Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (48 page)

To Ethel's dismay, Russell Nype lost the role of Kenneth. Nype just wasn't
an established name, especially to West Coast executives, who in addition
were looking for an actor who could dance. They decided on rising star Donald O'Connor, fresh from the success of Singin' in the Rain (1952) for
$75,000. Fox had to borrow him from MGM, where delays pushed back his
start date for Madam nearly a month, to August it, 1952. When wasp-waisted
dancer Vera-Ellen was cast as Princess Marie-Kenneth's partner in the secondary young romantic couple-casting was set. Because of these decisions,
the movie was free to feature dancing much more than the play had.

Vera-Ellen had crossed paths with Merman before, as a chorus member in
Panama Hattie. Zanuck had her in mind to play Maria from the start, and
choreographer Robert Alton was delighted to work with her. (They'd worked
together before.) Alton and Merman's working relationship went back to
Anything Goes and DuBarry; he had been approached to stage the dances for
Call Me Madam before the job went to Robbins. Alton was a top choreographer in musical theater and film, and many feel that his short career has been
unjustly eclipsed by Robbins, De Mille, Fosse, Gene Kelly, and others. (Alton died in 1957 at the age of fifty-one.) His Hollywood credits include Showboat,
Easter Parade, Annie Get Your Gun, Broadway Rhythm, and The Barkleys of
Broadway. Alton was versatile, as adept at staging romantic duos as group
scenes, which he could choreograph with dazzling degrees of activity, balance,
and color. His work with Call Me Madam contributed greatly to its success. i9

The last time Ethel Merman had lived in Los Angeles was 1938, but now, in
the summer of 1952, she was finally back in Hollywood, going between her
favorite hotel (the Beverly Hills) and a home she rented during the film's production. Her language to the press balances candor about her previous experiences out west and care in maintaining an upbeat, professional tone about
her new project there:

When I was here before I had to step back in favor of people who were established in the films. At zoth during Alexander's Ragtime Band, Alice Faye was
the reigning star of the lot in musicals.... The best I could hope for was a
featured role in a picture, singing spots, but I wasn't in a position to carry a
film.

I resolved then that my next trip to the Coast would be on a different basis.
It would be in some story specially designed for me, with which I was definitely identified, and that would also be right for me in pictures.

The perfect format has been reached, I feel, in CallMe Madam. It was written for me on the stage, became an established and very personal sort of suc-
cess.20

LA hosted no shortage of New York talent that summer: Mike Todd, Robert Sherwood, Howard Dietz, Dorothy and Herb Fields, among others.
Ethel's kids ("I call them Little Bit and Stinker")" spent days swimming with
a young Liza Minnelli at the home of Sidney Luft and Judy Garland. Her July
and August evenings were filled with parties, and Louella Parsons commented, "The hit Broadway's darling, Ethel Merman, has made it in Hollywood just being herself-which is really swell."22 Ethel mingled with studio
heads (Louis B. Mayer), prominent businessmen (Conrad Hilton), and stars
at one party;23 at another, hosted by the Screen Producers Guild honoring
Mayer; and at several by actress and Hearst partner Marion Davies, whose
guest lists ran as high as five hundred. On October 2, Davies transformed
three rooms in her mansion to resemble New York's Stork Club, El Morocco,
and 21. Ethel enjoyed visiting other celebrities, among them new parents
Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.

July 28, 1952, was a warm summer day when Ethel first reported for work
at Fox's studio on iozoi West Pico Boulevard. Her first task was to record
songs for Madam. As was typical for musicals, the show's songs were prerecorded, and actors later lip-synched to their own vocals. (Vera-Ellen's vocals
in the film were dubbed.) Shooting wasn't scheduled to begin until close to
September.

