Merv's fans never knew what Arthur was going to say, especially when a politician came on. He never liked politicians. Merv might be interviewing Hubert Humphrey and Arthur would make some wisecrack on the side. The audience would burst into laughter. Merv was constantly having to remind his guest, “Don't mind Arthur.”
After some preliminary dialogue with Merv, Arthur would retreat to the far end of the sofa, which became known as “Treacher's Corner.” He didn't try too hard to be entertaining, feeling perhaps that he'd done his job. After all, his philosophy of acting was simple: “Say the words. Get the money. Go home.”
The most embarrassing incident occurred when Dan Dailey came onto the show. Arthur had known this singer/dancer/actor back in their vaudeville days. During one broadcast, Dan was telling Merv that shortly after he signed with MGM, Louis B. Mayer had cast him as a Nazi in The Mortal Storm in 1940. “Looking at the rushes, Mayer realized I was no Nazi. From then on, it was musicals for me.”
Just as Dan was telling Merv about his onscreen appearance with a then relatively unknown Marilyn Monroe in A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950), Arthur woke up and noticed Dan. “Hello, Dan,” Arthur said. “Are you still wearing dresses?” Merv's offscreen staff immediately cut to a commercial.
Unknown to the general public, Dan, a bisexual, often dressed in drag. He often “borrowed” (or stole, depending on how his actions were interpreted at the time) the gowns of his costar, Betty Grable, then showed them off at crossdressing parties throughout Hollywood.
***
379
In 1965, Roddy McDowall was appearing in a movie, Inside Daisy Clover, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. There was an uncredited part in it for a radio announcer, and Roddy called and asked if Merv would take it, pending the approval of the director. When approval was granted, Merv signed on.
Appearing in archive footage were some of the great stars of Hollywood. After the completion of his work, Merv said, “At least I can claim to have appeared in a movie with John Barrymore, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power. Alas, I had no love scenes with them.”
“Mickey Rooney was also in the film,” Roddy said jokingly.
“Forget it!” Merv said.
The trenchant and gritty film provided an account of Daisy's rise as a Hollywood star in the 1930s, but upon its release, and despite its allstar cast, it misfired. One reviewer condemned it for portraying “caricatures instead of people.”
***
“Guess what?” came a familiar early morning voice over the phone. “I just married Judy Garland.”
A sleepy Merv recognized the voice at the other end. It was Mark Herron, with whom he'd enjoyed a brief affair. “I don't know whether to congratulate you or sympathize with you,” Merv said. “Judy—and I know her well—is not your typical doting American housewife.”
Somewhat shocked at the news, Merv was eager for details. The decision to get married had been made in May of 1964 when Mark and Judy spent a week vacationing together in Hawaii. The press had described Mark as “Garland's new escort.”
Judy had married Mark in Las Vegas' Little Church of the West on November 14, 1965, at 1:30am. After the wedding, they'd attended Don Rickles' late, late night club act. As was his oftrepeated style, the comedian gave the newlyweds a terrific ribbing before the couple flew to San Francisco for their honeymoon. “Liza approves,” Mark assured Merv. “She calls us the Scott and Zelda of the 1960s.”
“If you've read anything about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, that's not exactly a compliment,” Merv said.
“Judy's going to promote my career,” Mark said. “We're going to star together in plays—dramas, not musicals. She wants us to do Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth.”
“I'm not sure that's a good idea,” Merv cautioned. “People might get the wrong idea. After all, that play is about an aging actress who takes up with a young gigolo.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “You've got a point there.”
As part of their honeymoon, Mark and Judy completed eight months together of hopping around the world. Their tour included stopovers in Hong Kong and an appearance in London, where Peter Allen became a hit with the critics as Judy's opening act.
Mark and his new bride finally landed back in the United States in 1965. Mark called Merv and wanted to get together for drinks and dinner. Merv gladly accepted and said he was bringing Hadley. “That's fine,” Mark said. “I'll bring my boyfriend as well.”
