April 22, 2007
Did Somebody Say Indiana Jones?
By STACEY STOWE
AHUSH fell over the standing-room-only crowd at the Explorers Club in
Manhattan on Feb. 5. In a room whose dark-paneled walls are hung with
flags once planted in the far-flung precincts of Everest and
Antarctica, the man at the lectern had just finished talking about his
anthropological travels through almost 40 countries, across some
500,000 miles, where he recovered from food poisoning and chigger bites
in Peru and swam through shark-infested waters off Easter Island.
Any questions?
“Do you want to have children?” asked a well-groomed
youngish woman, who sat attentively with a few dozen of her peers and a
smattering of schoolchildren and older people.
Not missing a beat, the lecturer, Josh Bernstein, the star of
“Digging for the Truth” on the History Channel, flashed his
square-toothed snow-white smile and assured the crowd — which
included the most women ever to attend a lecture there, the
club’s manager said — that, yes, he would like to be a
father someday and, no, he’s not dating anyone right now.
Murmurs of approval and titters of laughter followed, with more questions: Does he intend to settle down?
“Someday, yes, absolutely,” Mr. Bernstein said.
Later, clutching Mr. Bernstein’s book, “Digging for the
Truth” (Gotham), urban women with thousand-dollar handbags lined
up for the autograph of a man who prefers an ice cave to a glassy
penthouse. His car is a 1982 Toyota Land Cruiser that runs on vegetable
oil. His jeans are made with organic cotton. In one program that tests
the authenticity of the Holy Grail, he dons chain mail and jousts in
Southern France. In another he chariots in Greece while shooting a bow
and arrow.
“I feel like I should touch him to see if he’s real,”
whispered Rosina Seydel, 40, a tall, youthful and blond real estate
agent from Atlanta, who attended a second talk at the Explorers Club on
March 28, a “fireside chat” for members.
Ms. Seydel was there as a guest of Tee Faircloth, an Explorers Club
member who is a friend of Mr. Bernstein’s and the owner of F. M.
Allen, the safari outfitter on Madison Avenue. “Could he be that
good looking and that smart and charming?” she said, her eyes
locked on Mr. Bernstein.
Yes, dear reader. Or at least his largely female fan base thinks so.
Mr. Bernstein, 36, is an anthropologist and Cornell graduate. He is the
host of a program that explores mysteries like the lost cities of
Atlantis and El Dorado. He travels to location by camel or paraglider
or with oxygen tanks and flippers, sometimes braving natural disasters
and parasites.
Last Monday, during his finale on the History Channel, Mr. Bernstein explored Aztec civilization and human sacrifice.
He is a member of both the Explorers, whose membership roster included
Theodore Roosevelt, and the Royal Geographic Society in London, where
Charles Darwin and Ernest Shackleton were members. His official fan
club numbers 1,700.
For two of its three seasons, “Digging for the Truth” was
the History Channel’s No. 1 series, said Lynn Gardner, the
station’s publicity director. When his three-year contract was
up, he was poached by the Discovery Channel, which has more viewers.
His as-yet-unnamed program, to begin in January, will include Mr.
Bernstein’s usual pursuits of anthropological and archaeological
subjects, as well as another of his passions, the environment.
All in a day’s work, with no two days the same, he said.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world, given my work,”
Mr. Bernstein said, as he guided chopsticks into monkfish in oyster
sauce and sipped a litchi martini at Chinatown Brasserie, in Lower
Manhattan.
On the air he says, with a serious look, “We’re digging for
the truth, and we’re going to extremes to do it.” But in
person, he is self-deprecating, once joking during a lecture that he
needed “three cans of Red Bull to get up the nerve” to
navigate some raging rapids. He can also be poignant. He e-mailed his
fans to share his heartbreak at the death of the crocodile hunter Steve
Irwin.
For his own risks, Mr. Bernstein said, he triple-checks every knot and
loop when he paraglides or rappels, adding, “I’m not
cavalier, and I don’t have a death wish.”
He has the manners of an earlier era. When Angela Schuster, the editor
of Icon, an architectural preservation magazine published by the World
Monuments Fund, introduced herself during cocktail hour at the
Explorers, Mr. Bernstein promptly fetched her a drink before ordering
one for himself.
His program, too, has a retro appeal: no shooting, no swearing and no
provocative babes, unless you count wall paintings of Nefertiti. Mr.
