Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

by Darwin Porter

  At the end, Merv walked Monty and Mira to their car. Still no review from either of them. Finally, he asked, “Okay, guys, what did you think of Doris Day's future leading man?”

  Mira remained silent, but Monty spoke up. “There was something up there on that screen,” he said. “Maybe a bit raw. But definitely something up there on that screen.”

  With that enigmatic review, Monty drove off with Mira but not before inviting Merv to join them for a drive the following day down to Laguna Beach.

  After that, Merv began to see more and more of Monty, usually with Mira. One day Monty complained that he found the noise at his hotel, Château Marmont, deafening. Merv invited him to come and live with him in a house he'd rented from his agent, “Bullets” Durgom. In the days and weeks ahead, Merv would regret that invitation.

  One Saturday afternoon, Merv and Monty spent time alone together. Mira was nowhere to be seen, and Merv suspected that Monty was feuding with his “boundatthewaist twin,” as he called her.

  Monty had not had one drink that afternoon, but Merv noticed that he kept retreating to the bathroom. Merv walked out on the patio and dreamed of other conquests, as his onagain, offagain sex life with Monty was not adequate for him. He gave in whenever Monty wanted sex, but never pursued it.

  In his unexpurgated version of Hollywood Babylon, filmmaker Kenneth Anger referred to Monty as “Princess Tiny Meat,” and as a result, the actor had been deeply wounded that the size of his penis should be known to his public. “What is this going to do to my image?” Monty had shouted. “Jesus H. Christ. Is nothing sacred?”

  When Monty emerged from the bathroom, Merv suspected that he'd been taking drugs, perhaps in pill form. Around seven that evening Monty abruptly announced that he had been invited to Alfred Hitchcock's house to meet with Olivia de Havilland to see if she'd like to take the female lead in I Confess. In 1949, both Monty and Olivia had made the highly successful film, The Heiress.

  Seeing Monty's condition, Merv offered to drive him there. He also had an ulterior motive. He wanted to meet Hitchcock, hoping he might have a role for him in the film. He also wanted to meet Olivia since Gone With the Wind had been one of his alltime favorite movies.

  Monty adamantly refused, claiming he preferred to drive himself. Sensing what Merv really wanted, Monty agreed to use his influence and star power to get Hitchcock to offer Merv a role in I Confess.

  At Hitchcock's house, as later reported by Monty to Merv, the actor bonded with Olivia. After nearly three hours of talking, and shortly before midnight, Olivia decided the part wasn't for her. “I would be horribly miscast,” she told Hitchcock and Monty. The female lead eventually went to Anne Baxter.

  Years later Olivia remembered that evening, recalling how “hyperintense and overexcited” Monty was, his pupils dilated. “He talked very fast in an almost hysterical voice,” she said. “Usually his speech pattern was much slower.” At the time she believed he had had a strange reaction to the alcohol he'd consumed, not suspecting drug use.

  Shortly before midnight, Monty called Merv from a phone booth. His speech was slurred. It seemed that he'd had an accident after leaving Hitchcock's house and had crashed into a tree. Although badly bruised with some cuts, he apparently didn't have any broken limbs. He gave Merv his location and begged him to come and pick him up.

  About thirty minutes later Merv, only half dressed, arrived on the scene but couldn't find Monty. Getting out of his car, he searched the deserted neighborhood, eventually finding the actor wandering dazed in a park. He was limping, and his cheek was bleeding.

  Although Monty had summoned Merv to the scene, he was hostile at first, even refusing to get into Merv's car. Merv forced Monty into the back seat where he collapsed in sobs. Before taking Monty back to Bullets' house, Merv drove nearby to the scene of the accident, getting out to survey Monty's smashed car. It was so badly damaged that Merv wondered how Monty could have escaped relatively intact.

  Back at their rented house, Merv tucked Monty into bed after undressing him and putting iodine on his cuts. The moment he hit the pillow, Monty passed out. In his living room, Merv impersonated Monty's voice and called the police. “My car's been stolen,” he said. “I wanted to drive it somewhere tonight and found it missing.”

  The police apparently were convinced by Merv's act and took down all the information. Merv went to bed beside Monty that night, thinking he had saved him from embarrassing headlines the next morning, and possibly time in jail.

