Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (43 page)

It was a strange backdrop for one of the more innovative decades in Broadway musical history. For the '50s saw the rise of shows in which dance routines
would be crucially important to the show's storytelling and provide insight into characters' inner lives and dreams. This was the decade of the "choreographer-director," and although Ethel would work with one of the most famous
ones and in one of Broadway's most innovative shows, there was no doubt that
her school of the old book musical was on its way out.

Popular culture was changing as well, primarily because of the speedy rise
of television. With it, the rules of comedy were changing-they had to.
Shows were broadcast into living rooms across the nation, and so tamer family fare ruled the day. Jokes were toned down and cleaned up. Industry was
targeting "average" audiences, and that meant white, suburban, nothing
identified with a particular region, such as New York's Lower East Side. Oldtime performers like Cantor and Lahr had trouble adapting; others brought
their old personalities onto TV (Groucho Marx, Durante). For female performers the transition was generally harder: singers like Kate Smith were reduced to one-trick ponies; comics like Gracie Allen transitioned well, successful as ever as a hilarious ditz; Imogene Coca was brassy but unthreatening;
Lucille Ball flourished, even if most of her younger audience was unaware of
her prior career as actress and dancer.

Female comics often experience longer careers than other female entertainers who have to depend on their looks or voice. Merman was enough
of a blend of both to keep her career going: her voice was in fine shape, and
she could capitalize on her instinctive comedic gifts in the new TV era. Yet
while her energetic appearances kept her in the public eye for a long time,
her performance style and mannerisms often marked her as from another
era and another medium. Merman's ability to turn sex into a "good clean
joke," for instance, had the vestiges of vaudeville and old music hall comedy and was readily available to a broad, working-class urban audience. Legitimate Broadway theater and, even more so, Hollywood film were now
setting their sights higher, on the ostensibly more respectable middle class.
Hollywood excelled at turning human sexuality into something transcendent and glamorous or at rendering it innocuous through jokes and caricature; TV whitewashed it even more. Such gentrifying trends didn't
change the musical comedy Merman was known for, but Broadway itself
was now becoming a leisure form for middle- and upper-class consumers;
expenses and ticket prices skyrocketed after the war. With so much financial stake in every new show, producers were weaning themselves from
"risky" ventures, a tradition that continued for decades, culminating late
in the century with endless musical revivals or shows based on existing
films, operas, and TV shows.

Staying with Her Roots

One thing that was starting to make Ethel stand out from other celebrities is
that she didn't try to escape the worldviews into which she'd been born. Even
if she enjoyed having one foot in the high-flying world of celebrity, she kept
the other firmly in the lower-middle-class mentality she'd known since
birth. High culture was not for her. "She's always been the kind of gal who'd
rather have a rhinestone orchid than two tickets to Faust," said Lew Kessler. i i

Ethel also kept a hands-on approach to the way her home was maintained. "A lot of women, for heaven's sakes, don't want to be bothered about
the help, and [Ethel would] get down and scrub the g.d. bathroom floor herself when the help would quit," said husband Levitt after their divorce.12
Like any woman of her station, Ethel preferred having the help, but, according to her son, working for Ethel Merman was not always easy, and she
rarely enjoyed good relations with people hired to serve her. (Levitt has a
vague memory as an infant of being wrenched from the arms of Abba, the
nurse he loved so much and whom his mom fired, replaced by the cruel Miss
Kopeman.) His mother's difficulty with her employees did not come from
being inherently nasty; she just didn't think of them as people with feelings
of their own: they were there for her. She was a terrible tipper, for instance.
"Mom had attitude when it came to the people who served her, and she was
hard on them," driving the doorman in one hotel to the point of nearmurderous impulses. "Mom had very little empathy for other people's emotional needs or for their experience with the financial rigors of life.... Her
own certainty in her own ability to sustain herself in life, at brilliant levels,
seemed to create an attitude towards others made up, in part, of a general
disinterest and, in part, from a general expectation that anyone else could
do the same if they just applied themselves. I can't recall seeing Mom take
any real pleasure in her generosity's impact on others. She really did believe,
and rightly so, that Ethel Merman gave a lot to the world around her. Big
tips not included."13

