Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (50 page)

With Call Me Madam behind them, Irving Berlin and Leland Hayward
now acquired rights to Cleveland Amory's The Last Resorts: A Portrait of
American Society at Play. They wanted Merman to agree to the project, which
they would set in Palm Beach, but it seems that she was too busy being in
Palm Beach to consider it, and by March, papers announced she was turning it down to pursue nontheatrical ventures: "You get no time to go off and
have a vacation on Broadway," she said. "But gee! You do one or two pictures
a year in Hollywood, and the rest of the time you can have a life of your
own."60 Over the following years, she'd be using that line more and more,
and press reports would appear: "Merman won't do a Broadway show. She's
tired, Hollywood is less work," but one variation that appeared was significant: "Also, she would like to have time for a honeymoon. "61 Ethel was denying her actual March marriage with Six well into the spring, and it wasn't
until June that Walter Winchell spilled the beans, claiming in his column that "someone in Colorado" had beaten Ethel Merman to announcing her own
wedding.

After February, when the soundtrack was cut, zoth Century-Fox prepared
Call Me Madam for release and put its publicity machines in gear. The
whirring was especially loud in New York, where on March z there was an
advance screening at Fox's home office on 56th Street, followed by a party at
which Irving Berlin gave Ethel a big kiss for the cameras, and they happily
hammed it up with a rendition of "You're Just in Love."62

The official premiere was in Los Angeles, where the Miracle Mile Fox Ritz
Theater charged a whopping two dollars per seat and took advance reservations. Ethel stayed in New York, and it is unclear why she wasn't in LA for
the opening night gala. (Of the four leads, only Donald O'Connor attended.)
The Zanucks and other West Coast glitterati were present, though, as were
plenty of fans. "Most of the fans were women, from to to 70 years old....
Screams of delight rang out when favorite stars stepped from their big
limos."63 Joan Crawford, Cesar Romero, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Dinah
Shore, Dorothy Lamour, Clifton Webb, Mitzi Gaynor and Hugh O'Brian,
Farley Granger, Louella Parsons. That first week, Call Me Madam broke records, grossing $15,900, surpassing industry estimates of $13,000, which itself
would have been strong business.64

As Ed Sullivan reported, "For the first time in her spasmodic movie career,
Miss Merman ... is the `take-charge femme." '65 And Cole Porter told Ethel
that this was the first movie in which they allowed her to be herself successfully. This was the consensus, and it was easy to see why Ethel was telling the
press, even in New York, that she preferred the film version to the play. The
movie, she said, provided "broader and more authentic background" and
reached broader audiences. But one thing wasn't changed from the stage:
Madam's highlight remained the duet "You're [Just] in Love." Read one telegram she received soon after it opened: "Dear Ethel, as per our promise, my
daughter and I will be singing the duet from Call Me Madam Thursday
night, on my television show, and if you don't listen to it, I will never buy
any of your records again. Love, Groucho."66

On March iz, Ethel flew with Six to Miami for the opening there at three
different theaters at eight, nine, and ten P.M., going from one to the next. The
city honored her with a parade that included a 15o-piece drum and bugle
corps and an official welcome with keys to Coral Gables. She stayed in Miami
Beach at the Kenilworth Hotel.

Ethel and Pop saved all these items, along with all of the movie's reviewsand even theatrical playing times-highlighting the positive reviews in red crayon. In general, Madam was well, if not enthusiastically, received, with
critics consistently praising the picture's lavish production values. Variety
called it "a literate musical, and it avoids most of the common cliches. "67 Because Madam was not a widescreen production-common for spectacle films
at this juncture-several reviewers quipped, predictably, that the big Broadway star might have needed 3D. She and Donald O'Connor were usually singled out for praise, sometimes getting more kudos than the picture itself.
Wrote Hy Gardner, "Ethel Merman, the gal with the 3-dimensional personality, makes such a lark out of the Fox tickle-colored version of Call Me
Madam you almost get the feeling that you're watching an in-the-flesh performance. Never have we seen any actress who was so much the master of the
situation so much of the time."68

Time magazine accurately summed up Ethel's current status in the business:

For years, Hollywood has seemed unable to make effective use of Ethel Merman.... She has appeared in a number of second-rate movies (the best: the
1936 Eddie Cantor musical Strike Me Pink,- one of the worst: the 1936 movie
version of her own Broadway hit Anything Goes). But the moviemakers, fearing that the rowdy Merman personality was too strong for the screen, usually
tried to tone it down. When she arrived at the studio to begin CallMe Madam,
she finally had a film tailored to her dimensions.... [And] she was told to be
herself.69

Call Me Madam had given Ethel a chance to transform into a glamorous, mature woman without losing any of her joie de vivre. With its tight, escapist
story, bouncy score, and the vibrant Sally Adams, it seemed the perfect vehicle to "introduce" her to America's moviegoing public. Film attendance was
at a historical high in the immediate postwar period (although it quickly tapered off with the rise of TV), and this picture gave Ethel what she thought
was an entree into a strong career in pictures. She became increasingly firm
when she told reporters that she wanted "a life" and was not considering opportunities on Broadway. "You might say," she said with characteristic optimism, "Hollywood and me-we've discovered each other."70 Given that she
was already involved in the preproduction of There's No Business Like Show
Business, her next musical with Fox, Merman had every reason to be confident.