  Monty's smashed car was blamed on “joy riders” who had hotwired his vehicle. Since the car could not be repaired, Merv went with Monty the next day to shop for what Monty called “new wheels.”

  Grateful to Merv for rescuing him, Monty kept his promise to get Merv cast in I Confess. At first Merv was thrilled until he learned what part he had, and then he was bitterly disappointed. If Merv thought his screen appearance in Cattle Town was brief, he learned what brief really meant in I Confess. He did not even appear on the screen. He was unseen but his voice was heard on the other end of a phone call.

  He complained to Roddy, “Just as Monty gets the juicy role of the year in From Here to Eternity, I get to do voice-overs.”

  Two days later, Merv's luck changed, or at least he thought it had. He received a call from Bill Orr at Warner's informing him that he'd been cast in Doris Day's latest picture, By the Light of the Silvery Moon.

  “I'll show Hollywood,” Merv vowed. “Doris Day and I will knock Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower off the front pages.”

  ***

  Two weeks later Merv drove to the Kirkeby Mansion to meet Monty for a game of tennis. The home later became famous as the setting for The Beverly Hillbillies. Monty was nearly two hours late, and Merv was ready to leave. At the last moment Monty showed up, looking bedraggled and depressed.

  He couldn't even finish one game, as his heart wasn't in it. He asked Merv to drive him at leisure through the Hollywood Hills where they might find a secluded place to talk. Merv willingly agreed. On the way to a lonely little hillside, Monty didn't say a word. Merv found a place with a beautiful view and retrieved a blanket from the trunk of his car, spreading it out for Monty.

  No sooner had Monty sat down than he reached for Merv and burst into uncontrollable sobs. Merv held him tightly until he'd cried himself out. “Tell me what happened. It can't be all that bad.”

  Through tearstreaked eyes, Monty looked at him. “But it is. The worst humiliation of my life. What is it with me? I love women and want to be with them, but for sex I always turn to men.”

  Slowly, very slowly and with great hesitation and embarrassment, Monty revealed his story. Over the past few weeks, and much to the regret of Mira Rostova, Monty had developed an obsession with Greta Garbo. She had seen three of his pictures, including A Place in the Sun, and was equally fascinated with him.

  If such a thing was possible for Garbo, she seemed flattered that such a handsome, brilliant young actor would show an interest in her, since she'd faded from the screen after the disastrous release of Two-Faced Woman in 1941. Her heyday in the late 20s and 30s was becoming more and more a distant memory, as each year passed and her onceloyal fans died in droves.

  Monty had been introduced to Garbo by Salka Viertel, the oncefamous Polish actress and writer who had moved to Hollywood in 1929 before marrying director Berthod Viertel. She had worked on such Garbo vehicles as Anna Karenina and Camille. Garbo was not only Salka's best friend, but they were said to be lesbian lovers.

  Monty claimed that until the previous night, he had never had any sexual involvement with Garbo, except for a kiss on her perpetually chapped lips. “But last night that changed,” he sobbed. “It was horrible. My thing never rose up beyond the size of a peanut, and I was faced with the Grand Canyon. I rushed to the bathroom where I threw up. I think she heard me. How unflattering for any woman. But for Garbo it must have been terrible, as it was for me. She'll never speak to me again.”

  That afternoon Garbo called and invi
ted Monty for dinner. Impulsively he asked if he could bring a friend, and Garbo said yes. When Monty told Merv that he'd been invited to meet Garbo, he claimed it was a deliberate choice to avoid any embarrassment over discussing the previous night. Merv was delighted and accepted the invitation, although he wished that it had been extended under more favorable conditions.

  Although her face had aged since Merv had last seen Garbo on the screen, he found that she was still a regal beauty with a thin, almost athletic body. In the years that lay ahead of him, he would become celebrated for the ease with which he dealt with celebrities, getting them to open up even in front of millions of people. Garbo, however, was not to be among his devotees.

  Over the worst dinner of his life, cooked by Garbo herself, the diva wasted most of the limited number of words she uttered praising the merchandise at Hammacher-Schlemmer in New York.