The local press learned quickly that Merman's voice made for good copy:
"Ethel had only started song rehearsals at the studio when she got a phone
call from friend Robert E. Sherwood, working at the studio on the screenplay of The Man on a Tight Rope. `Sure glad you're with us,' said Robert E.,
explaining that his office was only a few hundred yards from her rehearsal
stage. `And Ethel, I know you'll be happy to learn,' he said, `that you're coming in fine."'2' Said Variety, "Studio microphones will be fitted with `ear
muffs' when brassy-voiced Ethel Merman begins recordings today for zoth-
Fox's CallMeMadam. Decibel-stacked delivery of singer star necessitates use
of special baffles to protect the mikes."25

The studio gave her the dressing room of Betty Grable, who was under
suspension at the time, and Merman decorated it in a Victorian theme; she
told reporters she had filled it with "beautiful antiques," joking that she
hoped not to be confused with them, "because I haven't been here for so
long. "26

Press and crew were impressed by Merman's professionalism on the set,
and Walter Lang especially enjoyed working with her. "She's a real trouper,"
he said, lauding her hard work and lack of moodiness.27 O'Connor said
much the same: "She has a great deal of warmth.... She's herself off the
screen with many of the qualities which you would expect her to [have] on
the screen or on the stage but at the same time, it is a human functioning
person. She's real, she's nice," he added, implying "unlike other perform-
ers."28 "She works hard. She is never late," summed up a reporter. "She will
argue with a director about a piece of business until she understands it and
it is successful. Then she loves the director forever. She is a perfectionist,
but having achieved what she wants, she relaxes and enjoys it."29 Sol Siegel
remembered that the star became "fidgety between takes, having little to do
compared with the split second activity required when working on stage,"30
all the more understandable, given that she was forced into more inactivity than most of her costars. Merman's elaborate gowns required that between takes she had to prop herself on a board placed at a seventy-five degree angle to keep from wrinkling them. (Duplicates had been made so that
she always looked fresh.) It is hard to imagine someone with her energy in such a position, but Hollywood would again require this of her in her next
picture.

Madam's daily rushes did not interest Merman, who still didn't enjoy
watching herself, obviously unable to follow Tyrone Power's advice to consider it someone else's work. Part of this derives from Ethel's shyness or modesty and perhaps her fundamental pragmatism as well: once she was done and
the calls were out of her hands, Ethel didn't waste energy worrying about
them.

The shooting schedule went along without great incident. No falls or hurt
ankles, as there had been in Happy Landing. At the end of October, though,
low-risk Merman-who hadn't missed a single performance of Call Me
Madam on Broadway-missed a few days of work because of flu; but generally, her usual high-octane energy was uncompromised. ("High Ethyl," the
press punned.) In October she did a benefit for the Shriners, scribbling on
the program, "It was really something! I had been asked to appear as representing The loth Century-Fox Studio and could not very well turn it
down. "31

There was a lot of activity at Fox studios during the filming of Call Me
Madam, with many other projects in or nearing production. The studio was
planning to shoot nine pictures by the end of September 1952 (which would
break its own production record),32 and the pace and kinds of projects being
developed might have been too much for Sol Siegel, the producer of several
simultaneous projects.33 On September 13 he stepped down as executive producer of the studio's musicals unit, he explained to Variety, to avoid being
typecast as a musicals producer and because financial pressures for musicals
were simply growing too intense. The budget per picture now pushed two
million dollars, and with that came the special pressures such budgets entail.
It's unclear how confident Siegel really was about the future of musical comedies; he expressed concern that "musicals don't do well overseas," with the
exception of those with "universal talents, like Danny Kaye or Esther
Williams."34 These remarks indicate the extent of the stakes his studio was
putting into Madam.

From Stage to Screen

The main task of screenwriter Arthur Sheekman was to reduce the play's running time of over two and a half hours to under two, and he was able to
streamline the book without sacrificing its spirit, for instance, by telescoping the developing affection between Kenneth and Marie while adding several
dance scenes. The book stayed much the same, retaining its gags ("You do not
strike me as a cold woman, Sally." "Oh, I'm not. I've got a woolen sweater.")
and the joke about being investigated. Sheekman, incidentally, had worked
as a writer on Kid Millions.

On Broadway, Sally Adams had been a Democrat. Hollywood was more
concerned about selling a product to the entire country and demurred from
assigning particular political affiliations to its characters, even though Sally
Adams was appointed by a Democratic president. The story was depoliticized
in other ways as well, going from giving Lichtenburg a coalition government
(shades of the Marshall Plan) to making it a monarchist nation that supported democratic elections. Kenneth's expertise (a Harvard degree in international relations) and his plans to modernize and industrialize Lichtenburg
by turning a waterfall into a power plant were dropped, as was Kenneth's social stature: in the play, he had landed the job with Mrs. Adams because he
was the son of a senator; in the movie, he is a self-made journalist, peddling
the image of self-made men over that of political insiders.

