauchos appeared. To my surprise, they took our horses, and rode them back down. I was confused: I’d thought we were riding horses to the top.
Our rugged guide, Bass, disabused me of that notion. “This way,” he said with a smile, pointing up toward the peak. The rest of the ascent, he explained, would be on foot. It was only another seven hours uphill.
I looked behind at the gauchos riding down the trail. I wasn’t prepared for a major climb, and my backpack was heavy: I’d packed three bottles of wine—no problem on horse. One of the guys lightened my load by taking two of the bottles, and I fell in line and began the steep ascent. Everything was fine, the scenery was dazzling, as we hiked past mirrored lakes, and I was so happy that I carried on—for about five minutes. Until, that is, we came upon a narrow, hazardous crossing along a cliff. There was no ledge, just a narrow precipice; take a wrong step and you’d plummet thousands of feet to your death.
“Um, I have a deep fear of heights,” I confessed. “And that’s a real long way down.” I wished I’d brought a parachute.
“Keep your eyes focused on me,” said Bass. “Just put one foot in front of the other.”
I kept going, and, thankfully, reached the other side without incident. After a while, I started to love hiking in the pure air. “And just ahead,” said Bass, “is our hosteria.” As we rounded a bend, my eyes fell upon a glorified storage shed. Those were our sleeping quarters? It made the desert inn in Morocco look deluxe. On the positive side, I wouldn’t have to worry about scorpions. But there could be mites.
The hosteria was actually cozy in a sparse, heavily wooded sort of way, and after a few glasses of wine, which packed more zing at high altitude, I stopped worrying about mites. Before long, stew was cooking over the hearth, and perhaps due to the oxygen-deprived air or the fact that it was my first night off from “Mommy Duty” in six years, pretty soon everything struck me as funny, then absolutely hilarious, and I wasn’t alone: we were all roaring our heads off for hours, playing cards, and swapping tall tales.
Finally, we climbed to the loft to sleep, but the laughter continued. One of the guys was sawing wood so loudly he could have won the gold medal in the snoring Olympics. The person next to him woke up and nudged him, and he stopped, for one second; then he was back to those wall-shaking snores. The person to the other side woke up and poked him, and he turned over and immediately started his thunderous snoring again. Nobody got a wink of sleep that night, except Thunder Nose.
At 5 A.M., we groggily emerged from the shed, stumbling outside in the dark and cold even though it was summer in the Southern Hemisphere. At that altitude, it was snowing. We headed back up the trail, this time tied together by ropes. The first rays of the sun were just breaking through, when the silence of dawn was broken by a helicopter. It was Mark, swooping down in grand fashion to visit us. He jumped out, ran over, and gave me a kiss.
“From above, you guys look like ants,” he said. Then he ran back to the chopper and took off. I really considered running after him, as this climb was much more treacherous than I’d imagined. Stumbling through flurries and whiteouts, we made our way up the open face of the ice crevasses, struggling to get our footing. The higher we climbed, the more blustery it got. But we trudged on through the snow and reached the top.
I looked down, past the glaciers, the shimmering lakes, the valleys of alpine flowers: on one side was Argentina; on the other, Chile. I breathed in and got a total adrenaline rush. I’d finally climbed a mountain, and despite my reservations, the sense of empowerment I felt as a result of conquering nature—and conquering my fears—thrilled me.
“Wasn’t it a blast?” Mark asked when I returned to Bariloche. “How did you fare at mountain trekking?”
“It was a breeze,” I said with a straight face. “Next time, I’d like something challenging. Say, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.”
As was customary, Eco-Challenge began with an opening party incorporating the local culture. The Argentine cowboys cooked up a traditional gaucho feast—steaks on the grill served with empanadas (stuffed pastries), alfajores (a popular dessert), licuados (blended drinks), delicious helado (ice cream), and vino tinto (red wine). A band performed rhythmic cumbia music, and everyone danced late into the night.
For Eco-Challenge Argentina, 51 international teams had descended in Patagonia to embark on a journey over 250 miles of rough terrain, from mountains to rushing rivers. After the opening ceremonies, we traveled for several hours to the race starting point—a large open field next to Lake Nahuel Huapi. The first leg involved kayaking across the lake. However, the boats weren’t on the shore. Racers had to swim across the icy water to their boats—a cruel beginning, I thought. The competitors did, too: they were pissed, but thanks to underwater cameras that captured their scowls, it made for great TV! The entire race was dramatic: a blizzard in the mountains made the climbing leg particularly treacherous—and at one point, three teams were MIA. Some even had to be helicoptered off the mountain.
That year, satellite phone maker Iridium was a major sponsor and provided us with phones. Even deep in the wilderness, Mark’s phone never stopped ringing. Some of the calls were from CBS; they were being swarmed with inquiries from the media, all wanting to know more about Survivor. From that point on, the show stalked us.
Two weeks later—as the last contestants galloped across the finish line—we repeated the gaucho festivities with the closing ceremony, this time with many more bottles of fine Malbec wine, and champagne. While there, Mark’s phone rang again, with more exciting news from CBS. The network had expected 1,000 wannabe castaways to apply for Survivor; instead they’d received more than 6,000 videos!
I doubt there has ever been a more amusing casting process than the one to assemble 16 castaways for Survivor. Les Moonves himself told the press he’d never had more fun in his life than going through the videotapes. By day, Lynne Spillman and her casting crew at CBS made the rough cuts. At night, Mark and I put in our two cents on the videos, and CBS took it from there.
The wannabe castaways sent in hilarious tapes: some crept through their suburban backyards, imagining they were being stalked by wild beasts in the shrubs; one taped himself in the shower where plastic spiders kept dropping down. A sexy young woman opened her video grilling filet mignon over a pit. “If I’m chosen as a castaway,” she cooed, “I’ll make clothes from steak!” Then she took the meat off the grill, threaded it, and erotically slipped on her filet thong.
“Yech!” I said.
“Love it!” said Mark.
The next video opened with a tight shot on a young man wearing a hunting cap, plaid jacket, and jeans. “From years of working on a Wisconsin dairy farm, I’ve learned many survival skills,” he whispered, while crouching in a field. “For instance, hunting for firewood.” He leapt up, grabbed a rifle, and aimed it at a pile of wood. “Firewood! On the ground, now!”
In February 2000, Mark and CBS casting agents visited a dozen American cities making the final selections for modern-day Gingers and Mary Anns; they were looking for castaways who were telegenic, had strong personalities, and appeared to be up to the task. Finalists were subjected to psychological tests as well. We didn’t want to repeat the experience of Charlie Parsons; the first person voted off Expedition Robinson had promptly thrown himself under a train. Castaways voted off Survivor would be immediately greeted by staff and taken on trips around the area; counselors would be available, if they wanted to talk.
For the music, composer Russ Landau threw his name into the hat, wanting to compose the theme song, but Mark was leaning toward somebody else.
“Russ is our friend, Mark!” I insisted. “And he’s really talented.” My husband agreed, all the more when we heard Russ’s sample composition: he’d created such a compelling theme song that soon he was rating profiles of his own.
Finally, in early March, Mark flew off to a secluded island in Southeast Asia to prepare for what would become the most talked-about show in the U.S.