Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

by Darwin Porter

  “Your safest bet is never to fall in love and never take in a livein lover like Rock did,” Henry advised. “It's too dangerous. If you want to become a movie star, get married to an understanding woman, the kind of gal who will let you slip around and get dick on the side, since obviously that's something she can't supply for you. Of course, you've got to provide for her financially so she'll keep her damn mouth shut. Hell, I was about ready to marry Margaret Truman until her father, that asshole of a Missouri mule, put a stop to it. He was on to me. Perhaps that nelly faggot, J. Edgar Hoover, gave him the low-down.”

  “The president's daughter,” Merv said. “I'm impressed. You aim high. As for me, if I get married, it'll be to some gal the world has never heard of. I like to keep it quiet. I don't like a spotlight shining where it doesn't belong, I mean, one that's lighting up my private life.”

  “Keep it that way and you'll go far,” Henry said.

  In his impish way, Merv asked, “Tell me, have you managed to get that handsome hunk, Robert Wagner, to fuck you yet? I think he's the cat's pajamas.”

  “That, my dear boy, is for you to find out,” Henry said. “In time, I'll tell you all the dirt as well as all the dirt on everybody else as well.”

  He was true to his word, and in his gossipy way kept Merv informed with a blowbyblow description of his involvements, such as they were, with Troy Donahue, Rory Calhoun, Tab Hunter, Alain Delon, John Saxon, Mike Connors, Clint Walker, and an array of other handsome young men who never made it in show biz but ended up pumping gas and frying burgers.

  “I decided to start pimping for Merv the first day I met him,” Henry later told Rock, who passed the word along the grapevine. “I realized that he and I are attracted to the same hunky men. Both of us don't go for effeminate men. We want all-American hero types.” Before the end of the 1950s, Henry was telling his boys that Merv's ultimate fantasy types were Tab Hunter and Troy Donohue.

  At a dinner party attended by Merv, a drunken Henry told his fellow guests, “Merv here doesn't go for the Continental types. A lot of guys thought Alain Delon was sexy and handsome when he first came to Hollywood.” He held up a breadstick and broke it in half, holding it up in the air where it met with derisive laughter. “Delon just didn't have what it takes to make it in this town.”

  Weeks after Rock had starred with Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession, he drove over to Merv's house without previously announcing himself. Fortunately, Merv was home alone. It was very late, perhaps after one o'clock in the morning, but Merv was up listening to recordings. He liked to keep abreast of what the competition was singing.

  Rock looked very distraught, and his eyes were bloodshot, perhaps from both crying and drink. Merv remembered that he and Rock sat up talking until dawn's light.

  In the course of a long, drunken early morning, Rock confessed that Jane, the ex-Mrs. Ronald Reagan, had fallen in love with him. “I've got to turn her down,” Rock said. “In bed she does nothing for me. I have a hard time getting it up. But her assurance that I'm so much bigger than Ronnie sort of turns me on.”

  “She's a big star,” Merv said. “Let her down gently. And for God's sake, don't alienate her.”

  “Henry's convinced that after this movie, I'm gonna be the biggest male star in movies,” Rock said. “After all, Gary Cooper and John Wayne are getting a little long in the tooth. But there's a price to pay. I've already had to kick Jack out. Henry forced the issue. I even pretended I hated Jack, and I love him. I called him a dirty, rotten faggot, all those names, anything to turn him against me. As a star, my life will never be the same again, and I know that. I'll be under intense scrutiny day and night.”

  “You could always marry me,” Merv said, only half joking. “No one would ever believe that a guy with my ugly Irish puss could possibly be Rock Hudson's lover.”

  Even though still teary, Rock laughed at Merv's selfdeprecating humor. “For me to marry you, you'd have to dye your hair blond. I'm partial to blonds, you know, and we're not talking Marilyn Monroe here.” He smiled to soften the blow of what he was about to say. “And you'd have to add at least one or two more inches to your dick.”

  “Even if I did, it would never match that monster of yours,” Merv shot back.

  ***

  In 1953, it was mandated by Warners that Merv escort actress Dolores Dorn (sometimes known as Dolores Dorn-Heft) to the premiere of The Charge at Feather River, even though he was embarrassed by his limited involvement in the movie. Nevertheless, he and the glamorously dressed Dolores arrived in a stretch limo in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater on the night of the premiere.

