TLDR: Merv Griffin turned a talk show career into a $250 million empire built on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, then quietly held onto the rights that made him even richer after he sold. He also went to war with Donald Trump over a casino, survived two lawsuits about his private life, and left behind a family estate story that the internet has been getting wrong for years.
Before Merv Griffin was signing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he was just a big band singer with a surprise hit record.
His 1950 novelty song “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” made him a name, but it was a chance introduction to a woman named Julann Wright on a plane a decade later that quietly set his real fortune in motion.
Griffin married Julann in 1958 after meeting her when she guested on The Robert Q. Lewis Show, and the two had a son, Tony, born in 1959.
Everyone knows Griffin as the man behind two of the biggest game shows ever made. Fewer people know how close his talk show came to getting swallowed up by network politics, or how much of the money story people repeat about him today is simply wrong.
The Talk Show That Almost Didn’t Survive CBS
The Merv Griffin Show ran for 24 years, but it changed addresses so many times it’s a wonder viewers kept up. It launched on NBC daytime in 1962, moved into syndication with Westinghouse by 1965, then landed at CBS in 1969 for a direct shot at Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.
That CBS run turned tense fast. Network executives kept pushing back on Griffin’s choice of guests during the Vietnam era, at one point literally blurring activist Abbie Hoffman’s American flag shirt on air.
Griffin saw the cancellation coming before CBS made it official. He secretly lined up a return to syndication with Metromedia in late 1971, and when CBS pulled the plug in February 1972, his new show premiered the very next Monday without a single week off air.
The Metromedia years were his most comfortable, letting him tape frequently in Las Vegas and run practically uninterrupted until 1984.
The show only ended in 1986 because Metromedia sold its independent stations to launch the Fox network, and Fox wanted those same time slots for Joan Rivers’ new late show instead.
Everyone Gets the Wheel of Fortune Origin Story Wrong
Ask anyone how Wheel of Fortune was born and you’ll usually hear the same charming story: Griffin’s wife Julann suggested it to him on a plane, maybe on a napkin. That story is real.
It just isn’t about Wheel of Fortune at all.
The plane ride idea belongs to Jeopardy!, which debuted on NBC daytime in March 1964. Because King World eventually packaged both shows together for syndication in the 1980s, decades of retellings have merged the two separate origin stories into one tidy anecdote.
Wheel of Fortune actually grew out of Griffin’s own childhood games of Hangman, mixed with his adult fascination with the roulette wheels at Caesars Palace. Its real birth was far messier than the popular version suggests.
The first pilot, taped in 1973 under the title Shopper’s Bazaar and hosted by Chuck Woolery, barely resembles the show people watch today. The wheel spun automatically in the background, and the entire format was built around a shopping segment.
That shopping gimmick wasn’t Griffin’s creative vision either. NBC’s daytime programming chief, Lin Bolen, mandated it directly, wanting glamorous on-set boutiques to pull in female viewers.
NBC rejected that original pilot for being clunky, forcing a retool. The wheel got laid flat, contestants took over spinning it themselves, and the shopping was eventually phased out entirely by the late 1980s once Pat Sajak himself called it some of the dullest television around.
The $250 Million Sale He Didn’t Fully Give Away
By 1986, Griffin was ready to cash out. He sold Merv Griffin Enterprises to Coca-Cola, which then owned Columbia Pictures, for $250 million in cash, reportedly the largest sale of an entertainment company owned by a single person up to that point.
What made the deal so lucrative long term wasn’t the cash itself, but what Griffin quietly refused to hand over. He kept profit participation in both shows, stayed on as executive producer of each until 2000, and most importantly, held onto the music publishing rights to their theme songs.
The Jeopardy! thinking theme almost didn’t exist as we know it. Griffin originally wrote it as a lullaby for his son Tony, titled “A Time for Tony,” before repurposing it as the show’s countdown music.
Because that theme plays during Final Jeopardy on every single episode, the royalties from those few seconds of music added up to somewhere between $70 million and $80 million by the time Griffin died in 2007.