Ultimately, however, Call Me Madam would not prove as successful as either the studio or Ethel had hoped. There were a number of reasons. Yes, it was fun, but the movie was old-fashioned, and its main stars (O'Connor
aside) lacked the youthful draw audiences seemed to crave. And Ethel might
not have had the kind of national star power to carry it; even in a film in
which she is wonderful, she doesn't ignite the screen the way she could the
stage.

Over the decades, Call Me Madam has aired on American television from
time to time, and in 1981, it was licensed to air in Italy, Australia, and Canada. The next year, Irving Berlin negotiated to percent of all gross receipts
"for all media other than video and the same figure for wholesale worldwide
home video," 7' but Madam was never released on video, and it remained effectively out of print until a DVD version was released in 2004. If its afterlife was not what she hoped for, Call Me Madam remains the "biggest" movie
of Merman's career, and, truncated role in Anything Goes aside, it would be
the only time she reprised one of her stage roles on the silver screen.

I don't think I've ever been happier in my life. The air is
simply wonderful; it's the mile-high city, you know I
was in NewYork last week, and oh, it was terrible. The
smaze or smog or whatever you call it. You can hardly
breathe. Yes, I miss the theatre a little, but happiness is
more important.

What about doing a Broadway show?

Never again. Nobody is indispensable.

Merman to the Denver Post, 8 December 1953

Ethel gives conflicting dates for her divorce from Levitt and Bob Six's from
Henriette. In her first autobiography, she writes, "Six got his divorce in Colorado a month before mine was filed. His divorce became final in September of 1952. We married in March 1953."i In her second she says, "I flew to
Mexico City on 7 June 1952, for a quickie Mexican divorce. Finding the procedure complicated, I went to Juarez, where a mutual consent decree was
granted not more than thirty minutes after the petition was filed."2 Whatever the case, Merman and Six did indeed marry in Mexicali in a "quickie"
ceremony on March 9, 1953, which was, of course, just as quickly found out.
For all the high-flying publicity about their courtship, Six remained adamant
about keeping their actual marriage a secret, and Ethel claimed never to have
understood why. It may well have had to do with his terminating the union
with Henriette, whose fortune might have required delicate treatment. Or
there may have been taxes and other financial issues that Bob Six didn't want
to raise with his new bride.

So now Ethel Merman had remarried. The world received the news with fanfare: friends and strangers alike sent congratulatory notes, letters, and gifts, none
of which made it into her scrapbook (unusual, since letters of congratulations from work colleagues were usually preserved). The couple honeymooned in her
beloved Beverly Hills Hotel and then rented out Stewart Granger's home while
she was doing Madam. In the meantime, Six was working on purchasing the
new family home in Cherry Hills, outside Denver, Colorado.

It was soon after Call Me Madam's release that Ethel Merman made the stunning announcement that she was leaving Broadway indefinitely. The superstar was now asserting the role of superwife: "My husband works out of Denver. Why should I spend my life in New York when he's all the way out here?
I'll go to New York when my husband's business takes him there."3 Ethel,
Bobby, and Ethel Jr. had had plenty of time to develop a fondness for Colorado from their earlier family vacations there. New Yorkers were aghast, betting whether Ethel really meant it or not, assessing their loss, her marriage,
and the probability of her returning to the boards. Colleagues who knew her
rather well, such as Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jule Styne
(who would soon produce aTV version ofAnything Goes with her), were convinced by Ethel's radiant happiness, although Styne expressed a caveat: "She
has no right to bow out. Deep down in her heart, no matter what she tells
you, one of these days she's going to say, `I'm going back to it. -4

Of course, Ethel could no more abandon her career than she could stop
breathing. She still enjoyed working, earning money, and being in the spotlight. Now she was just ready to throw her energy westward, and given the
promise first shown by Call Me Madam, it was not an unreasonable expectation. Film and TV were easier work than the stage, and Ethel loved the
idea of not being tied down for months or even years on end, in contrast to
life during the run of a show, which she likened to "taking the veil." Plus, as
entertainers who'd left New York behind had known since the great Depression, Hollywood products reached more people and paid much better
than Broadway.

Although the movie version of Call Me Madam had slightly underperformed, Ethel was still able to view Hollywood as a land of opportunity, and
she was as close to "hot" as she would ever be on the West Coast. She was
sought after as a guest on television and radio shows with Bing Crosby, Dinah
Shore, Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, and Eddie Cantor, and, in January 1953, Leland Hayward asked her to perform in a television special that would be produced jointly by NBC and CBS, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of
the Ford Motor Company, the sponsor. What Hayward didn't tell her was
that he was also approaching Mary Martin with the same request. It all worked out rather quickly, by today's standards, and on June 15, 1953, the show in
which Merman and Martin sang their famous thirteen-minute, thirty-onesong medley went down in history. The two sat on stools in a minimally decorated set that favored neither one performer nor the other, its simplicity
guiding viewers' attention to where it belonged in the first place, on the two
singers. Everything about the production was carefully balanced. When a
record of the special was issued, one side of the jacket front features Mary
Martin on the left, with her name first, and on the other half the image is simply flipped, with Merman on the left appearing first. In 2004, a short DVD
of the special came out, and Merman's side was the one that was printed, to
the sure delight of her fans.