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Tavis: In May of last year, we were honored to welcome entertainment legend, Merv Griffin, to this program. That evening, he brought with him a new DVD collection of some of his favorite interviews during the twenty-three year run of his very successful talk show. Among the conversations he was most proud of, one with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Clip]

Tavis: I began my conversation with Merv Griffin by asking him about his career before becoming a talk show host. Did you have a life before being a talk show host? We know you like in two phases: talk show host and mogul. What did you do before -

Merv Griffin: - Mongrel (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) What did you do before talk show host?

Griffin: Before that, why, I was on radio in San Francisco. My home town is up in northern California. But, yeah, I was on KFRC radio in San Francisco. Then I joined the traveling big band, Freddy Martin, and had hit records with him. Then I left him as everybody left the ballrooms. Television was coming in strong.

Then I got to Broadway and did the first return of "Finian's Rainbow" (singing). Oh, I still got it (laughter). I went from there to game shows. So I came out of game shows the same way Carson did, Paar did. All the talk show hosts came out of game shows.

Tavis: Why was that?

Griffin: Because of the need to adlib. You had to. So the shows were all adlibbed. You knew the structure of the game, but you adlibbed all the script part of it and that's perfect for a talk show host. You're adlibbing.

Tavis: Yeah, I am still.

Griffin: Okay.

Tavis: (Laughter) There is something else about you, though, that made you really, really good at what you did as a talk show host and that is that you're curious. How did you develop that?

Griffin: I don't know. Peoples' lives have always interested me, so I never went for the obvious. "You just played that role. How did you get into that role?" I didn't care. Was the movie good? Okay. Was it bad? Thanks. But I liked to know how they got where they were because I think that's what America is all about and we've all forgotten that. Today still, people rise from, you know, abject poverty and get to the top. You can.

Tavis: Is there a short answer to how you got to where you are?

Griffin: Just enjoying my work, loving every minute of it, but not really falling in love with it until the first night I walked out to replace Jack Paar who was over in England or something. They hired me to emcee a talk show and I thought, my gosh, this is what it's all about.

I can play a piano if I feel like it and sing, didn't have to rehearse, you know, just say to the bandleader, "Hey, play," and talk and adlib and have fun with the guests. They used to give me all these copious notes and I never got to the notes. You'd start a thing like we're doing and away you'd go.

Tavis: It had to be -

Griffin: - and you asked for a short answer. You said is there a short answer.

Tavis: That was a short answer. But it had to be a special blessing for you, though, to be gifted in so many other areas, to your point about the singing and the piano playing. There were so many things in your repertoire you could call on at any point in time in your talk show.

Griffin: That's the beauty of the talk show.

Tavis: Yeah.

Griffin: You could just call on -

Tavis: - I don't do nothing but talk. I have no talent. I just talk.

Griffin: Oh, come on.

Tavis: You play piano, you sing, you dance.

Griffin: My first discovery, the first one I ever discovered, was Richard Pryor. We found him down in the Village. He was making about seventy-five bucks a week, and put him on. From the first, when he walked out - every comedian that we booked on the show, the newcomers, when they finished, they got big laughs and they'd look over to see if I would beckon them to the panel, meaning they were able to talk too.

On he came and, of course, from the minute he walked on the stage, he didn't say a word and the audience loved him. That cute little haircut, you know, and he was sweet, sweet. The rest of it didn't happen until much later (laughter) when he let it all fall out.

Tavis: What was his genius? Because every comedian I've ever interviewed, black or white, you ask them who they were inspired by and he's on everybody's short list.

Griffin: Well, he could take the tiniest little things like things on my desk and he would do a minute improvisation. Like one time, there was a thing there with all these cigarettes. In those days, everybody smoked on the show, you know.

Tavis: Can't do that nowadays.

Griffin: Oh, no, no. I went into your dressing room and lit one so I wouldn't get blamed (laughter). It was full of cigarettes and he would start to do a whole thing with it and end up with all of them in his mouth. I mean, he was just charming.

Tavis: You know, I'm really jealous of you, not because you're rich, not because you've interviewed -

Griffin: - who've you been talking to?

Tavis: I'm jealous of you for one reason and one reason only. Not "Jeopardy!", not "Wheel of Fortune." You got to interview Dr. King.

Griffin: Martin Luther King.

Tavis: I hate you.

