Merv (28 page)

The property itself is spread over fifty-seven acres, including one acre of Sauvignon Blanc grapes that are bottled as part of my Mount Merveilleux private label. There are six buildings on the property, including a number of guest houses, one of which Eva used following her divorce (and before she moved into my house).

Janice and Bob Emmett have been with me in Carmel for nineteen years. Janice is the cook, and Bob supervises the property. I’ve told you that Eva and I would often come back from long trips and collapse onto our respective couches. By midday, Janice would put two TV trays in front of us and, like zombies, we’d sit up and eat lunch, then fall immediately back to sleep until dinnertime. Five hours later, like Pavlov’s dogs, we’d answer the dinner bell (still never leaving our couches) and repeat the same routine. One weekend we slept through nine movies on television. But the food was great.

I think the only word for the ranch is “Shangri-la.”

Sometime in the late seventies, not long after I purchased it, I invited an eclectic group up to Carmel for the weekend. It included Cary and Barbara Grant, Gary Morton and Lucille Ball, Arthur and Kathryn Murray, and Armand and Frances Hammer. Like the President of the United States, Armand traveled with a personal photographer, so I have some lovely, albeit Armand-centric, snapshots of that weekend.

For three days, Cary and Barbara strolled the grounds holding hands and taking in the different views, each one more spectacular than the last. Barely speaking to anyone else (except to remain unfailingly polite), they walked around as if they’d just been transported to another world.

At one point, I said, “Come on, Cary, we’re going down the mountain to John and Monique’s for lunch.” (John Gardiner was one of my oldest and dearest friends. We’d first met when both of us were in our twenties and John was teaching tennis to Bing Crosby. He founded the Senator’s Cup tennis tourneys that I played in and MC’d more than a dozen times. John passed away two years ago and it was a very tough loss.)

Cary looked at me with a mystified expression and said, “Why would you ever
leave
this place?”

You know me, particularly when it involves food. “Cary,” I said, firmly. “We’ve
got
to go get something to eat. I promise you the ranch will be here when we get back.”

Lucy was just the opposite of Cary. Natural beauty be damned, she wasn’t going to miss her soap operas. She stayed in bed so much that, only half-jokingly, I asked Janice to go check on her to be sure she was all right. When she knocked on the door, Janice heard Lucy’s familiar throaty voice shout, “Whoever it is, come back after
All My Children
!” Eventually she’d appear, carrying a bag of Scrabble tiles with her. Lucy was a killer Scrabble player who would virtually accost you until you agreed to play with her. She was really good at getting lots of points out of three- and (not surprisingly) four-letter words.

Can you picture it? There was Lucille Ball hunched intently over a Scrabble board, while Cary Grant wandered around draped in a large caftan, looking like a Tibetan holy man. Every time Cary passed by, Lucy looked up and said, “There goes the great High Lama. Hello Lama!” Meanwhile, Armand, trailed everywhere by his photographer, kept trying to thrust himself into the picture. It was quite a scene.

There’s one more story connected to that weekend that I want to tell you. It involves my Carmel neighbor, Clint Eastwood. Now I’d known Clint long before we lived near each other. We first met back in the fifties when he was still putting fish oil in his hair to make a ducktail in the back. Cats followed him everywhere.

Anyway, Clint and I had a long tradition of playing tricks on each other (actually,
I
played the tricks and he just got mad), so that when Cary decided to come up for the weekend, I had a perfect opportunity to pull something on my old pal. As it happened, Clint was at his place up in Sun Valley that weekend, but I had the number there, so I called him on Friday afternoon.

“Hey, Clint. It’s Merv. When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow.” Even off screen, he is a man of few words.

“Great,” I replied. “Cary Grant is going to be here for the weekend and he’ll be here for dinner tomorrow night. I want you and Sondra [he was living with Sondra Locke by then] to come over and join us.”

Clint said, “Merv, Cary Grant is
not
going to be at your house for dinner.”

Years of successful gags had made him understandably skeptical of me, as I knew he would be. I also knew how much he admired Cary Grant, whom he’d never met, so the hook was baited perfectly. “If he’s not going to be here, why would I take the trouble to call you up in Sun Valley?”

“Because you’re a sonofabitch and these are the kinds of gags a sonofabitch like you pulls.”

Patiently, I said, “Clint, trust me. He
will
be here.”

He was unconvinced. “I don’t believe you, but I’ll call you as soon as we get back.”

The next day Clint called me. His voice dripping with sarcasm, he asked, “Is
Cary
having a good time?”

“He sure is. He and Barbara are out walking on the lawn right now. So are Lucy and Gary, Armand and Frances, and Arthur and Kathryn. Will you and Sondra be joining us for dinner tonight?”

Furious that I’d checkmated him, Clint growled, “I’m going to chance it, but if this is one of your jokes, Griffin…” He used his best “I’m-Dirty-Harry-and-you’d-better-not-mess-with-me” tone to let me know that I was flirting with real trouble if Cary suddenly “disappeared” from my living room.

When he got to the gate, which is a bit far from the ranch house, he asked
again
over the intercom, “Okay, Merv. Is Cary Grant really there?” For the umpteenth time (and loving every minute of his uncertainty) I said, “Yes, Clint. He’s
here
. I’ll buzz you in.”

When Clint walked into the living room, Cary leapt up in that fabulously graceful way he had about him. Before Clint could speak, he said, “I’m so happy to meet you. I admire your work as an actor. And I admire you as a director. You’re quite wonderful.” Cary had a tremendous gift for putting people at ease.

Do you know what Clint’s reaction was? He turned to the whole roomful of people, who had grown very quiet, and said, “He talks just like he does in the movies.”

Everybody roared. It was one of the truly great nights.

