Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (20 page)

After extolling "her vitality which is evident in all her movements," a male
columnist writes that, when Ethel sings, "That's sex appeal, a million men
will tell you; sex appeal that makes a siren like Dietrich look anemic!" seemingly echoing young Miss Cantor's preferences.

In the early 1930s, stars often gave beauty secrets in papers and magazines
devoted to women. Ethel was no different. In one piece, she goes on at length
about nail care-from her fondness of painting them with the whites of the
half-moons visible to her reminders that women should have manicures at
least twice a week so that their nails don't dry out, and always, always, to
moisturize their nails every night, as she does. Ethel advises against putting
eye shadow on anywhere but the eyelid. "That was my first big mistake, before I got used to stage make-up. I brought the color right up to the line of
my brow, and did I look terrible! I was a sight." Blondes in particular, she
warns, can easily appear "overpainted."75

These newspaper and magazine articles were usually written in-house and
then attributed to various guest stars. The kinds of columns and tips attributed to her, though, helped add to the Ethel Merman persona, of being a
practical, well-groomed girl who, unlike her blond sisters, wasn't interested
in appearing garish or going for too much. (Stories of Merman overpainting
herself when left to her own devices anticipate what a few claim about Ethel
in her later years, although one reviewer of the 1930s Red, Hot and Blue! remarked that he couldn't see how she could keep her eyes open, her eyelashes
were so heavy.)

Ethel Merman entered show business when fan magazines and gossip
sheets were becoming widespread and were enjoying wide popularity and influence, especially among female readers. Stars' lives were presented, held up
for fascination, emulation, or envy. Trade papers like Variety (both East and
West Coast versions), Screen, and Stage were part of this new wave of publicity and promotion of stars, as were the press sheets that accompanied films.
Syndicated newspaper columns peddled the latest news and gossip from
Broadway and Hollywood. It was, in short, an age of early star worship.
Ethel's open appreciation of other stars was part of this culture, just as surely
as it was tied to her almost childlike fascination with her own celebrity, a facet
of her that mingled freely with the honest pride she had in her achievement.
That fascination was lifelong, a constant theme of her autobiographies, scrapbooks, and tales for interviewers. She loved meeting stars and political figures,
and the scrapbooks show her comments written on ambassadors' place cards:
"he was the one who ... ," even if only to identify them for her dad.

In 1935, Ethel appeared in a motion picture and didn't do a stitch of work for
it. Paramount's The Big Broadcast of 1936 was a compilation film, directed
once more by Norman Taurog. It featured an array of stars, including Amos
and Andy, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bing Crosby, Bill Robinson, the
Nicholas Brothers, Mary Bolan, Charlie Ruggles, and the Vienna Boys'
Choir in a mash of a few newly done routines and (mostly) existing footage.
Its plot line is threadbare: faced with financial trouble and likely closure, New
York radio station WHY enters a contest with a $2,50,000 purse for producing the year's best broadcast. The two leads (Jack Oakie and Henry
Wadsworth) travel around with their "Radio Eye" machine to transmit skits
and songs in a kind of nascent televisual form. They win when, held as prisoners on the Isle of Clementi, the judges take their odd experience to be wellwritten intrigue. Ethel appears near the very end, "broadcast" on the Radio
Eye, where she is introduced as "Ethel Merman of Broadway." It was a
supremely easy way for Paramount to capitalize on a star they didn't know
what to do with. The prerecorded "It's the Animal in Me" shows our city girl
traipsing across the jungle (rear projection conspicuously evident), swinging
on vines, sliding down poles, and finally arriving in front of a set of chorus
girls and trained elephants. Filmed in low-budget Busby Berkeley styleeven going into a trademark overhead shot-the sequence gives Ethel less
than three minutes in a movie that is nearly two hours long.

Broadcast opened in New York on Friday, September 13, to standing-roomonly crowds. (Ethel later quipped that it was a great way to get paid twice for
so little work.) Photos of her with her animal costars hit the press, and although this coverage was neither new nor unique (reports of Ethel acquiring
a new pet dog were run-of-the-mill, as they were for most stars), it does suggest that shooting comic (or at least nonromantic) stars like her among "low"
beasts seemed somehow more appropriate than doing so in front of grand
mansions or expensive cars.

Red, Hot and Blue!

Merman's next show was Red, Hot and Blue! another star vehicle with a silly
plot. Her character, Nails Duquesne, is a former manicurist who inherits millions from her husband. The newly minted philanthropist holds a "comingout party" for five parolees, including "Policy" Pinkle (Jimmy Durante, per fectly cast), who actually prefers the jail. Nails's task is to run a lottery in order
to track down "baby," the girl whom lawyer Bob Hale (Bob Hope) loved as a
child and now wants to marry. She'll be easy to detect, Hale says, since a long
time ago she sat down on a hot waffle iron. The lost love turns out to be a
"floozy" named Peaches, who is in their own gang. Although Hale is puzzled
by what he ever saw in her, no one's disappointment is greater than Nails's,
who has grown sweet on Bob Hale/Hope, in the first of Ethel's improbable
pairings on Broadway. ("When Bob Hope says he loves Ethel Merman, it
seems only part of the kidding," wrote one reviewer. "He's a decidedly tepid
hero.")76 After some skirmishes with the government, which is watching to
make sure that the lottery ends up in a genuine marriage to the winner, the
Senate declares the lottery unconstitutional, and Bob and Nails marry.

