Great things are not done by impulse, but
by a series of small things brought together.
—Vincent Van Gogh
THE PASSENGERS SCRAMBLED ACROSS the deck of a double-masted wood sailing boat, frantically throwing chests over the side while disengaging crude bamboo rafts.
“Where are our life jackets?!” somebody screamed. Seconds later, the castaways plunged into the choppy waters, struggling to pull themselves and their few possessions onto flimsy rafts.
“You are witnessing 16 Americans begin an adventure that will forever change their lives,” said a dark-haired man with chiseled features. “They’ve been given two minutes to salvage whatever they can off this boat.” He pointed to a palm-fringed isle. “Their destination is right here—a beautiful but dangerous jungle in the middle of the South China Sea.”
Venomous snakes slithered, baring fangs. “For the next 39 days, they’ll be left to fend for themselves.” A man-eating monitor lizard flicked its tongue. Rats scurried over rocks. “Only one will remain, and will leave the island with $1 million in cash as their reward.” Torches lit with a dramatic burst of flame; thunder flashed. “Thirty-nine days, 16 people, one survivor …” Drums began thumping, tribes began chanting.
“So what do you think?” asked Mark, when the lights went up in the “production hut.” Electricity hadn’t arrived on the Malaysian island of Pulau Tiga until the production company’s generator revved up a few months before. Three miles long, one mile wide, the uninhabited island off of Borneo was the backdrop for the debut of Survivor.
It was mid-March 2000, and we’d just shown up on the isle to join Mark. I was amazed to see what a few months before had only been a dream—and a tower of audition videos—jump off the drawing board and materialize: Survivor was turning into reality in front of our eyes.
“Mark, it’s fantastic!” I exclaimed, throwing my arms around him. “Pulls you right in.” Thank God. If Mark screwed this up, his name would be mud. If he pulled it off, well, he could be golden. “And Jeff is great!” Previously best known as a VH-1 host, Jeff Probst, with his dimples and no-nonsense persona, had been perfectly cast as the show’s host.
“Seven hours, 23 cameras, and one take to make that,” said Mark.
Even my dad was impressed. “Nice work, Mark,” he said, giving him a slap on the back. “Looks good. Whatever the hell it is.” Even though Dad wasn’t entirely clear on the concept, he was curious enough to fly over and see what we were up to.
Mom was thrilled, too. “Oh, honey, this is just fantastic!” she’d said, when I called to tell her that Survivor had been picked up by CBS, but she declined my offer to visit the set. Then again, she would have melted in this weather. “Steamy” takes on new heights in the tropics; day and night the air felt thick, like we were pushing through hot Vaseline. Even though limited electricity had recently arrived, air-conditioning remained a foreign concept. I fanned myself with one hand, and with the other, swatted mosquitoes.
A few days earlier, I’d set out on the long flight to Borneo with James, Cameron, and my dad. Upon our arrival, we’d checked into Magellan Sutera Resort, a five-star hotel on the mainland, in Kota Kinabalu. I was pleasantly surprised to find luxury digs in such a remote destination, and I was especially relieved to see a comfortable king-size bed in our room after all that traveling. In the morning, we climbed into a helicopter and headed toward the tiny island of Pulau Tiga, 30 miles away; I wished I could have brought the hotel bed with me. On the secluded tropical getaway, we would be sleeping on lumpy cots.
“Wait till you see what’s on for today!” Mark said. “James, you ready for a bug-eating contest?”
“A what?” asked James and my father in unison, the younger voice thrilled at the thought, the other appalled.
“You’ll see,” said Mark, pushing in a few more videos to bring us up to speed on what had happened during the four days before we’d arrived. The 16 strangers were divided into two teams, named after the beaches where they camped—Tagi and Pagong. Given sparse supplies—a can of corn, a bag of rice, and a cooking pot—the castaways were seriously roughing it, trying to make fire without matches and building shelters from twigs and fronds. The stress that was evident the moment they shored up was bringing out power struggles faster than you could say “Gilligan”!
