Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (18 page)

Ethel left for Hollywood to do the film in August 1935 with hopes and head
held high. Again, Agnes went with her and "had this to say of the 2,4-year-old
`torch singer': My Ethel is just a home girl!"5' New York City had been throwing itself at Ethel's feet, and her persona was becoming established there, but
her fame and public persona had not been cemented in Hollywood. And Ethel
just wasn't crazy about LA, still complaining about how early the city closed
down at night. During the day she loved soaking up the sun, but other than
that, there wasn't much of Southern California life that really appealed to her.
"Don't get me wrong, I like to go to Hollywood once in a while and make pictures all right. But what a dead life it is out there. There's just nothing to do.
New York's the place for me, and anybody that's got the swing of it like I have
can't break out of it so easily. Yes sir, Broadway's the life and I'm going to stick
by it as long as I can."52 And, "In Hollywood, there's one big clique and no
matter how big a name you have on Broadway, until you've made a hit in the
movies, you don't exist. Broadway welcomes everyone."53

Anything Goes had the misfortune of being filmed the year after Hollywood had established the Hays Office, a self-policing censorship bureau to
create and uphold guidelines for "appropriate" content. A public relations
creation as much as anything else, the office was the result of the industry
submitting to mounting pressure from Catholic and other groups about the
cinema's purported moral excesses and indecency. It culminated in the halfabsurd, half-draconian "Production Code," which would, among other
things, determine how many seconds a kiss on the mouth could last, place
married people in separate beds (always with one leg on the floor), and censure expressions such as "They're nuts." Broadway never experienced this
level of institutionalized censorship-one perk of not having the extensive
national reach of Hollywood's mass-produced product.

Gimmick though it may have been, the Hays Office had real teeth and
masticated Anything Goes, particularly Porter's songs. "In view of the flavor
of the lyrics, the title itself [Anything Goes] might be objected to."54 "Your at tention is called to the scene where a religious hymn entitled `Blow, Gabriel,
Blow' is burlesqued. "55 "Gabriel" and "All through the Night" were fully scuttled, and the lyrics of three remaining numbers, "Anything Goes," "You're
the Top," and "I Get a Kick out of You," were dramatically overhauled. In
"Kick," "sniffing cocaine" became "whiffing perfume from Spain." It's hardly
surprising that Cole Porter, a fan of neither revisions nor censorship, handed
the task of writing new song lyrics to Ted Fetter, whose final work Variety
eventually deemed "below the standard of those set by the originals."56

Other changes were afoot. Paramount expanded the Billy Crocker role to
show off Crosby and gave him top billing over Ethel. (She was billed over
Ruggles in Victor Moore's role, however.) Studio press sheets (newspaperlength artifacts that were filled with articles and tips for theater owners on
how to market the movie through contests, posters, give-aways, tie-ins, etc.)
maintained that Ethel had an unrequited crush on Crosby and other nonsense. They said she "still fears the long arm of the law" for peeking into the
Paramount Studios as a kid in Astoria.57 Clearly, Paramount knew how to
make Crosby the enticing star, but what to do with Ethel Merman was rather
less clear, trying in the end to cast her as a good little girl.

Back home in New York, the press was cheering for their woman:

This flicker is a return engagement for Ethel Merman at Paramount. She never
really got a chance in We're Not Dressing. Much of her work was not in the released picture, and one number [will appear in] The Big Broadcast. They didn't
appreciate what they had. It will be different for Miss Merman in Anything
Goes.... She has a better screen makeup [sic], and is wearing her own hair and
not a wig as she did in We're Not Dressing. Ethel Merman will be seen as Ethel
Merman in Anything Goes.58

She may well have been more "Ethel Merman" in the film, but there was not
much of her to see. In the final cut, her role was substantially reduced; and
her performance style, curtailed. Unable to move around as she liked to do
on a stage, Ethel sang "I Get a Kick out of You" perched atop a neon-lit moon
suspended from a nightclub ceiling. "If Ethel Merman could get her feet on
the ground for a minute, she might be able to make a fair stab at singing a
song," read one review. "Ethel is growing weary of motion pictures.... so far,
she says, the studios have done everything possible to interfere with normal
vocalizing." In We're Not Dressing she sings one number while pitching about
on a boat deck in a storm; another, in the "upper branches of some trees a la
Tarzan.... [In Anything Goes] she sings the title song wearing a fifty pound
metal and beaded dress, while running up and down stairs ... and `I Get a Kick' . . . floating over the heads of some people in a night club. She duets
`You're the Top' with Bing Crosby and as far as Ethel can make out she's supposed to be hanging from a chandelier."59

