Richard Meryman (Aug. 6, 1926 – Feb. 5, 2015) was a journalist, biographer and Life magazine writer and editor who pioneered the monologue-style personality profile, beginning with a famous Marilyn Monroe interview, published two days before her death in 1962, which became the basis for a 1992 HBO program “Marilyn: The Last Interview.”
Over the course of his six-decade career, Meryman interviewed a host of 20th century luminaries, including Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Olivier, Mae West, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Carol Burnett, Burt Reynolds, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Armstrong, Paul McCartney, Marilyn Horne, Joan Sutherland, Joan Rivers, Neil Simon, and Andrew Wyeth, who became a lifelong friend.
A number of those interviews led to books, including two Joan Rivers autobiographies, Louis Armstrong’s 1971 self-portrait, Elizabeth Taylor’s eponymous 1964 autobiography, and four books on Andrew Wyeth, the last of which was published in 2013. He also turned his sensitive eye on himself and his family, reflecting on the death of his first wife, artist Hope Meryman, in the memoir “Hope: A Loss Survived.”
A resident of New York City and Dublin, New Hampshire, Meryman was born Aug. 6, 1926 in Washington, D.C., where his father, Richard S. Meryman, Sr., a portrait and landscape painter, served as principal of the Corcoran School of Art. He grew up and attended grammar school in Dublin, N.H., and spent summers on his mother’s family ranch in Carpinteria, Calif. He died in New York City Feb. 5, 2015 at the age of 88.
He was a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover and Williams College (1948). He served in the Navy as an ensign during World War II. In addition to Williams, Meryman spent a year each at Tufts University and Amherst College and did graduate work at Harvard University. He was an all-American lacrosse player and an avid downhill skier, golfer, and tennis player.
In 1949, possessed of “a love of adventure undiminished by caution,” as he later recalled, Meryman and future U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, along with a third friend, bought a 1935 Packard hearse, put a mattress in the back where the coffin should be, and set off for Alaska. After an axle broke on the second day, wiping out their savings, they detoured to Montana, where the Hungry Horse Dam was under construction. All three were hired and almost immediately fired for a variety of mishaps. Close to broke, Meryman and Moynihan hopped freight trains back home.
Shortly after his return, Meryman interviewed for a job at Life magazine and always believed it was that adventurous tale, along with his childhood in a visual, artistic home, that led the editor to take a chance on an inexperienced writer.
Meryman’s first assignment at Life was helping review unsolicited photographs. (He later recalled that one species nursing another was a favorite subject.) From there, he moved up to sports reporter, where he covered boxing and baseball, including Mickey Mantle's first game with the New York Yankees.
He was transferred to the Life bureau in Beverly Hills in 1951, and, while visiting his uncle on the family ranch up the coast in Carpinteria, met and fell in love with Hope Brooks. They married in 1953, just before he moved to Life’s Chicago bureau, and honeymooned in Las Vegas on their way east.
In Chicago, Meryman worked on a photo essay about the South Side, met Harry Truman, and, in classic Chicago style, while attending a press conference for a local politician, was slipped a $100 bribe by a political aide. He used it to buy a black-and-white photo printer.
In 1956 he moved to Life’s New York office, where he worked as the Religion editor and then the Education editor, writing a piece on exceptional teachers of which he was particularly proud.
When Meryman was picked to head the brand new Human Affairs department, focusing on “people stories,” his career took off. The department’s sweeping nature played to his inquisitive, compassionate, insightful style—giving him free rein to pursue virtually any story he could justify.
Attempting a piece on the experience of great fame, he tried unsuccessfully to interview Cary Grant. Then he set his sights on interviewing one of the most famous stars in the world, Marilyn Monroe, who had just been fired from Something’s Got To Give, after repeatedly failing to show up for filming.
After two get-acquainted meetings in New York and an interview by her press agent, Marilyn finally agreed and allowed their hours of conversation to be recorded. That interview, he wrote recently, was such “a bravura performance, a torrent of emotions, ideas, claims, defenses, accusations, self analysis, anecdotes, gestures, justifications, and squeaky laughter,” that “then and there I decided to assemble her words into a monologue—a Marilyn self-portrait on the pages. Between the lines, she herself would reveal her lonely insecurity.” It became his trademark style.
In 1970, Meryman shifted into covering the acting world and eventually headed the Entertainment department at Life. When the magazine folded in 1972, he began a freelance career that lasted the rest of his life, writing for such publications as Lear (where he was a contributing editor), People, Vanity Fair, McCall’s, Smithsonian, National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine and authoring a dozen books.
He turned his sensitive eye to non-celebrity subjects, as well—an unwed mother giving up her child for adoption, the wrenching struggles of alcoholic women, and his own overwhelming grief at losing Hope to cancer in 1975. With support from his second wife, Elizabeth Meryman, he continued to publish until the end of his life.
Meryman was gifted with keen emotional and psychological insight and a deep empathy for his subjects. He was an excellent listener, and his compassionate, self-effacing manner and thoughtful questions always had a way of opening others up, whether they were on the other side of a tape recorder or sitting around his dining room table.
He and Hope had two daughters, Meredith Landis and Helena Meryman.
Books:
Andrew Wyeth, a spoken self-portrait (2013) The Dublin Lake Club: A Centennial History (2001) Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (1996) First Impressions: Andrew Wyeth (1991; young adult book) Still Talking (1991; with Joan Rivers) Enter Talking (1986; with Joan Rivers) Broken Promises, Mended Dreams (1984) Andrew Hope: A Loss Survived (1980) Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz (1978) Louis Armstrong—A Self-Portrait (1971; with Louis Armstrong) Wyeth (1968), a major book of the artist’s paintings Elizabeth Taylor (1964 with Elizabeth Taylor, unattributed)