On Pagong Beach, white-haired B.B. Andersen, a 64-year-old retired contractor, had appointed himself leader of the pack. “We got a lotta lazy people around here,” he complained to the camera, when the others refused to perform strenuous labor in the blazing sun. He particularly singled out poor Ramona, a biochemist from New Jersey: she’d been heaving since the moment they jumped off the boat.
Over on Tagi Beach, ex–Navy Seal Rudy Boesch was barking commands that his teammates mostly ignored. Richard Hatch—a husky corporate trainer—was Rudy’s only serious competition for the role of alpha dog, leader of the pack. When they first shored up, Richard sat perched in a tree. While the others organized food-foraging expeditions and built a latrine, Richard encouraged everyone to share their personal reasons for volunteering to be part of Survivor, an exercise in corporate power-sharing, apparently.
“I’m a redneck,” ruddy Susan Hawk, a 38-year-old truck driver, told Richard the first night. “I don’t know nothin’ about anything corporate. But, Richard, corporate ain’t gonna cut it out here.”
On the second day, when Team Pagong had managed to light a fire, and Richard had shared with his teammates that he was gay, the two teams were summoned via “treemail”—a parchment map inside a wood canister hanging from a tree. They were to gather mid-island for their first “challenge” —a competition between the two teams.
Jeff Probst, the handsome host, greeted them. Looking cool as a cucumber in freshly-pressed khakis, he appeared freshly showered, well groomed, and perfectly coiffed—in stark contrast to the competitors’ grimy faces, salt-caked hair, and wrinkled beachwear. Cast in a role that combined “The Skipper,” “The Professor” and God—and speaking in a voice that evoked Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone, Probst ran through that evening’s challenge. He pointed offshore, where two “pots” of fire blazed atop two wood rafts. Each team was to carry their raft onto the beach and deliver it to the “Goddess of Fire”—a towering, carved wood statue painted in bright colors. En route, teams had to light a line of torches as they passed. The prize for whichever team completed the competition first: 50 fireproof matches.
Team Pagong won the relay; Team Tagi was sent to a “Tribal Council”—to vote one of their team members off the island. Sweet-faced ukulele player Sonya, a 62-year-old Californian, was booted: her teammates saw her as “the weak link” because she’d stumbled during the torch-lighting relay.
Having been brought up to date on the plight of the castaways—all of whom were familiar faces I’d first seen on audition tapes—we hiked through the forest to that day’s challenge site. The art department was hammering and sawing, busy constructing a long wood table that sat low to the ground and was set with 15 wood plates and 15 bamboo “glasses.” Cameras were poised from every angle, mics dangled from trees, and for hours the technicians tested different angles and lighting.
“Hey, James, you hungry?” asked Mark, holding up a jar with live beetle larvae—about the size of a thumb—crawling inside. “This is what they’re going to eat! They’re called Butok.”
“Cool,” said James.
“Bug,” said Cameron.
“Disgusting,” said my dad. As we watched from the sidelines, out of view, the cameras began rolling when Team Tagi and Team Pagong arrived and sat on bright pillows around the table.
“We realize,” said Probst, “that by now you’re probably hungry. So we’ve prepared a local delicacy.” He held up a large glass jar filled with crawling larvae, which resembled slugs, except even more revolting. “They’re like sushi around here.”
The challenge, he explained, was for every team member to eat one of the squirming larvae—starting with the head. If somebody didn’t participate, their team would lose.
“I can’t do it!” yelled Gervase, the basketball coach from New Jersey, but at the last second he bit off the head, chewed, and swallowed. To break the tie, one person from each team—Gervase and Stacey—was timed to see who could swallow two of them fastest. Gervase lost. His team, Pagong, had to go to Tribal Council that night.
