Host With the Most: The Cult of Bob Barker

"Every time we talked about changing the show, people would scream 'No, no,' " Barker says. "I sometimes ask the audience . . . and I don't even get the word 'change' out of my mouth."

There are the increasingly geezy commercials (the Hoveround "mobility scooter"; Wilford Brimley's diabetes kit; or the ad beckoning "attention, mesothelioma and asbestos cancer victims") which hoveround nicely with the jokes about Bob being dead, yet clearly alive. Barker's heard them all, or makes them himself: Check for strings! Look for batteries!"Did you see a coffin in his dressing room?" jokes Craig Ferguson to a guest on "The Late Late Show," which tapes in a studio down the hall. "Was it filled with the dirt of his native land?"

Barker went on Ferguson's show last year and karate-chopped the comedian's desk in half. For the last decade, an odd offshoot of the cult of Bob Barker is his promotion to the status of improbable badass. In every audience Q&A, someone (usually a college boy) raises his hand to ask about "Happy Gilmore," the 1996 Adam Sandler golf comedy in which Barker, playing himself, beats Sandler -- who taunts him with "The price is wrong, bitch!" -- to a pulp on the green.

"And that's where it really seemed to start, this 'cult' thing," Barker says. "I have to tell you, I don't understand it. I wish I knew the answer. I wish I could bottle it. Whatever it is, I'm grateful for it." Eighty-three and up and at 'em! A banana each morning does the trick, Barker says, and then some light weights and some stretching, followed by an hour on the elliptical trainer, during which time he lets his beloved rabbits (Miss Honey Bunny and Mr. Rabbit) out of their room-size cage to play. After some home office work and phone calls (he hopes to die knowing as little as possible about e-mail) and an early, light lunch, he descends yet another day into the land of Plinko, Punch a Bunch, Lucky $even and It's in the Bag. There is no chauffeured car; Barker drives himself.

For the last several years, he has renewed his million-dollar contract one season at a time. He liked the symmetry of ending it at 35 seasons--6,500-plus episodes is enough, and he's been on the air in one way or another for 50 years, more than that if you count radio.

"I'm going to miss it tremendously. I know I will," he says. "When my wife and I came to California, she produced my radio show, and so we were always talking about 'the show,' you see. Can we do this on the show? What are we going to do on the show today, tomorrow? It was the show, the show, the show."

The person who knows the least about the future of the show, it turns out, is Barker, even though he is, until he retires, the executive producer:

"They tried a nighttime 'Price Is Right,' which was a colossal flop. They had everything modern and it didn't work. It's a delicate thing we have here and if they start fooling with it, tweaking this and tweaking that, then I'll think that will be a mistake," Barker says. "But I've talked in greater detail with you right now about what happens to 'The Price Is Right' than I've talked with anybody [in charge], because they haven't asked me."

It's Showtime

The crew rehearses without him, on the tacit understanding that Barker needs no rehearsal. He knows each of the 80 or so pricing games by heart and rarely, if ever, gets confused. An assistant delivers a yellow sheet of legal paper with the day's six games (eight if you include the Showcase Showdown and the Showcase itself) listed in pencil. "That will tell me if we're going to have two plugs on Games 2, 3 and 4, or something like that, and that's it," Barker says. "Away we go. Grind out another hit."

By 1 p.m., out on the stage, the crew practices wheeling cars and sofas and pricing games into place, while announcer Fields rehearses that distinctive script copy that will describe everything from "a NEW CAR!!" to a set of roasting pans.

The Barker Beauties, in hair rollers and bathrobes, are being told which spot to stand on for each reveal.

Oh, the Barker Beauties! Younger and perhaps hotter now, named Phire and Brandi and such. Thanks to the first Beauties, most sentient beings now know how to properly show off a refrigerator; that it's all in the wrist. There are as many as seven of them now and they rotate shows, to keep things fresh. (And Barker is not boinking any of them, and they are not suing him for harassment or discrimination -- that sort of unpleasantness, which at one point involved multiple lawsuits with several former Beauties, is past, thanks for your question.)

The crowd is ushered in, with the energy of sleepless speed addicts who just got a fresh fix. The sound system pumps a techno-beat version of the theme song, and they dance goonily. Names are called to "come on down" and do they ever. Those big paneled doors upstage part -- a little arthritically, as if they need to be greased or replaced -- and Barker strolls purposefully out toward them, and it is bliss, and he basks in it for a professional 10 seconds and away we go, grind out another hit:

Rich, show us the first item up for bid!

It's an above-ground pool. (Of course it is.) ELISE wins it, bidding $1,800, closest to the "actual retail price" of $2,974, goes on to play the Clock Game, and she spits out prices faster than Barker can say "higher" or "lower," and finally Barker sits down on the pink-carpeted platform and makes a hammy production of how old he's gotten. "You did great," ELISE assures him, after winning a pair of recliners and a set of dumbbells.

JACOB, a young Marine, wins a set of Igloo coolers and plays Cliff Hangers to win an Ikea kitchen. LESONYA bids $1,300 on a pool table and Hot Pockets frozen sandwiches, and the actual retail price is $1,300 exactly, so she gets $500, but sorry, LESONYA (cue the sad tuba bleat), no Pontiac Grand Prix.

KEITH, a retired military man, wins his-and-hers American Tourister luggage and then, in one of "Price's" cinchiest games (Side by Side), a Yamaha upright piano ($7,995). ANDREW, decked out in a giant white T-shirt on which he has painted Barker's signature sign-off ("reminding you to have your pets spayed and neutered"), wins a curio cabinet filled with porcelain kitties ($2,280) and then wins $10,000 cash by guessing that salsa, cat litter, cold medicine and stain remover each cost less than $8. JOYCE wins an Aquabot pool cleaner, but in playing That's Too Much, stops too early on the price of a Ford Mustang -- $20,902. (JOYCE, that's too little.)

But it's not over.

When you don't win, when Barker places his hand warmly near your lumbar and sort of half walks you, half pushes you off the edge of your fleeting fame, it's still not over, because you can hang your hopes on the Showcase Showdown.

They keep the wheel backstage. During a commercial break, several stagehands drag it into place, where it sits on a red carpet.

Reach up there and give that wheel a spin and see who gets closest to a dollar without going over. See what the fates are telling you. See what Bob says. See what America is, or was. Boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-- "I'd like to say hi to my girlfriend, Kim, and Mom and Walter, and Trina" -- boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop . . .

Boop . . . boop . . .

Boop . . .

Boop.