Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (67 page)

Toward the end of the San Francisco run, Merman experienced a slipped
spinal disk and was in excruciating pain. Her physicians insisted she not perform, but she refused and took spinal injections before each show. When she
was not on the stage, Ethel was effectively in traction. ("I was in pain but kept
my hair appointments," she wrote in her autobiography.) 12' The star insisted
that the public not be told she was playing injured, and her problems weren't
revealed until the tour was over.

After seven weeks, Gypsy ended its San Francisco run on September 30,
and Ethel went on to Los Angeles in a brace for the penultimate stop. Agnes
and Edward had flown out, aware that Los Angeles would be a particularly
special event and also eager to help their injured daughter. Despite her back
trouble, the day before opening, Ethel went flea marketing with them (a favorite pastime). When she opened at LA's Biltmore Theatre, she received a
thunderous ovation (and a bouquet of flowers from Rosalind Russell-did
she know Ethel had allergies?). Sidney Skolsky wrote of the night, "I tell you,
you don't see a scene like this except in a movie. Considering the fact that
the majority of the audience were movie people, they acted like people in
movies."129 The audience was a who's who of celebrities, and most of Ethel's
colleagues outside New York had actually waited to see her there. Styne, there
for the opening, telegrammed in advance to joke, "By the way, I am sending
Mervyn LeRoy San Francisco reviews."130 Another fan wired, "Let them hear
it tonight, Ethel. Affectionately, Cary Grant."131 Merrick threw an openingnight party at Romanoff's, with partygoers then making their way to the
home of Mitzi Gaynor and Jack Bean to continue celebrating.

Despite hobnobbing with the royalty of the entertainment world, Ethel
never lost herself to it. And judging from at least one fan, not everyone was
convinced that she was a "Medusa Mother":

Please let me begin this letter by thanking you so very much for the $5.00 gift
you gave to Barry [Kemp, one of the children in the San Francisco cast] for his
birthday.... I will be eternally grateful to you for being so wonderful to my
child all these months. Barry would have been a very unhappy little boy during a good part of these last months, had it not been for the friendship and
kindness you extended to him. As Barry has said, "Mommy, I think Miss Merman really likes me." Being a Mother yourself, you must know how very good
all this makes me feel.132

Another missive from Los Angeles read:

When I was growing up back East my father was a great fan of musical comedy, especially those in which you appeared....

Yesterday my husband and I saw you in Gypsy. I must confess, without
shame, that I cried like a baby. Not only because your portrayal of Madame
Rose was tremendously moving, but because after twenty years, the last time
I saw you on stage, you still thrilled me to my fingertips....

One more thing. Whoever is responsible for not casting you in the film version must be out of his cotton-picking mind.133

After breaking records at the Biltmore, Gypsy's run was extended from November ii to the 25th. From Los Angeles, the tour's final stop with Ethel was
ten days at the American Theatre in St. Louis. The Gypsy tour continued
from there to Denver, but Ethel was eager to get back to her regular life, to
enjoy her freedom and her family, so a new Madame Rose took her place,
played by Mary McCarty, who had also done the role in Las Vegas. After taking the country by storm, Ethel now could go home.

New Turns for Rose

Rose's unconventional aspects have triggered responses that reshaped Ethel's
image for years to come, manufacturing new Ethel Mermans as well as revising old ones. Not only was there the belief that Rose "was" Ethel Merman
but also that the role revealed some of the ostensible "Jewishness" of Merman's persona. Rose Hovick was in actuality Jewish, a detail that enters the
play, according to historian Stacy Wolf, only through the backdoor, in character names like Mr. Goldstone and Herbie and in lyrics such as the stripper's
"Once I was a schlepper/ Now I'm Miss Mazeppa." It also resides in the
cliched aspects of Rose as a pushy show biz mom. Adds Wolf,

But it's not only that Gypsy powerfully evokes Jewishness without naming it
as such. In the musical, Jewishness works with queerness, another marginal,
malleable, not-quite visible identity; they both inflect each other. Merman's
Momma Rose, on Broadway in 1959, not only reads as Jewish but is the quintessential Jewish mother, queered.... The show refuses a musical's expected
heterosexual romantic resolution. Instead, Gypsy eschews heterosexual marriage for a gynocentric world, comes forth as a star vehicle for a single woman's
performance and develops a primary relationship between two women.134

Gay critic D. A. Miller also finds it significant that Gypsy gives little time to
male characters, maintaining that the show acknowledges a key mechanism
of the postwar musical: shows revolve around women who have the central,
most colorful roles. In Gypsy, he says, we see a full "swerve away from
men,"135 and hence a strong feminization of the entire spectacle that audiences take in on the stage. To be sure, the stage (and performing itself) has
been feminized in North America for over a hundred years; as recently as the
early twentieth century, theater work was considered disreputable, glorified
whoring.