  They walked the long red carpet to the entrance where an announcer with a microphone awaited them. Hundreds of fans yelled for their autographs, although Merv was convinced that not one of them behind the ropes knew who Dolores was or who he was. After they each spoke briefly into the microphone to the cheering crowd, they disappeared into the lobby of the theater. Then, Merv shook Dolores' hand before she faded through a side door to meet her real date of the evening. Merv scribbled a note to the star of the film, Guy Madison, agreeing to meet him at midnight after the premiere.

  In an autobiography, Merv wrote, “That was the first and last I heard of Dolores Dorn-Heft.” Like many of the statements Merv either said or wrote about his own life, that wasn't quite true. In 1956, Dolores made front page news when she married aging actor Franchot Tone, Joan Crawford's discarded husband of the 1930s. On September 14, 1951 Tone had barely survived a beating from a jealous, heavily muscled actor, Tom Neal. Rushed to the hospital, Tone fought for his life. Neal had serious objections to that actor's plan to marry the drugaddicted actress/hooker Barbara Payton, who had also promised to marry Neal.

  Merv had other, more private reasons to recall Dolores. He had had a brief affair with her future husband, the actor Ben Piazza. In 1969, Ben wrote and costarred in a play he had created for his thenwife, Khaki Blue.

  Merv had fallen for the Arkansasborn actor when Henry Willson had introduced the two of them around 1959 when Ben was appearing in The Hanging Tree opposite Gary Cooper. At the time Ben was being hailed in the press as “the new Marlon Brando.”

  As Merv later told Johnny Riley, “Our affair consisted entirely of three long weekends in Malibu, where I got very well acquainted with Ben's Italian sausage.” Merv later admitted that he had a “onenight stand for oldtime's sake” with Ben in New York in 1962, when he went to see him on Broadway. An accomplished actor, Ben had replaced the original cast member, George Grizzard, in the role of Nick in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In 1973, perhaps for sentimental reasons, Merv ordered his staff to arrange for a private screening of The Candy Snatchers, a film in which Ben and Dolores appeared together as Avery and Katherine.

  Merv encountered Ben two or three times after their brief affair. Privately, to friends, he expressed regret that the actor never lived up to his promise and certainly never became the next Marlon Brando. He was sad to learn of Ben's death on September 7, 1991, in Sherman Oaks, California, of AIDSrelated cancer.

  “God damn it, I'm gonna die too one day, but I swear it won't be from AIDS,” Merv vowed to his close friend, Eva Gabor. This was not the first time he'd made such a declaration to her.

  ***

  “My Hollywood career's going so great I don't even appear on the screen anymore,” Merv sarcastically told anybody willing to listen. “I'm assigned to voice-overs.” He was referring to such previous films as Stop, You're Killing Me,” a comedy directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring such firstrate talent as Broderick Crawford and Claire Trevor. Merv was uncredited, his voice used as that of a radio announcer. The film was a funny farce about gangsters who'd gone straight.

  “Guys and Dolls it ain't,” Merv said, “but it is pure Damon Runyon all the way.” Roy Del Ruth was old Hollywood, a former newspaperman who'd entered films in 1915 as a screenwriter and gagman for Mack Sennett. He'd also directed the worst sports biography of all time, The Babe Ruth Story (1948
), but had fared better with Doris Day and Gordon MacRae in both The West Point Story (1950) and On Moonlight Bay (1951).

  Audaciously, Merv told Roy that both of those pictures would have generated bigger profits if Roy had cast him in Gordon MacRae's roles. Roy seemed to like Merv and promised him he'd give him a “juicy part in my next picture.”

  In his next picture, Merv was also uncredited, cast as the voice of a football broadcaster in Trouble Along the Way (1953), a bigbudget film starring John Wayne and Donna Reed. The director was the abrasive, muchdreaded, Hungarian-American Michael Curtiz, who'd achieved screen immortality thanks to his direction of the wartime tearjerker Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

  Throughout the ups and downs of his long career, Merv was never afraid to meet and talk to the big names in movies and politics. The moment he met Michael Curtiz, he had the nerve to ask him for a bigger role.

  “Gree-fing, this is a man's picture about football. A man's sport, Not girlyboy shit, not chorus boy shit from a big band crooner. I vant to hear you as the allman voice of a football broadcaster. I vant you to sound like man on the air. With your stink of a talent, you're luck to get work. Who in hell do you think you are, keed? Bogie?”

  “I just want to be in front of the camera sometimes, not just a voice-over,” Merv protested.

  “Tell you vhat, keed,” Michael said. “I'll cast you in my next picture. A real heman part, not shemale. I'll put you on a horse in a Western. Turn you into the next John Wayne. With one great big different. He's got small balls. I'll give you big balls in my picture. Make you big, bigger than Bogie. All the hot pussies will be scream out for Gree-fing dick.”

  “That's sure something to look forward to,” Merv said. “I'll hold you to your promise. Say, I didn't know The Duke had a small dick.”

  “Yeah, not like Garee Coop,” [Gary Cooper], Michael said. “When we did Bright Leaf, I pissed next to him. Big dick. Gals like men with big dick. Ingrid Bergman told me she goes to bed only with big dick. Bogie has big dick. Errol Flynn, son of a bitch, has big dick. But I married his first wife, Lili Damita. She said I was better fuck than Flynn.”

  Waiting for the next scene to be set up, Michael told Merv that he'd heard that he had fucked Joan Crawford. “I fuck her on Mildred Pierce. I fuck Bette Davis too. Those two are bitches. But they have the biggest dicks in Hollywood. Davis tells people I'm a god damn nothing no good sexless son of a bitch. I tell people she's a fuck lesbian who can't face truth about herself.”

  At one point before he was called to the set, the director said, “Get up! Let's go to toilet and make poodle together.”

  “Fuck a poodle?” Merv asked in astonishment. “I'm not into bestiality.”

  “Make poodle, you dumb stupid idiot,” Michael said. “You don't speak English?”

  “Oh, you mean make puddle?” Merv asked.

  “C'mon get off your fat ass and come take piss with me. That way I'll see if your dick's big enough for my next movie.”

  Merv never told his friends what happened next or if he passed inspection. But he did relate a story about Michael's “conquest” on the set of Trouble Along the Way. The director had never been faithful to any of his wives, and he was known for having sexual involvements with female extras on the sets of his movies.

  One such extra was a tall, strikingly beautiful “woman” who identified herself as Loretta Zotto. She was a dead ringer for Jane Russell with a bust to match. But there was something suspicious about her, and Merv noticed an Adam's apple that seemed inconsistent with the anatomy of a beautiful showgirl. He began to suspect that she was a drag queen. Every day at around noon, Michael disappeared with her into his studio office where they were together for at least an hour and a half.

  One night Judy Garland and Peter Lawford called to invite Merv to a drag show in West Hollywood at a club called Tabu. Judy told Merv that, “I hear there's a drag queen there who does Judy Garland better than I do.”

  At the club, after sitting through three boring drag acts, the star of the show emerged singing “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). She was billed as “Stormy Weather,” but Merv recognized her instantly as Loretta Zotto, Michael Curtiz's “girlfriend.”

  At the end of the show Judy graciously agreed that Stormy sang “Over the Rainbow” better than she did. Backstage, Peter got Stormy's telephone number and promised to call her for a date. “I'll find out what sex we're talking about here,” Peter promised.

  When Peter reported back to Merv that Stormy [i.e. Loretta] was, biologically speaking, a male, Merv kidded his director the next day. Instead of taking the teasing, Michael exploded.“Gree-fing, I know the different between dick and pussy. I fuck that gal every day. I should know.”

  “But do you go through the front door or the back door?” Merv provocatively asked.

  “You sick pervert!” The director stormed off the set.

  “God damn it,” Merv later told Roddy McDowall. “I just blew my chance to get cast in Curtiz's next movie. Me and my big mouth!”

  ***

  To Merv's surprise, he encountered James Dean on the set of Trouble Along the Way. Like Merv, James was also appearing in the film as an uncredited extra. Merv hadn't seen James since he had moved out of the Commodore Garden Apartments in the middle of the night.

