Merv (19 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he was practically shouting, “as you know we have just purchased Merv Griffin Enterprises, one of the greatest television companies in the world! It includes
The Merv Griffin Show, Wheel of Fortune
, and
Jeopardy!
The capacity crowd cheered.

The closed circuit camera came in tight on a shot of me. The entire arena could see my beaming smile on the giant screens overhead.

But Keough wasn’t through. “And what a great buy it was! Three hundred and fifty million dollars!”

Knowing I was on camera, my expression didn’t change. But I turned to Fay Vincent and, out of the corner of my mouth, whispered, “Oh, so that’s what you were
really
prepared to pay.”

Fay turned bright red. He looked like a giant tomato on the Jumbotron screens.

I knew that I had to let Fay off the hook. He’s a terrific guy, and now he felt guilty. So I leaned over and said, “That’s the
last
time I’m ever listening to Don Keough speak. Just by sitting here, I’m out a hundred million bucks.”

We both roared.

When I got back to California, I thought, What now? Do I have a glass of champagne? Go out and buy a new pair of shoes? How about a shoe
store?

I felt like my old
Play Your Hunch
buddy, Robert Redford, in the last reel of
The Candidate
. Redford spends the whole movie trying to get elected senator from California. When he’s finally won his hard-fought election, he turns to the campaign manager and says, “
Now
what do I do?”

The first thing I did was to make gifts to my family members. To this day, that may have been the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.

My sister (who I think had the best sense of humor of anyone in our family) had the best reaction: “You just never think about anybody else, do you, Buddy? Do you have any
idea
how much more paperwork I’m going to have at tax time? Selfish, that’s what you are.”

After helping my family, the next step wasn’t quite so clear-cut.

I began seeking advice from people who knew more about high finance than I did (which, at the time, was a pretty long list).

Arthur Laffer, the top economic advisor to President Reagan (remember the “Laffer Curve”?), was one of the first experts I called. He suggested the names of several of the most respected financial institutions in America, then was kind enough to set up interviews for me with their top people.

Quite by chance, at a social function, I happened to meet Lord Solomon, the ninety-year-old founder of the famous London banking house that bore his name. He’d read of my sale and offered his congratulations. I brazenly asked him what he thought I should do with my money.

“Young man,” he said with a wink, “there will be a charge for that information.”

The room grew quiet, like one of those old E.F. Hutton commercials (
When Lord Solomon talks, people listen
).

“There is
nothing
,” he said, sounding for all the world like Arthur Treacher, “more secure than the government bonds of your country.”

I had a life-changing decision to make. I could roll the money over into bonds and live the rest of my life completely free of any responsibilities. Or I could start again in a different kind of business life.

In the end it was a no-brainer. I wasn’t ready to retire (I’m not sure that I’d even know
how
to do that), so I began to actively consider new ventures that might be of interest to me.

Let me tell you, they were a lot harder to find than the ones that didn’t interest me. Everybody and his brother-in-law’s best friend’s neighbor’s cousin brought me the “opportunity of a lifetime.” If I lived a thousand lifetimes, I couldn’t have pursued half of them, nor did I want to.

One of my favorite “opportunities” was the chance to buy Hebrew National Foods, the maker of a number of kosher products, including hot dogs. My son, Tony, who is very health-conscious, said, “Dad,
buy
it. Their hot dogs are pure beef. They don’t put all those chemicals in them.”

I turned it down, but I’ve always wondered if I made a mistake in doing so. Don’t you think that “Merv Griffin’s Hebrew National Foods” has a nice ring to it? Not to mention a new brand of “Orson Welles Kosher Franks” that would have served as a lasting tribute to my departed friend. Oh well, you know what they say about the road not taken…

One thing was certain. Whatever I decided to do with my newfound fortune, it would be done under the microscope of public scrutiny.

Right after my deal was announced, I was driving near my home in Beverly Hills. I had the radio tuned to the local all-news station and I heard the newsreader say, “Today
Forbes
magazine released its list of the four hundred wealthiest people in America. Coming up, we’ll tell you the name of the richest Hollywood performer in history.” And he went to a commercial. I thought to myself, Wow, Clint actually made the
Forbes
list. My buddy Clint Eastwood produced his own films, so I figured that it had finally paid off for him.

I drove along.

Coming back from the commercial, the newsreader picked up the story: “
Forbes
magazine has added Merv Griffin to its annual list of the four hundred richest Americans. Griffin, whose net worth is estimated to be in excess of $300 million, replaces Bob Hope as the wealthiest performer in Hollywood history.”

His words had the strangest effect on me. At first they didn’t register at all. Then I looked over at the next lane of traffic to see if someone in another car had heard it too. I know it’s irrational, but I got really embarrassed. Was it my imagination or were people now looking at me differently?

It
was
my imagination, of course, but I still scrunched down in the driver’s seat and hurried on to my destination. (By sheer coincidence, I was headed toward the Beverly Hilton, a hotel I would own the following year.)

The next day, I went out and bought a copy of
Forbes
magazine to see exactly what it said about me. Glancing further down the list, I read the name of a woman who, according to
Forbes
, had almost the same amount of money as I did. I put the magazine down and started laughing out loud, until there were tears running down my face.

She was dead.

And she had
been
dead for several years. So I called Malcolm Forbes, who had made several appearances on my show.

“Malcolm,” I began, “you probably know that I’m on your list…”

“Yeah, Merv, aren’t you excited?”