After heading to the staff’s primitive “Survivor Bar,” where we dined on boiled fish head stew—“Hope there’s no larvae in here,” mumbled my dad—we hiked into the jungle, where the crew was readying the site for the upcoming council meeting.
“Watch out for snakes,” warned Mark, carrying James, and handing sticks to Dad and me. Cameron, whom I rarely let out of my arms the entire time on the island, amused himself by observing nature.
“Monkey!” he said, pointing at the wide-eyed creature perched on a banyan tree. “Monkey,” he repeated every three steps. The simians were swinging everywhere, outnumbering their upright cousins by about 500 to 1.
Finally, we crossed a rough-hewn plank bridge tied together with twine. A fire was blazing in a stone pit; nearby stood wooden torches, unlit. We stood off-camera with a dozen reporters, waiting for hours before Team Tagi emerged from the darkness and crossed the plank bridge, each member banging the gong as they entered the Tribal Council. Under the full moon, it seemed like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell book.
“Oh jeez,” I whispered to Mark. “Look!” Just a few feet from where we stood, a pack of rats was scurrying around.
Probst instructed the Pagong castaways to each pick up a torch, light it, and place it in the torch holder as they gathered around the circle. “Fire represents life,” he intoned, “and these torches now represent your continuing survival on the island.” Their task, he reminded them, was to vote someone off their team. To my mind, the weak link was biochemist Ramona. The poor woman was so ill that she’d barely come out of the shelter for days. However, B.B. had pulled a stunt—captured on camera—that really ticked off his fellow castaways: while the rest of Team Pagong washed their beach garb in the sea, B.B. was found washing his clothes in the cooking pot—and using precious drinking water to do so.
Team Pagong looked glum as one by one they filed off to an isolated bamboo platform to write a name on a piece of parchment, put it in a canister, and justify their vote on-camera. Minutes later, Probst retrieved the canister and tallied the votes. He unfolded the first piece of paper as dramatically as an Emmy Award presenter. It said B.B. The next said Ramona. Then B.B. Then Ramona. Then B.B. Then two more for B.B.
“The tribe has spoken,” Probst said, with melodramatic intoning. “B.B., get your torch.” White-haired B.B. brought his blazing wood wand to Probst, who snuffed it with a bamboo ladle. “B.B., you must leave at once!”
I almost started crying, and so did many of the team members as B.B.—cast in blue light—walked off alone into the jungle.
“Do you think the tribal council is hokey?” asked Mark as we left.
“Yep,” I said. “But it works.”
Smacking mosquitoes every step of the way, we hiked back to our huts, passing the press tent, where reporters from People and other major magazines were holed up. Our accommodations consisted of primitive bamboo cabins, with two cots and a crude “bathroom.”
Dad wasn’t overjoyed when he was shown to his sparsely-furnished hut. “Why do we have to spend the night here?” he asked, looking at the sad, little bed with its mosquito-net canopy. “We’ve got a fantastic suite over on the mainland. Let’s just grab the helicopter and go back!”
“Get into the spirit, Dad!” I said, slapping another mosquito.
The next day, the sun began blazing at dawn, and monkeys awoke us, pounding at the bars of our windows. The sticky air felt sickeningly dense as we hiked to the beach to see the art department’s latest creations: they were busy painting and sawing, making a jungle obstacle course.
Mark explained the next challenge, showing us something that looked like an old treasure map. The convoluted relay began with a swim into the sea and finding a bottle with a map inside. Afterward, the competitors had to run through the jungle looking for clues under masks nailed to trees.
We moved on to Tagi Beach, where Dirk, the Wisconsin dairy farmer, was reading the Bible; several of the women castaways were stretching their arms to the heavens, doing tai chi; Richard, the corporate trainer, was explaining to the camera how the others had reacted when he’d told his teammates he was gay. The famished castaways were thrilled: they’d caught rats, and were dining on roasted rodents for lunch. My father looked at me, horrified.