Griffin: I loved him. You weren't born yet. Are you crazy? Oh, I loved that guy. It was the first time I ever - I mean, his eyes. That was his great feature. They were so peaceful that you felt a calm sitting and talking to him. Sometimes you almost felt like you were going to fall into his eyes. Those great big eyes, and they just looked at you and he answered so easy.

He's on the screen now with Harry Belafonte. Harry was my first roommate in New York. He had separated from his first wife and he was very sad and he didn't have a career going yet. He couldn't decide if he was going to be a folksinger or a jazz singer. And Harry brought him on. I was thrilled because I had major admiration for him.

Tavis: What's amazing about this, when I got the DVD pack, the first thing I did was rip it open and go right to that King conversation. I happen to believe -

Griffin: - because they're rare.

Tavis: Yeah, they are. But I happen to believe - and my friends know this - I believe that King is perhaps the greatest American we've ever produced. That's my own opinion. But I went right to your conversation with him.

Griffin: Well, it's the beginning of the understanding of the two ethnic backgrounds or the ten ethnic backgrounds or the fifty ethnic backgrounds we have in America.

Tavis: I went right to that conversation and you know what made me smile about it?

Griffin: What?

Tavis: That you had a conversation with this guy and you made him smile.

Griffin: I know.

Tavis: King didn't do that in public.

Griffin: I think it's the moment when he gets a laugh from the audience too.

Tavis: He didn't do that in public.

Griffin: I was kidding him about coming to New York and I said, "Do you get around?" He looked at me and he said, "I am a Baptist minister, you know." (Laughter).

Tavis: But everybody who knew him knew how funny he was.

Griffin: Oh, he was.

Tavis: He was a prankster, a jokester, but that was not his image he wanted to portray. He talked about why he didn't. He didn't want to portray that because his work was so serious. He didn't want America ever to catch him laughing on the job because the work was so serious. But you made this guy laugh and smile.

Griffin: Well, you know, in the 1960s, I once sent a memo down to my producer and said, “You know, we have a lot of great Black artists on. We have tap dancers and singers and everything else. Go look at the community. There's a lot of intellectuals in it.” I said, “Let's start booking them,” because through the 1960s, the Americans were afraid because there was stuff going on in the streets and everybody was nervous about it. I said, “I think it would be a calming effect to see the intelligence of the Black race.”

Tavis: Did you catch hell for that? For being so friendly to Negroes on the air?

Griffin: No. That's what they were called. We were advised by the NAACP at that time and you will see Dr. King refers to Negroes. Then it went to Colored. Then they advised us, no, we don't do that anymore. They are now -

Tavis: - Afro-American. Black, then Afro-American.

Griffin: But I got in trouble using Black, but we listened to them and did it. Andrew Young was my first interview of the intellectuals. He was, of course, with Martin Luther King, a consultant and everything else to him, then became our United Nations representative.

Tavis: Do you ever get uncomfortable talking to so many presidents? You talked to all of them. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan.

Griffin: I got to tell you something, Tavis. I never was intimidated by guests. The only person that ever intimidated and I really had trouble with -

Tavis: - me.

Griffin: No, that's this generation. You got to remember. I'm going to be eighty-one in July, so I've been through a lot of decades, buddy (laughter).

Tavis: Nothing intimidates you anymore.

Griffin: But Rose Kennedy. I suppose because she felt to me like my mother and a mother of the world and the mother of greatness. She was a very interesting, most interesting, woman.

Tavis: So how does Merv Griffin respond on camera when he's intimidated? How did that show?

Griffin: I felt that she was fragile and I didn't want to hurt her because how many times can you be hurt in your life? You know, with the assassinations and the kids and all the problems in the family and everything. It was just a constant, you know, problem family and continues to be.

Tavis: Let me shift gears here right quick. I went to my first Kentucky Derby this year just a few weeks ago.

Griffin: Oh, yeah.

Tavis: I'm hooked.

Griffin: Are you?

Tavis: Yeah. You love horses?

Griffin: Oh, yeah. I've had them for, gosh, thirty or forty years.

Tavis: How did you get hooked?

Griffin: They were in my life as a youngster up in San Mateo. We had riding stables, you know, up in the hills and we used to play cowboys and indians and ride. That's when I was attacking the Indians (laughter), but, son of a gun, they always won. So it was just an interesting hobby for me. I've always loved horses and now I live with fifty of them. Pardon me for wiping my shoes here (laughter). But Stevie Wonder Boy was -

Tavis: - I love that. Stevie Wonder Boy. Kind of a sad story, though, wasn't it?

