Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (6 page)

Non-Anglo performers such as Tucker and Brice were among the "white
ethnic" immigrants who formed a significant part of New York City's social
and cultural landscape of the era. (At times, Poles, Italians, and Greeks were
classified into a single group, placed a step above African Americans and a
step below Anglos and established nationals such as the Germans.) What set
these female singers apart from Angle, singers was not so much their voices
per se as the techniques and material they borrowed from a diverse set of ethnic and racial traditions.

And so a marked ethnic mobility infiltrated the songs, singers, and audiences of Tin Pan Alley, a mobility fully appropriate to the city's demographics of the time. More than a half century later, critics such as Stanley
Crouch would ascribe to this musical period a fantasy of ethnic transcen-
dence,35 but we might also consider the phenomenon in terms of an expansion of ethnic associations rather than their transcendence. Merman's
public persona, for instance, which borrowed techniques of these early vocalists, would be marked by a variety of non-Anglo features, even long
beyond this historical period.

Ethel's childhood fascination with popular female singers and stars was
able to flourish. She had a chance to catch glimpses of some of them at the
nearby Paramount Astoria Film Studios on the corner of 6th and Pierce, just
around the corner from the Zimmermann home. Founded in 1920, not long
before the film industry packed up for Hollywood, this East Coast production facility produced a full fourth of all U.S. films between 1921 and 1927.
As a result of financial troubles, the migration west, and the costly upheaval
of transitioning to sound, however, production eventually tapered off.

For young Ethel, the early location could not have been better. Whenever
she and her friends caught wind that a film was being shot, they would stop
playing their hopscotch game of "Hopsy" and run to the fence that surrounded the studio, where, through carved-out holes ("I wasn't responsible
for gouging any," said Ethel),36 they caught glimpses of stars such as Greta
Nissen, Adolph Menjou, and Greta Garbo arriving at work in their luxurious cars. Ethel's favorite was Alice Brady, whom she said she "worshipped."37

Somewhere between the age of six and nine,3S Ethel hit the small big time
when she performed "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (after
They've Seen Paree)?" "He's Me Pal," "Maggie Dooley," and other numbers
for U.S. troops stationed at Camp Mills and Camp Upton, on Long Island,
where the doughboys were training before being shipped off to Europe.
Ethel's future colleague Irving Berlin would immortalize his early experience
as a soldier at Camp Upton (then Camp Yankhank) in "Oh, How I Hate to
Get Up in the Morning," in which the famous night owl lodges his goodhearted complaint. Ethel loved the experience: "I remember one Christmas
day when I gladly abandoned my new toys, hopped into an ambulancesince no passenger car was available-and traveled to Camp Mills to entertain the troops."39 This started Merman's lifelong tradition of giving "something for the boys" in uniform.

Despite the tough but tender love of her parents, Ethel had some lonely
times growing up. She could usually bring her problems to Pop, but sometimes, as she later told interviewers, she wished for a sister, especially when
she was a little older and started to be interested in boys. Being an only child
may have deprived her of some steam-venting pastimes, and as an adult Merman retained a childlike love of secrets, games, and gossip. At the same time,
having the undivided attention of one's parents was not so bad and likely enhanced Merman's enormous self-confidence and sense of being in the center
of all things.

If Merman's childhood was basically happy, her education was routine.
She attended grade school at P.S. No. 4, a school that, while a long walk from
her home, was still the closest. High school was William Cullen Bryant High
School, near the Bridge Plaza in Long Island City. Ethel was reasonably active as a student, but she kept her musical activities to herself, never joining
the school's drama or glee club. As a senior, she was literary editor of The Owl,
the school's literary magazine and newsletter, and was secretary of the student
union.