“Boyfriend?” Merv asked. “You mean, Judy won't be there?”
“She's flown to Los Angeles,” Mark said.
“Well, bring him on,” Merv said. “I'm eager to see who's captured your heart.”
At a secluded restaurant and bar in Greenwich Village, Hadley and Merv were introduced to Peter Allen. Both of them were mesmerized by this charismatic young Australian with ginger hair, an infectious exuberance, and a lopsided but very engaging smile.
Gradually, Merv pieced together the story of these complex relationships. While Judy was in a hospital in Hong Kong, Mark had gone to the Starlight Room of the Hong Kong Hilton to catch an act by “The Allen Brothers” from Australia. After one of the best shows he'd seen in many a year, Mark went backstage and introduced himself to Peter.
“We made love that night,” Mark said in front of Peter. “And we've been making love every night we can since then. London. And now New York.”
“Does Judy know about the affair?” Merv asked.
“I don't think so,” Peter said. “But there's one complication. Judy has introduced me to Liza, who's fallen in love with me.”
“Judy's had one gay husband already,” Merv said. “During their marriage, Vincente Minnelli spent more time getting fucked by Gene Kelly than he did fucking Judy. And now Mark. She could write a book on gay husbands.”
Other than wanting to show off his new boyfriend, Mark had a motive for introducing Peter to Merv. He wanted Peter to appear as a guest on Merv's show.
Peter filled Merv in on his background. Born in a small town in Australia, he'd begun his career in showbiz by entertaining rowdy crowds at the local pub. Later he'd teamed with Chris Bell, a guitarist and singer, the duo billing themselves as “The Allen Brothers.” In the spring of 1964, they'd toured Asia together and ended up in Hong Kong.
When Judy was released from the Chinese hospital, Mark took her to see Peter's act. She was so impressed that she booked him as her opening act in London.
Mark revealed to Merv that it was Judy who had introduced Peter to her daughter, Liza Minnelli. “Judy is encouraging Liza to go after Peter, even though she knows Peter is gay,” Mark said.
“I do make that rather obvious,” Peter said.
“Liberace should be your role model,” Merv advised Peter. “If he could be flamboyant and campy in the 50s, you can sure get away with that in the 70s.”
Ironically, Peter would eventually become a household word in America, but not as Merv's guest, but because of his appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.
***
Like Johnny Carson before him, Mike Douglas became Merv's TV rival, based on ratings, advertising revenues, and on the “celebrity quotient” of their guests. Merv was jealous when Mike became the first syndicated TV talk show host to win an Emmy.
Right from the beginning, and based partly on the similarity of their names, the public confused Merv and Mike. Their backgrounds were similar. Merv had been a big band singer with Freddy Martin, and Mike had been a big band singer with Kay Kyser. Many fans came up to Merv and said, “Please, Mr. Douglas, may I have your autograph?” Merv hated that.
“I was often confused with Merv Griffin,” Mike said. “We were both the same height, the same weight, and we were both Irish tenors.” Unlike Merv, however, Mike had had a recent hit recording with his 1966 version of “The Men in My Little Girl's Life.”
Merv found the song corny and was amused to hear that Elvis Presley had shot out the TV screen in his h
otel suite at the Las Vegas Hilton while watching The Mike Douglas Show. Later, Merv learned that Elvis did not hate Mike, but couldn't stand his cohost, Robert Goulet.
That other Irish tenor from the big band era:
Mike Douglas
As the battle for TV ratings between Merv and Mike intensified, the two men came to loathe each other. Sometimes they competed for the same guests, and Mike often won out, snaring everybody from Truman Capote to Richard Nixon. After Rosemary Clooney appeared on Mike's show, Merv called her. “How could you do that to me, you Benedict Arnold?”
Zsa Zsa Gabor appeared on both shows. After she made a vulgar insult to Morey Amsterdam on The Mike Douglas Show, Mike's shows were no longer taped live. Mike's highest ratings were achieved when John Lennon and Yoko Ono cohosted the show with him. Reaching six million viewers every day, he saw his salary rise to $500,000 a year.
