Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (3 page)

By the 1950s, a middle-aged Merman shifted gears. For nearly six years, she
left Broadway to play the stay-at-home wife to third husband Bob Six, president and founder of Continental Airlines, in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.
She lived there with daughter Ethel and son Robert, her children from the
marriage to Levitt. Her proximity to Los Angeles, she said, would help her
career in television, a new medium whose mass appeal Ethel instinctively appreciated. That career, however, like the one in the movies, never really took
off, and Merman remained the perennial TV guest: here with Lucille Ball,
there with Judy Garland, or in Westinghouse's abridged versions of big
Broadway shows. Ethel did have her successes on the small screen, such as the
legendary 1953 Ford 50th Anniversary Show, in which she duets with "rival"
(actually, good friend) Mary Martin. But she really wanted steady work,
vying twice for a sitcom of her own, one in the mid-196os and the other in
the mid-1970s. Neither made it to serialization.

When she returned to Broadway in 1959 for Gypsy, based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, Ethel Merman reinvigorated her stage career and
at the same time reinvented herself. In addition to carrying a solid scoreincluding "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Some People"-Merman
did so well portraying Mama Rose that, for many people, she became the
overbearing "jungle mother," as Rose's actual daughter, Gypsy Rose Lee,
called her. Merman's heartfelt yet ferocious depiction of Rose was an acting triumph and resecured her top place on Broadway. At the same time,
it added a new dimension to her persona: there was something delightfully,
madly, over the top about Mama Rose that, among other things, made her
a bit camp. This was a vaudeville-era character who was a dramatic, colorful survivor.

Audiences were beginning to view Ethel Merman the same way. As Broadway's golden queen, she was also its robust veteran and, like vaudevillian stage
mother Rose, an icon of tough staying power. With her career having begun
in a very different era, Merman's image was now infused with an old-
fashionedness that many people revered, many camped up, and many simply enjoyed. She herself was able to accommodate it all, turning her attentions to one last Broadway show (Hello, Dolly! again, written with her
originally in mind), TV work in specials and guest spots, and traveling across
North America on concert tours.

Merman's long career was a lightning rod that reverberated with iconic
historical moments and public figures of over half a century of American life.
She made it to the top in the Depression-era Girl Crazy, performed at presidential inaugurations from FDR's to Ronald Reagan's, and played gangster
molls, gun-toting pioneer women, the child-eating Mama Rose, and the
cross-gendered Lieutenant Hurwitz. There was a religious Ethel, an illmannered Ethel, and, of course, the greatest star of Broadway Ethel. Some
New Yorkers remember Ethel Merman as a woman who was dedicated to her
parents or as a regular gal with whom they volunteered at Roosevelt Hospital. For some Americans, Merman was the star who answered their letters
when they were serving in World War II or who did a special show for their
sick children. For others, she was "too much," too brash, too tough. Baby
boomers may have been introduced to her as Gopher's mom on The Love
Boat; to young singers, Ethel Merman is the "belt" to which they aspire. For
her son, Bob Levitt Jr., she was a "presence" who sang rhyming songs at bedtime before she left to do her shows.

History has downplayed these different Ethels, leaving us with only one
or two: old Broadway's life force and queen or the boisterous camp icon. Of course, it's easy to have fun with either of these Ethels-camp icon Ethel has
scores of new personae on the Internet alone-but with either one, too much
gets left behind. Even the legendary belting Broadway Ethel fails to account
for the singer who performed beautiful ballads and doesn't convey the reality of a performer whose favorite and most cherished costars were the Muppets.

How then to tell the life story that moved a woman from being the "trumpet-throated" flapper who sang with crooner Rudy Vallee to the septuagenarian behind The Ethel Merman Disco Album? It's difficult to trace in a
single line the life of a woman who brings a smile to one's face even when
singing songs that bring tears to the eyes. (Or am I alone with that response?)
How to approach a legend whose fans will shun you if you trespass into
"their" territory, who are mortified if you misidentify one date of an obscure
radio broadcast? How to account for the others, the people who wildly misremember her: "Wasn't she the one who sang `God Bless America'?" (No,
that was Kate Smith); "She did the swimming movies, right?" (Esther
Williams); or "I loved her in I Love Lucy!" (Ethel Mertz, played by Vivian
Vance). How can an icon be simultaneously so frozen in the history of "old
Broadway" and so chaotically cross-referenced?

