Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

by Darwin Porter

  His buddies, Paul Schone and Bill Robbins, had joined the U.S. Navy and were serving on battleships in the Pacific. Bill Robbins might have been “too girlish” for Merv Sr.'s tastes, but apparently he found no objections from the Navy. He later wrote Merv: “I'm making my way through the entire ship's crew. Only the captain has eluded me so far.”

  Johnny Riley was more masculine-looking than Bill and would not have been rejected by the draft board as an obvious homosexual. However, he bluntly told the Army doctor examining him that, “I'm a cocksucker.” There were thousands upon thousands of homosexuals who fought in World War II, but Johnny and Merv were not among them.

  Johnny agreed to help Merv sell War Bonds by staging entertainment on the streets of their hometown San Mateo and later in San Francisco.

  “I became an early Bob Hope,” Merv later said, “staging shows for soldiers on the nearby bases in San Francisco. These guys were about to be shipped out to the Pacific Theater, and we knew—and they knew—that many of them would never see San Francisco again.”

  Years later, when Merv met playwright Tennessee Williams, both of them privately agreed that for a gay male, being in San Francisco was the place to be in the early 1940s. “If a homosexual man couldn't get laid back then, he couldn't get laid anywhere,” Tennessee said. “The young sailors virtually lined up to get one final blow-job before sailing away. Perhaps no city in America has ever been so hedonistic. When you're facing death, conventional sexual morality no longer matters. Although Merv and I didn't know each other, we were taking advantage of these fresh-faced young men, some of whom came from the Middle West and had never confronted a gay man below. Many had never received a blow-job before, certainly not from their uptight girlfriends back home.”

  “Merv and I agreed that it was a heady time for both of us, but it was also sad to realize that the young men we were servicing might be blown to bits by soldiers of the Japanese Empire,” Tennessee said. “What a waste!Wars always sacrifice the best of us, and leave rejects like Merv and me at home.”

  When he wasn't singing on street corners, heckling residents to buy War Bonds,Merv and a civilian watch team scanned the skies of the Bay area looking for unauthorized aircraft. Asneak air attack from Japan was greatly feared. He and various friends used the tower of the San Mateo High School for their lookout post.

  “The nights were long and cold,” Merv remembered. “Even if we spotted aircraft, I don't know if we would have known the Jap planes from our own Air Force fighters.”

  One night one of his fellow skywatchers, a handsome, seventeen-year-old boy who was still a senior in high school, brought along a bottle of gin. He and Merv got drunk. Merv later told Johnny, “We fooled around some that night. I think he felt guilty about the experience. The next day he didn't speak to me, even though he'd shot off the night before. I was assigned a different guy the following night. We never saw any planes with the Rising Sun on them.”

  His friend, Johnny, continued to prostitute himself with older men, but Merv never did that. “There was no demand for me,” he jokingly told his pals. Instead he made his money for gas (which was rationed) by playing the organ at weddings. He charged fifteen dollars for a wedding, commanding an extra five for funerals.

  The worst year for the U.S. military both in Europe and the Pacific was 1942, and despite some success selling War Bonds, 4F Merv wanted to do more. He took a temporary job in the provisions section at Hunter's Point Naval Station outside San Francisco. From here, provisions were trucked to transport ships in the San Francisco harbor. These life-saving supplies were then loaded aboard cargo ships for soldiers and sailors fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.

  Merv lost his job at the naval depot supply station when a sailor reported that Merv had propositioned him in the men's toilet. Although Merv adamantly denied this, he was still dismissed from his job. This would be the beginning of several sexual harassment charges that would be made against Merv by men during the years to come.

  Through an acquaintance of Merv's father, his son was given a job as a bank teller at the Crocker National Bank. “You can't make a living as a piano player,” his father told him. “You need a steady job.”

  “I lasted one day on the job,” Merv recalled. “I talked to a late middleaged bank teller next to me. He'd worked there for twelve years until his salary was raised to thirty-five dollars a week. The next day I barged into the bank manager's office and quit. I was still determined to make it in show business … or else.”

