The onetime big-band singer who leveraged his career as a popular TV talk-show host into a business empire that included the creation of the wildly successful syndicated game shows "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!," was 82.
By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
9:43 AM PDT, August 12, 2007
Merv Griffin, the onetime big-band singer who leveraged his career as a popular TV talk-show host into a business empire whose foundations included the creation of the wildly successful syndicated game shows "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!," died today. He was 82.
Griffin died of prostate cancer, according to a statement from his family released by Marcia Newberger, spokeswoman for the Griffin Group/Merv Griffin Entertainment. On July 19, his company said Griffin was being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for a recurrence of prostate cancer discovered during a routine examination a few weeks earlier.
An entertainer-turned-entrepreneur, who sold Merv Griffin Enterprises to Coca-Cola Co. for $250 million in 1986 and recently was reported to have a net worth of $1.6 billion, Griffin presided over an array of business endeavors.
His Beverly Hills-based Griffin Group includes film and television production; a luxury home development in La Quinta; closed-circuit coverage of horse racing around the country; a real estate brokerage specializing in high-end residential properties; and a stable of thoroughbreds that includes Stevie Wonderboy, the 2005 Breeders' Cup Juvenile winner at Belmont Park.
Since buying the Beverly Hilton in 1987 -- he spent millions renovating the hotel, which he sold in 2003 -- Griffin has bought and sold more than 20 hotels, gaming resorts and riverboats, including Resorts International in Atlantic City, N.J., and the Bahamas.
Nancy Reagan, a friend of Griffin's, appears on his show in 1971. Griffin would later be a pallbearer at the funeral of her husband, former President Ronald Reagan.
Although he was a TV talk-show host for more than two decades, Griffin's most enduring show business claim to fame is creating and producing "Jeopardy!" (launched in 1964) and "Wheel of Fortune" (launched in 1975). Both shows originally aired on NBC and, beginning in the 1980s, became the two most popular syndicated game shows in television history.
Both programs were included in the 1986 sale of Merv Griffin Enterprises. But Griffin wrote the theme music for "Wheel of Fortune" and the famous "thinking music" played in the final round of "Jeopardy," which continued to provide him with millions of dollars in royalties.
"I have to say that the ongoing success of 'Jeopardy!' and 'Wheel' is my biggest thrill," Griffin, a self-described "word and puzzle freak," told the Hollywood Reporter in 2005. "I mean, they're still right there at the top of the ratings -- they've never slipped. They're timeless and ageless, and in the history of TV there has never been anything like them."
In 2005, Griffin received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and a similar award from the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, which is now called the Paley Center for Media.
"There really has been no one who has managed to have his type of success in front of and behind the camera," Stuart N. Brotman, then-president of the Museum of Television and Radio, told the New York Times at the time. "He is a one-man conglomerate, and I can't think of anyone else who has had that reach."
Critic and show business historian Leonard Maltin agreed.
"Other show business figures have gotten wealthy from good investments, but I can't think of anyone who's become a one-man conglomerate quite like Merv Griffin," Maltin told the Los Angeles Times via e-mail. "The closest comparison I could make would be Gene Autry."
For older Americans, Griffin is best remembered as the genial host of "The Merv Griffin Show."
For two decades -- the Emmy Award-winning show aired variously on NBC, CBS and, for most of its 1960s-to-1980s run, in syndication -- Griffin presided over a wide-ranging gab fest.
Guests as varied as artists Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, writers Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, comedians Richard Pryor and Woody Allen and film legends Bette Davis and Orson Welles dropped by to chat.
Also thrown into the mix were guests such as burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, transsexual Christine Jorgensen and visionary architect Buckminster Fuller -- as well as a string of politicians and newsmakers that included Richard Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman.
Griffin also traveled to do filmed interviews with such notables as philosopher Bertrand Russell in London, actor Sean Connery in Cannes, and French sex symbol Brigitte Bardot in Paris.
