On the road with Kathryn, Merv flew to Knoxville, Tennessee, the hometown of the illfated Grace Moore. Arriving at the airport, he was mobbed by teenage girls. Merv experienced “my first taste of being Tab Hunter. I was a romantic hero on the screen to these gals. The little fat boy from San Mateo had come full circle, or so I thought at the time.”
“I even got to meet those hulking brothers of Grace Moore,” Merv said. “Each of them insisted on slapping me on the back. No sadistic masseur ever delivered such blows.”
Before appearing on stage before their fans that night, Kathryn and Merv rehearsed with the Kentucky Symphony. She went through her four big numbers and Merv did his solo. Later that afternoon, Kathryn and Merv rode in a convertible through the streets of Knoxville, waving at their fans. Rumors circulated that they were lovers. Even Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee turned out to greet them, inviting them to a reception after their performance that upcoming evening.
Hours later, with a beautifully gowned and madeup Kathryn on his arm, Merv paraded down the aisle of a packed auditorium. She suddenly gripped his arm. “I'm desperately tired,” she whispered in his ear. “I can do only one number. You'll have to carry the rest of the show.”
This was so unexpected that Merv was stunned. But ever the showman, he gallantly mounted the stage. After only one number, she retreated. The spotlight then shone on Merv, who cleverly won over the audience by singing “The Tennessee Waltz.” After that, the crowd was his. Among others, he entertained them with his Coconuts song.
Later that night, after the governor's reception, Merv answered a knock on his hotel room door. It was a handsome young room service waiter, delivering a bottle of champagne from the governor. After uncorking the champagne for Merv, the waiter was invited to stay over to help Merv drink it. “That's great,” the waiter said. “I just went off duty at midnight.”
“That's what I call room service,” Merv said jokingly.
In bed, the waiter told Merv he didn't know what to do. “I've never done it with a man.”
“Good,” Merv said, “I'll teach you.”
The following morning Merv's ego was a bit deflated when the waiter begged Merv to “take me to Hollywood so I can become a bigger movie star than you.”
Knoxville was Merv's last public appearance with Kathryn. For wider coverage, Warners split up the stars. Merv flew to Boston, checking into the Statler Hotel's presidential suite, an accommodation which had once been occupied by General Dwight Eisenhower.
Merv was delighted to learn that Freddy Martin's orchestra was appearing in Beantown. He called his former boss and invited all the members of Freddy's band to his suite after their final show. The musicians each predicted big stardom for Merv, as they devoured the champagne and caviar he'd ordered. “Warners is paying for this blast, so eat and drink like it's going out of style,” Merv told them. He even made the suite's bedroom available to them, urging them to call their girlfriends, boyfriends, or wives.
One of the musicians, who had previously fooled around with Merv on the road, stayed over for the night. “No one handles ‘Jimmy’ like you do,” the trombone player said before jumping into bed.
In the aftermath of that party, the accountants at Warners were furious that Merv's fiesta had run up a bill of three thousand dollars. In 1953, that was a lot of money.
Without Kathryn, the crowds diminished. By the time Merv reached Denver, there were fewer than one hundred fans who waved as Merv rode in a parade in a convertible along one of the city's main streets. Miss Denver got more applause than he did.
The publicists at Warners had arranged for the Colorado press to interview Merv at a reception within his suite at the Brown Palace. He was familiar with the questions that tended at this point in the tour to be routine: “Do you sleep in the nude?” and “What was it like kissing Kathryn Grayson?”
Around midnight, after a lot of alcohol had been consumed, there was a knock on the door. Uninvited, Peaches Browning burst into the room and kissed Merv on the lips. He remembered her from parties he'd attended in San Francisco during the war. She was the Anna Nicole Smith of her day, famous for being famous. Draped in furs and diamonds, the blonde, blueeyed, buxom headlinegrabber had married Edward W. Browning, a.k.a. “Daddy” Browning, as the tabloids called him.
The aging millionaire playboy had discovered Peaches in a ballroom in New York. Although at the time she was a fifteenyearold Irish colleen, she soon became his bride. In 1927, after a few months of marriage, she filed for divorce, creating a media feeding frenzy by levying a series of fiery accusations — “degrading passion, depravity, and lewdness. One of the charges involved how he kept a big fat goose in their bedroom to arouse his erotic passion.
