Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (5 page)

Agnes and Edward were hard-wired with what Levitt describes as "a sense
of order," propriety, and pragmatism. He recalls never spotting a speck of
dust in their house, and his grandfather's ledger pencils were always sharpened and neatly arranged on top of his mahogany office desk. "Pop was very prescribed, set in his ways, formalized," he recalls, noting how much love
there was in all of that order. Pop would "go to the office and do eight hours
of adding and subtracting at his own desk (always in his head, without the
benefit of an adding machine, much less a calculator), but when he was home
he'd sit at his own desk, a very warm and radiant piece of furniture, to do his
clipping work for Mom, his keeping of her personal `books,' and whatever
other tasks required a flat surface, nicely polished and always dusted by
Gram, Pop's beloved Agnes. "18 In ways, Edward and Agnes were right out of
central casting: the German and the Scotswoman with an impeccably neat
home, the paragon of affection, discipline, and order. Merman inherited
these traits many times over-in her grooming, her housecleaning, and her
work habits.

They also shaped her relationship to money. "I think her father's a thrifty
German," said friend and colleague Dorothy Fields in a 1950s interview. "His
attitude was, `Don't let them get you baby. You see that you get yours."'i9 (Of
her parents, though, Agnes was more suspicious about being cheated.) Ethel
benefited from that no-nonsense pragmatism and acquired a matter-of-fact
attitude about her career that floored many a lesser star. She also profited
from her parents' cautiousness with money; every grocery bill that came in,
Ethel double-checked.

To be sure, such attitudes were common among working- and lowermiddle-class families and immigrants struggling to maintain their footing in
the New World-and soon struggling in the Great Depression. But on this
latter point, the Zimmermanns were less typical, for not only did they ride
out the Depression years, they even prospered: Edward held onto his job
throughout, and his daughter soon hit the big time in a way nobody ever
could have anticipated.

The Young Singer

From the start, Agnes and Edward wanted their daughter to be able to stand
on her own two feet, something she claimed she was doing "from the age of
five." On this point too, the Zimmermanns were both of their time and station and not quite of it. Daughters of working-class families needed to acquire practical, employable skills, to be sure, but landing a husband was usually part of their training. Instead, Mom and Pop Zimmermann urged their
daughter to focus on making a living and to be self-sufficient above all. By
the time she was singing her ode to "Eadie" in Take a Chance, one writer would spin that protofeminist point of her life story fairly liberally: "Of the
entire group [in high school], Ethel was the only one whose dreams didn't
consist of a little white house with a pot of geraniums in the kitchen and a
couple of fat babies in the yard. Ethel knew what she wanted. No man could
dominate her life."20

No one knew that Ethel's autonomy would come from her voice, but
music was a central part of her upbringing. At age three, she began singing
around the house. (Musical show writing team Howard Lindsay and Russel
Crouse later quipped, "There was terrific excitement in the Zimmermann
home when they discovered that young Ethel could talk, too.")21 Ethel and
her parents averred that the boom in her voice was always there and that
neighbors could tell whenever the wide-eyed Zimmermann girl was singing.
This was no doubt true, but not because of Ethel's lung power, ample though
it was. For it was hard not to hear aspiring singers or musicians practice in
their homes: windows were open whenever weather permitted. Astoria was a
tightly knit community, and residents of the early decades of the 19oos spent
much of their time socializing and milling outdoors before radios and television sets would insulate them inside. So as true as this story is about Ethel's
childhood singing-and she and her biographers repeated it often-it would
have been the same for any singer or musician growing up at the time. In
short, the tale lingers not for its historical exactitude but to showcase the lung
power that was considered the hallmark of the Merman voice.

Like many middle-class American families, the Zimmermanns had a
piano, which Edward played on Sundays or while unwinding from work.
Agnes had sung in choirs, but it was Pop who remained musically active,
playing keyboards in a small amateur combo that played locally. He was also
the organist at his Masonic Lodge-"Never at church," said Ethel. Again, in
this era just before radio and when phonographs were still relatively uncommon, songs were popularized through sheet music and pianos. Edward
played while his daughter sang. "My father ... taught me to read music and
to play the piano-but not well."22 Although Edward read music, he
couldn't sight read or play by ear.

