The book proposal submitted by these former boyhood friends of Merv's after he'd dropped them amounted to an Outing of Merv as a homosexual. News of Merv's gender preference quickly spread along the cocktail circuit in New York City.
The mass media, largescale press Outing of Merv would be delayed until 1991, when two other men, with different agendas, exposed Merv to the public as a homosexual by initiating legal action against him.
***
Merv appreciated any chance he could get to interview a celebrity on location, outside a studio, and he was delighted when Richard Burton agreed to let him tape an interview in Oroville, California. It was there that the Welsh actor with the great Shakespearean voice was filming The Klansman (1972).
Richard had arrived in town two weeks before Elizabeth Taylor, who had promised to join him on location after she'd satisfied some prior commitment. In the meantime, Richard, as Merv soon learned, was sleeping with a beautiful local girl. Merv was introduced to her at the time, but later couldn't recall her name.
The actor bragged to Merv, “If there's a dame in this town I can't screw, my name's not Richard Burton.”
To Merv's surprise, Richard was completely candid in boasting about his sexual conquests. That tendency had been noted earlier by the cast of Cleopatra (1963) when Richard strode onto the set and announced to Rex Harrison and others: “I finally fucked E. Taylor in the back seat of my Cadillac last night.”
Richard tried to explain his womanizing to Merv. “I fucked them all—Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, Jean Simmons, Lana Turner, even a toothless old maid in Jamaica. But Elizabeth is my only love. She's more a mistress than a wife. She's pornography, but only the dreamy version through a veil. She's Sunday's child and can even tolerate my drunkenness. Come to think of it, she's a drunk herself. When I'm away from her, there's a tight grip in my stomach, worse than any belly ache, so I lose myself in other women.”
Merv joined Richard for a night on the town in Oroville. They hit one bar which remained open for them until six o'clock in the morning. Merv absorbed Richard's tall tales like a sponge. Perhaps out of deference to Merv's own homosexuality, which must have been known to him, Richard admitted that, “I was once a homosexual but it didn't take. Nevertheless, during that period I got to fuck Laurence Olivier, Noel Coward, your buddy Roddy McDowall, Michael Wilding, Emyln Williams. I even let John Gielgud give me a blowjob. Victor Mature and I did a sixtynine when we filmed The Robe. He wanted to fuck me, but I demurely said no. The guy doesn't have a prick. It's more like a club. But except for a few dalliances here and there, I think of myself as straight. I guess that's true. No, it isn't. All actors are homosexuals. Some of them mask that with drink. I'll tell you a secret I've told no one. Rex Harrison and I, as you know, played two gay lovers in Staircase (1969). To make our roles more believable, we actually went to bed together. What I've done for the sake of my art.”
“That surprises me,” Merv said. “Sexy Rexy. Such a ladies' man.”
“Those are the most suspicious types,” Richard said. “Tyrone Power. Errol Flynn. Robert Taylor. Howard Hughes. Marlon Brando. The beat goes on. I'll tell you one final story, but with the understanding that I want to leave open the possibility that I might be joking. One night in Rome, when I was trying to break up Elizabeth's marriage to Eddie Fisher, I raped him just to humiliate him. Noel Coward was right. He has a great ass.”
“Surely not!” Merv said.
“You'll never know,” Richard said. With that parting line, he lifted himself up from his bar stool, reached for his young woman, and headed out to greet the California dawn.
***
Merv especially enjoyed interviewing his octogenarian friend, journalist and Hollywood columnist Adela Rogers St. Johns, as a vehicle for the deflation of the sometimes bloated egos of his other guests.
When Truman Capote had come on, basking in the glory of his nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood (1966), Adela hadn't read it and didn't mind telling Truman why not. “Why should I read a book about a page eighteen murder?” she asked the astonished author.
Years later, Merv brought Adela on once again to deflate another author's ego. He booked her on a show with Erica Jong, who'd written the feminist lifestyle guide Fear of Flying (1973). The book became the literary sensation of the nation. Adela wasn't impressed, claiming on the air that it was “too dull to read.”
