When Merv talked about this with Miller, he said, “that's bullshit. The contract signed by Sinatra gave him the right to turn down any song. He's blaming me for his own failure.”
Mitch and Merv worked well together. They remained friendly acquaintances. When Miller turned 89 at the millennium, Merv sent him a telegram. “You'll be one hundred before I reach that mark.” In the year 2008 Mitch, born on July 4, 1911, was still alive.
Merv had greater luck with two other songs, “Banned in Boston” and “Charanga,” both of which hit the top twenty on the charts. “Even so, they had the life of sickly butterflies,” Merv said. “At any rate, I didn't make Elvis quiver in his blue suede shoes. The King still sat safely on his throne—that is, until the Beatles came along to unseat him.”
Merv was grateful to Arthur and Kathryn Murray to allow him to showcase his music on their Arthur Murray Party, even though the TV show existed mainly to publicize their chain of dance studios. The show would always end with the famous dancing couple—the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of television—performing a Johann Strauss waltz. Years later Merv said his chief memory of the show was not his failed music but of Ann Sheridan, a fellow guest, “teaching me to jitterbug.”
Merv's next gig, Music for a Summer Night, started as a summertime replacement on TV in June of 1959. The show was not successful and went off the air in 1960. It came and went so fast in Merv's career that he hardly remembered what happened except for one episode. “I encountered Dick Haymes, a singer whose voice I used to admire and imitate.”
He came up to Merv and said, “You're a stinking piece of faggot shit.”
“Why Dick, it's so good to see you again,” Merv said. He later speculated that the crooner had learned that Rita Hayworth and Aldo Ray had used his home in Los Angeles as a venue for their trysts.
Merv made yet another attempt at a TV show when he not only directed Saturday Prom, a weekly series, but cohosted the show with Hugh C. Daly. Beechnut Gum was the sponsor, and Merv spent a lot of air time chewing gum and trying to imitate Dick Clark's more successful American Bandstand.
In a game of oneupmanship with Dick Clark, Merv persuaded the network to hire a live orchestra directed by Bobby Vinton, who was just on the dawn of his great success which would come in the 1960s. Ironically, Bobby got some of his greatest exposure on American Bandstand, not Merv's Saturday Prom.
Merv thought Bobby was a musical genius and envied his talent. Like Merv he could play the piano. Unlike Merv, Bobby could also play the clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, drums, and oboe.
In the years ahead, Merv watched in awe as Bobby plucked a hit single from the reject pile and recorded “Roses Are Red (My Love),” which spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. His most famous song, however, was to be the 1963 “Blue Velvet,” which had originally been a minor hit for Tony Bennett about a dozen years previously, in 1951.
Merv:
Smirking host/enabler
of illicit trysts
During the course of his career, Bobby would sell more than 75 million records and became, in the words of Billboard Magazine,” the alltime most successful love singer of the Rock Era. From 1962 to 1972, he would have more Billboard Number One hits than any other male vocalist, including Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
Merv later lamented, “If I'd been successful in my singing, I would have wanted a career like Bobby Vinton had in the 1960s. Alas, it was not meant to be. But even Bobby could not stave off the British Invasion, although he made a spectacular comeback with ‘My Melody of Love’ in 1974—singing partly in Polish. Who would have thunk that?”
In many ways, Saturday Prom was a traumatic experience for Merv, making him feel “like yesterday's spaghetti.” He came face to face with “tomorrow's competition” on live television. Some of the most popular rock ‘n’ roll performers of the time appeared on camera—The Shirelles, Brenda Lee, Hank Ballard, Chubby Checker, Sam Cooke, The Playmates, Jo Ann Campbell, and Johnny and The Hurricanes. No lip sync was permitted. High school kids made up the studio audience. But whenever the cameras rolled, members of the relatively wholesome NBC Teen Workshop stood around Merv and his fellow performers so that no punk would present “the bird” to the camera.
***
Marty secured a booking for Merv on the DuPont Show of the Week series. He'd be appearing on TV in a segment called The Wonderful World of Toys. The setting would be New York's Central Park, where on the first day of filming he met one of the stars, Harpo Marx.