While they were truly living out in the wild, one thing was artificial: cameras, tucked away in palms and banyan trees, followed the castaways’ every movement; microphones dangled like black bananas from fronds. They taped the castaways when they were building and sleeping, foraging and eating, and trying to fish with fashioned twigs. Beyond capturing their survival ordeals, every day castaways were pulled aside and interviewed, privately assessing the challenges of that day—asides that weren’t heard by the rest of the team.
We made a couple of trips back and forth from the island to the luxurious Magellan Hotel on Kota. On one of the boat rides back to the island, we were joined by People magazine reporter Kelly Carter, a beautiful, statuesque woman. She was decked out in full safari gear, like Indiana Jones. Halfway to the island, the boat driver pointed out a diving spot where we could check out coral reefs. Deadly sea snakes also lurked in the waters. Unfazed by the warning, Mark, James, and Kelly dove in to check it out, while I stayed in the boat with my Dad and little Cameron, who was asleep in my arms.
Wherever we were, unless we were taping, Mark’s phone rang every few seconds, with more questions about art or that day’s activities: he was in nonstop meetings with the producers, the lighting guys, and host Jeff Probst. While Mark didn’t have a second to waste, we had little to fill our time. Dad and I spent days reading books between taping sessions. After a while, even the thrill of viewing the behind-the-scenes activities had worn off, and Dad wanted to return to civilization.
“Get me back to the hotel now!” he demanded. “I hope I never lay eyes on fish head stew again. And tomorrow I want to lie around by the pool.” Frankly, I didn’t mind the idea of a break from the bugs, the snakes, and the rats. Mark didn’t mind the last-minute change in plans, but the helicopter was already in use. So we took off with the hired Malaysian boatman, who often took people back to Kota Kinabalu, on the mainland.
The sun was dipping low in the sky when Dad, Cameron, and I set off in the small boat on the 30-mile ride back. James wanted to be a “big boy,” so he stayed behind on the island with Mark, getting a “job” working in the art department. Midway between Pulau Tiga and the mainland, a speedboat appeared and signaled for the driver to stop.
“Oh, great,” I said, thinking they were the Coast Guard. The three men had the swagger of military men, and they all carried large guns.
“Shit,” said Dad.
The rifle-toting trio began barking at our boatman, and he nervously said something back. They said something; he looked back at us, and anxiously replied.
“Excuse me,” I said to the boatman, who knew little English, “what’s the delay? Can we just get on our way?”
“Shh, Dianne,” Dad whispered. “Let him handle it.”
I turned to the gun-toting men. “What’s the holdup? It’s getting dark, and I need to get my kid here to sleep, so we need to go now!”
The armed men in the boat looked mystified, spoke among themselves, shot a few angry words at our boatman, and then sped off.
“Wonder what that was about,” I mused as we resumed our journey.
“Dianne,” said my dad, “they were pirates!”
“Oh, Dad, right!” It turned out that he was right. Piracy was an underreported problem in those waters, and pirates typically left their victims stripped of watches, jewels, and money—sometimes even taking their shoes. Other times, they kidnapped them and held them for ransom, sometimes taking their lives.
When the boat finally sputtered up to the pier, we hopped out and immediately caught sight of an old Coke machine.
“Hallelujah, civilization!” cried my dad.
Actually, we weren’t quite home free: before us was a two-hour ride in a truck with bad shocks on a pothole-ridden dirt road in the dark. Every few seconds there was another KA-BOOM as the truck hit another hole. But we made it. From then on, I tried to make the trip to Pulau Tiga exclusively via helicopter. Dad refused to return at all. “That was plenty for me,” he said, catching rays at the pool. “I’ll wait for it to come out on TV.”
I spent the next six weeks camped out half the time in our luxury suite on the mainland, and the other half in our air-conditioning-free island hut. On Pulau Tiga, I was pulled into the unfolding saga: Richard stopped wearing clothes, Colleen and Greg struck up a steamy romance, and other castaways made secret deals.
