Tryon had later publicly referred to Preminger as “a Nazi.” After filming The Cardinal, Tryon had suffered a nervous breakdown and had spent time in a psychiatric ward.
In Key West, during his attempt to nab a leading role in Butterflies in Heat/The Last Resort, Cal relayed in great detail his wild adventures as a star fucker, with a special focus on his affairs with Merv Griffin and Rock Hudson.
He also revealed that he'd had a brief affair with the older, Swedenborn megastar Ingrid Bergman, “even though pussy isn't my thing,” he said. “She taught me everything I know about being a star,” Cal said, citing his brief onstage appearance with her in a revival in the early 1970s of George Bernard Shaw's 1901 drama, Captain Brassbound's Conversion.
Although Cal struggled for several months to find a voice and a market for the memoir he had threatened, its content and style were weak, unfocused, and uninteresting. “I guess I'm not that great at selfanalysis,” he finally admitted. Much to the relief of Merv and other clients across the country, Cal's tellall book project was eventually abandoned
***
As the 70s seguéd into the 80s, Merv and Cal stayed in touch by phone. Merv was mainly interested in hearing what movie stars Cal had seduced, although Cal also took the opportunity to relate many of the manic and usually fruitless details of his fastfading career. It became obvious to Merv and everyone else that Cal, to an increasing degree, was walking on the shadowy side of the boulevard of broken dreams.
During the final months of Cal's life, he called upon Merv for a favor. Sexual relations between the two men had long ago ceased, but Cal wanted his old friend to devote the theme of one of his upcoming shows to AIDS. Cal agreed to appear on the show and confess to the world that he too had AIDS. “Your friend, Ronald Reagan, never mentions the subject,” Cal told Merv. “Someone has to. It's the Black Death, and it's queer—and it's here to stay.”
On Sunday, August 10, 1987, some unknown associate of Merv's called to tell him that Cal had died of a lung infection associated with AIDS, in Inverness, Florida, after a stint as a spokesman for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, advocating techniques to avoid the spread of the disease.
In the wake of his death, Cal was eulogized by Jay McKenna in The Advocate, who described him as a “gay Adam, the first widely embraced gay symbol to appear during the post-Stonewall years.”
For obvious reasons, Merv did not attend Cal's funeral at a church in Greenwich Village.
***
Merv's most lucrative idea for a TV quiz show originated with a game he used to play with his sister in the back seat of the family car during long rides with his parents in California. The game was called “Hangman.” Decades later, during a staff meeting, he proposed the adaptation of this contest into a televised game show. The final touch came when Merv remembered an annual church bazaar in San Mateo when a giant wheel used to spin around like a roulette wheel in a casino with various prizes written on the wheel's various spokes.
From this rather casual staff meeting, the concept for Wheel of Fortune was born. Millions of dollars of profits lay in the future.
Wheel of Fortune eventually became so profitable that, for large amounts of money, Merv was able to license international variations of the game in countries as diverse as Norway, Peru, Taiwan, and France.
Inaugurated in 1975 on NBC Daytime TV, Wheel didn't explode in popularity until a nighttime syndicated edition was conceived in 1983. The show became solidly profitable in 1984, and it's been going strong ever since. The show's 26th nighttime season, by then within the orbit of Sony Pictures Studio, premiered on September 8, 2008. Its theme song, “Changing Keys,” was written by Merv himself for the show's 198389 run. Since then, that same song has been officially adapted into at least three different musical configurations.
On Wheel, three contestants—or in some cases, three separate pairs of contestants—compete against each other in finding a solution to a word puzzle. The name of the show derives from a large wheel whose lettering determines the prizes and dollar amounts won or lost by the contestants.
The original host of Wheel of Fortune was Chuck Woolery. A handsome, devout, born again Christian from Kentucky, he was not always Merv's cuppa, as Merv himself put it. Woolery's religious background didn't prevent him from entering into four marriages.
Woolery remained as host of the show until his contract expired in the early 80s. Originally Merv paid him $65,000 a year. As incentive to sign on again, Woolery demanded $500,000. Merv came back with a counteroffer of $400,000 a year, which Woolery turned down, later confessing, “I made a big mistake.”
