Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (13 page)

Ethel's second song, "He Doesn't Love Me Anymore," is a somber ballad.
But, surprise! Paul returns, first through a reflection in a pond into which
Helen is considering throwing herself. "He Doesn't Love Me Anymore" becomes "You'll Never Leave Me Anymore," which she sings while clutching
the suddenly materialized man. Old Man Blues skulks off.

Ireno and Be Like Me (both 1931) feature characters that are in keeping with
the persona that her stage and singing roles were swiftly establishing. In
Ireno-not to be confused with the 1919 stage musical Irene or with Ethel's
future role as Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes-Ethel plays New York singeractress Irene, in town to divorce absentee husband Cliff. She mingles among
a group of wealthy visitors, laughing and drinking as they proclaim, "Everyday is independence day" in Reno, referring to Nevada's liberal divorce laws.
Like theirs, Irene's view of marriage and divorce is caustic and supremely casual: "Pretty place, Reno. The judge separates you from your husband, and
the wheel separates you from your money."

Once Cliff's name comes up, however, sincerity eclipses Irene's cavalier
cynicism. The lyrics of "Shadows on the Wall" recount her being haunted by
his after-image. (In an interesting visual, their relationship is depicted as a
shadow show, shot from behind a curtain with the back lighting and silhouette common to studio musicals of the period.) When Cliff literally emerges
out of the shadow to Irene's table, it takes but a moment for her to change
her mind and forgive him. She sings an upbeat "Wipe That Frown Right Off
Your Face," not just to Cliff, but to the entire group in Reno. It's a song that
redresses not only Irene's romantic woes but also the travails of contemporary audiences, with lines referring to people whose "spirits are busted ...
this must be readjusted." It is pitched to lift the mood of an entire movie theater, much as Merman-and perhaps "Irene" the stage star-was doing in
live shows. Indeed, this film shows very little stretch between Irene the performer and Merman the performer, giving audiences a great look at Ethel's
emerging performance style: the hanky clutched in her hand, the numerous
sparkling bracelets. What's more, Ethel moves with special ease in Ireno,
whose camerawork is more fluid than in the other films. She enunciates every
letter, every syllable, of the rousing song, and its very lyrics seem to allude to
her as a star: "If you can't sing good, just sing loud."

Be Like Me follows much the same formula and, like Ireno, nears the kinds
of characters Merman was and would be playing on the boards. It also shows
the extent of the "ethnic flexibility" in Ethel's persona. Here she plays Eve, a
saloon girl-bartender in a southwest mining town. When the local boss announces that the State Department is no longer going to protect the thinly
populated area and that he'll be taking "the Americans" (i.e., the white folks)
to San Francisco, he also announces that he plans to leave behind Merman's
love interest, Billy "Smitty" Smith, a small, feckless fellow who bears the same
name as the man Merman will marry at the end of the decade.

Eve is the toughest-and least Anglo-of the "broads" Ethel played in the
shorts. Her dark curled hair-topped with a big curl on the cheek-is short
enough to show large hoop earrings; her outfit consists of a houndstooth skirt
and a gathered blouse. Eve's interactions with Rita, her Chicana coworker, are
relaxed, as they are with a black worker reporting trouble in the mine. The
cafe's customers are a pair of Africans: one a white colonial caricature, replete
with pith helmet, pinched British accent, and monocle; the other a black Francophone. Their presence is quite unmotivated by the story line, serving, one
supposes, as comic viewers of the imminent brawl and adding to the picture's strange ethnic styling. Ethel/Eve, for her part, is an Anglo dressed like a Spanish senora who speaks in a Long Island accent.

Significantly, Ethel moves with more ease here than she mustered in the
staid Old Man Blues. Her songs first urge her saloon audience to look for happiness ("Be Like Me"), and then, alone with the rather dull Smith, turns to
the blusier "After You've Gone." After Smith implausibly vanquishes his boss
in a brawl, Ethel turns "After You've Gone" into a syncopated festival of joy,
scatting several phrases with lifted eyes and arms-vintage Merman.

At the time these short films were made, even big-budget Hollywood features were limited by technological restrictions. This was the beginning of the
sound era, when bulky sound-recording devices were attached to the camera,
often curtailing its movement. Miking actors was a challenge, so their movements, too, were restricted (something Singin'in the Rain sent up in 1952).
In the quickly produced, cheap one-reelers, that pared-down aesthetic is even
more apparent. Workmanlike and unambitious, they have no aspirations to
be anything but vehicles to hang songs on, providing just enough information and visual detail to sketch out a character, a situation, and, sometimes,
an identifiable location. With the exception of Ireno's shadow game, Ethel's
nonanimated shorts offer few stylistic flourishes. Even the actors were kept
to a minimum, with only three people appearing in Devil Sea, Her Future,
and Old Man Blues.

