***
In the spring of 1998, Merv granted an interview with Matt Tyrnauer of Vanity Fair. During their time together, Merv discussed Eva, who had died three years before. “Those years had great ups and downs,” Merv said. “We really loved each other a lot, but sometimes we would leave each other and go to different people. She would go to someone else, and I would go to—say, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. We had broken up just before her death, but when we were together we traveled everywhere: Morocco, all the islands.”
Herb Caen of the late San Francisco Chronicle, once said, “If Merv and Eva ever stopped laughing, they'd get married.”
“Now everyone says, ‘God, we really miss the two of you,’” Merv said. “We were like another version of Lucy and Desi.”
Merv refused to tell Tyrnauer the reason he split from Eva, although he did confess that they'd planned to be married, with Nancy Reagan serving as the matron of honor. “There was a premarital agreement,” Merv said. “But we could never agree which house we'd live in, and I couldn't agree which of her staff she would bring with her and that really drove us apart. It's awful, because there is so much more I can't tell. It was a monstrous problem and it wasn't mine—but I will never drag Eva's name through the mud.”
The “monstrous” problem that Merv referred to was Eva's demand that he settle fifty million dollars on her for all the years she'd been his companion. If he didn't come across with the money, Eva was threatening to file a palimony suit against him, like his former companion Brent Plott had done.
After learning of her intentions, Merv could not forgive her, and ordered her from La Quinta and all of his other properties. When she'd returned to her own home and recovered from her immediate anger, Eva told her friends, “I don't know what got into me. My Hungarian temper, I suppose. I would never have sued Merv, but he should have made some financial settlement on me.”
The unresolved marriage—or money—issues between them bubbled over when Merv fell madly in love with a young hustler and wanted to spend all his evenings with the handsome little stud—and no more evenings with Eva.
In June of 1995, after her split from Merv, Eva journeyed to Baja, Mexico, where she had a home. Bitterly disappointed over the failure of her relationship, she claimed she was in desperate need of a vacation.
On June 2, she “ate a bad piece of fruit” in her words and contracted viral pneumonia. As her condition weakened, she refused to seek help from Mexican doctors, having no faith in them. In her disoriented state, she collapsed on a staircase in her house, falling about ten steps to her foyer. Her hip was broken.
Eva's housekeeper placed a call to Merv, who claimed he was “devastated” to hear of Eva's injury. He immediately called for a private jet to transport Eva from Baja to the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
When Eva was admitted there on June 21, doctors discovered fluid in her lungs and a blood clot. She was also running a dangerous fever. Put on a respirator, she was given the drug heparin for the clotting and antibiotics for the pneumonia.
Experts have speculated that Eva may not have died of viral pneumonia, but of pneumococcal pneumonia, a horrible bug that can kill within twentyfour hours.
Under heavy medication and with her condition worsening by the hour, she slipped into a coma. Death came at 10:05 on Tuesday, July 4, 1995. Presumably, Eva was seventysix years old, although some have disputed that.
The increasingly senile Jolie wasn't immediately informed of her daughter's death, but Zsa Zsa and Magda, her older sisters, attended a 7pm memorial service at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. Eva had been cremated.
Paying his last respects was her faithful costar of Green Acres, Eddie Albert. He embraced Merv, who also greeted fellow mourners Rosie O'Donnell, Johnny Mathis, and Mitzi Gaynor. The matriarch of the Gabor clan, Jolie, and Eva's older sister, Magda, would each survive another two years, dying, respectively, on April 1, and June 11 of 1997.
From aboard his yacht, the Griff, Merv heard about Eva's death and went into shock. “Only because we'd had an argument, and we hadn't settled the argument yet, and I was mad, and I was off on my boat, and she died while I was gone. That was rough.”
Reportedly, Merv's final words to Eva before they departed forever were, “I've loved a thousand times, but never been in love.”
***
Merv knew the Prince and Princess of Wales somewhat distantly. “We circled each other,” he later said, “although at a distance, but a respectful distance.”