At Merv's reception, Warners' publicists didn't want Peaches horning in on their publicity, but Merv welcomed her and they posed together for pictures.
Merv was sad to learn of her death three years later. Peaches was found dead in her bathroom, and Merv always claimed that she had been murdered, although he had no evidence to back it up.
After Peaches, the tour dwindled down. Merv didn't remember the exact city where the publicity jaunt ended. “I blotted it out. By then, we'd learned that So This Is Love had bombed at the box office. On the last day of the tour, five fans showed up, and I'm exaggerating the number a bit. By the time I limped back to Hollywood, I feared my dream of stardom was eluding me once again. Yet hope bloomed eternal.”
In 1953, instead of going to see So This Is Love, movie fans in America were lured away from their television screens to see such cinematic spectacles as The Robe, which 20th Century Fox had released in the new medium of widescreen Cinema-Scope. Briefly, Hollywood moguls believed that widescreen spectaculars would lure fans back into the theaters and away from TV programmers and their “nasty little boxes.”
***
During the filming of So This Is Love, Merv had continued to play tennis with Howard Hughes, who was deep into his mostly unrequited obsession with Kathryn Grayson. Howard warned Merv not to tell her that they were friends or even tennis partners. Merv later said, “Howard had no real friends. He was the loneliest man in the world.”
Howard was jealous of any person, male or female, he became involved with, and he spied on both his current lovers and even his wouldbe lovers.
As studio chief of RKO, Howard had hired Jeff Chouinard, a dashing exfighter pilot, to be the head of an elaborate spy ring, giving him a budget of two million dollars a year. Chouinard's specialty was somehow managing to install a “bugging radio” in the bedrooms of each of Howard's paramours.
Howard had organized a team of drivers — mostly collegeage men — to infiltrate Los Angeles, trailing the beautiful women and handsome men upon whom Howard maintained a fixation at the time. When Howard learned that some of his drivers were actually encountering some of the women they were spying upon, and then seducing them, he fired all of them, demanding that henceforth, Chouinard hire only homosexual drivers.
One Sunday afternoon, while lunching with Merv after a tennis match, the aviator confessed that he had an army of some fifty detectives following such stars as Mitzi Gaynor, Barbara Payton (who later became a hooker), Gina Lollobrigida, Susan Hayward, and Zizi Jeanmaire, the French ballet star. His most sophisticated stateoftheart eavesdropping devices were installed in the residence of Jean Peters.
Every morning at breakfast, Howard listened to the recordings derived from monitors positioned within the bedrooms of these stars. Howard was particularly fascinated by a tape of the Swedish actress, Anita Ekberg, making love to a former college football player.
Howard arranged for his sometimes lover, Pat DiCicco, to escort Elizabeth Taylor out on a date. Despite the fact that she'd repeatedly spurned Howard's advances, he was still fascinated by her. One of Howard's detectives climbed a telephone pole behind Elizabeth's apartment on Sunset Boulevard and reported that Pat didn't leave Elizabeth's bedroom until 8am the next morning. “I told him to escort her, not fuck
her,” Howard said. “For his punishment, I'm going to fuck that twotiming bastard until he bleeds,” Howard told Merv. “That'll teach Pat a lesson.”
By this point in their relationship, Merv had come to believe that Howard was completely deranged. He'd heard rumors that the billionaire had contracted syphilis from the actress, Billie Dove, a former love, back in the 1920s, and that it had never been cured, adversely affecting his brain and thought processes.
After the first day's shoot on So This Is Love, Merv went to bed early to get his beauty sleep before facing the cameras in the morning. At 3am, a mysterious call came in from Howard, who wanted to meet him in a parked car in a seedy neighborhood of Los Angeles. A sleepyeyed Merv drove to the rendezvous point and met with Howard in the back seat of a twentyyearold car that Howard used, since he believed that none of the press would believe that he was driving such a beatup old jalopy.
Howard's proposal was blunt. The aviator wanted to spy on Kathryn during the shooting of the film, as he suspected that she was having a torrid affair with her handsome, dashing co-star in Show Boat, Howard Keel.