By the mid-1940s the star was complaining with surprising candor and frequency about not being able to keep good housekeepers. One New York Herald Tribune story was called "Ethel Merman Discovers Maids Are More Elusive Than Roles"; "Ethel Guns for a Baby Sitter" ran another. In one of her
1951 columns, Kilgallen noted, "If you can get her to do it, Ethel Merman's
recital of her difficulties with her domestic help is the funniest one-woman
sketch in town."14

Like many people tight with the penny, Merman was swift to spot
cheapness in others, disdaining hucksters and gold diggers, and referred to
an especially parsimonious acquaintance as a guy who could "squeeze a
nickel until the Indian humped the buffalo."is The public started to circulate stories about Merman's reputed stinginess too; Richard Rodgers's
comment on the Christmas tree was not the only anecdote out there.
"Three things are important to Ethel," said Lou Irwin, "and the first is
money, and the second is money, and the third is money." Ethel viewed her
attitude toward finances as nothing more than common sense and was
proud of her frugality and her attentiveness to expenditures. Talking with
Pete Martin, Ethel told the story of the morning after Annie had opened;
she was poring over the papers, noting to her husband that the price of
canned peaches had gone up. Levitt, she told Pete Martin, "never got over
that. "i6

There are just as many accounts of Ethel's acts of generosity. Her scrapbooks are filled with notes from fans, celebrities, and managers thanking her
for notes, gifts, and other acts of kindness. If someone was sick, Ethel came
through in abundance, even if theirs was just a casual working relationship:
"Dear Ethel," began a letter from choreographer Bob Alton during Panama
Hattie. "I cannot tell you how pleased I was with the beautiful basket you sent
me. I was pretty sick when [it] arrived and I am most grateful to you for being
so thoughtful.... I will drop backstage soon. Sincerely, Bob Alton."17 Betty
Hutton, also from Panama Hattie and MGM's future Annie Oakley, received
a large topaz ring from Ethel when she left Hattie.18 Many of Ethel's gifts
sparkled with her impishness. To John Mason Brown, hospitalized in July
1947, she sent an arrangement of red carnations interspersed with packs of
cigarettes and placed a phone call to him that he said had the hospital staff
in stitches.'9 Ethel's little black book had notes for everybody's birthday or
anniversary, and she never missed one.

A well-known Merm story is that every Saturday during the run of Gypsy,
she brought a chocolate cake to the theater after discovering that costar Jack
Klugman liked chocolate cake. A "gypsy" chorus member from Call Me
Madam recalls running into Ethel at Bloomingdale's on a day off. He offered
to help her take her bags out to the car, and she accepted, then offered him
a ride, which he declined. At the theater the next day he found a pair of platinum cufflinks from Cartier's waiting for him with a thank-you card. Going
to her dressing room, he said, "Oh, Miss Merman, I can't possibly accept
these." Without even glancing up from her makeup table, she bellowed,
"What's the matter, don't ya want them?"

"Mom never went for the trappings of celebrity," says her son today. "She
enjoyed its perks, and she liked having things. But she was never ever caught
up in her own fame."20 Ethel prided herself on not having a secretary, on
doing her own typing and correspondence, on supervising her finances (with
accountants-starting with Pop-and investment advisers). In many ways
Merman really did retain her modest roots, keeping records of every detail of
her life as a celebrity, including the building floor plan for the 1954 Republican National Convention, and even typing up menus of important dinner
parties. Her closest friends were not from the entertainment world; most intimates came from the days in Queens, like Josie Traeger and the Panzer family. Later, she relaxed in New Jersey with Kathryn Shreve, who looked after
Ethel's elderly Pop. "Ethel was most comfortable when she was with people
she knew weren't trying to use her for anything," says Cointreau.21

Ethel was not the first or last star to downplay her wealth and privilege;
most entertainment figures try to present themselves as not all that different
from their fans. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, swore that she was "just a
hausfrau," dispensing cleaning and cooking tips. (She actually loved homemaking.) Merman, who didn't, "kept to her roots," as her Call Me Madam
gypsy says; he recalls seeing her shooting craps with the crew.

