Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

by Darwin Porter

  “Not only that, but Frank was at the nadir of his career,” Merv later recalled. “Back taxes, maybe as much as $150,000. His $8,000 salary for Eternity wouldn't cover it. In fact, that paltry fee wouldn't even pay Frank's bar bills. Often Burt Lancaster and I had to carry both Monty and Frank back to their hotel, where we undressed them and put them to bed like little children. I personally took the responsibility of removing Frank's underwear to judge for myself if the legend was true. It was! Somehow Monty and Frank usually managed to pull themselves together to face the camera the following day, each giving brilliant performances,” Merv said. “It was amazing.”

  When Monty sobered up and Frank sobered up, Monty actually managed to give Frank acting lessons. The singer later thanked Monty and claimed his help was the reason he got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor that year.

  Most evenings, Frank seemed to be always trying to place a call to Ava in Nairobi where she was filming Mogambo with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. Word reached Frank that Clark and Ava had resumed their affair, which had been launched when they made The Hucksters years previously, back in 1947.

  After the filming in Hawaii, Fred Zinnemann ordered the cast and crew back to Hollywood, where the final interiors for Eternity would be shot at Columbia Studios. Monty booked a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood and invited Merv to stay with him, at least until the end of the picture. “I can't stand to be alone.”

  Sometimes at three o'clock in the morning, Monty would hang dangerously out the window of his suite, tooting his bugle. There were endless complaints from other hotel guests and nearby tenants about the noise. James Jones was still on the scene, presumably to help the pieces and personalities he had originally created in his novel fit together in their film rendition, but Monty preferred to spend most of his time with Frank. Tough and gritty, the author of From Here to Eternity was a worldclass drinker and would usually still be standing after Monty and Frank had passed out.

  Years later, in 1965, Merv would tape an interview with James Jones, by then an expatriate living in Paris with his wife, Gloria Mosolino.

  When he met her, Merv immediately bonded with the former actress. She amused Merv with her stories of being a standin for Marilyn Monroe on The Seven Year Itch (1955). “I stood for hours over that subway grate with my white dress blowing up to get the shot set up for Marilyn. When Marilyn finally appeared, the director couldn't use her first take. Marilyn's panties were seethrough and showed pubic hair, which happened at the time to be black. We had to rush Marilyn back to the hotel where I helped her bleach her pubic hair.”

  “Shit,” Merv said. “If only I could put that story on the air.”

  After meeting Gloria, Merv was almost tempted to do a TV show which focused exclusively on her and not on Jones. In Paris during that era, she had became the hostess of a literary salon the likes of which hadn't been seen since the days of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Her guests included Mary McCarthy, Romain Gary, William Styron, James Baldwin, and — just for fun — actress Jean Seberg and Merv's friend Peter Lawford.

  Later, when Gloria moved with Jones to a farmhouse in Sagaponach, near the Hamptons on Long Island, such cultural icons as Norman Mailer, Peter Pattiessen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Arthur Miller showed up regularly at her gatherings.

  During his time in Paris, Merv also interviewed another expatriate writer, Irwin Shaw, author of The Young Lions (1948). Like From Here to Eternity, it was one of the most famous novels to come out of World War II. Born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Irwin expressed his extreme disappointment over the film adaptation of The Young Lions (1957). By coincidence, the movie, like Eternity, had also starred Monty Clift. This time, Monty played a sensitive Jew who becomes a war hero. He was cast opposite a blondhaired Marlon Brando, who played a Nazi officer. Irwin spoke to Merv with a wellarticulated bitterness about America. He'd been placed on the Hollywood blacklist, having been accused of being a Communist.

  Shaw and Jones jointly invited Merv out for a night of boozing in Paris. Merv suspected that the two authors would be intensely competitive rivals, since they'd both become famous for novels about World War II. Outside the literary arena, their competitiveness was at its most obvious when it came to drinking one another under the table. He compared their uneasy friendship to that of two other American expats who had lived in Paris forty years earlier, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Literary Lion:

  Irwin Shaw

  Merv tried to match them drink for drink. “A big mistake. That and jet lag nearly killed me.” During the interview with Jones the next morning, Merv confessed that “I was a zombie.” Away from the camera, he asked Jones just one question. “What's the most important thing you ever learned in life?”

