Merv Griffin: '70s Showbiz Ringmaster
Aug 13, 2007, 11:43 AM | by Steve Korn
Categories: Channel Surfing, Television, Who Else Remembers This?
I probably didn't really watch the Merv Griffin Show every night as a kid in the '70s, but looking back on it, it sure feels that way. In a pre-cable era when there were only six channels to choose from on any given night (and one of those was PBS, which, to an 11-year-old, didn't count), there was a one-in-five chance at some point I'd be spending at least a little time with Merv, whose show aired in New York for 90 minutes a night, five nights a week.
In the retrospectives I've seen since Merv Griffin's death yesterday at age 82, the focus has been on his many accomplishments as a businessman, with his on-camera life represented by clips of his sit-downs with Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and other figures of significance. All to be applauded — but those aren't the moments that left the deepest impression on me. For me, the Merv Griffin Show was a nightly seminar in showbiz as circus.
On any given night, Merv would give us life's rich pageant, '70s showbiz-style. Orson Welles and Fred Travelena; Richard Burton and McHale's Navy's Joe Flynn. Entertainers who mattered, and those who maybe didn't so much, yet there they all were, interacting, gathered together because on some level, all were in the business of saying, Hey, look at me. And we did, and to a surprising degree it stuck with me, maybe more than is healthy to admit. Here are some flashes I remember, mostly moments when mismatched showbiz worlds collided with each other, or simply with reality, as in this clip:
- Andy Kaufman spending a segment telling Merv that he could fly, then seeming to do his best to convince the next guest, old-time, snooty-persona'd actress Hermione Gingold, that he was certifiable.
- Monty Python's Graham Chapman making Zsa Zsa Gabor livid by his (truthful) insistence he was a medical doctor, because she didn't think he had the proper demeanor.
- An entire show devoted to Jerry Lewis' starring role in a movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick of Another Kind, treated with the solemnity of the second coming of Citizen Kane, illustrated with clips that looked unwatchable. (Merv, coincidentally or not, had a small role in the movie. I can't pinpoint this, but I think it was quite a while between the time this show aired, and the film's actual limited, lambasted release.)
- Crooner Steve Lawrence introducing his recording of the "Love Theme from Rocky," with Merv telling him over and over that it was a No. 1 record, which made me laugh, thinking there was no way Steve Lawrence in the mid-'70s could have a No. 1 record. (Yet Merv would actually be sort of right on that one — unfortunately for Steve, it was the similar, but mostly instrumental, "Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)" that topped the charts. I'd always think of Steve Lawrence whenever I heard it.)
- Thor, as seen video clip embedded above. (I have to admit, I don't actually remember seeing this when it aired — but it sums up pretty well what I think of when I think of the endless possibilities of what you might stumble upon any given night on the Merv Griffin Show. Please stick with it long enough to see him stop mid-song to blow up the hot water bottle.)
I guess there's no telling what TV images you'll never shake. Odd as they are, all of these still make me smile, and I guess that's as good a testament to Merv's legacy as any. Now, will someone please put the great SCTV "Merv Griffith Show" skit, with Merv dropped into the Mayberry universe of Andy Griffith, on YouTube?
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