The Answer Is… AN EXPENSIVE HAIRPIECE

One of the side effects of chemotherapy is that my hair has fallen out. So ever since I started undergoing treatment, I’ve been wearing a hairpiece. Clearly, it’s a damn good one if you didn’t realize it until just now. But here’s a secret even the most die-hard Jeopardy! fan might not know: I actually started wearing a hairpiece in early 2018, about a year before I made my initial announcement about the cancer diagnosis.

It all started one night up at the house we used to own on Lake Nacimiento in Paso Robles, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Los Angeles. I was standing at the bathroom sink washing my face, and I lost my balance—I guess when I lifted my head up from the sink. I fell backward about six or seven feet into the tub. My ass landed on the front edge, and my head banged on the back edge. I slammed into the tub so hard it moved about an eighth of an inch.

I didn’t black out, and I wasn’t bleeding, so I went back to bed and woke up the next morning figuring everything was fine. Well, soon I started having these episodes where I’d lose my balance. I would start to tip over and then quickly right myself. Some people thought I was doing it intentionally, just kidding around, trying to get a laugh. But it started happening more often. And my left leg started to drag a little. When I got to work one morning, Tad, our security guy, said, “You gotta a little hitch in your giddyup.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve noticed that.”

Going around corners, I would bump into the wall. My spatial awareness was all out of whack.

Around this same time, I had an annual physical scheduled at Cedars-Sinai.

“Everything okay?” my doctor asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’ve got this little thing when I’m walking—this hitch.”

He asked me to step off the table, and I sort of missed a step.

“Were you just having fun with me?” he asked. “Or was that for real?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s one of these things I was telling you about.”

“Okay,” he said, “you’re going over to emergency.”

“Oh shit,” I said.

By this point, I’d been to the Cedars-Sinai emergency room so many times over the years I was practically on a first-name basis with staff. There were numerous handyman-incurred bumps and bruises, kidney stones, and not one but two heart attacks. (I’ve had so many maladies we turned them into a Jeopardy! category. When we revealed it in the game, it got a big laugh from the studio audience.)

For that first heart attack, I didn’t want to go to the hospital. Jeanie insisted.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “You’ve gotta go now.”

I never use my status as a public figure to get preferential treatment. I certainly don’t cut lines. Not at movies or restaurants or anywhere else. I’ve always resented people who pull that crap. I’m not like Gordon MacRae at the Brown Derby all those years ago. I’m happy to stand in line quietly and wait my turn. But you say the words heart attack in a hospital and you don’t have a choice. Then you’re in like a shot.

At least something good came of all my health woes: we got a category out of it.

I was worried, but not because it might be a heart attack. I was worried because it might not be. They started connecting me to the machines and speaking their jargon.

“MI?” I asked. “Is that a myocardial infarction?”

“Yes,” the nurse said.

“That’s a heart attack, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Oh, thank God,” I said.

“Why are you saying that?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to come here and waste your time,” I told her. I mean, if you go into the hospital and say, “I think I’m having a heart attack,” and they zip you to the front of the line and go to the trouble of running all those tests and it turns out not to be a heart attack? You have to feel pretty embarrassed.

Well, I had the same worry that day my doctor sent me to the ER because of my balance issues. I was worried it was going to turn out to be nothing. They ran an MRI on my brain, and when they came back with it, they were all smiling.

“Good news,” they said. “It’s not a stroke.”

“Oh, great,” I said.

“The bad news,” they said, “is that you have major blood clots on both sides of your brain… bilateral subdural hematoma.”

“Damn,” I said.

“We have to remove them,” they said.

“Can we do it now?” I asked.

“Have you eaten?” they asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s okay,” they said. “We’ll do it first thing in the morning.”

The next day at five in the morning, they did the surgery. On my cell phone I still have two pictures Jeanie took of my skull afterward. I don’t save any photos on my phone. I barely save any numbers. But these two I kept. There were long stitches on each side of my scalp where they cut through the skull in order to flush out both sides properly. These two rows of stitches look like a railway track. And in between the railway track is this flimsy tuft of gray hair hanging there. It was like a reverse Mohawk.

It scared the crap out of the staff when I went in. It wasn’t looking too good. That’s when the producers decided I needed a hairpiece to cover it and our experience with the hairpiece started.

The guy who did it does wigs for a lot of the big stars, mostly women. I won’t share their names, but I bet you’d be surprised. I certainly was. These pieces are so good. Nobody can tell. After I announced my cancer diagnosis I sat down for an interview with Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning. She was totally shocked when I told her it was a hairpiece, and she was sitting two feet away from me.

I usually let the makeup team at work put it on, but in a pinch I can do it myself. I did it once when Jeanie and I went out to dinner, and it wasn’t bad. In my case the hairpiece makes me look better than my real hair. I probably should’ve started wearing it a long time ago.

Real hair or hairpiece? To be honest, I’m not sure myself.