Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (54 page)

Daughter Katy, the most stable character of the family, marries, happily.
The male family members, by contrast, are dogged by problems. Unsure
about his place in Vicky's heart, Tim takes to drinking heavily, Steve turns
his back on vaudeville to become a priest, and Terry is depressed. Molly remains the dominant force in the family, particularly in keeping their show
alive, and several scenes are devoted to dramatizing the extent of her maternal concerns: it is Molly who bucks up her husband, sobers up Tim, and has
to deal with the effective loss of her other son to the ministry.

The low point comes one night when a drunken, hospitalized Tim has a
fight with his father and takes off for parts unknown. Shaken, Terry goes off
to find his son, but it is clear that he too has lost his way. Molly and Katy are
left to carry on the family act, doing so in numbers in which Molly plays
Tim's role with Katy ("A Sailor's Not a Sailor"). In the meantime, Katy convinces her mother that Vicky's feelings for Tim are genuine and makes sure
that Molly and Vicky patch up their differences. The film ends with
Molly/Ethel performing a rousing rendition of "There's No Business Like
Show Business" at the Hippodrome, the 1905 New York vaudeville theater
that was demolished in 1939. Terry, Tim, and Steve return, Tim in a military
uniform, Steve as a military chaplain, arriving at the theater while Molly is
in the middle of singing the song. When she catches sight of them in the
wings, she chokes back tears to finish the song and "go on with the show."
Everyone makes peace, and the six leads walk down a lavish staircase to close
the show with the rest of the song.

The production team was a virtual repeat of Call Me Madam. Walter Lang
directed, Leon Shamroy was cinematographer. Publicly Merman expressed
her delight; privately, she refused to do the picture if Lang and Shamroy were
not involved. Sol Siegel again produced, although from the start he found it
less compelling than Madam, telling Zanuck of his "dislike of the material"
on first receipt.4 Writing duties were assigned to Lamar Trotti (1900-1952),
whose work included stories and screenplays for movies as diverse as Young
Mr. Lincoln, The Oxbow Incident, The Razor's Edge, Cheaper by the Dozen,
With a Song in My Heart, and My Blue Heaven. Work on the story was under
way in 1952 while Call Me Madam was in postproduction.

No sooner had preproduction begun than serious setbacks intervened.
One involved Walter Lang, who in June 1953, a month after his contract
began, was rushed to the hospital with a perforated ulcer. Ensuing complications, including pneumonia and several infections, were so grave that for a
while, the director was not expected to live. Understandably nervous about postponing such a big picture for more than six months but aware of the great
skill and stability Lang brought to it, Fox's Frank Ferguson eventually declared, "It is a project which only Walter Lang can bring off with any degree
of satisfaction."5 Lang pulled through, but the production schedule was set
back nearly a year, to the spring of 1954.

The second tragedy involved screenwriter Trotti, who had begun work on
the project by December 1951. After a six-month leave from the studio, in August 1952, Trotti died unexpectedly. When he passed, the basic story was in
place (Trotti retained the final credit "story by"), but secondary plots, characters, and relationships would be altered substantially. Fox gave the assignment to I. A. L. Diamond (Love Nest, Monkey Business, and later, Some Like It
Hot and The Apartment), but Zanuck's concern quickly mounted about Diamond's ability to produce the "combination of comedy and pathos" that he
wanted, and he soon replaced him with Phoebe and Henry Ephron (parents
of Nora). They were not excited. Phoebe said, "I won't go to see it, why should
I write it?"' But the Ephrons stayed on.

Trotti had sketched out the story: "Here is the sort of family we are thinking about ... a `Royal Family' of Show Biz. They are not Barrymores, but
they are people who, for two, three or even four generations, have been in the
business, who know nothing else. They are Irish. They are a fighting, sentimental, humorous, lovable and loving group of people." 7 The mother would
be "a Thelma Ritter type, the central figure who holds the family together."
Dad would be a "hoofer," Danny, the eldest son would be "a Dan Dailey
type"; daughter Betty (later, Katy) a "Betty Grable type"; the younger son
would be a "Donald O'Connor type, in love with Mitzi Gaynor" (in the role
that eventually went to Marilyn Monroe), to whom he is ready to give his sister Betty's spot. Betty would be hooked up with an outsider, a famous dancer
named Al Garbey (a "Fred Astaire type"), a partner who would bring Betty
to new career heights.

