What Is… “A TIME FOR TONY”?

Back in those early days of Jeopardy!, when I was both hosting and producing the show, I used to answer all the mail. I’d send a response to everything, the fan letters as well as the hate mail. One day, Merv Griffin saw me doing this and said, “You know how I handle the nasty mail?” He grabbed a letter, balled it up, and threw it into the wastebasket.

I still take the input we receive from viewers very seriously—some might even say too seriously. If someone writes to criticize either me or the show, I probably spend way too much time and energy pondering their complaints and worrying about my performance. While I am no longer able to respond to every letter or email or comment on social media, I still try to answer as many as I can.

Merv was actually a very warm man. He had the unique ability to draw you in and make you feel like whatever you were saying was the only thing that mattered to him in that moment. He was not laid-back. He wasn’t cool. He was excited and engaged. That’s why he was such a great talk show host. He especially loved storytellers. That’s why he frequently had the two Orsons on his show—Orson Bean and Orson Welles. They knew how to tell great stories. It’s a lost art these days, when we only seem to have the attention span for sound bites.

With Merv Griffin.

The few times I spent with Merv were very special, but we didn’t have much of a relationship. He left Jeopardy! alone completely. He involved himself the first year or two in the design and colors of the set. And he did guest star with me on an episode of The Golden Girls that was shot on our set. But that was it. He never got involved in the material. His ex-wife, Julann, had originally come up with the idea for the show. As the story goes, shortly after the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, Merv was trying to come up with an idea for a new game show. Julann suggested giving the contestants the answers.

“That’s what put people in jail!” Merv said.

Julann then gave him an example of how it would work. I have heard two different stories about what she suggested as the first Jeopardy! clue. One version has her saying, “The answer is 5,280,” and Merv asking, “How many feet are in a mile?” The other version has her saying, “79 Wistful Vista,” and him asking, “Where did Fibber McGee and Molly live?” Whichever one it was, it convinced Merv to pursue the idea. And that’s how Jeopardy! came to be.

But his show, his baby, was Wheel of Fortune. He took a great deal of pleasure—and was good at it—in coming up with the word puzzles for Wheel. But he had no interest whatsoever in Jeopardy! That was Bob Murphy’s bailiwick.

Merv and Bob had been best friends as kids growing up in Northern California. Bob became successful in the real estate business, and Merv asked him to join his company. Bob eventually became president of Merv Griffin Enterprises.

Bob and I got to be best friends over the years. He’s Matthew’s godfather. In the early days of Jeopardy!, people would constantly challenge us to trivia games. There was a party one night hosted by the King brothers in which they decided they wanted to challenge Bob and me. Eight people got together on one team against the two of us. And we beat ’em. We beat ’em badly. I maintain we won because we made the perfect team. We complemented each other. Bob knew all that could be known, and I knew all the rest.

One fact about Merv that some people don’t know: he wrote the Jeopardy! theme song. It’s called “Think!”—though Merv originally wrote it as a lullaby for his son entitled “A Time for Tony.” Every time that song airs, Merv—and, since his death in 2007, his estate—gets a royalty. Even when, say, Paul Shaffer would play it when I made an entrance as a guest on David Letterman’s show, Merv would get a check. Shortly before he died, Merv admitted that the little Jeopardy! think music had earned him close to $80 million—more than $3 million a year for twenty-four years, plus little extras here and there when it’s used outside of the show.

People ask me, “Do you ever get tired of hearing it?” No, it’s just part of the show. I’m used to it. Granted, I don’t go around humming it. But I enjoy it when it’s played at a baseball game when a manager goes to the mound to make a pitching change, or when the referees at an NFL game are going to the video replay. It’s part of Americana. It’s something people recognize immediately. Same thing if somebody says, “Hey, you didn’t phrase that in the form of a question.” Everybody in the room knows exactly what the reference is.