Merv (16 page)

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I
am
going to tell you who I think my most interesting guest was. I don’t need a job in television anymore, so I can say whatever the hell I want, right? God, I’m starting to feel like Rosie O’Donnell…

Okay,
okay
. It was Orson Welles.

What an awesome character. The first time we ever booked him, in 1976, my staff worked for two weeks to prepare detailed questions about everything from the Mercury Theater radio broadcast of
War of the Worlds
that caused a nationwide panic, to
Citizen Kane
, which he co-wrote, directed, and starred in at the unbelievable age of twenty-six.

Paul Solomon was the person responsible for researching this voluminous amount of material, as well as for developing questions about Welles’s use of Marlene Dietrich in his magic act (he sawed her in half) and his tempestuous marriage to Rita Hayworth.

On the day of the taping, Paul called Orson to conduct the standard pre-interview done with every guest on every talk show. It isn’t a rehearsal, but it gives the guest a sense of the topics to be covered and it’s also a chance for him to volunteer good stories that the staff might have missed.

Paul was excited to speak with the great Mr. Welles, about whom he’d become something of an expert in the preceding weeks. He began by telling Orson about some of the film clips that he’d found to use during the ninety-minute show (he was to be my sole guest).

Before Paul Solomon could even say “rosebud,” Orson exploded, his stentorian voice booming through the phone, forcing Paul to hold the receiver away from his ear.

“Fuck you! Fuck You!
Fuck
you! No goddamned trips down Memory Lane!” And he slammed down the phone.

Poor Paul. He broke the news to Bob Murphy, my producer. Bob is my oldest friend; we first met in sixth grade. Bob joined the marines after high school and was sent to the Pacific, where he served with distinction during World War II.

After the war, Bob graduated from the University of San Francisco and took a job in the real estate business. Although he was a success in real estate, I’d always had it in the back of my mind that as soon as the opportunity arose, I would ask him to come work with me.

That was finally possible in the mid-sixties when I was developing game shows in New York. I called Bob, who was going through a rough divorce at the time, and offered him a job. He accepted and moved east with only a suitcase.

From the time he started with me (on
Jeopardy!
), Bob held almost every position in my company, including interviewer, booker, associate producer, and, finally, producer on
The Merv Griffin Show
. The obvious assumption is that he got those jobs because he was my oldest friend. Well, maybe he got in the door because of that, but the truth is that Bob earned each promotion through talent, hard work, and a marvelous ability to win the respect and affection of everyone he worked with. To this day, I’ve never heard a negative word spoken about him by anybody. And how about this: in more than thirty years of working closely together, we never had a single fight. Not one. That has to be some kind of record.

Two hours before the cameras would start to roll, Bob came into my office and explained the dismal state of affairs. The good news was that we had Orson Welles for ninety minutes. The bad news was that we had nothing to talk about.

I don’t mean to sound immodest (well, maybe just a little), but this is exactly the kind of situation I thrive on. Bob Murphy used to get terribly frustrated with me when a show would go exactly like we’d planned and afterward I would complain to him about how bored I’d been.

“You’re just not happy unless you have something to fix, are you, chief?” Bob would say this with just a hint of sarcasm. But he was right.

On that first night with Orson, I had to throw away all my notes and wing it. I asked him about everything under the sun—politics, current events, art, cinema (other than his own work), literature, travel—and it was an extraordinary interview. I quickly discovered that he was conversant on any topic I could think of. We developed an immediate rapport that only deepened over time.

Briefly alluding to his childhood, Orson did reveal something to me in our first conversation that I’ve thought a lot about over the years.

“I was very lucky,” he told me, “because I had parents who took me to the theater when I could hardly sit on a lap. As a child I had an adult vocabulary because I stayed up late at night and listened to grown-ups. You see, I was a kind of third-rate musical wunderkind, playing piano and violin, and I conducted too.”

Orson and I had several things in common that contributed to our becoming friends. Each of us was the younger child, with only one older sibling (he had a brother, Richard). We were both piano prodigies at a very early age, which required that we spend a lot of time entertaining and impressing adults. I think there’s something about the experience of being a child in an adult environment that changes you fundamentally—not always for the better. There’s a certain loneliness that develops; a sense that you don’t quite belong in either world. This was certainly true of many child actors. Look at Judy Garland or Mickey Rooney.

Ultimately, I think that both Orson and I were fortunate to have grown up the way we did. Yet only someone who’s gone through it himself can really understand what it’s like. Although we were different in so many ways, I believe that our friendship grew, in no small part, out of our similarities.

Over the course of the next nine years I did close to fifty interviews with Orson, each one more fascinating than the last.

I enjoyed our conversations so much that I broke my cardinal rule about never socializing with a guest. One day I met Orson for lunch at Ma Maison, where he dined daily on a little piece of grilled sole. On that diet, I couldn’t understand how he had remained so overweight. I’d always thought that there were very few calories in fish.

On my way back from lunch, I passed by Pink’s hot dog restaurant, an old Hollywood landmark. Wait a minute, I thought to myself. Could that be
Orson’s
car parked out front? We’d only finished lunch twenty minutes before. Slowing down to get a better look, I saw Orson’s chauffeur emerge carrying a tray piled high with at least a dozen hot dogs. He was headed straight for the car.

At least now I could stop blaming the fish…

One of my favorite moments with Orson was the time that I invited his old Mercury Theater collaborator John Houseman to appear with him as a guest. At this late stage in his career, Houseman, a distinguished film and theater actor, had recently become familiar to an entirely new audience as the imperious law professor on the television series
The Paper Chase
.

