Merv (21 page)

I love it when a great plan works. Business boomed immediately. First, producer George Schlatter announced that he would use the room to tape several big television specials. Then the Hollywood Foreign Press Association renewed its contract to hold the Golden Globe Awards show in the International Ballroom. That’s when the improvements that we’d made to make the room more production-friendly really paid off. TBS (and later, NBC) signed a long-term agreement to televise the awards, which now run a strong second to the Oscars in popularity. The American Film Institute Life Achievement Awards made its own television deal, and I knew that we had built the perfect ballroom.

The Carousel Ball is a star-studded event organized by Barbara Davis and held every two years in the International Ballroom to raise money for the fight against juvenile diabetes. It was in a speech at the Carousel Ball that Sidney Poitier made the observation that “more money has been raised for charity in this ballroom than in any other in the world.”

An entertaining little sidelight to all the renovations was the rug.

In my youth, I’d spent a lot of time in the elegant Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. As we were redoing the International Ballroom, I remembered that the Fairmont lobby had a magnificent rug fashioned by Dorothy Draper, the legendary interior designer. Charcoal black and covered with red roses—people came from all over just to see it.

Trying to help my staff visualize what I was describing, I came across a paperback book on roses. The cover art depicted a large pink rose on a black background. I sent the book cover to world-renowned weavers in Ireland and asked them to give me a sketch of a carpet bedecked with giant pink roses.

They did and I commissioned them to design it. Those pink roses have now become emblematic of the Beverly Hilton; they’ve been seen the world over because of the many international television broadcasts that originate from the ballroom. The inaugural network telecast of the Golden Globes featured the carpet prominently in many shots.

Warren Cowan, my publicist for many years, phoned afterward and asked, “Did you see that show? It was unbelievable!”

I said, “Yes, but did you see that
rug?
”

After finishing the ballroom, I redid the restaurant inside and out, renaming it Griff’s. Next, I flew in stone from Spain to surround the Olympic-size swimming pool. On the cabana rooms around the pool, I installed French doors and red and white striped awnings reminiscent of the famed ice cream parlor of my youth, Will Wright’s. Then I bracketed the rooms with huge bougainvillea of all colors.

All through the massive renovation period, I kept thinking of something that my father told me when I was growing up: “Always remember, Buddy. Nothing but the best.” My dad would really love the Beverly Hilton.

Soon after I purchased the hotel, the
National Enquirer
ran a story that effectively said, “Merv Griffin only bought the Hilton so he would have a place to work in for the rest of his life.”

My reaction was “How rude. I have no
intention
of performing there. It’s strictly an investment.”

Sure, Merv
. A few months later I found myself, microphone in hand, singing to a large crowd—in the Beverly Hilton. I had to admit (if only to myself) that the
Enquirer
had it right. I still enjoyed having a stage to perform on.

Little did I imagine that my next “stage” would be all the way across the country, in Atlantic City. I was about to co-star in an amusing little comedy called “The War at the Shore.”

(AP/Wide World Photos)

W
hat can you say about Donald Trump that he hasn’t already said about himself?

I’m going to surprise you—and probably him—with what I’m going to tell you next. Donald is a very gifted man. In some ways, I believe he is brilliant. I think that his buildings are magnificent additions to the New York City skyline.

But he is also a person of extremes. There’s no in-between with Donald. He’s either your best friend or your worst enemy. Sometimes he’s both—in the same conversation. There are days when his genius sparks him to dizzying heights of creativity. Then there are other, darker days when it causes him to rage at the world for failing to recognize his greatness.

In this regard, Donald is not unlike most of the legendary New York City developers, going all the way back to Edward Browning in the twenties. Browning’s flair for the dramatic caused him to drop bags of water out of a low-flying airplane in order to demonstrate how vulnerable Manhattan was to an aerial attack.

Robert Moses, the master builder responsible for most of New York’s roadways and parks, was as volatile as he was brilliant. When he failed to get his way on a project through persuasion, he would often bully his opponents into submission by resorting to character assassination.

Browning, Robert Moses, Donald Trump—these are men of outsize egos and temperaments to match. It goes with the territory.

Down through the years, there is a public stance that’s been shared by many of these giants of New York City real estate, one of grand public lives led amidst highly visible excess. This is no accident; it accomplishes precisely what they want. Everyone turns to them with major deals. Banks lend them large sums of money on the strength of their flamboyant reputations.

That said, I actually knew very little about Donald in 1988, when I was first approached about investing in Resorts International, a company whose principal assets were Resorts, an Atlantic City hotel-casino, and Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Also included in the package was the unfinished Taj Mahal, potentially the largest (and most expensive) hotel-casino ever built in Atlantic City.

