Merv (8 page)

That afternoon the handsome brown-haired actor with piercing blue eyes came to our hotel and gave one of the funniest interviews I’ve ever done. He did a funny recounting of all of the accidents that happened to him during the making of
Lawrence
.

When we were done taping, I said, “Peter when are you coming over to the States?”

“In three months, for the premiere in New York.” He turned to the press agent, who looked very relieved now that the interview from hell was finally over.

“Mark this down,” said O’Toole, grandly. “I will
only
do Merv’s show when I’m in America.”

True to his word, when he arrived in New York that December we booked O’Toole for an exclusive interview. As was my custom, I didn’t see him before the show (I’m always afraid that any conversation I have with a guest prior to taping will spoil the interview’s spontaneity).

The moment arrived for him to walk out and I gave him a huge buildup.

“Remember when we spoke with this brilliant young actor in England just a few months ago,” I told the audience. “Now he’s joining us again on the eve of the release of
Lawrence of Arabia
, which I believe will be regarded as one of the great films of all time. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Peter O’Toole!”

Out walked a light, almost platinum-haired man who, as far as I could tell,
wasn’t
Peter O’Toole.

A thought flashed through my head: This is a gag. The staff and O’Toole put some guy up to this.

I said, “Hello?”

“Hello Merv,” he responded, sitting down.

“You’re not Peter O’Toole.”

He looked puzzled. “I’m not?”

“No, I interviewed Peter O’Toole in England and I know him. You’re not him.” I was trying to be friendly, but I was making a mental note to decapitate whoever had the bright idea to send out a ringer on live television.

I sensed that the audience was growing uneasy with this exchange and the phony O’Toole seemed increasingly irritated by my attitude.

Then it dawned on me. “Wait a minute! You dyed your hair to look like your Lawrence character in the movie. That way people will know it’s you when they see the picture, right?”

“Oh,
really?
I dyed it?” He was sarcastic and plainly unhappy with this line of questioning.

“Well,
didn’t
you?” If I was going down, it wouldn’t be without a fight.

“I’d rather not discuss that, Mr. Griffin.”
Mr. Griffin
. Ouch.

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.” I surrendered.

“Indeed, you have offended me, quite seriously.”

I apologized again, then gamely tried to change the subject.

“Have you ever been to America before?”

“No.”

“Is your family here with you?”

“Yes.”

One-word answers. A disaster for something billed as a “talk” show.

So I dove into my notes and asked him ridiculous questions like “Do you have any hobbies?” and “What do you do for exercise?”

By this time he was furious and I knew that it was only a matter of time before he leaned across my desk and punched me in the face. I started to calculate how long it would take for me to make it to the nearest exit—then I had a flash of inspiration. I had the perfect question.

“Peter, you’d like to go home now, wouldn’t you?”

“I would, yes.”

“You’d probably like to go all the way back to London, wouldn’t you?”

Suddenly, he was completely agreeable. “I certainly would.”

“Well then,” I said. “Thank you for coming, Peter. Goodbye.”

And with that he walked off. As soon as he got backstage, he screamed (loud enough for the audience to hear), “He’s a son of a bitch!” and stormed out of the studio.

Peter O’Toole’s opinion of me was undoubtedly shared by a number of NBC executives (or “suits” as I’ve always called them) because Bob Shanks and I were quietly doing our part to undermine what remained of their notorious blacklist from the fifties. We booked people like Judy Holliday, Jack Gilford, and Phil Leeds, all of whom hadn’t been on NBC’s “air” in years.

In those days censorship took the form of a list of the following week’s guests that had to be presented to the network. It made the rounds of the NBC executive offices and if any one of those names was black-penciled, they were off the show. We weren’t told who was responsible for any given veto and, when we pressed for a reason, none was ever given. All we were told was that the person in question was “not a friend of the corporation.”

If you’ve been paying attention so far, you’ve already figured out that this was just the kind of thing I’d never accept. People who tell me that I can’t do something—without a good reason—are usually in for a fight. And there were two people that we really went to the mat for. One was Marc Connelly, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright who was once a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. The other was a man named Ira Hirschmann, who’d written a powerful book about his exploits in Eastern Europe during World War II, where he successfully negotiated the freedom of thousands of Jews.

Marc Connelly was in his seventies by this time and posed less of a threat to national security than Arthur Treacher (who I often suspected was a spy for Cornwallis). We had Connelly on the program and he was a wonderful guest.

And I was just amazed when the network vetoed Ira Hirschmann. Not only was he a bona fide American hero, his travels in Eastern Europe had been at the behest of our
own
State Department. Suits. (We won that one too.)

But all of these were just minor bumps in the broadcasting road. The bottom line was numbers. Since
Password
was beating us soundly in the Nielsen ratings (a show that Betty White and I had demonstrated to all three networks as a favor to my old friend Mark Goodson—talk about sinking your own boat!), and since Johnny seemed finally to have found his footing, NBC decided that my numbers just weren’t cutting it. We were canceled on April Fool’s Day, 1963. Trying to put the best face on it, the network said, “Merv is just too sophisticated for daytime.” Damned with faint praise…

In its wisdom, what the network hadn’t anticipated was the public reaction to the decision. NBC received 160,000 letters of protest in only two weeks. At the time it was the largest amount of mail ever received in support of a canceled show. The nation’s television critics also weighed in with column after column describing my show as “informative,” “intelligent,” “hysterically funny”—you get the idea.

But it was too late. NBC stuck to its guns, although they gave me a deal to develop my own shows as a sort of corporate consolation prize (
“What do we have for the contestants, Johnny?”
).

