Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (2 page)

Appearing on The Perry Como Show in 1957, Ethel Merman complains to her
soft-spoken host, "Every TV show I'm on makes cracks about my voice. Just
once, I'd like to go on a show where they considered me to be a lovely, delicate, feminine dame." "You don't need to yell," he replies. So the two decide
to sing a song quietly, "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob Bobbin'
Along." The duet is quite touching, and a twinkle dances in Merman's eye.
She seems relaxed with Como, pleased to be singing this way-in her voice
there is no harshness, no punched-out notes. But as they near the end of the
number, Ethel decides to go back to being Ethel Merman, feigning frustration about bottling it all up. Like a kid, she pleads, "Oh, come on, let me
belt!" Como literally stands back as Ethel lets it rip, ending the number with
volume and a bang. After the audience laughs and applauds, the overhead
boom mike is lowered into the TV frame. It is shattered, with wires and
springs sticking out from all sides.

Ethel was correct: nearly every TV appearance she made drew cracks about
her voice, and that big voice has arguably overshadowed all other facets of her
persona and performing skills. Ethel Merman was the unrivaled star of a
steady stream of musical comedy hits, from Girl Crazy in 1930, through Anything Goes, Panama Hattie, Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam, and Gypsy,
to Hello, Dolly! in 1970. Among the dozens of songs she introduced were "I
Got Rhythm," "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries," "Anything Goes," "Blow,
Gabriel, Blow," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and "Everything's
Coming Up Roses." For almost half a century, Merman reigned over Broadway not just as its queen but as its queen during its period of greatest achievement, the golden age of musical theater. She worked with royal talents, including George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jule Styne, and Stephen
Sondheim, performing some of their best work. Porter even said, "I'd rather write for Ethel than for anybody else in the world."' Merman simply sits on
the top ofAmerican musical theater. "You could teach a course on the history
of twentieth-century musical through Ethel Merman," says singer Klea Blackhurst. "She intersects with everything and everyone, even Richard Rodgers.
She never did a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but they were her producers in Annie Get Your Gun. Everything feeds back to her."2

What Merman could do like no one else was project her voice to the very
back walls of a theater, important in the days before amplification. When
most singers projected like that, their voices were diminished in other ways,
but when Merman "belted," there was no distortion or loss of clarity. Irving
Berlin was right when he cracked, "When you write lyrics for Ethel, they better be good, for if they're bad everybody's going to hear them anyhow."3 Her
innate sense of rhythm was extraordinary, her breath control a marvel, her
diction impeccable: you could hear every letter of every word when Ethel
sang, no matter how loudly or softly she delivered it. And, as Perry Como
learned, she could handle light, jaunty tunes (or, on other occasions, lullabies, ballads, jazz numbers, and torch songs) as deftly as rousing anthems like
Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business," the song from Annie Get
Your Gun with which she is practically entwined.

For most people who heard Ethel Merman perform live, her voice was less
a voice than a mesmerizing force. Said one reviewer of the 1940s Panama Hattie, "She blows through the script like a cyclone.... Broadway, not Park Avenue, finds its voice in her, and everyone listens to her enraptured."' People
who saw Ethel in Gypsy (1959) recall being "frozen, spellbound" by a voice
that was "bigger than the entire theatre. "5 To many, the voice seemed grander
than nature itself, and over her career, critics and composers had fun comparing it to marching bands, calliopes, and sonic booms; to Arturo Toscanini,
she sounded like a castrato.

For many, however, it's the full-out belt that is the only thing known as
"Ethel Merman," especially outside Broadway circles. A young performer recalled a singing class in a drama school in the Southwest: "There were a
couple times in rehearsals when my musical director would say, `Good, now
"Mermanize it!"' and these people, who were very young and had hardly even
heard of her, knew exactly what to do to produce the `Merman effect' when
they sang."6 It's precisely that Merman effect that outstrips Ethel Merman in
so many ways. Even during her own lifetime, people often assumed that Merman herself was articulated in the character of her voice: brash, full of vitality and resilience, and with an inflection that, however firm its homegrown
Astoria accent, seemed to take its cues from some other, joyous world.

In many ways, this is not an unfair understanding. Merman's vitality was
legendary, and she was a colorful figure offstage as well as on, as revered for
her quick comebacks and put-downs as for her distinctive voice. In her second autobiography, for instance, she teased readers with the chapter title "My
Marriage to Ernest Borgnine," suggesting an inside view of their infamously
short union. Its contents? A single blank page. Or, on her famous lack of stage
fright, "What's there to be scared of? I know my lines." She was hardworking
and tough, performing in an era that required eight shows a week without microphones and, in the first decades, air-conditioning. So few were her sick days
that her Call Me Madam understudy, Elaine Stritch, was able to check in,
check out, and go to New Haven to work on another show. And the worldfamous insurers, Lloyds of London, once labeled Ethel their best risk.

