Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (60 page)

That said, it's a domesticated, genteel Merman that prevails as Liz in
Happy Hunting; she is tastefully clad in respectable suits, wearing pearls, hair
swept up on and off the stage.36 A frequently reproduced production picture
has Ethel/Liz tilting her head with eyebrows raised in a look that suggests that
Liz is going to move cautiously into this group of high-society folks; a little
bit of hurt is in the look and a little mischief as well. It captures the status of
an outsider and lets us know that Liz is a bit of schemer, suspicious of bullshit or shenanigans. Ethel would use the same look, the same tilt, in Gypsy,
but had her eyes reflect a steady, shining gleam.

Ethel pursued other projects while in Happy Hunting, appearing on television's The Ed Sullivan Show. Phil Silvers, who was enjoying a successful run
on TV's You'll Never Get Rich, was said to be in "discussions" with her about
doing a new show together, but it never materialized. More troublesome was
the prestigious Crescendo television special sponsored by DuPont. Ethel was
to appear with Rex Harrison, the star then wowing Broadway with his turn
as Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Harrison's asking price was
forty-five thousand dollars; Ethel's, twenty-five thousand. (Next to this figure in the scrapbook appears a rare editorial notation: three inked-in exclamation points.) Ethel withdrew from the show at uncharacteristically late notice, dissatisfied with the lower pay and concerned about her weakly written
supporting role. (All she did was perform as a singer.) "Something MUST be
wrong with [Ethel's] role," said one bitchily sympathetic producer. "Merman's usually not very finicky about her parts."37 Harrison reportedly didn't
like his lines either and hired Peter Ustinov, at an expense of ten thousand
dollars, to doctor them. Other problems dogged the show, including a
behind-the-scenes incident with guest Louis Armstrong that almost caused
a racial boycott.3s After it aired, most reviewers complained that it used too many stars and rushed through too many numbers, and most were sympathetic with Ethel about withdrawing. Variety's front-page story ran, "It's no
longer a case of money," saying that dollars alone could no longer buy good
name guest stars on TV, "as Ethel Merman's case demonstrated. '139

For years, Ethel had wanted to stretch her legs as an actor and tackle dramatic, nonsinging work. Reflected Glory gave her that opportunity. A dramatic play by George Kelly (Craig's Wife, The Show-Off), Reflected Glory
starred Tallulah Bankhead when it opened on Broadway in the autumn of
1936. Another version aired on the Broadway Television Theatre in 1954 that
starred Clare Luce. On March 25, 1956, Ethel's version was broadcast on
CBS's General Electric Theater, hosted by her friend Ronald Reagan. Merman
played Muriel Flood, a popular actress who can't decide whether to leave the
theater to marry and settle down or to continue with her career-not a big
leap for Ethel the Denverite, as several reviewers noted. Costarring were Walter Matthau and Philip Bourgneuf. The play had been boiled down to half
an hour, and, as most reviewers argued, it was a crippling cut. Reviews were
poor, and in addition to complaining about the truncated story, many wrote
that Merman was overextended and out of her league with the material. (A
few suggested that she should have picked less corny material for her dramatic debut to begin with.)

End of the Sixes

Reflecting back on the period, Ethel said she had been able to forestall marital disaster by making a point of defining herself "in wifely terms" in interviews, indicating that she was rather well aware of her performance as Mrs.
Robert F. Six.40 In the summer of 1957, when she reprised her role as official
hostess of the New York City festival, the press dutifully played up that wifely
role, discussing the "Summer Festival hostess, playing to her husband, Bob
Six, the airline executive, who flew into Gotham for one of his infrequent
trips here." "No one," they added, "ever calls him `Mr. Merman."'41

That same year, a reporter quoted Six. "I suppose [my wife] is the old firehorse that paws the ground at the sound of a siren. She says that show business means nothing to her but work. We know that isn't true.... Ethel and
I are mature people. We have both been married before and we understand
each other very well. In the evenings I sit at home and watch television or go
through business papers. Then she comes back after the show and we get to
bed around midnight. "42 Hindsight or simply the passage of time may make it seem odd to refer to one's wife as an old firehorse or to omit any mention
of one's stepchildren, who were still minors at the time. But Ethel was hardly
saying anything much different, explaining to the press, "My children don't
like it in New York. Why should they? There's nothing for them here. At
home in Denver, they have lots of friends and so much freedom. It's just a
better life for kids there."43

Happy Hunting ran for 412 performances and, contrary to Ethel's hopes,
did not revitalize the marriage with Six. When they first returned to the city
in 1956, they were welcomed back with open arms, and the press reported on
their every move: their social life at clubs such as El Morocco; their trip to
England, where Ethel performed for the queen and Six landed a deal to purchase several aircraft. But now that Bob Six was increasing his out-of-town
trips and reducing his phone calls back home ("I'd rush home to wait for the
call and it wouldn't come" ),`'4 that was the kind of Merman-Six news finding its way into the press.

Ethel's home life was losing its sense of family all over again. Bobby recalls
spending a lot of his time at the Park Lane Hotel in New York, accompanying elevator man Bob "Duddy" Duddleson, riding up and down as famous
people came and went. Duddleson was a natural comic, a good man, and
quickly became an important "friend and teacher" to the preteen boy: "Bob
could confirm the presence of a meany or a phoney even before he'd shut the
elevator doors.... I'd be tickled to the exploding point exploring the airs and
natures of the Park Lane's guests and visitors ... in each and every ride....
Imagine a perfectly liveried, perfectly covert, clowning, mimicking, elevator
man: % Charlie Chaplin, % Jerry Lewis, and % himself, Duddy Duddleson."45
Bob Duddleson hailed from a lower-working-class part of Brooklyn, where
the ascending stage and TV star Jackie Gleason had also grown up and where
Gleason found the basis for many of his TV characters, notably crabby bus
driver Ralph Cramden. Clearly Duddleson touched Gleason as well, for at
the end of every episode of The Jackie Gleason Show, the comic paid homage
to the gentle man. Playing a bartender wiping up the counter at closing time,
Gleason bid his audiences good night, adding, "And good night to Duddy
Duddleson, wherever you are."

