Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

by Darwin Porter

  “Television is the world's first truly democratic culture, the first culture available to everyone, and entirely governed by what people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.”

  Clive Barnes

  “In the end, of course, the issue is not whether Merv Griffin's secret would be buried with him. In the age of Wikipedia, it's a given that anyone interested enough to Google Merv would quickly get the gist of the story, if not the gory details, or even the less savory details, such as those recounted by Michelangelo Signorile in his 1993 book Queer in America, in which an unnamed Hollywood “mogul” is described as firing men from his company for being openly gay. The real point of the episode is the enduring power of the Hollywood closet that held even a billionaire locked in its embrace, paying homage to the presumed prejudices of the public.”

  Larry Post, author of

  Truthdig--Merv Griffin's Bodyguard of Lies (2007)

  “This is an unauthorized biography”

  Blood Moon Productions

  MERV GRIFFIN

  A Life in the Closet

  OTHER BOOKS BY DARWIN PORTER

  Biographies

  The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart

  Katharine the Great: Hepburn, Secrets of a Life Revealed

  Howard Hughes: Hell's Angel

  Brando Unzipped

  Jacko, His Rise and Fall

  Paul Newman, the Man Behind the Baby Blues

  And Coming Soon:

  Steve McQueen, King of Cool (Tales of a Lurid Life)

  Film Criticism

  Blood Moon's Guide to Gay & Lesbian Film (Volumes One & Two)

  Non-Fiction

  Hollywood Babylon-It's Back!

  Novels

  Butterflies in Heat

  Marika

  Venus

  Razzle-Dazzle

  Midnight in Savannah

  Rhinestone Country

  Blood Moon

  Hollywood's Silent Closet

  Travel Guides

  Many editions of the Frommer Guides to Europe and the Caribbean

  MERV GRIFFIN

  by Darwin Porter

  MERV GRIFFIN

  by Darwin Porter

  BLOOD MOON PRODUCTIONS, LTD.

  WWW.BLOODMOONPRODUCTIONS.COM

  ISBN 978-0-9786465-0-9

  Copyright 2009 Blood Moon Productions, Ltd.

  First Edition, First Printing, April 2009

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover designs by Richard Leeds

  “Mythical Griffin” illustration courtesy Sandro Castelli

  Blood Moon's products are distributed in the U.S., Canada, and Australia by the National Book Network (www.NBNbooks.com)

  The author dedicates this book to Danforth Prince

  Prologue

  All heads turned as Merv Griffin made his way across the floor of L'Escoffier—“the most exclusive restaurant in the world”—on the eighth floor of the Beverly Hilton. And well they should. He not only owned the hotel but was the chief honcho of a multi-billion empire. The maître d' rushed toward him to usher him to the best table in the house. In fact, legend had it that Merv had bought the hotel to make sure he always had his favorite table.

  Leading the march across the elegant room, with its panoramic views, was the Hungarian beauty, Eva Gabor, who'd become his permanent “arm candy.” He'd never seen her look more stunning in her taupe gown and what she called “my Cinderella slippers.” Around her swan-like neck was a diamond-andruby necklace he'd presented to her only that afternoon. He told her that it had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, knowing that she didn't really believe that but would loudly advertise it as fact.

  She loved the necklace but had really wanted an engagement ring to solidify their relationship. He knew, however, that wasn't going to happen. There would be no other Mrs. Merv Griffin. It'd taken him three years to untangle himself from his one and only marriage. He had no interest—certainly no sexual interest—in entering into another permanent bond with a woman.

  Earlier in the evening he and Eva had stopped off at the hotel bar, making the rounds and encountering Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and Nancy Sinatra. She told him that she'd come just to sample the egg rolls at Trader Vic's that night.

  He also ran into a deeply suntanned George Hamilton, who said, “Look around you. There are at least five or six big-time movie stars here with their off-the-record girlfriends. But it's so God damn dark you can't make out anybody. Thank God there are two entrances. If a wife walks in one, the waiter can hustle the mistress out the other door.”