Not wanting to offend him, I attempted to be diplomatic. “You know, Malcolm, I don’t really know if
excited
is the right word.”

Malcolm was taken aback. I tried to keep my voice from revealing how ridiculous I thought his list was.

“What’s wrong, Merv? Didn’t we put enough in there about you?”

And I said, “Noooo, it’s not
that
…”

“What? What is it then?” Forbes was genuinely puzzled.

“Well, you see, Malcolm, there’s a lady on there, she’s actually listed right below me, who’s been dead for three years. The reason I know this is because I bought my house from her estate.”

For a long moment there was total silence on the line, then Forbes recovered smoothly: “Well, Merv, all that proves is that even after you’re dead, your money will
still
make money.”

It’s hard to believe now, in this era where an actor’s salary is practically an extension of his name (
Tom Cruise, $25 million
), but there was a time when it wasn’t a good idea for a performer to be thought of as having money.

That lesson was driven home to me very early in my career. In the mid-fifties, when I was still struggling financially, I took a walk in New York City with Jackie Gleason, who was already a big star. Everybody—cab drivers, construction workers, even policemen—all shouted, “Hey, Jackie!” as we walked by.

One day it appeared in the papers that Jackie had signed a new contract with CBS for the then unheard of sum of $12 million. From that point on, nobody yelled “Hey, Jackie!” anymore. People now thought he was unapproachable because he had so much money.

I think the public loses its connection with you if they view you as being really rich. So for the twenty-three years my show was on the air, I had made it a point to keep a very low profile about my investments.

Of course, all that changed immediately after Coca-Cola purchased my company. Although the deal provided me with what I’ve often called “a great American fortune,” it also meant that my business dealings would now be exhaustively detailed in the media. I was just as likely to find my picture in
Barron’s
or
Fortune
as I was to see it in
Variety
or
The Hollywood Reporter
.

That was only one of the considerations in my decision to end
The Merv Griffin Show
. Truthfully, I had become tired of the daily grind. Having to tape five shows per week, forty-five weeks out of the year, is a highly restrictive routine, even if you enjoy what you’re doing—and I always had. For a guy who thrives on change, it was difficult for me to even comprehend the fact that I’d now been doing the same job for almost a quarter of a century. (It was especially hard to believe, since, like Jack Benny, I was only thirty-nine years old…)

With all of that, I might still have continued to do my show were it not for one crucial factor that tipped the scales. As Jack Paar memorably observed when he quit
The Tonight Show
, “There’s nobody left to talk to.”

I was finally bored with asking soap opera stars questions, when I really didn’t care about their answers. They’d offer their heartfelt opinion on foreign policy and I’d be thinking, Oh,
please
. You’re on
Days of Our Lives
.

Even though I was often going through the motions, I remained polite; it was the way I was raised. I still said, “Ahhhh,” to my guests. (For the record, it was
never
“Ooooh.” I know this revelation will upset some people, but the truth had to come out eventually. I feel better already.)

By September 5, 1986, when
The Merv Griffin Show
left the air, I’d done over fifty-five hundred shows and interviewed more than twenty-five
thousand
guests. Over twenty-three years, our show was in the thick of cultural and political change in America. Through several vastly different eras, we always tried to reflect that change honestly. Making news was never the idea, although we frequently did. My satisfaction came from conversing with intelligent people who had something important to say.

Peter Ustinov once paid me the ultimate compliment. He said, “Merv, doing your show is how I find out what I think about things.”

Our show evolved right in front of the public. When I started out, the standard talk show rule was to put serious guests—authors, playwrights, political figures—in the last eight-minute segment. The networks referred to them disparagingly as “heavy furniture.” If you wanted higher ratings, you were encouraged to keep those bookings to a minimum.

After only a short time on the air, I came to realize that the networks were wrong (I was shocked,
shocked
). The audience was far more interested in those guests than they were thought to be. If nothing else, I knew this by the sheer volume of mail that we received after a Gore Vidal or James Michener had appeared with me.

I began to move the “furniture” around based on what
I
thought worked, as opposed to some focus group report. Not only would we sometimes open with a scholar or politician, I even built entire programs around them. One of the best shows I’ve ever done was all writers: Michener, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw.

I interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King when few news programs, let alone talk shows, would have him on. Lord Bertrand Russell, the brilliant Nobel laureate, gave me his scathing appraisal of U.S. policy in Vietnam in 1965. I was called a traitor for even putting him on the air. When I ran into John Lennon on the beach at Cannes, I persuaded him to sit with me for the only talk show interview he ever gave while still a Beatle. I spoke with four presidents—Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan—before, during, or after their tenure in the White House. It was almost five. In 1969, when I was still at Group W, I was told that former President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, were fans of my show. I flew to Pennsylvania and met with General Eisenhower, as he preferred to be addressed. I asked him if I could bring a camera crew to their Gettysburg farm and do an entire show with both of them.

He immediately agreed, then asked to discuss money. He wanted his payment to go to charity. We usually paid minimum scale to our guests (a few hundred dollars), but this was hardly the usual situation. I asked him what kind of figure he had in mind. When he said, “I was thinking in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars,” I swallowed hard but tried not to show my shock. I knew that that was a lot more toasters than Westinghouse would ever pay. I shook hands with the general and left his office, wondering where I was going to find the money to pay him. Sadly, I never had the chance. He suffered a fatal heart attack shortly afterward.