Charles placed his hand lovingly over Mark's, which was resting on the table. He assured him that he'd secure bigger and better roles for Mark in the future. Merv felt that Charles was just using promises of future work as a tool of seduction, which, of course, he was.
At the end of the brunch, as Charles heaved himself up from the table, he patted both Merv and Mark on their cheeks. “Both of you charming boys will have to excuse me but I have an appointment with that darling Tyrone Power this afternoon at his hotel.”
“My final advice to both of you precious chaps is this. If either of you make the horrible decision to get married, believe you me such a marriage can survive the obstacle of homosexuality. Of course, there will be pain from time to time on the part of the wife.”
Charles Laughton
***
Since Lana was entertaining Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner that night in her suite, Mark scheduled a date with the Germanborn veteran actor Henry Brandon. He usually played villains in films and had just completed what was to be his most memorable role, that of Chief Cicatrice in John Ford's The Searchers. In spite of a famous marriage that lay in Mark's future, he and Henry would become lifetime companions until Henry's death of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1990.
When Frank heard that Merv was in town, he asked Lana to include him as one of her guests that night. Merv was the first to arrive at Lana's hotel suite, and was greeted by the smell of chicken frying. “It's Ava's favorite food,” Lana said. “I have this small kitchen, so I hired one of the hotel chefs to cook dinner for us tonight. It'll be intimate. Frank and Ava aren't here yet.”
Within thirty minutes, Ava arrived wearing a red dress and a mink coat. “Where's that son of a bitch?” she asked before greeting Lana and Merv. “The fucker told me he'd be on time for once in his wasted life.”
After settling in for drinks, Ava an hour later claimed she was starved for some of the fried chicken she'd been smelling all night. Even though Frank still hadn't appeared, she begged Lana to order dinner served. “If the bastard shows up, I'll call room service to bring up some spaghetti. That's all Ringa Ding Ding eats anyway other than pussy.”
When the chicken was placed on the beautifully set table, Ava looked horrified. “Where's the fucking gravy? What's fried chicken without gravy?”
MOVIE STARS!
Left, Frank Sinatra with Ava Gardner
Right, Frank Sinatra with Lana Turner
Inset: Merv
Though wearing an expensive dress, she went into the cramped kitchen where she emerged later with the gravy. “This Tarheel Bitch is the best God damn gravy maker on God's green earth,” she said.
After tasting it, Merv agreed that it was the best he'd ever eaten. Ava had demanded both cornbread and hot biscuits, and she got her wish. The freshly baked apple pie she'd requested was sent up by room service from the hotel kitchen below.
After dinner, when Frank still hadn't arrived, Ava rose from the table, a bit wobbly on her feet. “I'm out of here. If Frank shows up, tell him I'm fucking Mickey Rooney tonight for old time's sake.”
An hour later Frank came into the suite, with apologies to Lana. When he asked where Ava was, Lana gave a weak excuse, suggesting she might have given her the wrong date.
“Fuck her!” Frank said. “We'll party without her.” He warmly embraced Merv. “Here's the guy who saved my life. I owe him one.”
“You don't owe me anything,” Merv protested to him once again. “Payback is hardly necessary.”
What happened later that night may never be known. All three participants—Frank, Lana, and Merv—are dead, and none wrote about the night in their memoirs. Mark Herron later provided the most speculation, but he wasn't there in the suite until three o'clock the following morning.
According to Mark, Frank finally let Merv give him that blowjob while he was kissing Lana and fondling her breasts.
It is for that reason that Merv appears today on those international lists of Frank's lovers. A typical list—say, one compiled by Mark Winburn—includes Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Shirley MacLaine, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Gloria Vanderbilt… and Merv Griffin.
A tantalizing show business hierarchy.
***
The gigs, around 1953, were few and far between, and bookings to sing were so insignificant that Merv had difficulty recalling them in later years.
