Merv (9 page)

They couldn’t have been more wrong. Each night after the show, legions of young people from our audience would literally follow Arthur down 44th Street.

Oh, Arthur could be irascible, and he often was, but that was part of his charm. I have two theories about why he was such a hit with the younger generation. The first is that Arthur wasn’t a father figure to be rebelled against, he was a beloved
grandfather
figure. Big difference. Then there were his film roles. Arthur appeared in children’s classics from two different eras: the Shirley Temple movies of the thirties and as the constable in
Mary Poppins
. The latter was his final big screen performance, released just a year before we started the new show. These roles connected him to young people in a meaningful way. This even included my son, Tony, who was five when he first met Arthur. It was a bit of a comedown for me to discover that “Constable Jones” was a much bigger star to my son than his dear old dad.

Early in every program we’d have our chat, then Arthur would move over to what he dubbed “Treacher’s Corner,” that section of the couch he had annexed as his own. On occasion, particularly when I was interviewing someone he found dull or pompous (Arthur was never fond of politicians—“Calvin Coolidge was my man,” he’d sniff), I’d look over at Arthur, and he would have his back turned to me as an expression of disapproval. Other times his chin would begin sinking toward his chest, which meant he was starting to nod off.

One night I had on Dan Dailey, the veteran song-and-dance man turned actor. Apparently Arthur and Dan had crossed paths years earlier on the vaudeville circuit, because there was obviously a history between them. Midway through my interview with Dailey, I saw that Arthur was already dozing. So when Dailey said something about his old vaudeville days, I called out, “Did that ever happen to you, Arthur?” Arthur blinked several times and roused himself. Then, as if he were just seeing Dan Dailey for the first time, he said, “Oh
hullo
, Dan. Are you still wearing dresses?”

I cut quickly to a commercial.

Arthur wasn’t the only one who could insult a guest. As was the case with Peter O’Toole on the NBC show, I also managed to irritate one or two people myself. During the sixties, my most memorable contretemps was with an unknown actor named Al Pacino. At the time he’d only done a few plays on Broadway and was hardly known outside of New York. I’d been told that he’d grown up in a rough neighborhood of the Bronx, so I innocently asked him, “How did you make it from the Bronx to Broadway?” It was a softball question with no hint of sarcasm on my part. But, for some reason, Pacino bristled at it. He stared at me, and then he finally said, “By subway.” The audience laughed and I moved on, thinking little about it.

By the time Pacino broke big in
The Godfather
, a few years later, I’d honestly forgotten who he was or that he’d ever appeared on my show. So imagine how surprised I was to read that the hottest young actor in films had permanently sworn off doing all talk shows because “Merv Griffin once asked me the stupidest question.” This year, after more than three decades of keeping his pledge and refusing to do a single talk show, Pacino finally consented to appear with David Letterman. The day of the taping, Dave called me, knowing the old story and wanting to hear my side of it. “You know, Dave,” I deadpanned, “I really don’t remember him on my show at all. Ask him if he ever worked under another name.”

From the start, the second incarnation of
The Merv Griffin Show
was more freewheeling than its network predecessor. Part of this was the greater freedom that came with syndication; part of it was the additional thirty minutes that allowed us to keep going when things were getting interesting.

There were so many fascinating characters to talk with in those days—artists like Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol; writers like Gore Vidal, James Michener, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote; actors ranging from legends such as Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and Bette Davis to “newcomers” like Richard Burton, Sean Connery, and Diane Keaton. Then there were the political figures of the era, many of whom only did my show: Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew (after his resignation), and, in one of his only talk show appearances, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

My staff was always amazed that I would just ignore their notes and follow the thread of something that interested me. I asked Nelson Rockefeller how he’d first made his own personal money, as opposed to his family inheritance. He was taken aback; no one had ever asked him that question before. He thought about it for a long moment, then a smile crossed his face as he remembered: “I raised rabbits.”

Because I didn’t do my show to win a popularity contest, I wasn’t afraid to tackle controversial subjects. During the Vietnam War, when the networks were under great pressure to present a united front in support of the war, I was the only one willing to give Cassius Clay (who’d just become Muhammad Ali) and Jane Fonda the opportunity to express their views. That doesn’t mean that I agreed with everything they said or did—I didn’t. But it seemed absurd to me that we were fighting to promote American-style freedom in a faraway corner of the world, while denying one of our most basic privileges—the freedom of speech—to our own citizens.

We were constantly out looking for new talent. Carson wouldn’t do that. He’d always wait until someone was more established. I remember once saying to Bob Shanks, “How many times can I interview the
same
guests?” I told my staff that if it came down to booking a bigger name for the umpteenth time or taking a chance on someone new, they should always go with the new person.

I first heard about George Carlin when he arrived in New York in the early sixties. It seemed that George, who’d been a disc jockey in Boston, had run afoul of the powerful Boston prelate, Cardinal Cushing, and had to leave town somewhat precipitately.

The story goes that the Boston archdiocese sponsored a short nightly broadcast immediately preceding Carlin’s slot that consisted of Cardinal Cushing reciting the rosary. One day, George arrived at the radio station and discovered that the cardinal was running long.

Now if you’ve ever seen a Carlin routine over the last forty years, you’re aware that reverence is not his strong suit. To George, the sacred cows of organized religion simply meant more steak for him. You can probably guess what happened next. When it came time for him to do his show, George simply flipped a switch, cutting off the diocesan broadcast. Within moments, the light on the studio’s private phone began flashing. As soon as Carlin had a record on the turntable, he picked up the urgently blinking line.