Survivor was contrived, dramatic, hilarious, and scary on many levels. Unlike Eco-Challenge, the feats the castaways performed weren’t life threatening: the contests were more like competitions at summer camp. On the other hand, they really didn’t have food or water, or shelter outside of the crude covers they’d erected themselves. Beyond their “battle for survival,” the battle for $1 million brought out their conniving sides: power plays and alliances were forged and dramatically broken, the teams merged into one, and the competition became cutthroat and fraught with betrayal.
While the island situation grew incredibly heated, in all senses of the word, the other half of the time I was hanging out on the mainland in Kota Kinabalu at our swanky hotel, heading out for festive dinners and long, hilarity-filled nights of dancing with the banished castaways. It proved to be good bonding time for my dad and Cameron. The two often fell asleep in the bed next to each other, and watching this scene night after night always brought a smile to my face.
Mark wanted to keep the ousted castaways close at hand: in the final episodes, they would be brought back in as judges. Besides, we were all worried that the castaways—or one of the 140 crew members—would leak information about the identity of the remaining survivor before the show even aired. CBS let it be known they would sue anyone who divulged that information, and they’d be hitting them for the whopping sum of $4 million.
With each week of shooting, the plot developed compelling twists and turns—transforming into not only a real-life soap opera, but a mind trip—and Mark’s stress level grew. So did his confidence that what was being captured on video would grab America’s hearts and wallets—until the very last week, when a boatload of potential sponsors showed up.
“What if they hate it?” Mark asked me as we set out to greet them, throwing a barbeque on the beach, and taking them for tours, including a behind-the-scenes look at that night’s tribal council. Afterward, Mark took them to the production hut and showed them the rough cuts. They were duly wowed. The next week we flew back to the States.
From May 2000 on, the image of Mark was a blur. My husband was an action figure running here, running there, and working the phone 24/7. Always adept at juggling, Mark was outdoing himself: he worked with the editors cutting down thousands of hours of videotape, he helped line up more sponsors, and he gave nonstop interviews—in between working with a writer to knock out a Survivor book to be released that fall. At one point, he jaunted off on a private plane to Russia to research a new show that would launch people into space and house them on the Russian space station Mir.
Writers who previewed the opening episode raved in the days leading up to the premiere at the end of May, and CBS revved up its in-house publicity machine. Shock jock Howard Stern plugged Survivor on his radio show, and Bryant Gumbel touted it on TV. Survivor was raking in tremendous publicity before the first show had even aired!
On Memorial Day, we were lazing on the Malibu terrace of Burt and Navabeh Borman, the well-to-do couple who had hired Mark as a nanny 20 years earlier. They’d remained friends, and were impressed by Mark’s leaps and bounds up the ladder. As we sipped chardonnay with the ocean crashing below, I noticed a small plane flying over the beach. It was pulling an advertising banner.
SURVIVOR —Premiering May 31st on CBS!
Survivor aired as a “summer replacement” series. It’s a notoriously tough season: most shows that make their trial runs in the summer wither and die by the time fall rolls around. We believed the show would hold its own, but we didn’t expect it to become a cultural phenomenon. Survivor fever struck the country from the airing of the first show.
“Survivor,” wrote Adam Buckman in the New York Post, “is no Gilligan’s Island. In fact, I’m not really sure what Survivor is. I just know I liked it—a lot.” A syndicated columnist called Survivor “manipulative, melodramatic and sometimes outright hokey, [but also] fun—lots more fun, in fact, than Regis Philbin and his entire collection of ties.”
For the second episode, we attracted 18 million viewers—and the numbers only grew. Every week, viewers nationwide were glued to their sets to see who would get voted off the island next. Even people who hated it couldn’t stop watching it.
“Since its debut on May 31,” noted The Washington Post, “Survivor has not only demolished [Who Wants to Be a] Millionaire in head-to-head competition but has built in popularity each time. At its peak last Wednesday, the show was watched by 25 million people—1.3 million more viewers than the other five broadcast networks combined.”