Merv found the idea of spying on someone distasteful. “But who was I to say no to Howard Hughes and live to tell about it?” he later said. For Merv's services, Howard agreed to pay him one thousand dollars a week, and Merv, who desperately wanted the money, agreed.
In Hollywood and later on the road, Merv dutifully recorded Grayson's every action, later submitting his written notes to Howard. One of Howard's obsessions involved wanting to know the exact number of times Kathryn excused herself to go to the toilet. In the past, Howard had been known to supervise the bowel movements of some of his conquests, both male and female. Cary Grant, for one, found that habit of Howard's “outrageously objectionable.”
Howard kept his word, arranging for those thousand dollar checks to be sent to Merv every week. Once Merv and Kathryn split up their road tour campaign as a means of carrying the publicity into more cities, Merv suspected that the checks would stop coming.
But once Merv was back in Hollywood, Howard wanted to keep him employed, this time as a midnight driver. Howard was continuing his personal surveillance of Kathryn. He often did his own driving, but whenever Merv encountered him, he claimed to have blinding migraines that made it impossible for him to steer a car. Merv suspected that these headaches were brought on by all those airplane crashes he'd survived.
On his first night as Howard's driver, Merv drove him to Kathryn's Tudorstyle mansion, parking a block away so as not to be detected, even though no one would have suspected that Howard Hughes was being driven around in Merv's old car. The pattern established on Merv's first night would be repeated frequently in the weeks to come.
Howard would stake out Kathryn's house from a lonely position in her rose garden, where he could look up at her bedroom window. One night she spotted him and informed her father the next morning. He threatened to take his rifle and “kill the whorechasing son of a bitch.” But Kathryn talked him out of it, claiming that such a scandal would destroy her career.
Dangerous liaison: Kathryn Grayson
with her billionaire stalker, Howard Hughes
On the nights that Howard stalked the Grayson garden, Merv fell asleep at the wheel, waiting for Howard's return, which was usually right before dawn.
On their third night of stakeout, Howard confessed what his real interest was in Kathryn. “It's her breasts, knockers from heaven. As you know from seeing Jane Russell in The Outlaw, I'm a breast man.”
Seeing Howard wandering night after night alone in her garden, Kathryn in time took pity on him. She invited him inside and allowed him to sleep in her guest room, but not in her own bedroom. The Grayson home became the perfect hideaway for Howard and an escape from the press and the everincreasing problems of Hughes Aircraft, RKO, and TWA.
Howard warned Merv one night that “both of us might be killed. I'm a marked man.” He claimed that he was constantly pursued by process servers and, in fact, had a total of twentysix law-suits pending, some of them paternity actions. He was sometimes chased by jealous boyfriends.
Howard was eventually accepted into the Grayson household as one of the family. Even her father grew to like him. For Merv, this acceptance led to financial disaster. But whereas paychecks stopped, the tennis matches continued.
The relationship between Howard and Kathryn lasted on and off for eight tumultuous years. She finally tired of his games and abandoned him at the altar. Much that he did infuriated her, including when he appeared at her live show in Las Vegas. She was honored that he showed up to see her perform, but she later learned that he had stashed two of his other mistresses, actresses Jean Peters and Terry Moore, within different suites at the same hotel. Hughes would later marry Jean. Terry also claimed that Hughes married her, although no marriage licence has ever surfaced.
“I wish Howard had married me,” Merv later told Johnny Riley. “Alas, he never proposed. Not only that, he never asked me to go to bed with him. I guess I wasn't his type. Once when I visited his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I noticed that he had three barechested pictures of the actor John Payne photographed both in his boxing and swimming trunks. I made a mistake that night when I wandered into Howard's bedroom to take a leak in his toilet. He later had the bowl ripped out. I pissed off Howard Hughes by taking a piss. No one, or so I learned, uses the same toilet bowl as Howard.”
In the years to come, Kathryn later recalled “a warm and wonderful relationship” with Howard. But Howard confessed that he'd once gotten violent with her. Merv suspected that her assessment of that warm and wonderful relationship was mere fodder for the tabloids, having nothing to do with reality.
In some ways, Merv was glad to escape from the clutches of Howard, as he found the job distasteful. He hadn't had a decent night's sleep in weeks. With Howard out of the picture except for Sunday tennis matches, Merv turned to the task of living his own life.