The Modern All-American Girl

The image of the all-American girl was being propagated all across the country, a soothing alternative to the more contentious icon of womanhood at the
time, the suffragist. Suffragists, often the butt of jokes, experienced an especially strong backlash after World War I. (Their goals were trivialized or considered unpatriotic.) Modernity, too, brought threats and anxieties to the
country at large. People fretted about the undoing of traditional gender roles,
the possibility of losing jobs (to women? to machines?), the loss of rural values, and the vague gloom of a society homogenized on a grand scale with the
intent of stamping out individualism. Women were entering the workforce
in greater numbers and were visible in areas that had previously been controlled exclusively by (white) men. How to reassure a changing American
landscape, how to soften the impact of women's growing autonomy? Answer:
extoll the virtues of a domesticated "all-American girl." This is precisely what
Florenz Ziegfeld had been doing in his Broadway revues since the end of the
nineteenth century in his Ziegfeld Follies from 1907 to 1928 and in his film
Glorifying the American Girl, which also featured a pre-Tarzan beefcake
named Johnny Weissmuller.

It's scarcely surprising that these anxieties were worked out iconically
through female archetypes that symbolized one sexual extreme or another.
Hollywood had its vamp, Theda Bara, and its virgins such as Mary Pickford
and Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Broadway never played the gender extremes
quite so hard, but even so, Merman was a rare breed, able to borrow from
both types. Publicity photos establish that Ethel was being presented less as
an all-American sweetheart than as an all-American modern. Young, white,
self-sufficient, down-to-earth, trendy, and "hep," the modern woman was
somewhat less demure than her sweetheart counterpart. Above all, she was a
friend to the latest trends and advances in American business and industry.
What better way to establish her than with advanced technologies that
showed off American know-how? People of the time were fascinated with
trains, cars, and, especially, planes-all that modernity could offer. Amelia
Earhart and Charles Lindbergh were heroes, and radio, stage, print, and
screen recounted aviator and aviatrix stories with abandon.

Entire studies have explored how modern technology and its products came
to be gendered in particular ways. Modernity meant mass production, more
leisure time, and more consumption. Whether as workers or as consumers,
women were suddenly taking charge of purchases for the home. The 19zos, like
the '5os after them, saw a glut of products aimed at making lives easier for female homemakers: vacuum cleaners and ice boxes in the'zos, blenders and specialty ovens in the '5os. In turn, these sorts of products would be aligned with
women, either through women's actual consumption of them or through the
illusion of consuming a "woman," say, with the purchase of a hot new car.

The 19zos had left behind a considerable legacy of products and of consumers used to enjoying them. Production had been robust, and goods multiplied. To make operating and owning these products seem alluring, advertisers presented scenarios in which "modern" women interacted with the new
devices, a tradition that remains with us today. Female stars entering the publicity machine were hired to promote high-end luxury products such as
automobiles, since there seemed to be something novel, even adventurous,
about a woman operating a large, motorized vehicle.

Ethel fit into this trend in interesting ways. Publicity agents posed her
in what can only be described as vehicular situations: One features a selfsufficient Ethel changing the tire on a car, advertising an auxiliary metal rim
that would "enable the woman driver to drive to the nearest service station"
with a flat.60 Another has her sitting in some indescribable exercise-as-flyingmachine contraption that is almost as bizarre as her bike-on-seaboards in
We're Not Dressing. (In reality, Ethel wouldn't have had a clue about what to
do with such devices; she rarely drove and her idea of exercising, she said, was
sun tanning.) Still, the publicity contributed to Merm's image as a hands-on,
hep working girl, and the well-publicized details of her pre-show biz career
added a touch of authenticity to the quirky photos.

