Merv (2 page)

It was almost beyond comprehension to me that my own uncle knew movie stars like Errol Flynn
personally!
Flynn was my favorite screen hero, leaping from ship to ship, brandishing his sword gallantly in the cause of justice. Invariably in the last reel he would vanquish the villain, then sweep the leading lady up in his arms and kiss her passionately. Fade to black.

When I was sixteen years old, I made my first solo trip to visit Uncle Elmer in Los Angeles. It happened that Errol Flynn was actually staying with him, as he often did between wives and girlfriends. I was literally trembling with excitement when I walked into my uncle’s house. What I didn’t expect was that my film idol, fresh from the shower, would be sitting
starkers
in Elmer’s living room. Now, how shall I put this? I think it’s fair to say that Errol Flynn brandished a sword both on and
off
the screen.

At thirty-two, Flynn was twice my age chronologically, but a thousand years older than I was in terms of life experience (his scandalous trial on statutory rape charges wouldn’t take place until the following year). Like a sponge with ears, I absorbed everything that I heard during my brief stay. I particularly remember Flynn talking scathingly about his then boss, the powerful (and often punitive) studio chief, Jack Warner. Although Flynn always credited Warner with having the vision to cast him in his first starring role as the swashbuckling hero of
Captain Blood
, it was no secret that the two men had a tumultuous relationship, due primarily to Flynn’s alcohol-fueled escapades off the screen. Flynn’s absolute fearlessness in dealing with Warner was fascinating to me. I couldn’t possibly imagine that in little more than ten years I would also be under contract to Warner Brothers, and that what I’d learned from Flynn would one day prove quite useful in my own dealings with the tyrannical “J.L.”

Since early childhood my fantasy had been to do what Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland did in the movies, which was to clear out a barn and have it became the stage set of a Broadway musical. I never could figure out how they did it; they would get this old barn, and then out would come this million-dollar set. Happened every time. But my secret dream was really to play opposite Judy. In the darkened theater, while she was singing “Dear Mr. Gable” up on the screen, I always imagined that the face in the picture frame was mine, not Clark’s.

In truth, I didn’t yet have any ambition to be on center stage myself. I just wanted to make things happen. You have to remember that at the time I didn’t think of myself as a singer at all. I knew that I had a talent for playing piano, but in the beginning that was as far as it went.

At this point in my life, having only studied classical music, I admit that I was something of a musical snob. I had little awareness of pop music until I was twelve and my family went to visit my sister, who was spending part of the summer at Camp Imelda up on the Russian River, north of San Francisco. They had a camp show every night where the campers sang or put on skits. One of the kids sang a brand-new Rodgers and Hart song called “Where or When.” We didn’t use the phrase back then, but I was blown away. I’d never heard a song that sounded so beautiful to me. As soon as we got home I taught myself to play it.

Shortly after that I had my first—and ill-fated—singing experience with the choir at St. Matthew’s Church, which I attended every Sunday with my mother, Aunt Claudia, and Aunt Helen. When I first joined the choir, I was often asked to do the solos, because I had a high soprano voice. One day, without warning (and in front of the entire congregation), puberty struck. I was a soprano no more. Instead I was stunned to hear a croaking sound coming from my throat that sounded like someone was strangling that frog-voiced kid from the Little Rascals. From then on I was only a piano player. I certainly never planned on singing in public again.

In the summer of ’42 (wasn’t that a movie?), I graduated from San Mateo High School. I was seventeen. At 5'9" and 240 pounds, I would fail ten consecutive physical examinations before the military finally decided to give up on me. During the last physical they even detected a slight heart murmur for which I had to be hospitalized. When they released me, the induction officer (whose name, fittingly, was Grimm) said, “That’s it, son. You’re done. We ain’t gonna pay you no veteran’s benefits for some heart condition. You ain’t goin’.”

I may have been 4F, but I was determined to make some kind of contribution to the war effort. So I took a job at the big naval shipyard out on Hunters Point in San Francisco. They put me to work in the supply depot, helping to organize provisions that were being loaded on giant transport ships bound for the Pacific Theater. At the same time (and only to please my parents) I took a few classes at San Mateo Junior College.

Although I was still very confused about my future, I did know one thing for certain—I was not cut out for academic life. After twelve years of school, that may have been the only lesson that I’d learned well enough to merit an A+. Unfortunately for me, they didn’t give out grades for a lack of interest in school. Don’t get the wrong idea. I love to read and I’m willing to match the depth and breadth of my knowledge against anyone with a college degree. Heck, I invented that game—it’s called
Jeopardy!
But I’m also someone who’s always resented being told what to do, particularly when someone says “it’s for your own good.”

I honestly believe that’s one of my greatest strengths. Making my own choices has allowed me to be more creative than I ever could have been if I was simply following someone else’s lesson plan or job description. More than that, it’s meant that I’ve always had to take responsibility for my own decisions. If it works, I can take pride in knowing that the achievement is truly my own. Should I fail—and believe me I have—then I certainly can’t blame anyone else for it. Creativity and responsibility. Shouldn’t we be encouraging those things in school? Okay, I’ll get off of my soapbox.

July 6, 1943. My eighteenth birthday. It was a Tuesday afternoon and I’d just taken the commuter train home from my new position in the checking department at the Crocker Bank in San Francisco. Just in case you’re wondering about my credentials for the job, let me clear that up for you: my father taught tennis to the Crocker family.