  At the time, Merv was also enrolled in San Mateo Junior College where he majored in music.

  While enrolled in Junior College, Merv developed a crush on his handsome male music teacher, who was about twenty-eight at the time and very popular with his students. Conveniently for Merv, the teacher turned out to be gay.

  His name and the details of their brief romance are lost. Merv later confided to Johnny, “He was the first man to break my heart, the first of many I might add. It lasted about three weeks, and I was in Heaven which soon became Hell for me. Suddenly, my teacher didn't have any more time for me. I later learned that he was dating a very cute—and much slimmer—blondhaired boy. I was history. I moped around the house for weeks. My revenge came after two or three months when Blondie dumped the teacher for one of the football coaches.”

  After junior college, Merv enrolled in the University of San Francisco but dropped out before earning a degree. “I just couldn't concentrate on what the professors were saying,” he later said. “I spent all my time in class day dreaming about breaking into show business.”

  “I educated myself by reading a lot,” Merv later said. “In the years to come, I interviewed every prominent person in the world, except the Pope. Not only that, I hung out with many of these people. Like a sponge, I listened to them and learned things I would never have learned in college.”

  “Boy, did I learn,” he said. “Stars were discreet on camera, but once back- stage or in their dressing room they seemed to want to share all their secrets with me. I guess I looked like a Father Confessor. If I would ever write a book about the secrets of the stars, it'd be a best-seller for sure. But then I'd lose the money in libel suits.”

  ***

  Johnny kept urging Merv to lose weight, assuring him he'd be attractive if he got rid of the pudge. Merv tried dieting, but for his whole family weight remained a problem. “We kept eating and eating. I wanted to diet but had no willpower.”

  In spite of his weight, Merv still wanted to break into show business. While still in college he met Barbara McNutt, “a fat gal with pudgy hands,” who, like Merv, had a beautiful singing voice. They teamed up and appeared on Budda's Amateur Hour for the local radio station KFRC.

  Merv sat at the piano and sang patriotic songs, including “God Bless, America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and George M. Cohen's “Yankee Doodle Boy.” The two-fatsos, as Merv called Barbara and himself, were clearly the best act but lost to a country fiddler from Kentucky who was also in the U.S. Army. Two show business pros, Gertrude Niesen and Billy (“Sneezy”) Gilbert, decided to vote for a man in uniform even though Merv and Barbara should have won.

  Merv got really mad at Niesen, a big band singer. He vowed to turn off the radio if she came on again, although he loved her brief 1943 film appearance in This Is the Army.

  Billy Gilbert realized he'd greatly undermined the boy's self-confidence and tried to befriend Merv after he lost. Since 1934 Gilbert had become one of the screen's most familiar faces, and Merv was enthralled when the star was cast as the voice of Sneezy in the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He'd even thrilled Merv when he'd danced with Alice Faye and Betty Grable in Tin Pan Alley (1940).

  “I'm sorry, kid,” Gilbert told Merv. “You deserved to win, but there's a war on. We had to vote the way we did. It'll give a boost to our troops. When the war's over, I predict you'll become a big-time star. Even bigger than Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.”

  “Do you really believe that?” M
erv asked.

  “Not really. But I can't resist a good line when it comes to my head.”

  Merv would later claim, “Barbara and I looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Even though they came in second, the host of the show, Dean Maddox, liked their music and secured bookings for Barbara and Merv all over San Francisco. Once they journeyed to Los Angeles for an engagement.

  At some point, he deserted “fat Barb” and teamed up with a slimmer Janet Folsom, who was also the social director of the swank Pebble Beach Lodge on the Monterey Peninsula. At the time, it was a secret hideaway for movie stars, many of whom were there as part of an off-the-record weekend, with spouses back in Hollywood, or else partners in Palm Springs indulging in their own infidelities.

  Janet told Merv that there was an opening at the hotel for the job of pianist, so he journeyed to Monterey for an audition.