Bringing them together was an extremely risky thing to do, because after a highly public row in a London restaurant, Welles and Houseman, once close friends, hadn’t even
spoken
in twenty-three years. By this point, I felt secure enough in my friendship with Orson to take the chance that it would all work out. And, what the hell, if they started shouting at each other on camera, it would make for an
interesting
show.

I needn’t have worried. Orson positioned himself offstage and when it came time for Houseman’s introduction (he was the first guest; we’d kept them separated before the show, so they still hadn’t seen each other), he heard his old friend’s voice describe him glowingly as “brilliant, talented, and inspiring.” Both men walked out at the same time from opposite sides of the stage. Meeting in the middle, they embraced each other warmly and the show took off from there.

Although we touched on their estrangement during the conversation, the significance of their rapprochement was lost on most of the audience. But not on me. I looked over at Orson several times during the taping and I could tell that he was truly enjoying himself. Perhaps there would now be an exception to the rule—“no trips down Memory Lane” unless accompanied by an old and very dear friend.

Sadly, that on-camera reunion with Houseman was a one-time only event. They never spoke again.

My final interview with Orson Welles was taped on October 8, 1985. Shortly before the show, he rapped on my dressing room door with his cane. The door was at the bottom of a flight of stairs leading up to the dressing room itself. Orson didn’t want to go up the stairs, because by this time he had terrible varicose veins and could barely walk. So I came downstairs and he was standing there, looking quite ill.

Although I was greatly concerned by his haggard appearance, I tried not to let on how worried I was.

“Hi, Orson. What’s up?”

He said, “Tonight, I feel like talking.”

“I’m sorry. What exactly have we been
doing
all this time?” I was joking, but when I looked into his eyes, I could tell that he wasn’t. He wasn’t mad. In fact, just the opposite.

“Merv, I mean it. I feel expansive tonight. You know all those silly, gossipy little questions you’ve been trying to ask me for years about Rita and Marlene? Well, go ahead and ask them. Ask me anything you want.”

I was taken aback. “
Anything
I want? Even about the making of
Citizen Kane
?” This was the most taboo subject of all.

“Ask me.” And he turned and walked slowly toward the Green Room.

It was far and away the most candid discussion we ever had. I’m convinced that it was the most honest and insightful interview he ever gave.

We talked about everything and everyone—Rita Hayworth (“one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived”), Marlene Dietrich (“the most loyal friend that anyone could ever ask for”),
Citizen Kane, War of the Worlds, The Magnificent Ambersons
—no subject was off limits.

At one point in the interview, we somehow got onto the subject of birthdays. Orson had turned seventy earlier that year and I asked him about age.

For the first time that night, he sounded tired. “De Gaulle, of course, said the truth about it. Old age is a shipwreck.”

“But you
feel
wonderful, don’t you?” It was more than just a polite question.

“Oh
sure
.” And Orson rolled his eyes skyward.

Moments later, the rogue in him returned and he was back on the subject of birthdays: “I used to pretend it was my birthday whenever I took a girl out to dinner. And then I’d have the waiter bring a cake in, and sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ I’d use that as an excuse to extend the evening. One night, a friend of mine, Ty Power, God rest him, whose birthday was on May 5th, one day before mine—saw a waiter singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me while I sat next to a pretty girl. But it was
February
. I got the dirtiest look I’ve ever had in my life.”

The audience howled and I remember thinking, Why did it take us fifty shows before we got to do
this?

Orson went home right after the show. Two hours later he died.

I’ve looked at that tape so many times. I honestly believe that when I asked him how he felt and Orson rolled his eyes skyward, God chose that moment to say, “Time to come home.”

I
’d known President and Mrs. Reagan since their days in Hollywood. Ronnie (as I used to call him back in the days when that was allowed) and I had crossed paths many times, although we didn’t become close friends until after he and Nancy appeared on my show while he was Governor of California.

In the spring of 1983, I visited them in the White House for the first time. It was on a Saturday, so they were in their private quarters when I arrived shortly after 11:00 A.M. I rode up the tiny elevator that went directly to the residence. Although it wasn’t my first time inside the White House (I’d attended a state dinner during the Ford administration), this would be the first time that I’d ever seen the First Family’s private living quarters.

When the elevator door opened, they were both waiting there to greet me. Since we would be having lunch in the residence, they were dressed informally in California ranch-style clothes.

Uncertain of the protocol, I’d chosen to wear my best dark suit. When I saw how casually they were attired, I blurted out, “Oh, that’s just great. Here I am dressed like Herbert Hoover and you two look like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.”

I got them laughing right off the bat, which I was hoping to do. I had arrived on a very difficult day. Later that afternoon they would travel out to Andrews Air Force Base for the arrival of the plane bearing the bodies of sixteen Americans who had been killed in the bombing of our embassy in Beirut.

While the president was momentarily busy elsewhere, Nancy took me on a brief tour of the presidential residence. We looked into each of the historic rooms, finally stopping at a small bedroom that she wanted to show me. Nancy had been redoing all the bathrooms, putting in new copper piping because the old plumbing was so corroded.

So there we were—the First Lady of the United States (or FLOTUS as she was referred to in the White House schedule) and me—down on our hands and knees under the sink in this little bathroom. I suddenly realized that somebody else was in the room. When I looked up, I saw that it was the president, standing in the doorway with an amused look on his face, as if to say, “What are you two up to
now?”