Merv had always been fond of the Marx Brothers when he'd watched their movies in the 1930s. He was eager to meet Harpo. At first, though, he didn't recognize him. When Harpo shook his hand, he encountered a bald man. Harpo had always been seen on screen with his poofy, curly red hair. It was a wig.
As they talked, Merv learned that Harpo, the silent one on camera, was actually very articulate. He told Merv that he too had wanted to learn to play the piano when he was a kid. “My family could afford to give lessons to only one of us,” Harpo said. “My brother Chico was selected. I mastered the harp instead.”
While waiting for the cameras to be set up, Harpo enchanted Merv with stories of his life, and those of his brothers. He said that Chico once appeared on TV as Harpo in wig and costume on I've Got a Secret in 1952. “Chico fooled all the panelists, including one in particular—Groucho himself.”
Harpo said that he was once vacationing in Nice on the French Riviera and enjoying sunbathing in the nude. “An elderly man and woman approached. I grabbed my bath towel from the Carlton and wrapped it around my genitals. The man yanked the towel from me, exposing me. He reached to shake my hand. ‘Good afternoon. I'm George Bernard Shaw. This is my wife, Mrs. Shaw.’ It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.”
Appearing before the cameras in Central Park, Merv launched into his song, “Hot-Cha-Cha.” Just as he did, a pigeon with diarrhea flew over and dumped on his head.
“That God damn pigeon got to me before the critics crapped on me,” Merv said.
During the filming, Merv had a reunion with costar Carol Burnett, who was no longer the president of his fan club in Hollywood. In fact, Merv no longer had fan clubs anywhere.
Merv was also surprised to encounter Milton Berle playing himself in the show. He hadn't seen Milton since that night in New York when Merv was escorting Elizabeth Taylor, who claimed at the time that she didn't know who Milton Berle was. “Has the bitch heard of me by now?” Milton asked Merv.
“She's not only heard of you, but thinks you're twice as good as Bob Hope. Elizabeth told me the other night that you're an original. She heard that Hope without his writers wouldn't know what to say.”
“The whore got that right,” Milton said, still obviously offended by Elizabeth.
When Merv was introduced to Audrey Meadows, another star of the show, he said, “You don't have slanty eyes at all. He was referring to her birth in China, the daughter of missionaries. “Well, I spoke only Mandarin Chinese until I was five,” she told Merv.
Merv's favorite show on TV at the time was The Honeymooners, where Audrey played Alice Cramden at that twoburner stove in her Chauncey Street kitchen. As Merv had coffee with her, he noticed that she was a chain smoker. The actress would later die of lung cancer in Beverly Hills in 1996.
“I almost didn't get the role of Alice,” Audrey said. “Jackie Gleason thought I was too chic and too pretty to be Ralph Kramden's wife. I made myself up for the part and wore frumpy clothes and sent him photographs of me. He went for it. You know Gleason. He's short and has a Napoleonic complex. That's why he hires short actors. I'm five feet nine so he made me wear flats.”
Audrey had just married Robert Six, the CEO of Continental Airlines. When Merv shook his hand, Merv indiscreetly blurted out, “You were married to Ethel Merman. Why would anyone in his right mind marry Ethel Merman?”
Merv was also introduced to Edie Adams, the actress, singer, and comic, who was also starring in The Wonderful World of Toys. He'd j
ust seen The Apartment in which she'd costarred with Shirley Mac-Laine, Fred Mac-Murray, and Jack Lemmon. It had been Edie's first major film.
In the movie Lemmon played a guy at the bottom of the ladder, who is trying to work his way up by lending the key to his apartment to his higherups — in this case Mac-Murray—for trysts.
Over lunch that day with Edie, Merv confessed that he too had lent his home in Los Angeles to illicit lovers. Although Merv around most people kept his own life closeted, he was often indiscreet in revealing the love affairs of his friends.
Reportedly, Merv told Edie a secret that day, revealing that Rosemary Clooney had been using his New York apartment to have an affair with Robert Kennedy that had to be kept a dead secret since his brother was the president of the United States. Other sources claim that Merv revealed that secret to Elsa Maxwell, not Edie.