Magazines and newspapers ran profiles of Mark, Jeff Probst, and the contestants. Richard and Rudy became fodder for water-cooler banter. And the show soon graced the covers of both Newsweek and Time. The response was amazing, but Survivor’s popularity was a double-edged sword.
“Mark,” I said, when he called me in June, “what do you mean CBS is sending guards? People watching us 24/7? Why do we need bodyguards to watch over us?”
After only three episodes, Survivor was prompting death threats. One came in the form of an e-mail from a woman who was not amused by the bug-eating contest and not entertained when Team Tagi grilled rats for dinner.
From then on, every morning when I woke up, guards hired by CBS—usually off-duty policeman, sheriffs, or detectives—were in our driveway; every night when I went to bed, they were there, sleeping in their cars. They trailed me to the grocery store, and they followed us when I took James to karate, where I always stayed and watched him. Before long, the number-two guard became like another member of the family. He started out watching us from his car, and then ended up sitting in the front seat of my car with me. He helped out when I shopped, hung out in the family room, and slept on the couch. The guards were particularly helpful in mid-July—hauling crates of wine and helping set up tables in the backyard in preparation for Mark’s birthday party.
He survived the deserts of Madagascar …
He survived the blizzards of Patagonia …
He survived 40 days and nights on a
deserted tropical island in the South China Sea …
But can Mark Burnett survive his Surprise 40th Birthday Party?!
July 15, 2000
6 P.M. sharp!
Luckily, my phantom husband was actually in town that week. Little did he know what I had planned. When Mark arrived home that evening, he was greeted by 120 of his friends, family, and co-workers, who’d secretly assembled in our backyard. All of the entertainment bigwigs were there with their families. Les Moonves, Tony Potts, Mark Steines from Entertainment Tonight, Jon Landau of Titanic fame, and Russ Landau were but a few of the notables. Even Charlie Parsons flew in from England along with Mark’s dad. My parents came in from New York, alongside old friends, and people who’d known Mark for decades—including the Bormans—were among those who’d gathered in the backyard to honor Mark. I’d hired a DJ, put up a tent, and set up a dance floor, while the cocktail party continued outside. Mark was blown away.
By then, there was already talk of a Rudy Boesch action-figure doll, and Playboy wanted female castaways to pose for the magazine; several were featured in ads for Reebok. Bryant Gumbel devoted several segments of The Early Show to interviewing the rejected castaways, newspaper headlines kept score, and Howard Stern ran down each week’s show for listeners who hadn’t turned in.
“The tribe has spoken” had entered the vernacular, becoming as popular a term as “Anyway” and “Whatever.” Every time I answered the phone, it was a friend, family member, or acquaintance, begging me to divulge the season’s winner. But my lips were sealed.
To celebrate the success of the show, CBS through a big party for us at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. We stayed in the penthouse, and I brought my mom with me; she had a blast schmoozing with celebrities from other shows.
By July, CBS had renewed the series: this time for primetime, and this time for much bigger money. By the end of the summer, Survivor had topped viewership ratings for any summer program since Sonny and Cher.
“[T]he folks on Cutthroat Island have pulled in more viewers than the five other networks combined,” wrote Newsweek. “They’ve also performed the biggest TV miracle of the year: people are actually watching Bryant Gumbel’s Early Show, at least on the days when Survivor contestants appear …”
Survivor put CBS back on the map and helped Les Moonves land a huge promotion.
One morning in early September, around half past eight, our doorbell rang. I ran down to get it. There stood two black-suited CBS guys asking for Mark.
“Honey, it’s somebody from CBS.” I invited the men in, but they insisted on standing in the doorway.
Mark padded down the stairs in his robe, his eyes barely open.
“This is from Les Moonves,” said one in a serious tone, handing Mark an envelope. My husband ripped it open, and we read the enclosed card. It was a congratulatory note from the network.
