Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (71 page)

Edward and Agnes Zimmermann, 1973.
Courtesy of Al F. Koenig Jr.

Ethel at home in her Surrey Hotel apartment with her ceramic bassett hound, George, 1982.
Courtesy of Al F. Koenig Jr.

Ethel the Comic

Reviewers of the film praised Ethel for holding her own among so many
renowned comedians. For those tracking her career, this may not have been
surprising. Although this was her first nonsinging role in a movie, theater
critics had, after all, been praising her comic abilities for over thirty years.
And now, as the "plump but comely 53 year old," as one interviewer in the
United Kingdom described her, she knew that comedy enabled her to branch
out from the tiring long runs of stage musicals. (On the clipping, Ethel underlined the word plump, writing "that's the English press, they're mur-
der!")20 Without any real desire-or need-for another long Broadway run,
Ethel was able to bank on her established comic persona in other media, and
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World marked an auspicious foray.

Her relaxed sense of play is evident in the movie's final scene. All the male
characters lie immobilized in traction in a hospital room, punished for their
greed. Variety writes, "Along comes Ethel Merman, an `old bag' mother in
law detested by all parties present.... Miss Merman flops head over heels [on
a banana peel], landing with a resounding thud on her derriere. The room is
instantly filled with convulsive laughter, and the picture ends on this optimistic note." 21

The mother-in-law gag was an old staple in comedy, of course, and Variety's remark about optimistic closure suggests that mothers-in-law (and perhaps the funny women who played them) seemed not altogether different
from the more serious judgments against mothers at the time. And the
women who played them had a rough time of it, too. Female comics enjoyed
less celebrity, less salary, and less success than their male counterparts, especially on TV and film screens (Lucille Ball being a significant exception); the
problem was somewhat less marked on Broadway. Was there something
wrong with being a bawdy, funny woman? One review ofA Mad, Mad, Mad,
Mad World extends praises to Jonathan Winters and, "in descending order,
Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, andTerry-Thomas," adding that "the effects [of other performances] range from brief smile (Milton Berle) ... to outright
disgust (Ethel Merman, showing off her bloomers)."22

Ethel could not only take this sort of thing but could take part in it, describing her character to an Edinburgh reporter, "She wears about a hundredweight [ton] of costume jewelry and bangles all the way up her arm so you
can hear her clanking toward you before she's even in sight. And she has this
big, white purse she hits everybody with. It's kind of a running gag."23 She was
sure enough of herself as a performer to be unfazed, no matter how declasse
or ridiculous her character was supposed to be. It had nothing to do with
her or the way she lived at home or interacted with friends; the image was
"just a joke."

During the r96os and '70s, Ethel's choice of roles was not entirely different from other stage divas who were taking up TV and film parts and
cameos. Ann Miller and Carol Channing were also playing up aspects of
their established personae in guest spots. In Ethel's case, though, there is a
discernible difference of degree. The cameo roles she took and the way that
she depicted them were full-out, lusty (though clean), and she seemed to
delight in parodying the icon that was "Ethel Merman," playing up the
brash, direct speech, the big hair and jewelry, and, of course, the voice. Few
stars of her generation appear as willing to poke so much fun at themselves,
culminating in her turn as Airplane!'s hysterical Lieutenant Hurwitz. Also
unlike many other female stars, Ethel kept on singing throughout this entire period, and soon, in fact, she would be embarking on a new concert
career phase.

Well before this and before It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World even began
shooting, Merman's work schedule found her all over the country. In 1962, she
had visited San Diego, where a young Marlo Thomas was performing in The
Yum Yum Tree. (A few years later, Thomas twice invited Ethel to guest star on
That Girl.) Ethel taped a TV show with Bob Hope in February 1962 in their
first work together since Red, Hot and Blue! In April, she participated in New
York's big Easter Day parade. That same year, Ethel was awarded "Actress of
the Year" by the Troupers, a charitable New York organization that looked
after needy theatrical children; of the April 8 ceremony, Bobby penned, "You
are a good girl-and I was so proud of you tonight, Love Bobby." Bobby was
sending his mom many billets-doux now, some scrawled on hotel stationery,
giving touching signs of a son reaching out to a busy mom.

Merman in Las Vegas

Ethel had never expressed much interest in doing a Las Vegas show. Nonetheless, the generous pay of the casinos and the novelty of the venue were nothing to turn your nose up at. By this point in her career, Ethel's antipathy against
working outside New York had softened, if not altogether evaporated; doing
a twice-nightly club act for a few weeks was certainly less taxing than working in an indefinite run of a Broadway musical. And so on October 2,5, 1963,
La Merm opened her one-woman show in Las Vegas at the historic Flamingo
Hotel, where her salary was top-of-the-line (forty thousand dollars per
week). Demand for the show was such that the hotel had to remodel to expand seating capacity by 2,50, and Ethel received so many flowers that one
critic compared her dressing room to a gangster's funeral. (The bouquets
were sent to local hospitals to avoid sneezing fits.) Planeloads of friends and
reviewers descended for opening night and the following celebration. Edward
and Agnes Zimmermann had flown out from New York, and Judy Garland,
whose own show at the Flamingo had closed just days before, sent a card"Darling Ethel, Know you will be a great success tonight.... I love you very
much. Judy."24 It was there that Dick Shawn boasted to the crowd, "That's
my Mother!"25 and Ethel's other movie offspring, Mitzi Gaynor, expressed
her delight as well, along with Jule Styne, Eddie Cantor, Stanley Kramer,
Spencer Tracy, and Dinah Shore. Roddy McDowall, who was working on
George Stevens's biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told, flew in from Los
Angeles with several cast members to take in the show and party. According
to columnist Sheila Graham, Ethel said, "It's the first time a Jewish girl ever
had St. Matthew, Judas, Nathaniel and St. Peter as her escorts," in a story that
was obviously not cleared by Miss Merman.26

The show consisted of twenty-three songs, most from her Broadway
shows, and was later released on LP. Reviews of the debut were enthusiastic;
one called Merman-ever the force of nature-"the happiest earthquake ever
to hit Las Vegas."27 By now, the voice was always cast as a force, the vocal
delivery a "belt."

