Dear Mister Fantasy

By the mid-1960s, Johnny Carson had turned his 11:30 p.m. time slot into the hottest ninety minutes in television. The other two networks could not cede all those advertising dollars to NBC and had to come up with challengers. And in 1969, CBS turned to Merv, who had relaunched his talk show as a syndicated program. Sensing CBS' desperation, Merv demanded double Carson's $40,000-a-week salary. CBS agreed. Newsweek put Merv on the cover and asked, IS MERV GRIFFIN THE NEXT KING OF LATE NIGHT TELEVISION? Adding to the aura of gladiatorial blood sport was a stroke that Merv, mischievously, engineered. Catching wind of a falling-out between Johnny and his younger brother Dick -- who had just quit after six years of directing The Tonight Show -- Merv hired Dick to be the director of The Merv Griffin Show. Dick remained with the Griffin organization for almost thirty years, until his retirement in 1999. ''Merv made working fun,'' says Dick. ''I wouldn't say Johnny wasn't a 'people' person, but he's not like Merv, who was very comfortable in any situation. My brother's kind of famous for standing off.''

The initial burst of media hype brought Merv's ratings level with Carson. But within a week, Merv's show started to sag. To better compete for celebrity guests, Merv moved the show from New York to Los Angeles; ratings improved, but not enough. Merv soon recognized his flair for conducting big coffee-klatchy group-guest gossip-a-thons -- and soon he was pioneering a form of television that has become ubiquitous today: panel-discussion single-theme shows about hot-button subjects: incest, pedophilia, transsexuals. Oprah, Merv says, has never acknowledged her debt to him. ''She got the themes from my show,'' he growls. ''We were the first to do themes.''

But not even a parade of transsexuals and sex fiends could pull Merv out of his ratings dive. (Carson, meanwhile, would urge his viewers to ''make sure you watch Merv tonight. He's got one of his provocative themes -- six Lithuanian proctologists who want to be nuns.'') Affiliate stations began to dump Merv's show for reruns of old sitcoms. And on December 3rd, 1971, two years after the show launched, The Merv Griffin Show was canceled. For Merv, it was a mercy killing. The stress had become unbearable. His weight, always a struggle to keep down, had ballooned thirty pounds. He was having anxiety attacks and -- to Merv's dismay -- his marriage was coming unglued. Merv had met his wife, Julann, an actress-comedian, in 1957 on a variety show. Their marriage, at least outwardly, was solid. But in 1973, Julann startled Merv by demanding a divorce. ''It was the largest settlement ever done in Hollywood at that time,'' Merv says, with a hint of boastfulness. ''It didn't bother me,'' he adds blithely. ''I liked her a lot. I said, 'Listen, come on in, meet with the lawyers, you get half, so take whatever properties you want.' I never balked at anything.'' The two still talk. ''Up to my twenty-first birthday, they didn't miss a Christmas or birthday together,'' says Tony. ''They're still very good friends.''

After Merv's cancellation by CBS, a new syndication company put his show back on the air. This version of The Merv Griffin Show hit the airwaves in March 1972, and stayed on the air for fourteen years. But by the early 1980s, the program, shot on a Merv-designed set of turquoise pastel scrims and sequined curtains, had acquired an antique patina dangerously akin to reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show. Increasingly, Merv's interviews -- with legendary septuagenarians like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier -- featured Merv, gray-headed, rotund but ever-twinkly, lamenting the demise of ''the old Hollywood glamour.'' One night in 1985 he innocently observed to insult comedian Don Rickles, ''Sometimes you say things that really surprise me,'' and Rickles shot back, ''Be surprised I'm here.''

Then, in 1986, Merv landed the perfect exit strategy from the TV show. He was approached by a Coca-Cola subsidiary, Columbia Pictures Entertainment, which wanted to buy Merv Griffin Enterprises with its cash-cow flagship shows, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Coke was offering Merv $250 million. Merv sold and saw his already comfy net worth of $25 million increase overnight by a quarter of a billion dollars. There was really no need anymore to do anything he didn't want to do. On September 5th, 1986, Merv taped the final episode of The Merv Griffin Show. But still only sixty-one years old, he was possessed of as much manic entrepreneurial and creative energy as ever. ''Now what do I do?'' he wondered. He got busy turning himself from a mere multimillionaire into a billionaire. His first move was to get into hotels -- or ''talk shows with beds,'' as he calls them. (''It's the same principle -- an exotic variety of people coming through the door, staying a short time, then departing.'') He bought the legendary Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles and spent $60 million restoring it. He rebuilt the restaurant and called it Griff's, flew in stone from Spain for the Olympic-size pool, installed cabana rooms with striped awnings and huge bouquets of bougainvillea. ''Ooooooh, I had more fun with that place!'' Merv cries. At his peak, Merv owned seventeen hotels across the country.