***
Confessions of a satyrist:
Richard Burton discusses rape.
Like everything else in America at the time, viewer reaction to The Merv Griffin Show was mixed. One member of the audience wrote, “Merv is a bit of a bore. Arthur Treacher on the other hand is amusing.” Yet another disappointed fan said that the only good thing about the program was Jack Sheldon on the trumpet and Mort Lindsey's Orchestra. “I often watched the show because with clueless Merv in charge, a train wreck was inevitable, especially when Merv got serious. And what was it about Merv and the Stephen Bishop song, ‘On and On’? He sang that thing about three times a week. The sets were cheap. Merv couldn't carry a tune and got fatter by the year.”
One viewer claimed that Merv's “interviewing skills were nonexistent. The guest lineup was terrible. You know it's bad when the most entertaining thing about the program is Miss Miller. How on earth did Merv get so rich and successful? He's incompetent!”
Most of the fans, however, approved of Merv, citing his “wonderful smooth style—one cool dude.” And most of these viewers genuinely liked his lineup of regular guests, who included Zsa Zsa Gabor and Moms Mabley. Actor Pat O'Brien could be counted on to appear every St. Patty's Day, spinning wonderful yarns. Demond Wilson from Sanford and Son came on, singing Kiki Dee's “I Got the Music in Me.” Fans wrote in, claiming, “he was absolutely horrible… couldn't sing a note!”
***
In 1973, Spiro Agnew was forced to resign as Vice President of the United States. Merv invited him on his show and was surprised that the disgraced politician accepted. He admitted that he and Nixon hadn't spoken to each other since he'd left office. “He called several times, but I've refused to take his phone calls,” Agnew claimed.
Polls early in 1973 had shown Agnew as the front leader for the 1976 presidential nomination, with California governor Ronald Reagan a distant second.
Out of office, Agnew became more controversial than ever. He dared to suggest, as TV cameras were rolling, that Nixon and Alexander Haig would have assassinated him if he had refused to resign the Vice Presidency. He claimed that Haig told him “to go quietly… or else.”
The former Veep also became embroiled in controversy because of his anti-Zionist statements, calling for the United States to withdraw its support for Israel because of its bad treatment of Christians.
Merv complimented Agnew on his alliterative epithets such as “pusillanimous pussyfoots,” “hopeless hysterical hypochondriacs of history,” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Agnew dismissed such praise, claiming these epithets were the creation of White House speech writers William Safire and Pat Buchanan.
On the show, Agnew discussed his new friendship with Frank Sinatra, who had been a lifelong Democrat until he felt rejected by Robert Kennedy. Agnew said that Sinatra had helped him pay back the $160,000 in back taxes he owed the government.
Merv later revealed that, backstage and after the show, Agnew tried to lure him into some dubious business associations. “A political cartoonist once lampooned Nixon with a caricature under which was written, ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ The same question could be asked of Agnew. I just didn't trust him. Even though he promised me I could make millions in some scheme in the Middle East, I turned him down.”
***
One of Merv's most controversial guests was writer Gore Vidal, who could always be counted upon to shock and polarize an audience. Merv focused a lot of attention on Gore's kinship with Jacqueline Kennedy. His mother Nina had married Jackie's stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. Even though acquainted with, and to some degree, relate
d to, the Kennedys, Gore sometimes demonstrated a scathing contempt for the President. “Jack wanted the presidency, and his father bought it for him,” Gore charged.
Merv later told friends that he'd never read a book by Gore Vidal except for the mysteries he'd written under the pseudonym of Edgar Box.
Gore was always consistently negative about how his plays had been adapted by Hollywood into movies, objecting strenuously to the casting of Jerry Lewis as the lead in the movie version of Gore's Visitor to a Small Planet (1960).
When Merv asked Gore why he was running for governor of California against the incumbent governor, Jerry Brown, Gore said that “the chance to compete against a Zen Space Cadet is too good to pass up.”
