Free Merv by Merv Griffin Page A

finally issued a decision on a case that had been working its way up the judicial ladder for years. The upshot of their ruling was that talent agencies couldn’t wear multiple hats without violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. That meant that MCA (which also owned Universal Pictures) was effectively out of the talent agency business. And it also meant that I didn’t have to pay them a hefty packaging fee for the sale of The Merv Griffin Show . Timing, as they say, is everything.
    Just as starring in a major motion picture hadn’t been nearly as glamorous as I’d once imagined, my first day at NBC was a rude awakening about what it actually meant to be a network “star.”
    In the early sixties, the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center seemed like a warehouse badly in need of a coat of paint. Furniture was scattered and mismatched; the “art” on the walls looked like something you’d pass up at a garage sale. My office was a 9 x 12 cubbyhole with a low ceiling and no windows. Perhaps as a concession to my soon-to-be star status, there was a drape covering one of the walls, behind which there might have been a window.
    And you know what? I didn’t care a bit. I was having the time of my life. In August, Bob Shanks and I sat down and planned out the first month of Merv Griffin shows, which would begin on October 1. The first thing I did was hire three talented young writers. Dick Cavett and David Lloyd were friends at Yale who had become a writing team working for Paar (David would go on to be an Emmy-winner for such classic sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Cheers , and Frasier ). The third member of our team was a large, incredibly funny man named Pat McCormick, who you’ll probably remember as a comic actor (he was “Big Enos” in the Smokey and the Bandit movies).
    They were a great bunch. One time I asked them to come up with some gag songs that I could do on the show. I’d pretend they were examples of some of the terrible songs that people would write “ especially for you Merv ,” and send me in the mail.
    Here’s one that Dick wrote (I wrote the music):
    Happy Thanksgiving Day
    I’ve got a drumstick in my teeth
    Goodbye to summer
    I wouldn’t have a drumstick in my teeth
    If I hadn’t picked a fight with the drummer
    Once the writing staff was set, we started booking talent. My first move was to put Woody Allen under contract to appear on the program every Friday. Then I called in some chits. I’d known Joan Crawford slightly back in San Mateo (my old Panda Records partner, Janet Folsom, was friendly with her), so when I called to ask her to appear on my new show, she quickly agreed. Then I called Adela Rogers St. Johns, the prominent newspaperwoman and author, who used to play tennis with Uncle Elmer. She was delighted to know that her former ball boy was doing so well, and she also agreed to be one of my first guests.
    Those two months went by unbelievably fast. One day I woke up and—bang—my calendar read October 1. Only nine months had elapsed since Bob Shanks shoved me back onstage to finish that first terrifying show, but I wasn’t the same guy. From the moment I walked into Studio 6B (the same studio Carson would use at night), I felt like I was home.
    That first week of shows was a blur. I remember asking Joan Crawford at one point if she had any romantic feelings toward any of her onscreen leading men. She gave the standard studio reply about how “they were all just friends and nothing more.”
    Adela, who suffered neither fools nor liars, couldn’t let that one go by. “Now, Joan,” she said, “you married three of them. You must have had some feelings.”
    It was going very well. From NBC’s standpoint, possibly too well. Few people remember it now, but for the first six months of The Tonight Show , Carson had a lot of trouble getting big names to come on the air with him. He was an unknown quantity and they weren’t willing to trust their careers with him—at least not