Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (21 page)

Ethel's big break in Hollywood, such as it was, came in 1938, when zoth Century-Fox released three Merman pictures: Happy Landing, Alexander's Ragtime Band, and Straight, Place and Show. A clipping she saved from January
i8 predicts "Ethel Merman's Film Rise Certain."' She had been signed for a
three-picture deal beginning October 2-5, 1937,2 and by Christmas she was living in Los Angeles. Though she lacked the clout to procure special
treatment-Ethel was not, after all, a "star" borrowed from another studioshe was able to amend the billing clause "to provide for featured screen credit
[with] only the names of three other artists to precede Merman's name on
each picture."3 She was paid twenty-five thousand dollars for the first picture,
Happy Landing, Fox's third vehicle for their contracted skating star, Sonja
Henie (1912-69).

Sonja Henie was the young Norwegian-born star who was so popular in
the 193os and '40s that her fan mail rivaled that of Shirley Temple, Fox's trophy child star. The only times Henie's volume slipped beneath Temple's was
when Temple had just released a film, such as Little Princess in spring 1938.
Clean-cut and happy, Henie was wildly popular among children, especially
girls and young teens who wrote the bulk of the fan mail. (In fact, when volume dipped, Fox attributed it "to the coming of spring and the children who
write the majority of fan mail being ... out of doors.")4

Ethel, by contrast, never received much mail from film fans. Children
were hardly going to be responsive to Flo Kelly (her role in the Henie film)
and similar characters. Nor was Ethel Merman a big national name shining
with stardust for young fans, who were likely searching for role models like
themselves (Henie) or for grown-up glamour icons like Alice Faye. (Of course,
as an East Coast quantity, Ethel had no shortage of fan letters, poems, and
the like from kids who'd seen her there.) Fox also noted in one of its seasonal assessments of letters that "comedians [or, we should add, second-string players] never receive as much mail as heroes or `glamour boys and girls."'S

Merman's fan mail count was low for other reasons as well. Like all the studios, Fox was concerned mainly with its contract players, not people who
were brought in for a picture or two, like Merman, and that's where its publicity and record-keeping energy lay. Every month, the fan mail department
released figures for correspondence received by house performers: sometimes
top scorers would receive over twenty-one thousand letters per month (a very
high count, but more common by the mid-'40s, perhaps because of the war),
sometimes around three thousand. The count for most stars in the midrange,
such as Alice Faye, fluctuated month to month, depending on appearances,
publicity, and, especially, whether she'd just been in a film. The top three or
four players at Fox stayed relatively constant from the late 1930s to the early
'5os, when Ethel worked there. The big winner was wartime pinup girl Betty
Grable, although once Marilyn Monroe entered the scene, the gap between
first and second scorer closed. Occasionally, studio personnel wrote notes to
explain why someone's mail count had gone up or down over the monthif there had been a radio address, the release of a rival's film, and so forth. For
Merman, Fox briefly listed a post office address for her fans, but there is no
indication that her letters were ever tallied or preserved.

Happy Landing

The story of Happy Landing was generic enough for early treatments to be
called "Sonja Henie Production #z."6 The movie opens with a big send-off
of nightclub bandleader Duke Sargent (Cesar Romero), who is bringing his
band by plane to Europe-he considers himself too important and in too
much of a rush to go by boat-along with a hundred thousand golf balls
to keep them afloat in case they hit water. The press sees the stunt for the
hammy gimmick it is; so does Duke's earnest, eyeball-rolling colleague,
Jimmy Hall (Don Ameche).

Duke is late to arrive, delayed while in the arms of Flo Kelly (Merman),
who has been secretly taping his sweet talk for future blackmail. After a
struggle, pal Jimmy crashes the recording, and Duke is free to go. The plane
runs out of fuel in a fairy tale of a town in Norway, where Trudy Eriksen
(Henie) is dreaming of her "storybook lover," a fantasy encouraged by what
a local witch tells her: her husband will appear from "far, far away," and will
be tall and dressed like a prince. Enter Duke in dashing aviator clothing. Trudy is convinced it is fate: "A gypsy told me!" Duke flirts openly with her
until he learns that, according to local custom, he has proposed to her by asking her to dance two times.

