Celebrity: Life’s a Beach
“Gervase is a total hustler,” says Mark Marcuse. “I mean that in a very positive way.
Salesmanship comes naturally to Gervase. Growing up, “I was a kid that everybody liked. I was a bit of a jokester, and I was a hustler. Bubble Yum was really big. In the mornings, I’d take a dollar and buy 25 pieces of gum, and I’d sell each piece for a quarter. I’d end up making a dollar profit on gum. When Sour Patch Kids came out, I’d go and buy three dollars’ worth of candy, and I’d give everybody one for free. It’s sugar — once you have one, you’re like, I want another one, right away. So I’d sell them for 10 cents apiece. I made a killing. When fat shoelaces were in, I’d go up to New York to visit my cousins, and on the avenue, they’d have fat shoelaces in every color. Here, they just had black, white, red; there they had fluorescents. They had stripes. So I’d buy a bunch and sell them. I always had money.”
“He would turn up with a new pair of sneakers or something, expensive sneakers, and I’d be like, how’d you get that?” recalls his brother Gerald. “It wasn’t ever anything illegal, he would just smile and be like, I have my ways.” It was Gerald who told his brother about the Survivor tryouts after Gerald’s pregnant wife wouldn’t let him audition. Gervase, whose then-girlfriend Carmella was also pregnant, jumped at the chance to leave his three jobs for a shot at a million-dollar payday and a stint on a tropical island.
“Look,” he says, back at Chuck E. Cheese’s. “When I meet with somebody about a promotion or an endorsement offer, I got about three minutes to close the deal. Survivor, you know, won a People’s Choice award. So I’ll say, ‘You’re looking at a People’s Choice winner. You’re looking at someone who five million people have seen on TV. I get letters from Finland, Mexico, Ireland, Sweden, Dubai. Some kid in Norway thinks that Gervase is the bomb-diggity. You’re a fool not to want me to endorse your product.’”
Of course, he’s right. You do want him to endorse your product. General Motors, after all, picked Survivors for a reason. If they’d bestowed a Pontiac Torrent on someone like Jennifer Aniston, it might have languished in a garage alongside other freebies. But they know with reality stars, they’re utilizing a bunch of hustlers. Which is probably why the literature given to the Times Square bunch warns: “There is no need to oversell the Torrent.”
In entertainment, as in business, it helps to be the type of person who oversells. Gervase will talk to your mom on the phone, he’ll come to your under-attended charity event, he is genuinely delighted to be co-starring with Screech from Saved by the Bell.
When Gervase gave his son Gunner the middle name “Tiga,” naming him after Pulau Tiga, the tiny island near Borneo where the series was taped, he must have known he was in this for the long haul — that he was making a strategic decision, letting Survivor become a part of his identity. He branded his own child. How’s that for marketing genius? Still, it doesn’t compare to the speech he gave when he was kicked off the island. “I freaked out, man,” he says, laughing. “I was like, you better kick me off. Because if you don’t kick me off today, I’m gonna kick all your asses.” This is, of course, an approximation; the actual speech was cut from the show, and the content was evidently more poignant — at least it was stirring enough that Survivor creator Mark Burnett was moved to tell Playboy, “Someday when Gervase’s son is old enough to watch the videotape of his father’s bold statements, he will see a model for manhood.” Burnett’s statement meant a lot to Gervase, who’s missed his own father since his death in a car accident when Gervase was 15. He also continues to mourn the loss of the speech.
“Aw, man,” he says. “If that speech hadn’t gotten cut, Americans would have loved me more than they already do.”