There are plenty of reasons Gypsy has the iconic place it does within gay
and lesbian cultures. Like many other musicals, it is about fantasy and the potentials of people with different worldviews and experiences, of people who
don't fit tightly defined norms and who fight for fulfillment in a world at
odds with them. If material and cultural conditions cannot make our fantasies possible "in real life," what better way to acknowledge or announce
them than with the extravagant, dramatic, openly emotional journey of a
musical? (Opera has much of the same appeal.) For as unrealistic as musicals
are aesthetically, the fantasies they provoke in us are deeply tied to the social
and historical realities underpinning them.13' Even the space of the theatrical house has importance as a historically safe place for different gendered and
social communities to meet.

It is the diva's commanding presence in these worlds-her on- and offstage sufferings (actual or perceived), her soaring voice, her materiality-that
gives everything its potent "reality." She is what enables fans to transport the
onstage passions offstage, bringing them into her image and all that she seemingly blesses. And while Miller and other gay critics have discussed the importance of divas specifically to gay men,137 it is apparent that divas and their
musical worlds have considerable stakes for all viewers, including lesbians and
other female viewers. In postwar American popular culture, for instance,
stage and screen musicals offered girls and young women a certain sanctuary from the male-dominated world of rock music, and, unlike opera, the musical gives women and other viewers a form that avoids opera's studied world
and ratified talents.

For one middle-aged lesbian fan from a Los Angeles suburb, Gypsy's
"Some People" has particular resonance and remains her favorite Merman
song. Rose is not like regular people; she's an outsider who is impatient with
the staid, stay-at-home, straight, middle-class existence her dad represents.
Laurents was well aware of the sexual subtexts of Gypsy's real-life characters:
"There had always been speculation that Gypsy [Rose Lee] was a lesbian,
but ... Gypsy Rose Lee's mother?"138 (Rose was actually bisexual, and June
Havoc wrote about the lesbian cocktail parties her mother and sister hosted,
for which they sometimes charged people admission.)

Theater historian Wolf describes Merman's performance of Rose as "butch
Jewish force."139 Less concerned with strict biographical fact, Wolf focuses on
features of the performance that have adhered to Merman over time, acknowledging the importance of speculative stories, appearances, and longstanding rumors that make of Merman an icon who is not your run-of-themill heterosexual woman. Wolf points out that in TV appearances such as the
one playing house with Frank Sinatra, Ethel only "plays at femininity," producing a "Merman-as-femme,"140 and other queer critics have similarly
noted that Ethel's drag as a man ("A Sailor's Not a Sailor . . .") seems less like
drag than when she is asked to play genteel femininity.

The Jacqueline Susann Story

It wasn't just subsequent critics who "queered" Merman in Gypsy. At the
time, Jacqueline Susann, an attractive second-tier actress who had been in
shows such as The Girl from Wyoming, Banjo Eyes, Blossom Time, and Lovely
Me and the TV series Open Door, developed a "fixation" on Merman.141 Susann, who was bisexual, was wowed by Ethel's depiction of Rose and was "intrigued with the kind of magnetism Ethel had," said Benay Venuta.142 According to Susann's biographer, Susann's erotic interest was clinched when
she reportedly performed a bump and grind at Ethel's Park Lane home one
night while helping her prepare for Gypsy.

Two other stories fan the infamous fire. The first involves an incident that
purportedly occurred one night at a party hosted by Lynn Loesser on Central
Park West, where a very drunken Merman and Susann had a make-out session on the couch. The second describes an incident that began at a nightclub where Merman, Venuta, and their dates were dining after a performance
of Gypsy.

