The sultry beauty was dressed very casually and wore no makeup. After approaching Robert, she suddenly slapped his face with all her power, then headed out the door, trailed by the mechanic.
When she'd gone, Merv turned to Robert, who was rubbing his cheek still stinging from Ava's slap. “What was that all about?” Merv asked. “You told her you didn't like her last picture?”
“When Ava and I were filming Venus, I made a surprise visit to her dressing room and caught her fucking Howard Duff. He retreated and let Ava and me fight it out. In a jealous rage, I slapped her. I guess tonight she was returning the favor.”
During the course of that weekend, Robert confessed that he'd once plotted to kill David O. Selznick for stealing Jennifer from him. “She's the only woman I've ever loved, even though I never felt I was good enough for her.”
The following week, Merv arrived at Robert's house, opening the door with the key he'd been given. Before entering, he switched on the lights to discover Robert on the sofa making love to Peter. “The prodigal has returned!” Merv said to Peter.
“Come join us,” Peter said in his most beguiling voice.
Before he left, later that night, Merv learned that Peter had dropped Tom Drake once again.
Peter himself had been dropped by Lana Turner, but he'd wasted no time finding a new female love. In addition to a sexual reunion with Robert, and with Merv as well whenever he wanted to join the twosome, Peter was also seducing Jane Wyman, who was in the recovery stage from her previous divorce from Ronald Reagan.
As the summer wore on, Robert began to drink more heavily. In the past, he'd usually waited until the afternoon to start boozing. During the final weeks of his life, however, he was often plastered before noon. Peter tried to help Robert, but during those days, Peter him self was often drunk before noon as well.
Merv didn't want to return to Tom, and he seriously debated dropping both Robert and Peter from his life as well. He had a movie career to pursue and didn't know how he could do that sitting around with two debauched actors in their underwear, refilling their drinks.
And then without warning, Robert was dead. He died on the night of August 28, 1951, when his maid encountered him in a distraught, highly agitated state. She'd called his psychiatrist, who arrived within the hour but could not calm Robert down. He'd been drinking heavily since early morning.
Drunk, disorderly, and disheveled:
Robert Walker
The doctor injected a dose of sodium amytal into Robert's veins. He immediately suffered an acute allergic reaction to the drug and stopped breathing. Although the psychiatrist worked frantically, he could not resuscitate the actor.
Merv sent flowers to Robert's burial site at Washington Heights Memorial Park in Ogden, Utah, but did not attend the funeral.
One reporter, no doubt knowing about Merv's involvement with Robert, tracked him down for a quote. “You know,” Merv said, “Robert was the original choice to play Judy Garland's boyfriend in Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944. But the role went to Tom Drake, despite protests from Judy.” That was Merv's only comment about the death of his close friend.
With Roddy, Merv showed more sensitivity. “I'll always remember Robert standing in his doorway wearing only his underwear,” Merv said. “Talk about a deer caught in the headlights. ‘You know,’ Robert once said to me, ‘even as a kid I knew I was never meant to be born in this world. It was an accident. I've spent my life trying to escape this world, wanting to go back to the peace I knew before I entered it.’”
***
Merv's jaw dropped when Warners told him that he'd been cast in his first picture. It was hardly a musical starring Doris Day. After he read the script of Cattle Town (1952), Merv knew it was going to be a disaster. It was a lowbudget “oater” (an early film nickname for a Western), and it was to be shot in black and white. “I thought I'd at least have one of the leads, but no such luck,” Merv later recalled. “I got twelfth billing, playing Joe, the secretary of the governor of Texas.”
On his first day on the set, Merv showed up hoping that the director would enlarge his part. Noel M. Smith informed him that the script was “locked up” on orders of Jack Warner himself. Between 1917 and 1952, Smith had helmed 125 films. Cattle Town would be his last effort, and he would face death in 1955.
Merv later recalled that Noel wasn't really directing the cast but “putting us through our paces. He had a faraway look in his eyes like he longed to be somewhere else. I hated the whole experience of being in that damn film. Right from the beginning, I knew in my heart that movies were not my calling.”