  In spite of the sad news he'd learned earlier in the day, Merv had a light step as he made his way through the restaurant greeting guests. He'd long ago learned to disguise his true feelings. He was still “every mother's favorite sonin- law,” although getting a bit long in the tooth for that appellation.

  He always felt more of a man when he had a beautiful woman like Eva on his arm, even though she was an expensive adornment. Hollywood was nothing if not public images. It was a city where truth didn't matter. Only the method you chose to deceive the public. All his life he'd believed in playing by the rules, not changing the game.

  Still eager to accomplish bigger and better deals in the future, he could rest secure that he'd become The King of Television. He'd failed to make it as the replacement for singing star Gordon MacRae in the movies, but he ruled the tube.

  After all, for nearly a quarter of a century he'd been a household word as host of the Emmy Award-winning The Merv Griffin Show where he'd interviewed everybody from John Wayne to Joan Crawford. He'd created and launched TV's two most successful syndicated game shows—Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. The Beverly Hilton was just one property in his empire.

  He estimated he had another ten to fifteen years to live, and he wanted to maintain his image until his dying day—and even after death if that were at all possible.

  He didn't want to die like his best male friend, Liberace, did in disgrace, succumbing to AIDS and having his reputation destroyed. If Merv could control events, there would be no notoriety to surround his death the way it had in the case of Rock Hudson, his former lover in the 1950s.

  Unlike Rock and Liberace, Merv knew how to protect himself. No virus would get to him. As he candidly told Eva, his most trusted confidante, who knew all his secrets, “I plan to die of natural causes. Not some disease I picked up from an overnight trick.”

  He had spent a lifetime creating the character of Merv Griffin. If his true character was never revealed, and his self-created image could prevail, even beyond the grave, then he felt his life would have been a success. To most of his fans, he symbolized the good life, a man who had it all. One day he was going to write a book about being on top of the world, the way he felt tonight as he looked out over the sparkling lights of Los Angeles.

  Eva Gabor with Merv

  The title was already spinning in his head—Merv: Making the Good Life Last.

  As he'd once told Liberace, “You and I have tasted the best that life has to offer, even if we had to spend our lives in the closet. For us, that closet was a jewel box, luxurious and spacious. Not a bad place to be. We've lived in worst dives. And what we did in private was our own fucking business.”

  “Didn't Rosalind Russell say it all in Auntie Mame?” Liberace asked. “Something about life's a banquet—and most poor fools are starving to death, something like that.”

  “Not us, pal,” Merv chimed in.

  Seated at table in L'Escoffier, and looking like a Hungarian princess, Eva didn't have to request her drink of the evening. Her champagne was already chilling. “Could you imag
ine a Gabor drinking anything else?” she had once asked him. Indeed he couldn't.

  But there was one big change on her menu for the night. She'd abandoned her usual caviar for a treat the chef had secured for her. The best salami from Budapest had been flown in.

  Eva would give up anything for salami. “It is a delicacy created by the Gods,” she told him.

  To take the “curse” off such a lowly cold cut, Merv had ordered the most beautiful orchids placed on their table. Eva said that when she consumed salami, she always wanted to be wearing diamonds and surrounded by orchids. In fact, she'd called her tell-nothing memoir, Orchids & Salami.

  Tonight in familiar, swanky surroundings, Eva was in what she called “my gay mood”—she still used the word in its old-fashioned sense. Skilled as a courtesan and arguably trained at the role since birth, she knew her job was to entertain Merv.

  She told him that at three o'clock in the morning she'd been caught swimming nude in his pool by two businessmen from Arizona.

  When the men spotted her, they plopped down in a chair waiting for her to emerge from the water. “Hi, Eva,” the taller of the men called to her. “No, dahlink,” she shouted back at them, “it's Zsa Zsa.”