Instead of going directly home from the station, for some reason I decided to take a long walk along the railroad tracks. Loosening my tie, I draped my jacket over my arm and headed south toward—where
was
I going? Boy, was that ever the $64 question. (Believe it or not, that was still the top prize on one of the most popular radio quiz shows of the forties,
Take It or Leave It
. Ten years later it moved to television. The show’s producer added three zeroes to that figure and
The $64,000 Question
was born.)

My thoughts were jumbled that day, but running through my head—almost like the soundtrack of a movie—were the words to “Where or When,” the Rodgers and Hart tune that was the first pop song I’d ever learned to play. The lyrics seemed to carry a special significance that day:

Perhaps my mind
was
playing tricks on me that afternoon, because I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sensation unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my entire life—before or since. With a clarity and power that caused me to stop right there on the tracks, a thought—actually it was more of an awareness—came into my head: “You will never again be a private person.”

I began to cry. The pent-up emotions of eighteen years were released in that single transformative moment.
When you’re awake, the things you think, Come from the dream you dream…

All my life I’ve been a dreamer. But from then on I knew that my dreams weren’t just childish fantasies. Something clicked inside me that day. My dreams—both waking and sleeping—were no longer mere abstractions; I now understood that I had to act on them. Sometimes that’s meant trusting my hunches and taking large risks, despite the odds. Other times I’ve literally followed the dream itself. And I’m not talking here about grandiose dreams like “someday I’m going to buy the Grand Canyon” (or, as Donald might call it, “Trump Canyon”), but actual precognitive dreams. Dreams that cause me to wake up in the middle of the night and write down every detail I can remember.

Even today, when I’m on the phone and doodling abstractedly, I find myself writing down the words, “Where or When.” But I do it in a very odd way. All the letters are connected like this: WHEREORWHEN. I have no idea what that means, but it gets weirder. A year after my epiphany on the railroad tracks, I was given a chance to sing on a nationally syndicated radio program called
San Francisco Sketchbook
that was broadcast from our local station, KFRC. The very first question that Lyle Bardo, the orchestra leader, asked me was, “Do you know ‘Where or When’?”

That was on a Friday. On Monday, the name of the program was
The Merv Griffin Show
. I was exactly twenty years old.

While I was at KFRC I made it into the record books in a rather interesting way. With my friend Janet Folsom, I formed my own little record label, Panda Records. We chose four songs and I recorded them at a studio in San Francisco. It just so happened that the recording engineer there had recently returned from the war in Europe, where he had been doing experimental recording with something called magnetic tape. In 1946,
Songs by Merv Griffin
became the first American album ever to be recorded on tape. (If you’re looking for a copy, you can find it in the Ampex Museum.)

After three years on the air, the first
Merv Griffin Show
developed something of a following. I had no way of knowing that one of my regular listeners also happened to be one of the most popular orchestra leaders in the country, Freddy Martin. That all changed one morning in 1948 when a young woman (she couldn’t have been any older than I was) named Jean Barry called the station and asked to meet me for lunch. She identified herself as Freddy Martin’s secretary.

Over lunch she told me that Freddy’s singer, Stuart Wade, was leaving the band after its current stand at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Then she dropped her bombshell: “Freddy wants you for the job, Merv.”

At first I didn’t believe her. I realized that she was serious only when she invited me to come see the band’s show at the St. Francis and meet Freddy in person.

Even before I walked into the elegant Mural Room of the St. Francis Hotel, I had pretty much made up my mind to say yes. At twenty-three, I was eager to expand my horizons beyond San Francisco—and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do exactly that.

If I had any doubts about whether I was making the right choice, they were forever dispelled that night. Before I even told him that I had decided to accept his offer, Freddy asked me to come up to the microphone and do a guest song. I went up on stage and, whispering in my ear, he asked me if I could sing—you guessed it—“Where or When.” You
betcha
, Mr. Martin.

The next day I walked into the KFRC manager’s office and said, “Sir, we don’t have a contract and I’ve been here three years. I think that I’ve done my job well, and you’ve been very generous, but I quit.”

The manager, whose name was Bill Pabst (no relation to the Blue Ribbon), was amazed. He said, “You quit?”

“Yes, sir. I have an offer to go with the Freddy Martin band as their singer for a hundred fifty dollars a week.”

Despite the realization that he was about to lose his star, Pabst couldn’t help but be amused. “Let me see if I understand this, Merv. You make a hundred dollars per show here and you do eleven shows a week. So you’re talking about a weekly salary cut of almost a
thousand dollars
. You don’t understand very much about economics, do you, son?”

What he didn’t understand was that money by itself was never that important to me. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to have it. But I never dreamt about it. I still don’t.

What I
did
dream about was being able to perform on the glamorous stages all across America that I’d only read about or seen in the Movietone newsreels. The Starlight Roof in New York. The Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. Even the Mural Room in the St. Francis seemed like a distant and exotic world to me.

My parents were very proud of me. Still, I don’t think they believed it all right away; it took a while for my success to sink in. First they had to cope with the fact that I had become a local celebrity who was now making more money in a week than my father made in a month. And they had to accept that their youngest child would be leaving home to travel all over the country as the featured singer of a famous orchestra.

To their credit (and my great fortune) none of that ever changed how they treated me. To them, I was just Buddy.

I took my mother to opening night with Freddy Martin at Ciro’s nightclub in Los Angeles. I was terrified. The shaking of my legs was clearly visible through my pants. The celebrity audience thought this was hysterical because while I was singing these romantic ballads, my legs were keeping their own separate beat. Of course, whenever people know you’re a newcomer, they’re extremely forgiving and very generous with their applause. Afterward, all my mother could say was, “They really
like
you, don’t they?”