  “When fighting,” Jones said, “never kick a man in the crotch.”

  Back in Hollywood, as the Eternity film was being wrapped, Merv confided to Roddy McDowall that he didn't believe Monty and Frank had become lovers, even though they had occasionally slept drunkenly nude in each other's arms. “I came in many times to wake them up, and saw them huddled together for comfort,” Merv confided. “But I think it was more for the moral support they gave each other — not sex. What a contrast. There was Monty's peanut exposed only a foot from Frank's monster Italian salami.”

  Once, when Frank got drunk in a bar along Sunset Strip, the remainder of the evening became devoted to his ongoing obsession with Ava Gardner. “Frank was a womanizer,” Merv said. “But at this point in his life, he wasn't interested in other gals. His rage about Ava consumed his life — that and his Here to Eternity role of Maggio. I kept urging him to get over her and get on with his life, but he wouldn't listen. After the release of Eternity, I predicted a big comeback for him but he was all gloom and doom. He claimed he was finished. He called my talk bullshit.”

  “He confessed to me that his vocal cords were hemorrhaged,” Merv said. “He'd also received a devastating blow from MCA. His agents there informed him that ‘no one wants you, Frankie, no more movie deals, no more night club offers.’”

  “Every night,” Merv said, “Frank threatened to commit suicide. It was Monty, as messed up as he was, who would talk him out of it.”

  One Saturday morning around four o'clock, Merv got up to go to the bathroom, which opened onto the hallway. Thinking Monty and Frank were asleep in the next bedroom, he turned the knob and walked into the bathroom. What he saw shocked him. A nude Frank lay sprawled on the tiled floor, an empty bottle of sleeping pills beside him.

  Frank appeared to be dead. It seemed pointless to scream for Monty to help, because he was completely wasted. Merv ran into the living room and called the hotel desk, demanding an ambulance and the police.

  Frank Sinatra:

  Without Merv, he'd probably

  have died that night.

  Covered with sheets, Frank's body was hauled out of the hotel on a stretcher through the back entrance. In the back seat of a squad car, Merv followed the ambulance's flashing dome lights.

  At the hospital, while Frank's stomach was being pumped, Merv put through an urgent call to Columbia's chief publicist, strongly advising him to get Harry Cohn involved. “Cohn knows how to keep stuff like this out of the papers,” Merv said.

  The call paid off. Within an hour, the PR staff at Columbia had launched itself into damage control. Cohn was an expert at keeping scandals about his stars out of the papers, and he managed to cover up Frank's latest attempt at suicide.

  Three days later, a sober Frank returned to Monty's suite at the Roosevelt for a reunion with Monty and Merv. He thanked Merv for “saving my rotten life.” His weight had dropped to 118 pounds, which Merv thought would make his interpretation of a defeated, burntout Maggio all the more convincing in Eternity.

  He talked openly about why he'd tried to kill himself, claiming that Ava had flown to London where she'd had an abortion. “Her exact words to me,” Frank claimed, were ‘I killed your son.’” It is not known
if Ava ever knew the sex of her unborn child. Perhaps by asserting that it was a boy, she hoped to cause Frank greater grief.

  Frank and Monty learned no lessons from the singer's suicide attempt. Within three nights, Frank and Monty had resumed their heavy drinking, referring to their binges as “sloshing good times.” Merv joined them on their nightly rounds, having little to drink himself because he knew he had to get both of them back to the Roosevelt intact.

  The script for his first starring film, So This Is Love, arrived, and Merv read it eagerly. He was bitterly disappointed. Even though he was cast as the male lead, the role was meager, not what he'd wished for. “It's definitely going to be Kathryn Grayson's picture,” he told Monty.

  The next day, while Monty and Frank were at Columbia Studios, Merv quietly packed and left the Roosevelt. He'd found an apartment of his own. He went by the Commodore Garden Apartments to get his stuff, learning that Nick Adams and James Dean had moved out without a forwarding address.