  After that pronouncement, she emerged completely nude from the pool and grabbed her robe, before disappearing into the elevator to her suite upstairs.

  Merv might have laughed at a story like that. But tonight he didn't even smile.

  “What is it, dahlink?” she asked, sympathetically taking his hand. “You look so sad, so blue.” Usually he was jolly and fun, filled with amusing anecdotes. After all, he'd interviewed or else had known practically every celebrity in the world from Marilyn Monroe to Marlon Brando. “It's Nancy,” he said, looking depressed and dejected.

  Eva knew that Nancy Davis Reagan was his best friend. He'd canceled many an engagement with Eva to escort Nancy to some function. Once when Eva had an argument with him, she accused him of plotting to marry Nancy after her husband, Ronald Reagan, died. “That would be the ultimate triumph for you,” she charged. “Marrying the woman who presides over the Free World. You could get a lot of publicity marrying the First Lady. Aristotle Onassis did. Did you know he proposed marriage to me before he asked for the hand of Ms. Jacqueline Kennedy?”

  “In your dreams,” he said.

  Eva had stormed out of his living room, but the next morning they made up at breakfast. It seemed that every night they had some silly argument, yet in most ways, she, not Nancy, was his best friend. He privately told his confidants that “Nancy is best friend, Eva first mistress.” He always laughed at his own joke, and so did his staff, although no one seriously believed that he'd ever gone to bed with Eva.

  “You still haven't told me why you're so sad,” she said.

  “You've got to keep this a secret,” he said. “Nancy will break it to the world when the time comes. No one must know.”

  “What is it?” she asked, genuinely interested.

  “Nancy called me this afternoon from Washington with the bad news. She's just found out: even Ronnie doesn't know yet. But the President has been diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease.”

  “Oh, my God!” she gasped. “No one must find this out. The Stock Market would crash. There could be calls for his impeachment.”

  The Reagans

  “That's why you're going to keep this news under that pretty blonde wig of yours.”

  After fifteen minutes of trying to console Merv, she said, “You need some serious distraction. You need some fun and games, and I know you've got something planned later in the evening to take your mind off the Reagans. Your mother knows about such things.”

  “You're so understanding,” he said.

  “But you're such a cad. You could have planned some fun and games for little ol' Eva. Perhaps that handsome lifeguard you hired two weeks ago. Don't tell me you've not had him already.”

  “You know too much,” he said. “Fortunately, you're not in a habit of calling the National Enquirer.” After dinner, Merv ostentatiously escorted Eva to her suite. Passers-by in the hall saw him as he disappeared inside with her, an indiscretion he wanted them to publicize. But he was going only for a nightcap.

  She poured him a drink and gave him a feather-light kiss on the mouth before heading into her boudoir and dressing room to begin her nightly beauty treatments designed to keep her, in her own words, “forever young.”

  He called down to Hadley Morrell, his most trusted employee whose name would never appear on his payroll. He was paid only in cash. The Minnesota-born Hadley had been Merv's lover in the 1950s. When passion dissipated, he'd stayed on as Merv's private assistant. For the sake of anonymity, Hadley was almost never seen in public with Merv. He wanted both Hadley's identity and their personal relationship kept secret. Merv once told Eva, “Hadley is the most trusted man in the world. What a guy! If you ever murder someone, call Hadley. He'll quietly dispose of the body—no questions asked.”

  When Hadley picked up the phone, Merv anxiously asked, “Is the kid here?”

  “He's in bed buck naked and waiting for you,” Hadley told him. “All bubble bathed and raring to go. He's very excited to meet the Merv Griffin. He claimed he'd rather meet you than any movie star, even Tom Cruise.”

  “That's the way I like to hear them talk,” Merv said. “It looks like I'm in for a very special evening.”

  “The best. The agency said the kid does everything. And I mean everything. You deserve the very best.”