The author could always deliver a shocker, as when he told stories about working on the screenplay of Ben-Hur in 1959, the picture directed by William Wyler. “To explain the animosity between BenHur and Messala, I inserted a gay subtext, suggesting that the two had been lovers,” Gore said. “Stephen Boyd played it gay but Charlton Heston did-n't have a clue that he was playing a homosexual love scene.”
Bagman and disgraced VP
Spiro Agnew
A murmur would go up in the audience whenever Gore expounded on his sexual theories. “The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. That plurality is a fact of our nature and not worth fretting about. Therefore, there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts.”
***
Although Gypsy Rose Lee had evolved into the most famous stripper in America, she never completely undressed, never fully exposing her breasts and always retaining a wisp of a Gstring as a means of allowing viewers' imaginations a bit of free rein. Her roster of emotional involvements was impressive: When the burlesque mystery novel she'd written, The G-String Murders, was made into the film Lady of Burlesque (1943), she'd had an affair with Barbara Stanwyck. And between two of her three marriages, she'd enjoyed an affair with the director, Otto Preminger. A son was born to them, Eric Lee Preminger.
Years after the huge success of the film, Gypsy (1962) which had starred Natalie Wood in the title role, Merv was intrigued by the stripper and eager to interview her on his show.
When the aging burlesque queen appeared on Merv's stage, Mort Lindsey, the orchestra leader, broke into a strip number. As she'd done countless times in the past, Gypsy immediately—and to some degree, automatically — launched into her familiar bumpandgrind routine, dropping her drawers during the finale, cupping her breasts and revealing herself clad only in a Gstring.
Almost instantly, the network cut her off, hastily filling in with clips from a show that Merv had filmed with his childhood friend and possible molester, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
Later, despite the censorship disaster associated with her appearance on his show, Merv said, “Gypsy was a reallife Auntie Mame. Her humor rivaled that of Judy Garland and her spirit was indomitable. My God, when her son, Erik, grew up, she hired him as her dresser. Imagine that!”
***
During the early 70s, it seemed inevitable that Merv would cross paths with pop artist Andy Warhol. By that time, Merv had succeeded in getting hundreds of people to open up and talk to him as they were being televised. But even in private, he found that Andy was no great talker, and he was forced to agree with the artist's selfassessment: “I am a deeply superficial person,” Andy rightly claimed.
The homosexual and endlessly campy arbiter of pop went on to tell Merv, “I'm also the most celebrated of the celebrated, and I know them all: Jackie, Mick Jagger, Truman Capote, Calvin Klein, John and Yoko, Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Dylan. My life is nothing but parties, galas, art openings, chic clubs. I once jerked off Marlon Brando in an elevator going down. He wanted me to blow him but settled for masturbation.”
In anticipation of the upcoming show, Merv bluntly asked Andy, “Can I drop vague hints about your lifestyle?”
Andy looked at Merv as if he were an alien just descended to Earth. “I'd prefer to remain a mystery,” he said. “I never like to give my background. At any rate, I make it all up differently every time I'm asked. It's not just that it's part of my image not to tell everything—it's just that I forget what I said the day before—and then I have to make it up all over again.”
After his interview, Andy invited Merv to Studio 54—at the time, the most celebrated disco in the world—where he was introduced to Troy Donahue, the prettyboy heartthrob of the late 50s and early 60s. Troy had always been Merv's dream fantasy. Merv, like many others of Troy's fans, overlooked his lack of acting talent and reveled instead in his image as a male pinup and pop icon.
Merv had heard enticing stories about Troy from Henry Willson, who already took credit for discovering a thennew actor on the circuit, Merle Johnson Jr. It had been Henry who had changed Merle's name to Troy Donahue. Originally, he'd thought of naming him Paris, after the lover of Helen of Troy, but then he concluded, “No celebrity can be named Paris. That's a city in France. Let's go with Troy and throw in the Donahue.”
“Don't mix me up with Tab Hunter,” Troy said to Merv that night at Studio 54. “He's the other blond, blueeyed actor. I'm the straight one.”