  One week later, Monty placed a desperate call to Merv, begging him to come over to his suite at the Roosevelt. Once there, Merv found that Monty had been severely beaten. Fortunately, he'd shot his last take at Columbia. He was far too beat up to face any camera. At first Merv assumed that Monty had picked up some rough trade along Santa Monica Boulevard, who had robbed and beaten him up.

  When he wiped the blood off Monty's wounds and put iodine on the cuts, Monty related the details of what had happened. In a drunken rage, Frank had attacked him. Monty refused to tell Merv what had set Frank off.

  The house doctor examined Monty, finding no broken bones. Merv called and ordered a male nurse to stay in Monty's suite and take care of him. That night he drove to Roddy's house to tell him what had happened.

  Roddy had some ideas about what had caused the uncontrollable rage that had swept over Frank. “I bet Monty confessed to Frank that he'd fallen madly in love with him, and that was more than Frank could take. He sure as hell wasn't going to go from the arms of Ava Gardner into the arms of Monty Clift. No way! Not Frank.”

  “Frank and Monty are too rich for my blood, and frankly, they're just too complicated.” Merv told Johnny Riley in a phone call to San Francisco. He was urging his friend to drive down to L.A. for a visit. “My big movie break is coming up, and I've got to think of myself. I can't get sucked into their whirlpool. I love the guys dearly, and I'll keep seeing them. But we were living in each other's crotches like The Three Musketeers. Our relationship got just a wee bit incestuous, and all of us need some space. The main reason I had to get out of the Roosevelt was that I'm not into selfdestruction.”

  ***

  Kathryn Grayson, Merv's costar in So This Is Love, was the reigning coloratura soprano at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, but had taken a shortterm leave to work at Warner Brothers. Merv had thrilled to her 1951 film, Show Boat, in which she'd starred as Magnolia opposite Ava Gardner. At the time, both women were being pursued by Merv's friend, Howard Hughes. Kathryn later recalled the jealousies that ensued as Ava “shot daggers at me on the set with those Tarheel eyes of hers.” Kathryn herself was a fellow Tarheel, having been born in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

  Kathryn Grayson with Merv Griffin

  in So This Is Love (1953)

  So This Is Love was a cinematic biography of the opera star Grace Moore. Nicknamed “The Tennessee Nightingale,” she helped popularize opera by introducing it to a large audience. As a young kid, Merv had seen Grace's 1934 film, One Night of Love, for which she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress of 1935. He later said that, “I was too young to appreciate her talent when my mother dragged me to see it.”

  On the morning of January 26, 1947, Grace Moore had boarded a KLM DC3 in Copenhagen, after a wildly popular concert that attracted hundreds of fans who demanded countless encores. She was sitting with Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, father of the present king, Carl XVI Gustaf. They'd had an illicit affair in Denmark and were en route to Stockholm when the aircraft at an altitude of 150 feet stalled, crashed to the ground, and exploded. Unexpectedly, Elvis Presley so admired the operatic performances of Grace Moore that he named his beloved Graceland after her.

  In So This Is Love, Merv was cast as Buddy Nash, the manager and fiancé of Grace, as played by Kathryn. For his role in the movie, Merv, a future billionaire, was paid $250 a week. Other cast members included players who at the time were well known: Marie Windsor, Walter Abel, Joan Weldon, and Rosemary DeCamp.

  So many dire warnings had been issued to Merv about “that impossible diva,” Kathryn, that he had trepidations about meeting her. There was a legend at the time that the worst thing that could happen to an actor was to get cast opposite Kathryn. Her former husband, Johnny Johnston, had warned Merv that “Kathryn will hog the camera and shove you out of the picture.” Johnston had divorced the singing star two years previously.

  To his surprise, Merv even received a phone call from Mario Lanza, who had starred with Kathryn in That Midnight Kiss in 1949 and in The Toast of New Orleans in 1951. “I despise the cunt, and so will you after making this picture,” The Great Caruso warned Merv. “Those two big tits of hers kept knocking me down in every scene. She's a camera hog. She'll eat you alive.” The actress was noted for having the largest bust measurements in Hollywood, putting Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe to shame.