Merv and the director did not get along. On his first day of actual shooting, Merv had to deliver a line, “The governor wants to see Shiloh,” the name of a character role played by George O'Hanlon. Merv was supposed to exit but when he reached for the door handle, it fell off in his hand. “Cut!” the director yelled. With a certain annoyance, Noel called out as loud and as sarcastically as he could, “You're gonna go far in movies, Griffin.”
The next day Merv met the writer of that memorable first line of his, and he wasn't impressed. Not even when Tom W. Blackburn told him that he was also a lyricist — “not just a screenwriter.” He was familiar with Merv's music, and had heard him singing with Freddy Martin's band.
Tom was working on “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” He played the song on a studio piano for Merv and asked him to try it. Merv refused, thinking it was just another silly novelty tune. “I could have beaten myself to a pulp when the Davy Crockett craze swept America,” Merv said. “I could have made millions. I had forgotten that my one big hit, ‘I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,’ was also a novelty song.”
Merv was introduced to one of the female leads in the picture, the dynamic Rita Moreno. She was said to be suicidal over her illfated romance with Marlon Brando. He wanted to tell her that he too had gone to bed with Marlon, but hardly thought it was an experience to get suicidal about.
He bonded with the other female star of the picture, Amanda Blake. She was on the dawn of her greatest success when she'd play Kitty Russell in the hit TV series, Gunsmoke, which ran for 351 episodes beginning in 1955. He liked her immensely but on the downside blamed her for accelerating his smoking habit. “After trying to keep up with her, I found myself smoking two packages a day, a disgusting habit I kept up for far too long in my life. Poor Amanda contracted mouth cancer and underwent surgery in 1977. “That was a sort of wakeup call for me, but then I've been known to sleep through wakeup calls,” Merv said.
Merv was saddened when he learned that Amanda had died in 1989 from AIDSrelated complications. She contracted the dreaded disease from her last husband, Mark Spaeth, who also succumbed to AIDS.
Meeting actor Philip Carey, a former U.S. marine, thrilled Merv. He'd heard that Philip was straight and Merv didn't have a chance with him. “At least I could admire him from afar,” Merv told Roddy McDowall. “I thought he was one of the handsomest men I'd ever met, and incredibly sexy. No wonder Joan Crawford went apeshit over him.”
The actor had finished This Woman Is Dangerous with Joan that same year. He was being groomed to appear with Doris Day in her upcoming hit, Calamity Jane (1953), a picture in which Merv also wanted to appear.
At six feet, five inches, Philip towered over Merv. He wished that he'd been ordered to share Philip's dressing room, but ended up instead having to dress with the extras. In 1958, Merv, with his passion still unrequited, gazed at the screen image of Philip as he starred in what became a cult fave, Screaming Mimi with Anita Ekberg and Gypsy Rose Lee.
Late one hot afternoon, when there was a long wait between scenes, Merv finally got to meet the star of the picture, Dennis Morgan. “It was a talk I'd remember for the rest of my life,” Merv said. “Through Dennis I saw how the film factory sucked the young blood out of a performer and then discarded him when he got a little long in the tooth. It was a bitter lesson that Dennis was learning at the time I met him.”
Launched near t
he closing years of World War II, the career of Dennis Morgan had peaked by 1949. Merv remembered him from his starring role opposite Barbara Stanwyck in Christmas in Connecticut and in another role with Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle. Even though Dennis was of Swedish descent, the star, like Merv himself, was known for his “Irish tenor voice.”
Dennis acknowledged to Merv that he'd heard the rumor that Merv had been brought in to replace Gordon MacRae. “Believe it or not, Gordon was brought in to replace me as the singing sensation of Warner Brothers,” Dennis said. “Before a guy even gets started, they bring in your replacement. I should right now be making movies opposite Doris Day, not Gordon. But here I am stuck in this stinker.”
Dennis felt that his life mirrored the Bette Davis film, All About Eve. “Margo Channing is the reigning star. Eve Harrington wants to replace her. But at the end of the picture another eager young starlet is waiting to replace Eve Harrington. That's the movie business.”