Yet two of these modest films fly in the face of that plain, to-the-point aesthetic. Both HerFuture and Devil Sea, directed by Mort Blumenstock,46' have
a strikingly antinaturalist aesthetic. (Al Siegel is credited with their musical
arrangements, although that seems to have no bearing on their look.) The
towering podium of Her Future, for instance-a good fifteen feet-undoes
conventional perspective, dwarfing the judge seated behind it and Merman
standing in front of it. Shots are canted, perspective skewed, with walls,
floors, and ceilings meeting at impossible corners and angles, and high-key
lighting produces shadows in unexpected places. In a sense, the jagged look
fits the broken illusions Merman sings about, with the illusion of credible
surroundings so destroyed. Much the same occurs in Devil Sea, where the
action starts atop a tall angled staircase before moving to the floor below in
a basementlike interior, where Ethel performs her songs. Like that of Her Future, the space is physically impossible.

The visuals of both pictures seem to have popped right out of German expressionism, the movement that characterized Germany's art cinema from the
late i9ios to the mid-'2os (e.g., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). Expressionism
looked for ways to press "interior" psychological elements, such as character disturbances or imbalance, onto surface mise-en-scene and visuals. It's rather
remarkable that such run-of-the-mill American movies can be read as textbook expressionist pieces, with the dark underside of their story lines (crime
and possible incarceration in one, death in the other) conveyed visually, as they
are. At the same time, though, these shorts were never intended to present
complex characters struggling with madness or despair, but existed simply to
showcase a few popular tunes. That incongruity is echoed by placing a
working-class all-American figure, Ethel Merman, within this aesthetic of high
European art. (Even at this early point in her career, Ethel had gone on record
for disliking modern art or even reading books.)

Despite this odd incongruity, the two shorts are not at all campy. When
Merman's characters close each of them with fun-loving jazz numbers, the
camera simply zeroes in on her, and we lose sight of the improbable, nightmarish sets. Perhaps what these pictures ultimately show is how readily influences cross borders between countries and traditions and, in the process,
cross the sense of "high" and "low" class or entertainment styles. And there
Ethel Merman is, caught in the middle. And given that Merman's appearances were being noted by Die New Yorker Swats-Zeitungat the time, perhaps
this imported visual style was something recent German emigres might recognize. It is hard to say.

Since little of Merman's career is preserved on film, this handful of shorts
provides compelling documentation of her early singing and performing
style. "They show how physical Merman was as a performer," says Klea
Blackhurst.47 They also reveal her instinctive sense of control, her comic timing, and her complete lack of stage nerves; she is remarkably at ease in front
of the camera. Strangely, however, she seldom talked about the films, not because they were embarrassments, as The Cave Club was, but perhaps because
they seemed inconsequential in the face of her other work. In her second autobiography, for instance, Merman ignores them altogether. She never acquired copies of the shorts, despite her penchant for saving all of her recordings, press clippings, and the like. Tony Cointreau recalls that in the 1970s or
'8os the two of them went to the home of a fan in order to view them.48

Like press and publicity photos of the time, the films reveal an attractive
woman, full-figured but not abundantly so, neither heavy nor thin. And as
unself-conscious as she is with her body, it's the face that is most expressive and
striking. With her round cheeks and open mouth, Merman seems to light up
when she sings, her dark eyes twinkling when performing the upbeat numbers.

That attractiveness is arguably all the greater for not resembling other alabaster faces or cookie-cutter beauties of the time. And although the press never failed to take note of her appearance-stressing her good looks during this early
to mid-1930s period-even then, Ethel's looks were never the mainstay of her
image. Both the press and her fans gravitated to her voice, her energy, and her
down-to-earth style: "Looks? No, Ethel's not a beauty, and shorn of her plumage
and makeup, she might resemble any other nice little girl from Astoria. Her
taste in clothes is nothing to shout about; her background is unexciting. But
Ethel's got a quality which has made sirens of certain women since Eve was
born. Ethel has a greedy, lusty, honest-to-goodness love for life." 49

Take a Chance

The story of Merman's next hit, Take a Chance, can't be told without telling
the story of a flop that never made it to Broadway. Back in New York from
Los Angeles, Buddy DeSylva partnered with Laurence Schwab to write and
produce a show about putting on a show, called Humpty Dumpty. Jewish
comic Lou Holtz was cast as a theatrical angel who, with his family, provides
seventy-five thousand dollars to finance a revue lampooning events of American history, such as the Boston Tea Party and Betsy Ross sewing the first flag.
Merman's role was playing torch singer Wanda Brill.

