The First-Person Account of a Paso Man Who Made It on ‘Millionaire’

BY JOHN RICKENBACH

It’s an unusual trip when a well-dressed man greets me at the baggage claim area, holding a sign with my name. Even stranger when he loads me, a regular guy from Paso Robles, into a black limo and whisks me into Manhattan, no questions asked. But that’s one of the surreal aspects of being on a game show, when random chance provides fleeting celebrity status even though nothing has happened yet.

But this wasn’t your ordinary trip. This was my chance to win a million bucks.

Irving, the limo driver, broke the silence as we eased onto the crowded Van Wyck Expressway. "You don’t mind if I take off my hat, do you?" He didn’t even wait for an answer. The hat fell to the empty front passenger seat. "It gets in the way sometimes."

A thick Brooklyn accent emerged from the now-hatless man in his mid-50s. Looked like the classic stereotype of the chauffeur, complete with black suit. Irving already knew why we were in New York. "So I hope you can win some money while you’re here. Did you see last night’s show?"

Irving was a most pleasant fellow and a damn good tour guide. With heroic attention to detail, he pointed out the site of the 1964-65 World’s Fair, including the skeletal remains of a tower built for the ’39 fair. "That’s Forest Hills over there. La Guardia coming up on the right–too small nowadays, nobody uses La Guardia."

We traversed Central Park on 66th Street, and Irving was glad to talk about something else. "That’s the building they used in ‘Ghostbusters.’" My wife, Pattie, recognized the jagged-topped high rise; I didn’t.

"Do you mind if I put this on?" Irving turned on the radio to his favorite station, a mix of light rock hits. He turned it up a bit when Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic "I Will Survive" came on, throbbing at low volume over the quiet hum of the engine. To my surprise, the old chauffeur began to hum along. Pattie put on her sunglasses and chimed in, too. Stereo. Great. I watched Central Park slide past and, as the song ended, the singing limo eased left onto Columbus Avenue. "Your hotel is just up ahead."

Possibilities

It began as a fluke phone call three weeks earlier, a late-night, toll-free call to a recording of Regis Philbin’s voice.

Since being launched late in 1999, ABC’s "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" has become an unlikely pop-culture phenomenon, striking it rich on the formula of combining regular people, real drama, and a whole lot of cash.

Individual contestants answer multiple-choice trivia questions for escalating sums of money. A wrong answer carries severe financial consequences, which is the source of the dramatic tension. It’s deceptively simple, the kind of game that works because the home audience is thinking "I can do that, too!"

And they’re right, they can. It’s just a series of simple steps, mostly consisting of a mix of phone calls, quiz questions, and persistence.

In a nutshell, here’s how you make the leap from watching at home to winning a million bucks. It starts with that first call. Correct answers to three quiz questions could net you a random callback from the show, in which case you’d have to call again to answer five more questions.

If you can get over this hurdle, you’re whisked to New York and pitted against nine others for the right to sit across from Regis on national TV. Fifteen consecutive correct answers to more trivia questions wins you a million dollars. The whole process takes about three weeks. Simple.

The hidden trick of this system is that while each step is simple, there are a whole lot of them. The odds of negotiating the whole sequence of events are not good–maybe better than a comet hitting the earth, but considerably worse than betting on the lame nag to win the Kentucky Derby.

To illustrate the problem, think of the best free-throw shooter in the NBA, who consistently makes about 85 percent of his attempts. A great shooter, sure, but the chance of him making 23 in a row is less than 2.5 percent. That’s how this game works, too, only the odds are a lot steeper than that. Shaq would have no chance. None.

On "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" the statistics break down like this: If you get the three questions right on the initial phone call (only 1 in 17 people do) your chances of being called back by ABC are somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 300, depending on the number of right answers they received. Very long odds indeed.

From there, your chances improve–you’ve basically got a 1-in-4 chance to get through the second round of five questions and win a trip to New York.

Once on the show, your chances of making it into the hot seat are probably about 20 to 30 percent. From the hot seat, so far only three people have become millionaires out of maybe 150 or so who’ve tried.