Dennis, like Philip Carey, had also appeared with Joan Crawford in This Woman Is Dangerous.
“What was it like working with Joan?” Merv asked.
“When she couldn't get Philip, she went for me and also for David Brian. Crawford's too much woman for me, but our other costar, David Brian, handled her just fine. He told me that the one way to keep Crawford happy is to shove a big dick up either end of her.”
Jack Warner still had a contract with Dennis but wanted him off the lot, because he was the highest salaried actor still left. To get rid of Dennis, Jack was sending him the worst scripts he could find, hoping Dennis would reject the latest offering and buy his way out of the contract.
“That's why I got Cattle Town,” Dennis said. “This film should not even be made. Even though I know the screenplay is awful, I sent word to Jack that I loved it and couldn't wait to star in it. Do you think I'm going to pass up a weekly paycheck? I think my career in films is winding down, and I'm going to get every last penny coming my way, even if Jack Warner demands that I moon the camera in my next picture.”
Dennis Morgan
Later a reviewer commented on the numerous songs sung by Dennis in the picture. “We usually like to hear Dennis Morgan sing. But not this time. The songs come across as irritating.”
As Dennis was called to the set for a retake, Merv asked one more question, “Any regrets?”
“Yeah,” he said, “one big one. In 1942 I was set to play Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Damn you, Humphrey Bogart. And just for fun, I should have let Jane Wyman have her way with me when we worked together in Cheyenne, but I insisted on being faithful to my wife, a good woman I married back in 1933.”
When Jack Warner saw the first cut of Cattle Town, he didn't like the scene of a barroom brawl, and he ordered footage from Dodge City (1938) thrown in instead.
Merv finished his small part in the film and felt a wave of great disappointment come over him. He invited Roddy to go with him for a long weekend in Las Vegas, but he was too busy.
Roddy told him to check into the Las Vegas Sahara Club, claiming that there was a wellmuscled and incredibly handsome lifeguard there who was available to men or women. “You've got to pay.”
“But I've never paid for sex in my life,” Merv protested.
“Get used to it,” Roddy advised. “Anyway I hear this guy is worth every inch. Speaking of inches, take along enough money.”
“You've convinced me,” Merv said. “I'm packing my bags right now, ready, willing, and able to meet this Adonis.”
***
On the theory that the early bird gets the worm, Merv was at poolside at the Las Vegas Sahara Club when Gordon Werschkul reported to duty at ten o'clock. Later he would tell Roddy, “It was more like a snake than a worm.”
Since no one else was at the pool, it was easy to strike up an acquaintance with this startlingly handsome athlete and his nineteeninch biceps. He stood six feet, three inches tall and weighed 218 pounds. Merv pretended he didn't know how to swim, and Gordon volunteered to teach him. The way Merv figured it, this would allow him to come into a close encounter with all those muscles.
After one hour of instruction, Gordon, after enduring a lot of fondling, turned to Merv. “I get off for an afternoon break at two o'clock. What's your room number? We both know what you want. But it'll cost you fifty bucks.”
“It's yours, all in tens,” Merv said.
Merv would later tell Roddy that even before Gordon got out of his swimming trunks, he warned Merv that “you can have me only from the waist down. I like girls.”
In the months ahead, Gordon, either in Las Vegas or Los Angeles, would earn many a fiftydollar bill from Merv, who became obsessive about the bodybuilder's virility and good looks.
Months later Merv was astonished to read in one of the trade papers that the producer, Sol Lesser, had signed Gordon to a sevenyear contract to play Tarzan. He was replacing the equally handsome Lex Barker, who had been married to Lana Turner.
Gordon Werschkul became Gordon Scott and a household name in America in the late 1950s. Gordon beat out 200 other male athletes to become Tarzan. Two of his more memorable pictures were Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955), costarring the actress Vera Miles, whom he married, and Tarzan's Greatest Adventure(1959) with a young, pre-James Bond Sean Connery playing the villain.
