{"id":318,"date":"2012-09-13T17:57:45","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T17:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=318"},"modified":"2021-02-07T20:56:51","modified_gmt":"2021-02-07T20:56:51","slug":"merv-griffin-the-moist-happy-visionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=318","title":{"rendered":"Merv Griffin, the Moist Happy Visionary"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Leonard and I were as one on many things, especially when it came to television. (Among our shared enthusiasms: The Rockford Files<\/em>, Bill Russell\u2019s NBA commentary, Dana Delany.) He, as much as I, believed deeply that Ed Sullivan was one of the indispensable figures of the 20th century for making his weekly variety show a spectrum of culture from Broadway to the Bolshoi to the Beatles to the Great Ballantine. But for all the props John gave Ed, he had little use for Merv Griffin, to my mind, as far-sighted and boundary-breaching an emcee as Sullivan.<\/p>\n

\u201cCharlie Brown in a Rep Tie\u201d was the handle for John\u2019s withering 1972 Life magazine column on Griffin, whose talk show had just gone back to syndication after a brief late-night fling on CBS. \u201cEmbarrassingly personal,\u201d he wrote of Merv\u2019s persona. \u201c\u2026[a] hybrid of Nelson Rockefeller, Kahlil Gibran, Little Beaver, Gunga Din and the Little White Cloud That Cried. Throw this man a security blanket!\u201d<\/p>\n

As with similar Leonard tantrums, this came as much from a keen sense of injustice (towards the ratings-besieged Dick Cavett, whom he \u2013 and I \u2013 preferred at the time to Merv and Johnny Carson) as from distaste. Griffin was indeed every bit as moist as Cavett was dry and I, too, can take only so much moisture on my screen.<\/p>\n

But Griffin, as everyone now knows,\u00a0was soggy like a fox. No one who became as wealthy as he did from inventing\u00a0Jeopardy! <\/em>\u00a0and Wheel of Fortune<\/em> could be as needy or as na\u00efve as he seemed to Leonard. Before he became a media mogul, the Mozart of the game show, Griffin was a cabaret\/nightclub performer who\u2019d seen a lot of great jazz, R&B, Broadway shows and glossy pop during New York\u2019s post-World War II golden age. He couldn\u2019t avoid bringing such paraphernalia to the mainstream. For instance, Play Your Hunch<\/em>, the Goodson-Todman daytime game show he hosted from 1958 to 1962, included such cutting-edge legends of the moment as Jon Hendricks and, in this clip, songwriters Jerry Lieber and Burt Bacharach.<\/a><\/p>\n

Once he got his own talk show, Griffin took even bigger chances, bringing to the desk-and-couch format such unlikely visitors as Bertrand Russell, Norman Mailer, Abbie Hoffman, both Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick (She did most of the talking<\/a>) and Phil Spector, who managed to piss off every other guest on the panel that evening <\/a>\u2013 including Richard Pryor, who achieved his first nationwide exposure on Griffin\u2019s show as did the more venerable Jackie \u201cMoms\u201d Mabley, whose renown had heretofore been mostly a \u201cblack thing\u201d no white person\u00a0could literally understand. Both would eventually appear on the Sullivan show, but one doubts either of those loose cannons would have made it there without Merv clearing a path to the mainstream.<\/p>\n

If you want to know how truly…extraterrestrial Pryor was from the start. Check out this clip where he does some amazing contortions to “The Kid From Red Bank” — and later gushes all over Jerry Lewis. This was regular TV back then. Now it’d be an Event!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n