Bernstein said, “We’d get letters saying, ‘This is
the only show we watch together as a family.’ ”
That’s not the only response to the swashbuckling, cowboy-hatted Mr. Bernstein.
“Some women send me nude photos of themselves, yeah, and I
don’t mind that,” he said, grinning as he tucked into dim
sum. “I also get the letters, some men write and tell me
we’d be the perfect couple, and that’s O.K. But I just
don’t play for that team.”
Reflecting a couple of days after Mr. Bernstein’s talk in March, Ms. Seydel said his looks are a lure.
“He looks good, so that gets your interest,” she said.
“But then you hear what he has to say, and that’s
what’s really interesting.”
Before all the globetrotting, Mr. Bernstein was rooted on the Upper
East Side, where he was raised in a fairly typical upper-middle-class
Jewish household. But he long had a passion for nature.
“I had a tracking box in my bedroom,” he said. Huh?
“That’s a box of sand that I walked in, pretending I was an
animal. That determined how my tracks would look if I turned or walked
backward.” It helped him, he said, to understand the nuances of
animal movement.
For all his rugged handsomeness, Mr. Bernstein is that kind of geek. As
a teenager at Horace Mann School, he was a faithful reader of two major
newspapers, as well as three or four environmental magazines. He
clipped articles on the environment and politics and put them in
plastic sleeves before cataloging them by subject in binders.
As children, he and his twin brother, Andy (who is now a corporate
consultant), went to Camp Winaukee in New Hampshire, where Josh
mastered bow and arrow and Andy the BB gun. Their parents divorced when
the boys were 5. They lived primarily with their mother and visited
their father in Bedford, N.Y. But in 1986, weeks before Mr. Bernstein
turned 15, his father died of a heart attack. Seemingly overnight, he
said, he grew up.
“While my classmates were comparing their new BMWs and trying to
sneak into the city’s coolest bars with their fake IDs, I was
coming to terms with life without my father,” Mr. Bernstein wrote.
In his later teenage years, Mr. Bernstein, a Clint Eastwood fan, fell
in love with the American West. In summers he attended a wilderness
ranch in Wyoming and learned desert survival and primitive living in
Utah with the Boulder Outdoor Survival School.
At Cornell, he double-majored in anthropology and psychology and was
the president of his fraternity (Pi Kappa Alpha). He spent a year in
Jerusalem and considered rabbinical school but said the pull of the
outdoor life was stronger.
He returned instead to the survival school at Boulder, Colo., becoming
its marketing director and expanding its staff and programs until a
downturn in the economy after Sept. 11 shuttered the place. But as the
pitchman for the school, Mr. Bernstein attracted attention. He made a
demo tape for a survival show of his own. It caught the eye of Peggy
Kim, who was the programming director at the History Channel, and he
was hired in 2004.
Ms. Schuster, the magazine editor who listened to Mr. Bernstein’s
talk at the Explorers Club, conceded that Mr. Bernstein is
“entertaining and charming,” but she described the program
as light.
“I think if you’re in the field, a lot of the ‘gee
whiz’ in the show isn’t so ‘gee whiz,’ ”
said Ms. Schuster, a former senior editor at Archaeology.
“There’s so much cool research out there, but I’m not
sure how much of it is getting into the show.”
The History Channel, which is losing Mr. Bernstein, said his program
had dropped to its fourth most watched. “The numbers aren’t
where we want them to be right now, and we’re going in a whole
new direction with the new show,” said Ms. Gardner, the publicity
director.
Mr. Bernstein said he is looking for more substance in his new
Discovery Channel program and wants to deepen its message by covering
ecological issues in a smart and urgent way.
“We create a tremendous amount of waste,” Mr. Bernstein
said. “We’re creating a greater environmental debt that
we’re going to have to pay. And that’s not sustainable, and
it’s highly problematic. I hope that my new show will address
those realities.”
Mr. Bernstein, who keeps an apartment in Manhattan for the few days a
year when he is home, left on April 6 for the filming of the first
episode of his Discovery Channel series. Under orders from his bosses,
he was keeping the first location secret.
Yes, he does think about settling down sometime, which will influence whether or not he continues to be so far-flung.
“When you meet the right person, you make changes,” he said.
And the right person is?
“I’m attracted to tall blondes,” he said, laughing.
“It isn’t easy to find a tall blond Jewish girl who is
interested in the environment.”