I don’t spend a lot of time in life doing the “woulda, shoulda, coulda” routine. My philosophy has always been that when something’s over, it’s over. Turn the page.

But I must confess that I was more than a little pleased when the Emmy nominations came out later that year. I’d been nominated in the category of Outstanding Performance in a Variety or Musical Program or Series, along with Edie Adams, Danny Kaye, Andy Williams, and another newcomer, a young woman with a big voice. No, not Streisand. It was the former president of my fan club, Carol Burnett. And
she
won. How perfect is that? (For the record, I should note that Robert Redford also came up short that year.
Don Knotts
beat him for Best Supporting Actor.)

Anyone who has ever been fired from a job knows how much it hurts. Now try imagining what it feels like to have the entire country in on that experience with you. It’s not your gloating critics who make it the most difficult, it’s your friends offering you endless amounts of sympathy that make you want to burrow right into the ground and pull the hole in after you. Instead, Julann and I decided to see Europe for the first time. We went to Paris, Rome, and the land of my forebears, Ireland.

Meanwhile, NBC, caught completely off guard by the overwhelmingly negative reaction to my cancellation, was now plying me with various offers to continue my relationship with the network. (Only in television can the equivalent of kicking someone out of bed be viewed as a “relationship.”)

After we returned from Ireland, I agreed to appear in two summer stock plays,
The Moon Is Blue
and Neil Simon’s
Come Blow Your Horn
. NBC was so desperate for a rapprochement, they even sent emissaries out to plead with me in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Warren, Ohio. Finally, I agreed to host a new game show I’d developed called
Word for Word
, provided that my company produced it.

It was during that year, 1963, that I also came up with an idea for a quiz show that I called
What’s the Question?
But we’ll talk about that a little later on.

That fall—exactly one day shy of a year since
The Merv Griffin Show
debuted on NBC—I found myself back at Rockefeller Center as the MC of my own…game show. In the not-yet-immortal words of Yogi Berra (who was also getting banged around a few miles to the north), it was “déjà vu all over again.”

The premise of
Word for Word
was simple; contestants would attempt to make as many different words as they could out of one big “master word.” It was anagrams with prizes. Since I’ve been a word and puzzle freak all my life (I still do four crossword puzzles a day), the idea for it came easily to me. And hosting it was even easier.

Of course, that was precisely the problem for me. It was like sleepwalking. Even though I was now wearing the producer’s hat as well, this was essentially the same routine that I’d grown bored with on
Play Your Hunch
less than eighteen months before.

Enter Chet Collier.

Chet was a vice president of Group W, the broadcasting division of the giant Westinghouse Corporation that manufactured everything from washing machines to nuclear reactors. Group W owned television stations in five cities—Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. A year earlier, using its five stations as the anchor, Group W had cobbled together a syndicate of over a hundred other stations from around the country—some network affiliates, some not—to carry a new talk show with Mike Douglas from Cleveland as the host. Thus the era of syndicating original programs (as opposed to
I Love Lucy
reruns) was effectively launched.

When Chet Collier came to see me in early 1965 about reviving
The Merv Griffin Show
, syndication was still in its infancy, an untested David to the three established network Goliaths. Although they’d had some success with Mike Douglas, and with another show by the first
Tonight Show
host, Steve Allen, it was still considered a risky venture, particularly if you had strong ties to a network (as I did). Still, the economics of owning your own show, as opposed to being a network employee, were a compelling argument for taking that risk.

Group W proposed that the new show would run ninety minutes, as opposed to the one-hour format we’d used on NBC. Moreover, I would have complete creative control over the show’s content; the only suit I’d have to think about would be the one I wanted to wear on any given night.

If Group W could make
The Merv Griffin Show
fly again in syndication, it would be an unprecedented programming move, a phoenix rising from the network ash heap. Nobody had ever done it before.

That was all I needed to hear.

We made the deal in February; three months later, I stood in the wings of the Little Theater on 44th Street, next door to Sardi’s, and listened as Arthur Treacher intoned what was to become my trademark introduction, “Look sharp! Here’s the dear boy himself,
Merrrvyn!”

I’d never forgotten the promise that I’d made to Arthur when we were on
The Tonight Show
together. Amazingly, neither had he. His agent was flabbergasted when he called Arthur to tell him of my offer. Before the agent even said why he was calling, Arthur asked, “Did that dear little Griffin chap ring up?” More than three years had elapsed since our brief conversation, and we hadn’t seen each other in the interim. Yet Arthur wasn’t at all surprised to hear from me.

For my part, I had no doubt that Arthur’s British reserve and dry wit would provide the perfect complement to my earnest enthusiasm. However, I was the
only
one who believed that Arthur was a good choice. He would turn seventy-one shortly after the new show was scheduled to debut; I would just be turning forty. Arthur was old enough to be my father. (In fact, he was born in 1894, eight years before my actual father.)

My wife, Chet Collier, and Bob Shanks (who once again had signed on as my producer)—everyone whose judgment I trusted—were all strenuously opposed to my choice of Arthur, a decision they thought of as “Griffin’s Folly, a one-night joke.”

I didn’t care.

To this day, hiring Arthur remains one of my proudest—and smartest—career decisions. He was an instant hit with the audience, particularly among our younger viewers. Of course this flew in the face of the many research experts who predicted that Arthur would “skew” old; that is to say, his only appeal would be to viewers in his own age bracket. The numbers-crunchers were even more certain that young people couldn’t relate to Arthur. As they saw it, someone who was alive when Queen Victoria was still on the throne would turn off the hip sixties kids in droves.