  Throughout the dinner, Monty did most of the talking. When not praising that department store, Garbo was mostly silent. When she got up to go to her kitchen, Monty whispered to Merv, “Isn't she terrific? My Sphinx Goddess.”

  After dinner, Garbo played a record on her phonograph and settled down in her favorite chair. To Merv's horror, Monty continued to drink heavily. He stood up only to take off his shirt and pants, retaining only his underwear. Lowering himself onto a position on all fours on her carpet, he began to crawl toward Garbo. At her feet, he removed her sandals. Once that was accomplished, he rubbed her big feet and then began quoting from The Wanderings of Oisin by William Butler Yeats:

  The mistdrops hung on the fragrant trees.

  And in the blossoms hung the bees.

  We rode in sadness above Lough Lean,

  For our best were dead on Gavra's green.

  At the end of his recitation, he began to wildly kiss her feet.

  Garbo claimed that Yeats had written her a fan letter after watching her emote in Flesh and the Devil. “He proposed marriage to me,” she claimed. “He said that even though we'd engage in the ‘tragedy of sexual intercourse,’ we would still maintain the ‘perpetual virginity of our souls.’ I'm sure that must have been from one of his poems or something.”

  Over brandy consumed on her side porch, Merv sat with Monty and Garbo watching the fireflies. “God damn it, did I feel left out,” he'd later recall.

  Suddenly, a new excitement came over Monty, as he tried to revive Garbo's interest in appearing on screen as George Sand to his Alfred de Musset. Merv was not familiar with either the names or genders of these 19th- century French lovers, but his ears perked up when Monty said he wanted George Cukor to direct. Garbo suggested Salka Viertel for the screenplay, but Monty held out for the French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre.

  Merv learned that the George Sand/Alfred de Musset affair had first been suggested in 1948 as the theme of Garbo's comeback picture. Apparently, Monty was hoping to rekindle hope for the production.

  At one point Monty assured Garbo that she'd look great in the men's clothing that Sand wore. Merv wondered how Monty and Garbo felt they could bring a homosexual love story to the screen.

  After Merv surveyed a reluctant Garbo and a hopelessly wrecked Monty, he would later tell Roddy McDowall, “That film with those two will never be made. Maybe if they would cast me as George Sand, it might have a chance.”

  “You'd have to do the role in drag,” Roddy warned him. “George Sand was a woman.”

  ***

  William Butler Yeats,

  Greta Garbo, and

  “the perpetual

  virginity of our souls”

  Merv was disturbed that he still hadn't been shown a script for his upcoming movie with Doris Day. At Warners he had spare time on his hands, and he wanted to begin rehearsing the musical numbers he'd perform with Doris.

  He was also troubled that Doris hadn't asked to see him on the Warners lot. She'd been responsible for his coming to Hollywood, but she hadn't even placed a call to him. He decided to go to her dressing room, knock on her door, and reintroduce himself to her, as he hadn't seen her since that night in Las Vegas when she attended his show.

  Bill Orr had instructed him never to go and knock on the door of a star. It was not proper etiquette, but Merv decided to defy the mandate. Although his knees were knocking, Merv stood before the door of Doris' dressing room, took a deep breath, and knocked three times. It was Doris herself who threw open the door, greeting him with such a bright smile that one would have thought she was welcoming one of her alltime best friends for a reunion.

  “C'mon in, Merv,” she said. “I've been meaning to call you. There are some friends I want you to meet.” Taking his arm, she directed him inside where she introduced him to Steve Cochran and Ronald Reagan, two contract players at Warners, although both of them were being shoved out the studio door at the time.

  Doris was having a gettogether with friends she'd made while filming Storm Warning, a movie about the KKK. Merv had heard rumors that Doris had had an affair with Ronald before Nancy Davis snared him. Ronald was polite, friendly, and courteous, giving no hint that a grand friendship would one day form between Merv and himself.

  As for Steve, Merv found him “about the sexiest thing walking on the planet,” as he would later tell Roddy.

  The conversation was mostly “shop talk,” as Merv remembered it. He kept hoping that Doris would at least bring up the subject of working with him on By the Light of the Silvery Moon, but she said not a word about the upcoming picture. Finally, Merv himself built up enough courage to bring it up. Her only response was, “We'll have a grand old time making the film.”