A
s a youngster, I’d always enjoyed watching movies about rich people cruising the seven seas in their yachts, having glamorous adventures in exotic ports of call. I dreamed of owning a yacht myself someday and of being able to take the people I loved around the world on adventures of our own.

My yearning to spend time on the high seas was somewhat ironic, given that I am also deathly afraid of the water. Remember when I went up to Camp Imelda on the Russian River to visit my sister, Barbara? That was where I first heard the song “Where or When.” It was also where I nearly drowned.

I’d gone swimming with a bunch of other kids out to a raft in the middle of a lake. When we got out there, each of us took turns diving off. When my turn came, I hit the water and then came back up under the raft. I could hear voices above me shouting, “He didn’t come up!” Several adults then dove in and started frantically looking for me. Fortunately they found me quickly. I was pulled out from under the raft, gasping for air.

To this day, I don’t go swimming. Every house I’ve ever owned has had a pool, and Tony is an excellent swimmer. But not me. I love the water—as long as I’m on top of it.

My first experience captaining a ship came in the sixties, when my show really started to do well. For the first time in my life, I could afford to splurge a little.

One weekend, I chartered a yacht in New York. It was the sister ship to the
Honey Fitz
, the Kennedy clan’s famous vessel. I took Julann and Tony, my mother, Julann’s two sisters and their husbands, and George and Tad Vosburgh (George was a longtime friend who produced
Jeopardy!
). We cruised Long Island Sound, swimming (except for me) and dining, singing and laughing, overwhelmed by the Gatsbyesque quality of the whole experience.

It was every bit as wonderful as I had imagined it would be when I was a child. But I knew that to make the dream complete, I’d need my own boat.

Twenty years later, after selling my company to Coca-Cola, I was deluged by yacht brokers who somehow had gotten wind of my dream and knew that I could now afford to realize it. They inundated me with glossy brochures filled with photographs of yachts for sale. I just tossed them in the circular file until, one day, a picture caught my eye. I sat and stared at it for a long time. The next day I phoned the broker and arranged to fly to Fort Lauderdale where the yacht was docked. When I arrived, he walked me along the dock looking at various other possibilities, none of which appealed to me. Then we arrived at “her.” She was, quite literally, my dreamboat. I boarded this 127-foot, three-story beauty and stood in the middle of the main salon. I swear I could hear the song “You’re Mine You.”

Turning to Ronnie Ward, who was with me as always, I said, “Do you think you can get all this furniture reupholstered and the interior recarpeted in one month?”

Ronnie, who never shrinks from a challenge, immediately replied, “Yes.”

Away he went to meet upholsterers and drapemakers, and quickly the ship began to get a new face. I flew back to Los Angeles and went directly to the big design center in West Hollywood. The majority of materials I wanted couldn’t be delivered immediately, but those they had in stock were almost as beautiful. I went on a four-day shopping spree for my new “girl.”

My next step was to phone Tony, who was fishing near Key Largo with Trisha and their eight-month-old baby daughter (and my first grandchild), Farah.

“Tony, I want you to fly to Fort Lauderdale right away and meet someone. It’s urgent.” I told him nothing more.

Tony and his pal Guy Manos, the world champion skydiver, took off immediately in Guy’s plane and got to Fort Lauderdale a little over an hour after our phone call. He met the broker, who rushed him to the boat without telling him why. When he got there, Tony called me from his cell phone and said, “Dad, what are you doing?”

“I bought it.”

Even without the cell phone, I could hear him whooping and shouting all the way across the country.

The
Griff
was delivered to me in Atlantic City one month to the day after I’d first laid eyes on her. Ronnie, as usual, had done a flawless job in outfitting her for our maiden voyage.

I assembled a great British crew (the Brits are born to the water), headed by Captain Mike Mullin, a gifted sailor who had spent most of his life at sea. We cruised up the Atlantic Coast, stopping to visit Bob and Audrey Loggia at their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. The Loggias were also thrilled with my new acquisition and they would become the perfect traveling mates on all my future voyages. Over the course of the next seven years, we would make eleven trips together.

Days later, out in the middle of the Atlantic, I received a call informing me that Eva had died.

You know how you can hear something and it doesn’t quite register? Like when President Kennedy was killed or Princess Diana died in a car crash, there are times when the brain simply can’t process overwhelming information—it needs time to sort it out.

Eva’s death was one of those times. My immediate reaction was identical to when I was told that my father had died suddenly of a heart attack. It must be a mistake. It
had
to be.

After a series of tortured ship-to-shore calls, I pieced together what had happened.

Eva had been in Baja California with her former stepdaughter, Mary Jameson, when she’d slipped and fallen in the bathtub. Although she was in pain, Eva refused treatment in Mexico, insisting on flying home to Los Angeles where she could see her own doctors at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. That much I had known before we even left port in Atlantic City. But I’d been assured that it was only a hip injury and that she might need surgery for that. There was never any suggestion it could be something more serious. Had there been, I never would have made the trip.

I need to explain why Eva wasn’t with me on a voyage she surely would have loved.

Over the ten years since her divorce from Frank Jameson, Eva and I had been together far more often than we’d been apart. But there were periods of separation where we saw other people. Sadly, this was one of those times.

In my heart I know that we would have healed our relationship. We’d worked out our problems in the past because, no matter what, we never stopped loving each other.

I know that there’s one more question you’re probably asking, and I’ll try to answer it as best I can.

More than anything else, the reason Eva and I never got married was because I couldn’t forget something Julann said soon after our divorce: “I married my best friend and it was the end of a beautiful friendship.”

Our other problems may have been worked out over time, but I was reluctant to make the same mistake twice.

Eva truly was my best friend. And, in the end, I lost her anyway.