TV Guide Magazine profiled Wheel’s graceful letter-turning icon Vanna White in the March 4, 1989, issue. At the time, the 32-year-old former model was pulling double duty working on both the daytime version (with host Rolf Benirschke) and nighttime iteration (with Pat Sajak) of the game show, starting her business empire — and charming everyone along the way.
It’s leather week on Wheel of Fortune. At least that’s the way it seems. In the three shows just finished taping, every skintight outfit Vanna White wore was leather.
“I’ll be out in just a minute.” It’s White talking as she disappears into her dressing room to squeeze out of a leather dress for supper.
A minute, two minutes pass, then a startling, “OK, you ready?” and there she is — cheerleader extraordinaire, adolescent fantasy in the flesh — dressed for dinner in a blue terry-cloth bathrobe.
Mario Casilli / TV Guide Magazine / Everett Collection
Between bites, White talks about her cats, the fishing trips she’s taken and her passion for the Los Angeles Lakers. For dessert, she washes down two fat chocolate chip cookies with a paper cup of ice tea. The cookies are definitely not on her “Get Slim, Stay Slim” video.
Wiping barbecue sauce from her fingers with a wet napkin, White seems far from the living mannequin so often portrayed in the press. She may be real famous. She may be real pretty. But most of all, White is real…real.
“What you see is what you get with me,” she says simply.
That, perhaps as much as anything, is the secret to her mysterious success.
It’s been six years since Merv Griffin plucked White from obscurity, selecting her out of 200 other women for what should have been a minor role on NBC’s then modestly successful daytime Wheel. What happened next is media history. Ratings soared after the debut of the nighttime, syndicated Wheel in 1983. Quicker than you can say “Oh, Vanna?” White became a household name. No one’s quite sure why. Least of all White.
“I have to tell you truthfully,” she says, words sweetened by a slight Southern drawl, “I have no idea why I get the recognition I get.”
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