Merv (25 page)

This is how naive I was: it never occurred to me that there might be another reason why Bill didn’t want to send out my picture. He knew that the minute they saw my face, people would just start laughing at his roly-poly romantic star.

One day, I was walking out of the studio when a woman came up the stairs and asked me where they did
The Merv Griffin Show
. Pointing to the studio I’d just exited, I said, “They do it in there. But I’m sorry, ma’am, there are no guests allowed. They don’t have a studio audience.”

At that moment one of the crew came out and passed by as we were talking. “Hey, Merv,” he said casually.

The woman looked me up and down and said, “
You’re
Merv?” Then she became hysterical with laughter. Security had to escort her from the building.

That hurt a lot. So I went on a drastic salad and steak diet. In four months I lost eighty pounds.

Since then I’ve spent my life losing those same eighty pounds and then gaining them back. Up forty, down forty. I’ve had more swings than the stock market.

There’s an old Totie Fields joke that sums up my experience with diets: “I’ve been on a diet for the past two weeks. And you know what I’ve lost?”

“No, what have you lost, Totie?”

“I’ve lost two weeks.”

One of the perks of hosting your own talk show is that publishers send you free books on a daily basis. You can meet almost any author you want (except maybe J.D. Salinger), provided you’re willing to do it on camera.

Every popular diet doctor came on
The Merv Griffin Show
.

And I murdered several of them.

You think I’m kidding? Okay, let’s recap: in the late sixties, I had on Dr. Irwin Stillman, chief proponent of the “Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet.” His plan basically consisted of cottage cheese and water (they should have called it the “
Prison
Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet”). I remember him literally screaming at my audience, “Drink eight glasses of water every day!” Of course I tried his diet myself (I tried them all—I wanted to be a good host), and I spent weeks sloshing around the studio like the Atlantic Ocean with shoes.

Not long after he appeared on my show, Dr. Stillman died. I’m not sure what was listed as the official cause of death, but it doesn’t matter. Trust me, he drowned.

Then I had on Jim Fixx, who wrote the best-seller
The Complete Book of Running
. He was single-handedly (“footedly”?) responsible for the jogging craze in America during the seventies. I started jogging and kept at it…until Fixx dropped dead of a heart attack while
jogging
.

The most frightening example of my diet doctor curse has to be Dr. Herman Tarnower, inventor of the “Scarsdale Diet,” which limited you to 700 calories per day, largely from protein. Within a year of doing my show, his mistress, Jean Harris, shot him to death. I’ve always wondered…do you suppose there’s any protein in lead?

The poor guy never had a chance. I should have testified at the trial and told them that, although Jean Harris pulled the trigger, she really didn’t do it. I consider myself to blame.

I once lost fifty pounds on the Jenny Craig food plan (this was after I’d stopped doing my show, which is why she’s alive today). All her foods seemed to start with a “p”—pancakes, pasta, peanut butter. My problem was that I just kept right on going through the rest of the alphabet until I got to shish kebabs, steaks, and sundaes.

In recent years, I’ve made a certain amount of peace with my fluctuating weight. I’ve even gotten to the point of being able to poke fun at it publicly. Here’s one of the promotional spots I did for Resorts Atlantic City:

I still try to lose. It’s not great for your heart walking around carrying too much weight. But I’ve accepted the fact that I will always love food. And a hundred years from now, what are they going to say about me? “Merv was
fat?
” I don’t think so. They’re going to say, “Who the hell was that guy with Arthur Treacher?”

There was another way I learned to cope with the stress and anxiety of my split with Julann; a way which, at the time, was considered highly unusual.

When I bought my place in Pebble Beach I became very friendly with Clint Eastwood and his then wife, Maggie. Clint and I played tennis most weekends during the early seventies and we often included Tony in our doubles games.

One morning I called him to set up a match, and the maid, who didn’t speak English well, answered the phone.

“I sorry,” she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Eastwood doing their BM.”

This same, rather bizarre conversation happened more than once until I finally said something to Clint.

“I don’t mean to get her in trouble, but I think you should know that your maid is telling people every time you’re in the bathroom. And she’s awfully
specific
about what you’re doing in there.”

Clint looked at me blankly for a moment, then he threw back his head and guffawed.

“Not
BM
, Merv,” he said, between gasps of laughter, “
TM
. Transcendental Meditation. You remember the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi from India? The one who taught it to the Beatles a few years back? Maggie and I do it for twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes at night. It’s the greatest.”

I was surprised that Clint, a low-key, somewhat conservative guy (despite his “Dirty Harry” image), would be involved in something so…well,
weird
.

But the more he talked about it, the more intrigued I became with the idea of trying it myself. He described how TM allowed him to focus his thoughts so completely that when he was directing a movie he could visualize an entire scene, down to the tiniest detail, then shoot it exactly that way later on.

Lord knows I needed something to help me focus. My separation and pending divorce from Julann had left my thinking scrambled and my life in a state of perpetual chaos. I still did my show every day, but I knew that my interviews were beginning to show the effects of my personal turmoil.

I asked a friend in Carmel to recommend a meditation teacher. He gave me the name of David Rosencranz, who ran the TM center in Monterey. The results were amazing and almost instantaneous. My thinking became more orderly, my mind became calmer, and I was able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in months.