At that point Liza Minnelli danced by, stopping to evaluate Troy with her eagle eye, and then whispered in Merv's ear. “The boy's a real looker—go for it!”
When Merv met Troy, his career was fading. He wanted work and Andy had a film project in mind. Before auditioning Troy, Andy had tossed the idea to three other stars, including Mick Jagger, and each of them had rejected it.
Merv was astonished when he learned more about Andy's film proposal. For the entire length of the movie, Andy wanted the camera to focus only on Troy's facial expression as he received a blowjob from a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese boy, hailed at the time as the most talented fellatio artist in Greenwich Village.
Addictively exhibitionistic:
Gypsy Rose Lee
At first Troy thought Andy was joking. “That's the picture you want me to star in?” an incredulous Troy asked. As the evening progressed, however, and Andy kept pitching the proposal, Troy came to realize that the filmmaker was serious. “You're out of your mind,” Troy said. “There's no way in hell I would do that!” He rose from the sofa and headed for the door.
“Oh, fuck,” Andy said. “I really wanted Troy but I'm sure Joe Dallesandro will do it. I've always been fascinated by my superstar. I did my first painting of him. That was before Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.”
“You've already shot Blow Job,” Merv said. “You don't need to do it again.” He was referring to a film which had starred DeVeren Bookwalter, who at the time was supposedly receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to see the action.
That night at Studio 54 was not the last time Merv would see Troy. Within a few months, Merv received a call from Henry Willson. “Your dream has come true. Troy Donahue is coming to New York. He's completely broke and needs a place to stay for about a month until he can land a job. He also needs someone to pay his expenses.”
“Troy Donahue,” Merv said in astonishment. “Old and gray, pot-bellied and bald, that hunk can put his shoes under my bed any night he wants.”
“Oh, and could you part with a thousand dollars a week in spending money?” Henry asked. “I mean, this star of yesterday is really broke.”
“Tell Boy Troy he's got a deal,” Merv said. “Send him on.”
Merv's dream did not come true with Troy. It was more like a nightmare. When the actor arrived at Merv's apartment, he was deep into drug addiction and alcoholism. When they had sex together, Merv closed his eyes and tried to imagine what Troy used to look like in A Summer Place (1959).
Merv later told Hadley, “Troy has a hard time getting it up. And when he does manage to get it up, there ain't much there.”
Troy's worst days were yet to come. In the 1980s, he was discovered sleeping in a cardboard box
in Central Park.
***
The Merv Griffin Show on CBS was simply not working out. Merv had to do something to save the show and his own career. “I knew I had to come up with something, but I didn't know what. Then one afternoon an idea occurred to me. It was an impulse, but I acted on it at once. I decided to return to my roots.”
National pinup and
ruined teen idol
Troy Donohue
Without bothering to go home to pack, Merv called his wife from the airport to tell her he was flying to California, address uncertain. He promised he'd stay in touch.
Landing in Los Angeles, he rented a red convertible and drove to Malibu, where he talked to a real estate agent who rented him a house on the beach that was often leased to movie stars for offtherecord weekends, especially if those weekends were for gay old times.
On the fourth night, Liberace sent him what he called a “party favor.”
The “prize” Liberace shipped over to Merv was John C. Holmes, a wellhung actor popularly known as both “Johnny Wadd” and “The King of Porn.” Merv had already seen three of his movies.
Pop journalist John McAbee once wrote, “In the world of dicks, John Holmes was the DDay, the 1969 NASA moon landing, the JFK assassination, and the invention of television all rolled up into one big, giant cock. His penis truly defined a dick generation that came, but hasn't gone yet.”
Hadley later reported that Merv claimed that his weekend with the star was “the wildest of my life.” As a favor to his usually faithful Hadley, Merv promised that, “You can have Johnny, too, but only after I've finished with him.”
“Always sloppy seconds for me,” Hadley protested.
After that weekend, Merv called Liberace, who was vacationing in Palm Springs. “Thanks, but no thanks,” he said to his longtime friend.
Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet Page 58