One of the challenges faced from the start was how to repackage Irving
Berlin's songs, some of which were close to half a century old. Although
Alexander's Ragtime Band had been a bit of a musical throwback, There's No
Business Like Show Business was even more so: set in the past, with few attempts to update the material, as Alexander had done by turning ragtime
numbers into swing. In the final picture, the only exceptions to this were
Monroe's numbers, which were set in a jazzy present. After Alexander, Hollywood had released other Berlin tributes, such as White Christmas and Easter
Parade, but there was no denying that the postwar music scene was in transition. Slightly blind to this new arena-or defiant of it-the studio was planning to open the picture with chestnuts like "Alexander's Ragtime
Band," a flashback of the family singing "Mandy," or a minstrel act they performed "in Uncle Tom costumes."

Although blackface was part of vaudeville during its heyday, by the early
to mid-1950s, it was no longer a mainstay ofAmerican popular entertainment
and was in dubious taste in these early days of civil rights, which Zanuck
openly supported. For Merman, fresh from her triumph in reopening the
National Theatre in Washington, doing blackface would have added an odd
new layer to the racial and ethnic associations that already swirled around her
image. (The ethnic and class associations of Molly already marked a return
to Ethel's pre-Madam persona.) Although the blackface finally did not come
to pass, the minstrel act stayed in draft after draft of the film's screenplay, used
variously to establish Molly and Terry's first meeting, their wedding ("And
so they were married," Berlin was to voice-over, "the dancing teacher and the
minstrel man"),8 or the birth of their first child ("while playing `Uncle Tom's
Cabin,' Molly, playing Eliza, goes into labor").9 Even the Donahue children
were written into the blackface act, with "Mandy." The scenes continued
after the Ephrons came onboard, and it wasn't until late May 1954-very late
in the game-that the detail was dropped. No explanation was recorded.

Berlin was paid four hundred thousand dollars for the picture and was required to prepare only six new songs; the rest would come from existing material. (Once again, he tried to use "Mr. Monotony," but to Ethel's relief, it
didn't make it in.) A few attempts were made to update his music. Said
Zanuck about the songs scheduled in one script version: "I would like to
eliminate Scene 124 on page 88, which is a repeat of the number we used in
Alexander's Ragtime Band. 10 I think we would be criticized.... It is too well
remembered from Alexander's Ragtime Band ... and we must not do anything that will take away from the musical punch at the end of our picture."11

In the final film, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is performed midway
through by combinations of the Donahues, each combination with the costumes, backdrops, accents, dance, and musical styles evocative of different
nations and cultures. Katy performs a jazzy version, sprinkled with pidgin
French; O'Connor, a Scottish version; Ray, a rock-gospel version; and Mom
and Dad do a kitschy Swiss-German rendition in lederhosen and braids,
"Commen Sie hied Commen Sie bier.!" For some reason, producer Sol Siegel
liked doing the song that way: "[To] stress its international appeal, it will be
done partly in a middle Europa accent. The whole number now becomes a
new number since it is a showcase and in truth has become an international
jazz piece since it was written 43 years ago."12

Other changes included dropping a long, overwrought subplot in which
Tim enlists and goes to battle in Europe, where he is killed. The family arrive, and Steve, now a military chaplain, blesses Tim's remains as they perform "There's No Business" for the soldiers at the finale. The military story
in Europe was deemed too expensive and dropped. Zanuck's instincts might
also have told him that in 1952, an era of perceived peacefulness in the United
States, it was time to move beyond reminders of the recent high costs of
patriotism. In the final picture, Tim enlists, but all of the military activity
occurs off-screen; he is the family's "black sheep" not because of military
ambitions but because of a drinking problem-showing that the 1950s
social-problem film was trumping the patriotic one of the '40s.