“Thank you,” mumbled Mark, his eyes still at half-mast.
“And this is from Les Moonves,” said the second man, handing him a basket that was heaving with fruit. Tucked inside was a little toy car.
“Thank you very much!” said Mark, fighting back a yawn.
“Mr. Burnett, one more thing,” said the first man. He grandly gestured to the driveway. A brand-new, salmon-colored Mercedes 500 SL convertible now sat there.
“Compliments of CBS,” added the second man.
We ran out in our pajamas to admire the car.
“Oh my God,” exclaimed Mark. “Di, I’ve made it!”
The summer took a few other dramatic turns that weren’t so much fun, though. Mark became the MIA husband, as he was often on the East Coast. I attended dinner parties and charity events alone, as he was always jaunting off somewhere for more meetings or another interview. Although we still talked at least once a day, he was on the road for weeks at a time; I missed him horribly. And while the nation developed Survivor fever, and the countdown began, a different kind of fever played out around our home.
James was sick.
One night back in May, a few weeks after returning from Borneo, I was awakened by my seven-year-old son. He was screaming. I bolted down the hall: James never screamed.
“Mommmmmmmy!” he cried out again when I threw open the door.
“Honey, what’s the matter?”
“My knees,” he said.
I whipped up his pajamas legs. Both knees were swollen—puffed up as big as grapefruit. And purple marks had popped out all over his body.
I carried James to the car and sped to the hospital, calling Mark en route. He was at another executive dinner. “Something’s wrong with James, his knees, meet me at the hospital emergency room.”
At 9 P.M., we were in a curtained room, James in hospital gown, crying and scared. The doctor was examining his knees; when he touched them, James shrieked in pain. The door opened, and Mark ran in still decked out in his dinner suit. “How is he? What’s wrong?”
The ER doctor motioned for us to meet him in the hallway.
“We’ll have to drain the fluid over the knees,” he said. “It’s a very painful procedure.”
Mark and I looked at each other.
“No way,” I said. “We need a second opinion. I’m calling the pediatrician.”
I called the office, and was forwarded to an answering service, becoming one in a queue of messages.
“What does it entail?” asked Mark. The doctor explained the gory details.
“We need another opinion,” I said. “This is just the emergency room diagnosis. We have to wait for a specialist.”
“Di,” said my husband, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He started off with the ER doctor to sign the necessary papers.
“Mark,” I said, following after him down the hall, “don’t do this. Wait until the morning!” He ignored my pleas.
I will spare you the details of what happened next, except to say that it was horrifying and James screamed throughout. I was screaming, too—at Mark for approving it without waiting for a second opinion. I grew more upset when the pediatrician called at 8 A.M. Before he’d ever seen James in person, he had an idea of what was wrong. Henoch-Schönlein purpura—a rare immune system disorder that can damage the kidneys and wreaks havoc on the body.
I told him the ER doctor hadn’t mentioned it.
“Don’t tell me he tapped the kid’s knees,” said the pediatrician. “That’s excruciating. And it wasn’t needed.”
I’ve never felt so guilty. I should have grabbed James and run him out of the hospital before the knee tapping began. I should have stopped Mark from giving his permission. My guilt extended beyond that night at the hospital. I began feeling guilty for the dangerous situations we’d led our kids into, the lifestyle we’d subjected them to. The whirlwind vacations that before I saw as a positive—exposing my kids to new experiences and new cultures—I now saw as simply exposing them to foreign germs and diseases. And some of the diseases might have started before we even left.
I’d always wondered about all the inoculations we received before setting out to foreign lands. We got shots for everything from hepatitis to malaria—often a dozen different vaccines before we set out. Some schools of thought held that the inoculations can trigger reactions as bad as the diseases they were supposed to prevent.