Humpty Dumpty went into rehearsals, and its previews were set to begin
at the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh, a city that never had the weight that New
Haven had as a preview town. Perhaps this was a good thing, for when it
opened there on September z6, 1932, Humpty Dumpty closed within a week.
DeSylva and Schwab did serious surgery, shortening the show, and changing
title, book, music, and cast; they briefly renamed it We Three and replaced
Holtz with Jack Whiting, whom they deemed stronger leading-man material.
They added a romantic story with a character played by June Knight; Jack
Haley replaced singer Eddie Foy Jr. Vincent Youmans was hired to patch up
Richard Whiting and Nacio Herb Brown's score. Ethel Merman was one of
the few original featured players whom the producers retained as Take a
Chance was born.

It got strong reviews in Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Newark. Still, bad
luck dogged the show. Merman came down with the flu, causing the November 18 performance in New Jersey to be canceled and the New York opening to be delayed. And on November 24, fire damaged about a third of the
entire wardrobe.

Two days later, Take a Chance finally opened at the Apollo Theatre, two
months to the day of its disastrous Pittsburgh preview. It was an apposite title, opening in the worst year of the Depression and competing against shows
such as Of Thee I Sing, Face the Music, Dinner at Eight, Gay Divorcee, and
Noel Coward and Alfred Lunt in Design for Living. The chance paid off. Critics and crowds alike enjoyed it, especially Ethel's four numbers, "You're an
Old Smoothie," sung with Haley; her solos, the evangelical "I Got Religion"
and "Rise and Shine"; and the fourth, the runaway hit of the show, "Eadie
Was a Lady," the homage to the turn-of-the-century madam. Originally the
last was written for performer Walter O'Keefe, known for novelty numbers
such as "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" and "When Yuba Plays the Tuba
down in Cuba." But when DeSylva and Schwab couldn't secure him, they
turned the piece into a bigger production number, getting Richard Whiting
to modify the lyrics and Roger Edens, already working with Merman, to
arrange. (DeSylva also cowrote.) It was so big a hit, its lyrics were printed in
the New York Times.

One reviewer of the cynical, slightly bawdy torch ballad said, "Perhaps
only two persons in all this world savor all the salt that lies in that song, Ethel
Merman and Mae West. "50 It was not the only time the two were compared.
In "Mae West Old Story, Says Ethel Merman," the Los Angeles Times reports,
"Accused of sailing in on the Mae West vogue, Ethel chuckles naughtily. `I
began that vogue. I was singing "Eadie was a Lady" all dressed up with the
wiggly hips an' everything before Mae West's first picture, "Night after
Night," came out. Also, West was the sort of a hussy I was in Girl Crazy as
the wife of the gambler ... so I shall always claim Mae sailed to glory on my
vogue."'51 Their images would be intertwined throughout their lives, as
strong, lusty women and as widely impersonated icons among gay men, show
queens, and others.52 Papers of the time wrote that "Eadie" made an impression on no less than Hollywood's "Blond Bombshell," Jean Harlow, who
played the recording, she said, to get in the mood for her roles.53

Critic Bernard Sobel observed that "Eadie" and Take a Chance sailed on a
wave of i89os nostalgia that was also showing up in other Broadway shows
of the time, such as the new George White musical Melody and One Sunday
Afternoon. "How nostalgic this song and setting made us for days gone when
naughtiness thrived so happily," he wrote.54 Take a Chance was old-fashioned
in other ways as well. Some reviewers complained about the outdated physical style of vaudevillian veterans Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (who replaced
Jack Haley and Sid Silvers on June 5): "There was no place for the old-time
recruits from burlesque," one opined.55 John Mason Brown noted that Chic
Johnson was "fidgeting and writhing" during one of Ethel's songs; he "should
have known better than to try to outplay her ... he did everything but reach up to the top balcony and turn a spotlight on himself during her song."56
Whatever other nostalgia Take a Chance was trading in, vaudevillian humor,
by contrast, had run its course.