For one local reporter, interviewing Ethel proved comic but embarrassing.
After their conversation, Ethel asked him to play some of it back on his tape
recorder. The thing didn't work. "I tried explaining to Merman that I was unskilled with mechanical gadgets.... She just glared at me in a slightly homicidal manner.... Yesterday I got a year's subscription to Popular Mechanics
with a note from Ethel Merman which read: `Maybe you'll learn how to operate that machine of your's [sic] now.' "28

Ethel on Television and around Town

During the filming of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Ethel entered negotiations to launch her own half-hour TV sitcom. On February 4, 1963,
Ethel went to Desilu Studios in Cahuenga, Los Angeles, where good friend
and Desilu co-owner Lucille Ball, her husband, Gary Morton, and Mitzi
Gaynor watched as the pilot for Maggie Brown was shot in color. The script
was by Bill Manhoff,29 and the show's premise made clear nods not only to
Merman's Panama Hattie but also to the Titanic's fabled unsinkable Molly
Brown, recently the subject of the 1960 musical. Ethel portrays Maggie
Brown, a club owner on Lobster Island, a naval atoll in the South Pacific used
largely for refueling planes, where she is a solo mom to teenage daughter,
Linda. The pilot episode concerns the island's beer supply, which has been
temporarily cut off. With a still operating under the saloon floor, Maggie's
saloon remains in business, but then when a rival bar owner tips off local authorities, they uncover it. This is not before young Linda nearly runs off with
the handsome sailor whom Maggie had hired to help repair the contraption.
Over the half-hour running time, Ethel reprises two Broadway tunes,
"Friendship" (singing to the sailors in her establishment at the beginning)
and, with her daughter at the end, "Mutual Admiration Society." In between,
she does a rushed, comic medley of fragments from numbers such as "The
Trolley Song" and "Steam Heat" to hide the noises of the ailing still during
the inspectors' surprise visit.

Maggie Brown has its moments. Ethel's voice is used to compelling effect,
whether speaking or singing. Its gags are no worse than most other TV shows
of the time: As Maggie stares wide-eyed at the legs of her rival restaurateur, a
kilted Scotsman, he says, "You've seen me in my kilt before." "Yeah," she says,
"but not since you raised the hemline." The characters-a protective single
parent of a hormonally challenged teen with suitors-were standard issue sitcom ingredients. But the show was able to appeal to longtime Merman followers and fans by exploiting her established trademarks, like her easy camaraderie with working-class people, the military, and people of various
ethnicities; here she was playing yet another spirited saloon woman with a
brassy, can-do attitude and a mother with tough love and a sentimental heart.
Unfortunately, what Maggie Brown lacked was much of anything new.

Ethel was the usual go-getter talking up the pilot's future, and she deeply
wanted the stability that a weekly series would give her. "There's nothing like
it on TV now," she told reporters about Maggie. "It's a half-hour that's partly
situation comedy and partly musical comedy. I'll be able to sing two songs each week." Each of the networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, considered it, but
they all took a pass, and Maggie Brown was in the end never picked up. Even
Lucille Ball's appreciable clout wasn't enough to get the show on the air. Maggie was beset by conceptual problems from the start. The brass, nervous about
Merman's star power, first called it The Ethel Merman Show, which then became Trader Brown (surely to Ethel's consternation) before becoming Maggie Brown. 10 Studios were clearly not sure about how to package it or its star.

A West Coast insider speculated, "I figure the pilot didn't sell because of
the setting; take Ethel out of that musical comedy-type island and put her
in a big city saloon and I'll bet even a presentation without a pilot will make
an easy sale."31 Evidently, Ethel's affiliation with New York City was not
helping her success in television. (Fifteen years later, though, another Merman sitcom was placed squarely in Manhattan and fared no better.) Ethel,
who lobbied for Maggie for years, seemed circumspect but slightly peeved
about the whole affair, complaining to the press as late as 1966 that the show
was "killed" by one CBS executive in particular, "who," she added, "was
later fired."32

During this time, Ethel was enjoying a healthy personal life, going out with
different men. ("I'm not a nun, you know.") Some were lovers, some simply
escorts. Among the latter were several gay men who ranged from trusted,
charming, and discreet confidants, such as Eric Palm, to dissimulating types
who "led Ethel on, just to say they'd been with her," according to Cointreau,
who knew some of them.33 Ethel was reported to be in the frequent company
of songwriter Jimmy van Heusen, whom she called Chester (his birth name
was Chester Babcock) and was also escorted by Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue. Her name was frequently tied to Jimmy Gardiner, an oil businessman
and producer whose cards and letters suggest a solid friendship, and to
screenwriter Ernest Gann, a friend from the West Coast. The press still speculated that she had a romance going with Chicago friend and escort Eddie
Bragno, and she still wrote them to deny it. Ethel also resumed her relationship with Sherman Billingsley, under the radar as always, sleeping at
girlfriends' apartments. In 1966, Billingsley passed away without ever having divorced his wife.