So based on a few educated assumptions, what it boils down to is something like this:

• Successfully answering the first three phone questions: 17:1

• Getting a random callback from ABC: 3,400:1

• Going to New York City to be on the show: 13,600:1

• Getting into the hot seat with Regis: 340,000:1

• Winning a million dollars: 17,000,000:1

These are the harsh statistical realities, all things otherwise being equal. Fortunately, all things are not equal. Individual skill, persistence, and patience greatly improve your odds.

But you don’t–you can’t–think about these things till later. You just pick up the phone and take your shot.

For me, it all moved quickly, like clockwork. I called on Feb. 29, Leap Day. I got the three questions right, only the second time I’d done that in about a dozen tries. ABC called back the next day, which surprised the crap out of me.

From there, they told me to call back on March 7, at a certain time, with several other restrictions. Failure to follow the rules would mean disqualification. Almost like returning a call from a kidnapper who leaves a ransom note ("Call at between 12 and 1 sharp–and no cell phones!"). Five quick questions in two minutes, push a few buttons in response, then the call is over.

I had no idea how I’d done because they don’t tell you. All they say is that if you made it into the top 10, you’d get a call in about an hour or two. So you wait and take a deep breath.

"Hi, this is Renee from ABC’s ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.’ Is this John Rickenbach?" Was that a New York accent? I think it was. "I just wanted to get a little information from you before you appear on the show!"

I put down my sandwich and grabbed a pen. I guess this is good news.

Turns out Renee was going to be my producer on the show. Now I had no idea what a "producer" actually produces, but I was apparently going to find out. Over the next several days, Renee and I traded phone calls, the purpose of which was to find out a little about me–odd stories, habits, other foibles–that Regis Philbin could latch onto, needle me with during the show. Renee quickly got what she needed, in a New York sort of way. Professional efficiency, directness with a healthy helping of humor.

By the end of the week I figured out what she was producing: John Rickenbach, Game Show Contestant.

So there it was; Pattie and I would be off to New York on March 19, an unlikely turn of events not even considered less than a week before. The show would tape the next day.

I called work, a few friends, and family, crossed Monday and Tuesday off the reality calendar, and off we went. No time to think of the possibilities. Just concentrate on having a good time. And ignore that little demon with the dollar signs, John.

Anticipation

At 10:15 in the morning, Pattie and I descended from the seventh floor to the lobby of the Empire Hotel. The mahogany-paneled elevator opened, and there they were: 18 lost souls milling, mostly with grim expressions, keeping to themselves, the contestants and their designated companions, typically husbands or wives, but also a few friends or relatives.

I looked around the room–mostly folks in their 20s and 30s, equally male and female. A quiet but bright-looking bunch, probably doing the same thing I was, cautiously scanning the competition.

But which ones were the other nine competitors, and who were their companions? Kim, one of ABC’s helpful liaisons, provided the needed clue at last night’s orientation meeting: The ones dressed like slobs would be the competitors, while the nicely dressed ones were the companions. Competitors would change into dressy clothes at the studio.

I added up the T-shirts and jeans: three women and seven men, including myself. Hmm. That’ll help a little against the concerns over the show’s unintentionally male-dominated demographics.

I looked for signs of familiarity among the closed faces. Was that a Cal Poly jacket on one of the women? It was! Turns out she’s a student, Gina Carady. How about that–10 contestants from all over the country, and two are from San Luis Obispo County!

Quick odds check: 260,000 people in SLO County, about 260 million in America. OK, odds are 1 in 1,000 of an American being from SLO County. Nine other people on the show. Odds of someone else coming from home are just over 110-to-1. Not that bad really. Still, an odd coincidence. I hope it’s a good sign.

The others hailed from much farther away, mostly from the East and Midwest. They were from Connecticut and New Jersey–practically Tri-State locals–others a bit farther away in the Rust Belt, Pittsburgh and Buffalo. One lady came from Lincoln, Neb., another man from Sioux City, Iowa. There was a bald cab dispatcher from Cleveland.