In the 80s, Merv threw a party for Charles and Diana in Palm Beach. The Prince of Wales had given his first American TV interview to Merv. After that, Merv developed an ongoing relationship with the royal couple that never became close.
“I adored Di, who for some reason I kept calling Lady Di,” Merv said. “That stuck in my mind even when she became a royal princess. I simply adored her. But I also thought Prince Charles was wonderful—a really marvelous guy, funny and charming. Harry and William simply adored him, and he's wonderful with them.”
When Princess Di was killed in Paris in 1997, Merv sent Prince Charles a condolence note. “I hate that Britain's royal family has become the heavies in the tragic death of Di. It's foolish. People are even saying that Charles had Di killed—or that Prince Philip did it. Such charges are baseless. Ridiculous. Beyond libel.”
Although Merv's strongest attachment was to Princess Diana, he also got to meet Prince Charles' second bride, Camilla.
Merv admitted in 2000 that he “adored” George W. Bush, who invited him to the White House to attend a party for Prince Charles and Camilla.
“The President yelled at me across the room,” Merv said. “‘Meeerv is here!’” Merv quoted the president as saying. “Ooooh, I love him! He's funny. He's bright. He's intelligent. And he loves to have a good time. I wish everybody could get to know him personally.”
***
Built in 1784, and surrounded by fiftyfive acres of rolling green hills, “the most beautiful house in Ireland,” St. Clerans Manor, a Georgian estate in Craughwell, County Galway, had been acquired after World War II by John Huston. When he was in residence, the famed director entertained Hollywood luminaries who included Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Peter O'Toole, and Paul Newman.
After Merv bought the property in 1997, he restored the estate to its original splendor, lavishly upgrading and redecorating it before its launch as a luxury hotel made available to paying guests whenever Merv was not in residence.
John Huston's bedroom is now called the Griffin Suite. Its bathroom still has gilded taps shaped like swan's heads. The Angelica Suite is actually a small separate octagonal guest cottage, once the bedroom of Angelica Huston, John's daughter.
The opulently furnished dining room that had hosted kings, princes, consorts, and movie stars, now feeds rich tourists.
***
Merv responded to the challenge by the Federal Communications Commission to develop TV programs for young people that were more challenging than Scooby Doo and Beavis and Butt-head. Responding to the need for educational kids' programming, he created Click, a children's quiz show. “I want to do a fastmoving questionandanswer show,” Merv said. “I want to do one with high speed, because kids react to questions faster than adults do.”
He hired Ryan Seacrest as host of Click. Seacrest called Merv a perfectionist who personally oversaw the production of the show's first twentytwo segments. “Merv is very ‘on,’ very quickwitted,” said Seacrest. “He's very handson. He has a vision. He knows exactly what he wants.”
Ryan Seacrest / Merv
When Seacrest began his association with Click, in September of 1997, he was relatively unknown. The game show was based around computers and the then relatively novel medium of the Internet. Click aired in syndication from September of 1997 to August of 1999.
Other than Vanna White, Merv cited as one of his greatest achievements the discovery of Ryan Seacrest. Merv had
developed a lateinlife crush on the handsome twentytwoyear old. “I saw energy in the boy. There's the look of him. Easy smile. He could do it!”
Seacrest, by now a familiar face on American Idol, was maliciously rumored to have slept with Merv to advance his career in media, and bloggers went to work posting these charges on the web. However, they were just that—rumors—and have never been proven.
Some of the blog postings were more humorous than real. “Holy shee-it, really?” wrote Fanatic. “I'd never heard the Merv rumor before. I thought when they said ‘screwed over your idol to get the gig,’ they meant ‘screwed OVER your idol,’ not literally banged. That's just too funny. Because Merv Griffin was actually my first ‘celebrity crush’ when I was only about three years old. I used to try to feed him potato chips through the television screen. So like, wow. My first celebrity crush and my last celebrity crush have apparently done the deed. Ain't that some shit? I've come full circle with my too foolish manslut obsessions.”