The event is the town's annual ice festival, and a lavish spectacle scene
shows offTrudy/Henie's ice skating. Duke tries to make a hasty exit; dialogue
more than intimates that he has had legal troubles from past womanizing. In
a slightly queer moment, Jimmy tells Trudy, "Don't pay attention to my
friend-he's a woman hater." (Romero was a closeted gay man. To help manage that "problem" and stir up interest for the film, Fox fabricated a romance
between Romero and Merman.)

Duke's band continues to perform back in New York, where a love-struck
Trudy shows up, unannounced, determined to follow her destiny. Good guy
Jimmy starts to fall for her and introduces her to her first hamburger in a
diner scene that delighted Henie's fans. The high-rolling Duke has moved
on, using women as muses-"She had a song in her!" he will say, and now
uses Trudy's line "A gypsy told me!" as part of his performance routine.

Flo has moved on as well, now on the arm of a wealthy elderly man, whom
she introduces with Mermanesque flair as "Count Filmore Veryschmarty."
She performs a spirited swing number, "Hot and Happy," in a long slit dress,
with her signature bracelets, raised hands, and sustained notes, holding "Oh!"
for a very, very long time. Near the end of the picture, she sings "You Appeal
to Me" with Romero at the piano, a song whose hard-boiled lyrics are appropriate to Flo's affair with Duke: "I never believed in cupid ... because of
all the things he did to me."

By the end of the film, Jimmy and Trudy are coupled, as are the squabbling, volatile Flo and Duke. At one point, Duke pleads to Jimmy, "She beats
me! She's trying to kill me for `getting a good song out of a blonde."' Flo confides in Jimmy, "I love him, even though he's an alley cat" (a line that raised
objections from Breen's censorship office), and Jimmy produces her recordon which Duke's sweet talk has ostensibly been recorded-to force Duke into
marrying her. Finale? Duke looks pained as the two newlywed couples go
skating together. (Ethel-not her character-is visibly uncomfortable, small
surprise given that she had hurt her ankle rehearsing the scene.) In fact,
Romero, Ameche, and Merman were poor skaters, although Romero was
helped by his experience as a dancer.

Studio head and producer Darryl Zanuck (1902-79) was known for his
hands-on approach and typically went through nearly every script and draft
of his movies. With Landing, there was some difficulty pulling together a
plausible narrative for the skating star. (Initially, she was Swiss and going to fall for an American hockey player.) Zanuck's primary concern for the picture was that "care should be taken to keep Sonja Henie's vehicles free of [the
sexual angle] ... even though that element is introduced via Lynette [later,
Flo]." 7 At first, when Ethel was considered for the part ofAmeche's love interest, Zanuck wondered, "She may be too tough a type."8

Early drafts had "Lynette" performing scenes in negligees, doing an offscreen "strip tease" in the men's room, receiving a "copped feel" "under the
robe," and "throwing herself at Bob brazenly" (Zanuck's remarks).9 Both
Zanuck and the censors objected to such details. For Breen, that was his job;
Zanuck was less guided by moral concern but instinctively knew what would
be expected and tolerated of a Sonja Henie movie. He proved right. On its
release, some critics voiced relief at the movie's "gay, frothy success";10 here
was a kids' movie without the controversy caused by another children's film
several months earlier-Disney studio's Snow White, whose evil witch upset
critics almost as much as she did children.

For anyone who is not a Henie fan, Happy Landing is not terribly interesting. Its story is standard issue, and only the skating numbers show off
strong production values and care. But Happy Landing is interesting for
building on Ethel's film persona, the hard and scheming but ultimately goodhearted woman "romantically" paired with an insincere (drunk, comicchoose one) secondary man. Zanuck's concern about Ethel's being "too
tough" shows just how established that persona was, even though she had not
worked extensively in Hollywood by this point. It was an image that was a
flattened distillation of the roles she played on Broadway, stripped of their
vibrant context-not to mention their musical authority.

