Rudeng asked him to come in to the control room. They reran the take, and the phenomenon was repeated. The others sat in total silence, hypnotized in fact, or as if they could not believe what they were seeing. Even Jonas was surprised, because it was powerful stuff. Only then, when he saw himself on a television screen, did Jonas realize what a striking face he had. And on the screen, or on camera, something had happened to it, making it even more striking; the face on the screen was different from the face he saw in the mirror. The camera must have acted like a prism in reverse, Jonas thought, in such a way that the lens united the entire spectrum of faces that he owned and transformed them into one powerful dazzling face. Jonas stared at the screen and felt, with a touch of dread, a tingling sensation creeping up his spine, and I would like to stress that this had nothing to do with his being infatuated with his own looks, what is known as narcissism — it was simply because, as Jonas himself realized, he found himself confronted with a work of art.
And right there and then, in that control room at NRK’s Television House, Jonas also realized something else, because he had not always had such a striking face, it must only have become fully formed some years earlier, through some slow process of inner growth, and Jonas understood that this face had something to do with the exceptional women with whom he had lain. He had converted this beauty into other currency, as his grandmother had done with her collection of paintings. He had converted it, not into cash, but into strength, into personality, into charisma.
Rudeng would later describe the most important criterion when assessing people: whether they could come across on screen. Jonas Wergeland had certainly come across on screen, so much so, said Rudeng that he had had to take a closer look at the monitor to satisfy himself that the image he was seeing was not, in fact, three-dimensional. Rudeng would tell that story again and again. ‘You should have been there when Jonas Wergeland auditioned for the job of announcer,’ he would say with a note of pride. ‘It was like witnessing someone breaking not the sound barrier, but the vision barrier.’
Before they parted, Rudeng asked Jonas whether he had been thinking of anything in particular. Jonas shook his head. But he had been thinking of something in particular, he had imagined that he was talking to Nefertiti, and that may well be why people would later say that they felt as though Jonas Wergeland spoke to them as a friend, directly to them, with a warmth and charm, not to say love, that could not help but strike at their hearts even if he were only presenting a run-down of the next day’s programmes. And in a way it was true, Jonas truly believed that Nefertiti was listening to him.
They called, of course they called; and he was signed up for a trial period, first assigned to the morning slot but soon moved to the evening broadcasts so that his real breakthrough came with the ingenuous words: ‘Good evening, and welcome to Children’s Hour.’
And from the word go, Jonas liked it, liked it better than reading astronomy or architecture; the minute he sat down on that chair he knew that there, finally, in that broom cupboard, was where he was meant to be; there, sitting all alone, talking out loud, talking to the wall; he could not explain it, but he loved it. It was a hub. He recalled Gabriel’s hymn of praise to his little boat: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, and to begin with he did not give much thought to the fact that, while he was sitting alone in that cupboard, his face was being reproduced a million times over, appearing on sets in a million households; nor did it occur to him, naïve though it may be, that his face would strike a chord with people, possibly because he had watched so little TV himself. To his surprise, however, people started nodding and smiling at him in the street and at bus-stops; and Jonas, who had long been in the business of recognizing fine art, pictures, when he saw it, found that he was now being recognized, like a picture, like fine art; and only then did it really dawn on him that there were people beyond the wall of the broom cupboard, that despite his seclusion, he was visible to all and sundry — a fact which was reinforced when the letters started to pour in, not to mention the people being turned away from reception, elderly ladies asking for his autograph.
Another few months were to go by before Jonas Wergeland perceived, with his eye for an angle, that the job of announcer was the one angle that revealed everything there was to know about Television House, the whole secret of television, for that matter: that it all came down to the face, to showing one’s face, to being recognized, no matter what one said or did. All that counted, as far as the public was concerned, was that you were a face on the TV. And hence, strangely enough, Jonas Wergeland felt as famous after a few months in the announcer’s chair as he did after years of programme making. The way he saw it, only from a tiny slice of the population could one win greater respect for creating something than for showing your face.
In all fairness, it ought to be said, by way of excusing the majority of the Norwegian people, that there was something quite unique about Jonas Wergeland’s career with NRK. And moreover, people could tell one face from another. It was not every day that you were confronted with a face which suddenly raised a mouth organ to its lips and launched into a virtuoso performance of Duke Ellington’s ‘Take the “A” Train’ before going on to announce one of Children’s Hour’s long series of films about a group of little locomotives; and even without the mouth organ, Jonas Wergeland had such exceptional presence that people almost had the feeling that he was sitting there, in person, in their own living rooms. In other words, Jonas Wergeland’s face possessed such an uncommon luminescence that he rapidly came to overshadow everyone else; he was quite simply NRK’s supernova. For years Rudeng never referred to him as anything but ‘the Duke’, completely off his own bat, not merely on account of Jonas’s marvellous English pronunciation of the names of the Duke and the members of the orchestra. There were even those who would recall Jonas Wergeland’s first appearance on the television screen as a milestone on a par with the live transmission of the lunar landing. There seemed almost to be a certain prestige attached to having seen him and discovered him when he was still filling the morning slot. ‘I knew it,’ people would say years later when Jonas Wergeland was one of the country’s most famous, most written-about figures. ‘The minute I laid eyes on him I knew there was something special about that guy.’