In 1988, Merv ventured into the casino business in Atlantic City. With gambling losing its sleazy, underworld aroma and becoming a form of mass entertainment of the type he'd been trafficking in since age nineteen, Merv set out to buy Resorts International, a sprawling company that owned Paradise Island, a hotel and casino in the Bahamas, and the massive, unfinished Taj Mahal. There was one obstacle: Donald Trump controlled eighty percent of Resorts and wanted to own all of it. Trump had bid twenty-two dollars a share for the remaining stock, believing that no one else was in the running. Merv snookered him with a thirty-five-dollar bid and seized control of the company. Merv and Trump met in Trump's glass-walled penthouse office overlooking his ''trophy'' hotel, the Plaza, in midtown Manhattan, to thrash out who got what of the spoils. ''We sat down; I said, 'Listen, Donald, I want to make this fast: What do you want?' '' Merv recalls. ''He said, 'What do you want?' I said, 'I want everything, but I don't want the Taj Mahal. Do you want the Taj?' He said, 'Well, I would like something of Paradise Island.' I said, 'No, that's out of the question.' We shook hands on it and that was the end of it. Took ten minutes.''

But the two bickered over the deal for months, and years, afterward in the press. In fact, they're still at it. ''When I took over Resorts,'' Merv grumbles, ''it was all this screaming and yelling from Donald: 'I won! I won! I won!' He wrote books about it: 'I won! I won!' I couldn't care what was going on with Superman in New York with the orange hair going, 'I won!' ''

Trump, at first, sounds anything but combative. ''Merv is a very sophisticated businessman,'' he says. ''He's very affable, and at the same time he's a tough negotiator. Smart, congenial. Very different than your more typical type of successful businessman. I like Merv. But'' -- and here his voice takes on that tough-guy tone familiar from The Apprentice -- ''his only problem is that he has never been able to say that Donald Trump beat the shit out of him in business. And it was so easy for me. It's very simple. He paid too much for a company that I sold him. And he's never been able to live that down. Oh, it kills him. He goes around trying to justify what he did. He tells people that he did fine with Donald. But Donald kicked his ass! It was a great deal for me. I got the Taj Mahal -- he got shit.''

Merv now claims the last laugh is on Trump. ''From the day I bought,'' he says, ''Donald only had $16 million profits; and when I sold it, it was 70-something million.'' At which point, Merv sold Resorts to Sol Kerzner, a South African businessman who owns Sun International Hotels. ''I knew when to get out,'' Merv says. ''We sold at ex-act-ly the right time.''

It hasn't all been triumph in Merv's pastel paradise. In 1991, Brent Plott, a former employee described as a ''secretary/driver/horse-trainer/ bodyguard,'' leveled a $200 million palimony suit against Merv. Plott claimed to have been Merv's longtime live-in lover and instrumental to the creation and development of Wheel of Fortune. Merv is not happy when this topic comes up. ''Listen -- it was extortion,'' he says. Merv launched a countersuit against Plott. ''I said, Well, I'm not going to pay him off! That's admission of guilt. We go to court. I'm not going to pay hush money. I forget what it was -- $5 million that he wanted? Five million, my ass.''

Plott's case was ultimately dismissed with prejudice by the California Supreme Court. But Merv's legal problems were not over. That same year, Merv was sued by Denny Terrio, the host of Dance Fever, a disco show that Merv created in 1979. Terrio was charging sexual harassment, claiming that Merv propositioned him and then fired him when Terrio declined his offer. This case, too, was thrown out of court. Merv insists that any accusations against him were motivated by greed. ''It was after they started printing the money stuff!'' he says. ''After the sale of Wheel and Jeopardy! You're a target.''

Merv does not refute the underlying implication in both cases: that he is gay. Nor does he admit to it. Instead, he mentions the high-profile relationship that he began with actress Eva Gabor at the time of his legal troubles. They were photographed everywhere: Atlantic City, La Quinta, Hollywood premieres. Merv says that they discussed marriage, and he parries any direct questions about his sexual orientation. ''You're asking an eighty-year-old man about his sexuality right now!'' he cries. ''Get a life!''

For all his evasiveness, Merv's reaction is the most spontaneous, and thus genuine-sounding, utterance he offers over the course of four days of interviews. Every other anecdote, reflection, memory and comment is one that I recognize as recycled, often word for word, from his two autobiographies. That Merv, at eighty, has reduced his long, varied, richly eventful life into little more than a series of shticky sound bites is wholly in keeping with his devotion to showbiz pizazz and glitter, but it does conjure the philosophical conundrum about whether the unexamined life is worth living. Well, in Merv's case, it's certainly very comfortable. It is also, of course, finite.

''Do I think about death?'' he says. ''No. I kid about it. Like, someone will say to me, 'Merv, in five years this community is going to be incredible.' And I'll say, 'Uhh, how long?' I suppose it's dismissing it with a joke. But physically I feel good. There's a few constant bladder infections, but all old guys get it. There are little glitches. The hair grows in places where I'm shocked: ears, nose.'' He pauses for a moment. Then says, ''I look in the mirror and see the kid from high school.''