  James bonded with Merv like he was a longlost buddy. He made no mention of Nick Adams, but said that he was planning to abandon Hollywood forever as soon as he finished his brief appearance in “this John Wayne piece of shit. How can you respect a town that would make that Nazi jerk a star?”

  That same day, shortly after five o'clock, both actors headed for a drink at a bar near Warner Brothers. James quickly informed Merv of his new ambition. “I'm going to be a Broadway star. I've already appeared in See the Jaguar. I got rave reviews.”

  Merv had read in the trade papers that the play had closed after five performances. “I appeared on stage locked in a jaguar's cage,” James said. “I bet Marlon Brando can't do that. I even got to sing, ‘Green Briar, Blue Fire.’ People raved about my singing.” He smiled and winked at Merv.“Move on, baby—make room for the competition.”

  Over his second drink of the day, James confessed to Merv, “I've given up hustling. Before I hit it big on Broadway, I found an easier way to make money. Homosexuals in New York went crazy for me. They even sent me gifts backstage.” He paused. “An invitation for various things. I'm one pretty boy, or so the love notes said.”

  “So how are you turning that into money?” Merv asked.

  “I posed for nudes in New York,” James confessed. “Including one with a big erection. I sell these photos to my most ardent fans at twentyfive bucks a picture. It beats hustling. They get to look at what I've got and they pay for the privilege—and no one even touches me. Not bad, huh?”

  “Sounds like a great way for an actor to make a living if these photos don't come back to haunt you after you've made it as a star.”

  “Like I give a damn about that,” James said. “I've even set up some sessions with photographers here in Los Angeles. I've got a posing session around nine tonight. Wanna come with me?”

  “I'd love to,” Merv said. “There's more than a bit of the voyeur in me.”

  Just outside the photographer's apartment later that evening, James removed his denim shirt and blue jeans. He wore no underwear. He handed his apparel to Merv for safekeeping. “I like to arrive at the doorstep dressed for action.” He chuckled at his own comment.

  At the door, the shocked photographer hustled his visitors inside. “I've got two Eisenhower Republican old maids who live upstairs,” the photographer said. “They might see you and have a heart attack. I don't want those old biddies to know what goes on down here.”

  That night, Merv assisted in James' photo shoot whenever and however he was called upon, fetching a glass of water or, in one case, holding a spotlight. But mostly he stared at the subject in fascination. As a nude model, James see
med to have no inhibitions at all. At one point he grabbed a black lace mantilla left over from a previous posing section and plucked a red rose from a vase, grasping on the stem with his teeth.

  “That may be too girlish a pose for most of our clients,” the photographer warned, but snapped the campy picture anyway. “But we'll do this one just for laughs.”

  At the end of the session, James put on his jeans and denim shirt but turned down the photographer's invitation for a threeway with Merv.

  Back out in the open air, on the sidewalk with James, Merv asked, “What's next?”

  “I want to go back to your place and fuck you,” James said bluntly.

  “A man after my own heart,” Merv said. “Let's go!”

  The pictures that James posed for that night—still in private hands—are a valued collector's item today.

  ***

  215

  On the Warners lot, Merv reintroduced himself to Donna Reed, John Wayne's costar in Trouble Along the Way. He'd met her briefly in Hawaii when she was costarring in From Here to Eternity with Monty Clift. They spoke only briefly, and she praised Monty as the “most sensitive actor on the screen today. But how long will it be before he destroys himself? Two years? Maybe three?” She raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps you can save him through your friendship.”

  “Only Monty can save himself,” Merv replied.

  “I don't think he will,” she said, before turning to leave. At that point John Wayne walked up, kissing her on the cheek. She introduced The Duke to Merv before excusing herself to get ready for a scene.

  John shook Merv's hand. “I heard you at the Grove one night. Nice voice. I like the old songs, the romantic ballads. Not this fucking rock ‘n’ shit coming out of Miss Elvis Presley. What a faggot!”

  The Duke clearly intimidated Merv. He'd heard from Michael Curtiz that the actor had been grouchy and grumpy on the set that morning and was absolutely “merciless” with minor actors who blew their lines. Even though he was undergoing horrendous personal problems with the women in his life, he arrived cameraready every morning, with all his lines memorized. He was taking his role seriously, playing a poolshooting, divorced football coach at a financially strapped Catholic college.