Griffin: He would have won the Derby this year easily. The most amazing horse last year. He won the Eclipse Award, he won the Breeder's Cup, he won the Delmar Futurity. I mean, in six months, he'd won over a million dollars in purses. Couldn't stop him. Came from the back of the pack and, when he got up to the stretch, you know, the last moments of the race, he would like shift gears and just go like Secretariat used to do.

Tavis: So how did you come up with that name, Stevie Wonder Boy?

Griffin: Well, see if have to name my horses when I name them after their sires or the mares so I can remember who's who and what their breeding is. Breeding is everything in horseracing. So his father name is Steven Got Even. So I said that Steven is kind of boring, but Steve? No, not good for a horse.

Then I would imitate, you know, the guy on the microphone, "They're coming around the corner and it's Stevie Wonder Boy," and I thought that's good. Stevie Wonder Boy. You know, Stevie Wonder started on my show and I thought, well, this would be a great honor to name a beautiful horse after him. So I did and it stuck and the crowd loved it.

Tavis: So how much money have you made off "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!"?

Griffin: A hundred thousand two million forty-one and twenty-one cents (laughter). Tavis, you don't know things like that in life.

Tavis: But these are the most successful shows, like it's unbelievable.

Griffin: I know. I sold them to Coca-Cola and then, in turn, they sold them to Sony. But, yeah, they have.

Tavis: The ideas came from where? Very simple ideas.

Griffin: What's one of the most successful parts of "Jeopardy!"?

Tavis: The what?

Griffin: What's one of the most successful parts of "Jeopardy!"?

Tavis: "Double Jeopardy!" Oh, the song, the theme song.

Griffin: I wrote that.

Tavis: You wrote this theme song?

Griffin: Sure. I'll write a theme song for you if you need it.

Tavis: I could use it.

Griffin: You got to pay me.

Tavis: Yeah. Never mind (laughter).

Griffin: Okay. You're tough to deal with.

Tavis: I just want to own it. I want to be like you. You can write it, but I got to own it.

Griffin: Uh-oh.

Tavis: Yeah, and we'll talk. That song is the hook, though. That theme is the hook.

Griffin: Yeah, it's played at every football, basketball game ever.

Tavis: I was on "Celebrity Jeopardy!" one time. It's been a couple years ago.

Griffin: Good. How did you do?

Tavis: Why you have to ask that question?

Griffin: How did you do? Come on. Fess up.

Tavis: There were three of us. We played for charity. Christy Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, came first. I came second and Tim Russert came. I beat Tim Russert.

Griffin: Whoa, and was Tim Russert mad that he was third? You played that in Washington at the Convention Hall?

Tavis: Exactly.

Griffin: I saw a couple of those shows. We've done it from there a number of times. I was amazed how dumb our government officials are - but maybe I wasn't (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) You don't want to see my episode. I got lucky at the end.

Griffin: Give me "Final Jeopardy!" Do you remember it?

Tavis: It was - oh, my gosh.

Griffin: See, a talk show host is supposed to -

Tavis: - what was the question again? Exactly - thank you, Luke. In 1958, how many U.S. Senators were there? The obvious answer, you think there's always a hundred, but it's not.

Griffin: No, no, no. Before, down. It would be ninety-six.

Tavis: How did you -

Griffin: - because I know about Alaska and Hawaii. They each have two senators.

Tavis: I said ninety-eight.

Griffin: Oh, you forgot about Alaska.

Tavis: I forgot about Alaska. This is really embarrassing (laughter). The guy's a legend; he got to King before I got to him -

Griffin: - I'm a legend in my own mind.

Tavis: He's rich, he's got horses and he knew the answer to that question. That's really embarrassing. You just came on to embarrass me, didn't you?

Griffin: I invented the show, Tavis.

Tavis: You came on just to embarrass me, didn't you?

Griffin: When you're eighty-one years old, I know everything in the world.

Tavis: Merv Griffin's abilities as a talk show host were perhaps exceeded only by his prowess in business. In addition to all of his well-known ventures, it is said that he made over seventy million dollars alone just on the publishing rights to that little answer jingle you hear on "Jeopardy!"

Tavis: That's our show for tonight.