Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet

by Darwin Porter

  The motel where Johnny and Hadley had had their torrid affair was the most sordid Merv had ever stayed in, even during his crosscountry tours with Freddy Martin's Band. “So this is my honeymoon cottage?” he said, surveying the wreckage Hadley and Johnny had left behind.

  “Who needs a great room when you've got me?” Hadley asked.

  Merv felt he'd launched himself on a new adventure into the unknown with a perfect stranger.

  Later that evening in Laguna, Merv and Hadley walked along the beach until they discovered an offthebeatentrack bistro. From a seat inside, and for the first time, Merv really studied Hadley's eyes, which were large and blue, clear and intelligent, set in an angular face with spectacular bones and perfect honeycolored skin. As Bill later said, “When Merv got back to Los Angeles, he gave us a blowbyblow description of his time away with Hadley. He didn't spare us the slightest detail.”

  After dinner they wandered the streets, stopping off at a club, The Thundering Surf, with a bright neon sign that flashed letters in fire engine red, sunflower yellow, and Halloween orange. Finding the club too raucous, and the music too loud, they wandered next door to a club called The Fighting Cock, marked outside with a neon red rooster. It was more intimate, the music more subdued.

  Midnight found Merv in bed once again with Hadley. Their honeymoon in this tacky motel lasted three nights. By the end of the third night, Hadley was proclaiming undying love for Merv. Yet Merv held back. He wasn't quite sure he wanted to commit to Hadley. It was all too soon, all too fast. He needed more time to think. Hadley was virtually proposing that they live like a married couple.

  On the way back to Los Angeles, Hadley promised eternal fidelity. But Merv said nothing. Back in Los Angeles, he talked privately to Bill and Paul, while the sound of hammering could be heard outside. Hadley was certainly industrious, having launched the restoration of the poolhouse.

  “It looks to me like he could become the love of your life.” Paul said. “If you don't want him, pass him on to me.”

  “And you can always slip away in the night and get fucked by Guy Madison,” Bill told him.

  “So much for serious advice from two horny queens,” Merv said jokingly. “I'd better go and fetch my new husband a glass of something…”

  ***

  When Bullets called the next day, the agent didn't disguise his enthusiasm. “You've finally hit it big. Roy Del Ruth liked you when he directed Stop, You're Killing Me. You've been cast as the male lead in Three Sailors and A Girl. Your buddy, Jane Powell, is the lead. The third lead is the guy I think she's having an affair with, Gene Nelson. What a dancer. And Jack E. Leonard has been appropriately cast as ‘Porky.’ And it's a musical, so you'll shine, baby, shine.”

  “What role will I play?” Merv eagerly asked. “Hopefully someone not called ‘Porky.’ I don't want to be reminded of my past blubber.”

  “Choirboy Jones.”

  “Choirboy?” Merv asked astonished. “Porky and Choirboy?”

  “Gene Nelson plays Twitch,” Bullets said.

  “Who in the fuck named these characters?” Merv asked. “What character does Jane play? Cooze?”

  “Penny.”

  “Are you sure you've nailed down this role for me?” Merv asked. “I've been screwed so many times.”

  “It's in the bag!” Bullets promised. “Who loves you, baby?” He hung up.

  This time, Merv not only got the script and liked the role, but received a personal call from the director himself. “You don't have to test for it, kid,” Roy Del Ruth said. “I know what your voice sounds like, and your acting is not all that bad. We start shooting in a week. In the meantime, drop fifteen pounds.”

  “How do I do that?” Merv asked.

  “One lettuce leaf a day,” Roy said, “without dressing.”

  When the script arrived, Merv, emerging from the shower, didn't even finishing drying himself off. He ran to a chaise longue by the pool and began to read. He even ordered Hadley to stop hammering so he could concentrate.

  To Merv's surprise, he found the script oddly familiar. Three Sailors and a Girl evoked the film, Born to Dance (1936), which, significantly, had also been directed by Roy del Ruth. It had starred Eleanor Powell and it had included a scene wherein Jimmy Stewart actually sang a song by Cole Porter.

  Merv had been told to report to the studio the following Monday, and he spent the weekend rehearsing his lines and the music.