Because of her very long career, Merman's trek through American culture
can be measured in part by different forms of transportation, literally moving as it did from buggies, trains, and steamships to cars and airplanes. Privately, the young Ethel didn't travel much, and when she gave up her private
car ("too impractical") in favor of cabs and walking in New York, it made the
papers. She didn't enjoy touring, and in general, up until midlife, Ethel preferred to stay close to home. In the 1950s, this changed first with a new residence in Colorado and then even more after Gypsy, when a footloose Ethel
Merman traveled around the world.

When she was positioned as a "modern woman" in the late r92os to mid1930s, Merman was not too different from other young stars of the time; these were the kinds of women who, the press intimated, could change a spare just
as easily as they could impart grooming tips. Ethel may have been in a league
of her own as a singer and Broadway performer, but newspaper photos show
that the media weren't ready to capitalize exclusively on that, focusing instead
on making Ethel seem like other contemporary female entertainers.

It was, for example, utterly routine for the press to stage pictures as stars arrived or departed from New York's Penn and Grand Central stations. On July
zI, 1938, Ethel posed at the back of the Twentieth Century train, holding a
lantern. Someone urged her to start swinging the lantern, and when she did,
the train started to lurch out of the station and a surprised Ethel had to be
helped off. The incident was dutifully reported, and as a result, the Railroad
Trainmen's Union gave Ethel honorary membership. Two weeks later, Bloomingdale's chimed in, promoting six-inch train lanterns for a dollar apiece.

Another photo, appearing in the Apollo Theatre program the week of May
15, 1933, shows an attractive Ethel in a low-backed gown; she was photographed
from behind in a typical glamour pose, hand on hip. The design is a sleek art
deco. Appearing to her right, however, is not a pitch for fashion gowns but
the following "quote": "I am told that American women spend billions of
dollars every year for cosmetics and facial care. Also that 45% of all motorists
who are injured in automobile accidents are cut by broken, flying glass. Why
in the world will a woman who spends so much time and money in caring
for her beauty, expose it so thoughtlessly to such a hazard? I'll never be able
to understand it ... with Safety Glass so easily and inexpensively obtainable,
and its protective value so thoroughly proven. -Ethel Merman."6' The effect is almost humorous, having glamour girl Merman offer technical advice
on car glass. But modern travel, like the modern woman, remained a cultural
obsession, even in Ethel's shows: the long taxi ride to Arizona in Girl Crazy,
the ship scenes in Anything Goes, in We're Not Dressing, and in Ethel's upcoming Eddie Cantor film, Kid Millions. Later, Ethel would be in a car caper,
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and, later still, in Airplane!This is not to
suggest that Ethel was alone in being linked to travel-indeed, it makes her
quite ordinary-but the range of her career and the persistence of these images offer a literal pun of a woman truly on the move. (The link was even supported in her real-life marriage to Continental Airlines CEO, Robert Six, in
the r95os.)

Ethel was able to get her name in public by doing benefit performances of
her shows or songs from her shows and recordings. The appearances fortified
aspects of her emerging star persona: the good-hearted girl next door, the
team player supporting important national, international, and humanitarian causes, a "trouper" for organizations in the Greater New York area. The charity work gave Merman's image a wholesomeness that remained with her the
rest of her life, even though some of her less wholesome social behavior would
complicate it in years to come. The frequency of this work clinched Ethel's
image as a vibrant, energetic modern-a young gal on the go who made time
for others in her busy professional life. Beyond its impact on her image, however, Merman's charity work demonstrated her strong personal and professional commitment to Broadway. Many of the organizations she supported assisted unemployed actors during the Depression and the war.

Work included benefits for the Theatre Wing and the young Actors Equity.
On December zo, 1931, she did a Sunday benefit for the New York Christmas and Relief Fund along with Everett Marshall, William Demarest, Kate
Smith, and her costar from Scandals, Ray Bolger. She did benefits for the
Milk Fund; she appeared for the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies; for the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society, where she was
billed with Fannie Brice, George Jessel, and Bill Robinson;62 and for the Israel
Orphan Asylum. Whether Merman was popularly perceived as Jewish at this
point is unclear. These events included prominent Jewish participants such
as Fannie Brice, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and Paul Muni
along with gentile performers such as Bill Robinson, a diversity that increased
as Hitler's machinery intensified and U.S. policy became less isolationist.