“Unlike Lemmon in the movie, I'm not trying to advance my career this way,” Merv allegedly said. “But I do believe in the secret life. Not all affairs were meant for public consumption.”
Johnny Riley later claimed that Merv allowed his secret hideaway to be used by a number of stars conducting offtherecord weekends. “I think he got a vicarious thrill out of it,” Johnny said. “I encountered Bob Kennedy and Rosemary on several occasions. Who am I to judge? I'm not exactly a candidate for sainthood myself.”
Merv liked Edie and sent his condolences to her when her husband, Ernie Kovacs, died a few months later in a car accident in 1962 following a party at Milton Berle's home where Kovacs had had too much to drink. Upon his death, Kovacs owed half a million dollars in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. When Merv had met Kovacs, the comedian told him that the American tax system was “unfair, unjust, and illegal. That's why I'm not going to give those fuckers a penny of my money.” Merv told him he was playing a dangerous game.
After the death of Kovacs, Edie refused to go along with her lawyers, who urged her to declare bankruptcy. She took every job she could until she'd paid every cent back to the IRS.
Years later, Merv, head of his own production company, saw a proposal for a film that seemed to have the endorsement of Edie. It was to be based on the life of Kovacs, and Merv understood that Edie wanted George Clooney to play her late husband. Merv passed on the script. He'd already seen a 1984 TV movie, Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter, starring Jeff Goldblum, and thought the movie was unsuccessful.
Elsa Maxwell, the short, stout American hostess and celebrity tattletale columnist, had also been cast in The Wonderful World of Toys. At the time Merv met her on set, he'd seen every episode of her controversial appearances on The Jack Paar Tonight Show. Merv was already telling friends like Peter Lawford and Rosemary Clooney that he was one day going to replace Paar as emcee of the show.
“When I do, Elsa is just the type of guest I'm seeking,” Merv said. “She's never boring, and she knows everybody's secrets—perhaps my own. Elsa's parties for royalty and high society figures of her day earned her the nickname of “the hostess with the mostest.”
Elsa spread gossip, but was also its victim. He knew that she was a lesbian and had actively pursued Maria Callas, who was repulsed by her. Even so, Callas appreciated Elsa's introduction to Aristotle Onassis. Elsa was quickly discarded as the Greek shipping tycoon and the Greekborn opera singer launched their own torrid and tormented affair.
Merv met Elsa at the end of her celebritystudded life. She was to die in New York on November 1, 1963, when she'd declared that “I didn't do bad at all—not bad for a short, fat, homely piano player from Keokuk, Iowa, with no money or background, who decided to become a legend and did just that.”
During the filming, Elsa invited Merv to a party at the Plaza Hotel. She already knew about Rosemary's affair with Robert Kennedy—in fact, she knew everybody's darkest secrets. She even confessed to Merv that she'd introduced Patricia Kennedy Lawford to the notorious Porfirio Rubirosa, and that they'd had an affair.
“My darling Rubi has affairs with anything that moves. When he gets drunk, he doesn't give a damn what kind of legs are open to him. He's going to be at my party tonight. I'll introduce you to him.”
The party was a starstudded event, but Merv had eyes only for Rubirosa. Stories about the size of his penis were legendary. Jerome Zerbe, the society photographer, claimed that the penis “looked like Yul Brynner in a black turtleneck sweater.” The tobacco heiress, Doris Duke, Rubirosa's third wife, told anyone who was interested, that “it is the most magnificent penis I have ever seen.”
From gossips, Merv already knew that Rubirosa's conquests had included Ava Gardner, Veronica Lake, Marilyn Monroe, Susan Hayward, and countless others, ranging from chambermaids to the upper crust of royalty and international society, even multi-millionaire male size queens with a preference for their own sex.
At the party, Merv noticed that Rubi was drinking heavily, and Merv knew that at some point the handsome, dashing stud would have to heed nature's call at a hotel urinal.
Celebrity hostess Elsa Maxwell:
The dyke from Keokuk
Merv waited for his chance, and followed the former diplomat of the Dominican Republic into the men's room, where he stationed himself at the urinal immediately next to Rubi's.