Her sense of humor was as robust as her voice. One of the most hilarious
moments of Merman ever captured on film is a cameo she did in the 1980 disaster spoof Airplane! in which she plays Lieutenant Hurwitz, a soldier suffering from war trauma. So severe is his condition that the poor man believes
he's Ethel Merman. When the camera reveals Hurwitz, there is seventy-twoyear-old Merman in hospital pajamas, sitting up in her sickbed, belting out
"Everything's Coming Up Roses" from Gypsy. It takes several attendants to
sedate the lieutenant. Few stars of Merman's stature would even have considered doing such a hammy send-up of their persona, but she enjoyed the
appearance (one day of work, after all) as much as audiences did.

Like Lieutenant Hurwitz, everybody believes they know who Ethel Merman was, and she remains a popular and often fun reference point today. Yet
the popular conception of Merman as the irrepressible, big-voiced wonder
fails to cover all that she meant to Americans over the decades. Nor does it
do justice to her personal life. Given that her career spanned from Tin Pan
Alley to disco and moved from costars such as Bing Crosby to Jack Klugman,
Betty Boop to Batman, one would be hard-pressed to find just one "Ethel
Merman" over the years. The sheer number of myths that circulate around
her (Did she never actually tour? Was she in any flops? Did she really have an
affair with Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann?) create an unsteady
icon that the ardor of both fans and detractors intensifies. And people are
rarely neutral about Ethel Merman.

Merman's singing career ran from the late 192,os to the early r98os, during
which time the Broadway musical was transformed several times over; entertainment forms and media came and went, along with different music,
comedy, and acting styles. She began in the waning days of vaudeville and
peaked in the era of light book musical comedies whose thin stories were little more than excuses for composers to show off their tunes. These shows were
written with specific stars in mind rather than with sophisticated story lines
or character development. Merman's shows were "hers" in a way that is no
longer possible today, adding to her impact as a performer. With the exception of Gypsy (and to a lesser extent Annie Get Your Gun), Merman never did
an "integrated" musical in which stories and music advanced each other or
complex, well-developed characters were featured.

Early on, in the 1930s, one critic called Ethel a "coon shouter," 7 the happily outdated expression used to describe black powerhouses such as Ma
Rainey and "ethnic whites" who performed in African-American styles or in
blackface, such as "Noisy Sophie Tucker." But it was rare for Anglo-Saxon
whites to receive the epithet. It's almost as if Merman's voice, rhythm, and
lung power were too instinctive to belong to a WASP, and a number of related assumptions-about race, ethnicity, social station--did, in fact, cling
to her public image for over forty years. So, too, did the nuanced prejudices
of these assumptions: Merman and her voice were ostensibly crass and primal; her voice alone, uncrafted or even coarse. In the words of one New
Yorker, "She didn't sing, she honked."8

As for her roles, whether onstage or on-screen, Merman usually played the
tough cookie with a soft heart and a crush. In her thirteen musicals, she never
played a typical romantic female lead. Yes, she often got her man (Stars in
Your Eyes, Call Me Madam), but usually the affair was too forced to make
sense, a point made even through casting. In the stage version of Call Me
Madam, for instance, the prime minister of Lichtenburg was played by operatrained Paul Lukas and, on film, by the even more implausible George
Sanders. Hollywood had plenty of trouble with Merman's image, deeming it
too brash for the film industry's more genteel notions of romance and womanly glamour. Indeed, Merman's femininity was always bedeviled: a castrato
for Toscanini; the fantasy lesbian in the Jacqueline Susann rumor; the male
Lieutenant Hurwitz in Airplane! Her gender never seemed to coincide fully
with American norms, but at the same time, it didn't escape them either,
especially for Ethel in real life.

Privately, Merman could be as hard as her stage image, but that hardness
has assumed such legendary proportions that it's come to overshadow her
other features. An entire book could be written of zingers attributed to Merman; one, for instance, is that, during a rehearsal, she told her accompanist,
"Look, pal, do me a favor. Take the Vienna rolls off your fingers!"9 But what's
not clear from this remark (which she did make) is that the pianist in question, Lew Kessler, had a long working relationship with Merman and that, with these words, Ethel was merely teasing an old friend. The private Merman was, like all of us, contradictory, but the traits that sit most uneasily with
her public persona are those that point to her softness-the affection that
could exist in a "Vienna rolls" comment, for instance. Those closest to her
knew that Ethel was often extremely diffident and vulnerable, especially
when not called on to perform as "Ethel Merman." "That's what the public
finds hard to believe about her," says close family friend Tony Cointreau.
"And that vulnerability came out in close relationships with men."10

When she first hit the big time, young Ethel Merman was New York City's
"girl next door." She went from being a stenographer in Queens to being the
toast of Broadway when, literally overnight, on October 14, 1930, the secondstring singer brought the house down with her performance of George and
Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm." Across the greater New York area, young
working women responded to her as a Depression-era fantasy come true, and
for over a decade, the press stressed Merman's natural, wholesome look, her
untrained voice, and her down-to-earth personality. By 1946, she seemed
ideal for Irving Berlin's song "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly," which he wrote
with her in mind for Annie Get Your Gun. At 1,147 performances, Annie Get
Your Gun was Merman's biggest hit to date-and her best role. As Annie
Oakley, Merman personified American grit, determination, and vitality,
things that she personified offstage as well, whether in her wartime benefits
or at home, where she was raising two children with journalist husband Robert Levitt.

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