Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

by Darwin Porter

  She was already formulating a facesaving device for Merv. At the end of Gordon's act, Judy strode forward, taking over the piano as Gordon bowed out to loud applause.

  “As a special treat, I'm going to do ‘Over the Rainbow’ tonight for you,” she told the audience, the news causing the guests to burst into the loudest applause of the evening. “Accompanying me on the piano and singing with me tonight will be Merv Griffin, the new musical sensation of Warner Brothers.”

  Merv joined her. He and Judy had never rehearsed the number, but Bill Orr later said that Merv and Judy delivered one of the finest and most tender renditions of this song he'd ever heard. “If only I had recorded it.”

  ***

  After leaving Bill Orr's party, Merv congratulated Judy on her wedding to Sid Luft, although he'd heard from songstress Peggy Lee that Sid frequently beat her, even before their marriage, which Merv didn't think would last. He also congratulated Judy on having turned thirty, and she apologized that Sid did not invite him to the celebration. Merv had also heard that Judy was pregnant, presumably with Sid's child, but he did not offer congratulations because she did not mention it.

  Peter and Merv drove Judy home, and she kissed both men good night, a very wet kiss for each of them on the lips. She promised to call Merv soon and had plans to see Peter tomorrow for lunch. Peter dropped Merv off beside the spot where, earlier, he had parked his car. Before kissing him good night, he bluntly asked, “How's life with my ex?”

  “I won't kid you,” Merv said. “It's not the most exciting spectacle. It has its dull moments. But he's a good kid.”

  “On Tom's tombstone, I think they are going to write, ‘The Boy Next Door’ was a good kid,” Peter said.

  “How's life with Mr. Robert Walker?” Merv asked.

  “A thrill a minute,” Peter said. “Not just the sex. It's the feeling that with him you never know what's going to happen next, including the possibility that he's going to commit suicide at any moment.”

  “He's a very attractive guy,” Merv said, “and I envy you. You're a very attractive guy too. I think I missed out on something.”

  Before Merv got into his car, Peter stopped him and took his arm, squeezing it tightly. “You don't have to miss out on anything. Bob and I like threeways. The first night you can get away from Tom, give us a ring.”

  “You're serious?” Merv said, not knowing at first if Peter were joking. The look on his face told Merv that Peter meant what he said.

  “That's an offer I'd like to take you up on,” Merv said. “After all, I'm in the most decadent city on the planet and not wallowing in filth like I should be.”

  Peter reached out and fondled Merv's genitals. Then, without saying another word, Merv got into his car and drove off into the night.

  Before returning home to Tom, Merv called Roddy McDowall, giving him a playbyplay description of his encounter with Peter. Roddy's parting advice was, “Go for it!”

  ***

  The next day Merv received a call from “the girl singer,” Rosemary Clooney. She announced that she was back in Hollywood and wanted to get together with him. He'd met her on the road when traveling with Freddy Martin's orchestra and had been drawn to her wit, charm, warmth, and humor.

  Actress Janet Leigh had told Merv that Rosemary was “one hell of a person,” and he eagerly wanted to pursue a friendship with her and to become a part of her inner circle of friends. They included Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, and Billie Holiday. Merv had also heard from Roddy that Rosemary was seen frequently in the company of Marlene Dietrich, with whom she was recording some duets.

  At the time, there was a lot of speculation about Marlene and Rosemary being an item, but Merv dismissed this as malicious Hollywood gossip, even though at parties, a drunken Louella Parsons often insisted that Marlene and Rosemary were having an affair. “She seems like a oneman woman to me,” Merv told Roddy. “But who knows? It's Hollywood. If Marlene could fuck Eddie Fisher, she might be capable of fucking Rosemary Clooney.”

  Merv had first met Rosemary in Virginia Beach when she was singing at the Surf Club. Freddy Martin, with Merv as the lead singer, had been booked into the club following the closing of one of Rosemary's gigs. It was a longstanding custom there for the new entertainers to arrive the night before to hear the closing act of the previous group.