  “And so I do,” Merv agreed. “This is one Depression Baby that didn't always get the best. Far from it!”

  “But you're making up for it now,” Hadley assured him.

  “Hell, yes!” Merv said. “I didn't begin life in style. But I'm sure ending it with the most succulent prime rib. Let my enemies gossip. I don't care.”

  “They're just jealous of you, jealous of what you can get.”

  “You mean what I can pay for?” Merv said.

  “That, too,” Hadley said.

  “My good man, just remember my motto: Living well is the best revenge.”

  “A Master of Talk TV”

  Chapter One

  “Please don't take my toys. Please, mister. I've been good.” It was almost a scene out of Charles Dickens. The year was 1930, and the place was San Mateo, California, a small community about 21 miles south of San Francisco.

  A five-year-old Merv Griffin was in tears when a burly, moving man carted off his rocking horse, his favorite toy. “Not Smiley. That's my horse. He belongs to me. He's mine!” He rushed to retrieve the toy from the man but his mother restrained him.

  Even at his age, Merv knew that the men sent by the bank were taking over their home, and even all of their possessions. At the height of the Depression, his father wasn't selling enough football and baseball equipment in the sporting goods store where he worked. It was hard enough to keep food on the table, much less pay the mortgage.

  Like so many other families in the nation, the Griffins were six months behind in mortgage payments. The bank, within its legal rights, moved in to evict them and seize their possessions. The bankers had ordered the movers to “take everything,” hoping to find something of value. It seemed that bankers all over the country were doing that, humiliating their former clients by taking not only the roof over their heads but their meager goods as well.

  The moving men left only some clothing, which seemed to have little value even to the Salvation Army. Merv hugged Barbara, his sister, who was two years older. She was crying. The two children joined their parents in gathering up their remaining belongings. They had until twelve o'clock to evacuate their former home.

  Standing in the front yard, Merv in tears looked back at the only home he'd ever known. It was where he'd been brought on July 6, 1925 when he'd been named Mervyn Edward Griffin Jr.

  He'd been born to Irish Catholic parents, Rita Robinson, the daughter of a newspaperman, and Mervyn Edward Griffin Sr., a tennis pro who'd won both the
California State and Pacific Coast singles title. Rita had fallen in love with the athlete watching him play on the courts.

  Behind the wheel of the family jalopy, which somehow still belonged to them, Merv Sr. called to his son to hurry up. Holding his mother's hand, Merv looked once more at their former home. “One day I'll be rich,” he vowed to his mother. “Richer than all those bankers. I'll build a palace for you, mama.”

  “I'm sure you will,” she said. “Now c'mon, Buddy. We're going to my mother's. Bless her, she's agreed to take us in.”

  Rita Robinson Griffin

  in 1927 with Merv, age 2

  The Griffins left behind only a toilet seat. In the late 1970s, Merv learned that the seat had sold for $2,000 at a charity auction in San Mateo. “To think some idiot would pay good money for a toilet seat,” he said. “Maybe I should sell the fool other souvenirs. Instead of flushing toilet paper I wipe my ass on, maybe I should save it. Put it up for auction. I could make a whole new fortune. The pizza crust I didn't eat. A pair of shoes I'm throwing out. My soiled underwear.”

  Merv would remember the morning of the family's eviction in San Mateo for the rest of his life. That gray day left a deep scar on him. Decades later he would tell Eva Gabor, “That eviction changed my entire life, the way I looked at things. In the years ahead, I would become obsessed with material things. Far more than a desire to perform, it was the hope of getting rich that drove me into show business. I listened to Bing Crosby on the radio. I heard he was getting rich singing. My family and friends told me I could sing. Even though I was a chubby little brat, I decided that I was going to go to Hollywood and replace Bing Crosby. Get rich by using my singing voice. There were times in my future when that dream of mine became a nightmare. But I never gave up hope. Never! Even on the darkest of nights.”