  Mrs. Lent Hooker liked the audition of Merv and Janet, and hired him as a party pianist to entertain the guests. Her father, Sam Morris, was the owner of the lodge.

  With his jovial personality and perpetual smile, and his good—not great— singing voice, Merv became an instant hit with guests at the lodge. One morning at breakfast, Janet introduced him to her friend, Dinah Shore. Merv was in awe of the singer, one of his favorites.

  Sitting next to Dinah, and looking rather stoic but devastatingly handsome, was the actor George Montgomery, Dinah's recently acquired hunk of a husband. Other than Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn, Merv thought Montgomery was one of the sexiest men on the screen.

  Montgomery was in his soldier's uniform, and his much publicized marriage to Dinah had earned him fame. Merv and Johnny had thrilled to him when he appeared as the leading man opposite Ginger Rogers in Roxie Hart (1942) and opposite Betty Grable in Coney Island (1943).

  Back in San Mateo, Merv later confided to Johnny, “One night I got to stand next to Montgomery at the urinal. Lucky Dinah, I'd say. He talks like he's speaking through clenched teeth. But what a man. He was a heavyweight boxer before becoming a movie star.”

  Three views of George Montgomery:

  Above, with then-wife, Dinah Shore

  “I read in a fan magazine that he studied to be an interior decorator,” Johnny chimed in.

  “I don't believe that,” Merv said, trying to defend this macho star. “Those fan magazines make up a lot of shit.”

  That night as Merv sat in the lounge of the Pebble Beach Lodge at the piano, he was shocked when Dinah herself got up to sing a duet with him. She asked him if he knew the words and music to her hit, “You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To.”

  “Do I ever!” he told her. “Let's go for it.”

  The applause was so deafening that Merv and Dinah did an encore, “I'll Walk Alone.” The guests applauded even more wildly the second time around. “Kid, you and I should form an act and take it on the road,” Dinah said before kissing him on the cheek and returning to her table. Later, on his resumé,Merv claimed that he'd sung professionally with Dinah Shore. While technically true, the credit was misleading.

  Relaxing by the pool the following day, Merv was surprised when Ann Sothern came over and joined him on a chaise longue. “Miss Sothern,” Merv said. “What an honor! My God, there are more stars at this lodge than there are in heaven.”

  “I like your music, big boy,” she said, “but you've got to take off a few pounds. I fear that both you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives fighting the battle of the bulge.”

  With such an unlikely beginning, a friendship was formed that would last for years. No one in movies, at least in Merv's view, could deliver wisecracks better than Ann. “The Queen of the Bs” at Columbia Pictures had come up in show business “one hard knock at a time.”

  At the time she met Merv, Ann had been cast as the irrepressible namesake of the Maisie movies, films that evolved into at least seven sequels based on the original Maisie (1939) in which she had been cast as a brash vaudevillian stranded in a small town. Most of the Maisie films were released during the dark years of World War II, frothy comedies with names that included Congo Maisie (1940), Gold Rush Maisie (1940), Maisie was a Lady (1941); Ringside Maisie (1941), Maisie Gets Her Man (1942), and last in the series, Undercover Maisie (1947).

  Lesser Diva: Ann Sothern

  Addressing his future, she became one of the first show business personalities to urge him to abandon movies and break into television. When her own film career virtually collapsed in the 1950s, Ann turned to the tube, playing the role of Susie in Private Secretary (1953), which ran until 1957. The following year she starred in The Ann Sothern Show, which ran until 1961. Over the years, Merv faithfully watched most of her appearances on TV and often talked over career moves with her.

  He always admired her brutal honesty about herself. “Frankly, she said, “Jean Harlow was slated to play Maisie before she died. I won the role by default.” Merv was saddened when he talked to Ann in the 1970s and 80s. She called those decades “drought ridden. The buzzards are circling over me.”

  In a mood of nostalgia, as he was getting old and blubbery, Merv visited Ann “for old time's sake.” He'd obtained a copy of his favorite film of hers, A Letter to Three Wives (1949), in which she played a writer married to a younger man, Kirk Douglas.