  The club was positioned directly on the beachfront, and Rosemary strolled out between acts to breathe the ocean air. There she had encountered Merv for the first time, little knowing that he was destined to become one of her most loyal supporters and lifelong allies.

  “He looked a little lonely that night, and I immediately gravitated to him,” Rosemary later told Janet Leigh. “I think he wanted to be in love instead of singing about love every night. At the time, I knew nothing of his sexual preference. But intuitively, I realized he wanted a friend more than he wanted a hot tamale.”

  “We spoke and opened up to each other, sharing our mutual experiences of the hardships of the road,” Rosemary later said. “It was a tough life in those days, and we'd both been wounded in various ways. Later, when I got to know Merv better, I came to realize that we both shared a tragic flaw. He and I were always falling in love with the wrong man.”

  Just before Rosemary was called back onstage, she kissed her new found friend on the lips and agreed to meet with him later at the Cavalier Hotel where both of them were staying. Merv came

  Merv came in to the club to catch Rosemary's closing act. As she delivered her last song, he watched something remarkable happen. The band got up and paraded right off the stage and in to the Atlantic Ocean, soaking their baby blue dinner jackets and their red Scottish plaid dress pants. Merv eagerly reached out to take Rosemary's hand as they headed for the cold waters with the rest of the band.

  Two views of

  Rosemary Clooney

  Merv later told Freddy Martin, “The waters were so God damn cold that night I think I got blue balls, but who would turn down Rosemary Clooney, Miss ‘Beautiful Brown Eyes?’” He was referring to her hit song that sold more than half a million copies.

  After Merv agreed to see Rosemary, she called him two days later inviting him to “Come Ona-My House,” referring to what would become her signature song, although she hated it and at first refused to record it.

  She suggested to Merv that he bring a date, presumably a female, since she'd be with her new beau, the distinguished Puerto Rican actor, Jose Ferrer.

  ***

  When he met Jose Ferrer, Merv did the obvious and congratulated him for the Oscar he'd won as Best Actor in his portrayal of Cyrano in the 1950 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac.

  “Yes, thank you,” Jose said sarcastically. “I celebrated by being subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected Communist. I'm not, incidentally.”

  When Merv first met Jose, he'd been Oscar nominated for the third and last time for portraying the French painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, in John Huston's Moulin Rouge. Jose was preparing to appear opposite Rita Hayworth in the 1953 Miss Sadie Thompson, a remake of Rain.

  At the time of his first dinners with Jose and Rosemary, Merv was still dating Judy Balaban before she ran off with the agent, Jay Kanter. The first time the quartet got together, Jose did all the talking. “I was so in awe of him that all I could do was listen,” Merv later said. “He was the first intellectual I'd ever met in show business.”

  Jose spoke seven languages fluently, and often reminded his listeners of that. He'd been accepted at Princeton when he was fourteen, and he'd studied at an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. He could wax eloquently on seemingly any subject, from the literary output of Thomas Hardy to the plight of the underpaid workers at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

  Love Triangle:

  Rosemary Clooney with her husband Jose

  Ferrer and her friend Marlene Dietrich

  Jose always preferred to take his guests to a steakhouse where he'd dis
cuss in precise detail how marbled he preferred his choice cut of meat. He'd even inspect the steak before it sizzled on the grill.

  When Judy and Rosemary headed for the powder room, Jose immediately took Merv into his sexual confidence, which Merv found incredibly indiscreet.

  “I don't know if Sadie Thompson will ever be filmed,” he said. “I'll be too busy fucking Rita Hayworth in her dressing room.”

  Merv had already heard that Jose was a firstrate womanizer. Later he'd tell Tom Drake, “I was stunned that Rosemary was planning to marry this rooster, even though he was the most talented actor in Hollywood. Here he was contemplating infidelity before ever putting the wedding ring on Rosemary's finger. Poor Rosemary.”

  Merv didn't think Jose had any sex appeal at all, and in some respects he struck Merv as downright ugly. “However, he could charm the pants off anybody with that mesmerizing voice of his,” Merv recalled.

