Merv (30 page)

When Ronnie came back, his eyes were wide and he spoke in a flat tone, as if he couldn’t believe the words he now heard himself saying. “They cleared us to the wrong runway. Had we landed there, we probably wouldn’t have made it. The crosswinds were so strong, the plane would have been blown completely off the landing strip.”

I could hear John through the open cockpit door screaming at the control tower. “Is anyone
awake
down there?! Are you paying any
attention?!!
You could have killed us!”

Eventually we were given the coordinates for the right runway and we landed safely, although everyone was extremely shaken by the experience.

The next day I traveled to the town of Loughrae, twenty minutes outside of Galway to inspect that two-hundred-year-old manor house, which I had seen once before, many years ago.

I remembered it vividly. In the sixties I’d gone to Ireland, the land of my ancestors (my maternal great grandparents were Thorntons from Clonmel, County Tipperary, and my father’s family, the Griffins, were from Liscannor, County Clare), to do a television special. One of my guests was John Huston, the larger-than-life director of films such as
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
and
The African Queen
.

While I was in Ireland, Huston invited me to visit him at St. Clerans, his magnificent estate near Galway. John had purchased the eighteenth century Georgian manor house for £10,000 in 1954, shortly after he’d finished shooting
The African Queen
.

Over the next two years he spent fifty times that amount restoring the house and filling it with eclectic items from all over the globe. The master bedroom included a hand-carved canopied bed from Florence, a chest of drawers he’d found in a French cathedral, a thirteenth-century Greek statue, and two Louis XIV chairs. John had a traditional Japanese bath with shoji doors and mats installed in his bathroom. The Red Sitting Room got its name after he had the walls re-covered with bright red silks and placed Chinese porcelain drum stools on either side of its entryway.

On his travels, John had collected many objets d’art, including Arezzo, Etruscan, and Magna Grecia ceramics, as well as paintings by Monet, Juan Gris, and Morris Graves. All of these expensive pieces eventually made their way to St. Clerans.

The minute I saw St. Clerans, I loved everything about it and the way he lived in it. He regaled me with stories of the many lavish dinner parties he’d given in the formal dining room where, on any given night, you’d find men like Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, or Montgomery Clift dressed in black tie and women such as Elizabeth Taylor and Olivia de Havilland clad in long, elegant gowns. They would dine by the light of fifty candles, a fire roaring on the hearth, the conversation as sparkling as the crystal. John said it was “as beautiful and fantastic as a masquerade.”

After owning it for eighteen years, John had finally been forced to sell St. Clerans due to the great expense of maintaining it. He later wrote, “The decision was forced on me. I sometimes feel that I sold a little of my soul when I let St. Clerans go.” St. Clerans had a succession of owners after John, including the two American families who had been using it as a vacation home and had now put it back on the market.

Now there I was, back in Ireland after a thirty-year absence, once again walking past the giant stone lions that guarded the main entryway of St. Clerans. It was every bit as magical a place as I’d remembered it to be, although it had clearly suffered some in the years since Mr. Huston had been lord of the manor.

Back outside, I encountered an old caretaker who lived on the grounds and chatted with him about the property.

“That’s a beautiful waterfall,” I said, referring to a stretch of the clear river that runs through the property. “We must have wonderful water in the house.”

He gave me a funny look, but said nothing.

Picking up on it, I pressed him. “Is something the matter with the water?”

Knowing that I was interested in the house and that his candor could jeopardize the sale (and maybe his job), he admitted, very reluctantly, “Well, sir, you see the well is down. The pipes are all corroded. We don’t
have
water right now.”

“Oh my God,” I said, stunned. Dana had been right again. I still bought St. Clerans, but until we repaired the water system, I only drank Evian in the house…

Fixing the water wasn’t the only thing that needed to be done to convert St. Clerans into a world-class destination. I approached the restoration of the house with the same enthusiasm that John Huston brought to the task forty years earlier. Unlike John, however, my intention was to return St. Clerans to its original Irish splendor, rather than use it as a showcase for exotic art from almost everywhere
but
Ireland.

I completely redid the interior. Even though I had a staff of designers and no formal design experience of my own, I knew exactly what I wanted. For example, the Irish practice of hanging pictures high on the walls made no sense to me. I got a stiff neck from looking up at the art, so I made them lower everything to eye level. Sometimes the best design sense is common sense.

Picture this scene: I was stretched out on the floor of the great living room of St. Clerans surrounded by books with photographs of different rooms, swatches of fabric for the drapes, samples of paint for the walls, wallpaper panels, and pieces of carpet. The designers were all hovering over me, a bit tremulously, as I told them what I wanted done. Periodically, one of them would raise a protest, “But, Mr. Griffin, you can’t
mix
stripes with checks. It doesn’t match.”

“Trust me,” I said. “It will.”

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this chaos, Ronnie Ward called me from the other room.

“Merv, come in here. You’ve got to see what’s on television.”

I picked myself up off the floor and went into the next room, where Ronnie was watching what appeared to be a cooking show on the BBC.

“What’s so important?” I asked.

“Just watch this guy, Merv. He’s great. We should sign him.”

I looked at the screen. Ainsley Harriott was a 6'4" chef from London whose clever monologues even made chopping vegetables interesting and funny to watch. According to Ronnie, his program,
Ready Steady Cook
, was a huge hit in England. I could see why.

“You’re right, Ron,” I said, chuckling at Harriott’s witty patter over chicken pâté. “Let’s see if we can get him.”

Ronnie got immediately on the phone to Ernie Chambers, the former producer of my show who now ran my production unit, and made arrangements for him to fly to London from L.A. I went back to my swatches and samples.