  The girl he didn't marry:

  Ronald Reagan with Doris Day

  in Storm Warning

  After a while, Ronald shook Merv's hand and kissed Doris on the cheek, as he had to leave for another appointment. Steve remained behind to talk with Doris and Merv. At one point Merv complained that he still hadn't been assigned adressing room and was forced to dress with the extras.

  “Jack Warner is such a cheap bastard,” Steve said. “You're welcome to share my dressing room until you get one of your own.”

  Merv thanked Steve profusely, even though trying to conceal his eagerness to share the dressing room of the actor who'd been called “the male sexpot of Warner Brothers.”

  Doris abruptly shooed the men out of her dressing room, claiming she had to get dressed for a shot. She told Merv that she was looking forward to working with him and predicted that he'd become a big star at Warners.

  Walking with Steve to his dressing room, Merv told him, “Getting to star opposite Doris is the big break of my life.”

  Steve stopped and stared at Merv, as if not comprehending what he'd just said. “Star? I ran into Gordon MacRae yesterday. He told me about starring once again with Doris.”

  “There must be some mistake,” Merv said, utterly confused.

  “Better clear it up, kid,” Steve said. “That God damn Silvery Moon has been shining for two weeks of shooting on both Doris and MacRae.”

  ***

  On their first day of sharing the dressing room, Steve laid down the ground rules. If a yellow ribbon was tied around the doorknob, Merv was to idle away his time by having a cup of coffee in the commissary. The ribbon meant that Steve was engaged, seducing one of the female extras on the lot. “Sometimes I bed a big star, but not that often.” He also confided that, “I have to have sex every afternoon. I often can't wait for the evening to roll around. If I don't shoot off in somebody, I get splitting migraines.”

  Merv had heard all the gossip about Steve, but later said, “seeing was believing” when he arrived at Steve's dressing room the following morning to see him emerge from the shower. “It hung all the way down to Honolulu,” he confided to Roddy later that day. “Talk about meat for the poor.”

  Steve appeared amused that Merv kept staring at his appendage but seemed in no hurry to cover it up. Merv suspected that the Bmovie bad boy might be an exhibitionist.

  Steve Cochran

>   The Los Angeles crime writer, James Ellroy, had made more fans for Steve thanks to references to him in his novels American Tabloid and L.A. Confidential. Steve had one of the largest penises in Hollywood and was nicknamed “Mr. King Size” because of his endowment. In some of his writings, Ellroy referred to Steve with the sobriquet “The Shvantz.”

  Virile and swaggering on the outside, Steve seemed deeply troubled to Merv, as if he possessed dark secrets that tormented his soul. The son of a lumberman from Wyoming, he exuded a rugged super masculine manofthewest appeal. He'd once worked as a cowpoke.

  He'd had an ongoing affair with Mae West when he'd appeared on stage with her in Diamond Lil.

  Steve told amusing stories about Mae, particularly one time when he had to administer an enema to her before she could go onstage. He grabbed his penis. “That's not all I administered to her. I made her squeal, and that from a woman used to taking the big ones.”

  Steve called his seduction of such big stars as Mae West “mercy fucks.” He confided that he was still having an affair with Joan Crawford that had begun back when he'd appeared in her film The Damned Don't Cry (1950). “I don't fuck her because I have a hardon for her. I keep plugging her, hoping she'll get me cast in her next picture.”

  Steve often drank in the afternoon while waiting to be called to the set. He drunkenly confessed that his dream in life was to have a harem composed entirely of thirteen and fourteenyearold girls. “For me, that would be paradise — not Crawford or West. Those broads have seen their day!”

  Every afternoon, Merv sat in the commissary pondering his fate, waiting for Steve to finish off his afternoon seduction. One day when he wandered back toward the dressing room to see if Steve had done his duty, he spotted two teenage girls emerging from Steve's dressing room. The rather beautiful girls looked thirteen at the most. When they were out of sight, Merv came into Steve's dressing room, finding the actor nude, sitting in a chair with an impressive semi-erection.