Merv (14 page)

Tickets for a taping of
The Merv Griffin Show
were among the toughest to get in town. People from all over the country planned their vacations to coincide with the weeks we were at Caesars.

The demand for tickets was so great that on the day of the show, the line would start at the front door, wend its way around the entire casino floor, and then move outside past the swimming pool. On any given day there were literally thousands of people trying to get in, many of whom had to be turned away when we ran out of seats. The hotel had to hire extra security to protect the slot machines and guard against fights breaking out. It was some kind of scene.

Each morning our crew came in at 4:00
A.M.
in order to install a specially constructed ramp that extended from the stage out into the house. During the show, I used it to get closer to the huge audience.

Okay, now that I’ve given you the backstory, here’s what happened. On this particular show, my guests were those two Las Vegas icons, Siegfried & Roy. They’d been on before and their tiger act was always a big hit with my audience.

The final part of Siegfried & Roy’s act involved a beautiful Bengal. When it was over, they left the stage to great applause and I cut to a commercial. During the brief break, I walked out on the ramp and began to chat with the audience. Offstage, just out of my field of vision, the tiger somehow managed to get away from his handler. The audience saw it before I did. There was a collective intake of breath and, as I turned to look, I saw the tiger trotting toward me. Before I could move, this sleek, eight-hundred-pound animal was right beside me. To my great relief (sort of), he didn’t leap for my throat or into the audience.

What he
did
do was sit right down on my foot.

I kept talking, quietly. “Now ladies and gentlemen, if I were you I wouldn’t make any sudden moves. Everything is going to be okay. He’s a trained animal. He just likes me.” There was a brief murmur of nervous laughter, then the packed house fell silent again.

On the other hand, there was a
lot
of commotion behind me. I could hear Siegfried and Roy backstage, screaming German epithets at the handler. It sounded like a bad episode of
Hogan’s Heroes
. At the same time, the stalwart members of my band suddenly remembered something very important they all had to do. In my dressing room. With the door locked.

The women sitting closest to the stage had the strangest reaction. They immediately grabbed their purses off the edge of the ramp. Gosh, that’s the
first
thing a tiger will go for—the credit cards.

Meanwhile, the Bengal seemed to have fixed his gaze on a little girl who was seated only a few feet away from us.

Oh God, I thought. I’ve got to get his attention back on me.

I don’t know how I was able to come up with it right at that moment, but I suddenly recalled something that Tippi Hedren once told me about tigers.

Tippi (Melanie Griffith’s mother, for those problem spellers who think
The Birds
was David Crosby’s first band) has been deeply involved for a long time in rescuing tigers and other jungle cats from abusive situations. To this day she still maintains her home on the property of an animal reserve in Southern California.

Once, as a guest on my show, Tippi brought with her a very young tiger cub who played adorably on top of my desk. She decided on the spot to name him Merv.

Going for the laugh, I asked her, “What will you do if Merv ever gets mad at you?”

Tippi said, “Oofa.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oofa. O-O-F-A. It’s a sound that’s very soothing to tigers.”

We’d soon see if Tippi was right. Softly, I spoke the magic word into the microphone.

“Oofa.”

Still sitting on my foot, the tiger looked around, wondering where the sound was coming from.

“Oofa,” I repeated. “Oofa, oofa, oofa.”

The audience had no clue what I was doing. But the tiger did. By now, he’d figured out that I was talking to him, and he was staring up at me with what I could only hope was a friendly expression. At least he was no longer looking at the little girl.

“Oofa.”

He began to purr.

“Oofa. Oofa.”

The handler was next to us now. Very gently, he got my new friend up off my foot and led him backstage.

I looked out at the audience. You could feel the tension leaking out of the room, like a balloon slowly deflating.

I held the microphone up. There was only one thing left to say.

“Oofa.”

“N
ow
it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”

Those were the last public words spoken by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, shortly before his assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, early on the morning of June 5, 1968.

My dear friend Rosemary Clooney had spent months campaigning around the country for Kennedy, as his presidential campaign moved toward California and its crucial winner-take-all primary election.

On that night, she was in Los Angeles to celebrate Kennedy’s anticipated victory along with several thousand other supporters gathered in the second-floor Embassy Room of the Ambassador.

Rosie arrived early that evening, accompanied by two of her five children. The Embassy Room was packed to capacity; a second room had to be opened up on the floor below to handle the throngs of people who couldn’t fit inside. At one point during the evening, as the election returns trickled in from around the state, Rosie went down to the overflow room and sang a few songs to pacify the anxious crowd.

Shortly before midnight, Robert Kennedy took the stage to claim victory. Rosie and her kids were in a roped-off VIP area adjacent to the stage. Although Kennedy was speaking less than hundred feet away, they had to watch him on a television monitor because the podium was around a corner, just out of their line of sight. A red carpet had been laid down at the base of the stairs, so that Kennedy would pass through the VIP area when he exited the stage. The plan was for him to continue downstairs to thank his supporters in the overflow room.