  At six o'clock on Monday morning, as Merv was awakening for his anticipated first day on the set, there was a persistent ringing of his telephone. Sleepily he answered it to find Bullets at the other end. “Real bad news. Sammy Cahn — he's the producer—just signed Gordon MacRae as Choirboy. It was a lastminute casting change. But don't worry. Del Ruth is still going to cast you as one of the sailors in the movie. Of course, the part is uncredited, but I know you'll be just great in it.”

  “Fuck!” Merv shouted into the phone, suddenly angry at Bullets for leading him on. “Here we go again. Of course, I should be used to getting dumped at the last minute. Riding high yesterday, shot down in flames today.”

  In disgust, Merv wanted to walk off the picture, but he had a contract and he needed the money. He not only had rent to pay but another mouth to feed.

  Merv showed up the following day and shared a dressing room with other extras in sailor uniforms. As his bad luck would have it, he encountered Gordon MacRae the moment he appeared on the set.

  The singing star rather sarcastically looked him up and down as if he was a piece of meat. “I must say, Griffin, I fill out my sailor's uniform better than you do, especially in the crotch area. Haven't you given up trying to be a star in Hollywood? You'll never make it in this town, kid.” With that prediction, the romantic lead of the picture turned and walked away.

  That night and for days after, Merv raged to Hadley that Gordon's mother should have smothered him at birth.

  Merv quickly realized that Roy Del Ruth was using him mainly for set decoration. “Whenever I appeared on screen, I was always pictured standing behind Jack E. Leonard, who made Jackie Gleason look like a starving fashion model. People called him ‘Fat Jack.’All through Three Sailors and a Girl it looked like Jack had a wart on his head—namely me!”

  In spite of his resentment at being shuttled to the side as an extra, Merv bonded with the rotund, bespectacled, baldheaded comic. Merv defined him as “the funniest man I know—he was always breaking me up.” Jack's forte was the comic art of the insult, and his most enthusiastic and devastating imitator became Don Rickles.

  In years to come—during May of 1973 to be exact—Merv sat in the audience listening to Jack's hilarious performance at the Rainbow Room at New York's Rockefeller Center. “Good evening, opponents,” Jack quipped as an opening line. “I see Merv Griffin is here tonight. He brought a girl for a change.”

  After the show, Merv headed backstage for a reunion with Jack. But a stagehand denied him access. Immediately after his performance, the comic had collapsed en route to dressing room. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died the following day from complications following emergency heart surgery.

  ***

  On his final day on the Hollywood set of Three Sailors and a Girl, Gordon MacRae—Merv's most clearly defined enemy—approached him again. “You've got a great future, kid,” he said, “but not in this business.” He turned and walked away. It was not Merv's nature to hate people, but in the case of Gordon, he was willing to make an exception. He simply could not stand the man or his put-downs.

  Right on the spot he vowed he was going to steal Gordon's next big musical from him. That afternoon he called Bullets. “Find out what picture Gordon is up for next,” he commanded Bullets.“And, also, the name of the director. If it's the last thing I ever do in Hollywood, I'm going to show that egotistical shit that he's underestimated Merv Griffin. I'll be making millions when he's a brokendown old drunk singing at roadside motels in Indiana.” In his utterance of that prediction, Merv turned out
to be a prophet.

  As Merv later told Bill and Paul, “There was only one good thing that came out of his appearance in Three Sailors and a Girl.“I had a reunion with Burt Lancaster. He made a gag appearance as himself at the end of the film. We not only met up with each other, but I got to sample that delectable uncut meat of his one more time in his dressing room. I've hardly begun my affair with Hadley, and I'm already twotiming him. And I'm sure it'll happen again.”

  “Baby, you and me are fated to be twobit whores,” Bill chimed in.

  ***

  Once again, the temperamental, almost psychotic Michael Curtiz cast Merv in a movie, The Boy from Oklahoma (1954)—“another God damn oater,” as Merv described it to Hadley. Dressed as a cowboy, Merv showed up on the set, where Curtiz shook his hand. “It's not another Casablanca,” he said. “I'm directing this turkey for one reason and only one reason. To pay my pussy bill from all my cunts.”