Donald, who owned 80 percent of the Resorts voting stock, likes to say that I relished the idea of taking him on. The truth is a lot less dramatic. At the time, I’d heard his name and knew that he was a successful New York City builder, but that was about it. I had no real impression of him as a person, nor was I familiar with his regional reputation as a swashbuckling developer. He was—and is—far better known on the East Coast than on the West Coast.

Unlike Donald, I have a long history with Atlantic City. In July of 1949 (when Donald was three), I sang with Freddy Martin’s orchestra on the Steel Pier. We played to more than 100,000 people over that Fourth of July weekend. It was quite a scene, not only for the size of the crowd, but also because every member of the orchestra took turns vomiting behind the bandstand. The night before we’d arrived in Atlantic City, our bus had stopped at a diner in Pennsylvania. Everybody but Jean Barry and me ate dinner at three o’clock in the morning. Food poisoning and fireworks—it wasn’t a pretty combination.

I’m not claiming to be Sinatra or Springsteen, but my connection to the Garden State is pretty strong. In the sixties and early seventies, Julann and I lived in New Jersey, on a farm in the small town of Califon. Around that time I’d also begun investing in radio. First I purchased WMID, the number one station in Atlantic City. Then I built an FM station that broadcast in the same market. And on several occasions, I’d brought
The Merv Griffin Show
down to Atlantic City for a week of tapings at Caesars or at the Golden Nugget for Steve Wynn.

Remember too that since its earliest days, I’d spent a lot of time in a little gambling town in the Nevada desert called Las Vegas.

Let me paint a picture for you of what Vegas was like in the late forties and early fifties. The famed “Strip”—Las Vegas Boulevard—was a simple two-lane highway. I used to perform at the Hotel Last Frontier, which was purchased in 1951 by two brothers, Jake and Bill Kozloff.

I learned a lot about gambling from the Kozloff brothers. Jake Kozloff showed me the secret of the double-reds in roulette. Here it is: there are four double-reds on a roulette table. What that means is that two red numbers are adjacent to one another on the betting table. The four pairs are 9 and 12, 16 and 19, 18 and 21, and 27 and 30. If you place your bet on the line between them, you increase your chances of winning. The payoff is 17–1 instead of 35–1, but that’s still pretty good.

Next door to the Last Frontier was Beldon Katleman’s El Rancho Vegas. And that was it. Las Vegas started out as a two-lane town with two casinos. It stayed that way until a fellow named Siegel (It was either “Mr. Siegel” or, if you knew him well, “Benjamin.” That other name was death in the desert.) built a flashy new casino much farther down the street called the Flamingo.

Years later, when I did my show from Caesars Palace, I gained valuable insight into gaming as a business from Cliff Perlman. Cliff, who owned Caesars, was gracious enough to share his genius for marketing with “the talent.”

So between my history in New Jersey (and Atlantic City in particular), as well as my familiarity with the gaming business, I was certainly receptive when the new president of my company, Mike Nigris, first brought the Resorts proposition to me early in March of 1988.

The idea had reached Mike in an unusual way. It all started with a car dealer from upstate New York named Dale Scutti.

Do you remember the movie
Working Girl
with Melanie Griffith? She played a secretary who fantasized about breaking into the world of high finance. In her spare time, Melanie’s character studied both the financial pages
and
the gossip columns. Her unorthodox reading habits allowed her to spot a business opportunity that everybody else had missed and, by the end of the film, she’s scored her big deal (and Harrison Ford).

Dale Scutti did the same thing in real life that Melanie Griffith’s character did on screen. His hobby was to carefully examine publicly traded companies, looking for undiscovered opportunities. The way a tout reads the
Racing Form
, Scutti scoured the stock pages. First, he’d spot a company that he thought was undervalued. Then he would back up his hunch with a lot of research. As a result, Scutti’s tips were often pretty good.

Scutti was already a shareholder in Resorts, and he wasn’t a happy man. Donald had previously made a low offer of $15 per share to acquire the stock that he didn’t already own, thereby gaining full control of Resorts. There were several pending lawsuits challenging Donald’s lucrative management contract with Resorts and alleging that Donald’s offer of $15 a share for Resort’s Class A stock undervalued Resorts. Donald vigorously denied the allegations contained in the lawsuits. However, as part of a proposed settlement of the litigation, Donald raised his bid to $22.

Believing that $22 per share wasn’t sufficient, and angry that he’d already lost money through what he perceived as Donald’s cynical stock ploy, Dale Scutti hired a New York securities attorney, Morris Orens, to find another buyer for Resorts. He showed Orens all the work he’d done, and said, in effect, “Resorts isn’t in Trump’s pocket, even though he thinks it is. It’s up for the taking and I know how to do it.”

Here’s where the story gets a little complicated, so stay with me. A year earlier, Orens was in his car listening to the news when he heard an item about the wealthiest performers in Hollywood. Sound familiar?

