Book Review: Vanna Speaks

Title: Vanna Speaks 

Author: Vanna White (with Patricia Romanowski)

Date: 1987

Publisher: Warner

ISBN: 0-446-51366-0

Length: 191 pages

Illustrations: color photo section

Quote: "My publisher pointed out to me that I was a woman of mystery, because I didn't talk on the show."

At the time when the word "supermodel" was invented, Vanna White's career was going beyond "supermodel." The luckiest model in the world attracted enough attention to create a demand for a memoir while she'd hardly reached her full adult size. She may still be the only human being who's ever been paid, primarily, to walk around a giant signboard touching panels in a different designer dress every day, for almost forty years. As she's grown older feminists in the audience have demanded that she start talking on the show, but a main attraction of "Wheel of Fortune" has always been "What Vanna will be wearing." 

Could she explain the secret of her success for younger models who might want to emulate it? Of course not. It's doubtful that there ever will be another lifelong career opening for a generic blonde whose primary talent is looking good in a lot of different dress styles. Some of Vanna's dresses have been pretty controversial, but an early decision to keep the same model on the show allowed Vanna to become as iconic, almost as dearly loved by people who've been watching since the early eighties, as Alex Trebek. 

Did she, in fact, have anything to say that would have sold a book if she hadn't been famous as the ultimate fashion model? Not exactly. People wanted to know how she'd sound if she talked. The answer was blandly polite. In 1987 Vanna White was thirty years old and had had some life experience other than modelling clothes--bereavement, for one thing--but nothing she reveals in this book is very radical or controversial. The big surprise for her audience was that the things she hadn't talked about included losing her mother to cancer and a boyfriend in an accident.

Far more surprising was that, instead of fading off the scene at thirty-five as models normally do, Vanna White would go on dressing up and lighting letter panels for another, by now, thirty-four years. She is by no means the only baby-boomer who still looks as if she might be thirty or forty years old while being well past sixty, or even the only one whose splendid state of preservation has been displayed on television for all those years, but she is the only one for whom looking thirty or forty years old has been her only noticeable career skill.

Nice work, as the saying goes, if you can get it. Being Vanna White has taken some talent, fortitude, and discipline, but in this early memoir it was still mostly about luck with some mention of exercise and learning to eat sensibly. 

By this time most people who originally wanted to read Vanna Speaks have undoubtedly read it, but documentation that the Ultimate Supermodel really is older than some of their mothers may still interest the young, so here it is, complete with a solid crochet pattern you, too, can use to fill up boring backstage time with unique handmade gifts for all your friends.