  Even though he was fantasizing about his future infidelities, Jose seemed bitter and resentful about the perceived competition for Rosemary's affections.

  “That god damn lesbian, Marlene Dietrich, is around our house day and night,” Jose claimed. “I can't even walk around with my dick hanging out without encountering her. She even puts on an apron and scrubs our kitchen floor. A hausfrau at heart. If Rosemary gets a slight headache, Dietrich puts her to bed and hovers over her like a newborn infant. The Nazi bitch is always making buttermilk soup for Rosemary and she completely ignores me. Actually, Dietrich is bi. When not chasing after Rosemary, she's out fucking Frank Sinatra. Frank told me that Dietrich gives the best blowjob in Hollywood.”

  “If you've got to compete with Dietrich, I don't envy you,” Merv said.

  “Not only Dietrich but Marlon Brando,” Jose claimed. “We run into him all the time, especially in New York. He always drags Rosemary off into a corner and spends the rest of the evening whispering some shit in her ear.”

  “Marlon always gets what he wants,” Merv said enigmatically, “And I speak from experience.”

  Just prior to one of their scheduled rendezvous, Jose had to cancel with a stomach virus, and Merv took Rosemary out to dinner by himself.

  En route to the restaurant, she asked Merv to stop at a newsstand. “Please go and buy the latest copy of Confidential magazine. It's for Marlene. Even though she hangs out with famous writers like Ernest Hemingway, she reads every word of Confidential.”

  “No doubt to find out the latest gossip they're spreading about her.”

  Merv returned in a few minutes with the latest issue of the gossip rag. “I feel so sleazy buying it, but I love it, providing no one's writing about me. I like to keep my secret life to myself.”

  Over their steaks that night, she told him that the conductor Mitch Miller had introduced her to a hot new male singer. “It was Guy Mitchell, and he said he knows you. ‘Great guy’ were his exact words to describe you. Guy said you and he used to pal around together in San Francisco.”

  “What else did Guy tell you?” a nervous Merv asked.

  “Nothing, nothing at all.” Finally, Rosemary slammed down her fork. “Listen, if we're going to be pals, we've got to be honest with each other. There's no way in hell we can have a friendship any other way. I know you had a crush on Guy. I know you and Tom Drake are lovers. Surely you don't think I have a problem with that? In the future, I'll tell you about the different men who've made love to me, and you can tell me about the men you've loved or will love.”

  “Okay,” Merv said, biting into his steak. “You've asked for it. Gal, can we talk. Who goes first?”

  Some of the details Merv related to his new confidante involved his sexual involvement with Peter Lawford and Robert Walker.

  ***

  As related to Rosemary Clooney, Merv had accepted the invitation of Peter Lawford and Robert Walker to shack up with them as part of a threeway. He later told Roddy, “Until I met those guys, I was a bit of a square. They taught me tricks that only a whore in a bordello in Shanghai could have known.”

  In later years when Merv was rich and powerful, he staged many nights of debauchery himself with a paid “cast.” He always credited (or blamed) Peter and Robert for liberating him. “Until I started hanging out with those guys, I was limited to just the missionary position,” he once confided to Johnny Riley.

  As Merv told Roddy, something the actor already knew, “Peter has only one physical flaw. A deformed right hand. He conceals it by hiding it in the pocket of his slacks or holding a jacket over his hand. Otherwise, he's perfection itself.”

  Merv related to several of his friends that Robert Walker had a profound effect upon the acting techniques of both Montgomery Clift and James Dean — both, according to Merv, were inspired by the rebelmisfit brand of sensitivity that Robert Walker had originally brought to the screen. The tortured souls he played on the screen, especially in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, mirrored his own life.

  To Merv, Robert always spoke of “the demons haunting me,” though he never specified exactly what those demons were. During the final months of his life, according to Merv, Robert seemed to be migrating toward deeper patterns of self-destruction.

  Merv continued the ménage à trois with Peter and Robert for at least five more dates, taking great pains to conceal his sexual involvement from Tom Drake, who was still pining for Peter, despite his ongoing declarations of love for Merv. One evening, Robert told him that he had not been able to reach Peter for five days. He'd left several messages but Peter had not returned his calls.