They looked like ordinary people. Smart ordinary people, with just a hint of geekiness, especially among the men–balding heads, glasses on some, a goatee here, skinny torso there. People you’d find in a graduate seminar.

ABC loaded the whole contingent–friends and family, too–on a waiting shuttle bus, which turned a five-minute walk to the studio into a harrowing 10-minute drive.

We entered the inconspicuously marked back door of the ABC studio on West 67th Street and went past a security checkpoint and through a maze of dimly lit halls. Ultimately, we wound up in a large, airy, comfortably furnished room, a marked contrast to our shadowy introduction to the studio.

Soon a parade of smiling but casually dressed ABC officials–producers, assistants, even lawyers–came in to greet us, reassure us, remind us of the rules, all things we were mostly aware of from earlier phone contact.

It’s already 1:30, just three and a half hours to show time. By now, the novelty of sizing up the neighbors had worn a bit, and we all began to be more comfortable with each other as regular folks, chatting about everyday things. These were normal people, caught in the eye of a very abnormal situation, embodied in the odd shell of a New York television studio.

The call finally came–time to practice on the stage. But before marching off to the studio, the contestants were first assigned numbers, 1 to 10, and lined up in that order, just like in third grade. I was No. 9. This would be the order we would array behind Regis on the set when the time came.

My first impression was that the set was small and dark. We entered behind the low bleachers, eight or so dark-colored rows of bleachers, the same kind you’d find at Little League baseball games. These would eventually support a studio audience of maybe 100 to 200, I’d guess.

They were arranged around a circular stage, maybe 20 to 25 feet in diameter, featuring a clear Plexiglas-paneled floor. Two high chairs shared center stage, flanking a two-sided computer screen. The chairs looked difficult to scale and seemed to be prone to tipping over. Regis would sit in one; the other would be for the contestant in the hot seat.

I found my seat, one of 10 arrayed in a semicircle. I was flanked by a quiet man from Connecticut to my left and a bright but slightly manic lady from Nebraska on the other side. Joe and Ann. Ann looked a little like my old piano teacher.

In front of each of us stood a simple computer screen and a small metal box with six colored buttons–four blue ones marked "A" through "D," a red "delete" key, and a little green square marked "OK." This flimsy little piece of machinery held the key to the hot seat. Surprisingly cheap for such an important function–duct tape held the sides together, the buttons only crudely aligned. Loose wires occasionally needed a technician’s attention. That was it. Much less mysterious than on TV.

From out of the shadows emerged Michael Davies, the show’s executive producer, the head honcho. He took center stage by himself. Like a lot of people in charge of something, he’s not what you’d expect, in this case a mild-mannered Scotsman with a quiet intensity that belies the baby face.

He spoke, quietly but firmly, with authority and an odd compassion for the contestants. He explained in plain but sympathetic tones that probably eight of us would go home with nothing. As if to soften that blow, he offered strategic and tactical advice about playing in both the hot seat and the initial "fastest finger" round–the more important of the two because one wrong answer means you lose, you wait, you hope there is a second round.

With his funny stories about past contestants told with razor-sharp detail, he provided a calming reassurance. He knows it’s only a game, but it’s also his business, and he takes it seriously.

He assures us all: Only he and the show’s lawyer know the questions beforehand. Regis, in case anybody wondered, knows nothing. That little piece of information is delivered devilishly, to convey that he really means it. We laugh, and Regis isn’t there to defend himself. But the production crew obviously likes the famous host, just like a kid might be fond of a wacky uncle who visits occasionally and has endearingly eccentric habits. Just leave him alone, he’s harmless.

Davies then leads us through practice versions of tonight’s game. This is the best part. We gather around the monitor at the middle of the stage, and there are the questions, just like at home. Most of the ones we get seem to have something to do with England, the place where the concept of the "Millionaire" show started. After the third question, the feisty Scotsman shouts, "Why all these questions about England? I hate England!" Eventually, with a little help, Davies lets us win an imaginary million dollars. A tease.