Initially, there were opposing ideas about the kind of musical that There's
No Business Like Show Business should be. Zanuck said, "We should avoid socalled elaborate production numbers, mainly because they have worn out
their usefulness and audiences are becoming sick of them. We should only
use production numbers where they are essential in the telling of our story
[and the aim of the music should be for] realism and personality effect rather
than scope and size."13 (Trotti's brief treatment, on the other hand, planned
on twenty-five to thirty production numbers!) 14 Zanuck was most concerned
about building up to a big finale that packed an emotional punch: "Almost
every great musical has contained an emotional last act. The really great
musicals make you cry: Show Boat, Alexander's Ragtime Band, etc. I believe our
new last act can top them all and that we can emerge with a four star picture
as well as a `four handkerchief' picture."15

Siegel disagreed. "I have always felt that in a story of this kind, the basic
story ... is not the prime consideration.... The title There's No Business Like
Show Business gives the promise of great entertainment and in a sense sounds
like it ought to be `the greatest show on earth' of musicals. [A better story]
might help ... but the musical and entertainment content ought to far outbalance the story values."" As the script was being written, Siegel complained
that there was "more story than we need." It was his intervention that excised
a number of complex "twists and turns," producing, in the end, a tighter story.17

Despite the similarities between the production teams on There's No Business Like Show Business and Madam, the studio did not perceive the new picture as a star vehicle for Ethel Merman. Siegel, Zanuck, and others were at
pains to divide the leading roles evenly and to balance the two older stars with
the younger ones. "It is not a solo picture for anyone," Zanuck told Berlin,
adding, to Ethel's certain horror if she'd ever known, "Like Call Me Madam,
it will have five or six roles of almost equal importance."18

Ethel was not even on the producers' minds when the project got under
way. Berlin, a champion for her if there ever was one, initially proposed box
office stars Betty Grable and Fred Astaire for the leads,'9 and as late as December 1952, no less than Zanuck himself was envisioning Fox contract
player Jane Wyman as Molly. Other players in his "ideal cast" were Robert
Wagner as Tim, Johnnie Ray as Steve ("we will have to convince him"), and
"Mitzi Gaynor or June Haver" as Katy.20 Zanuck liked Dan Dailey for Terence and O'Connor for the "Fred Astaire role" as Katy's love interest. Eventually, O'Connor landed the role of Tim, Katy's brother, so that angle was
changed. No stranger to vaudeville, O'Connor had been a child star in his
own family act. And he had actually played a similar role on film before, in
a 1944 Universal picture about a fictional vaudeville family called The Merry
Monahans, necessitating Fox's transformation of the Monahans into the
Donahues for There's No Business Like Show Business.

Ethel was onboard by late February 1953. Siegel worked to "keep her alive
even in scenes in which she is not the dominant personality. I want to borrow the character of Minnie, the Marx Brothers' mother. She was the business agent and the brains of the combination,"" not a far cry from Merman's
stage image either, but again one that eschewed the glamour of Sally Adams.
Siegel was also writing the Denver resident independently, requesting photos of her Broadway shows to give him "costuming ideas."22

Mitzi Gaynor, who played daughter Katy, was born Frances Gerber.23 Fox
changed her name on the basis of the popularity of Janet Gaynor. Levelheaded, well-adjusted, and talented, Mitzi Gaynor was a trained dancer,
gifted with a great body and good skills at light comedy. Studio publicity
talked up the young star as a "stripper without removing clothes," and, as
Oscar Levant said of her, "There's nothing wrong with being an exhibitionist if you've got something to exhibit."24 In addition to her sexiness, Gaynor
exuded a wholesome sparkle that easily carried over to her public persona.
She had a private life that was without scandal, marrying Jack Bean in 1954,
and ever since has been able to give the press views on being a good homemaker and maintaining a successful marriage. Gaynor's ability to combine
unneurotic wholesomeness and sex appeal served her well when she reprised
Mary Martin's role in filming South Pacific.

Popular singer Johnnie Ray was fresh off his huge 1951-52 successes with
"Cry" and "Little White Cloud That Cried," songs that fused the music of
country ballads, gospel, and rock and roll. An emotionally intense performer
nicknamed "the Prince of Wails," Ray would contort his face and weep while
he sang. At the time of There's No Business Like Show Business, Ray was freshly divorced. He was also a closeted gay man, which makes his "coming out" to
his parents in the film as a man of religion interesting, since both Molly and
Terry had earlier been worried about Steve's lack of interest in women: "It's
like he's a poet or something," says Molly. (Even when Steve was a child, the
Father of the children's school talks about him as studious and contemplative, whereas Tim, by contrast, is "all boy.") Ray was not to everyone's tastes,
but among young middle-class teenagers, "bobby soxers," he was insanely
popular. Girls would whip themselves into a frenzy when Ray removed the
mike from its stand to deliver one of his overwrought performances. Older
women were not necessarily immune, either; Tallulah Bankhead was so smitten that one night she left a Manhattan club in the wee hours of the morning to search him out.