As soon as Sheekman produced his first working script in March 1952,35
Zanuck expressed concern over its political satire and its many tongue-incheek moments. He agitated for something less edgy and was particularly
concerned about giving the story, especially the romance between Sally and
Cosmo, credibility: "We should root for them to get together." He urged the
writer to give a "little more depth" to their scenes together: "I feel that she
now shrugs off too easily her loss of Cosmo" before their final reunion.36

Zanuck had worked on plenty of musicals, but he preferred films with
strong story lines, driven by compelling, interesting characters. He was most
at home with social issue films that lent themselves to credible character psychology and clear motivation, features at odds with most musicals. In an
April 2, 1952, conference on Call Me Madam's first treatment, for instance,
he expressed trepidation about "chorus numbers": "I think it is wrong to have
secretaries, reporters, tourists, singing."37 In short, Zanuck was more interested in personality over spectacle. That he could make a musical at all, especially one as fantastically set as Call Me Madam, is something of a marvel,
especially since he said he wanted "no great splendor ... or grand scale."38

Two songs were deleted from the Broadway show, "Once upon a Time"
(sung by Kenneth) and "They Like Ike" (sung by three U.S. senators). The
latter was not only too sectarian but too actively political with its afterlife as
Eisenhower's presidential campaign song. Berlin added two in their stead,
"What Chance Have I with Love?" and "The International Rag." Neither was new: "What Chance?" had appeared in Louisiana Purchase (1940), and "The
International Rag" had been composed in 1913 for Sophie Tucker. Audiences
didn't seem to mind the recycling, if they noticed it at all. Certainly the final
film allowed knowing viewers other traces of Berlin, providing a glimpse of
him in his photo that appears on sheet music held by Marie/Vera-Ellen during "It's a Lovely Day." (The in-joke went even further when Kenneth tells
her that the song was a hit in a Broadway show a few years back.)

The picture's big budget enabled it to depict Lichtenburg as an even more
lavish, quaint place than the play had, a fictive meeting ground of Monaco,
Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Filled with tradition, royalty, and not one but
two love stories triumphing over national and cultural differences, it offered
a fairy-tale world steeped in the myths of high Europeanness with which
Sally's Americana was contrasted. True, her dresses weren't lowbrow "American" like those of Panama Hattie or Annie Oakley, but her mannerisms were,
and her dialogue and songs were filled with references to a whirring American economy and up-to-date way of life. Both play and film play the tension
for laughs in scenes with Sally's charge d'affaires, whom she calls "Fancy
pants," contrasting Ethel's down-to-earth, tough persona with Maxwell's
upper-class, more feminized European one. The contrast also informs the
scenes between Sally and Cosmo, though to more poignant effect.

In many ways, it is impossible to tell where Ethel Merman's public persona ends and Sally Adams's begins. Her Americanness is established through
a variety of means: like a good Jewish mother, she promises to deliver some
chicken soup to the archduke for what ails him (a weakened economy); she
has to defend herself against the advances of political officials (with her
comment about a sweater); et cetera. Like the play, the film capitalized not
just on Ethel playing an American abroad but also on Ethel being a New
Yorker out of her element, comparing the size of Lichtenburg with Brooklyn.
And when she is told on first arriving in the duchy that she is to be presented
at the palace that night, she says, "The Palace? Who's playing there?"39

Like a Rodgers and Hammerstein show or even previous Merman vehicles such as Girl Crazy, assimilation was an important theme in Call Me
Madam; here, however, Americanness is exported to the economically vanquished postwar European "colonies," and Sally Adams is its ambassador:
"You are the most American American I've ever met," George Sanders tells
her, and she thanks him for the "best compliment" she's ever had. Sally's infatuation with Cosmo dramatically literalizes the notion of winning hearts
and minds, something that had occurred onstage, but now, in a film that
would appear all across the country, the stakes were higher. Moreover, in the few years since the story's Broadway run, the Cold War had intensified, and
the United States, an isolationist country to begin with, was even more suspicious of foreigners.