Something else I should have mentioned in my piece on Merv Griffin. All the obits are saying that Merv was a good interviewer…and he generally was. But comedians often didn't like chatting with him on his show because of something I once heard Milton Berle call "The Frank Gorshin Rule." It flowed from a time when Frank Gorshin was on and Merv asked him, "Are you working on any new impressions?" Gorshin made the mistake of saying, "Well, I've been working on Charles Bronson."
The reason this was a mistake is because Mr. Gorshin had not yet perfected his Charles Bronson impression to the point where he was ready to do it in front of America. He didn't even have lines to go with the impression. Nevertheless, Merv pounced on the chance to debut Frank Gorshin's Charles Bronson impression and badgered the poor mimic into doing it. It wasn't very good and Gorshin was humiliated.
Merv did this kind of thing often. One time, he had Morey Amsterdam on…and as you may recall, Mr. Amsterdam sometimes played a few lines of music (and only a few) on a cello during his act. I'm not sure if he was ever much of a cello player but by the time of this particular appearance with Merv, Morey was way out of practice and genuinely unable to play more than a few bars of nothing. Merv, however, challenged him. He said something like, "Morey, you always promised me that some day, you'd play a real cello solo on my show here. Well, tonight's the night." And despite Amsterdam's insistence that he was rusty, Merv had just such an instrument brought out and The Human Joke Machine was forced to perform with it. It was one of the most embarrassing moments I've ever seen on a talk show because Morey couldn't play the thing and he couldn't even find a way to be funny about not being able to play it. Merv finally realized what he'd done and tried to alibi for Morey by saying the cello they'd supplied was woefully out of tune. But from the way Morey Amsterdam was sweating, that obviously was not the problem.
Anyway, The Frank Gorshin Rule, as it was explained to me is that you never say you can do anything around Merv Griffin unless you're prepared for him to make you do it on the air. If you said, "Next time I'm on your show, Merv, I'll juggle for you," you were going to juggle immediately whether you liked it or not. Berle told me about this and added that it came in handy. If there was something he wanted to be asked to do on the show — sing a certain song, tell a certain anecdote, whatever — all he had to do was tell Merv he wasn't prepared to do it. Suddenly, it was a Command Performance.
A few weeks after he told me this, Berle was on with Merv and I made a point of watching. Just as that segment was ending and Merv was about to introduce the next guest, Berle said, "I'm going to practice and some day when I come on here, I'll do a card trick." Griffin immediately brightened up and said, "Well, I bet the audience would love to see one right now." Uncle Miltie protested he wasn't prepared but at Merv's urging, the audience applauded and demanded a card trick. And lo and behold, Berle just happened to have a deck with him…