Merv (10 page)

My beloved Tallulah died December 12, 1968. In character to the last, her final words were reported to be “codeine” and “bourbon.”

The only appropriate way to honor the memory of Tallulah Bankhead is with laughter. Let me share with you my favorite Tallulah story, in loving remembrance of my wonderful friend.

It happened over Christmas one year, outside Bloomingdale’s in New York City. Tallulah was walking past the store and one of the seasonal Salvation Army workers, a young girl, was shaking a tambourine to get people’s attention for a donation. Tallulah stopped, studied the girl for a moment, then reached into her purse and gave her a hundred dollar bill. Recognizing her, the stunned girl could only say, “Oh Miss Bankhead, thank you
so
much!”

“That’s all right,
dahling
,” said Tallulah, gravely. “I know it’s been a
terrible
year for you Spanish dancers.”

She was one of a kind.

(Courtesy of Fred Wostbrock)

L
egend has it that the word “quiz” was invented in a bar in Dublin, Ireland, in 1791. Maybe it’s pure blarney, but it’s a great story. It goes like this: A man named James Daly, who was the manager of the Dublin Theatre, was out drinking with his lads. Daly, full of ale and himself, boasted that he could invent a meaningless word that would become a permanent part of the English language within twenty-four hours.

The next day the letters “Q-U-I-Z” were scrawled on walls and buildings all around Dublin. Daly had hired a gang of street urchins, given them chalk, and set them loose on the unsuspecting city. That night, everyone in the bar was buzzing about this mysterious word, “quiz.” What did it really mean? Nobody knew.

Over in the corner, Daly quietly collected his winnings and listened with amusement as everybody who wasn’t in on the bet failed to guess the truth—that “quiz” was a nonsense word with no significance whatsoever. What Daly never anticipated was that in short order, the very act of trying to decipher the word’s meaning would itself
become
the meaning. “Quiz” became synonymous with “puzzle” or “test.”

As I’ve said, I’ve always loved puzzles and quizzes. One of my favorite radio shows growing up in San Mateo was an extremely popular program called
Doctor I.Q.
, where they went out into the audience and found people to answer the questions posed by a “mental doctor,” who was also the show’s host, James McClain. The show’s signature line was, “I’ve got a lady in the balcony, doctor!” If someone got the right answer, Doctor I.Q. would shout out, “Give her ten silver dollars and a box of Mars Bars!”

Doctor I.Q
. moved to television in 1953 with less success (although one of the doctor’s assistants was a young navy veteran named Art Fleming), but it was part of the first wave of quiz and game shows that swept across America in the fifties.

Before we go any further, I think it’s important to make the distinction between a “quiz show” and a “game show,” since the two are often mistakenly believed to be the same thing. A quiz show tests the knowledge of a contestant for money; a game show (like
Play Your Hunch
) generally involves some kind of activity that results in a prize being awarded for the successful completion of a task. Panel shows like
What’s My Line
or
To Tell the Truth
were yet a different animal. The celebrity panelists on these shows attempted to guess the identity or profession of the contestants. The only way the contestants could win any money was if the panelists guessed
incorrectly
and were therefore “stumped.”

Confused? So were a lot of television viewers in the fifties, who saw average people like themselves winning ever-increasing sums of money and bigger and bigger prizes right there in their own living rooms.

By the mid-fifties, quiz shows had become a national obsession led by shows such as
The $64,000 Question, Twenty-One
, and
Dotto
. (For those of you too young to remember any of this, just think back to when
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
was on ABC four nights a week and you’ll get the idea.)

A man named Herbert Stempel brought the whole quiz show phenomenon crashing down. Stempel was a graduate student at the City College of New York and, in 1956, he’d lost out to Charles Van Doren, a handsome Columbia University professor, on
Twenty-One
. The disgruntled Stempel revealed that Van Doren (whose matinee-idol looks were garnering big ratings) had actually been
given
the correct answers by the show’s producers, in order to guarantee that he would return the following week.