The Casino War With Donald Trump
Griffin didn’t sit on his $250 million. He poured it into real estate, hotels, and casinos through his new company, the Griffin Group, and it dropped him straight into one of the ugliest corporate fights of the late 1980s.
In 1987, Donald Trump had taken control of Resorts International, the company behind major casino properties in Atlantic City and the Bahamas, and moved to buy out the remaining public shareholders at a low price. Minority shareholders sued, and Griffin saw an opening.
In March 1988, Griffin jumped into the fight with a competing offer nearly triple what Trump had proposed.
The battle was settled that May in a court-brokered deal that split the spoils, with Trump getting the unfinished Taj Mahal casino for $273 million and Griffin taking control of Resorts International itself for $365 million.
That win came with a catch Griffin hadn’t fully priced in: nearly a billion dollars in inherited debt. He financed it with high-yield junk bonds arranged through Michael Milken, and within ten months the company was tens of millions of dollars short on its own debt payments.
Resorts International filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 1989.
Griffin’s other properties fared far better, including the Beverly Hilton, which he bought in 1987 and sold in 2003 after a $25 million renovation, and a Palm Springs ranch where he raised thoroughbred racehorses.
His Private Life, and the Lawsuit Rumor That Isn’t True
Griffin and Julann divorced after eighteen years together, though sources still disagree on whether that happened in 1973 or 1976. The two stayed close and friendly for the rest of his life regardless.
He never remarried, though he shared a long, visible relationship with actress Eva Gabor from the 1980s until her death in 1995.
Rumors about Griffin’s sexuality followed him for decades, something he addressed with characteristic dryness in a 2005 New York Times interview, joking that he was “a quarter-sexual” who would “do anything with anybody for a quarter.”
In 1991, two lawsuits put his private life in the headlines whether he liked it or not.
A former employee named Brent Plott sought $200 million in a palimony suit claiming a nine-year relationship, and dancer Deney Terrio filed a separate harassment suit alleging unwanted advances dating back to 1978.
Both cases were dismissed within the following year.
Griffin died on August 12, 2007, from a recurrence of the prostate cancer he’d first beaten back in 1996.
His son Tony inherited the estate and smoothly took over as president of Merv Griffin Entertainment, standing alongside the company’s top executives as one of his father’s pallbearers.
That last detail matters, because a persistent rumor online claims Tony Griffin sued his father’s estate executors in a bitter trust battle.
That claim traces back to two entirely unrelated court cases, one involving a different man also named Tony Griffin embroiled in a Kentucky family business dispute, and another involving Herbalife founder Mark Hughes’ estate, which happened to include a Beverly Hills property Merv had once owned.
Neither case has anything to do with Merv Griffin’s actual family, and no such lawsuit exists in the court record.
Griffin is buried at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park under an epitaph that sums up his sense of humor perfectly: “I will not be right back after this message.” You can read more about his broadcasting legacy in the Television Academy’s official Hall of Fame tribute.
Griffin’s era produced plenty of other larger-than-life hosts too, and this look back at the great American talk show hosts of the 60s and 70s rounds up a few more of them.
Merv Griffin, Frequently Asked Questions
How wealthy was Merv Griffin when he died?
Merv Griffin’s net worth was estimated at well over $1 billion when he died in 2007, built primarily on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, his real estate holdings, and retained music royalties.
Did Merv Griffin create Wheel of Fortune based on his wife’s idea?
No, that popular story actually describes the origin of Jeopardy!. Wheel of Fortune grew out of Griffin’s childhood Hangman games and his interest in casino roulette wheels, and its shopping-segment format was originally mandated by an NBC programming executive, not Griffin himself.
Did Merv Griffin’s son sue his estate?
No, this is a commonly repeated but false claim that stems from two unrelated court cases involving a different person also named Tony Griffin and an unconnected Herbalife estate dispute. Merv Griffin’s actual son Tony inherited the estate without any legal dispute and became president of Merv Griffin Entertainment.
How much did Merv Griffin sell his company for?
Griffin sold Merv Griffin Enterprises to Coca-Cola, then the parent company of Columbia Pictures, for $250 million in cash in May 1986, while retaining profit participation and music publishing rights to his shows’ theme songs.