Then it’s on to the "fastest finger" game. Here it’s a quick question, frantic button-pushing, and a glance up at a chart projected on a big white screen above. It’s cutthroat competition against nine others, and only the fastest correct response advances.

The game is simple enough: a question appears, asking to place four events/people/body parts/cities/movies/or whatever else in some logical order. You punch your answers into a small box in front of you, then wait. It’s the longest 10 seconds imaginable, even in practice. You have to work like a gunslinger: Think quickly, then react. No time to second-guess.

We tried six practice rounds in all, and the results were encouraging to me, almost unbelievably so. On four rounds out of six I was the fastest in the group! This suggested I had the mechanics down. With the right question in the real game, I liked my chances. But no time to be overconfident, especially after a nearby technician warned me of the Curse of the Fastest Finger in Practice.

At 4:50 p.m., the call comes from beyond–10 minutes to show time! Out the door, down the hall in single file, still No. 9. Off we go.

Show Time

The stage door flung open to admit a line of ordinary people disguised as game show contestants. On the whole they were nervous, quietly nervous. The procession stopped under the bleachers, now humming with the energy of a full studio audience.

Laughter pealed from the crowd above, now being entertained by a warm-up comedian. First time out for the guy and getting good laughs–J.P. the producer took note to keep him for future shows. Meanwhile, we waited under the stands, still in a line, in the dark.

There he was–spotted for the first time all day–Regis Philbin. Probably just showed up, too, fresh from wardrobe, now calling out last-minute, good-natured admonitions to various assistants. The fact was, the show was ready to go without him; Regis was just the truck driver that moved it forward.

After an obligatory meet-the-contestants handshake, where we served as a stationary receiving line to Regis, the manic little host was back at his post, ready to jump on stage. He’s shorter than he looks on TV, maybe 5-foot-8, but extremely well-preserved. He’s got a full head of hair.

"Let’s get this show going, c’mon!" The host is growing impatient with the wait. So are the contestants.

The process of how the show is pieced together is fascinating. It’s not live, and for a good reason–too much editing is required. Some is to splice in key shots of Regis, the contestants, or certain props, like a phony million-dollar check. Other edits are to correct mistakes, mostly word-butchering by the host. Regis does an admirable job, but a linguist he is not.

And in some cases, spontaneous off-color language or gestures need to be reshot. It’s a family show, but Regis steers along the fine line of sexual innuendo whenever the opportunity for a cheap laugh presents itself. The producers have to rein him in.

At each break, stagehands crowd the set, cameramen move to line up shots, TelePrompTers roll, makeup artists powder Regis’ face, and all the while the hired comedian fills in the dead air. A signal from the director, and the comedian dashes for the wings, mid-joke. Rolling.

One complication for this particular episode of the show is that there's a returning contestant in the hot seat. He’s a 19-year-old from Georgia Southern University. As contestants we are ambivalent about Jason’s presence. We like him personally, but he’s in our seat and taking up time. It’s only a one-hour show, and with a returning player everybody realizes that the chances of having more than two of us appear on the hot seat is slim at best.

Eventually, the kid bows out at the $16,000 level, unsure of a question about Girl Scout cookies. He would have had the right answer, and Regis rides him mercilessly during a commercial break. "You could have won a million! You shouldn’t have quit!" Jason looks like the unhappiest guy who’s ever won $16,000. Regis consoles the kid by saying he can buy a lot of beer for that money.

With Jason off the hot seat, now comes the moment of truth: the all-important "fastest finger" round. Deep breath, time to concentrate on the blank monitor. Just like in practice. I felt confident, if I got the right question. Here it comes:

"Put these TV shows in the reverse order of their first appearance."

Ugh. Not my best subject–but possible–gotta concentrate. There is a slight lag between the question appearing on the screen, and the four answers:

A. West Wing

B. Murphy Brown

C. Benson

D. Hearts Afire

I don’t know the last show, but know where to place the other three. Can’t take time to think about something I don’t know–so I guess. Is it D then A, or A then D? I surmise that because I never heard of it, "Hearts Afire" must be the most recent. I act quickly and put it first. Seconds later the answers flash on the screen. I guessed wrong. Groan.

