Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (24 page)

The show was recognized in national venues as a genuine sensation. In February Life magazine ran a large glossy photo of the Stars in Your Eyes audience enthusiastically applauding, and Merman took her copy and circled two
people on it, with a long arrow going to the bottom of the page: "Mother and
dad," whom she always brought to her shows.47

Ethel's comedic skills-her timing, delivery, and use of her face and
body-were receiving more and more recognition. And the references to her
voice's force, especially its brashness, were on the rise. Indeed, between her
and Durante-who could spin the English language into a nutty dictionary
of puns and gags-it is small wonder that one of the most printed images
from the show showed him leaning over Merman with a "hush" finger over
his mouth. As a reviewer put it, "A calliope is as quiet as a sylvan nook compared to Miss Merman. Mr. Durante can make the fog horn of the Normandie sound like a child's whistle."48

Big-Voiced Merman

Given that Ethel's voice has been the most "Mermanized" of her featuresnot unreasonably, for a singer-it is not altogether surprising that that voice
has taken on a life of its own. Much of the effectiveness of Merman's belt derives from the impression it gives of physical accomplishment, as opposed to
the lighter, more disembodied style of other singers. (Recall the comparison
of her sustained note in "I Got Rhythm" to swimming laps in an Olympicsized pool.) The same analogy can be applied to dancer Gene Kelly's style:
Kelly's body seemed to celebrate the sheer strength his movements required.
In contrast, Fred Astaire made his movements look effortless, as if he were
dancing on air rather than earth. Kelly struck a more working-class, tough
image-not that of a man in top hat and tails. Although these class distinctions didn't disadvantage either of the two dancers (in fact, Astaire's characters typically were working class-"hoofers" who happened to make the big
time), the "airier" realms ofAstaire's dancing, like nonbelt singing styles, stereotypically are linked to higher social positions or decorum. Never high art
or transcendent-as the critic who said that Merman's voice aims "slightly
above the entrails"49-her vocal style only reinforced her image as an earthy,
unpretentious woman who spoke and lived in the vernacular of the street.

If it was one thing, the Merman voice was strong: her lung power was remarkable, and she sang her songs with the kind of vitality that could cut the
oxygen from a room. This is why few people know of ballads like "Satan's
Little Lamb" and why many would be surprised to see her doing "Red Robin"
with Perry Como. Over time, descriptions of her voice's "loudness" increased as reviewers responded to that feature at the expense of its other ones. In other
words, the press helped limit and ultimately make Merman's vocal strength a
cliche. As early as 1943, one critic took note, writing, "The few persons-and
they are remarkably few-who do not enjoy her, feel that she is too loud, too
devoid of subtlety and describe her as brassy but, making all allowances for discrepancies of opinion, this is to do her less than justice. Substitute the word
exuberant for loud, and I think you have the essence of her personality...
The voice and personality still have the infectious heartiness of a good brass
band, but time has taught her to soften the attack just a little, to let her personality come through without too sharp an attack." 50

By the late 193os, the press had in fact let the tags of jazz, blues, and torch
singer fall by the wayside in favor of commenting on Merman's loudness. Not
all of the references were meant critically at the time ("substitute the word exuberant"), but the trend only escalated, and after the war, the loudness became
increasingly brushed with negative connotations. Given changes in music,
vocal styles, and recording technologies of the time, this is hardly surprising.
Since the early 193os, with the rise of crooners such as Rudy Vallee, Bing
Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and, later, Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Pat Boone, and
Dean Martin, male vocalists were certainly eschewing the physical, performative style of Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Cab Calloway, and others.

And if, by the '5os, rock-and-roll vocalists would be called screamers
(Little Richard perhaps being king) and were also dubbed "too loud," they
were not belters, and much of their volume was produced by electric amplification. Of course, it would be simplistic to equate people's grumbling over
Ethel's "loud" voice with the rejection of rock and roll, for at that point,
many of the anti-Merman grumblers were younger music critics. While some
of them were no fans of rock and roll, others were, and Ethel's voice may have
seemed too much a voice of the past. But back in the late '3os, this trend in
people's response to the distinctive, energetic voice was beginning to coalesce.
The difference was, calling it loud was a way of having fun with it, of loving
and even worshipping the powerful spell it cast.