Much to Merv's regret, Mike extracted unusual performances on air from his guests, getting Barry Goldwater to play the trombone or golf prodigy Tiger Woods to putt before cameras. Both Barbra Streisand and Joan Crawford each agreed to cohost Mike's show for a whole week. Mike even persuaded Judy Garland to sing “Over the Rainbow” when she was reluctant to perform that song any more.
On looking back at TV programming in the mid60s, Merv said, “It was a great time for a guy like me to have a talk show. The whole nation was having a debate over which direction to take. Hippies everywhere battling the Establishment. An unpopular war in Vietnam. Even religion itself had come under assault.”
Privately, Merv told Hadley, “If you ever wondered how that studly jock on your football team was hung, you've got a chance now. Nudity's everywhere. Somewhere, some place he's taking off his clothes and letting his thing cool in the breeze.”
When some rightwingers attacked Merv for having Communistic leanings, he proclaimed, “I've arrived! I loved it. It meant I was reaching them, that the show wasn't just a piece of fluff. Of course, I had controversial guests, but some of them—most of them—in fact, were booked just for the fun of it, including my very first guest, Miss Carol Channing.”
***
Saucereyed and scratchy in voice, Carol Channing, in Merv's view, was “a space cadet but always good for a laugh.” He'd first seen her playing Lorelei Lee in the original stage version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1949, eventually losing the movie role to Marilyn Monroe as she'd also lose the title role in Hello, Dolly! to Barbra Streisand.
As Merv's first guest, Carol came across as a largerthanlife personality, just as he expected her to. Privately, he knew that the most famous blonde on Broadway was part African-American on her father's side. She wasn't blonde at all but wore a wig, as she was allergic to bleach.
Carol claimed that she'd first met Merv when he sang at Lowell High School in San Francisco, although somehow the years don't seem to match up here. If Merv sang at her high school, he would have been thirteen years old. Carol was born in 1921, Merv in 1925. She also claimed that she became “fast friends” with Merv in New York, which was a bit of an exaggeration.
Merv did come to her rescue when she was starring in Hello, Dolly! at the St. James Theater on 44th Street and he was a few buildings away at the Little Theater broadcasting his show.
When there was a power breakdown at Con Edison, and the St. James went black, Merv ordered his crew to snake a series of extension cables over to Carol's stage. The Little Theater was on a different electrical system than the St. James.
“The airconditioning went off, and it was in the middle of summer—terribly hot,” Carol said. “Merv came over with a huge box of Kleenex and went up and down the aisles giving everyone a tissue so they could mop up the sweat. Merv stayed through the whole performance and told the crew exactly where to focus the lights because he'd seen the show so many times. Oh, I loved him. Everybody did!”
Merv didn't just stick to Broadway legends like Carol, or even to movie stars. He brought back his “regulars” like Woody Allen, but he also searched for new talents, including Dick Cavett, his future latenight rival. “If I knew that Cavett and I would one day compete for the same audience, I wouldn't have brought him on at all,” Merv said. “But how can you predict who will be tomorrow's competition?”
When Merv, or others, tried to get Cavett to tell them, “What is Johnny Carson really like?” he deflected the queries with humor. “Just because everybody says he is a drugaddicted, sadistic, commie sex pervert, he never showed me that side of himself. He is cold. One day he was napping in the nude in his dressing room, and I shoved a thermometer up his ass and the mercury froze.”
Word spread quickly across Broadway that Merv was showcasing new talent. “Dozens of performers tried every gimmick in the book to get on my show,” Merv said. “One stripper wanted to come on with a python. Only a few got booked, and years later I was proud to have discovered so many of them. Great talents.”
George Carlin and Richard Pryor were littleknown standup comics performing in dives in Greenwich Village when Merv discovered them in 1965. Merv signed both of them to multishow contracts.