One of the pillars of the Merman myth is that she was an untrained singer
("I never had a lesson in my life!"), and so the question of her ability to read
music comes up from time to time. Now, among the giants of American popular music, figures who didn't read music are not difficult to find; Irving
Berlin, for instance, couldn't and could play only in F# major. (He had a
"trick piano" especially made that was outfitted with a transposing keyboard.) With La Merm, however, things are not very black and white. In the early 196os, when she appeared on Judy Garland's TV show in a now-classic
episode with Barbra Streisand, the three Divas of Belt shared a giggle about
their inability to read music. Yet as a guest on The Mike Douglas Show a decade later, Merman said, "Oh yes, I read music. My father taught me." A few
years later, on The Merv Griffin Show, when Griffin teased her, "Still no lessons, still not able to sight read?" Ethel did not disagree.

Given her phenomenal instincts as a singer and her successes, it scarcely
matters that Ethel Merman didn't read music (or, more likely, didn't read it
well). Her ear was incredible, and she had a knack for nailing songs after only
one or two hearings. "I'd send her a tape in the morning," recalled pianist,
arranger, composer, and close friend Roger Edens, "and by the afternoon,
she'd learn a new song or a new arrangement. It was amazing."23 Merman
was happy to have learned music the way she did, since most "girl singers are
usually forced at the beginning to sing in a choir. They always sounded like
they had a muffin in their mouth," she quipped.24 A happy result: she was
never self-conscious about technique or breath; "I sing honest," she'd say.25

Ethel gave her first public performance at age five. "There was a Captain
Eddie who put on an annual performance called `La Parada' to benefit the
Tubercular association," she told biographer Pete Martin.26 Pop accompanied Ethel on a song she sang for her mother, "She's Me Pal"-a distaff variation of Vincent Bryan and Gus Edwards's "He's Me Pal"-and "How Ya
Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?" She also sang at picnics at the
Women's Republican Club of Astoria, in which Agnes was active. "Pop accompanied me on the piano, and I must have been a hit, because I appeared
there often, billed as `Little Ethel Zimmermann." '27 She sang at her father's
Masonic Lodge, where her mom's best friend, Marie Gardiner, a local singing
star, also performed. "Sometimes there would be singing contests for five dollar coin pieces. I remember winning some." She sang at local churches. Because the Church of the Redeemer, where she'd been baptized, didn't allow
girls to sing, she "ended up at the Dutch Reformed church most of the time,"
where "the choir was mixed. "28

Agnes and Edward encouraged their daughter's interest in music by taking her to hear contemporary singers. Their home was only a few blocks from
the subway, and it was an easy ride into Manhattan's theater district. So it became a tradition on Sundays, when Tom Mossman, a family friend who
worked with Edward, joined the family for lamb or roast beef ("Mom was a
great cook," recalls Ethel), that every other week "Uncle Tom" took Ethel to
the matinee at the Palace, the historic vaudeville theater erected to great fanfare in 1913. Eventually, Agnes started going there with her daughter on Friday evenings, since it was not a school night, and Ethel remembered, "We sat in
the first row of the second balcony, where the seats cost forty-six cents. Then
later we moved down to the back of the first balcony, where seats went for
eighty-three cents."29 At the Palace, Ethel experienced singing sensations
such as Grace La Rue, belter Blossom Seeley (1891-1974), and Nora Bayes
(1880-1928), the popular chanteuse and musicals star to whom Ethel would
soon be compared. As Ethel later told her biographer, she also liked performers Dorothy Fielding and Betty Fields. Already nursing aspirations to
become a singer, the young girl memorized all of their songs.

Tin Pan Alley and Ethnic Interplay

Tin Pan Alley describes not just the reigning popular music of the 191os and
192os but the place that produced it, New York City's West 28th Street, headquarters to the country's largest music publishers. Earlier, Tin Pan Alley had
been located farther downtown, before the theater district moved north to midtown and the area we now associate with Broadway. This was a busy, clanging,
boisterous part of the city, where participants and passersby could hear tunesmiths working songs out on their pianos, singers practicing, musicians rehearsing. Everywhere song pluggers hustled singers into performing songs of
their music publisher, a new practice that benefited all parties. In the '2os,
spurred by the rise of radio, record labels were cropping up everywhere, catering to mass and niche markets alike. There were "race records," recording labels primarily for African Americans, labels for klezmer music, and so on.

The typical Tin Pan Alley song was composed of thirty-two bars that
broke down into four eight-bar phrases and followed the standard A-A-B-A
form. With language taken from colloquial speech, these songs often told
small stories about topics or figures gleaned from current events or even from
other songs and singers. Tin Pan Alley borrowed liberally from earlier minstrel, folk, and tavern songs in addition to contemporary jazz and ragtime,
especially their rhythmic patterns and accentuation. Its songs ranged from
ballads through African-American blues to send-ups of Scottish, Irish, and
Yiddish airs.