My own Ethel quest began, without my knowing it, as a child. The home I
grew up in was filled with original cast recordings and soundtracks, all from
shows and films that I had never seen. I was too young and my mom too smalltown to venture into the cosmopolitan streets of Manhattan. Since the contents
of our collection were governed by her tastes and since her tastes leaned toward
what might be called the G-rated musical comedy-Rodgers and Hammerstein, Julie Andrews vehicles, fantasies in which hope and romance could
thrive, not the grittier stuff of Applause, Gypsy, or anything by Stephen
Sondheim-Ethel's voice was not in my house. Mom never talked about her,
and I can only assume that she did appreciate her talents but found them a little
rough for her liking. In order to hear Ethel and the grown-up shows, I had to
go over to Holly's, where we sang our hearts out. Years later, during college,
Ethel reentered my life. Settling into our dorm rooms, all of the guys were jockeying to be owner of the loudest stereo set. You could hear Bruce Springstein's
"Born to Run" from every point on the campus. Yet my friend David blasted
out Ethel Merman in singular, defiant protest. She was back. For me, tracking
Ethel these last four years has been a way to track my own past, filling in the
missing parts and some of the fun that I want to put there.

My sources were official and unofficial: stage and film archives in New
York and Los Angeles; interviews with surviving friends and family members, including son Bob Levitt Jr. It involved casual conversation with regular
Merman fans as well as detractors. My aim has not been to uncover a singular, authentic Ethel Merman-she was too complex a phenomenon for
that-but to trace the different Mermans who lived, privately and publicly,
for so many Americans across the twentieth century.

Late in 1932, New York's hottest singing sensation appeared in Take a Chance,
a new Buddy DeSylva musical playing on Broadway. As nightclub singer
Wanda Brill, Ethel Merman sang a bluesy ballad that paid tribute to a woman
of ill-repute from fin de siecle New Orleans:

The song's affectionate bawdiness was also apparent in Merman's costuming.
Accentuating the hourglass figure popular in Eadie's time, Merman wore a
tight, long red satin dress edged in black lace. Accessories included a boa,
a headdress, and plenty of kohl around the eyes.

This was twenty-four-year-old Ethel Merman's third show, but it wasn't
the first time she'd played a sassy-but-sensible singer/working-class girl. That
had begun with her debut in the Gershwin brothers' Girl Crazy, two years
earlier. What Wanda Brill-and this song especially-did was help hone the
likable streetwise image that the star was already acquiring. The archetypal
unpolished, tough though good-hearted woman, Wanda/Ethel was more
suited to make fun of sex than to pine at its feet.

"Eadie Was a Lady" was Take a Chance's hit number, mixing languorously
delivered bluesy jazz with a strong melodic line. It needed a singer who could
punch out its rhythm, sustain its long notes, and project it from the chest area,
not the throat, thereby avoiding lighter, more delicate sounds. So perfectly suited was the song to the young singer with the big voice that, in both articles and fan mail, people referred to her as "Eadie."

Earlier that year, Merman had spent a day at Paramount Studios in Astoria,
Queens, filming a one-reeler called Old Man Blues. The thin story line involves
a young woman pining for a lost lover. Ethel sings in the woods, where she's
joined by a villainous older man in dark robes who informs us through song that
he is feeding off the young woman's despair. Then, when her lover suddenly appears, Old Man Blues slinks off. The short, atmospheric picture creates a fairytale world filled with forlorn maidens, lost suitors, and threatening older
men/moods/spirits, a fable of romantic love triumphing over despair. In her
frilly dress with a wide, full skirt and a bodice trimmed with ribbons, all topped
by a wide-brimmed bonnet, Ethel seems the very paragon of antebellum gentility. Her song, "He Doesn't Love Me Anymore," woefully moans love's departure. It has none of the strong beats of "Eadie," instead boasting a measured
rising and falling melody. The piece is light, delicate, and airy, delivered as if
Merman were Jeanette MacDonald giving us the best of a film operetta.

Today, it's easier to picture Ethel Merman as Eadie than as a singer of
wispy operetta. But back in 1932, there was an easy coexistence between the
two songs and their singer. American music then had more interaction between legitimate, high singing and the songs and singing styles of popular
culture. Something in the early'3os enabled the Broadway belter who would
soon dominate twentieth-century musical theater to span the gamut from
bawdy American blues to light European operetta. How did these musical
styles shape how people were responding to her, and what do they tell us
about American entertainment and its audiences or about class, ethnicity,
femininity, and gender at the time? How did they help transform the young
singer from Queens into the bigger-than-life production that soon became
"Ethel Merman"? And how did Ethel Merman find her place within the
musical environment in New York of the period?