Before Stempel blew the whistle, Van Doren had become so popular (he’d won $129,000—the equivalent of well over a million dollars today) that he was receiving hundreds of letters a week, including quite a few marriage proposals. NBC even gave him a contract to appear regularly on the
Today
show.

Desperate to save their shows and themselves, the producers tried to justify their deception with the sort of spin that would have been worthy of Richard Nixon. They argued that
everybody knew
(wink, wink) that these shows were “scripted,” just like the great TV dramas found on
Studio One
or
Playhouse 90
. Providing answers to quiz show contestants was the same as giving a script to the actors before the show. Sure it was.

Needless to say, the public wasn’t buying any of it. To sponsors whose livelihood depended on trusting viewers buying their products, this was a disaster. What if people began to doubt
them
too?

In a panic, the networks canceled every single one of their quiz shows, whether they were fixed or not. Most game shows survived, including
Play Your Hunch
(whew) and Johnny Carson’s
Who Do You Trust?
Even so, we still got hundreds of letters from hypervigilant viewers who reported seeing strange “shadows” moving around in the background of our set. (
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
)

The following year, Congress conducted hearings into the whole mess and Charles Van Doren was the star witness. Under oath he admitted that not only had he been given the right answers, the producers had even coached him as to what
facial expressions
would make him seem more believable while he was “struggling” with a difficult question.

The public was as fascinated with each new revelation as it had been with the quiz shows themselves. (I’ve always believed that “Hell hath no fury like an audience wronged.”) Even thirteen-year-old Patty Duke, then starring on Broadway in
The Miracle Worker
, testified that her appearance on
The $64,000 Challenge
had been rigged as well. One of the New York tabloids trumpeted her confession with the headline,
THEY EVEN FIXED THE KID!

President Eisenhower weighed in, calling the deception “a terrible thing to do to the American public.” Finally, a law was passed in 1960 that made it “unlawful for any person, with intent to deceive the listening or viewing public…to supply to any contestant in a purportedly bona fide contest of intellectual knowledge or intellectual skill any special and secret assistance whereby the outcome of such contest will be in whole or in part prearranged or predetermined.”

Of course, I watched all this play out with a great deal of interest, not to mention considerable relief that
Play Your Hunch
was a game show, not a quiz show. (I told you it was an important distinction.)

The only change that we were required to make was the addition of monitors whose job was to guarantee security. I was never quite sure what they actually
did
, since there were no real secrets to secure on our show. I used to tease them by saying that I wasn’t really Merv Griffin, but an impostor who, in reality, could neither sing nor dance. They didn’t think that was very funny.

Before I move on, I’ve got to tell you a story that connects
Play Your Hunch
to the quiz show scandals, in a very roundabout way. Do you remember the movie
Quiz Show
that was directed by Robert Redford? Great film, wonderful performance by Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren. Well, when the film was released, Redford naturally did a lot of promotion for it. During one of these interviews, he recalled having appeared on
Play Your Hunch
, not as a contestant, but as an actor who was pretending to be someone’s twin brother. The players tried to guess if he or another actor was the real twin brother. He told the reporter that when he walked out, the audience booed him because he didn’t really look like the guy’s twin. (Probably the only time in his life that Robert Redford has ever been booed for his looks.)

Anyway, when the show was over, Redford contended that he went to collect the $75 that he’d been promised for his appearance (“My first payment in show biz,” he explained to the reporter) and, instead of money, he was given a fishing rod from Abercrombie & Fitch that was valued at $75. Somehow, Redford tried to make a tenuous connection between what he considered to be his shabby treatment at the hands of
Play Your Hunch
and the whole quiz show scandal. He even went so far as to say that he called me personally to help him rectify this terrible injustice and that I turned him down.

It’s a good anecdote, and since I enjoyed
Quiz Show
, I hope that it helped Redford sell some tickets to his movie. But, you’ve heard of “fish stories”? This is a fishing
rod
story.