As Jeanette Adair, Ethel might well have derived satisfaction in sending up
the Hollywood divahood that had eluded her thus far. One interview ran:
"Miss Merman prefers playing on the stage to motion pix and radio work.
`For one thing,' she said,

you've got an audience to play to. And you don't have to get up at five in the
morning like you do in Hollywood. They, they'll rehearse and even film one
scene over and over until it's perfect. Of course, that [sic] good because it keeps you on your toes. But anyway, I like the people in New York City better. 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, and has a grand time doing it.51

Madame DuBarry

Ethel's next appearance on the boards was in DuBarry Was a Lady, with a
book by Herbert Fields and Buddy DeSylva. Ethel had worked with DeSylva
before in Take a Chance, but DuBarry was his first show as solo producer, and
he reportedly put a hundred thousand dollars of his own money into it.
Songs were by Cole Porter, working on his first show since Leave It to Me! in
1938-39. The story revolves around an actual historical figure, early nineteenthcentury Duchesse Marie-Caroline de Barry, who, at sixteen, married the only
Bourbon family member likely to produce an heir. While pregnant, she
watched as her husband was stabbed to death after an evening at the theater,
and over the next decade, the widowed duchess created a big following in Parisian circles through her active social life. In the process, though, she created
friction with the royal family, much as Princess Diana did a century and a half
later. Eventually de Barry was imprisoned for trying to secure her son the
French throne, and adding to her intrigue was the fact that she had a baby in
jail and never divulged the father's identity.

An unconventional woman at the cusp of the modern age, Duchesse de
Barry personified a less stiff, less remote royal figure even if she was also perceived as a sign of all that was wrong with monarchy. The tensions made
her story ideal fare for modern audiences, and, indeed, it was not new to
Broadway: an operetta loosely based on her life had appeared in 1932. The
DeSylva-Fields book, however, was concerned less with her actual story than
with the springboard she offered their own. We open with a nightclub washroom attendant, Louis (sometimes written as "Louie") Blore (Bert Lahr),
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. With his new wealth, he hopes to woo the
club's top singer, May Daly (Merman), who herself is involved with a married newspaperman, Alex Bartin. Louis decides to slip a Mickey Finn into his
rival's drink but accidentally drinks the concoction himself. In the ensuing
fantasy, he becomes French king Louis XV, and May Daly, his mistress. But
even in the fantasy, May/DuBarry's heart is elsewhere. The "Louis" of the
fantasy suffers further indignities when his son shoots an arrow into his
britches. (Prone, the poor man complains of looking like a weathervane, to which Ethel's DuBarry retorts, the king can always hang a flag out on Bastille
Day.) When Louis comes to, he has a change of heart and gives Alex ten thousand dollars of his winnings so that the young man can divorce his wife and
marry May. Since most of the rest goes to taxes, Louis resumes his menial job.

The role was perfect for Lahr, who had made a fine art of playing put-upon,
fumbling, snarly men: his was "a face that was obviously invented for falling
on."52 Madame DuBarry, some maintain, was a part initially conceived for
Mae West,53 whose ribald persona seemed ideally suited and helped people
resume connections between West, Ethel, "Eadie," and the like. Miss West,
though, was more interested in her film career at the time; 1940 would be the
year that My Little Chickadee with W. C. Fields was released. Ethel was billed
second to Lahr but proved to be his comedic equal-and not bad at the Mae
West stuff either. And, as an object of romantic fantasy (however wisecracking), her character was given something of a new twist.

Unfortunately, it was not Cole Porter's best set of songs. They weren't weak,
just not up to the elevated bar he'd established in Anything Goes. Naughtier
numbers were used in the fantasy sequence when Louis tries to bed DuBarry,
"But in the Morning, No!" (banned on radio) and "Give Him the Oo-La-La."
The sequence also contained a sweet ballad, "Do I Love You?" which was a
huge radio hit. Songs set in the nightclub scenes were more burlesque, like
"Katie Went to Haiti," again a nod to "Eadie." The clear nightly favorite,
though, was Merman and Lahr's duet in which, as May and Louis, they sang
Cole's sprightly rhymes in "Friendship": "If you're ever in a jam/ Here I
am. / If you ever need a pal, / I'm your gal." Porter had to write extra verses in
the Boston previews so that they didn't run out in all the encores.

