From right to left, that's the wonderful Charlie Weaver, host Merv Griffin, British fashion model of the day Jean Shrimpton, Israeli singer/comedienne Aliza Kashi, and Merv's announcer Arthur Treacher.
What an eclectic gaggle of geese. Five people that would be the unlikeliest of friends. Or guests at the same party. But there they are. While I needed help to identify them all in 2015, I certainly would have known who they were when I was a kid.
That's because I lived in a TV talk show household.
Some very astute video company just put out a DVD collection of Merv Griffin shows from the 60s right through the 80s and I was a quick buyer. Moreover, last weekend, I couldn't stop watching episodes one after another. Once again, it was expert time travel for yours truly. Suddenly, I was back in my grandmother's living room. Invariably, each TV season, she would get disgusted with the prime time fare offered by the three big networks.
"They're making the people so stupid."
Grandma would sit on the little chair she used to park herself on in front of the TV whenever she wanted to change channels. (There was no remote control for her black and white television). And, usually, she wound up tuned to New York's Channel 5 Metromedia. That's where the Merv Griffin Show aired every night at 830PM for ninety minutes.
The same ritual started upstairs at our level of the house as well. Once my mom went back to working days, she had little use for regular television. On popped Merv and his merry band of yaksters.
It's how we get in touch with show business and politics and life. Because, back in that day, the TV talk show offered something for everyone. Totally unrehearsed and unscripted. Spontaneous as life itself.
A 180 degrees away from what TV talk shows are today.
When I got to the age of nine or ten, I fell into the same TV patterns as my grandmother and mother did. For me, it started as soon as I got home from school. With the Mike Douglas Show. 4:30PM every afternoon. Mike could have been my tutor. I did more homework with him than with anybody else.
At the time, the Mike Douglas Show provided me with my first glimpses of the show business world. Everything was wonderful. All the movie and TV stars were nice people. Everybody loved everybody else. They were all regular people, who could be singing a song or telling a joke one minute and then cooking up some beef goulash the next.
I swallowed it all hook, line, and sinker. And it was terrific.
Mike Douglas was unique back in the day. Mike was one during the day and geared to mothers and kids. Yeah, my house. My grandmother had pretty much finished her early bird dinner on the first floor by the time Mike came onto Channel 9 in NY.
Meanwhile, upstairs, my mom was trying to figure out what to heat up for my supper as I wrapped up some book report for school. The Mike Douglas soundtrack echoes throughout. And I was glued.
Totie Fields trying to crawl up on a stool.
Milton Berle "being funny" by slapping Marty Allen in the face.
William F. Buckley playing charades.
It was all so weird, but delightful.
What made Mike's show so interesting was his daily broadcast always featured a weekly co-host. Totally ingenious because, by the end of the week, you felt like that particular star was a member of your family. I remember my grandmother (and me) becoming a huge fan of Pearl Bailey after she spent a week squeezed into those goofy white plastic chairs situated amid a sea of those big asterisks. My grandmother said she wished Pearl could come over for dinner and that was a big deal in those days for my family, because it was specific that Pearl could eat the meal with us and not be the one serving it.
That's the way it was with the Mike Douglas Show. It oozed this personal touch and Mike Douglas was the ultimate nice guy sharing his friends with you. And he mixed and matched them with abandon. You could watch Moe Howard teaching Ted Knight how to take a custard pie to the face. Or a three-year-old Tiger Woods teaching Bob Hope how to putt. Or a strangely sober Judy Garland just chatting away with Mike and co-host Peter Lawford.
I gobbled it all up. And then had my dinner.
If the sitcoms that night on prime time TV didn't tickle me, I'd join in either upstairs or downstairs with Merv Griffin. A lot of the same people showed up on that show, but it was still different. While Mike's show was a bunch of people having coffee over cake, Merv commandeered a nightly cocktail party. There were performances, but the real feature was the conversation. It could go in a variety of directions. It was like somebody was planning a party but didn't give a damn about the guest list.
You could have comic Moms Mabley with no teeth in.
Opera star Beverly Sills.
Country performer Minnie Pearl with the price tag hanging off her hat.
And rounding out the night...Robert F. Kennedy.
You'd scratch your head and wonder how any of this makes sense. But, somehow, it was smart and funny and educational.
Merv regularly invited politicians or civic leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. They'd mix in with the rest. And the key to it all was that it wound up as a political discussion that was very...well...apolitical.
That's the cool thing about the likes of Merv and Mike and Johnny Carson. To this day, you wouldn't know what their political leanings were. They were as impartial as Switzerland. Compare that to the bloated screwballs sitting behind desks today. Folks like Bill Maher and David Letterman and the annoyingly overrated Jon Leibowitz...er, I mean...Jon Stewart. Balanced discussions made for better television.
And smarter viewers.
Today's TV talk show has little spontaneity. Most of the conversation is scripted and pre-planned in the green room. There is no chance for any sort of organic moment. Guests don't hang around long enough to sit with the other guests. It is a sad testament to the folks who pioneered it all. The guys who went out of their way to create lively and unpredictable television.
I was so enamored of it all that I tried to duplicate it on my own in the basement. My own talk show. If Grandma had freshly laundered curtains hanging to dry, it was even better. I could make an entrance. I'd come out, tell a few jokes, and introduce everybody to my co-host Barbara Feldon. Well, she wasn't really there, but it was pretend after all.
That was all the influence of all the time I spent with Mike and Merv. And, on Friday or holiday nights, Johnny. Yeah, those were the only nights I could stay up. And I longed for those days when I knew that I could finish off with Mr. Carson, hoping that, on this night, he would be listening to Suzanne Pleshette complain about her husband or Jimmy Stewart reciting a new poem he just wrote.
My daily education was complete. And, by revisiting the Merv Griffin DVDs, I'm smarter all over again.
Dinner last night: Shanghai noodles at Wokcano.
2 comments:
This may be second iteration of the same comment. The paragraphs that book and the Mike Douglas show photo are duplicates of each other. Is that intentional?
I remember your Mike Douglas stage setup as you entered in between the sheets your grandmother had hung up in the basement.you had such an entertaining and vivid imagination. It was all great but smart fun.
15avebud
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