Gossip columnists had a feeding frenzy on the deteriorating Six marriage.
Ethel may not have been the front-page news she had been before, but small
matter. In the world of postwar gossip columns, scandal was blood to the
shark, and the colorful Robert Six was bigger game than either Bob Levitt or
William Smith had been. Moreover, unlike in her relationship with those
men, Ethel Merman's hackles were up in this one, and while silent on many matters, such as his violence, once she suspected that she no longer had her
husband's full affections, she made noises to friends in the press corps.
Columns now included tidbits like "Why was Bob Six now taking so many
long stopovers in Hawaii?" items that could have been fed to them only by
her. Small jabs aside, however, Ethel did her best to keep a sense of dignity
about her marriage She had no interest in inviting scandal or in making
things more unpleasant than they already were.

In January 1958, life would change dramatically when Robert Levitt Sr.
was found dead in his home of an overdose of sleeping pills. Although Ethel
had put the marriage behind her by this point, there was no way around
the horrific impact his suicide had, especially on her sixteen- and twelveyear-old children, who were unable to cope with the threats and violence
of their new home. To manage the news publicly, Ethel reminded interviewers that she and Levitt had been divorced for years, saying, in effect,
that it wasn't the dissolution of their marriage that had caused the tragedy.
(Levitt had since remarried, twice-most recently, three months prior to
his death.) Bob Jr. remembers how his mother broke the news to his sister
and him: there was "Mom's phone call that took us out of school and mysteriously home only to learn that our father was dead.... hearing that
news, both my sister and I dropped our phones on the floor. I can't recall
who hung them up. I do recall that there was no comforting, maternal presence ever to follow," adding that their cook, Venus, gave the children
deeply needed loving and mothering in the months following the news.46
There was no service for their father. Today, Bob Jr. says his mother gave
them "all kinds of reasons ... why it must have been true that Big intentionally killed himself on Bill Hearst's birthday ['to get back' at Hearst, she
would say]. But I never-ever once-heard Mom give any reason or even
a comment-much less any consolation-about why Big killed himself in
the middle of our childhoods." It was Venus, he said, who "let me sit in her
lap and cry."47

Tony Cointreau, who was dating young Ethel at the time, recalls, "Her
tone was flat when she told me. There was no outward grieving-Bob did
more of that. I think Little Ethel just swept it under the rug."48 Bob agrees
and says that by swallowing her grief, his sister did herself some real harm.
At the time, though, neither of the children had much opportunity to wade
through their feelings, with a family falling apart and a mother who, despite
her good intentions, was dealing with the tragedy through the cover of repression. Six was publicly supportive of his wife, but that could hardly have
provided any meaningful succor. Cointreau recalls that Six never spoke to him and that Little Ethel told him her stepfather was even now constantly
threatening to harm her beloved poodle, Midnight.

According to Robert Six's biographer, "Those who knew Merman and Six
intimately are convinced that her decision to do Gypsy made their breakup
inevitable, even though Six apparently didn't try very hard to stop her."49
That might have been the view of Six's friends, but not of Ethel's. There were
the visceral incidents that Roger Edens and her parents knew about and the
troubles that even average New Yorkers were starting to glean from local gossip sheets. The truth was, their marriage was already well past repair before
Ethel went from being Mrs. Six to Mama Rose. But at last, Ethel's instincts
finally kicked in, and she opted to embrace her stage career anew and live in
a more supportive world of family, friends, and fans in a city that still adored
her.

For a few years, Ethel had grown suspicious that Six was having an affair.
Whether he was or not will never be known; he died in 1985 and hardly would
have wanted to make such an admission to begin with. In all, it seems likely
that Six was most probably trying to avoid a crumbling marriage rather than
actively seeking refuge in another woman's bed. Nonetheless, Bob Six started
seeing Audrey Meadows, the costar of Gleason's current TV hit, The Honeymooners, immediately after separating from Merman, if not before. A gifted
comic, Meadows played Alice, the long-suffering but fiery wife of Gleason's
bus driver Cramden. Meadows would turn her back on show business to become the third and final Mrs. Robert F. Six, and the couple remained together for the rest of their lives.

It was in 1959 that Ethel, still living at the Park Lane, announced to the
press that she and the Colorado maverick were officially separated. (Evidently, that was how Six found out.) Now, whenever business took him to
New York, he and Ethel met only to settle their holdings, prompting the press
to speculate uselessly about a reunion. Their talks lasted for months. The two
did keep a promise they'd made to the children, taking a family vacation to
the Caribbean that winter, but soon after that, Six and Ethel went their separate ways. During a short break from Gypsy, Ethel flew to Mexico City for
a divorce.

While the failure of Ethel's second marriage to Bob Levitt had been a disappointment, her trust had not been abused. "I imagine they just let it go,"
says Cointreau, who by now was a second son to Ethel, long after he and Little
Ethel had stopped dating. "They might have been able to make a go of it, but
like a lot of couples, they reached a point where the relationship could either
go on or not. In later years, she never seemed to understand what went wrong and considered him to have been the love of her life. "50 The divorce from Six
was different. Although Ethel was too life-affirming to dwell on the marriage,
she was, according to her son, very bitter about Bob Six and never forgave his
abuse. For her, the relationship was a profound betrayal, one that left her
guarded when it came to financial and romantic matters in the future.