Carlin made successful appearances on Merv's show, beginning in 1965. The astringent standup comedian was the natural heir to Lenny Bruce. Network “suits” were worried, claiming he “assaulted the barricades of censorship,” but Merv loved his indignant counterculture humor, and always laughed. In all, Carlin made 29 appearances on Merv's shows.
“Want to hear an oxymoron?” Carlin asked the audience. “Military intelligence.”
Before every performance, Carlin faithfully promised Merv he would not use his infamous schtick about “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”
“By the way, George, what are those words again?” Merv often asked.
Carlin dutifully replied, “Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits.”
Richard Pryor, whom Merv had known for years, had become a friend by the time he appeared on the show. Merv knew a lot about this controversial African/American actor/comedian, the son of a prostitute who was reared in his grandmother's brothel. Richard had survived child molestation—once at the age of six by a teenage neighbor and later by his local priest.
“Our own little Richie Pryor,” Merv would tell his audience as he brought on the gangly, wideeyed kid from Peoria. Merv sometimes referred to him as “a comic genius.”
Sadly, Merv realized early in their relationship that Richard was struggling with drug addiction. When Merv went to see him portray a drugaddicted piano player in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Merv defined it as type casting.
As the years went by, Merv witnessed Richard sinking deeper into drug addiction. In the early 80s, Merv heard that Richard had attempted to commit suicide after freebasing cocaine. Richard's managers tried to make it seem like an accident, but according to several reports, Richard had very clearly tried to kill himself by setting himself on fire.
Merv always remembered Richard's enigmatic statement: “It's been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white—and I refused.” He once told Merv, “I'm a survivor with no pity, and that got me through eight marriages—twice to the same woman.” He told Merv's audience that he had served in the U.S. Army but spent “most of that gig in the brig.” Along with some other blacks, he became annoyed when a white soldier seemed “a bit too amused” at the racially charged sections of Imitation of Life, the Lana Turner movie. Richard and three other black soldiers beat up the white soldier and stabbed him. Fortunately, the beating and stabbing weren't fatal.
Three of Merv's favorites: Carol Channing (center), big-mouthed, saucer-eyed, and spacy.
Merv referred to George Carlin (left) and Richard Pryor (right) as
the most vulgar acts in show business.
Merv liked Richard before he developed his raw and racially provocative style. When he took his nephew to see Pryor perform in a theater in Baltimore, Merv later said, “I was shocked. The filthiest routine I've ever heard in my life.”
Richard Zo
glin, in an appraisal of Merv's career as a TV talkshow host, accurately summed it up. “Your ultimate goal was to land on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. But for many upandcomers who weren't yet on Carson's radar, the first TV stop was the friendlier, more accessible, less highpressure showcase that Merv provided. His show didn't have the cachet or the clout of Carson's. But Merv and his producers were smart enough to realize that to compete they had to take more chances with guys like George Carlin or Richard Pryor.”
The tunnel-mouthed comedienne, Jo Anne Worley, stood tall with piledon jetblack hair and had Merv's audiences laughing long before she wowed them on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968). Merv found the brassy, indefatigable performer a delight both before and off the camera. He knew that she'd been Carol Channing's standin for Hello, Dolly! But as Jo Anne told Merv, “Channing is known for never missing a performance.”
“I have this big mouth,” she told Merv, “and I've always had it. When I sang in the church choir, I only mouthed the words so I wouldn't drown everybody else out.”
Merv had discovered Jo Anne when she created her own nightclub act in Greenwich Village. He was so impressed with her talents that she became a regular on his show, eventually making two hundred appearances.
She later recalled, “I became part of Merv's family, you know, his onair family of people.”
Reni Santoni, an American actor of French and Spanish heritage, started his career as a comedy writer, and frequently entertained and amused guests on Merv's show. In 1967, he was on the dawn of his breakthrough role in Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing. Merv predicted “big things,” for Reni, but he never became a top star, even though he played memorable roles in such films as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry in 1971 or Howard Stern's Private Parts in 1987.
Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet Page 52