Merv Griffin

George McKelvey, 72, a comedian who provided a bit of a boost to Steve Martin's early stand-up career and later became a club owner known as the "godfather" of the Denver comedy scene, died of a stroke Friday in Hemet. McKelvey, who began his career singing folk songs in the late '50s and switched to comedy in the early '60s, wrote and recorded the 1964 satirical song "My Radiation Baby (My Teenage Fallout Queen)," which also appeared on the LP "A Crowd of George McKelvey." As a comedian, McKelvey appeared on the Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson shows and performed with the San Francisco improvisational comedy group the Committee before moving to Denver, where he helped found Comedy Works, George McKelvey's Comedy Club in suburban Aurora and Wit's End. McKelvey's assist to Martin's budding comedy career came in 1967: After breaking his leg skiing in Aspen, McKelvey asked the 21-year-old Martin to fill in for him at a small folk club there.

When Rosie O'Donnell set out to make her mark in daytime talk, she modeled "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" after the chat fests of daytime pioneers Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. An unabashed fan of all things television, O'Donnell, 35, grew up enthralled with Griffin's Emmy-winning show, which was seen in syndication and on CBS from 1965 to 1986. Griffin, 72, also created the long-running game shows "Jeopardy!"

The Coconut Club, which opened last week in the Beverly Hilton Hotel, isn't exactly a jazz club. Its luxurious retro setting, in fact, resonates more with swanky '40s and '50s nightclubs such as Mocambo or Ciro's than with dedicated jazz venues such as Birdland or Bop City. The new room, created by Merv Griffin, entertainment business mogul, onetime TV talk-show host and former big-band singer, will have a music policy strongly oriented toward big bands and swing music.

It really was Mervelous. Especially when Merv Griffin, honoree at the John Wayne Cancer Institute Auxiliary's Odyssey Ball, sang "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts" and "It Had to Be You." The evening at the Beverly Hilton was just like the old Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador, where Griffin crooned before going entrepreneurially bonkers with TV--as, probably, America's first talk show host and creator of "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy."

Merv Griffin, the former 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 Sunday. He was 82. Griffin died of prostate cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to a statement from his family that was released by Marcia Newberger, spokeswoman for his Beverly Hills-based Griffin Group.

In 1985, Merv Griffin was granted an exclusive interview with President Reagan for "The Merv Griffin Show." As its producer, I was summoned to the West Wing to meet with Reagan advisors. The ground rules session lasted all of 30 seconds ("Merv can ask whatever he wants"), but the meeting lasted almost an hour, because the staff, all fans of the show, wanted to know what Merv was really like.