Agnes Sharkey was a cousin of Ethel's who was employed as a seventhgrade teacher. Pop and (especially) Mom thought this was great and wanted
Ethel to follow in her footsteps. Teaching was good, practical work for a
young woman. But Ethel already had her heart set on a career as a singer, and
teaching was not in the cards. The compromise? While at Bryant High, Ethel
pursued the four-year stenographer course of study to gain her the practical,
bankable skills she could always fall back on. Following a course in commercial, as opposed to general, bookkeeping,40 Ethel mastered bookkeeping,
shorthand (the Pitman method), and typing-and earned great marks.41

According to Ethel, she was a good student. "I never fought with other
kids," she told her biographer, and "I was always pretty good at math."42
Less successful were her history classes (she failed once) and gym (physical
stamina aside, Ethel was not athletically inclined). Ethel accounted for her
lack of extracurricular activities to biographer George Eells: "I guess I was
too involved in my studies"43-not a terribly convincing claim. Certainly
Ethel was not one to blow off schoolwork, but neither did she give it obsessive attention. When interviewed in the 1950s, her teachers remembered
the young Zimmermann girl as a sparkling character with good, but not exceptional, abilities.44

The teenage Merman was an attractive young woman: she had an ample
chest, a long waist, shapely arms, and great legs. She was not particularly tall:
just over five feet, five inches, a fact that surprises fans, who believe that Ethel
Merman must have been much, much larger. Throughout most of the late
191os and 'zos, she wore her hair in a modified bob, popular among young
urban women. Ethel never had an inflated sense of her looks and was always
matter-of-fact with interviewers about her assets (legs, eyes) as well as her lessthan-perfect features. But in 1934, columnist Louis Sobol decided to remodel
the newly arrived star's self-conception, writing that Ethel had told him: "I
was an ungainly child ... and heartbroken about it, for I thought I never
would have a chance to be on the stage. I thought beauty was the one and only
`open sesame' to the theatre and the screen.... even when I began taking part in amateur shows around Astoria ... I felt I would never grow up beautiful enough to be an actress."45 It was all part of creating Ethel Merman.

When Ethel, her parents, and childhood chums were interviewed in midto late life, all had surprisingly little recall of the star's childhood years. Merman's memory of her friends, for instance, was as vague as her knowledge of
her family background. Some people stuck: she had met Alice Welch in the
bookkeeping program, and the two remained friends for much of her life; she
also played with a girl named Martha Neubert. But where boys were concerned, Ethel was fuzzier. In her second autobiography, she says that she tried
to impress her "first big crush" by coaxing her father to go to the piano to accompany her the moment she saw the boy coming down their street on Sundays on his way to the ballpark.46 Because of this, she said, this lad was probably her only classmate who knew that she sang, but for the life of her, she
couldn't recall his name. High school boyfriends fared little better, fading behind other, more vividly recalled details. " [I don't] remember if I went to senior prom with `Frank or Clem.' . . . That's the time I had my first evening
dress. It was peach taffeta. When I graduated from P.S. No. 4, I wore a uniform of old rose and white. We had to make our own in sewing or we
couldn't graduate."47 Although Merman's memory wasn't purposefully selective, it does suggest a playful (however unconscious) reluctance to discuss
entanglements with the opposite sex, a trait she would guard for life.

"Mom didn't talk much about her childhood, her parents, or their background. She wasn't trying to hide anything; her focus just wasn't there."48
Today, Bob Levitt Jr. is one of the few people around able to give intimate
accounts of the Zimmermann family. Other first- and secondhand personal
accounts are few and far between; three of Ethel's four husbands, her parents,
and her second child have died, and close family friends in Queens and their
offspring have either passed away or scattered to places unknown. Yet even
during her lifetime, when the press interviewed friends, parents, and associates, it was primarily Merman's version of her past (bolstered by her autobiographies and scrapbooks) that illuminated the early days. By necessity, that
version is subjective and, in the first autobiography at least, heavily scripted.
But when all is said and done, not much is there: Ethel's childhood years were
too early to have been tracked by Pop's scrapbooks, which focus not on young
Ethel Zimmermann but on the public Ethel Merman. And even Levitt admits he knows little about the background of either his mom or his grandparents. Given her lifelong adulation of her folks and the very real pride Ethel
took in her roots, it's rather striking that she rarely talked about her past or
showed much interest in the family tree.

The discrepancies surrounding Ethel's early residences, which spring
largely from Merman's own accounts, offer another case in point. Here as
well, her poor recall on the point is scarcely deliberate (unlike her birthday),
but her inability to remember reveals a certain disinterest all the same. By her
own admission, Ethel was not the introspective type, and dwelling on details
of the past was not her style. What this suggests is that for her-and the
image she would cultivate as Ethel Merman, not Zimmermann-the precise
details of her family's back history mattered less than a few particulars to
round out the contours, such as the Astoria location; her parents' class, religion, and ethnic backgrounds; and her exposure to early singing stars.

When she graduated from high school in 1924, Ethel signed up at an employment agency located near the school, quickly procuring a job at Boyce-
ite, a nearby firm on Queens Boulevard in Long Island City. The company
manufactured an antifreeze product and paid Ethel twenty-three dollars per
week. She did well there and advanced quickly. Within six months, she'd acquired a new job, at B [ragg] K[leisrath] Vacuum Booster Brake Company,
another company with a delightfully improbable name that had opened
across the street on the second story of the EPCO Building (its namesake,
Etched Products Corporation, occupied the first). Booster's product was a
power brake for industrial use in tractors and trailers. Production facilities
were near the office site where Ethel worked. Among her duties was typing
material to be sent to patent attorney Louis Seigel Whittaker, and, according
to Ethel, she never typed up a technical reference she didn't understand (contradictorily, she also averred never to have understood how the brake
worked). Small matter. Young Ethel was now pulling in thirty-five dollars a
week-very good pay for a stenographer at the time.

Her main role at the company was working as the personal secretary of coowner Caleb Bragg, a well-to-do businessman and sportsman. Bragg liked to
travel in high circles, socializing with Broadway luminaries such as Gertrude
Lawrence, producers Earl Carroll and George White, and, apparently, a lot of
nice-looking chorus girls. Louis Schutt (future agent of Bert Lahr and Bob
Hope) recalls that Bragg owned a variety of ships, "a racking boat, one called
The Bootlegger and The Casey Jones in addition to several speed boats."49 (His
houseboat, The Masquerader, reportedly capsized during one of the rare times
Ethel was invited to join him and his society friends.) Overall, Ethel found the
dapper bachelor gentlemanly but aloof, and she "rarely talked to him." Vic
Kleisrath, Bragg's partner and the technician of the pair, was more approachable, "a very regular fellow,"50 and Ethel was even able to call him by his first
name. It was Kleisrath who had interviewed and hired her. Sometimes on weekends, he would invite Ethel to his family home in Port Washington,
where bands would play and Ethel would sing along. Ethel also socialized with
other young women from Queens who worked at the brake company, among
them Edna Ackerman and Josephine (Josie) Traeger, who remained a close
friend for decades.

Although she was a conscientious worker, Ethel was clearly biding her
time until her singing career got off the ground. "Every night, promptly at
the stroke of S, like a princess in a fairy tale, Miss Zimmerman [sic] dropped
the last of her letters in the basket of outgoing mail, and with it her business
attitude";51 then she left to perform at venues across the metropolitan area.
Ethel's first radio appearance, "Ethel Merman Time," on WHN, dates from
this mid-r9zos period. The pace was grueling, since Ethel's night gigs involved commuting to other boroughs to perform, and she would start many
a workday with little sleep. Solution? A warning system she and her coworkers devised to keep Bragg from catching Ethel when she was getting some
shut-eye on the job. The phone operator had a buzzer that rang a large gong,
and different numbers of rings announced different people; "Bragg had three,
the head of purchasing had four." Arriving exhausted, Ethel slept on the back
room cot until the boss's arrival. (Fortunately, Bragg rarely got to work before ten or ten-thirty.) When her coworkers spotted him approaching the
building, they pulled levers, causing eight "gongs" to sound at the nearby
production plant-the cue to warn her that Bragg was on-site. The warning
gave her enough time to get up, get dressed, and be at her desk by the time
he entered. As far as she knew, her boss never caught on.52

It was during this time at the brake company that a legendary Merman
story was born. It involved a letter of introduction that Bragg wrote on
Ethel's behalf to George White, the former Ziegfeld dancer who was now the
celebrated Broadway producer of George White's Scandals, the spectacular
revue that was a huge event every year that it was mounted. Hoping to procure a singing position in the upcoming edition, Merman approached Bragg
for an introduction to the Broadway impresario, and he dictated a letter to
her. It was, she recalls, "very short" and didn't mention anything about her
singing because, she explains, he had never heard her sing.53 The note landed
Ethel a five-minute interview in the outer vestibule of Mr. White's office at
the Apollo Theatre Building on 42nd Street. Sorry, White told her, but he
had hired Frances Williams to sing in the show. But wait-he was looking
for another showgirl. Would this interest her? Merman, hunting bigger game,
declined.