Griffin with characters from the "Peanuts" comic strip. After moving his show to late night in 1969, he altered the traditional format by introducing “theme” shows in which he devoted entire programs to a single topic or person. The first was a 90-minute salute to “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz.
After moving his show to late night on CBS in 1969, Griffin altered the traditional talk-show format by introducing "theme" shows in which he devoted entire programs to a single topic or person. The first was a 90-minute salute to "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schulz.
Griffin also devoted theme shows to highly controversial subjects such as incest and pedophilia, which prompted good-natured jabs from late-night king Johnny Carson on rival NBC's "The Tonight Show."
As Griffin amusingly said of Carson in "Merv: Making the Good Life Last," a 2003 book, "In his monologue, he'd often say something like: 'Make sure you watch Merv tonight. He's got one of his provocative themes. Six Lithuanian proctologists who want to be nuns.' "
Carson's audience roared with laughter at such comments, Griffin wrote, but "it was always great publicity for us."
From the beginning of "The Merv Griffin Show" in daytime on NBC in 1962 to its end in syndication in 1986, Griffin hosted more than 5,500 shows and interviewed more than 25,000 guests.
But the heart of the show was the boyish and gregarious former "boy singer" for the Freddy Martin Orchestra, who scored an unlikely No. 1 hit in 1950 with his Cockney-accented rendition of "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts."
As Arthur Treacher, the dry-witted veteran British character actor who served as Griffin's longtime announcer and sidekick, would intone at the start of each show:
"Look sharp! Here's the dear boy himself, Merrrvyn!"
Born on July 6, 1925, in San Mateo, Griffin began learning to play the piano at age 4 and later took lessons at a music conservatory in nearby San Francisco.
At 14, he was placed in charge of his church choir, for which he'd play the organ and often score an entire Mass himself. He also earned money playing the organ for weddings and funerals.
At San Mateo High School during the early years of World War II, Griffin assembled a small musical revue with three high school girl singers and performed at local USO shows.
The overweight Griffin was declared 4F after failing several military physical exams during which a slight heart murmur was detected. To contribute to the war effort, he took a job in the supply depot of a San Francisco shipyard for a time while also attending classes at San Mateo Junior College. Nights, he wrote songs and entered talent contests.
In 1945, he heard about an audition for a piano player at radio station KFRC in San Francisco. When it turned out the station needed a singer rather than a piano player, he auditioned for that instead.
His voice impressed station officials so much that they put him on as a guest singer on KFRC's nationally syndicated "San Francisco Sketchbook" show the next night.
Two days later, the show changed its name to "The Merv Griffin Show," and young Merv was hosting his own 15-minute radio show five days a week.
KFRC billed him as "America's New Romantic Singing Star." But at 5 feet 9 and 240 pounds, Griffin didn't fit the image his radio listeners had of him. After a female fan from Fresno dropped by the station to meet him -- and burst out laughing upon seeing her radio idol in the flesh -- Griffin when on a crash diet and dropped down to 160 pounds.
Pat Sajak, Susan Stafford and Merv Griffin.
One of his admirers was bandleader Freddy Martin, who heard Griffin's show over KHJ in Los Angeles and invited him to join his band in 1948.
The job paid $150 a week -- a far cry from the $1,100 a week Griffin was earning for his radio show -- and entailed traveling in a bus doing one-nighters. But the allure of singing at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles and the Strand Theater on Broadway -- as well as recording with the band on RCA Victor -- easily won out.
As a singer with the Freddy Martin Orchestra from 1948 to 1952, Griffin recorded numerous songs, including "Wilhelmina," "Never Been Kissed" and "Am I in Love." His hit "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts," for which he was paid only $50 to record, sold 3 million copies.
In 1952, Warner Bros. star Doris Day saw Griffin singing in a Las Vegas hotel and a screen test was arranged for him at the studio, which signed him to a long-term contract.