Two months later, I’d completely redone twelve bedrooms and the dining room of St. Clerans and my production team had signed a syndication deal for
The Ainsley Harriott Show
with Buena Vista Television in America. As my old friend Lucille Ball used to say, “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”

Today, St. Clerans is one of the most critically acclaimed and highly photographed houses in the world. But the biggest vote of confidence for my restoration came from one of its former residents, John Huston’s daughter Anjelica.

Anjelica Huston has mixed emotions about growing up in Galway. In interviews she’s talked about the idyllic setting and her memories of riding horses and playing games in the fields. While all that was true, there was also a darker side to her childhood, which she’s only rarely discussed. Anjelica and her mother, John’s fourth wife, didn’t live in the main house. They shared a stable house a half mile away, while inside the manor John entertained a series of mistresses.

When I called Anjelica to tell her that I’d bought her childhood home, she was delighted. She said, “I don’t know anybody in the world who I would rather have own that house other than you, Merv.”

Anjelica has never been back to St. Clerans, although she’s seen pictures of the restoration. In her honor, I’ve converted her childhood playroom/studio into a guest bedroom and named it the Anjelica Suite.

Ironically, I haven’t been back to St. Clerans in three years myself, although it’s not because of John Huston’s lingering presence.

The reason is someone named Charlie Chan.

All my life I’ve never been without a dog. Even when I first moved to New York City and only had a one-room, fourth-floor walk-up apartment, I kept one. There was no elevator and my dog always had to go to the bathroom. Instead of trudging up and down four flights of stairs, I went out on my balcony and put him on the roof next door. This was in the fifties when the Soviet Union had just launched a dog into space. So, like everyone else in those days, I blamed the Russians for the mysterious rooftop droppings.

Four years ago, as a Christmas present to myself, I decided to get a third dog. At the time, my two older dogs, Patrick, a purebred Irish setter, and Lobo, a half-Malamute, half-wolf mix, were living primarily on the ranch in Carmel.

It was a Saturday and I’d been visiting Tony, Tricia, and my grandchildren at their home in Malibu. On the way back to the Beverly Hilton, I stopped into the Pet Headquarters, a wonderful pet shop in Malibu. I used to drop by there quite often because they’re so sweet with their animals. On weekends they take them out of their cages and let kids come in and play with them. Cats, dogs, everything.

When I walked into the store I ran into my friend Linda Foster (who is both the wife and writing partner of David Foster, the Grammy Award–winning producer, composer, and arranger). There was a crowd gathered in the center of the pet store, and they were all looking down at something on the floor, but I couldn’t see what it was. So I asked Linda what was going on.

“Oh Merv,” she said, looking a bit downcast. “If I didn’t already have eight dogs at home…” Her voice trailed off wistfully. She suggested that I push through the crowd and see for myself.

There on the floor, in the center of a circle of adoring adults and children, was a three-month-old Chinese Shar-Pei puppy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the breed, but it’s very different from almost any other kind of dog in the world.

The name “Shar-Pei” literally means “sand-skin.” Translated more loosely it’s also come to mean “rough, sandy coat,” which describes the unique qualities of the Shar-Pei’s skin. It hangs loose in folds on certain parts of their bodies, giving rise to the nickname “wrinkle dog.”

There’s an amazing story about this breed. Almost two thousand years old, it had survived everything from Genghis Khan to the Boxer Rebellion. But when the Chinese communists came to power in the late forties, they decided that dogs as pets were a bourgeois decadence, so they systematically eliminated millions of dogs from the cities and the countryside. Twenty years later, when the U.S. restored diplomatic relations with China, animal lovers in the West were shocked to discover the devastating effects of this policy of canine genocide. The Shar-Pei had been all but eliminated. If it were not for a dog breeder in Hong Kong named Matgo Law who, in 1973, issued a worldwide plea to save the Shar-Pei, it’s entirely possible that it would be extinct today.

I knew none of this when I saw that adorable, crinkly-faced puppy with his unusually long hair on the floor of the pet shop. In fact, I only saw him for about five seconds. That was all it took. I walked to the front of the store, got out my credit card, and said, “Whatever that dog costs, I’ll take him.”

It was love at first sight. He came home with me that afternoon and he hasn’t left my side for four years.

I was looking for a famous Chinese name to give him. I decided on Charlie Chan because I was a big fan of the Warner Oland–Sidney Toler detective movies of the thirties and also because I couldn’t think of Mao Tse-tung’s name at the time. Good thing too.

I got on to the subject of Charlie because of St. Clerans. As I said, he’s the reason I haven’t been back there since shortly after the renovation. Here’s why: like all island nations, the Irish have a strict quarantine policy for pets entering the country. They are isolated for
six months
before they’re released back to their owners.

When I flew to Ireland while Charlie was still a puppy, I was unaware of the rigidity of this policy. When the plane landed, I tried to take Charlie onto the tarmac to pee and a man from the Minister for Agriculture and Food stopped us. He told me that Charlie would have to go back on the plane and, I guess,
go
back on the plane, as well.

I don’t get angry very often, but this idiot really got my Irish up.

“Let me see if I understand you,
pal
(just a tip—when I call someone my “pal,” they’re definitely not), you’ll allow those horses over there [a plane across the field was letting off some racehorses from England] to come into your country when they could very well have mad cow disease, but you won’t let my dog take a leak on the runway?”

I fought their absurd policy all the way up to the president’s office, but to no avail. I even spoke to our former ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith. She was also helpless to do anything, but told me to keep fighting. “Merv, you’re absolutely right,” said Jean. “They even made
me
put my dogs in quarantine when I arrived here and they both died.” Personally, I think there’s an even greater scrutiny of American pets than there is of animals from other countries. We have the healthiest, most “vetted” animals in the world, yet that doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to their travel abroad.