The playboy of the Western world sensed at once that Merv wanted him to put on a show. Rubi unbuttoned his trousers and let it all hang out. He was used to having men, even merely curious straight ones, follow him into urinals around the world. In fact, the legend of his penis was such that men, including Merv, called for a “Rubirosa” when they wanted the waiter to bring a giant peppermill to table.
Merv was not disappointed at Rubi's show, later telling Johnny that it looked like “a fat baby's arm dangling from his pants.”
Zipping up and shaking himself dry after his show, Rubi shook Merv's hand. “I would have shown it to you hard,” Rubi said, “but it takes so much blood to get it up that I would have passed out. And you would have passed out at the size of it. When it gets hard, I can balance a phone book on it. For my virility, I drink Japanese mushroom tea.”
Merv would learn a lot more about Rubi when he became a friend of Zsa Zsa Gabor, who had had a notorious affair with the playboy during his marriage to the Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton.
One morning in 1965 Merv picked up the newspaper to read that Rubi, at the age of fiftysix, had wrapped his sports car around a tree in Paris' Bois de Boulogne and was dead.
Paul Schone was sitting opposite Merv having his morning coffee.
“I don't think I could have handled it even if Rubi had given me the chance,” Merv said. “Six inches in circumference is a bit large even for my big mouth.”
Finally, the final star of The Wonderful World of Toys, Eva Gabor, came onto the set and immediately enchanted Merv. “She even invited me to a lunch of salami and champagne, which I later learned was her favorite snack,” Merv said.
Before meeting Eva, Merv had seen her hilarious TV appearances with Jack Paar. When Merv was first introduced to Eva, she was deep into her fourth marriage, this time to Richard Brown.
Playboy Porfirio Rubirosa:
The size queen's favorite
Years later, as Merv recalled his first luncheon with Eva, she rather cautiously told him virtually nothing about herself but spent most of the time complaining about her sister, Zsa Zsa, and her “eternal fascination with that awful George Sanders. He was a complete scoundrel through-out his entire marriage to Zsa Zsa.”
Eva went on to assert that her sister knew that George had been cheating on her throughout the course of their marriage. “Hedy Lamarr, Marilyn Monroe, Lucille Ball, you name her. The bastard even slept with Doris Duke. But Zsa Zsa got even with George by having an affair with Porfirio Rubirosa, Doris Duke's former husband. Zsa Zsa taunted George by telling him that Rubi was three times the man he was, at least in one department, and could go all night.”
Releasing additional details about her sister Zsa Zsa, Eva maintained that “Throughout the course of th
e marriage, George humiliated Zsa Zsa by insisting that he should have married a rich woman. But by marrying George, Zsa Zsa had relinquished the alimony that was coming in from her earlier marriage to Conrad Hilton. And then, as a means of taunting her, George had the cruel bad taste to tell everybody that when it came to women, ‘there is no greater aphrodisiac than money.’”
At the time of their first luncheon together, Merv was not sexually attracted to Eva, even though he found her fascinating and “incredibly beautiful.”
As Merv later recalled, when they parted that day she gave him a light kiss on the lips. “Someday when we're older,” she predicted, “we'll be great friends. We Hungarians are like gypsies. We know of such things. But, right now, both of us have too much living to do.”
The glamorous Eva Gabor:
“Too much living to do.”
Chapter Eight
As 1958 neared its end, Jack Paar was the king of latenight television.
Evoking Merv's own experiences in Hollywood, Paar's screen career had gone nowhere, despite having been cast in a role opposite Marilyn Monroe in Love Nest (1951). Paar's TV guests included, among others, a drunken Judy Garland making fun of Marlene Dietrich. Hungarian sexpot Zsa Zsa Gabor could also be trotted out for a laugh. But Paar could get serious too, as when, in 1960, he brought on both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, appearing separately, when they were running for president. Robert F. Kennedy had also granted Paar his first televised interview after the assassination of JFK in Dallas.
Merv would watch nearly every lineup of Paar's guests, using his methods as a role model. Frequently, Paar would book, as part of the same show, both serious authorities in their respective fields and guests who could be counted on for light amusement. What Merv chose not to imitate was Paar's unpredictable emotional style.
Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet Page 47