In his latest memoir, entertainer Merv Griffin jokingly refers to his career as having been blessed with the luck of the Irish. Griffin’s eyes may have been twinkling as he wrote this book and his tone light and fun, but all of this is just a disguise for his astute understanding of the entertainment world and his uncanny ability to gamble on long shots and make them payoff in his favour.

Griffin, born in 1925, was a child of the Depression years. When his family lost their San Francisco Bay area house to the bank, they moved in with his mother’s sisters, who tutored the five year old prodigy on the piano. Later he took classical music lessons at a music conservatory and considered himself somewhat of a classical music snob until he one day encountered some students singing the pop song of the day, Rogers & Hart’s composition, "Where or When." Returning home, Griffin taught himself to play the song.

A couple of years after his high school graduation, Griffin was given the chance to sing on a San Francisco radio station. The first question the band leader asked Griffin was whether he knew "Where or When." By the following Monday, the fortunate Griffin, barely twenty, became host of the newly named "Merv Griffin Show," earning $100 per show for 11 shows per week. Three years later, deciding that he needed to experience more than just life in San Francisco, Griffin quit the lucrative radio job to join The Freddy Martin Orchestra. His pay was about one-tenth of the radio salary, but the learning experiences he had and the contacts he made during that time served him so well that he eventually became a multimillionaire.

One by one, the incidents recounted in this memoir serve to point out how Merv Griffin has not only learned from his life’s lessons, he has profited from them too. His on-stage charisma led to him being offered a screen test for a game show called Play Your Hunch, which led him to guest hosting The Tonight Show in Jack Parr’s absence, and then serving as summer replacement host, just prior to Johnny Carson taking over. Griffin’s willingness to bring in some off beat talent that Jack Parr would not even consider, comedians like Woody Allen, The Smothers Brothers and George Carlin, helped Griffin win such a huge audience that NBC offered him an hour long day time talk show in the fall of 1962. Although the show was cancelled by the network within the year, Griffin was allowed to continue to make the show in syndication, which meant he controlled the whole show, and owned the production company too, so he ended up making even more money from the independent stations that chose to carry his talk show.

With his knowledge of show business, and especially the game show business, Griffin worked for over a year to develop a game where the contestants were given the answers and had to ask the appropriate questions. Jeopardy, a Merv Griffin production, ran on NBC for eleven years. Of course, Jeopardy and the other famous Merv Griffin Production, Wheel Of Fortune, have had a terrifically long run in syndication, and have made Merv a very wealthy man. In 1986, for $250 million, Griffin sold his ownership of the two shows to Columbia Tri-Star Entertainment, which in turn was owned by Coca Cola.

Griffin’s breezy story is fun to read and full of interesting tid-bits about television and the entertainment world. Clearly, he has won life’s lottery.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.