Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (40 page)

In New York, the office had been unable to handle the heavy advance demand for tickets, and Hayward had to go so far as to take out articles in local
papers instructing patrons how to place mail orders, explaining how their
orders would be processed, and pleading for their patience-all good publicity, to be sure. Call Me Madam ended up enjoying the biggest advance sale
for a Broadway musical to date, with tickets going for as high as $5.4o before
tax, pushing potential receipts for a full house to $40,000. (The show went
on to surpass the previous record of $36,500, set by South Pacific, whose ticket prices topped at $4.80.) 17 During the run, Merman would be taking in over
$5,000 a week, more than anyone else on Broadway.

Before Call Me Madam's opening at the Imperial, another legendary Merman tale was born. After so much tinkering with new songs, lines, and choreography, she simply refused to accept additional changes. Merman claims
to have told Lindsay and Crouse, "I won't do it," when they approached her
with new material, but Pete Martin-and others in his wake-gave her a
much more endurable line: "Boys, as of right now, I am Miss Birds Eye of
1950. I am frozen. Not a new comma."18

On opening night, October i2, scalpers on Broadway were charging as
much as two hundred dollars a ticket, and it's hard to imagine that anyone
doubted the troupe had a hit on their hands. Everyone involved with the production showered the star with notes, telegrams, gifts. Ethel avoided flowers
because of her allergies, typically forwarding them to local hospitals. Telegrams came from a young belter named Judy Garland, whom Ethel adored
and encouraged, especially in her early concert years. ("This was the greatest
thing I've ever known," said their close mutual friend Buster Edens. "They
were starry-eyed with each other," and the two women remained warm, dear
friends.)19 Mary Martin wired, "They may call you Madame, but I just think
you're very great and very wonderful," and Rosalind Russell exclaimed,
"They can only call you Great." Among scores of others, Lynn Fontanne later
wrote to say that she and Alfred Lunt had seen the show several times and
enjoyed it more every time.20

Audiences enjoyed the topicality of Call Me Madam. Lindsay and
Crouse had inserted playful disclaimers into the program about the obvious real-world references: "The play is laid in two mythical countries," it
read. "One is called Lichtenburg, the other the United States of America."
And "neither the character of Mrs. Sally Adams, or Miss Ethel Merman, resembles any other person alive or dead." Regarding Miss Merman, Cole
Porter said, "They [Lindsay and Crouse] couldn't have been righter about
that. 1121 (The filmed version would go for a vaguer reference about the story
taking place "long ago," in what would be the recently ended Truman presidency.)

Not only is the book filled with contemporary references, but it also pokes
fun at contemporary political figures. Sally has several long-distance phone
conversations with "Harry," and at the curtain call an impersonator played
by Irving Fisher, unnamed in the program, joins the crowd as the president
to take a bow with the cast. The dialogue makes references to first daughter
Margaret Truman and the infamously poor reviews she received when she tried her hand at singing. Berlin's rousing tune for the show, "They Like Ike,"
was later transformed into "I Like Ike" and, with modified lyrics, was used
in Eisenhower's actual presidential campaign. As light and fanciful as Call Me
Madam was-not unlike fairy-tale operetta in its setting and tale-it was
very much a product of a specific political moment. At one point, Mrs.
Adams says, "I'm so happy that I oughtta be investigated," referring to the
activities of Senator McCarthy. One London critic said, "The theme of this
smash hit ... is the Marshall Plan" and went on to add how typically American another remark of Sally's is: "I've always followed the affairs of Lichtenburg closely.... by the way, where the hell is Lichtenburg?" In that, he
writes, "the whole idealistic policy of the administration is held up to joyous
ridicule. "22

"To me," wrote an American critic, "the most heartening thing about this
show is that it is the first political satire we have seen in the musical field for
some time, and it comes at a time when people are getting neurotic about
speaking critically for fear of misinterpretation. This show ribs Democrats
and Republicans ... [everyone] except, I dare say, those who hew to the
Communist lie. As long as we can laugh at our own government's foibles
right out in public without fear of being banished to Siberia, we are doing all
right."23 A somewhat less tolerant view was voiced in the New York journal
American: "The Sardi set hears Lindsay and Crouse will tone down the satire in Call Me Madam if the war situation gets worse. The theory being that
this is not time for ribbing the government, even [in] a musical comedy
way "24

As usual, the critics' focus fell on Ethel. "Give her a show," wrote Robert
Williams and Vernon Rice, "and she'll carry it like a suitcase."25 Everyone
knew that the show's success was a result of her starring in it. Press reports
and reviews made innumerable references to Merman as "the one and only"
or "inimitable." Even tough guy Walter Winchell said, "Ethel is the undisputed musical comedy queen. No queen ever wore a crown more gracefully."" More surprising, Hollywood was trying to piggyback on the show's
success, with Paramount re-releasing her mid -1930s movies, We're Not Dressing and Anything Goes.

Merman in Mainbocher

Part of the great success of Call Me Madam was its exquisite costumes. Raoul
Pene Du Bois did general costuming, but the real coup was having Main bocher, Manhattan's premiere haute couturist, designing nine outfits for its
prima donna. Mainbocher (aka Main Rousseau Bocher or Main Bocher) had
first designed for Broadway in One Touch of Venus, the show that launched
Mary Martin's career. Of Call Me Madam, he said, "I wanted those clothes
to do for Merman what the gong is supposed to do for a fire horse-get it
ready to go out and give."27 Ethel's gowns cost nearly twelve thousand dollars, and some outfits were so elaborate that it took hours to press them after
every performance; it cost nearly thirty-five dollars just to clean her court
gown alone.

Mainbocher was never known for outre designs or colors-he'd developed
his "Venus pink" for Martin-and for Ethel in Call Me Madam, he went for
a vibrant elegance that she appreciated. "In Madam, I was properly attired for
the first time in my theatrical life. Until then my costumes had never been
designed to accentuate any physical charms I may have had as Ethel Merman.... In Madam they were."28 She especially liked the long, elaborate red
dress he designed, which she described as having "yards and yards of lace,"
and later wore it to private affairs, even shipping it to a party in Denver by air
freight at the rather extravagant cost of thirty dollars.29 Mainbocher
appreciated Ethel also, finding in the forty-two-year-old actress a well-proportioned, "perfect figure." 30

An obvious part of the show's thrill was seeing ex-Queens stenographer
Ethel Zimmermann-Merman portray a U.S. ambassador, a role in which
Ethel could bring her down-home, straight-shooting Americana style into
the high-class, formal dress and manners of old Europe. Although the
show's comedy was derived from that incongruity, Ethel carried it off effortlessly and glamorously-no more Panama Hattie fashion errors here. As
Brooks Atkinson noted, "Since Miss Merman is now moving in the best society, she is wearing dresses hemstitched by Main Bocher in his most lyric
mood. They are expensive and look it. But," he continues, "they have not
tempered the clangorous vulgarity of this phenomenal lady."" Call Me
Madam's book highlights that same disconnect between boisterous Ethel
and her high-end wardrobe when Sally says, "I don't mind a train, but
why'd they give me the Super Chief?" after taking a pratfall in a silver lame
gown.

While Annie Oakley might have begun the process of making a lady out
of Ethel, it was Sally Adams who turned her into a sophisticated, attractive
woman-without the airs of such. And although the latter role capitalized on
her direct, boisterous style (especially in her speech), this glamorous, more respectful treatment of Ethel helped reinvigorate her stage persona. Ethel was
now a good-looking adult, capable of romance, and for once boasted an emotional range that entailed more than just wisecracks, spunk, and a booming
voice. Sally Adams took Ethel out of the woods and into the full blush of
womanhood, without sacrificing her down-to-earth style and skills, and
today it's a joy to watch Merman depict a simultaneously attractive and
funny woman in the film version, a welcome departure from the cliches that
Hollywood had usually assigned her.

Despite Ethel's new elegance onstage, a few contradictions and some detectable "edginess" started to emerge in some of the press's comments on her
and her sartorial sensibilities.

There was a time ... when she heavily favored tight black dresses with jet bugles for daytime street wear. "Ethel had a lot of ideas about clothes in those
days," one of her friends said recently with a reminiscent shudder, "mostly
bad." Miss Merman has long since been persuaded out of such indiscretions
and is now practically indistinguishable on the streets from any other woman.
Her single eccentricity in matters of fashion is that she will not wear green, on
stage or off, on the obscure theory that it will make her look "horrible."32

Still, at the time of Call Me Madam, most jabs were put to the back burner
as Broadway celebrated its biggest star. And it was not just New York that
was celebrating her, but also Washington, D.C., a city that was fully enjoying its ambassadress onstage. Dwight Eisenhower was among many politicians who attended the premiere, along with the usual high-profile theater
and film stars. And that year Ethel, who was entered in the latest Who's Who
of the Theatre, was given the chance to correct galleys to reflect a birth year
of 1909.

Ethel's mounting success was evident according to countless New York
standards and traditions. Al Hirschfeld's portrait of her splashed the cover of
the Sunday New York Times Arts section; writer E. B. White mentioned her
in a poem he wrote for the New Yorker about Antony and Cleopatra, then playing on Broadway with the soft-speaking Vivien Leigh:

Successful though it was, no critic accused Call Me Madam of being cutting edge. "In some ways," writes Gerald Bordman, "Call Me Madam was a
reversion to the topical musicals of the thirties."33 Indeed, the play boasted
old-fashioned references to contemporary political figures; the double couple
romance, whose outcome was strictly by the numbers; and the old-school
guffaws that banked on Sally's "gaucheries," double takes, and double entendres.

By now, Ethel the acting comedienne was garnering as much praise as she
did as a singer. But there was also a growing awareness of the sense of history
Ethel seemed to carry with her onto the stage or into a room.

Show biz is a mechanized industry these days, with a mass market. It depends
on machine tools-the microphone, the camera, the tape recorder, the
cathode-ray tube, the juke box, the gag writer-and the product is economysized, built-in ... and, worst of all, homogenized. But Merman, she's still got
the cream left on top. She's too bouncy to fit into machines. Cameras make
her look like an overblown peony.... She's back in the great days of show
business, the Palace Theatre days, the handicraft days, the days when an actor
and an audience felt they knew each other personally and sparks flew between
them. That's why she gives the people such a lift. When they watch Merman
they can feel, for a change, that human beings are more attractive than ma-
chines.34

The critic Robert Rice's nostalgic appreciation appeared in Flair, a short-lived
arts monthly whose trademark was cut-out covers printed in saturated colors on high-quality stock. (Ethel, Berlin, Crouse, Hayward, and the rest of
the Call Me Madam team made the cover in October 195o-as so many elaborate, handmade dolls.)