Merv (6 page)

At that moment the secretary reappeared and said, “They’re ready for you now.”

I looked at Marty. “Just read the cards, Merv. You’ll be great.”

Well, I
was
already there. I might as well see it through. It would probably be good for a laugh. And in those days, I needed all the laughs I could get.

As I walked through the door, somebody said, “Now, here’s the star of our show…Merv Griffin!” I found myself standing in a conference room full of Goodson-Todman employees, posing as a studio audience. All of them were applauding as I entered the room.

I turned to Marty, who was right behind me. “I guess we’re playing for keeps, huh?” Which was fine by me. Adrenaline pumping, I stepped right up to the podium and began interviewing the faux contestants. I read the cue cards and discovered that the show was called
Play Your Hunch
. For the next thirty minutes we played the game, which involved a series of stunts that tested the abilities of the players. The host needed to sing, dance, lead an orchestra, perform in skits—and be funny the whole time. By the time I was through, the applause was clearly genuine.

Then the diminutive producer, Mark Goodson (who I later learned was a fellow San Franciscan), said, “Merv, are you sure you’ve never done a game show before? You’re a natural!” Marty was smiling broadly, although he had the decency not to say “I told you so.”

I did the pilot for
Play Your Hunch
and, during the six months it took CBS to buy it, I returned to my grueling regimen of staying home and watching television. Occasionally, I even appeared on it. For those months I became the “go-to guy” when they needed a substitute or replacement host on some of the daytime shows. I replaced Carl Reiner as moderator of
Keep Talking
on ABC, and I was a frequent substitute for Bud Collyer on
To Tell the Truth
. (On one of those appearances, my panel included a young comedian who already had his own game show: the host of
Who Do You Trust?
—Johnny Carson.)

But even though I was now getting occasional jobs during the day, I was
always
home by 11:30
P.M.
to watch
The Tonight Show
. Almost from the moment Jack Paar made his debut as host on July 29, 1957, I was an unapologetic “Paar-tisan,” as his fans were quickly dubbed. With the distance of time, it’s hard to explain just how riveting he was or how obsessed with him America became, almost overnight. It was like watching a high-wire walker work without a net. Or, as one columnist put it, “would this be the night that Jack finally has a nervous breakdown on the air?”

Jack’s emotions were never far from the surface, every night. This made for compelling, if exhausting, television. His feuds were legendary. Powerful newspaper columnists like Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen were no match for the emerging power of television, and Jack knew it. Once, he literally threw Mickey Rooney off his set.

Yet for all his volatility, Jack was also an extremely bright and engaging interviewer. He was fascinated by the world and he shared that fascination with his viewers. When Castro came to power in Cuba, Jack went to Havana to interview him, for which he was roundly criticized in the press. He sought out Albert Schweitzer in Africa and then he took his show to Berlin, so we could watch that terrible Wall go up on live television.

Jack was at the height of his influence in 1960. His interviews with Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy were considered as pivotal to the outcome of that closely fought presidential election as Oprah’s chats with Bush and Gore would be forty years later. In fact, the president-elect’s father, old Joe Kennedy, sent Jack a note afterward that read: “If we had had five more Jack Paars in the United States…we wouldn’t have had to wait almost twenty-four hours before we knew we were elected.” (
“We?!”
)

That same year Jack’s emotions finally took him over the edge, and we went right along with him. It seemed innocent enough at first. In his opening monologue, Jack told a joke that included the phrase “water closet,” an innocuous nineteenth-century euphemism for toilet. What happened next would become headline news for the next month. The NBC censors decided that the term “water closet” was offensive to the American public and, since the show was done live on tape, they edited out the
entire
joke. In its place they inserted a three-minute news broadcast.

Jack was understandably livid, but with Paar that was only the beginning. NBC accused him of being “thin-skinned.” Jack shot back, “It’s
my
skin.”

Obviously enraged (and fighting back tears), Jack played his ace: “I am leaving
The Tonight Show
,” he told his stunned audience. “There must be a better way of making a living than this.”

NBC may have won the battle of the water closet, but it lost the war of public opinion. After weeks of public outcry, both the chairman and the president of the network issued abject apologies to their victorious star. His first words after returning to the air were vintage Paar: “As I was saying before I was interrupted…”

Being the host of
Play Your Hunch
every day was like doing improvisation in acting class. I got to ad-lib everything, which to me was the best job in the world.

We had lots of big-name stars on the show, including Bob Hope, Boris Karloff, Jonathan Winters, and the Three Stooges. In a lucky coincidence that I couldn’t appreciate at the time, one of those celebrity guests was a very tall, “veddy” British character actor named Arthur Treacher.

Harpo Marx was another one of the celebrities who came on
Play Your Hunch
. In 1961, I returned the favor by appearing with him on an NBC program called
The Wonderful World of Toys
. The premise of the show was that Harpo and Carol Burnett led a tour through Central Park and along the way discovered various interesting toys. Two things stand out in my memory of that experience. The first was standing in the middle of the park with the cameras rolling and, just as I was about to do my song, a pigeon crapped on my head. Harpo, who famously never spoke on camera, shouted “Wonderful! That’s good luck!” Unfortunately for Harpo fans (but luckily for my dignity), that footage never aired.