After leaving the Tarzan movies, Gordon went to Italy to star in a series of “swordandsandal” epics, featuring handsome bodybuilders. In one, Duel of the Titans(1961), he teamed with Steve Reeves, an old buddy from his days at a gym in Oakland, California. Gordon was cast as Remus to Steve's Romulus. The film became a cult favorite among homosexuals, and remains so today.
A wealthy homosexual in England became so fascinated with Gordon and Steve that he invited them to his estate in Surrey where he convinced them to make a porno film, starring just the two of them. His obsession compelled him to offer a fee of $100,000, a vast sum of money in the early 1960s.
After leaving films, Gordon was unemployed for decades. For three years he lived off that fee for doing porno. Merv once heard about the film and went to great trouble to obtain a copy of it but to no avail.
Near the end of his life, Gordon was rescued financially by Roger Thomas, who had become obsessed with the star when he'd appeared in those longago Tarzan movies.
Roger used to spend his vacation time trying to track Gordon down. Eventually he located him and invited him to live in a back bedroom of his South Baltimore rowhouse. Gordon came for a visit and stayed for six years, mostly spending his days watching old blackandwhite movies on TV.
Gordon Scott
“Me Tarzan, You Merv”
Long before that happened, Gordon used to send word to Merv that he needed money. Merv would often send him a thousanddollar bill, especially one time when he heard that Gordon was sleeping on a park bench.
The last time Merv ever spoke to Gordon on the phone, the former actor told him, “Years ago I never understood the attraction of you guys toward me when I became Tarzan. But I understand a lot more about it now. You guys still worship me when all those beautiful gals of the 50s have gotten old and forgotten me. After all, who wouldn't want to go to bed with Tarzan?”
***
In a surprise call, Merv picked up his phone receiver to hear the voice of Monty Clift, who had arrived unexpectedly in Los Angeles. In the early 1950s every major director in Hollywood wanted Monty to star in his next movie, despite rumors that he was emotionally unstable and very difficult to work with.
Monty told Merv that he'd signed to film I Confess, to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Based on Paul Anthelme's play, it was the story of a priest who is charged with murder after the real murderer had confessed the killing to him in confessional.
Monty was troubled by the plotline and wanted to meet with Merv to read him the script to see how plausible it was. “After all,” he told Merv, “you're a practicing Irish Catholic, and you should know about such things. I bet you brought a whole list of sins to confessional to your priest, who p
robably molested you in return.” He giggled. “I'm just joking, of course.”
Monty may have been joking, but Merv realized how accurate his intuition was.
That night at Monty's, Merv met Mira Rostova, the impoverished Russian acting coach. He'd never encountered her before, although he'd been told that she and Monty were inseparable.
He seriously doubted if there was any great romance going on here, at least not on Monty's part. Mira, however, seemed in love with Monty and constantly referred to him as “my comrade.” If only to get a drink for Monty from the bar, she moved through his living room like a great tragedienne. Her students in New York claimed “She is Duse and Bernhardt all rolled into one.”
Merv was astonished to learn that even though the great Hitchcock was going to direct I Confess, Monty actually intended to take direction from Mira. She planned to send signals to him on the set. A pull on her left ear would mean the scene was no good and should be reshot. Monty carried out his threat. When I Confess was filming in Québec, Hitchcock might pronounce a scene “brilliant” and order it printed. But if Mira tugged on her left ear lobe, Monty would demand that it be reshot.
The reunion with Monty and his introduction to Mira occurred prior to Merv's screen test with Phyllis Kirk. The talented pair had given Merv acting tips before he'd shot that test. On the day that Merv's screen test was first shown on the Warner's lot to potential directors, Merv invited both Monty and Mira to the screening. Jack Warner had urged his directors to use contract players such as Merv whenever possible.
As the lights dimmed, Merv twitched nervously in his seat, glancing every now and then to see if he could determine the reaction of Mira and Monty in the light reflected from the screen. They remained respectfully silent throughout the brief showing, their faces emotionless.
Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet Page 20