  “Sounds like a good enough reason to me,” Merv said, secretly appalled at the director's phraseologies.

  The stars of the film included Will Rogers Jr., Nancy Olson, and Lon Chaney Jr., none of whom had been scheduled for an appearance on the set that day. Merv spent most of the morning talking with such oldtime actors as Wallace Ford and Slim Pickens.

  With his hoarse voice and pronounced Western twang, Slim would later immortalize himself by riding an atomic bomb in Stanley Kubrick's Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). “All Curtiz needs to do is turn the camera on me and let me be myself,” the former rodeo clown, bronco rider, and bullfighter told Merv.

  Wallace Ford seemed disgusted with his role in the movie. “I've been in practically every film ever made—and now this piece of shit.”

  When called to the set, Merv sauntered over to Curtiz in an imitation of John Wayne. “I told you to stop walking like fairy,” Curtiz called out to him in front of the entire cast.

  That night Merv told Hadley: “Curtiz is a fucking sadist.” Only hours before, the director had ordered him to lead a posse of three dozen men on horseback down a dusty hill. “I'm terrible on a horse,” Merv protested.

  “Gree-fing, get on the fucking horse,” Curtiz ordered.

  It turned out that all the extras were experienced horsemen who'd appeared in many Western films. Wardrobe positioned a tengallon hat on Merv's head, and it was far too large, repeatedly falling down over his eyes. Brandishing a bullwhip, and evoking memories of Erich Von Stroheim, Curtiz called for action.

  The cowboys roared off on horseback down the hill. Although Merv was supposed to be leading them, the other riders left him in the dust. His oversized hat blew off his head, disappearing like a tumbleweed in a tornado.

  At the bottom of the hill and at the rear of the posse he was supposed to be leading, Merv fell off his horse.

  “Cut! Cut! Cut!” Curtiz shouted through a megaphone, snapping his bullwhip with his free arm. “Gree-fing, you stink on rotten horse. Go back to the top of the hill. We shoot fucking scene again, you dumb shit!”

  After ten more takes, Merv still hadn't gotten it right. “Gree-fing, you no Garee Coop. I can't shoot no more. You'll never get it right. I'll order fucking editor to make you look like Gene Autry on his horse Champion.”

  The next day was even worse. The script called for Merv to shoot a gun. After the first take, Curtiz screamed at him: “You fire gun like fucking cunt. You blink eyes before firing. I want you to act like Garee Coop in High Noon.”

  By the ninth take, Curtiz had grown so exasperated with Merv that he cracked his whip very close to his face, narrowly missing his eye. “You god damn faggot,” he shouted at Merv. “You're off the picture. I use only hemen in my future pictures, not pussy boy like you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Curtiz,” Merv said, trying to maintain what little dignity he had left.

  Still on friendly terms with Jack Warner, Merv called the studio chief and told him he'd been fired. “You stay in the fucking movie,” Jack said. “You're on the payroll. I'll call that pussychasing Curtiz and tell him who does the hiring and firing.”

  Merv stayed on the picture until the last day of the shoot, reporting to work in cowboy garb every day. Curtiz, however, never looked his way again and never used him in another scene.

  In lieu of actually working in front of the camera, celebritystruck Merv used the time to chat with the stars of the film. He found it ironic that both Will Rogers Jr. and Lon Chaney Jr., had each been cast as costars in the same film. Both of those actors had to live in the long shadows of their more famous fathers, neither of them expecting, or achieving, the fame of Will Rogers Sr. and Lon Chaney Sr.

  Like his father, Will Jr. was quick with a rope. Merv got to chat with him several times, learning that he'd served as a Democratic congressman from Southern California between 1943 and 1944, when he resigned to join the U.S. Army. Merv had read about his heroic efforts to try to save the Jews of Europe during World War II and of the opposition he'd faced, even from President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself.

  In later years, Merv would invite Will, Jr. as a guest on his TV talk show, but the actor always opted not to go on. He was in poor health and had suffered several strokes. His hip replacements were a source of constant pain.