Other bloggers such as “Ladyjaney,” took a more reasonable point of view. ‘As far as Seacrest and Merv go, I refuse to believe it. Or I sure as heck don't want to anyway.”
“GJJ,” another blogger, summed up “this newfound lust for Seacrest. It couldn't be because he appears to be ‘enhanced’ by packing a pair of tube socks in his pants, could it?”
***
Merv's last protégé was Andrew Yani. At the age of thirtyone, he was appointed as head of Merv's television company. An extraordinarily handsome young man, Yani looks like a model for GQ. Merv's publicist, Marcia Newberger, claimed, “Merv loves having young guys around—it makes him feel young.”
***
At the age of seventy, Roddy McDowall died in October of 1998. He and Merv hadn't sought one another out with any particular frequency during the final years of his life. By that time, their friendship was essentially a distant memory of their youth. However, they occasionally remained in touch, usually by telephone.
Merv was saddened by Roddy's death, feeling his own life slipping away as old friends of the 40s and 50s died. He said, “Roddy was living proof that not all former child stars were doomed to be either forgotten or else a drug user or alcoholic. He was the world's greatest movie fan, and a star in his own right. All of his friends, including Elizabeth Taylor, who appeared with him in Lassie Come Home, were saddened today. A friend told me that he died very peacefully at his home in Studio City, just the way he planned it.”
Later, Merv revealed to close friends that he'd visited Roddy privately during the weeks before his death. “He took my hand and looked deeply into my eyes. ‘This is not a time to be sad,’ Roddy said. ‘We've both had incredible lives. It was like a visit to Walt's Magical Kingdom. With all our pain and disappointments, it was a life that most people only dream about. Too bad it must end, like all good things.’”
***
Merv lived to accept many honors due him, including a lifetime achievement award at the Daytime Emmys. He was also honored by the Museum of Television and Radio, now known as the Paley Center for Media. Stuart N. Brotman, then president of the museum, said, “There really has been no one who has managed to have his type of success both in front of and behind the camera. He is a oneman conglomerate, and I can't think of anyone else who has had that reach.”
In his final years, the awards came frequently. In 1994 he was honored with the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame Award, sharing it with Dan Rather and Diane Sawyer. Throughout his life, Merv won fifteen Emmy Awards, including the 199394 Outstanding Game/Audience Participation Show Emmy for his role as executive producer of Jeopardy!. The John Wayne Cancer Institute presented Merv with “The Duke Award,” and he was also honored by the American Ireland Fund and the SHARE organization. As the awards piled up, Merv soon lost count.
His last big honor came in 2005, when he was presented with Daytime Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award at the organization's 32nd annual award ceremony.
***
In March of 2001, Merv released It's Like a Dream, a CD of mostly vintage songs he'd recently recorded. They included “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” as well as the album's title song, which he had himself composed.
Soon after, Merv endorsed a retrospective of the best of the thousands of televised interviews he'd conducted during his long and gregarious lifetime. Containing three separate discs, it was entitled The Merv Griffin Show: 40 of the Most Interesting People of Our Time. Some of the younger viewers who played these discs were seeing The Merv Griffin Show for the first time.
In reviewing it, Ken Tucker, a TV critic writing in Entertainment Weekly, said that as a talk show host, Merv was about “as confrontational as Elmer Fudd. Not all of this stuff ages well. I'd been looking forward to seeing Totie Fields, a 60s comedian who's attained cult status as a pioneeringly ruthless female comic since her death in 1978, but the guest spot here finds her braying tired jokes about how expensive vacations are.”
Merv's last “gig” would have involved singing at the Hollywood Bowl beginning on September 14, 2007, as an introduction to Pink Martini, a “little orchestra” devoted to a vintage blend of Latin, lounge, classical, and jazz music. Sadly, because Merv died the day before the scheduled date, his appearance at that event never came to be.
***
Often, Merv was asked by reporters to comment on his rapidly expanding waistline. “I've been very fortunate with my health,” he said. “I smoke, I drink—not heavily, but I like my wine. I don't exercise. I take a cab to a cab. It's all in your DNA. My philosophy of life? Turn the page. If something falls through, turn the page. It's over with, get used to it, get on with it. Very simple. It's always worked for me.”
