Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (30 page)

Like other celebrities, Ethel knew her benefit efforts were part of her professional responsibilities, but in her case what she did deeply correlated with who she really was. For compared with other entertainers such as Betty
Grable and Rita Hayworth, whose pinup work during the war transformed
them into national fetish figures more than patriotic icons, Merman had the
perfect energy for a nation that liked to define itself in terms of vitality and
spirit.

Helping Ethel's transformation were her frequent public appearances
with government officials locally and nationally, from Jimmy Walker and
Fiorello LaGuardia to J. Edgar Hoover and FDR. Although she'd been appearing with politicians for over a decade, now she was not just rubbing elbows with them socially but also working alongside them quite publicly (and
getting fan mail from them privately). This was no truer than with New York
politicians, who appreciated the asset that Ethel was to the city. Ethel's traveling in the same social circles as politicians scarcely made her different from
other stars, but it helped cast her image in a more overtly political light than
before.

Ethel had a special admiration of FDR and always kept a signed autograph
of him on her wall. Their mutual respect was kindled by their bonds as New
Yorkers and as people whose successes coincided during the same historical
moment. "Mom liked FDR, she liked his company, and, of course, she deeply
respected the office of the president," says her son today.41 Afterward, Ethel
would turn to the political party more in keeping with her position as a
woman of elite stature and wealth, as Levitt puts it. "Like a lot of people then,
and even now, Mom believed in the political myth that Republicans are the
`hard work' party, and the Democrats are `on the dole parry.' "42 (Agnes and
Pop were lifelong Republicans as well.)

Ethel's work in lighthearted musical comedies didn't hurt her transformation
into a patriotic icon. Sometimes it was the titles alone that showed off the
new veneer-Red Hot and Blue., Stars in Your Eyes, and the upcoming Something for the Boys (1943)-but her characters resonated that way as well. In
Panama Hattie, she was an uncouth American who proves her worth to both
man and country by exposing terrorists in U.S.-controlled territory; Something for the Boys features an even more outrageous twist that starts with Ethel
as a munitions plant worker and ends with her intercepting enemy radio signals. Merman's mildly credible depiction of a munitions worker reveals how
much her background as a working-class woman didn't vanish when her
image took a new direction.

Other attributes also stayed the same, even as they were being redirected.
By wartime, for instance, the press was connecting the Merman voice to the
factory lines: "She'll never be signed by the Metropolitan Opera," wrote one
review, "but her singing ... is ideal for musical comedy. Her voice cuts right
through sheet steel, yet it's not unpleasant."43 Ads and promotion work show
just how thickly the patriotism of Rosie the Riveter was being shellacked onto
Merman.

Gender roles and war always make for curious bedfellows. One piece, discussing the toned-down women's fashions necessitated by wartime scarcity,
featured a photo of Ethel wearing a man's tailored pin-striped jacket along
with four other women in slacks. Evidently, such a look needed explanation,
which the author offers by asking a psychiatrist to respond to this trend of
"mannish suits, fly front coats, tailored shirts." We learn that the trend "is
probably due to the chaotic times, to our something like wartime preparations for national defense in which women are competing." In short, it's just
a fad, we're assured, since women want to remain "women at all times."44
And thus Ethel and other women were kept soft and "feminine," whether
they were working in factories or "cutting sheet steel" in musical comedies.
One of the most amusing ways that Ethel was made patriotic (and femme)
comes from Dorothy Kilgallen, writing then in "Voice of Broadway": "Ethel
Merman has one freckle shaped like a star on an American flag, but you can
only see it when she wears an evening dress."45

Though Ethel was at the top of her game in the early 1940s, Broadway was
not. This circumstance was due not to the war, which was actually lifting the
American economy and consumer leisure spending, but to the toll taken by
the dual threats of the Depression and motion pictures. Broadway had not
been able to rebound from the Depression as quickly or as thoroughly as Hollywood, which had lured patrons back with air-conditioned theaters, double
features, and popcorn. On Broadway, a year after the stock market crash in
1929, seventeen legitimate theaters had been converted to movie houses.
Stage musicals in particular, with their big budgets, suffered-recall the
downturn in revues-and by 1940, the Big Stem was producing less than half
the number it had in the '2os.