Originally intended as an Eddie Cantor vehicle under the title Chutes and
Ladders, Red, Hot and Blue! was produced by Vin Freedley. The newly
formed team of Lindsay and Crouse wrote the book, and songs were by Cole
Porter in his widely anticipated first show since Anything Goes. Songs included "Hymn to Hymen," a risque tribute to a false god of marriage: "So
Hymen, thou phony/ God of matrimony, /We say baloney to thee." Merman's numbers, "Ridin' High," "Down in the Depths on the 9oth Floor,"
"You're a Bad Influence on Me," "Red, Hot and Blue," and, especially, "It's
De-Lovely" (sung in a duet with Bob Hope), had more staying power.

After previews in Boston and New Haven, Red, Hot and Blue! opened on
October 29, 1936, at the Alvin. That evening, as with any opening night, Cole
Porter was not having fun. "The morning after an opening of one of my own
shows," he wrote, "is more or less the same as any other morning, except that
I sleep much later. In the case of Red, Hot and Blue , I broke my record by exactly ten minutes." One by one he got telephone calls from Freedley, Merman, then Durante, who all asked, "How are you feeling?" Once he told
them fine, they hung up. When Ethel called, though, he had mixed feelings.
"I wasn't sure what to do. I love Ethel.... [But u] sually, when Ethel phones
me it is to suggest changes in her songs, and this was one morning when I
did not feel like doing anything of the kind." 77 He took the call.

Reviews said that Merman's voice was in its best form yet, and Red, Hot
and Blue! would run for a respectable 183 performances. No one pretended
that the show was earth-shaking, and Brooks Atkinson noted that the ghost
of Ethel and Porter's previous "gangster musical, Anything Goes" was "haunting the makers of Red, Hot, and Blue, to their disadvantage."78

Red, Hot and Blue! has gone down in the books for several behind-thescenes stories. One is a sweet one: Bob Hope, residing at 65 Central Park West at the time, would pick up Ethel at her 25 Central Park West address while
walking down to the Alvin. Another involved them in a less tranquil moment. It was starting to get around town that you didn't mess with Ethel
Merman, especially onstage. Bob Hope did. One night, he delivered his
scripted lines to her while he was lying down, and the audience howled.
Merman was furious. Not only had Hope deviated from the script, but he
had done so at her expense. Not one to be upstaged, she told him, "Do that
one more time and I'll flatten that ski nose of yours even more," and had producers give him a warning. Hope stuck to his lines.

The most famous anecdote involves billing for the show. Durante and
Merman were the two featured players, and neither wanted to cede top
billing to the other. Durante was the established star, the beloved old-time
vaudevillian, but Merman was hot, and her star was ascending. Their agents
were at it for weeks, and no one budged. Finally an agreement was struck: the
names of the two stars were inscribed on what resembled the crossed planks
of a railroad crossing sign so that neither appeared "first," and every few
weeks their names would be reversed. As the newcomer, Bob Hope was on a
horizontal plank underneath.

These last two stories circulated widely and offered the press (and the producers) a calculated way to give the public some behind-the-scenes information. By now, consumers expected that kind of thing, however apocryphal or
controlled the material that was parceled out. Moreover, the show's producers,
agents, and stars must have approved of the leaking of these backstage escapades; they were, after all, lighthearted tensions rather than vicious dramas.
Even so, their accounts dovetailed only to a limited extent: one version has Durante relinquishing top billing after he'd been told that, as the senior entertainer,
it would reflect well on him to permit "ladies first"; Ethel claims it was the result of producers seeing the wisdom of awarding her top star billing; Hope, six
decades after the incident, said the "crossroads" solution was his idea.

Billing skirmish aside, relations were cordial among the three, especially
between Merman and Durante. The two had a genuine affection for each
other, openly admiring the other's skills and wisecracks. Durante would joke
that when he met his costars, he would be disappointed if they weren't in
complete awe of him. And so he sniffed around Merman in rehearsals, who
finally went up to her elder colleague, eyeballed his outfit, and said, "Say
Jimmy, do you think that style of suit is ever coming back?"79 He cracked up.
Over the years, the two of them did dozens of benefits and TV and radio
shows together. On January 24, 1954, they performed in an abbreviated version of Red, Hot and Blue! for NBC; twenty-five years later, when Durante was on his deathbed, Ethel visited him, staying over an hour, talking, singing,
and reminiscing. She could barely keep her composure when she left her old
friend, who had not recognized her for a moment.

The same day that Red, Hot and Blue! closed, Saturday, April to, Ethel did
a radio show and told audiences, "Well, we're closing on Broadway tonight,"
and then sang "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm."80 Hollywood would
end up adapting Red, Hot and Blue! for the screen, though not until 1949,
when Betty Hutton was given Ethel's role.

With the New York run behind her, Ethel uncharacteristically agreed to
take Red, Hot and Blue! to Chicago, where it proceeded to break records at
the Grand Opera House. Producer Freedley was on hand to introduce it
when the show opened there on April 13. Once again Ethel did not enjoy
being on the road. While gracious to the Chicago press, she still complained
about being in a city that shut down so early and that remained so cold.

Red, Hot and Blue! gave critics a chance to note Merman's comedic abilities more than ever; it also gave a slight spin on her image as the all-American
girl. For no longer did she simply embody traits like down-to-earth fire and
determination; now her characters had a relationship to the U.S. government.
Although Ethel's characters had yet to become heroines on the side of public
good, her shows were presenting a slightly more politicized sense of what that
public good entailed. And although Ethel would never have played in overtly
political shows like Pins and Needles or The Cradle Will Rock, certain politicized traits started to settle on her persona: she was on her way to becoming
the girl who, intentionally or not, was happy to do good for her country, to
follow the rules and support the powers that be. Her next show, Stars in Your
Eyes, a send-up of left-leaning screenwriters in 193os Hollywood, unionization,
and FDR's cultural programs, made this unambiguously clear. But before
then, Ethel returned to Hollywood for another shot at movie stardom.