***
Throughout the early 50s, Merv made and maintained a friendship with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, two highly photogenic and congenial newcomers who were married on June 4, 1951. Having appeared on the cover of virtually every movie magazine in America, they were often headlined at the time as “America's Sweethearts.” During the course of their bumpy elevenyear marriage, they would costar together in five films, the bestreceived of which was Houdini (1953). During the era of their early friendship with Merv, Janet's careerdefining role as stabbing victim Marion Crane in the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Psycho (1960), lay in her future.
Sometime during the period when they were still defined as newlyweds, Tony called Merv and asked if he'd join Janet and himself for a Halloween costume party at the home of Jerry Lewis. Merv agreed and told him that Marilyn Erskine would be his date that night.
Merv had only recently gotten to know Tony and Janet, both of whom he found to be open and candid with him, enough so that he felt he didn't have to keep secrets from them. Both Tony and Janet were already aware of Merv's homosexuality. And at least when they were separate from each other, both of the young stars were equally candid with him.
From the beginning of the friendship, Merv became aware that Tony was cheating on his wife. At the time, he didn't know whether Janet suspected that her handsome husband was “playing the field,” as Tony described his lifestyle to Merv.
Without Tony, Merv and Janet frequently had lunch together to gossip about their romantic involvements. She delighted in telling Merv about how Errol Flynn had seduced her when they'd appeared in That Forsyte Woman (1949). “Yes, but I had him long before you did,” Merv boasted to Janet.
“Well, at least I got to sample Joe DiMaggio before some of these other starlets,” she said to Merv. She'd met the baseball great when he'd appeared in her movie, Angels in the Outfield (1951).
Later during Merv's friendship with Janet, she'd be cast with Robert Wagner in their rather laughable adventure film, Prince Valiant (1954). Merv confessed to her that he thought the stunn
ingly handsome Robert Wagner was the sexiest man who'd ever lived. He begged Janet to go to bed with the young man, so “you can give me a blowbyblow, inchbyinch description.”
“I'll get back to you on that,” Janet promised.
Both Janet and Merv had slept with Peter Lawford, so Merv didn't need for her to spill any secrets about him. But he did want to know “all the details about that Tarzan stud, Lex Barker,” who would go on to marry Lana Turner. Merv also heard about Janet's involvement with the gangster Johnny Stompanato, who later would become involved with Lana and who would eventually be stabbed to death under murky circumstances in her home.
During the period Merv was hanging out with Janet, she was also being pursued by his friend, Howard Hughes. “I'd call it sexual harassment more than a romance,” Janet confided. What surprised Merv most was Janet's confession that she'd married a student, Kenneth Carlyle, when she was only fourteen years old. That marriage was later annulled.
Knowing that for career reasons Merv needed to keep dating a string of beautiful women, Janet promised to arrange a date for him with her friend, Gloria DeHaven. Ironically, Tony Curtis had also dated Gloria.
With Merv, Tony was equally candid about his sex life. “I don't know what there was about me,” Merv later said. “Perhaps I was just a Mother Confessor. But stars always wanted to tell me their secrets. I had this ability to get them to open up and talk. That certainly came in handy when I became a talk show host.”
Tony revealed that he'd first ejaculated when he was eleven years old in a dark movie theater in the Bronx while holding hands with a girl from his neighborhood. “But it wasn't until I was in the Navy that I lost it in a whorehouse in Panama City,” Tony said. “I was eighteen at the time.”
Merv had continued to find accommodating young women to date, doing what was deemed necessary to keep up appearances and mask his private homosexual lifestyle. Marilyn Erskine, Merv's date, had been briefly married to the director Stanley Kramer in 1945, but after a few weeks this mysterious union was annulled. Around that time of her date with Merv, she was costarring in The Eddie Cantor Story (1953). Merv and Marilyn jointly decided to dress up as drag versions of Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster, who were appearing on screens across the nation in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). Merv dressed in drag as Shirley's character of Lola Delaney, with Marilyn disguised as the male character played by Burt Lancaster, Doc Delaney. In synch with the cross-dressing choices of Merv and Marilyn, Janet dressed as Tony, and Tony appeared in drag as Janet.
Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet Page 26
