Singer, host, entrepreneur Merv Griffin dead at 82

Merv Griffin, 82, the onetime big-band singer who leveraged his career as a popular TV talk-show host into a business empire whose foundations included the creation of the wildly successful syndicated game shows

Wheel of Fortune

and

Jeopardy!

, died yesterday.

Mr. Griffin died of prostate cancer, according to a statement from his family released by Marcia Newberger, spokeswoman for the Griffin Group/Merv Griffin Entertainment. On July 19, his company said Griffin was being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for a recurrence of prostate cancer discovered during a routine examination a few weeks earlier.

An entertainer turned entrepreneur, who sold Merv Griffin Enterprises to Coca-Cola Co. for $250 million in 1986 and recently was reported to have a net worth of $1.6 billion, Mr. Griffin presided over an array of business endeavors.

His Griffin Group, based in Beverly Hills, includes movie and television production, a luxury home development in La Quinta, closed-circuit coverage of horse racing around the country, a real estate brokerage specializing in high-end residential properties, and a stable of thoroughbreds.

Since buying the Beverly Hilton in 1987 - he spent millions renovating the hotel, which he sold in 2003 - Mr. Griffin had bought and sold more than 20 hotels, gaming resorts and riverboats, including Resorts International in Atlantic City and the Bahamas.

Although he was a TV talk-show host for more than two decades, Mr. Griffin's most enduring show business claim to fame is creating and producing Jeopardy! (launched in 1964) and Wheel of Fortune (launched in 1975). Both shows originally aired on NBC and, beginning in the 1980s, became the two most popular syndicated game shows in television history.

Both programs were included in the 1986 sale of Merv Griffin Enterprises. But Mr. Griffin wrote the theme music for Wheel of Fortune and the famous "thinking music" played in the final round of Jeopardy!, which continued to provide him with millions of dollars in royalties.

"I have to say that the ongoing success of Jeopardy! and Wheel is my biggest thrill," he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2005. "I mean, they're still right there at the top of the ratings - they've never slipped. They're timeless and ageless, and, in the history of TV, there has never been anything like them."

In 2005, Mr. Griffin received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and a similar award from the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.

For older Americans, Mr. Griffin is best remembered as the genial host of The Merv Griffin Show. For two decades - the Emmy Award-winning show aired variously on NBC, CBS and, for most of its 1960s-1980s run, in syndication - Griffin presided over a wide-ranging gab fest.

Guests as varied as artists Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, writers Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, comedians Richard Pryor and Woody Allen, and movie legends Bette Davis and Orson Welles dropped by.

Also thrown into the mix were guests such as burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, transsexual Christine Jorgensen, and visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, as well as a string of politicians and newsmakers that included Richard M. Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman.

From the beginning of the show on NBC in 1962 to its end in syndication in 1986, Mr. Griffin hosted more than 5,500 shows and interviewed more than 25,000 guests.

Born in San Mateo, Calif., Mr. Griffin began learning to play the piano at age 4, and later took lessons at a music conservatory in nearby San Francisco.

In 1945, he heard about an audition for a piano player at radio station KFRC in San Francisco. When it turned out the station needed a singer rather than a piano player, he auditioned for that instead.

His voice impressed station officials so much that they put him on as a guest singer on KFRC's nationally syndicated San Francisco Sketchbook show the next night.

Two days later, the show changed its name to The Merv Griffin Show, and young Merv was hosting his own 15-minute radio show five days a week.

As a singer with the Freddy Martin Orchestra from 1948 to 1952, Griffin recorded numerous songs, including "Wilhelmina," "Never Been Kissed" and "Am I in Love." "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts," which he was paid $50 to record, sold three million copies.

He then moved to New York, where he was in a short-lived 1955 revival of the musical-comedy Finian's Rainbow and focused his professional attention on television.

He was hosting Play Your Hunch when he began substitute-hosting for Jack Paar once a week on The Tonight Show in early 1962.

Griffin was offered an hourlong daytime talk show by NBC. The Merv Griffin Show debuted in October 1962.

Griffin's 1958 marriage to Julann Wright - he met her when she was TV personality Robert Q. Lewis' secretary-assistant, produced a son, Tony. They divorced in 1976. Griffin later had a close relationship with actress Eva Gabor, who died in 1995. He was also good friends with Nancy Reagan.

In 1991, Griffin, then 65, faced a multimillion-dollar palimony suit from Brent Plott, 37, who claimed that for years he had been Griffin's business consultant and lover and was entitled to a large share of his fortune. In a statement issued by his attorney, Griffin called the claims "ridiculous and untrue."

The same year, Deney Terrio, the host of Dance Fever, the disco show executive-produced by Griffin in the late 1970s and '80s, filed an $11.3 million sexual-harassment suit against him.

Both cases were eventually dismissed.

Griffin dismissed the issue with characteristic good humor, telling the New York Times in 2005 with a sly grin: "I tell everybody that I'm a quarter-sexual: I will do anything with anybody for a quarter."

Mr. Griffin is survived by his son Tony and grandchildren Farah and Donovan.