It is a strange feeling to simultaneously experience profound disappointment for yourself and vicarious happiness for someone else. But when goateed Scott from New Jersey jumped up with a whoop, you couldn’t help but feel good for the guy. He did it! I wish I had. No doubt that’s what everyone else thought, too. All we could do now was sit back and wait.

Turns out Scott climbs up through the question tree quickly enough, eventually winning $64,000. Sixty-four thousand dollars!! That’s a nice day’s work. As he leaves the stage beaming, we all applaud, hoping we’ll get the same opportunity.

Time’s running short, but the director calls for another round of the "fastest finger." Another chance. Gotta do it now. Just have to get the right question. There’s already been one entertainment question, so it has to be something different. Think cities, events, biology. Anything else. Relax. Here it comes:

"Put these movies in the order of their theatrical release."

Movies. Don’t panic, think. "Rain Man," "Independence Day," "Aladdin," "Phantom Menace." I think I know this! "Rain Man" or "Aladdin," which was first? I think "Rain Man"; I guess "Rain Man." The others I’m sure of. I punch it in. Felt good, a little long maybe, but not bad.

Now the answers. I was right! Just me and one other–Patrick from Seattle–got them all right. My heart jumped for a split second–until I saw Patrick was a hair quicker. I slumped back in my seat, ready to ride the same emotional roller coaster as when Scott hit the hot seat a few minutes before.

Ann from Nebraska, sitting to my right in Chair 8, turns to me and whispers, "I think that’s it." She looks crestfallen. We both know what she means, and I think she’s probably right. C’mon Patrick, win, but do it fast. Eight nervous contestants wait, knowing that time is no longer on their side.

Patrick’s at $100, $200, up to $1,000. He glides easily to $8,000 before hitting a snag; he calls a friend for help. That takes some time, but he got the answer right. He goes on.

Then suddenly the stage director barks out, "Let’s go to Act 6!" I have no idea what this means, but Regis does, and so do his assistants, who immediately swarm the floor.

Ann turns to me; she doesn’t look happy. "That’s it. The end of the show." Could it be?

Sure enough, "Act 6" was a call for final shots, parting goodbyes. It was over. Over, that is, for all but Patrick, who would continue on tomorrow’s show. The rest of us would go home. Just like that.

Aftermath

It was now 7:15 p.m., a cold New York evening, and we were back on the shuttle to the hotel. It was a quiet ride. Scott, the $64,000 winner, wasn’t on the bus–probably off writing a big check to the IRS–but Patrick was. Several people offer him subdued but genuine congratulations. I was exhausted, slumped against the back seat. So was Pattie, but she offered a ray of encouragement. It’s just a game show.

Game show or not, it’s a feeling I’ve never experienced. This morning I was ecstatic just to be here, happy to have a shot, full of possibility, even though I knew the chances of winning were small. Tonight, with the ABC studio trailing behind the taillights of the bus, it was all different. Joy for the two winners–both extremely nice guys, people I got to know and like. But also real disappointment for myself. Were the others thinking that, too? Probably. The shuttle pulled up to the landing in front of the Empire Hotel, and we all filed out, quickly dispersing to our rooms.

It’s easy to get caught up in self-pity at times like these. It’s human nature and tough to fight. If your tendency is to obsess about what might have been, it’s best not to try to go on this show. Just don’t try. But let’s get some perspective, for cryin’ out loud–it’s not exactly as if any of us were starving beforehand. And this was certainly the only three-day trip to New York I’ve ever taken where it cost a grand total of $42 out of my own pocket. So shut up, John.

But this much I know: If you are lucky enough to make it to the show, do not expect anything other than a great time. You might win big money; you probably won’t. When the competitive spirit rises–and it will–go with it. As Sam Cooke would say, "Don’t fight it, feel it." And if stars align, wouldn’t that be sweet? Just don’t count the money before you get to the studio. Æ

Paso Robles resident John Rickenbach is an environmental planning consultant. His boss is the only person who's glad he didn’t win a million dollars.