When you meditate, you slow down everything within your body. You empty your mind into nothingness, and thoughts will just occur to you—whatever you want to think about flows freely.

I was so thrilled with TM’s effect on me that I subsequently invited the Maharishi (the title means “Great Sage”) to be a guest on my show. Actress Ellen Corby (Grandma Walton) joined him and made a passionate pitch about the benefits of meditation. Within days, TM had gained tens of thousands of new practitioners all over the United States.

Two years later I did a second show on TM, this time with the Maharishi, Clint, and Burt Reynolds as my guests. Now if you’ve never seen him (more to the point, if you’ve never
heard
him), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is a tiny man who always dresses in traditional white robes. He has a long, flowing beard and a distinctive, high-pitched laugh that I loved to provoke. On that show, after the Maharishi emitted a particularly long series of “hee-hee-hees,” Burt turned to the audience and said, “Hey, he has the same laugh I do.” People were laughing so hard that it took a full minute to restore order in the studio.

I liked the Maharishi, but I didn’t understand a lot of the religious aspects of his movement. He traveled with many disciples, one of whom had the job of carrying a lambskin for him to sit on at all times. You also weren’t permitted to touch the Maharishi. I had to resist the impulse to greet him with a handshake for fear of offending him.

I’ve used TM many times over the last thirty years, especially during stressful situations. Actually, I now find it to be even more effective as a preventive step, before a situation has the chance to
become
stressful.

Today every doctor I know recommends meditation for dealing with tension and anxiety. Indeed, the healing methods of Indian culture made popular in the books of Deepak Chopra, one of the Maharishi’s closest disciples and students, are rooted in the same science that gave rise to Transcendental Meditation.

Meditation helped me in many ways, but it was no cure for the loneliness I felt after the breakup of my marriage. The hardest part was the stark contrast between my days and my nights. Every afternoon at 5:30, I’d sit down to talk with some of the world’s most intelligent and fascinating people. Then the camera light would go off, the tape would stop rolling, and I’d be left sitting there wondering what I had in the refrigerator for dinner.

After fourteen years with Julann, it was a rough transition to make. I know that a lot of people go through being single again after many years of marriage, but there’s an added dimension to it when you’re in the public eye. Meeting someone isn’t the problem; it’s meeting someone you can open up to and trust that’s really difficult. This goes back to that whole idea of people’s preconceived expectations of you when you’re famous. The reason so many actors marry other actors is because it allows them to avoid the problem entirely. Someone who’s had similar experiences with fame is a) not impressed or intimidated by it and b) comfortable with its many ridiculous, and sometimes unpleasant, accoutrements.

Which brings me to Eva Gabor.

Eva was the youngest child of Vilmos and Jolie Gabor. Born in Budapest shortly after the First World War, Eva, like her older sisters, Magda and Sari (known as Zsa Zsa), was constantly pushed toward fame and fortune (not necessarily in that order) by Mama Jolie, a frustrated actress. While still a teenager, Eva married Dr. Erik Drimmer, an osteopath who would later become the personal physician to Greta Garbo.

In the late thirties, Eva was the first of the three Gabor sisters to come to America, followed shortly after by Zsa Zsa and Magda, and eventually by Mama Jolie. I was never very clear about what became of papa, except that he remained in Hungary.

Although she had no formal training as an actress, Eva was put under contract at Paramount where she made a couple of forgettable films. Now divorced from Dr. Drimmer, she married a wealthy San Diego businessman named Charles Isaacs. That marriage lasted seven years during which time her career floundered. In 1950, Eva landed a major role in the Broadway production of
The Happy Time
, produced by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. This was also an apt title for Eva’s life during the fifties even though she divorced and remarried twice more during the decade. Her career really took off after a successful run on Broadway. She was given her own radio show, where creative syntax quickly became an indelible part of Eva’s public persona.

During this time her older sisters, Magda, and especially Zsa Zsa, were also becoming famous.

All these years later, it’s hard to describe the phenomenon of the three glamorous Gabor girls and their ubiquitous mother. They burst onto the society pages and into the gossip columns so suddenly, and with such force, it was as if they’d been dropped out of the sky.

Let me try to translate the Gabor craze into more contemporary terms. Suppose Madonna had two sisters. Now suppose that their names were Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears. Okay, now that you have that image in your mind, picture Elizabeth Taylor as their mother. From the standpoint of fame, that’s how visible and popular the Gabors were in their heyday. They were glamour personified.

I told you before that my first memory of meeting Eva was when we both appeared on the Harpo Marx television special in 1961.

A year later, I asked Eva to be a guest on my afternoon show on NBC. She was booked for a Friday, the same day that Woody Allen made his weekly appearance with me.

On a whim, I asked Woody, “If you were writing a play, what part would you cast Eva in?”

Slowly giving her the once-over, Woody paused for maximum effect, and then said, “As my mother.” Eva blushed bright red and hurled her purse at Woody’s midsection. I kept them apart after that.

She made many other memorable visits to my show, ultimately appearing as a guest on all four versions: NBC, Westinghouse, CBS, and Metromedia. Throwing caution to the wind, I once asked Eva which of the Gabor girls was the oldest.