Ethel had to miss the marriage of her friend and future godmother of her
children, Eleanor Holm, to Billy Rose during previews, which had started
November 9, 1939, at the Shubert in New Haven before moving to Boston
and Philadelphia. Reviewers found the first act long, and a few complained
about the number of "sentimental songs," but most enjoyed the score, the
book, and the costumes. (The responses to the show's lusty humor were
mixed.) On two things there was total consensus: Lahr and Merman.

On December 6,1939, DuBarry opened in NewYork at the 46th StreetThe-
atre and became the season's hit, one of only two shows to exceed two hundred
nights. Ethel received congratulatory notes from Walter Annenberg, Louella
Parsons, Buddy DeSylva ("You're the nicest girl I ever worked with and the
cleverest-good luck"), Patrice and Damon Runyon, Irving Berlin ("I'll be out
front rooting"), New York mayor Jimmy Walker, Ray Goetz, Katharine Hepburn, J. Edgar Hoover, and Clyde Tolson. All of the entertainment gossipers received her well: Winchell, Hopper, Parsons, Sobol, Sullivan. (Sobol thanked
Ethel for a recording she had sent him; Louella Parsons, a basket of heather.
Their notes, preserved in the scrapbooks, show not only Ethel's professional
courtesy but also her savvy in greasing the wheels of the press.)

Reviewers loved the onstage antics between Lahr and Merman, "shows in
themselves," according to John Mason Brown.54 (At one point, when King
Louis/Lahr is chasing Madame DuBarry/Merman around a bed, he suddenly
reversed direction and got such a laugh from the crowd that they kept it in.) 55
Raoul Pene Du Bois's set design and costumes also drew unanimous praise.
(Merman had seven costume changes.) But the book took a few knocks.
Scarcely ambitious and with no pretensions of being so, "its wit is almost nil,
but its wisecracks are raw as a cannibal sandwich, suggestive as a red light burning in the hall."56 "No two entertainers other than Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman could carry [off ] this plot, plus the songs they sing, without driving the
audience into the street screaming for the morals squad. The subject of sex is
belabored mightily throughout this opus, with no suggestion of kid gloves."57

Of course, charges of vulgarity were nothing new to Broadway. Ethel's
own musical comedies had usually provided a nod-and-wink attitude toward
sex, and during the 193os, Broadway in general was doing what post-Code
Hollywood could no longer get away with, Mae West or not. As a critic had
said of Red, Hot and Blue! "Freedley's new musical is a riot of low comedy. It
is not only very low, but is almost the bottom,"58 not unreasonable for a story
featuring a search for a woman with burn patterns on her bottom. Then there
were the opening lines of Stars in Your Eyes: A movie set carpenter is hammering and mutters, "How do I keep these damn things in? I've nailed 'em
as deep as I can." Then a chorus girl, adjusting what the script describes as "a
very low necked bodice," repeats the same line.

Still, it was DuBarry that pulled out all the stops. One Philadelphia previewer went so far as to call the book pornographic.59 Of its many reviewssaved, every one of them, by Edward Zimmermann-the best was offered in
this: "Dubarry is about as lowdown as the most prolific patron of peepshows
could desire. But, as the individual three seats to my right remarked tersely,
`I don't mind smut so long as it's clever.' "60

Reviewers may have deemed DuBarry a bit raw, but they were clear that
Ethel Merman was not. She was the opulently dressed DuBarry, still dispensing beauty tips. "Ethel Merman Just a Home-Loving Girl"-subtitled
"You Wouldn't Think So, However, If You Saw Her DuBarry in Musical
Comedy."6i The press acknowledged Ethel's ability to handle coarse material
and remain "natural," almost pure: "'I follow stage directions, of course,' she said, `but not to the letter.... I do whatever comes to me naturally at each
performance.' Offstage Miss Merman is completely natural. She seems to
have not a single glamour girl trick or pose or gesture up her sleeve. She has
great respect of her ability to put over a song, but she doesn't think her talent gives her a right to be temperamental or late for appointments.... Ethel
Merman is known as a `good egg. -62