Broadway's national influence, moreover, was waning, particularly in introducing trends in music, fashion, stars, stories, and gossip. This shift had less
do with the Depression than with the changing popularity of entertainment
forms and the ascent of mass media. Broadway simply did not enjoy the wide
reach of film; show tours, no matter how numerous, were not going to change that. Motion pictures had become an established, eminently affordable form
of entertainment for Americans of all means; in 194o New York, you could see
a movie for only a quarter. Radio was even cheaper-free after the purchase
of the set.

Still, ticket prices for musicals remained within reach for most working
people, and audiences were still coming to the Big Stem in throngs to pass
the evening. (Theaters had actually lowered prices during the Depression; by
1940 the most expensive theater ticket was $4.40.) And even if Broadway in
general was losing its influence, the musical was far from moribund; critics
had, after all, been pronouncing its demise since its beginnings in the i86os.
So while the 1939-40 season was not an especially robust one for musicals, it
was scarcely a bust, with Leave It to Me, Streets of Paris, The Mikado (revival,
along with The HotMikado and The Swing Mikado), and Rodgers and Hart's
Too Many Girls opening.

Enter Rodgers and Hammerstein

Every fan of musicals knows that the 1940s included one of Broadway's fetish
moments: Oklahoma! With this 1943 musical, historians tell us, musicals became integrated, and songs now worked to develop narrative situations and
provide insight into the emotional lives of stage characters. No longer aiming to present spectacle with a nod and a knowing wink to the alwaysacknowledged audience, integrated musicals aimed to establish self-contained
fictional worlds that, however fantastic, operated according to rules and behavior appropriate to that world. Song-and-dance numbers emerged organically from emotional situations, not from an impulse to razzle-dazzle. All of
this did not start with Oklahoma! of course. Predecessors included Jerome
Kern's monumental Show Boat in 1927, and before that were the Princess
Plays, all important examples of integrated musical shows that predated
Rodgers and Hammerstein. But these shows' successes lacked the immediate
and lasting influence of Oklahoma! whose impact was so great that no less a
Broadway historian than Gerald Bordman refers to 1943-49 as the "Rodgers
and Hammerstein Years."46

A Rodgers and Hammerstein musical tackled social issues with a trademark
liberal idealism. Understating things a bit, that is not the typical Ethel Merman musical show. The more "serious" orientation of the integrated musical
has led some historians to refer to it as the more "mature" theatrical form,
in contrast to the revue-influenced musical comedy, leading critics to bring charges of vulgarity, outdatedness, and childishness unfairly against earlier
musicals-and performers like Merman.47 In a show with the Rodgers and
Hammerstein imprimatur-almost a brand name-audiences could expect to
find themes of community integration, tolerance, and assimilation (see Oklahoma! South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of
Music). That soft liberalism was hardly Merman's forte, personally or professionally, so it is scarcely incidental that she never performed in a Rodgers and
Hammerstein show; she and Rodgers didn't even get along well. (He told
Marilyn Cantor Baker that Ethel was "so cheap" she stored her artificial
Christmas tree in a theater to avoid paying for storage, a falsehood disproved
by her year-round enjoyment of her beloved Christmas tree, decorated in her
foyer, at least in her later years.)48 Others speculate that the frosty relationship
began when Ethel refused to extend her contract for Annie Get Your Gun,
which Rodgers produced, at the end of the 1940s.

Ethel's strong suit was always the light book comedy, those star vehicles
whose songs Porter, Berlin, and George Gershwin wrote with her in mind.
As their kind of music became dated, along with the old style of musicals,
Ethel's professional wings would be clipped. And so despite Josh Logan's
accolade of her being the best instinctive actress, Merman's work outside
musical comedies never got her high accolades. Her few efforts to perform
straight dramatic roles on radio, for instance, were met with almost unanimously unfavorable reviews. Ethel was surely aware of her limits as an actor
and later was justified in cherishing her dramatic success in Gypsy as much as
she did.