Another feature of Tin Pan Alley was its mode of production. Tunes were
written quickly and were just as quickly thrown into the world. For all their
catchy charm and contemporary flavor, however, these Tin Pan Alley songs were
driven first and foremost by profit. They were never considered a form of personal or artistic expression (in contrast to classical or art music). Rather, they were products of a bustling metropolis and modern technologies that could
mass-reproduce songs and deliver them to consumers through nightclub and
stage performances, sheet music, records, and radio.

Many Tin Pan Alley songwriters were Jewish immigrants, working at a historical moment before they "became white,"30 and for some, Tin Pan Alley and
ragtime offered the fantasy of leaving their ethnic and European roots behind
in the process of assimilating into American culture. The music that resulted,
though, can hardly be called ethnically unmarked, even if its African-American,
Irish, and Jewish influences are not as mutually distinct as we might think.
Music historian Mark Grant has made precisely this point, noting, for instance,
that these traditions favor consonants and lyrical clarity over "legitimate"
singing's rounded vowels and tonal beauty; the impact of Irish ballad singing
was such, he notes, as to inform "Jewish Irish tenor" Al Jolson. A particular
technique associated with Jolson, the spoken tremolo, "is not exclusively Hebraic and cantoral in origin, as some commentators have claimed, because it
clearly occurred in the singing of performers of other ethnicities" (British,
American, Irish).31

Most of the white female vocalists Ethel admired performed Tin Pan Alley
songs. African-American singers, by contrast, found their greatest successes
recording blues for race records aimed at African-American consumers (a few
labels were even black-owned). By the end of the 192os, however, as blues
caught on with white audiences, bringing bigger profits, even greats such as
Ma Rainey (1886-1939) were consigned to the sidelines as black male recording artists-and, eventually, white men-took over. The blues got smoothed
out. By this time, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith (1894-1937), and other female
black singers of renown, including future Broadway and film star Ethel Waters (1896-1977), had to sing second-tier Tin Pan Alley songs to get by.

In the 19105 and 'zos, white female singers, especially gentile ones, typically performed in what might be called an exaggerated "feminine" style.
Upper registers, slides of pitch, and a light, fluttering, tremulous vibrato were
favored by vocalists and stage stars such as Ruth Erring, Marilyn Miller,
Helen Kane (on whom cartoon Betty Boop was modeled), and Helen Morgan ("Julie" in the original Show Boat). Recordings of Ruth Etting's "You're
the Cream in My Coffee," for instance, reveal a smooth delivery, minimal
chest projection, and almost no accentuation on the downbeats. For most
white female singers, crisp enunciation was also de rigueur, something that
was largely eschewed by blues singers working out African-American traditions. (Ethel Waters often faced accusations from the black press of being a
11 race traitor" precisely for her crisp diction.)

It was common for nonblack female singers to assume different ethnic
identities in performing Tin Pan Alley songs, especially in pieces pitched for
comic effect. Nora Bayes, for instance, sang "How Can They Tell That I'm
Irish"; the Yiddish performer Fannie Brice did "I'm an Indian" using a central European-Yiddish dialect and phrasing. And Sophie Tucker was not just
the "last of the red hot mamas" but began her career as a "coon shouter," when
producers had the Yiddish Russian perform in blackface before they knew
what to do with her. Along with that blackness came cliched assumptions
about the women's bodies and their overall decorum. Compared with the
white "jazz baby" of the 'zos, wrote one journalist, "your coon shouter was a
lusty, rounded lady. She was all curves. Her voice was a wild, raucous yell, and
perfect intonation was her least concern."32 Earthy, sexualized, AfricanAmerican attributes were assigned to women whose material or performance
style seemed to fit the bill, regardless of race: there was the bluesy work of Libby
Holman and the "sassy," overtly sexual Mae West. In the early'6os, a Los Angeles critic called Merman a coon shouter, and in the mid-'50s, after the opening of Anything Goes, another wrote of "her progress from coon shouter to the
most subtle lyric-putter-over extant, enhancing her appeal by deft repression,
making her a most engaging comedienne as well as songstress."33 (Note that
the critic measures progress in terms of leaving African-American influences
behind.) For some, Merman's "belt" style clinched her link to blackness: "The
belting voice is a voice of strength ... it is a voice that evokes darkness in tone
and timbre, a `colored' voice [in contrast to] the `whiteness' always ascribed
to [Julie] Andrews's voice. 1134