Nobody knows for sure what causes Henoch-Schönlein purpura. Like some other physicians, the pediatrician believed it may have been related to the frequent immunity boosters that James had received—probably set off by the last round we’d gotten just before we’d jetted to Borneo. Few people develop his affliction—and of those most don’t develop life-threatening symptoms. James was one of the 6 percent who did: his kidneys were infected, and for months his stomach felt like it was being slashed with a knife.
Morphine and steroids were prescribed to check the pain, but the summer was filled with more late night trips to hospital; one night we roared off in an ambulance. We were still making the rounds to specialists as summer ended; although his condition had improved, James still sometimes was doubled over from the pain.
In August, Mark began preparing to spend a few weeks in Borneo again—this time for Eco-Challenge Borneo. As usual, he wanted the family to come with him.
“No way,” I said in what was turning into the worst argument I ever had with Mark. “James is still sick, Mark. And more immunizations right now could just make it worse.” The doctors said no; I said no.
Mark blew up. We’d gone to almost every event; it was important for us as a family, he insisted. He demanded that we accompany him to Borneo. He wouldn’t back down, but I wouldn’t budge.
He hugged James and Cameron goodbye the day he flew off in early August, promising cool toys when he returned in September. The goodbye kiss Mark gave me was noticeably frosty.
That year—2000—76 teams signed up for Eco-Challenge, the biggest turnout ever. And that year, there had been torrential rains just before the event, which swelled the rivers in Borneo. That year, Eco-Challenge also added spelunking.
The rains and the caving events were among many factors listed as possible causes for the outbreak of a nasty disease in Borneo that season. The situation was so serious that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta got involved: shortly after Eco-Challenge Borneo ended in early September, competitors were tracked down and interviewed by medical research teams. They’d never ever seen such high numbers of rat catcher’s yellows. Almost half of the racers interviewed by the medical research team had what is officially known as leptospirosis. Many were hospitalized. Nobody died, but some risked kidney failure.
For James’s sake, I was glad I’d held my ground. But my decision not to accompany Mark to Eco-Challenge Borneo rocked our marriage.
By the time Mark returned from Borneo, the verdict was in: Survivor was the number one show in America: “An unlikely mega-hit,” one article called it; Time said it was “The hot crush of the summer.”
Some 40 million viewers tuned in to the two-hour finale. By the time the Survivor Borneo finale aired on August 23, 2000, the show had become so popular that its ratings beat out all of the major sporting events of that year. The winner, Richard Hatch, notorious for traipsing about in the nude, became an instant celebrity. Burnett Productions became the hottest name in town. In one season, we’d transformed from persistent dreamers to the big kids on campus. And that was only the beginning.
Success had been attained; we’d hit the jackpot at the lottery machine of TV network programming. So maybe it was the sudden onslaught of fame, or that we’d gone from “thousandaires” to multimillionaires overnight. Perhaps it was, as Mark insisted, the stress from juggling so many balls. Whatever the reason, something was different when Mark came back to L.A. after Eco-Challenge Borneo. He worked late into the night, and when he finally came to bed, he couldn’t sleep.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him over and over. “What is happening?”
He began taking sleeping pills, often spending the night dozing on the couch or in James’s room. There were changes in his vocabulary: where he’d once said “we” and “our,” he now substituted “I” and “my.” Dinner parties—with Les and Nancy Moonves or with old friends—became multicourse stages for him to brag. I felt like a waitress, serving courses, in between Mark’s stories of how he’d started Eco-Challenge, how he’d launched Survivor, and how he’d sold Destination Mir to NBC for a cool $40 million. It was all about Mark—his stories about his next pitches, and his stories about being Mark.
That September when we attended the Emmy Awards, Mark and I smiled brightly and held hands as we walked the media gauntlet and down the lit-up red carpet. Flashes went off, cameras rolled, as broadcasting reporters announced the arrival of “Mark Burnett, executive producer of the smash hit Survivor, and his wife, Dianne.” But for all the smiles, something had changed and was threatening to pop our “bubble.” It wasn’t for some time that I understood what was wrong.
Howard Stern tipped me off.