Not only was Ethel's standard material at odds with the new kind of musical theater, but her very style of performance chafed against it. She still sang
her songs staring straight into the audience or camera. (Again, one is reminded of Mary Martin fluttering around, wrapping her arms around Ethel's
shoulders, as Ethel stares straight ahead.) Ethel never unlearned that selfconscious, performative delivery. Why should she? It had brought her success for decades. Her stubborn adherence to it, though, not only made her
an ill fit for the kind of theater that Rodgers and Hammerstein exemplified
but arguably impeded her success in film and television as well. In a very real
sense, Merman's acting style was simply too big, too much for the cameras.

As early as Red, Hot and Blue! a few critics were starting to tire of the old
vaudevillian-styled musical comedy that had been the staple of Ethel's work.
The perspective continued with later shows: "It is a strange thing to say of so
bright and dashing a show as DuBarry that there is something nostalgic
about it."`'9 Whether as criticism, encomium, or simple description, the term old-fashioned started to be attached more often to Merman vehicles,
even as her star was hitting new heights. Some Broadway critics found the
more adult, nuanced fare proffered by Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, and the
work of Rodgers and Hammerstein more enticing; some found the light
book musical to be inappropriate for a country at war (although others argued precisely the opposite). But for other writers and theatergoers, this form
of musical entertainment had simply run its course, much as operetta had
done fifteen years before.

Rodgers and Hammerstein also changed theatrical rules by not writing
their musicals as star vehicles geared to a particular personality (a decision
that helped simplify tours and revivals). Marketing, too, was changed. For
Oklahoma! Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein made a deal with Jack
Kapp, president of Decca records, to release an original cast recording of the
show that contained its bigger numbers, and the record was such a hit that a
second volume of songs from the show was released. These cast recordings
not only made for a good source of revenue but also exposed Broadway musicals to the entire country. People who couldn't catch shows in New York or
on tour could experience them through their songs sung by the original performers. And for people who had seen the shows, the recordings were powerful souvenirs that could be played over and over; in them listeners could
also discover new performers or cement addictions to old ones. Insofar as
they "captured" an element of historical productions, the recordings also gave
Broadway historians and critics a means of preserving and documenting the
notoriously ephemeral art of the stage.

On a related front, Broadway was also able to increase revenues and expand its influence through jukeboxes. This actually predated the Rodgers and
Hammerstein "revolution," since jukeboxes were available as early as 1928
(though without mechanical amplification). By 1936, business was such that
fifty thousand units were manufactured and sold in the United States, and
the industry forecast even higher figures for the 1940s.51 Marketing Broadway was changing, and war was only part of it.

Something for the Boys

Ethel's last wartime show was Something for the Boys, reuniting her with Cole
Porter and Herbert and Dorothy Fields, who did the book. Three estranged,
competitive cousins inherit a ranch near Kelly Field Air Force base in Texas.
Ethel's character, Blossom Hart, a former chorus girl from Newark, kept the Merman image close to New York. Paula Laurence (according to Charlie
Chaplin, the "funniest woman in America") played her burlesque queen
cousin; the third cousin, played byAllen Jenkins, is a pitchman. The trio converts the base into a working residence for wives of servicemen, and when a
resentful local misinforms an official that they are running a brothel, the
place is shut down as a Senate investigation looms. But in a deus ex machina
even more absurd than Panama Hattie's, Blossom realizes she's able to pick
up radio messages through her tooth fillings and thus saves the day-and gets
a guy to boot.

Vinton Freedley was set to produce, but on October 16, the New York
Times announced his withdrawal due to creative differences with the rest of
the team, and the Fieldses replaced him with Michael Todd. Todd (1909-58)
was the wunderkind whose quick rise as a Broadway producer stemmed from
his bigger-than-life personality and his lavish big productions such as The Hot
Mikado, By Jupiter, Star, and Garter, and later, Around the World in 8o Days.
The prototypical self-made man, Todd moved quickly from being a shoeshiner to coproducing the 1940 World's Fair in Flushing. And though he was
only in his mid-3os at the time of For the Boys, Todd's life was already moving with the bold strokes that would characterize everything he did. He
would go on to marry Elizabeth Taylor before his untimely death in a plane
crash in April 1958.