Ethel mingled just as easily with heads of state and big celebrities, yet she
never adopted or tolerated the airs or pretensions that might have made her
a more seamless fit into the upper classes, and she seemed strikingly aware
that that was a deliberate choice. To her granddaughter she later advised,
"Don't fart higher than your ass."22

Backlash

For some, Ethel Merman was the gauche nouveau riche, the inappropriately
landed celebrity-Horatio Alger stories tend to overlook the resentment
that awaits the suddenly elevated. This perception was formed by roles and
the reports of incidents such as her purported outburst over the wardrobe
in Red, Hot and Blue! Later, during a Call Me Madam revival in the 196os, a
gypsy says that Merman barely interacted with anyone in the show other
than Nype. But as early as the mid194os, the press was already hinting at
her aloofness:

Unlike Tallulah Bankhead, who, offstage and on, is always and emphatically
Tallulah Bankhead, Miss Merman has two personalities. In the theatre she is Annie Oakley, Panama Hattie, or whatever part she happens to be playing, and
such is the vehemence of her portrayal of these noisy, domineering girls that
some of her colleagues are prone to credit her with similar qualities in private
life. "I know Ethel gets terribly cozy with the audience," one of them remarked
thoughtfully a little while ago, "but you can't help feeling that she's never been
introduced to the cast."23

Ethel had quickly come to embody class tensions and disparities. For some
people, her roots and her ongoing connection with "regular" Americans on
and off the stage, coupled with stories about rough behavior and language,
made for a distinctly unpalatable combination. Rather than adoring her
blunt-edged joie de vivre, they recoiled from the crassness or lack of sophistication they perceived in, or projected onto, her. "My father," recalls a fortyish Italian American raised in working-class Queens, "hated her. He wouldn't
let us listen to her when I was growing up, even though he adored show
tunes. She came on too strong for him. Maybe it was a misogynist thing, but
he thought she was vulgar."24 And a middle-aged woman recalls how her
father, born around 192o in New Jersey, referred to Merman as "that loudmouthed Jew."25

Jewishness was still sticking, and for some of the public, Merman's consummate New Yorkness clinched it. (Recall Wolcott Gibbs's comment about
the "Semitic cast" of her nose.) Yet others are convinced that Merman was
biased against Jews; Arthur Laurents remembers a day off during Gypsy's run
in Philadelphia, when he and Sondheim "ran into Ethel wandering around
the city. We asked what she had been up to. `Praying for the show,' she said,
hastening to add, `in church!' " For Passover, she not only brought a ham
sandwich to the seder that Jule Styne held for the cast but also ate turkey
sandwiches with Russian dressing in front of them during rehearsals, infuriating Styne.26

Whenever the press called her Jewish, Ethel wrote or called to correct
them, and Laments is right to note that she was rather obsessed about being
mistaken for Jewish. Says Tony Cointreau, "You have to put it in perspective.
In the 192os and'30s, New York was a very anti-Semitic town. There were 'restricted' areas. Jews and blacks did not live on the Upper East Side and other
of the tonier addresses. And they accepted it."27 In this way Merman was just
a product of her time, neither rising above it nor forecasting more tolerant
future attitudes. Levitt Jr. gives an indication of what those "treacherous, historical waters" were like when he discusses his own experiences. "For me, as
a child, anti-Semitism was an unpleasant wisp of something that came and went, a bad smell, a different sounding name, a condemning tone.... Long
before I knew its name, anti-Semitism was in my childhood as a'vague something' that I felt within the distancing, disgust and disliking that I observed
as it was acted out by some of the prominent adults in my world. Including,
and especially, my mother and father."28

When Pete Martin interviewed Bob Levitt Sr., Levitt told him he believed his ex-wife had inherited the "bigoted prejudices" of her parents,
whom he considered small-minded. (He would derisively refer to them as
"Momsy" and "Floppsy." )29 Yet Levitt hardly escaped those influences himself; Levitt Jr. refers to his father's "lifetime effort to cover-up the Jew he
was in religions he wasn't-first Episcopal, then Presbyterian, while persistently, and aggressively, keeping his distance from his family and his Jew-
ishness."30