In addition to uncredited bit parts in several films, Griffin had small parts in "Cattle Town," "Phantom of the Rue Morgue" and "The Boy From Oklahoma" and appeared opposite Kathryn Grayson in "So This Is Love," which earned him a footnote in movie history: It was, he said in his book, "the first time an open-mouthed kiss had ever been shown in theaters."
But after two lackluster years as a Warners contract player, Griffin bought out the remainder of his contract, moved to New York, where he appeared in a short-lived, 1955 Broadway revival of the musical-comedy "Finian's Rainbow" and focused his professional attention on television.
He was hosting "Play Your Hunch" when he began substitute-hosting for Jack Paar once a week on "The Tonight Show" in early 1962.
Griffin proved to be a natural in the host's chair and went on to guest-host "The Tonight Show" for a number of weeks that summer, after Paar quit the show and before Carson took over in the fall.
Having generated such big ratings that summer, Griffin was offered an hourlong daytime talk show by NBC. "The Merv Griffin Show" debuted in October 1962, the same day Carson began hosting "The Tonight Show."
Despite having stars such as Joan Crawford and Woody Allen as guests, "The Merv Griffin Show" was beaten in the ratings by the quiz show "Password," and NBC canceled Griffin's show in April 1963.
In two weeks, Griffin wrote in his book, NBC received 160,000 letters of protest --"the largest amount of mail ever received in support of a canceled show" at that time, he said.
Griffin returned to NBC in the fall of 1963 as host of a new game show, "Word for Word," that he developed and which his newly created company had produced.
But in the spring of 1965, "The Merv Griffin Show" was back, this time as a 90-minute program syndicated by Group W, the broadcasting division of Westinghouse Corp.
After 2 1/2 years as CBS' late-night talk-show offering -- from 1969 to 1971 -- "The Merv Griffin Show" moved back into syndication, this time with Metromedia Broadcasting, and ran from 1972 to 1986.
Griffin is flanked by son Tony, left, and actor Clint Eastwood at the Publicists Guild of America awards luncheon in 1998 in Beverly Hills. Griffin received the guild's Award of Merit.
Griffin's 1958 marriage to Julann Wright, whom he met when she was TV personality Robert Q. Lewis' secretary-assistant, produced a son, Tony, and ended in divorce in 1976. Griffin later had a close relationship with actress Eva Gabor, who died in 1995. He was also good friends with former First Lady Nancy Reagan.
In 1991, Griffin, then 65, was facing a multimillion-dollar palimony suit from Brent Plott, a 37-year-old former employee who claimed that for years he had been Griffin's business consultant and lover and was entitled to a large share of his fortune.
"We lived together, shared the same bed, same house," Plott told NBC News. "He told me he loved me."
In a statement issued by his attorney, Griffin denied Plott's claims.
"This is a shameless attempt to extort money from me," he said. "This former bodyguard and horse trainer was paid $250 a week, lived in one of two apartments underneath my former house as part of his security function, and left my payroll six or seven years ago. His charges are ridiculous and untrue."
The same year, Deney Terrio, the host of "Dance Fever," the disco show executive-produced by Griffin in the late 1970s and '80s, filed an $11.3-million sexual harassment suit against him.
Both cases reportedly were eventually dismissed, but questions about Griffin's sexuality lingered.
For his part, Griffin dismissed the issue with characteristic good humor, telling the New York Times in 2005 with a sly grin: "I tell everybody that I'm a quatre-sexual: I will do anything with anybody for a quarter."
Throughout his life, Griffin managed to remain upbeat.
"You know, I really never get down," he said in a 2005 interview with the Hollywood Reporter. "My philosophy is that you have to constantly be turning the page, which prevents me from getting caught up in any negativity. It's all about change for me: I just keeping moving and enjoy the ride."
Griffin is survived by his son Tony and grandchildren Farah and Donovan.
dennis.mclellan@latimes.com
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