Merv (26 page)

“Mama,” she said, demurely.

When she achieved major stardom with the hit TV series
Green Acres
, I invited Eva and her co-star, Eddie Albert, to come on together. As it happened, one of the other guests on the panel was Cleveland Amory, then the television critic for
TV Guide
. Amory hated
Green Acres
, and had said so in print. Eva and Eddie decided to give him their own review, telling Amory exactly what they thought of
him
.

Then there was the time Eva took questions from my audience. Not surprisingly, most of them were about romance or marriage. One woman asked her if it was proper to keep the ring after a broken engagement.

“No, darling, you should always give back the ring. But keep the stone.”

My favorite Eva appearance happened when I was still doing my CBS show in New York. Eva was backstage, preparing to make her entrance, when the guy from Standards and Practices stopped her and insisted that she change into a less revealing dress. Her bosom, he said, was much too visible. She looked at him disdainfully, as though he were a peeping Tom, staring at her through a keyhole. Interposing himself between Eva and the stage, the insistent censor refused to let her go on. Eva ducked around him after she heard me introduce her. But before she could make it through the curtains, he reached in and shoved a handkerchief into her décolletage.

Of course, I saw none of this when it was happening, but as soon as she made her entrance, I said, on the air, “What’s the matter with you?” A white cloth was sticking up from her breasts.

“It was that censor man, darling, he shtuffed this in me. He doesn’t like my bosoms.”

“That fool,” I said, winking at the audience. Then I added, “Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. Just take it out.”

She was happy to comply and we did the whole interview with her cleavage uncovered. Truth to tell, the dress wasn’t nearly as revealing as others I’d seen her wear off-camera. Then I insisted she remain on the couch for the rest of the program, knowing that CBS would be helpless to edit her out of the entire show.

Eva and I got to be really good friends after her thirteen-year marriage to entrepreneur Richard Brown ended in 1973. That same year she met and married aviation executive Frank Jameson, who became her fifth and final husband.

In 1979, she called me out of the blue and asked, “Darling, do you do that show every day?”

I said, “Yes, I do it every day. Why?”

“Well my friends Al Rockwell [Willard Rockwell, Jr., chairman of the board of Rockwell International] and his wife, Constance, are going to fly all over Asia, and they’ve invited Frank and me. I told them that I wanted to invite you too.”

They would be hop-scotching across Asia, stopping in the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, all places I’d never seen before. Since this was an important business trip for Rockwell, a large group of the company’s executives had to be included. This necessitated using a converted 727, thus providing plenty of additional room for Eva and Frank (and possibly me) to tag along.

I thought, What the hell? You only live once. I arranged my taping schedule so I could get away, then I called Eva back and told her I was going.

“Darling, that is wonderful! These are
such
boring trips. We will pep it up together.”

It was an amazing trip and if I were to give you all the details, it would fill an entire chapter. Let me tell you just one story that occurred on the very first leg of the trip, when we stopped to refuel on one of the Midway Islands in the Pacific.

Ever since the famous battle that took place there during World War II, the Midway Islands had served as a small naval outpost. The few thousand people living on Eastern, Sand, and Spit Islands (the three atolls collectively known as the Midways) are greatly outnumbered by the vast number of exotic birds, which are their chief residents. Indeed, some years after we landed there, the birds accomplished what the empire of Japan could not, and the navy finally surrendered. The Midways are now exclusively a wildlife preserve.

The most visible and certainly the most unusual bird living on the Midway Islands was the Laysan Albatross, commonly know as the gooney bird. Let me tell you, it’s easy to see how it got its name. The gooney stands about three feet tall, with a seven-foot wingspan. It struts around a great deal, periodically emitting a mooing sound that makes you think of a small flying cow.

As the 727 was refueling, the pilot announced that a gooney bird had flown into one of the wings, causing a small dent. Obviously the bird suffered more than the plane, but just to be safe, we were all escorted to the officers club while the mechanics checked everything out.

When we got there, several hundred naval personnel and their wives were all sitting down, facing a large television screen.

Nobody turned around when we walked into the room, so I had time to look up at the screen and realize what they were watching.

“Eva,” I whispered, “that’s my show.”

It turned out that gathering to watch
The Merv Griffin Show
was an important daily ritual for the men and women stationed on those remote islands. It was one of the ways they maintained a connection to home.

The show was almost over when we entered the room, so I decided to remain in the doorway until the closing credits came on. I’d motioned for Eva to stand outside in the hallway, just out of view.

When my theme music finished, the set was turned off and everyone stood up, preparing to leave.

“Well,” I said from the back of the room, “how did you all like my show today?”

You’d have thought they were witnessing the Second Coming. Everyone began yelling, “It’s him! It’s him!”

“Wait a minute!
Wait
a minute!” I had to shout to be heard above the din. When they finally got quiet, I played my ace. Actually, it was more like my queen: “You think
this
is something? Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Miss Eva Gabor!”

Like the pro that she was, Eva made a grand entrance. For a long moment everyone was so stunned that they didn’t make a sound. They just stared at her, then back at me, as if the whole scene might be some sort of television-induced hallucination.

Then the entire room burst into deafening applause and cheers.

Smiling, Eva looked at me and said, “I
told
you we would pep things up, darling.”

Eva and Frank Jameson were divorced in 1983. It may surprise you to learn that someone who had been married five times could still be heartbroken by a divorce, but Eva was truly crushed.

Understanding exactly what she was going through, I invited her up to my ranch in the mountains above Carmel Valley. It’s an extraordinary spot with tremendous healing powers.

I gave Eva the use of one of the six guest cottages on the property and told her that she was welcome to stay on as long as she wished. Knowing how much she loved them, I had fresh roses delivered to her every day. Slowly, her natural effervescence began to reappear; what I always thought of as “La Joie de Eva.” She later told our friends that being in Carmel during those dark days had almost certainly saved her life.

People always ask me if Eva was anything like the slightly off-center character she played on
Green Acres
. Let’s see what you think.

We were at a party together at Zsa Zsa’s house, chatting with an older man who seemed to know Eva quite well. When he walked away, I said, “Eva, that wasn’t like you. We were talking with that man for ten minutes and you never introduced me. Who is he?”

She looked at me the way Lisa Douglas (Eva’s character on
Green Acres
) used to look at Arnold the pig, vaguely with a kind of detached amusement. “Darling, I have
no
idea who that was.”

At that moment Zsa Zsa came over and Eva asked her sister if she knew the name of the man we’d been talking to.

“Eva, that was
your
first husband.” True story, I swear.

It wasn’t long before I started to think of the ranch in Carmel as the home Eva and I shared. We began to take long trips together, especially after my show ended in 1986. No one was a better traveling companion than Eva. And always we returned to Carmel. There were two giant couches in the living room that came together in an L shape. Eva would get on one, I’d get on the other and we’d lie there for days at a time—laughing, sleeping, laughing, watching television, laughing, eating, and laughing some more. We almost never argued except when we watched
Wheel of Fortune
. She’d get furious because I knew all the answers in advance.

Eva used to say that we had the perfect relationship: “He has his place on the sofa, and I have mine.”

She was fiercely protective of her friends. During the Trump battle, Mike Wallace came to Atlantic City and interviewed both Donald and me at Resorts. Eva, who had never met Trump, walked right up to him and said, “You awful man. You’ve said terrible things about my friends Barron Hilton and Marvin Davis.” It was one of the rare times I’ve ever seen Donald speechless.

Once we took Eva’s mother with us to Atlantic City. Like the former Miss Hungary that she was (a title she won long after becoming
Mrs
. Gabor), Mama Jolie refused to go out for the evening unless she was elegantly dressed and perfectly coiffed. She treated Atlantic City like it was Monte Carlo.

Eva and I were usually exhausted and asleep by 11:00 P.M., but that was when Mama was just getting started.

“You two are so boring,” she sniffed. “Where is the little boy? Tell the little boy I wish him to take me gambling tonight.” Poor Ronnie Ward, who was in his mid-twenties by then, had to stay up all night watching Jolie hold court in the casino.

Eva and I had so many marvelous experiences together. Getting to share my good fortune with her was one of the great joys of my life.

Larry King once asked me what it’s like to be able to buy anything I see. My first response was to take a slow look around his set and say, “Well, I like this
studio
, Larry…” Then I got serious with him and said, “You can’t ever think like that.”

I think that’s a result of how I earned my money. If you had to struggle for it, you know the value and the responsibility of money.

One of the reasons I’ve always been reluctant to talk too much about money is that the topic seems to attract some pretty strange people.

Ever since I was first included on Malcolm Forbes’s ridiculous list more than fifteen years ago, I’ve received a steady stream of requests for financial assistance.

My heart truly goes out to the people who write to me about illness or personal tragedy. It’s extremely hard to say no to some of their requests, particularly those involving children. But I do. I turn down everything that comes to me unsolicited, across the board.

Before you think that I’m some sort of Scrooge, let me explain why I do that. I believe strongly in charitable giving. But what I had to decide, as soon as I came into that “great American fortune,” was how I could be most effective in helping others.

I quickly came to the conclusion that a scattershot approach to charitable giving was a terrible idea. If I simply reacted to whoever got my attention for a cause, no matter how needy, I’d be spread so thin that I would have time for absolutely nothing else. Moreover, I’d inevitably wind up giving money to something that, on the surface,
seemed
worthy but was actually a scam.

That’s why I’ve focused on just a few charities, primarily those involving children or people who are really suffering with life-and-death issues, such as in a hospice situation. I’ve given a great deal of money in support of groups like Childhelp USA or the Young Musicians Foundation.

And I do my homework. I ask to see their budgets before I get involved, because I really don’t like to contribute to groups that are top-heavy with staff. Too much is eaten up by overhead and the people who are supposed to benefit wind up getting shortchanged.

Life isn’t nearly as meaningful if you can’t share your success with others. I now accept a few select invitiations to perform at charity functions. There’s no pressure because I’m not getting paid and if they hate me, what are they going to do? “We didn’t pay him. We can’t throw him out.”

Let me tell you about a recent one that was a classic. Dr. Arnold Klein is a longtime friend of mine and one of the country’s leading dermatologists. He organized a major AIDS benefit in Laguna Beach where he lives, and I agreed to co-chair it, along with Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.

The evening was planned in two parts: a private dinner in an elegant Laguna Beach home for the highest donors, followed by a larger reception at a nearby art museum. The dinner was called for six and the reception was set to start two hours later, at eight o’clock.

I flew down to Orange County on my plane with my close friends Rose and Bill Narva. Until I sold it, Rose was the general manager of the Givenchy in Palm Springs. As an Admiral in the Navy, Bill served as the chief physician to the U.S. Congress for twenty-five years, while also treating every president from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan. Before we landed, I gave my prediction to the Narvas: Elizabeth and Michael would be at least two hours late.