“Who cut off the Word of God?” thundered the voice on the other end of the phone.

It was His Eminence, demanding an explanation. Without speaking, George quietly placed the receiver back on its cradle. In that instant, he realized his career in Boston had just come to an end—he’d now cut off the most powerful man in the Catholic Church twice in as many minutes. Talk about being banned in Boston.

Shortly after we began the Group W show, I signed George to an exclusive agreement (similar to the one I’d had with Woody Allen on NBC), and he eventually made twenty-nine appearances on my show.

Another comedian who got his start with me was Richard Pryor. Just the other day, someone showed me a tape of his third appearance. Seated right beside me (in those early years it was our practice to have the first guest join me at the desk), Richard turns to me and says, “I just want to thank you, Merv. You’ve been really nice to me. You were the first one to have me on.” I know it’s hard to believe, but in those days he was such a sweet little kid, he wouldn’t even say “hell” or “damn.” Pryor’s act was so clean-cut that Bill Cosby even called me once after seeing him on my show. “Hey, Merv,” asked Cos, “are you sure that wasn’t
me
you had on today?”

One of our bookers at the time, Paul Solomon, remembers a would-be comedienne named Lily Tomlin who took the train down from her home in Yonkers to audition for the show. She lived in a little bungalow right next to the railroad tracks, which was all she could afford.

Even then she had a unique personality. And she wrote all of her own material. On Paul’s recommendation, I put her on television for the very first time. A year later she had signed to do
Laugh-In
.

Lily told me that everything changed for her after she did my show: “Cab drivers would yell at me, ‘Hey, I saw you on
Merv
last night! You were really funny!’ I might as well have been on the cover of
Time.”
By this point, my syndicated show, which had begun on only seventeen stations, was now carried by 155 stations in the United States and Canada.

As the number of stations carrying our show steadily increased, so did the interest in being on it. And I’m not just talking about celebrities. One of the more bizarre examples of this newfound attention occurred the time a strange man stepped off the elevator that opened to my office floor. He was carrying a wooden flute. Without speaking, the guy just began to play, right in the middle of our busy production office. I stopped to watch him, along with several members of my staff. How
was
he? Let’s just say that if he’d been the Pied Piper, the mice would have been running for the nearest exit.

Anyway, after about five minutes of fluting, he finished. I said “Thank you” and he got back on the elevator. He never said a word, not even his name.

The next day we had a lock put on our elevator floor.

If there was one constant to
The Merv Griffin Show
, it was that we always managed to have fun.

There was the time when a young Neil Diamond, who’d been a championship fencer in school (I’ll bet you didn’t know
that
), tried to teach me how to fence on the air. After several scary parries and a thrust that came much too close for comfort, I shouted over to Arthur, “If you want the show
that
bad, you can have it!”

Zsa Zsa Gabor and Pamela Mason were the first two guests on a show that almost immediately turned into a gab and gossip fest. Nobody was spared, especially not their ex-husbands. The last guest out was the English actress and comedienne Hermione Gingold. When she entered, she was carrying a small dog under her arm.

“Why, Hermione,” I said, unwittingly, “you’ve brought your little dog with you.”

“Well, my dear,” she said haughtily, “I thought that one more bitch certainly wouldn’t matter.”

There was a limit to what we could get away with even in syndication. I discovered what that limit was when the legendary burlesque queen, Gypsy Rose Lee, came on my show. Mort Lindsey, my whimsical orchestra leader, played her onstage with a strip number. Like a great racehorse, Gypsy hadn’t lost the spark that made her famous. And this was a track she been around
many
times before. She started swinging her hips. Va-va-voom. Va-va-voom. The audience was egging her on. Without warning, Gypsy turned her back to the audience and—
va-va-voom
—she dropped her drawers.

If you were at home watching
The Merv Griffin Show
that day, I believe you saw a rerun of a show we did with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen…

My Catholic background often entered into my performance in a strange way. If there were nuns or priests in my audience, I almost couldn’t do my show. They were the only people who intimidated me—not presidents, movie stars, or Nobel Prize winners. Just nuns and priests. If there were nuns seated in the third row, I’d tell my staff, “Don’t be rude, but please ask them to move back a few rows.” I just didn’t feel free to be myself when I saw them watching me. I was afraid that if I inadvertently said something offensive, one of them might come up the aisle and rap my knuckles with a ruler.

Apropos of that, in 1966
Time
magazine hit the stands with its now famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) “Is God Dead?” cover story. The article featured a group of young theologians who described themselves as Christian atheists. Despite my nun-phobia, I invited one of the priests to appear on my show and explain his position. It was a scary moment. People in the audience were literally yelling, “Kill the bastard!” As I watched this poor guy’s complexion turn increasingly pale as the crowd kept screaming threats at him, I remember thinking (somewhat devilishly, I admit), “I wonder who he’s praying to
now?”

As you might expect, one of my all-time favorite guests was my dear old friend, the incomparable Tallulah Bankhead. And Tallulah loved coming on my show because she felt that other interviewers often mocked her. She told me once, “My
dahling
Merv, you laugh with me, not
at
me.”

By the mid-sixties, years of high living had taken their toll on Tallulah’s health. In what would be her last appearance with me, I surprised her by booking two other guests who were emblematic of her life’s passions: baseball and politics. Her heroes were Willie Mays and Harry Truman. I got Mays, but the former president was unavailable, so I persuaded his daughter, Margaret, to do the show in his stead. Tallulah was as gleeful as a young girl. She hugged Mays and greeted Margaret like a sister. When it was over there were tears in her eyes—and mine.