He became accustomed to lastminute appearances on radio and TV, especially if someone got sick and had to fill in. “I was a utility singer,” Merv told The Miami Herald. “I knew every song that was ever written. If someone couldn't do their number singing in front of a waterfall, everybody would say, ‘Call Merv—he knows all the waterfall songs.’”
His reviews were never raves, but pleasant. The New York Herald Tribune referred to him as “a glib, likable, singing emcee type.”
Of those days, Merv said, “I did anything that was offered to me. I just loved the feeling of a live audience.”
Suddenly, as if to break Merv's monotony of a stalled career, Monty Clift showed up in New York. He'd filmed Indiscretion of An American Wife with Jennifer Jones. It was produced and directed by Vittorio De Sica, with extra dialogue by Truman Capote.
Over the phone, Monty told Merv that he was having a brief affair with Truman Capote and asked Merv if he could bring the author over for dinner. In response, Merv invited both Truman and Monty. “I'm eager for you guys to meet the one true love of my life.” Merv, of course, misstated the depth of his romantic attachment to Hadley, which was far more casual than what he was suggesting.
He was shocked when a dissipated and underweight Monty arrived on his doorstep. He was gaunt and disheveled, his clothes looking as if he'd slept in them for the past four nights. Truman seemed as drunk as Monty but was immaculately groomed, wearing a white sports coat with a chartreuse lining.
It was obvious that Monty was still taking too much Demerol. Merv had heard that the drug made its victims increasingly paranoid. Truman appeared not to care, but it was obvious to Merv as the evening progressed that Monty felt everyone was out to get him…everyone except Hadley.
Seated on Merv's sofa, Monty was almost on top of Hadley, virtually ignoring Merv and Truman. “At last,” Monty announced, “I've found a man who understands me. A kindred spirit. I have the same kind of feeling when I'm with Elizabeth.”
Intoxicated though he was, Truman still had his eagle eye, and he kept glancing at Merv for signs of jealousy. At that point in their relationship, Merv had gotten used to sharing Hadley, so he wasn't particularly jealous of Monty's interest in his boyfriend.
Merv's dinner of beef stew, cooked by Hadley, was interrupted that night by a phone call. The call upstaged Truman just as he was relating the most tantalizing story about the night Errol Flynn fucked him.
“I'm Monty's friend,” came a rather ominous voice on the phone. At first Merv thought the call was for Monty, but the strange voice claimed he wanted to speak to Merv.
Terrible Truman
Earlier in the evening, Monty had told Merv that he'd given out his number to three different friends, any of whom might be calling. “You don't love him!” the mystery voice said to Merv. “I do! You hangerson just use Monty. You're trying to destroy him. You'll pay for what you're doing to him. I'm going to follow you down streets on dark nights. You're fucking with the wrong person when you're messing with me. One foggy night I'm going to stab you in the back.” He slammed down the phone.
At first, Merv thought that Monty had been playing some cruel joke on him, as he'd been known to do such things in the past. But the voice had sounded too real, too upset, and too psychotic to be a joke.
At the dinner table, Merv interrupted Monty's fixation on Hadley and Truman's heavy drinking to tell about the phone call. “A weird friend of yours called,” he told Monty. “He's threatening to stalk me. Stab me in the back on one Jack the Ripper night in New York.”
“What's that?” Hadley asked.
“A person who gets off having sex with dead bodies,” Truman said.
“That's disgusting!” Hadley said. “I like mine live and kickin’.”
“Necrophiliacs have always fascinated me,” Truman said. “Monty has promised to take me to his friend's next sex party. These parties are staged spontaneously. You have to wait until some young hot body—preferably male—dies, perhaps in a car accident. The body is taken to this morgue where they have a deal. I want to observe how one makes love to a dead corpse. I'm considering writing a short story about it. Perhaps I'll call it Dead Bodies and Other Delicious Indulgences. ”
“Monty, I always thought you liked live people,” Merv said. “Is this some new kick?”