  At the end of the movie, which Merv adored, she turned to him and said. “You know something? I'm always amazed at what a lousy actress I was. I guess in the old days we just got by on glamour. Today's actresses and actors have real talent. Good looks are no longer an essential part of this rotten business.”

  He was gladdened when she was nominated for an Academy Award playing Tisha Doughty in the 1987 The Whales of August. “It's my Last Hurrah,” she told Merv in a phone call. “But I truly believe that working with Bette Davis has shortened my life span, and at my age I ain't got that many years to spare.”

  ***

  One high-profile regular guest at the Pebble Beach Lodge was even more famous than either Ann Sothern or Dinah Shore. She was Joan Crawford, who happened to be a friend of the socially connected Janet Folsom. To Merv's astonishment, Janet told him that she had checked into the lodge with her longtime flame, Johnny Weissmuller. Janet said that “Tarzan and Joan are sometime lovers … sometimes, on occasion. But they can't be seen together in the public rooms.”

  Merv was hoping for another glimpse of one of his idols, which he'd seen in the nude at his Uncle Elmer's club. But Johnny made no public appearances that weekend, but stayed in Joan's suite.

  Major Diva: Joan Crawford

  Joan came down to dinner by herself and made a stunning entrance into the dining room, wearing all white, including those famous high heels that later became known as Joan Crawford “fuck-me shoes.” Even though Merv knew that Joan's days as the Queen of MGM were over, and she was struggling to reinvent herself, she was the epitome of self-confidence and graciousness when Janet introduced him to her.

  When not entertaining guests, Janet and Merv wrote music and lyrics together. The following night, they composed one for Joan herself when she came down, again alone, to the dining room. She sat at a front table and had to suffer through:

  Someone's out to kill me

  ‘cause

  I'm honestly acting like a dilly

  I'm silly

  ‘cause I'm in love,

  I'm horribly, borably

  So in love.

  Joan's reaction? “I think you kids have come up with something terribly, even horribly, cute. Maybe a bit too cute. Try harder next time.”

  Mrs. Lent Hooker not only got Merv his gig at Pebble Beach, but she also arranged for him to play the piano at private parties for twenty dollars. “I'd play in a treehouse for twenty bucks,” Merv said at the time. At a Halloween costume party at Mrs. Hooker's estate, everyone except Merv showed up in masks.

  After midnight Merv was joined by a rather dashing figure dressed all in black, with a black mask concealing his features. In his autobiography, Merv remembered the guest disguised as a ghost,
but other guests claimed he was actually in disguise as The Cisco Kid.

  For about an hour “The Kid” joined Merv in a round of songs, Merv finding his voice “acceptable—not great.” But they were having fun, and by that time the other guests were too drunk to care.

  At one point, the mystery man handed Merv some sheet music from the film, Springtime in the Rockies, one of Merv's favorite movies, starring Carmen Miranda, Betty Grable, and Cesar Romero. He asked Merv if he would play a few numbers from this film.

  “Do you know the lyrics?” Merv asked.

  “I most certainly do,” said the guest, removing his mask to expose the face of Cesar Romero himself.

  The Latin star sat with Merv until around three in the morning, playing requests from the other guests. The two men got along famously, laughing and joking, with Cesar telling the more innocent Merv dirty jokes. Romero had been drinking heavily all evening, and Merv was given four cocktails, although liquor went to his head.

  When Cesar invited him to join him in the back seat of his imported car, Merv went along with it. “I usually like them a little thinner, but all cats are gray at night,” Cesar said. In the rear of the car, Merv received a blow-job from one of the most talented and experienced mouths in Hollywood.

  After that night, Merv and The Gay Caballero (the name of Cesar's 1940 film) never became lovers again, but their friendship would last for several years to come. One night when Merv was singing for the Freddy Martin band in San Diego, he was surprised to see Cesar seated at a front table with Desi Arnaz. Desi was also appearing in the San Diego area but had the night off.

  After the show, both Cesar and Desi came backstage to congratulate Merv on his show and to invite him for a nightcap in their suite.