Throughout his gig on Wheel of Fortune, Woolery had remained an enthusiastic bass fisherman with a talent for selling his own line of fishing products, and he had an obsession with jewelry. He eventually amassed more than four hundred diamond rings and a bass guitar encrusted with diamonds. When Merv learned that Woolery had rejected his offer, he said, “Let him go fishing. We'll find someone even better.”
Anyone who's ever seen Wheel of Fortune is likely to remember the show's svelte and enigmatic assistant, Vanna White, whose every sinuous movement seemed to celebrate the spinning wheel's drama and propel the game forward.
The day he met her, Merv selected Vanna from a lineup of other contestants, and later said, “Even I could not have predicted the cult of Vannamania.” Although treated as a campy joke in some circles, the beautifully coiffed and elegantly dressed Vanna soon became indelibly associated around the globe as a key element in the ongoing allure of Wheel of Fortune.
Hailing from South Carolina, where she was known in high school as “Vanna Banana,” she made her first national television appearance on June 20, 1980 on an episode of the game show The Price Is Right. Vanna's first episode, where she functioned as Pat Sajak's assistant presenter, and a replacement for the show's original hostess, Susan Stafford, was aired on December 12, 1982, and she remained as a highly visible component of the show until its cancellation in 1991.
When the show moved to a prime time evening slot in September of 1983, Vanna was credited in part with making Wheel the highest rated syndicated program in broadcast television. Yet in fact, she rarely spoke, and her role in the show was almost purely decorative.
She was candid about her role on Wheel, claiming that “I don't have the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters.” She also said, “And I enjoy getting dressed up as a Barbie doll.”
In the early 1980s, during her initial involvement in the show, Merv had been impressed with Vanna's handsome boyfriend, John Gibson, a former Chippendale dancer. Acopy of Playgirl had featured him as a nude centerfold. “I could go for the hunk myself,” Merv told Hadley. Vanna became engaged to Gibson, but tragically, he died in a plane crash in 1986.
In 1987, Vanna released her autobiography, Vanna Speaks!, and it became an immediate bestseller. That same year she was featured in a Playboy pictorial. The photos of her wearing seethrough lingerie were shot prior to the debut of her career on Wheel of Fortune. Since she'd signed a release at the time the pictures were taken, there was no way legally that she could prevent the magazine from publishing these revealing photos.
In 1992, Vanna entered the Guinness Book of World Records, as the globe's most frequent “clapper.” Vanna puts her hands together for contestants some 28,080 times a season—an average of 720 times per show.
Always proud of the fact he had personally selected Vanna as his original choice for Wheel, Merv, with Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek, showed up when Vanna was awarded the 2,309th Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A former TV weatherman, Pat Sajak, the son of a Polish American trucking foreman, took over for Woolery in 1981. Merv, who appreciated his jocular TV style, had personally selected him for the job. Sajak functioned as host of the daytime version of Wheel of Fortune between December 28, 1981 and January 9, 1989, and as the host of the syndicated evening version of Wheel of Fortune beginning on September 19, 1983.
Previo
usly, Sajak's bid for his own latenight talk show had failed. Pitted unsuccessfully against Johnny Carson, Sajak's show had aired between January 9, 1989 and April 13, 1990, when CBS dropped it. “You were more successful than I was in battling Carson,” Sajak told Merv. “My gut feeling is that the only way to beat Carson is for him to retire.”
Like Merv, Sajak was a conservative Republican, and as such, they rarely conflicted over politics.
After Merv sold his rights to Wheel of Fortune and no longer functioned as Sajak's boss, they remained lifelong friends. Sajak visited Merv in the hospital shortly before he died. Merv's final words to his longtime collaborator were, “Goodbye, Pat. Give my love to Lesly and the kids.”
Spinmeisters:
(left to right) Vanna White, Pat Sajak, Chuck Woolery
“When you were with Merv, you rubbed shoulders with the most exciting and famous people on the planet,” Sajak claimed after Merv's death. “He was a biggerthanlife person. The solar system of which he was the center was filled with bright stars who seemed to gravitate toward him. Whether on a TV talk show or in a living room, no one could make you feel more alive than Merv Griffin. His entire life was a celebration.”