  In 1993, at the age of 81, as a means of ending his suffering, he drove into the desert and shot himself in the head.

  Circumstances were somewhat different with Merv's other onset friend, Lon Chaney, Jr. Although he resembled his father physically, he admitted, “I hate trying to cash in on his name just as much as I hate people constantly comparing me to my dad. He was an original. I'll never be as good as he was. I fail to live up to his reputation every single day, and I handle my disappointment by drinking myself into a stupor every single night.”

  Since he had nothing else to do on the set, Merv encouraged Lon's conversation. “My father pushed me out onto the stage when I was just six months old. When I was a teenager, he never gave me money, even though he was a big movie star. I had to earn my own money—a meat cutter's apprentice, a metal worker, a plumber, and at one point, a farm worker in the Midwest shoveling cow shit.”

  Left: Lon Chaney as himself

  and (center) as Werewolf. Right: Will Rogers, Jr.

  Lon was a secret drinker. He would disappear into the men's toilet every now and then to down booze from a flask. “Chasing the fame of one's father is never a good thing,” Lon told Merv. You're lucky to have been born to an unknown father.”

  “Well, at least you've done what no other actor has accomplished,” Merv said. “You got to play all four of the major monsters—The Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and Dracula.”

  A pathetic moment occurred near the end of the shoot. Around three o'clock one afternoon, Merv encountered Lon again. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up, but he seemed to recognize Merv. “Help me, my friend,” Lon said. “I don't know where I am or why I'm here.”

  Merv escorted the drunken actor back to his dressing room and eased him down onto the sofa. There, Merv removed Lon's shoes and put a blanket over him so he could sleep off his intoxication.

  ***

  Despite the fact that most of his energies were being devoted to being cast as a romantic lead, Merv retained an unshakable belief in the viability of his appeal as singer. And as the competition for singing roles got more intense, he cited a particular sense of rivalry with Eddie Fisher, upon whom he'd once had a crush. His feelings for Eddie had turned first to covert jealousy and later to occasionally expressed outrage at his success.

  Merv couldn't stand hearing Eddie's voice on radio or TV, and would immediately switch channels if the young star came on.

  “And to think I introduced Elizabeth Taylor to the bum,” he told Hadley.

  As Merv moved deeper into the 1950s, he spent time in recording studios when he didn't have movie work. Still under contract with RCA Victor, he recorded “Morningside of the Mountain,” with the Hugo Winterhalter Orchestra. Very briefly, i
t appeared among the Top 40 hits, but soon after sank into oblivion.

  In the mid50s, Merv recorded “Once in Love with Amy,” with high hopes for the song. Ray Bolger, in 1948, had had a hit with this song. But Merv's version failed to generate any excitement.

  By 1956, RCA had decided not to renew his contract. Merv drifted from Columbia to Decca, but failed to turn himself into another Perry Como. In 1958, he recorded songs which included “Introduce Me to the Gal” and “You're the Prettiest Thing,” both recorded with the Sy Oliver Orchestra. When the records were released, the public wasn't interested.

  Still pursuing a recording career, Merv found himself at the relatively obscure Carlton Records in 1961, singing the disastrously campy “The Screamin’ Meemies from Planet X.”

  Merv experienced a secret Schadenfreude when he learned that Eddie Fisher, too, had been dropped by RCA Victor. But that didn't happen until 1960. At the peak of Merv's TV successes a decade later, he read in the papers that Eddie, burdened with debts of more than a million dollars, had declared bankruptcy.

  “So he married, in quick succession, both America's Sweetheart and America's femme fatale, and all that it got him was an addiction to methamphetamines,” Merv said. “I hear that Debbie Reynolds also told friends that Eddie is lousy in bed. I'll have to check with Elizabeth for the real low-down.”

  ***

  Asleep with Hadley at four o'clock in the morning, Merv was awakened by the ringing of his telephone. In those days, he had only one phone, and it was in the living room. Arousing himself from bed, as Hadley mumbled something and rolled over, a nude Merv stumbled toward the phone.

  Picking up the receiver, he heard a worldfamous voice: “It's Judy. You've got to come over right away. I can't tell you over the phone. Promise me you'll come over NOW.”