It never happened. When he finished speaking, someone said, “This way, Senator,” and Kennedy was led off from the opposite side of the stage to meet with reporters in a nearby banquet room. That room could be reached by cutting through the hotel kitchen.

Unaware of this detour, Rosie continued to wait with her young son and daughter in the crowded VIP area, expecting Kennedy to pass by at any moment.

Suddenly, a woman in the ballroom climbed up on a chair and began screaming, “Blood! Blood!” Pandemonium broke out as people ran wildly toward the exits. Rosie clutched her two children, then dropped to her knees in tearful prayer. Moments later, her worst fears were confirmed: Kennedy had been shot. He died twenty-six hours later.

Like much of the nation, Rosemary Clooney had tremendous difficulty coming to terms with the death of Robert Kennedy. But for Rosie, the loss was so devastating that she found herself unable to recover from it. She began drinking and using drugs in order to dull the pain. A few months later, she had to be hospitalized for what we euphemistically used to call “exhaustion.” The truth was that Rosie fell apart completely. She was unable to perform and only barely able to function.

Earlier that year I’d interviewed Bobby Kennedy and I understood Rosie’s anguish. Of all the political figures I had ever met, he struck me as the most sincere. I found him to be an extraordinarily compassionate man who seemed to follow his conscience instead of the polls.

After Rosie’s release from the hospital, she isolated herself from her friends. After several
years
of trying to see her and being rebuffed, I’d lost patience with the situation. I kept calling her home until I finally got her on the phone.

“What the hell are you
doing
, Rosie?” I was yelling. “Are you going to sit in that house and mope for the rest of your life?”

Surprised by my tone (in twenty years of friendship, she’d never heard me raise my voice), Rosie said, “That’s not fair, Merv.”

I didn’t back down. “It
is
fair, Rosie. Somebody’s got to tell you this. You’ve got to get off your ass and get out of that house.”

“Merv, I don’t know…” She was wavering.

“Come on, Rosie. Do my show. I promise you, you’ll be great.”

A few weeks later, she finally agreed. She came on with songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman and was predictably sensational. Fittingly, she sang their hauntingly beautiful “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” The audience went wild, showering her with love and applause.

Rosie told me that because of that one appearance, she gained the strength to start singing in public again. Not long after that, Bing Crosby asked her to join him on tour.

I was traveling in Europe earlier this year when I got word that Rosie had succumbed to lung cancer. The news hit me hard. During the two months I was abroad I had stayed in frequent contact with her husband, Dante, who told me the doctors believed that she would pull through. What a loss. Rosie was one of the great ladies of show business and an even greater lady in life. I will miss her deeply.

In addition to providing Rosemary Clooney with the opportunity to end her self-imposed retirement, my show in the seventies often made news for other reasons. Spiro Agnew gave me his first in-depth interview after resigning the vice presidency. Watergate Judge John J. Sirica chose my show as his first posttrial forum only because his daughter was a big fan of mine. I brought the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi into the living rooms of millions of Americans for the first time. His appearance generated over one hundred thousand calls and resulted in forty thousand new practitioners of Transcendental Meditation (including yours truly).

At the same time, I continued to develop new programs through my production company. By 1975,
Jeopardy!
was in its eleventh year on NBC and still going strong. But the new head of NBC’s daytime programming, a hard-driving woman named Lin Bolen (on whom Faye Dunaway supposedly based her portrayal of a ruthless television executive in the movie
Network
), decided to move
Jeopardy!
out of its noontime slot, where it had been enormously successful for most of its run.

Although I had many bitter fights with this difficult woman, I developed a grudging respect for her talent and determination. She wanted to put her own stamp on NBC’s daytime lineup, and if that meant throwing out a few babies along with the bathwater, well so be it.

Bolen first moved
Jeopardy!
to the morning, immediately costing us the college students who had been our most loyal viewers. Even in a weaker time slot, it still managed to beat its chief competition,
The $10,000 Pyramid
on CBS. Then she shifted it again, this time to the afternoon slot opposite
Let’s Make a Deal
and
As the World Turns
. Soon after this last move,
Jeopardy!
was canceled, allegedly for “low ratings.” This is the programming equivalent of killing your parents and then complaining about being an orphan.

I subsequently learned that Bolen’s real goal was to get rid of Art Fleming. She believed that he was too old to attract young female viewers and she knew that I wouldn’t replace him. Her only alternative was to pull the rug out from under the show itself.