Between 1999 and the publication of this book, Harry Friedman was producer of both Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, earning credit for many of the innovative ideas that kept both shows fresh and vital. During his childhood in Omaha, Friedman to a large extent witnessed the birth of television from the vantage point of his father's appliance store in Omaha. His father was the first retailer in the area to sell TV sets.
Thanks to his involvement in Merv Griffin Productions, Friedman is a seventime Emmy Award winner. In September of 2006, and under his direction, both Wheel and Jeopardy! became the first syndicated TV shows to broadcast in High Definition.
In 2003, Friedman lifted the fiveday limit for contestants on Jeopardy!, allowing returning champions to continue playing as long as they remained winners. This change of the rules led to the famous winning streak of Ken Jennings, a software engineer from Utah. In a historymaking, seventyfourday consecutive run, he won $2.5 million. During his appearance, viewership increased by thirty percent, leading to Jeopardy! becoming the single most talked about TV show in America.
In its 20072008 season, Wheel of Fortune became the longest running syndicated TV program in history, celebrating twentyfive seasons, during which $180 million worth of cash and prizes had been distributed to its contestants.
***
As the decades moved closer to the millennium, Merv's socalled “movie career” sputtered on. In most of the films he agreed to appear in, he was either cast as himself or appeared in brief walkons. Sometimes only his voice was used, evoking the screen credits he'd compiled during his 1950s career at Warner Brothers.
In 1976, Merv returned to the screen in Two-Minute-Warning, a thriller that starred Charlton Heston, whom Merv had not seen since that day he came on to him in Hollywood back when they were struggling actors. No mention was made of that incident.
The film was about a psychotic man who's being hunted by both the police and a SWAT team. Armed with a rifle, he goes on a sniping spree. A great star of the 1940s, Walter Pidgeon, had been cast in a minor role as a pickpocket. Ruefully, Walter told Merv, “Show business sure does have its ups and downs, doesn't it?”
So what did Merv do in this cliffhanger? He appeared as himself, singing the National Anthem.
In One Trick Pony (1980), Paul Simon was cast as an aging rock star trying to write and record a new album in the face of an indifferent record label, a failing marriage, and a talentless producer. Some critics suggested that the film made many references to Paul's own life. For reasons known only to himself, Merv appeared, uncredited, as an à capella singer. He jokingly told Hadley, “I turned down the role of a blonde girl groupie. I didn't like the wig.”
On the set, Merv encountered Tiny Tim playing himself. “Tiny, what are you doing in this thing?” Merv asked him.
“Mr. Griffin,” Tiny Tim said, “I need the money. But I might ask, what are you doing in this thing?”
A Jerry Lewis movie, Slapstick (Of Another Kind), whose plot had been adapted from a story by Kurt Vonnegut, premiered in 1982. The voice (but not the image) of Orson Welles intoned the words of the “Father of the Aliens.” It was Welles who persuaded Merv to accept the role of “Anchorman.” The plot, Merv found out on the day he showed up for work, focused on a rich, beautiful couple who give birth to deformed (and alien) twins. When their heads are together, and when they concentrate on a shared goal, they turn out to be the smartest kids on the planet.
“Oh, my God,” Merv told his friends. “I've bottomed out. I'm appearing in a Jerry Lewis movie. If my family finds out, they'll think I've gone on relief.”
In 1983, Ron Clark wrote and directed a film called The Funny Farm with a talented cast that included Peter Aykroyd, Miles Chapin, Jack Carter, and Eileen Brennan. The film was about a group of young entertainers performing at a comedy club called The Funny Farm. Clark asked Merv if he'd perform in the film as “The Voice of Merv Griffin.”
“Why not?” Merv told Clark. “No one does Merv's voice better than me.”
In 1985, Alice in Wonderland, based on a work by the Victorian writer Lewis Carroll, brought Merv to the silver screen once again. It wasn't the film but the cast that Merv enjoyed. It included Shelley Winters playing “The Dodo Bird” and Sammy Davis Jr. as “The Caterpillar.” Merv got to meet and talk to Martha Raye, who played, in what turned out to be her final screen appearance, “The Duchess.”
