From Talk Shows to Takeovers

By Daniel Benjamin

He seems a most unlikely tycoon. But Merv Griffin, the chunky, eternally cheerful and perfectly tanned TV personality who was host of 5,520 talk shows during a 23-year on-air career, is precisely that. In the past two weeks, in fact, Griffin, 62, has shown the mettle of a super-tycoon by taking on a formidable foe: Donald Trump, 41, the billionaire New York City developer.

Griffin is trying to wrest Resorts International, the Atlantic City-based hotel and casino operator, from Trump. The developer, Resorts' chairman since last year, has been buying shares in the company and bidding for the rest. His aim is to merge it into his privately held Trump Organization. But on March 17, Griffin began his unexpected last-minute bid for the company, initially offering $35 a share for stock that Trump intended to buy for $22 a share. Last week, despite the sluggishness in Atlantic City's casino business, Griffin raised his offer by $70 million, for a total bid of $295 million.

When Trump responded by filing a $250 million suit against Griffin for interfering in the Resorts/Trump merger, the entertainer promptly countersued for $500 million. Trump, he charged, had misled stockholders about the company's value and breached his fiduciary responsibility by not considering a more attractive offer. "It's a real war," says Marvin B. Roffman, a senior security analyst for the Janney Montgomery Scott investment firm. "Griffin is dead serious."

For Griffin, the bid for Resorts is merely his latest exercise in empire building. The move follows by three months his acquisition of the Beverly Hilton, for which he paid $100.2 million. Among Griffin's other properties are four radio stations in New York and Connecticut and a national closed-circuit television system that broadcasts horse and dog races onto screens at tracks and betting parlors. His large California real estate holdings include a $20 million home and a 157-acre site on the highest spot in Beverly Hills, where he is building a mansion. He continues to run Merv Griffin Enterprises, the TV production firm that he sold to Coca-Cola in 1986 for a reported $250 million. All told, the chairman of Griffin Co., which manages the business ventures that he still owns, is worth something like $600 million, making him one of America's richest individuals.

That is a long way from the $150 a week Griffin made as a Big Band crooner in the late '40s, when he recorded I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts. Once a boy blimp who weighed 240 lbs., Griffin shed a third of that bulk so he could sing on stage. He later had a brief movie career, which included one line in a Doris Day film. Guest appearances for Jack Paar, Johnny Carson's predecessor in NBC-TV's late-night spot, won Griffin his own daytime talk show in 1960, which he syndicated. It was so successful that in 1969 CBS offered him $80,000 a week for a show opposite Carson.

When it failed, Griffin put together a new syndicated show, serving as host until 1986. But through the '60s and '70s, he was laying the foundation for his fortune, using game shows as the building blocks. With his wife at the time, Julann, he devised a program whose gimmick was the simplest of inversions -- giving the answer and asking for the question. Jeopardy's success funded Griffin's other investments, including Wheel of Fortune, the most profitable syndicated show ever, with estimated revenues of more than $100 million a year. The two shows were the trophy properties in Griffin's sale of his production company to Coca-Cola.

Griffin is a hands-on chief executive, thoroughly involved in planning and now plotting takeover strategy. He oversees a staff of 120 in Los Angeles and is constantly on the phone to Griffin Co. President Michael Nigris, who directs 100 employees in New York City. Griffin the businessman is a tougher character than the talk-show host who sympathetically listened to an endless parade of guests. To beat Donald Trump, Griffin will have to be as aggressive behind the scenes as he was agreeable in front of the camera.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles