What Is Jeopardy!'?

"How many feet in a mile?" Merv shot back.

"Seventy-nine Wistful Vista."

"Wow! What was Fibber McGee and Molly's address?"

And on that slender column of trivia. Jeopardy! was built.

In the early days, questions about the show's survival outnumbered the answers. "The only people we could get to appear were these heavy intellectuals and earth mamas we pulled out of bookstores," says Griffin. "None of them seemed too concerned with grooming. I was very nervous about it."

Griffin appreciates the value of appearance. As a radio crooner in the '50s, he was billed as "America's romantic new singing star." But 250-pound tenors don't seem nearly as romantic on TV, so directors had to devise ways to keep Merv out of camera range. "They had me sing behind 14 dancing girls and a potted plant," he says.

Ironically, it was on TV that Griffin achieved his greatest fame, first as the host of a game show called Play Your Hunch, and then seated on a chat-show couch, purring, laughing obligingly and comparing life-styles and sport-jacket linings with the rich and shameless. "I ask a lot of questions, read all the local papers." coos the man who made himself master of the trivial interview. "I am a thick blotter of mostly useless information."

In 1975, he remembered the word game called Hangman that he and his sister had played as kids in the backseat of the family car. Out of that memory came Wheel of Fortune. Eleven years later he sold Merv Griffin Enterprises, which consisted mostly of Jeopardy! and Wheel, to Coca-Cola for a reported $250 million. But he still has a hand in his production company and often watches the shows it produces. He also watches the stock market. Last year he bought Donald Trump's share of Resorts International for more than $160 million (the entire Resorts deal cost Griffin $364 million). He now estimates his personal worth at $1 billion.

And what sort of guy is Merv?

"What is overweight?" deadpans Trebek.