Richard Sumner Meryman (August 6, 1926 – February 2, 2015) was an American journalist, biographer, and Life magazine writer and editor. He 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.
Some of Meryman's most notable interviews were with 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 self-titled 1964 autobiography, and four books on Andrew Wyeth, the last of which was published in 2013. He also reflected on the death of his first wife, artist Hope Meryman, in the 1980 memoir, Hope: A Loss Survived.
Early life
Richard Sumner Meryman Jr. was born August 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. His mother, Dorothea Bates Meryman, was a kindergarten teacher. He grew up and attended grammar school in Dublin, New Hampshire, and spent summers on his mother's family ranch in Carpinteria, California.
A graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover, and Williams College, Meryman was an all-American lacrosse player and served in the U.S. Navy as an ensign during World War II. He did graduate work at Harvard University. He also spent a year each studying at Tufts University and Amherst College.
In 1949, possessed of "a love of adventure undiminished by caution", as he later recalled, Meryman and future U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with another 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.
Career
Shortly after his return, Meryman interviewed for a job at Life magazine and was hired. He always believed it was the adventurous tale of his Alaska trip, 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, then to the Chicago bureau in 1953. 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 magazine's new department of human affairs, focusing on "people stories", his career took off. The department's sweeping nature gave him free rein to pursue virtually any story he could justify.