Bob, if you’re reading this, I can’t dispute the fact that you may have gotten the shaft (so to speak), although truthfully I don’t remember. What I’m certain of, however, is that I didn’t refuse to help you. I
couldn’t
have, since I had nothing to do with either prizes for the contestants or payments to the actors.
Play Your Hunch
was a Goodson-Todman production. I was merely the MC. Anyway, even if it
was
true, that hardly meant that our show was rigged.

So Bob, just to show you that there are no hard feelings, I’m sending you a check for $75. The next time you go fishing, maybe you can use it to buy bait. And, hey, I loved
A River Runs Through It
…

Many years later, sometime in the eighties, I was a guest on
Night-line
with Ted Koppel and the subject was game shows. As you may have noticed by now, I have trouble staying really serious for very long. It’s just not me. Well, I must have gotten a little too silly for Ted, because he suddenly said to me, “You know, Merv, this is
not
a game show or your talk show. These are serious questions I’m asking you.”

Looking straight into the camera (I was in a remote studio), I said, “I guess you’ve forgotten, Ted, that
you
started on my game show
Play Your Hunch
. You were part of one of the problems the players had to solve.”

Glancing at the monitor, I saw Ted back in Washington, D.C., looking very embarrassed. In my ear, I heard him sputter, “Can we get on with this? Can we just get on with this, please?”

I thought to myself, Oh God, I’ve really done it now. I’ve ticked off Ted Koppel.

Aside from launching the careers of Robert Redford and Ted Koppel,
Play Your Hunch
also had the distinction of being the only program in game show history to run on all three networks. We started on CBS in 1958, and then moved to ABC the following year. After a hiatus of several months, we were picked up by NBC. The show ran there in daytime for another three years; I even hosted two prime-time versions in 1960 and 1962.

Now, as I said in the previous chapter, I’d grown increasingly bored with simply being an MC, although working with Mark Goodson gave me an invaluable education in how to develop and produce game shows. Trying to keep my enthusiasm up, he often used me as a substitute host on his other shows like
The Price Is Right
and
Beat the Clock
.

I often filled in for Bud Collyer on
To Tell the Truth
. I remember one show in particular, when my panel consisted of Tom Poston, Dina Merrill, Peggy Cass, and Johnny Carson. The guests were a Secret Service agent, a woman who was a mess boy on a Norwegian freighter, and an expert on the whooping crane. Honest.

After we moved to NBC, I finally got to provide my own input into the format of
Play Your Hunch
. Mark Goodson called me into his office and said, “Merv, you know all those ideas that you’ve had for years about how to loosen up the show—the ones that I’ve always told you that we couldn’t do? Well, let’s do ’em.”

I learned several important lessons at the knee of Mark Goodson. One was that in order for a game or quiz show to succeed it has to be based on an interesting and easily understandable premise. Ideally, the person sitting at home will do better than the contestants. There’s nothing more satisfying to a viewer (and more likely to keep him tuning in) than to feel smarter than those “geniuses” who can’t solve an obvious puzzle or answer even the simplest question.

Mark Goodson also taught me the importance of using precise verbiage in the structure of a show. By verbiage, he meant recurring phrases like “Will the real John Smith please stand up?” or “Enter and sign in, please.” Goodson intuitively understood that viewers came to wait for these lines and that they provided a sense of continuity and comfort to the audience.

When the time came for me to develop
Word for Word
, I was more than ready to put what I’d learned into my own production. As I’ve told you, NBC was willing to put
Word for Word
on the air solely to keep me in the fold. It was a Faustian bargain, because they insisted that I host the show as well, not just produce it. Still, it gave me a chance to build up my company, so I saw it as a fair trade-off.

Word for Word
was on the air for a year. It was canceled because it sank to a 36 share and NBC was horrified when it dropped that low. They told me that it was dragging down their whole lineup. To give you some idea of how drastically times have changed, today a 36 share (a “share” represents the percentage of all people watching television who are tuned in to a given program) would be more than
twice
the size of the audience for a top-rated program on any network.