“Don't be an ass!” Monty said. “I go to their parties because, unlike you, I'm not judgmental. I believe an artist must take the blinders off and look at all forms of human behavior, even love that takes a bizarre twist. I don't condemn people like you do. That's why I love Elizabeth so much. She tries to understand human foibles, not apply some stupid, smug condemnation to desires.”
“But dead bodies?” Merv protested. “Come on. As Tallulah would say, ‘Please, dah-ling, people are eating.’”
At that point, Monty indulged in one of his food attacks, for which he was becoming known around town. He picked up his plate of beef stew and tossed it into Merv's face. Sitting silently, Merv looked down as the stew beef, carrots, and onions oozed down his white shirt.
“C'mon,” Monty said to Hadley. “Let's get the fuck out of here.”
Hadley rose to his feet, as Monty almost collapsed into his strong arms. The actor stood on wobbly legs, almost too drunk and drugged to leave the room without bodily help. “I hope you won't mind,” Hadley said to Merv. “I'd better see that he gets home safe. I'll be back real soon.”
“Yeah, right,” Merv said. “You are, after all, a star fucker, and there's no doubt that Montgomery Clift is a genuine star.”
As Hadley helped Monty to the door, Truman under his breath said, “Yes, a fallen star.”
After they'd gone, Truman turned to Merv. “Now we gals can get down to some serious gossip. I'll tell you about the time I went down on Humphrey Bogart when we were making Beat the Devil in Italy. He said he'd let me suck him off, but absolutely forbade me to swallow his semen. He told me I had to spit it out. But after the son of a bitch came in my mouth, I swallowed it down to the last drop.”
***
That fall, with no local television jobs available in New York, Marty booked Merv in night-clubs and hotel lounges in the East, principally in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Merv remembered these gigs in what he called “dives, blood buckets, and seedy motels.”
Still dreaming the dream of being an emcee on television, Merv sang “I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” every night to drunken, smokefilled rooms, along with many of the songs he'd performed in the 1940s while touring with Freddy Martin's band.
Both Hadley and Merv tried to hold onto their diminishing nest egg, which had dwindled to less than $10,000. On some nights, the money Merv made didn't pay for the gas and the motel room. To economize, Hadley shopped at local grocery stores. Before leaving New York, he'd purchased a hotplate on which he fried hot dogs or scrambled eggs. He recalled that some of their motel rooms were “so small that mice had to go piggy back to cross the floor.”
To add spice to their sex lives, Hadley sometimes managed to lure a handsome young waiter or a bellhop to their bedroom. Before heading on tour, Liberace had given Merv a list of socalled gay bars in some of the towns where he'd already played.
“Everything was very discreet in those days,” Hadley said. “There were gay bars but they were risky. Any bar filled only with male patrons could be raided at any time by the police. Still we found some secret hideaways, and many of them had pianos. After singing all night in a club, Merv often entertained the boys at these tawdry bars with his singing. He was also a great hit in these bars, and often we'd pick up something on the hoof for the night. It was fun, really. In those days Merv always threatened that he was going to give up singing. But he'll be singing when he's eighty. Merv Griffin is a total ham, but I find that quality in him adorable.”
When Merv learned that his old friend, Marlon Brando, was sailing to Europe, he called Marlon and asked if he could sublet his apartment, the one where the star had lived with Wally Cox and his pet raccoon. Marlon was relieved to have Merv as a tenant and asked that only one closet be reserved for his personal items—“and kept locked at all times.”
Once in residency, Merv could not resist the temptation to see what the mystery closet held, thinking it might contain pornographic pictures of Marlon with various stars, male or female. To his surprise, the closet mostly seemed to hold the wreckage of an electric toy train. Nonetheless, he went to the hardware, as he'd promised Marlon, purchased a lock, and securely locked the closet, leaving the key for Marlon upon his return.
The apartment still reeked of Marlon's pet raccoon, which had long departed. The animal had never been potty trained. When Shelley Winters once visited the apartment to get seduced by Marlon, she said, “the raccoon smelled like it'd just let eighteen farts.” When Merv and Hadley moved in, it took them nearly a month to erase the lingering odor of that raccoon.