The other thing I remember about that Harpo special was that it was the first time I ever met a young Hungarian actress named Eva Gabor, who was also a guest on the show. We didn’t become friends then, but I remember thinking, “God, she’s
beautiful.”

Long before Woody Allen became an Academy Award–winning filmmaker, he was a television writer and stand-up comedian. In the fifties, along with Neil Simon and Carl Reiner, he was part of Sid Caesar’s comic brain trust on
Your Show of Shows
. By 1961 he had taken a tentative step toward a performing career of his own by developing a stand-up routine in some of the small clubs around Greenwich Village. Around this time I was on my sofa at home watching Jack introduce this “talented young writer” as his first guest.

Out walks this twenty-something kid with black-framed glasses, wearing a sport jacket and tie. If I’d seen him on the street, I would have given him my keys and told him to be careful parking the car.

Although his timing and delivery were superb, Woody seemed as if he’d been plugged into an electric socket and someone had flipped the switch. His hands never stopped moving, his head bobbed up and down, and his facial expressions ranged from nervous tic to epileptic seizure. But he was brilliant.

At home, I was having convulsions from laughing so hard. He said things you’d never heard before on television. Remember, we were barely out of the fifties, a decade where a husband and wife couldn’t be shown in bed together unless one of them kept a foot on the floor. (Which, of course, begs the question, where
did
Little Ricky come from?)

At the end of Woody’s routine, the camera cut back to Jack, who was plainly furious. He said, “Whoever booked that man and knew what he was going to say, I want to see in my office immediately following this show.”

It was a frozen moment. At home I thought, “Oh God, someone is going to get fired.”

Shortly after that I had my own run-in with Jack Paar—luckily with much better results.

I was doing my daily hosting duty on
Play Your Hunch
when, suddenly, there was a gasp from the studio audience, followed by tremendous applause. I turned around and standing behind me was Jack Paar, who had just come through the curtains.

I looked at him like Stanley must have looked at Livingstone. Instead of “Mr. Paar, I presume?” the best I could come up with was “What do you want?”

Jack replied, clearly confused, “What are
you
doing here?”

“Taping my show,
Play Your Hunch
.”

“Play your what?”

“Hunch. It’s a game show.”

By this time Jack had noticed the studio audience, which was eating this up.

“Oh. Okay, then. Sorry to have disturbed you, Merv.” With that, he waved to the crowd and disappeared back through the curtains.

“No problem. Drop in any time,” I said to Jack’s retreating back. The audience roared its approval.

It turned out that Jack always cut through that studio on the way to his office. On that particular day, he came to work much earlier than usual. Because he was such a creature of habit, nobody had ever thought to tell Jack that somebody else used
his
studio in the morning. So when he walked through those curtains, he had no idea that he’d be walking onto a live stage.

Marty Kummer had been pitching me for months as a possible fill-in for Paar on his regular Monday night off. Shortly after our close encounter, Marty ran into Jack at a restaurant.

“Hey Marty, don’t you represent that sharp kid on
Play Your
…whatever it’s called—that game show MC?”

“That’s Merv Griffin. He’s the same guy I’ve been telling your producer about.”

“Well, let’s give the kid a chance.”

Marty couldn’t wait to tell me. He called me from a pay phone in the restaurant with the big news.

When it was over, the night of Monday, January 29, 1962, felt like the longest
year
of my life. I made it through on sheer willpower and the generous support of a twenty-nine-year-old staffer named Bob Shanks. As low man on the
Tonight
totem pole, Shanks had been stuck with the thankless assignment of producing the Monday night shows in Jack’s absence.

I was so panicked that, during the first commercial break, I tried to leave the show before it was over.

“I can’t do this, Bob. Get somebody else.
You
go out there.”

To his great credit, the normally soft-spoken Shanks found his producer’s voice at just that moment.

“You
can
do it, Merv. And you will! Now get back out there!” With his hand in the small of my back, he pushed me back onstage. (Only much later, when I could laugh about the experience, did it occur to me that this was exactly how Mickey Rooney must have felt when Paar heaved him
off
stage.)

I learned three things that night. One was that Aretha Franklin (who had made her first talk show appearance that night and killed) was a phenomenal singer. The second was that Bob Shanks, although he’d never produced a television show before, was a natural at it. I promised him then and there that if I ever got my own show, he was going to be my producer.

The final lesson I took away from my first
Tonight Show
experience was how to deal with stage fright. Since I’d never had it before, it was something that I’d never considered until that moment.

I realized that you shouldn’t fight your fear; you could use the tension it causes around you to create a more exciting atmosphere. “Controlled chaos” was how Jack Paar would describe it to me later, as he was complimenting me on my performance. All of a sudden those countless nights where I’d watched Jack do his high-wire act came back to me.
That’s
why he worked without a net. If he wasn’t scared, we would have stopped watching.

I must have done all right because I was invited back the following Monday. I asked Bob if he could book that writer “Jack doesn’t like” as one of my guests.

“You mean Woody Allen?” asked Shanks. “I’d love to have him back. I was the one who originally found him down at the Bitter End. After that show Jack told me to stop going down to the Village to look for talent. It would be great to give him another chance.”

I told Bob to book him. Fortunately, Jack gave his guest hosts complete latitude to bring on whomever they wanted (probably under the theory that if they screwed up, he’d look even better on Tuesday).

As usual, Woody was a riot: