Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (41 page)

`Reprinted by permission; © E. B. White, originally published in the New
Yorker, all rights reserved, 19 January 1952, (MCNY, SC 10-

Fun Off the Boards

Ethel's life wasn't all work. The Duchess of Windsor and "the Boy," as Ethel
called him, were constantly seeking her company, thanking her for tickets
and for time spent together. Ethel kept a photo of them on her piano, signed
to the Levitts. Ethel also socialized with Tallulah Bankhead, her old friend
Madeline Gaxton, and Vivian Blaine, currently playing in Guys and Dolls. In
1951, Dorothy and Richard Rodgers held a big New Year's Eve party in which
guests were asked to come as their favorite painting. Their invitation had
Little Lord Fauntleroy on the front and, to "eliminate the horrid possibility
of seven Mona Lisas turning up," instructed guests to okay their choices with
a designated clearance person. Moreover, it advised, "there will be dancing,
[so] if you are a `Nude Descending a Staircase,' be sure the staircase is de-
tachable."35 Ethel and Levitt came dressed as a Spanish couple, posing with
friends as the subjects of Goya's Majas on a Balcony.

Prior to Call Me Madam, Ethel's feelings about art, especially modern art,
weren't too different from her love of books. As Lew Kessler recounts, "She
goes to this art gallery with Eleanor [Holm] and Billy [Rose] and the bidding
starts on this painting. So it's a still life, a bowl of fruit or something. And
Merman sits there and it's going up [and up, to some] fourteen thousand.
And finally Merman turns to Eleanor and says, ` . Fourteen thousand bucks! I can buy all that fruit for thirty-five cents and eat it besides.' "36
Cole Porter had once given her a painting by Grandma Moses, and later Ethel
was unable to recall whether she had given it away or not.

By the time of Call Me Madam, however, the press was announcing Ethel's
new interest in paintings by such masters as Manet and Renoir. She was buying art for her home, and Richard Rodgers's New Year's Eve party now
seemed an apt way to celebrate her new fancy. Pals Lindsay and Crouse did
not take Ethel's recently acquired interest too seriously, however, joking that
she had once told them that she "had an original over the mantel in [her]
apartment. And either Buck or Howard said, `An original what?' And [Ethel]
turned on the full power in [her] pipes and said, `An Original. That's all.' "37

Ethel was hitting the late-night New York scene more than she had in the
1940s, frequenting the Casino, El Morocco, the Stork Club, and other popular clubs of the time. She would go out with friends alone or with Levitt,
leaving Bobby and Ethel, no longer toddlers, in the care of their governess. Her scrapbooks suggest that her level of socializing seemed to nearly rival that
of Perle Mesta's.

Bob Levitt Sr. did not enjoy this period, later saying that Ethel was getting caught up in the high-society scene. If she was, the phase didn't last long.
She still retained old friends from Queens, such as Josie Traeger, and even
these newer celebrity friendships with people such as the Duke and Duchess
of Windsor were based on genuine fondness, not name-dropping or social
climbing. Their status didn't trip her up, and her high wattage energized the
often lackluster Edward, whom she frequently brought out onto the dance
floor. She and Levitt had a private joke about him-about his habit of humming to himself. "Why do you suppose he does that?" asked Ethel. Levitt:
"Well you see, maybe he's AC and the Waldorf is DC."38

Throughout the run of Madam, Ethel constantly told reporters that her
main happiness was her family, and indeed a strong, stable family life was her
priority, even if she wasn't always capable of honoring it. One story that was
frequently told explained why she and Levitt were an hour and forty minutes
late for a dinner when they were to meet Perle Mesta for the first time: their
physician was late in arriving at their home to treat Bobby's measles.

In early November 195o, Ethel was a hit on NBC's The Big Show, the popular radio show emceed by Tallulah Bankhead. (That particular evening
Jimmy Durante started the proceedings by musing how hard it would be to
translate his "good looks" into words for listeners.)39 Merman and Bankhead
were a riot together. Bankhead: "Well, DAHLINGS, we're forced to have Ethel
Merman on the show again tonight." Ethel, very sarcastically: "Tallulah, I
think you're the most divine woman." Another night, Bankhead drily noted
to her guest, "I saw the movie of Annie Get Your Gun, and you're not in it."
With radios in nearly 95 percent of American homes, these hilarious appearances expanded Ethel's audience-and her popularity with NBC brass.
Other activities when Call Me Madam was running included fundraisers for
Eddie Cantor's March of Dimes and the Actors' Fund of America as well as
numerous benefit performances of the show.

Mrs. Adams in an Integrated Washington

After eighty-one weeks, Ethel's friend and fellow musical comedy performer
Benay Venuta took over the role of Sally Adams, and Ethel's understudy, Elaine Stritch, toured. Just before leaving, she telegrammed, like a gladiator
to the emperor, "We who are about to die salute you." Although Ethel's run
with Call Me Madam at the Imperial terminated on May 3, 1952,40 she took
the show to Washington, D.C., for a historic two-week run before her contract expired on May P. The Washington run began on May 5, not too long
before the start of the national political conventions. The event was historic
not only because Ethel Merman was finally bringing a hit show outside New
York but also because she was performing at the National Theatre, which was
opening its doors to a racially mixed audience for the first time in its 117
years.41

Given Merman's "apolitical nature," the political dimensions of the National engagement might be brushed off as irrelevant. But the event shows
again how complex her relationship to race and ethnicity was. Here was conservative Merman, appearing at a politically charged, progressive event. If
Ethel wasn't always the most sensitive being ever to walk the planet, she had
an innate sense of fairness that might have enabled her to make a prointegration statement in those early days of the civil rights struggle.