Irving [Mansfield, Susann's husband] wanted to take Jackie home, and Jackie
was having none of it.... "Fuck you! Get the hell out of here!" she [screamed].
Jackie later remembered Ethel saying, "I don't ever want to see you again. You're
as crazy as your son [who was autistic]." Benay doesn't recall that remark, but
she does remember Ethel leaving the restaurant with Jackie following her. Jackie
followed her all the way home and then stood outside her apartment, banging
on the door and yelling, "Ethel, I love you!" Ethel said later that this went on
for hours, until she at last threatened to call the police. 143

Soon after the drunk stalking incident, Susann was admitted to a sanitarium.
She exacted revenge in her novel Valley of the Dolls, in which she drew the
nasty, drunken, middle-aged stage diva Helen Lawson with exaggerated features of Merman, down to her drink of choice, champagne on the rocks.
Ethel never spoke to Susann again.

The afterlife of this tale has taken on huge and conflicting proportions,
giving both Merman and Susann strangely unattractive features as they both
get "queered." Susann's biographer, for instance, considers her attraction to
Merman a sign of inner instability, as if lesbianism were a sign of sickness:
"Jackie seemed to follow Ethel almost everywhere.... Jackie was past forty
now, a bit old for those adolescent `star crushes' she'd had [on other women] .
It just wasn't right for her to be tagging around after Merman so blatantly. 11144

But if these stories make Susann immature, they make Ethel into a
grotesque lowlife: "[Jackie] knew Ethel was coarse and vulgar, a woman who
described Benay's important Jewish society friends as `dull as pig shit.' .. .
When she starred in Gypsy, Ethel was turning fifty, overweight, physically unappealing, and an intellectual lightweight to say the least.... She drank too
much, and she was often abusive when she'd had too much to drink....
Dumpy and vulgar though she might be, and bigoted as she certainly was
about `niggers' and `commie Jews,' she was the undisputed star of the musical stage."145 The biography offers no sources for the unsavory remarks attributed to Ethel here; one is supposed to take them as truth, along with the
vicious description of her. It's strange that people buy into this Ethel Merman, one who is anti-Semitic for not liking the upper crust and homophobic for shunning Jackie's unwanted advances.

The less mythic, ordinary Ethel Merman had no trouble interacting with
lesbians; her agent and many close friends and associates were lesbians, recalls Levitt. And Cointreau recounts a time at a party where Ethel said that she
found that gay and lesbian couples were among many of the happiest long-term
relationships she knew-and that included Cointreau and Jim Russo. Cointreau also remembers her saying, "I just like men. Never liked women, never
have," no big deal.146 It's unlikely that her matter-of-fact attitude was anything
she'd want to make a big fuss over. And she was, understandably, furious about
the Susann story. What remains interesting-and deeply ironic-about that
legend-that-won't-die is that people seem to take it as an indication both of
Merman's homophobia and of her latent lesbianism, neither of which she had
anything to do with.

Why have so many gay and lesbian critics insisted that Ethel Merman was
homophobic? Wolf, for instance, states matter-of-factly that Merman was
"very rude to lesbians." Merle Louise, who as a child played the replacement
Baby June, is quoted as saying: "They used to say Merman never liked gays.
But we went to this club once in Detroit, and it was a gay club-and everyone was surprised she went in the first place. One of the men asked her if she
would please sing a song and I thought, `Oh, Jesus.' But she said, `Sure.' They
had this piano that wasn't in the greatest tune, and she sat on top of that
piano and sang `There's No Business Like Show Business.' And those guys
wept. We all did."147

Merman's not-quite-straight public image in midlife is as complex as the
overlapping layers she had with her not-quite-white image in the late 19zos.
Neither has much to do with the facts of Ethel Merman's life. The historical
record does not bear out the claim of her homophobia, but what remains significant is the force with which its association-along with her purported
lesbianism-has stuck to her. Obviously, a lesbian is what many fans want
Merman to be. No disrespect to her is intended by many of these people or
by critics like Wolf, who argues that Ethel might have been playing a lesbian,
or someone like a lesbian, or a figure that lesbians could take to their heart.
In fact, even if the role of Mama Rose caused Ethel to lose some of her older
female fans, it helped usher in new, younger ones. To some of the lesbians and
gay men who adore her to this day, that "queerness" resides in Ethel; for others, it does not. For many, it is enough that the show made Ethel Merman
Broadway's top figure, Mama Rose its shining crown.