Orens contacted me about Resorts through the president of my company, Mike Nigris (who was formerly my accountant). The link between Orens and Nigris was a man named Ernie Barbella. Barbella was Mike’s roommate in college, so they went back a long way. I’m still not entirely sure how Morris Orens knew Barbella; suffice it to say that he did.

Even though the idea to get involved with Resorts had come to me in a roundabout way, I was still intrigued about the possibility of getting into gaming. I could see that it was changing from a business that catered primarily to Las Vegas–style high rollers into something that I was very familiar with: mass market entertainment. Atlantic City had the potential to become a tourist town more like Branson, Missouri, than a gambling mecca like Las Vegas. (Of course, Las Vegas has now evolved into precisely that kind of tourist destination.) What interested me most was the marketing aspect of it, the chance to make a creative connection between gaming and entertainment.

I decided to take the plunge. At the time, I had no idea how high the diving board was or how little water there was in the pool.

On March 17, I was having a St. Patrick’s Day tennis party at my home. I kept the television on all day because I wanted to follow what was going on. Suddenly, the news broke that I’d made a $35 per share offer for Resorts stock. My friends at the party kept looking from the television screen back to me. They were used to seeing my face on the screen, but not in the context of a major financial story.

Across the country, in New York City, I’m told that when Donald was informed of my offer, he said, somewhat in disbelief, “
Merv
Griffin? Is that the
band singer?
”

The timing also threw him. Donald was fully expecting that on the very next day, the Delaware Chancery Court was going to approve his settlement with the shareholders of Resorts International, which would give him everything: Resorts and the still unfinished Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and Paradise Island in the Bahamas. He had planned on walking away with lots of real estate and a considerable number of assets without a further fight.

Then, from out of left field, my $35 per share offer came in, rendering Donald’s settlement offer moot. Now, instead of dealing with the court, he had to deal with me.

About a month later, when I was planning a trip to New York, I called Donald, introduced myself, and asked if I could stop by and see him while I was in town. He agreed and we set up a meeting for 2:30 P.M. on Wednesday, April 13, in his penthouse office on Fifth Avenue.

When I told them about the appointment, my lawyers and financial advisors were aghast. Every one of them tried to talk me out of it. “You
can’t
meet him on his own turf,” was the common refrain. “It’s usually done on some neutral ground like a restaurant.”

“What’s the difference?” I was amused by everyone’s apoplexy. “Just because he owns the furniture? I’ve got furniture of my own. I have no interest in his. I’m going there to make a deal.”

Somehow the New York City tabloids, the
Post
and the
Daily News
, got wind of the meeting (I didn’t tell them) and built it up into something on a par with the Reagan-Gorbachev summit.
“They’re going to meet! They’re going to meet!”

When the day of the meeting arrived, I took the elevator all the way up to Donald’s office. When I got out, I had to pass through a sea of very pretty secretaries who were pretending to be typing things or on the phone, all the while trying to catch a glimpse of me walking by. The overheated media hype had turned this into a scene out of
High Noon
.

I was led into something you don’t really see much of in California, a glass penthouse. Donald walked out from behind his desk to greet me.

“How are you, Merv? Come here, I want to show you something.” He immediately took me over to a window that allowed us to look down on New York’s great lady, the landmark Plaza Hotel, recently purchased by Donald.

He said, “There it is. I own it. It’s my greatest acquisition.” All of this in the first thirty seconds after I’d walked into the room.

We started talking about the number of rooms in the Plaza, and I said, very quietly, “That certainly will house the lawyers it will take for you to fight me.”

What the hell. Get it over with
.

He laughed. “You
are
a son of a bitch aren’t you?”

Grinning, I replied, “I’m a son of a bitch
band singer
.”

I enjoy negotiations. They’re very similar to doing a talk show. As each unfolds, you see where you can make your move. The trick in both is to get into areas that are easy, wait until you see a little spark, then seize upon it. That’s the secret to a good interview—and to making a deal. You might even call it an art.

Twenty-three years of interviewing came right into focus sitting across from Trump. After so many years, you learn to judge body language, and speech—and to gauge, immediately, just how far you can go. Donald was a case study in impatience. In his chair, he sat all scrunched up, as if it were a chore for him to remain still. Apparently it was. Periodically, he’d just get up and walk around his office. It was as if he had a blinking sign on his forehead that continually flashed, “URGENT! URGENT!” And sitting or standing, he never stopped talking. He talked for almost thirty minutes and all I did was nod or utter an occasional “Ahhh.”

Finally, I said, “Donald, I appreciate everything you’ve said (most of it about the difficulties I’d face taking on a project this size, and how I didn’t have the experience or political connections to pull it off), but I’m here to make a deal. If you want to do a deal, then let’s do one. If not, tell me now and I’ll go home.”