Whatever its limits, Happy Landing is a curious document of its time. It's
a film that champions international tolerance when the United States watched
from the sidelines as Europe was being swirled into war. Its international "flavor" is assured through endless bad jokes about accents and comparisons of
American and European cultures (hamburgers and swing versus fairy tales and
fortune tellers). Yet Happy's script is hardly a sanctuary for international tolerance: At one point, Jimmy scolds Trudy, "That's the trouble with you foreigners. You can't get it through your heads that you're in a free country now.
Ifyou don't want to work, you don't have to. And ifyour boss gets tough with
you, you tell him to cut it out," suggesting a workers' paradise where people
are free from harassment and where working itself is strangely optional.1'

So interchangeable is the film's depiction of "old Europe" that Fox used the
same set for its Norwegian village that it had used for Heidi, the Shirley Temple hit set in the Swiss Alps, the year before. Cliches are also evident when Duke approaches a bandleader to play a "European song" and is told "we
don't do swing" before the band plays generic "oom pa pa" music. The idea
of old-Europe-as-fairy-tale was a staple in operetta, and it inflected Ethel's
work from Old Man Blues to Call Me Madam and Happy Hunting. In Happy
Landing, it works to showcase America's patronizing good-neighbor policy before the fact, a point reflected even in the casting, with "Latin lover" Cesar
Romero (born to Cuban parents in New York) and Norwegian Henie, who
also, it was claimed, "discovered" Latina bombshell Carmen Miranda for Fox.

Merman, wrote one review, "sings with her usual lid-off verve";12 said another, "Ethel Merman's impudent personality comes through for the first
time in the movies."13 Most reviews, though, had little to say about her, lavishing most of their attention on Henie in her third feature; some compliments were doled out to Romero for doing well in a nondancing role. Most
of Pop's scrapbook clippings involved newspaper pictures of Ethel socializing with "Butch" (Romero). Ethel and Butch had gotten along well while
making the film-both had a penchant for practical jokes-but after a while,
as she wrote in her memoirs, she tired of her costar's enthusiasm for their fabricated affair. Gossip columnist Ed Sullivan announced: "After all the talk of
Ethel Merman and Cesar Romero, it was just `publicity hooey.' "14

Alexander's Ragtime Band

Less than eight weeks after the wrap of Landing, Ethel was scheduled to start
work on her second film. Her salary was upped to $27,500 for six weeks'
work. More important, Alexander's Ragtime Band was an altogether different
picture from Happy Landing. It was going to be an extravagant, two-milliondollar production promoted heavily by the studio, "produced in lavish proportions!" The project was green-lighted by Zanuck himself to showcase the
music of Irving Berlin. Much was made of the fact that its story line spanned
three long decades, an epoch stuffed with Berlin's music. For the Picture,
Berlin would produce two new songs ("Now It Can Be Told," "My Walking
Stick"), but most attention was given to existing classics. The picture sailed
on a wave of spectacle and nostalgia.

The plot follows Alexander/Aleck/Roger (Tyrone Power, one of Fox's top
male players), a classically trained violinist who prefers the lowbrow life of his
swing band, with Davey the drummer and composer Charlie (Jack Haley and
Don Ameche, also Fox contract players). Their success starts once they perform "Alexander's Ragtime Band," a song that was once part of Stella Kirby's act (played by Fox's Alice Faye). Stella, first a rival, joins the band and quickly
transforms from a cheap saloon singer into dignified glamour gal. She begins
a love affair with Aleck that capsizes when she accepts an offer to go to New
York as a solo act. Aleck rebukes her angrily.

A distraught Aleck joins the army with Davey (World War I has started),
where the two put on a show. Back in New York after the war, Aleck discovers that Stella and Charlie have married. Only now-over an hour into the
film-does Ethel appear. She plays Jerry Allen, the singer who replaces Stella
in Aleck's band. Now a smashing success, the band plays Paris, but Aleck is
still carrying the torch for Stella, as Stella is for him. Charlie, who recognizes
this, lets her go, and in a parallel story, Jerry sees through Aleck's attempts to
persuade himself that he now loves her.