  Robert and Merv made love as part of a conventional twosome that night, relating to each other without the distracting presence of Peter.

  To Roddy McDowall, Merv had high praise for Robert's friendship. “He's quiet, gentle, a lovely but very lonely man, at least when he isn't drinking. He's tender in his lovemaking. Very giving of himself. He always tries to satisfy his partner instead of selfishly thinking of himself.” Merv would later lament, “If Robert had lived, I think I could have fallen madly in love with him.”

  With Tom out of his life, and Peter gone from Robert's life, Merv began to see Robert exclusively. But he hardly had exclusive rights to Robert, since he had to share him with Nancy Davis. At the time, Nancy was trying to get Ronald Reagan to marry her, despite the fact that he was dating a roster of other women who included Doris Day.

  Often when Ronald didn't call, Nancy spent her evenings with Robert, although Merv never encountered her again the way he had that first day he'd visited Robert's home.

  As he spent more and more time with Robert during the final weeks of his life, Merv came to know him quite well. Robert often spoke of Nancy, although it was obvious that he still carried a torch for his first wife, Jennifer Jones.

  One night Robert revealed that he'd once proposed marriage to Nancy, and that she had turned him down. “Nancy likes that vulnerable littleboylost quality in me,” Robert confessed to Merv. “When I'm around her, I turn that particular charm of mine on to the maximum.”

  “Then why didn't she accept your offer of marriage?” Merv asked.

  “She told me that over the course of a lifetime, Ronnie would be the better provider,” Robert said.

  Nancy maintained enormous faith even then in Ronald as a prospective husband, even though his movie career at Warner Brothers was at low tide. A few months later, after Warners had dismissed him, Ronald was offered a job as emcee hosting a parade of bigbusted strippers as part of a burlesque act in Las Vegas. He turned down the gig.

  Once, after a night with Robert, Merv arrived back at his suite in the early hours of the morning. He was startled to find Tom Drake packing his luggage. “I hate to do this to you, but Peter called,” he said. “He's in Palm Springs. He's taking me back. I'm leaving you.”

  Merv was stunned, at first thinking that the reason Tom was deserting him was because he had learned of his ongoing ménage with Peter and Robert. At the very least, Tom had revealed to Merv where Peter was.

  As Me
rv later told his intimates, “I was glad Tom was leaving. He never really loved me — always lusting for that fickle Peter — and I never really loved Tom, although he was mighty cute and adorable at times. But it was time to end it, and I let him go. We kissed tenderly — and that was that.”

  During the latter days of Merv's involvement with Robert, he suspected that the actor was on the verge of another breakdown. He'd had a highly visible nervous breakdown in 1949 and had checked himself into the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. When he'd escaped and was arrested for public drunkenness, a picture of him in the police station had appeared on front pages across America.

  As Merv would later recall to his friends, Robert would have good days and bad days. On a good day, he liked to drive Merv to little hidden, outoftheway places in Southern California. Once he took him to an enchanting Japanese garden teahouse, which could be reached only by climbing a mountain.

  Long before the hippie communes of the late 60s came into vogue, Robert drove him to Laguna Beach for a long weekend. At this compound, they shared a Quonset hut. Young people in varying states of dress lived here and engaged in all sorts of sexual couplings. One longhaired young man told Merv that “one week I'm into girls, the next week I want to share my love with a boy.”

  On another weekend Robert drove Merv to an unpopulated spot near Big Sur, where he was contemplating building his dream house. He claimed that he wanted to bring his two sons, Bobby and Michael, here when they weren't in the custody of their mother, Jennifer Jones.

  One night Robert invited Merv to The Blue Note, a jazz dive in North Hollywood. It was strictly an offtherecord joint where stars sometimes took tricks who weren't suitable for public viewing.

  Just as Robert and Merv entered the club, Ava Gardner was leaving. With her was a studly garage mechanic wearing a uniform with the insignia of Howard Hughes Aviation. Robert had had an affair with Ava when they filmed One Touch of Venus in 1948.