In November of 1998, Merv appeared in an episode of the TV series Hercules. He told his friends, “If you don't watch it, there will be no hard feelings.”
At the millennium's end, Merv decided that he wanted to be cast by director Harvey Frost in a comedy/drama called Murder at the Cannes Film Festival. Because Merv was one of the film's executive producers, Frost could hardly say no. Released in 2000, the film starred French Stewart, with much of the attention going to Bo Derek in a supporting role.
After the release of the film, Merv told Eva Gabor, “I think I'll abandon my film career. Or has it abandoned me? Okay, so I never became as big as Debbie Reynolds. But look what happened to her. She ended up having to sleep in her car.”
***
Every year for an eightweek period, Merv left his luxurious Trans-American Video Studios (TAV) in Hollywood, and moved his staff and base of operations to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
One of the guests Merv persuaded to appear at Caesars was Bing Crosby. “Bing wanted to visit this dental expert in Vegas. I called the pennypinching singer and agreed to pay his airfare if he'd appear at Caesars—and he agreed to it. He got his teeth fixed, he sang at Caesars, and flew home on my dime.”
Merv's most dangerous onair moment was associated with the appearance of Siegfried and Roy as guests on his Las Vegasbased show. At one point in the segment, one of their Bengal tigers escaped, leaving Merv alone, on the set, with the potentially lethal cat. “The cameraman ran and the orchestra fled into the dressing room,” Merv said. “The damn tiger sat on my foot. Siegfried and Roy, who are just fabulous, started talking in German. Finally, they got the beast to walk away. That's why I'm still alive today.”
***
One day, Merv told his thenproducer, Bob Shanks, that he wanted Salvador Dalí, the mad Catalán surrealist painter, to be interviewed on his show. “He's an odd bird. No one had a clue as to what he'd say or do,” Merv said. Dalí, however, agreed that he'd appear on the show after filming a TV commercial for Lanvin chocolates.
The artist arrived with a chairsized leather replica of a rhinoceros, and refused to sit on anything else. On the show, he uttered a series of statements that some viewers found baffling: “The only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist. Dalí is immortal and will not die.”
Backstage, he was even more entertaining than before the TV cameras. Talking with Merv, Dalí seemed fascina
ted by masturbation, letting it be known that back in 1929, he'd named one of his most celebrated paintings The Great Masturbator.
Dalí invited Merv to visit him at his studio on Spain's Costa Brava, north of Barcelona. “I have this sculpture which depicts a large armpit of the Christ figure. If you visit, I'll want you to strip off all your clothes and lie in a fetal position in this armpit. I'll take photographs of you as you masturbate. I ask many of my male friends to do this for me.”
“I'll get back to you on that,” Merv said.
Before leaving, Dalí kissed Merv on the lips, using tongue. He also gave him a miniature painting of an erect penis. “It looks very small in the painting, but actually in perspective, the penis is fourteen inches when fully erect,” Dalí claimed.
Merv took the penis home, but it was later stolen, perhaps by an overnight trick.
Merv was furious. “Who knows?” he asked. “That God damn penis might have brought me three million dollars one day.”
***
Merv once told some friends that Zsa Zsa Gabor was more fascinating than Eva. Previously, columnist Earl Wilson had told Merv, “Zsa Zsa is unbelievable—you can't believe a damn thing the dollink says. You can't even trust her on when she lost her virginity. Once, she told me she lost it to her first husband, a Turkish diplomat, Burhan Belge. On another occasion, she told me that as a teenager she surrendered the cherry to the liberal Turkish dictator, Kemal Atatürk.”
“What I found the most fascinating,” Merv said, “was her marriage to Jack Ryan. Do you know he's the guy who invented the Barbie doll?”
Merv once tried to compile a list of Zsa Zsa's lovers. They included the most notorious and fascinating playboys in the world—Rafael Trujillo Jr. (son of the dictator of the Dominican Republic); Prince Aly Khan (the playboy and spiritual leader of the world's Ismailian Muslims who had married Rita Hayworth); and Porfirio Rubirosa, (the Dominican diplomat and playboy who had married both of the world's richest women, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton and tobacco heiress Doris Duke).
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