Pat Sajak and Vanna White have a good time taping “Wheel of Fortune.” In fact, occasionally they’ve had a little too good of a time.
Sajak Admitted He and White Would Drink Before ‘Wheel of Fortune’
Sajak shared with ESPN host Dan Le Batard in 2012 that he and White sometimes drank before the show in the past, according to Good Housekeeping.
“Vanna and I would… have two or three or six [drinks] and then come and do the last shows and have trouble recognizing the alphabet,” Sajak said. “I had a great time. I have no idea if the shows were any good, but no one said anything, so I guess I did okay.”
The drinking happened early on in the show, when Sajak first started hosting.
“[I] was much younger and could tolerate those things,” Sajak explained. “We had a different show then.”
Sajak said he and White drank to fill all the free time that the show’s original format created for them. They would cross the street from the NBC lot in Burbank to get margaritas.
“Our dinner breaks would be two and a half hours long while they drove in new cars and boats and gazebos and stuff,” Sajak said. “So at NBC in Burbank we had a place called Los Arcos across the street, and they served great margaritas.”
Sajak and White’s Relationship Over the Years
White has described her relationship with Sajak as similar to a sibling relationship.
“People at home see the chemistry between Pat and me,” White told Closer Weekly in 2019. “We are like brother and sister, and I think that is what makes it work.”
While Sajak once described their friendship as “like lightning in a bottle,” he apparently didn’t initially see the potential there.
“She seems like a nice, sweet girl. It’s too bad she’ll never get hired for anything,” he said of White when she auditioned for the show, according to Closer Weekly.
But get hired she did, and the pair have been a major hit on “Wheel of Fortune,” which is now the longest-running game show on television.
And when “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek died of pancreatic cancer last November, Sajak and White both publicly mourned their game show host peer.
“I knew Alex for almost 40 years, and he’s just been a good friend,” White told Entertainment Tonight. “Through the years, I have gotten to know his wife and his kids and he is just part of the family.”
“I have been at this a long time and I really admire what he has done, and he had done so much,” Sajak said. “When I started the show… Alex had already done a half a dozen, maybe more, game shows here and in Canada, he has done a bunch of them, and was always highly professional and was like the perfect match for his show.”
For their part, Sajak and White seem to be the perfect match for their show – at least, now that they’re doing the show sober.