  On the first day of the shoot, Doris Day showed up to wish Merv good luck. “You're gonna be big one day,” she predicted.

  “But when is that day coming?” he asked her.

  “Just be patient,” she assured him. “It'll happen. In fact, I'm considering casting you as the male lead in my next musical.”

  He smiled indulgently, having heard Doris's worthless promises before.

  When Merv finally met Kathryn, she seemed to be the opposite of a monster. A pretty, petite brunette, she had a heartshaped face and an engaging smile. Her costar in Show Boat, Howard Keel, had described her as “the most beautiful woman in the history of movies.”

  Merv disagreed with Mario Lanza. “I found Kathryn a peach to work with,” Merv claimed. “She gave me the most favorable camera angles, though she was known to nudge her leading man out of the scene. She encouraged me at every turn. In closeups I had no problem with those big tits of hers because wardrobe had bound her breasts so she wouldn't project so much. After all, she wasn't trying to look like Jayne Mansfield. Perhaps Kathryn sensed I was a fish out of water, and she practically guided me through every scene.”

  The difficult point came in a kissing scene, which had to be shot nearly thirty times. At one point, Merv stuck his nose in her eye. To make matters worse, he had to act out the scene in front of the entire football team from the University of Texas. In town for the Rose Bowl, they were visiting the set that day. Practically to a man, every member of the team later claimed they could have done a better job of kissing Kathryn than Merv.

  At one point the director, Gordon Douglas, insulted Merv in front of the homophobic team. “Griffin, just pretend Kathryn is Rock Hudson, and you'll do just fine.” The team members cackled with laughter at Merv's humiliation, but he got through the next scene, and it was good enough for a print. The movie lives on today as a footnote in film history. It was the first major motion picture to focus on an openmouth kiss.

  Even though he received top billing alongside Kathryn, in the final version of the film he appeared onscreen for less than twenty minutes. He did get to sing, “I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,” but it was one of his more lackluster numbers.

  Kathryn found Merv “a nice guy,” but feared he lacked the aggression and drive needed to become famous as a movie star.

  Gordon Douglas later apologized to Merv for humiliating him on the set, and then promised to cast Merv in his next movie. Merv was excited at the prospect until he discovered it was to be a Western. To reinforce his reconciliation with Merv, Gordon singled him out for long talks between takes, and never insulted him again, even after he flubbed several takes. A native New Yorker, Gordon had had
a long career in movies, beginning with those Our Gang tworeelers and graduating upward to Laurel and Hardy comedies.

  After Gordon's death in 1993, after a career that had spanned nearly 50 years of filmmaking, Merv facetiously remarked, “He was the only filmmaker in the history of Hollywood to direct four screen legends — Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Liberace, and Merv Griffin.”

  The press screening of So This Is Love was held at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, and both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were star guests. Merv remembered slinking down so low in his seat that he was almost hiding on the floor. He'd never seen himself in a featurelength movie before, and he was horrified at his image as projected on screen. He especially hated his big number, “I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.”

  In the lobby, Merv encountered Hedda, who kissed him on the mouth before exclaiming, “You're the next big star in Hollywood, maybe destined to be the biggest. I was flabbergasted by your performance.”

  In his attempt to escape from her clutches, he fell into the arms of Louella. “Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, move over. They've got nothing on you. That wop, Sinatra, can't even sing any more. Jack Warner should cast you in all his next big musicals, not Gordon MacRae. He's drunk all the time anyway.” It was obvious to Merv and virtually everybody else that Louella herself was drunk that night.

  “Before I fell asleep that evening, I deluded myself into believing those old bitches,” Merv later said.

  As part of the film's release, Jack Warner ordered Merv to go on a crosscountry tour to promote the movie, even though the studio chief had serious misgivings about the film. “It stinks,” he told Merv. “You stink in it. But I want to earn my money back.”