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Jeanne
Hebert ’84 ventures into the Amazon as a participant on America’s
favorite reality series.
 By Maria Healy
“I never really knew how strong I was,” says Jeanne
Hebert ’84, “until I was away from my family and friends.”
Hebert, who lives in North Attleboro, Mass., recently competed
on Survivor: The Amazon as one of 16 stranded strangers along a
remote section of the Rio Negro—an experience she pursued less for
the big cash prize than to prove she could do it. She took with her daring,
guts, a love of the outdoors and a taste for adventure. She returned with
a newfound sense of herself as stronger than she ever imagined.
“I didn’t realize how powerful and how strong my
soul was,” she says. “I’ve always been a high-spirited person,
but I never realized how events, friendships and relationships provide
so much energy until I was alone in the Amazon.”
Even for those who don’t watch Survivor, the
adventure reality television show, the rules of the game have become notorious.
The Survivors must band together to endure exotic, remote settings, making
their own shelter, gathering their own food and competing in contests for
rewards. In three-day cycles, they vote to send someone home, whittling
down the crew until there are only two Survivors left, at which point the
most recent castoffs return to choose the Sole Survivor, who wins one million
dollars. The show finds its grit not only in the physical and mental challenges
but also in the clashing of competitive characters, motives and strategies.
Wily backstabbers and double-crossers emerge, as do stalwart victors who
advance via integrity, loyalty and skill.
Having watched earlier Survivor shows with her family, Hebert
and her three children, Kaitlyn, Madison and C.J., loved the show, rooted
for the more loyal and genuinely skilled Survivors, and began talking about
how Hebert could be one.
“I’ve done lots of crazy things in my life,” she
says. “And I think my kids enjoy that. They know I do.”
Wanting to show her daughters that “women over 40 have
guts, determination and the benefit of life experience,” Hebert answered
an open call at the Prudential Center in Boston in February 2002. After
a series of interviews and a trip to Los Angeles, where she met with producers
and underwent psychological, medical and personality testing, she made
it as far as an alternate for the Thailand Survivor. Told to sit
back and wait for the next season, she got called for Survivor 6 three
weeks before she was to leave, though she wasn’t told where she’d
be going. “They told me I was going somewhere hot and that it was
top secret,” she says.
Each Survivor was given a pair of pants, a shirt, a bathing
suit, a raincoat and a jug for water (that came from the river and had
to be boiled), and one luxury item each. Hebert wanted to bring a letter
from her mother, a journal, a picture of her kids and some moisturizer.
The show’s producers nixed her suggestions, instead encouraging her
to bring massage oil, which Hebert ended up using to fry fish and spark
dry kindling.
Much of the popularity of the Survivor shows revolves
around the clashing and bonding of personalities. In fact, according to
Hebert, the point of the interviews and tests is to “match people
up so some get along and some don’t.”
The concept for Survivor: The Amazon was a tribe of
women versus a tribe of men. Building camps along the Rio Negro, Hebert
was “the worker bee” of her tribe, laboring from dawn until dark,
at first with the help of another woman, Joanna, who shared a strong work
ethic. But when Joanna got voted off the tribe, Hebert worked in large
part alone, catching dozens of fish, cutting down wood with a machete,
tying shelters together with vines—challenges she enjoyed.
“That’s what I found exciting and why I wanted
to go out there,” she says. “My strategy was to work really hard,
to work as a team of women. The problem was I didn’t connect with
the younger women who had much different values. They wanted to use their
good looks and charm to get ahead. There are people who have won Survivor
in past seasons who kept their integrity and remained loyal. They didn’t
lie and backstab and that’s how I thought I could do it. But it just
didn’t work that way.”
Hebert lasted 15 days before being voted off the tribe, the fifth Survivor
to go home. She explains this disconnect in part to generational differences
between her and the younger women, and in part to the changing nature of Survivor itself.
When she first began watching the show in 2000, she felt that it was “a
great family show.” That first season, Survivor drew over 50
million viewers for its concluding episode, but in seasons since, the ratings
have leveled off, and Survivor now competes with popular sitcoms
for its share of 20-something viewers.
Gearing up to combat the final season of Friends, according to
Hebert, CBS and the producers of Survivor made the show more tantalizing
in ways that have nothing to do with the original premise, contriving sexual
content and asking female survivors to get naked. “It was rated G
until this season,” Hebert says. “But it’s going to be R
next week.”
Overall, Hebert is not at all disappointed with her experience on Survivor.
Though the adversity was different from what she expected, she is grateful
for the new sense of herself she now has. The experience on Survivor brought
this to the surface, but Hebert attributes it to the major influences in
her life—her mother, who died six years ago of cancer; her husband
and children; and the foundation she gained at Holy Cross.
“Holy Cross teaches you about values,” says Hebert, whose father,
sister and brother all graduated from the College as well. An economics
major, she worked in grueling marketing departments of several Fortune
500 companies before landing a job she truly loves as director of marketing
for the New England Dairy Promotion Board, selling milk and cheese for
a board of directors made up of dairy farmers. “Good people working
hard, good products to market,” she says.
“Even though you’re so young, you take a lot away (from Holy
Cross) that works itself into your life as you get older.” Hebert
still speaks with awe about her experience on the Spiritual Exercises in
1982, when she spent a week reflecting on who she was and where she wanted
to go. And there was one spring break with a Jesuit volunteer group in
Kentucky that stays with her—Hebert and other students worked in an
underprivileged area, where, like so many who pass through Holy Cross,
she experienced the gift of giving, realizing all she took for granted,
as she saw how the poor really lived.
“Holy Cross gives you a foundation that really means something, something
to build upon and build upon,” Hebert says.
Even in the Amazon, 20 years later, the College serves its students. Jeanne
Hebert survived not only two weeks of essential deprivation, but also the
dubious values of ratings-hungry primetime TV. “The young women out
there really didn’t have anything to look forward to,” Hebert
says. “And I knew I had everything. And everything I had, you can’t
buy with a million dollars. It was a good feeling.”
Maria Healy is a freelance writer from Northampton, Mass.
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