Call Me Madam had been selected for reopening the National for a number of reasons: (i) Leland Hayward's skill as a producer, (2) the presence of
Broadway's biggest star in the cast, and (3) the show's Washington setting.
The way Call Me Madam was received-and, to some extent, writtenshows how flexible the lines between theatrical entertainment and American
political life were becoming. Of course, Washington was thrilled about the
short run there; it had taken over twenty years to get Merman to perform
there, and opening night attendees included congressmen of both political
parties, members of earlier administrations, ambassadors and former ambassadors to dozens of countries, justices, military officers, and, of course, stars
of the theater world, including Berlin, Lindsay, and Crouse.

Just as Annie Get Your Gun had produced two Armies, Call Me Madam
gave the press the opportunity to draw constant comparisons between Mesdames Mesta and Merman. There were plenty of differences: Mesta was a
well-rounded, educated diplomat appointed by President Truman; Merman
was a self-made star whose public decorum was not always for the fainthearted. That hardly stopped the comparisons: Saks Fifth Avenue promoted
leather portfolio bags by asking, "What famous Broadway ambassadress carries a portfolio just like this?"; Perle Mesta penned a piece in the journal
American called "Call Me Minister";42 and Ethel was suddenly approached
as an expert on throwing successful parties (although she rarely hosted them,
especially when she lived in New York). In a piece for Cosmopolitan that had run several years earlier, during the show's preopening buzz, Merman offered
advice as "the poor man's Elsa Maxwell": "Don't have too many seats"people need to mill about. "Nooks and crannies have killed more good parties than Carrie Nation." Hosts should have a star guest list, with a "good
line-up of hams" (her favorite was Jack Pearl) and then a large group of "semisquares," appreciators who "can recognize a hilarious story, but they don't try
to tell any." Always important to invite "a few unattached men of known
wolfish tendencies. Their presence somehow makes the married men more
attentive to their own wives. "41 Like other pieces, this was likely to have been
co-penned by Levitt.

Marriage Troubles

Levitt, meanwhile, was having a rougher time. Although he had been promoted, his career was not moving in ways that gratified him personally or intellectually. He had reportedly declined a military promotion in order to stay
in New York City as a Hearst journalist, but during the run of Call Me
Madam, the corporation fired him when his drinking and depression were
interfering with his work. They were not helping his marriage either.

Alcohol was no friend to Bob or to Ethel. As Bob Jr. recalls, "When Mom
drank she could be intensely inappropriate as a parent to her children; as a
friend to her friends; as a celebrity to her fans.... When she was loaded, she
could be fiercely irrational and maudlin, carelessly and wantonly aggressive,
and unyieldingly self-centered to the point of total emotional abandonment.... I dreaded an encounter with `Mom, drunk' more than I dreaded
an encounter with `Koppi, mad.' Why? Because I learned to expect nothing
[but trouble] from Koppi. And though Mom and I had no mother-child security established between us ... I still needed it, yearned for it, and I believe
that my mother needed it and yearned for it too. Alcohol inflamed the hurt
and confusion around all that unfulfilled need and yearning."44 Ethel's social
drinking remained heavy all of her life and affected a number of people, although Tony Cointreau and his partner, her two closest friends, never saw her
lose control. And despite its corrosive effects on her family, Merman was able
to control her need for drink and could turn it off at will. She never drank
alone. She never drank when she was working, and she did not tolerate it in
colleagues who did. Her husband, though, lacked this iron will.

A few years later, the always-direct Dorothy Fields said, "Bob Levitt was
an irritant to Ethel. He was so far above her intellectually.... He's a very, very bright guy. And Ethel is not an intellectual woman. She is a shrewd woman,
but she's-she knows all the small talk, but you can't sit down and talk to her.
You just can't."45 (Fields made her remarks when Ethel was happily married
to her next husband.)

And so two strong, stubborn, and loving personalities watched as their
dreams began to wear out. After a long time of fighting and raised voices, Bob
and Ethel separated for good in May 1951. Soon thereafter Levitt was seen
around town escorting Linda Darnell, but he was hardly doing well. In August, he was involved in a horse-riding accident in which he suffered multiple broken bones, and the double lock of depression and alcoholism was taking its toll. Although he would remarry, twice (the first time to a fellow
alcoholic), Levitt never really got his life back.

After their parents' separation, Bobby and Ethel Jr. spent summers and
weekends with Big at his rented apartments in the city, and, after he moved,
at houses he rented near the water, like Bell Island and Rye, and eventually
at a home he bought in East Hampton. At first Little Ethel would take her
brother to the window in Big's den to point out the building their father was
going to move to. "All of a sudden," says Bob Jr., "there was no father in our
underparented lives."46 For Big Ethel and Bob, there was heartfelt regret on
both sides, along with the usual acrimony, especially for the more cynical and
introspective Levitt. Both never seemed to know exactly what had gone
wrong.