When he turned eighty, Merv admitted that he'd tried all the diets — Atkins, Scarscale, Jenny Craig—“and just plain water. Now I've given up worrying about my weight.” Critics claimed that he'd become “mountainous—he's taking to wearing polo shirts that drape his girth like a tent,” wrote John Colapinto in 2006. “Life is too short for fatfree brownies,” Merv said.
“I've outlived all of my diet doctors,” Merv said. “My first diet doctor was Dr. Atkins. And then I went through Dr. Stillman, the water diet. I think he drowned on his own diet. And I had Dr. Tarnower, and his girlfriend shot him. So I gave up dieting.”
He was referring to Herman Tarnower, the cardiologist who wrote The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. His lover, Jean Harris, the usually prim headmistress of a private girl's school, fatally shot him on March 10, 1980 when she discovered that the confirmed bachelor had been seducing other women. Merv also tried the doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet (The Stillman Diet). A creation of Irwin Maxwell Stillman, it was an early incarnation of the high protein, low carbohydrate diet.
Merv had referred to Robert Atkins, a nutritionist and cardiologist who created the Atkins Diet, a controversial way of dieting that entails close control of carbohydrate consumption, relying on protein and fat intake instead. On April 28, 2003, at the age of seventy two, Dr. Atkins slipped on a patch of ice while walking to work, hitting his head and causing bleeding around his brain. The fall killed him.
Even as late as 2003, friends were urging Merv to cut back on the package of Marlboro Lights he smoked daily. “Any day now,” he told them. “I'm likely to coldturkey it. I've stopped countless times in my past. But, ooooh, that first cigarette after you go back. It's like your first time at Disneyland.”
***
Facing death by 2005, Merv told The New York Times, “I know death is inevitable, but I'm happy for the time being. I've got great energy, and I've got all my hair. For my tombstone epitaph, I'm suggesting—“I will not be right back after these messages.”
When Merv was told by Dr. Skip Holden that he needed immediate surgery for prostate cancer, he said, “I don't want anything sliced out of me. I've never had an operation in my life. No, I don't want that. And, then they told me about radiation. I said that I'd do that. And then I went off on my boat out in the Mediterranean for
two months. The doctor called and said, ‘Merv, you have to undergo treatment. What are you doing out there?’ And, I said, ‘Well I will. I will. I will.’ By this time I had forgotten and he ruined my whole day. He said, ‘You've got cancer, remember?’ So, I came back.”
Back in California, Merv, at the age of eightytwo, entered Cedars Sinai Medical Center on July 8, 2007 for a recurrence of prostate cancer. He'd been treated for the disease more than a decade before. Once there, he undertook radiation treatments five days a week.
Before checking in, Merv said, “I'd rather play Jeopardy! than live it. I feel ready for another vacation. Cedars Sinai Medical Center was not the destination I had in mind.”
Even on his deathbed, as he lay in the hospital, Merv was working on a game show—in this case a proposed syndicated series called Merv Griffin's Crosswords.
Merv wouldn't live to see the show's debut on September 1, 2007. He had hoped that it would attain the success of Jeopardy!, but that appears to be a deathbed wish. The show's credits posthumously listed Merv as executive producer.
A frail Nancy Reagan, accompanied by Secret Service agents, made a bedside call on the Friday afternoon before Merv's death. She knew he didn't have long to live, but no mention was made of his grave condition.
She wisely listened to him talk about his success as a horse owner. His colt, “Stevie Wonderboy”—named for entertainer Stevie Wonder—had won the $1.5 million Breeders' Cup Juvenile in 2005, and his mind was drifting back to happier times.
When the nurse signaled Nancy that her time was up, she kissed her friend of fifty years a final goodbye on his forehead.
Merv drifted in and out of consciousness, with feeding tubes and morphine drips. The cancer had spread to his bones, lungs, and liver.
Merv Griffin- A Life in the Closet Page 68