Marty tried to get work for Merv on Broadway, and even advised him to wear platform shoes so he'd look taller on stage. Merv auditioned for Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II, hoping to secure the part of Prince Charming in their TV production of Cinderella. Before these music men, he sang “It Might As Well Be Spring.”
Before he could finish the number, Rogers called for him to stop singing. “Let me get this straight,” he said to Merv. “Are you impersonating Margaret Whiting or Frank Sinatra? Dismissed. Next!”
Max Liebman agreed to audition Merv for a role in his TV special, The Desert Song. Merv walked on stage a bit wobbly in his elevated shoes. “What are you trying to be? A comedian?” Liebman asked. “What makes you think you're right for the role?”
“You got me there,” Merv said. “Frankly, I think I'd be lousy in the part.”
“Then get the hell out,” Liebman said. “You're wasting my God damn time.”
Marty was furious when he heard what Merv had said. He warned him, “Don't pull that shit again. Who do you think you are? James Dean?”
He eventually got over his fury at Merv and once again set about getting work for him. A break came when Marty found Merv a job filling in as host for Barry Gray. The smoothtalking but tarttongued Gray in time became known as “The Father of Talk Radio.” His shows were broadcast from Chandler's Restaurant on East 46th St. between midnight and 3am.
At first, sponsors didn't believe that listeners would stay up that late. But they did. Not only that, but Gray began to book top talent onto his show, including Danny Thomas, Phil Silvers, and Eddie Cantor.
When Merv filled in for Gray, he could not have known at the time that he was beginning a career as a talk show host that would bring him fame and fortune in the years to come. Instead of radio, it would, of course, be on television.
When Merv took over the show, the columnist Walter Winchell was still feuding with Gray over an incident involving Josephine Baker at the Stork Club. She'd claimed on Gray's show that the club owner, Sherman Billingsley, had refused her service.
One of Billingsley's best friends, and a regular at the Stork Club every night, Winchell counterattacked. He denounced Gray as a “pro-Communist” and made veiled references claiming that the announcer was also a homosexual. He spread the word at the Stork Club that Gray sucked off men in subway toilets. The feud between Winchell and Gray became so intense that both men began carrying pistols th
reatening to kill each other.
When it was announced that Merv was going to be a substitute host, Winchell placed a secret call to him one Saturday around two o'clock in the morning. “I know you're trying to get a career jump started,” Winchell said to him in an ominous voice. “Hedda Hopper has given me the goods on you. There are two things your listeners might want to know about you.”
“What's that?” Merv asked.
“First, that you're a cocksucker. Hedda gave me the full report. Second, that you joined the Communist Party in Los Angeles as an active cell member.”
“That's a god damn lie,” Merv said. “I'm not a homosexual, and I don't even know what a Communist smells like.”
“Go on the show and I'll ruin your career.” Winchell slammed the phone.
Defying Winchell, Merv subbed for Gray whenever he was needed. As a favor to Merv, Frank Sinatra once came onto the late show. He was accompanied by a blonde showgirl but didn't introduce her. “We stay up late, you know,” Frank said. “As the song goes, Broadway babes don't get to bed until the dawn. Until the milkman comes. Shit, I forgot the fucking words.”
Winchell did not attack Merv in his column, but Merv later claimed that Winchell hired “a goon” to mug him as he was walking back to Marlon's apartment in the predawn hours. Merv's wallet was stolen and his eye blackened, and he always blamed Winchell for the assault, even though it could also have been a routine mugging.
At long last, in 1954, a big break came when Marty got Merv cast as one of the male leads opposite Helen Gallagher in a revival of Finian's Rainbow by the New York City Center Light Opera Company. Cast opposite them was Will Mahoney, who would be nominated for a Tony as Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
Even though he'd emerged as a Broadway “star,” Merv was disappointed to learn that his salary would be only eightyfive dollars a week. “I made more singing with Freddy Martin's band in the 40s,” he told Hadley.
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