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.
[1] 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.
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.
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.
Then he set his sights on interviewing Marilyn Monroe, who had just been fired from the unfinished 1962 film, Something's Got to Give, after repeatedly failing to show up for work.
The interview, Meryman recalled, 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.
He turned his attention to non-celebrity subjects, as well—an unwed mother giving up her child for adoption, the struggles of alcoholic women, and his own overwhelming grief at losing Hope to cancer in 1975.
He was regarded as an excellent listener with a compassionate, self-effacing manner and thoughtful questions that 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.