The Road to Reality

by Dianne Burnett

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.

  Chapter Eleven

  HEARD IT THROUGH

  THE GRAPEVINE

  Betrayal can only happen if you love.

  —John Le Carré

  IN EARLY 2002, THE phone rang. It was Mark.

  “Di,” he began. He sounded really upset. “Di, don’t listen to The Howard Stern Show. Don’t listen to what anybody says about it.”

  “Okay, Mark, whatever you say.” I wondered if he’d bombed on the show, although by then Mark was a sound-bite machine. He could conduct interviews in his sleep.

  “Don’t listen to it,” he warned again.

  He clicked off, and I curled back up with my pillow. The phone rang again. Then again and again and again, as friends and family from New York gave me the lowdown on what had happened. A little after 10 A.M. Eastern time, Mark had called in to Howard Stern’s radio show to promote Survivor’s fourth season, which was premiering that night. Howard was instrumental in stirring up viewership: he ruled the morning airwaves in the sought-after 18-to-34 demographic.

  Mark usually loved doing the show, and he and Howard ping-ponged jokes back and forth. The interview in February 2002 had started off swimmingly—with Howard asking if this season anybody was going to die or at least get laid on Survivor, then rapping Mark’s casting of the castaways.

  “I’d swear you’re a gay guy,” said Howard. “You always have a plethora of good-looking guys, but where are the hot chicks?” Mark said not to worry. This season they were plenty hot, and that castaway Sarah had “the best body money could buy.” Howard, perhaps innocently, perhaps not, then stepped on a land mine.

  “You’ve got an amazing story, Mark.” Howard began recapping the highlights of Mark’s career. “You move to L.A., broke, and support yourself by being a male nanny …” And then Howard gave him some grief for having that job, wondering who the hell would hire a male nanny. “Then you open up some flea-market booth selling clothes, right? And then you went to hear Tony Robbins … and that’s what made you a TV producer?”

  “More or less,” said Mark. There was no question, he said, that Tony Robbins had strongly influenced him, as had his mother’s terminal cancer. Mark said that when she became ill, it underscored the fact that life really did end, and our days are finite. “I knew I’d better get my butt in gear and do something I really wanted to do. So I focused on adventure, realizing that the best money would be television. I had some luck along the way. But I did it.”

  “So you become a success and …” Howard paused. “You got a divorce, right?”

  Pause. “No.”

  “You’re still married?” asked Howard. There was a really, really long pause—the longest pause in the history of the show, the radio staff later concluded.

  “Geez, you’ll admit to being a male nanny, but you won’t admit to being married?” cracked comedian Greg Fitzsimmons, who was in Howard’s studio.

  “Mark,” asked Howard, “you didn’t survive marriage?”

  “Howard, leave me alone on that. I’ve been gone 12 months of the last 18. Don’t bust my balls.”

  “Oh,” said Howard, “you don’t want your girlfriend to know you’re married.” Another long silence, with Mark mumbling something about how he was gonna kick Howard’s ass and how the radio host was going to need his bodyguards.

  “Mark, are you a single guy?”

  Pause. “Yeah.”

  “In other words, is the Survivor money all gone?”

  “No,” Mark answered with a laugh.

  “How are you going to get away with being divorced and not give your wife half the money?”

  “Who said I wouldn’t?”

  “You’re gonna have to,” Howard told him.

  Mark said he’d come to America broke, so he was prepared to leave it broke, and go climb the Himalayas for a couple years if need be.

  “Well,” said Howard, after a few more minutes of ba
nter, “hope you survive your divorce.” And then, even after Mark signed off, Howard kept talking about the divorce in Mark’s future.

  The 18-to-34 radio demographic knew where my marriage was heading before I did.

  Then again, as they say in beauty salons coast-to-coast, the wife is always the last to know. Or maybe it’s that the wife is the last one to give up hope. Because even then I was still hoping, thinking, and believing that it wasn’t over with my husband.

  I made a cup of tea, went out on the terrace, and as I gazed out over the flowering dogwood and rose blossoms, I began going through the film reels in my mind, reviewing the events of the previous year and a half that had brought me there.

  As far as I know, there aren’t any courses that teach people how to deal with the upheaval that becoming famous brings about—the sudden spotlight, the oceans of dough, the way people treat you differently when you’ve “hit it big.” Some turn into foot-kissers, others turn resentful—and big names in L.A., who start snagging headlines for changing their hairdos, are particularly at risk for believing their own hype. The lightning-fire success of Survivor—“the unlikely mega-hit”—blasted Mark and me, along with our marriage and our family, into a state of shock.

  It wasn’t just the way our credit cards no longer had caps on them, or the way that restaurant patrons stopped and stared when Mark entered, or the realization that there are crazy people out there whose buttons were being pushed by Survivor. What also blasted our “bubble” into uncharted territory was the timing. We’d hit the career jackpot at a most vulnerable time, just as we were approaching notoriously rough spots on the calendar of life.

  Mark had just turned 40—the magic number for the beginning of a midlife crisis; we’d also been married eight years, the length of the average American marriage.

  Marriages, I think, go through cycles, as do the timelines of individuals: there is such a thing as “the seven-year itch.” So exactly where we were heading on the intertwining highways of our lives should have been marked with signs reading: “Slow speed—hazards ahead.”