After that, you’d think I would have had enough of game shows…

Wheel of Fortune
came about as the result of a game that my sister and I used to play in the back of the car during those endless summer vacations that kids never want to go on. My parents would take us all the way to the Carlsbad Caverns to see the bats fly out or something equally exciting. There was no air conditioning in those days; people would hang a bag of water out in front of the car in order to keep cool. It was
so
hot driving through the desert, and we’d be sitting in the back, bored out of our minds.

To pass the time, we used to play a game called Hangman (kind of a violent name, when you stop to think about it) where one person selects a word or name. Blanks corresponding to the number of letters in the word are drawn on a sheet of paper, and if the other person doesn’t guess the right letter, he has to sketch in various body parts, starting with the head. The object is to fill in all the blanks before getting “hanged.” Barbara and I would usually guess the names of movie stars—“Franchot Tone” was a particularly good one.

One day during a production meeting in the mid-seventies, I told my staff about my childhood memories of playing Hangman. They all thought it had great potential as a game show, but that it needed a gimmick or “hook” in order to succeed on television.

That’s when I remembered the wheel.

When I was a kid our church had an annual bazaar and there was always a wheel that spun around with prizes written on the spokes. If you were lucky enough to hold a ticket with the right number on it, you won. During all those years that I did
The Merv Griffin Show
at Caesars Palace, surrounded by blackjack and crap tables, it was always the big spinning wheel that I was drawn to. It drove me crazy. I could never win on it, but I still loved to play.

Wanting to find out everything that I could about how the casino wheels operated, I sent the president of Merv Griffin Enterprises, Murray Schwartz, to Las Vegas. There I arranged for him to meet with a powerful Caesars Palace executive named Ash Resnick.

Ash was a tough customer; you didn’t mess with him. He insisted on collecting all the casino’s markers (debts) personally—
render unto Caesars what is owed
—and he never returned empty-handed. His car had been machine-gunned more than once; luckily for him, never while he was in it. Acid had been poured in his swimming pool. Like most of the top Caesars Palace executives, Ash owned a remote control device that allowed him to start his car in the morning from a safe distance away.

Let’s just say Ash didn’t have a lot of friends.

Strangely enough, I was one of them. He used to come see my show when I was taping at Caesars, and we’d swap stories about the old days, when Vegas was a wide-open town run by men named Siegel, Lansky, and Luciano. I found him to be a colorful and likable character. On the other hand,
I
didn’t owe him any money.

Murray asked Ash lots of questions about the big gaming wheels—how they were constructed, how often the various numbers hit, how fast the wheel spun—everything he could think of. Then he brought all that information back to our production staff. In late 1974, that data, in combination with the basic rules of Hangman, led to the invention of the
Wheel
.

As the host for the pilot (which had the awful working title of
Shopper’s Bazaar
), we used Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, the comb-carrying teen idol from the old
77 Sunset Strip
TV series of the early sixties.

It’s funny how history—and television—has a way of repeating itself. Remember when NBC canceled the original
Merv Griffin Show
and gave me a deal to produce
Word for Word
as a consolation prize? Well, it was happening again.
Jeopardy!
went off NBC after eleven years and 2,753 episodes on Friday, January 3, 1975.
Wheel of Fortune
made its debut the following Monday.

The first host of
Wheel of Fortune
was Chuck Woolery, who remained with the show for six seasons, from 1975 to 1981. The original “letter-turner” was a young woman named Susan Stafford, whose previous television experience was as the co-host of a local talk show in Los Angeles.

Both Chuck and Susie did a fine job, and
Wheel
did well enough on NBC, although it never approached the kind of ratings success that
Jeopardy!
achieved in its heyday.

In 1981, Chuck decided to leave
Wheel of Fortune
, en route to making his
Love Connection
. The following year, Susie Stafford left show business entirely, choosing instead to do wonderful work as a caregiver for cancer patients.

My first job was to find a new host. And I thought I knew the perfect guy.

Pat Sajak did the weather on KNBC, the NBC station in Los Angeles. At that point, Pat’s only television experience was as a weatherman, with four years at KNBC and five more at his previous job with a Nashville station.

Pat’s sense of humor was…well,
odd
. I used to watch him every day, just to see what he’d do next. Because the weather was always the same in L.A.—74 degrees and sunny—Pat figured that he had to do some unusual things to keep people’s attention. I remember once he came out wearing a small bandage on his right cheek. He went over to the weather board, did the forecast—
74 degrees and sunny
—and then cut to a commercial. When they came back on, he was wearing the bandage on the other cheek. I don’t know how many people caught it, but
I
did. He was hilarious.

So I brought him into NBC. The new vice president of daytime programming (who’d replaced Lin Bolen) said, “You’ve got to be kidding. He’s a weatherman, for Christ sake. And not even a
network
weatherman. He’s
local
.” He said the word “local” with absolute contempt in his voice.

I just sat there and let him rant. By now I was used to it at the network.

“No way, Merv. He’s not acceptable to us. Find someone else.”