Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (80 page)

By this point Bob Levitt and Barbara Colby were separated. Their 1972
marriage had lasted just two years, but their commitment and closeness to
one another remained deeply bonded. Says Levitt today, "In our seven years
together Barbara endured so many hurts from my young man's imbalances
that my heart winces for her as I remember them. Contrarily, I can't think
of one single hurt that she inflicted on me, ever."27 When they made the decision to end the marriage, the two of them split their assets 5o-5o, moved
Barbara into a rental on the beach in Malibu, and then "went on a dissolution honeymoon." On their return, their beloved cat, Spike, who was to stay
with Barbara, went missing-a painful sign of the sadness of the split. Yet
many months later, in July 1975, when Bob came to visit Barbara for her thirty-seventh birthday, the missing cat miraculously reappeared. Just as
Bob was unpacking his car outside of her home, "Spike came meowing his
way off the hills of Old Mailbu Road into my arms. In keeping with the theatricality of our family, Spike made himself into Barbara's surprise birthday
present," an event of "amazing grace," he says, "one more in a steady stream
of such events that saturated our seven years together."28 In spite of giving
up on their marriage, Bob and Barbara had hoped to find a way of sharing
what Levitt calls their "eternal union." Shortly after this, however, Barbara
was gone.

Her death closed down a promising career. Colby had moved from theater work on the East Coast to reside in California, where she was branching
into television, including guest roles on popular '70s shows such as Colombo,
Gunsmoke, and even an appearance on The Odd Couple. She had done two
well-received guest appearances on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Sherry, a
woman Mary gets to know when she does jail time. That engagement had led
to Colby getting a featured role on Phyllis (Cloris Leachman's spin-off from
the Mary TylerMoore Show), where Colby played Julie Erskine, Phyllis's boss.
Colby had appeared in one episode before her death (she was replaced by Liz
Torres). MTM's CEO Grant Tinker and, especially, costar Cloris Leachman
grieved for the warm, talented actress of whom they had become fond, and
Leachman prepared a eulogy that, in the end, was not aired.

Bob Levitt immediately flew to Los Angeles. Because he and Colby were
still legally married and he stood to benefit financially from her death, he was
briefly considered the prime suspect. Although the case was never resolved,
the police ultimately suspected gang or gang-related activities behind this and
other murders in the area. At Paradise Cove, just off the Malibu Coast, Levitt;
Colby's mother, Estelle Galliano; and a huge boat full of her closest friends
gave Barbara's ashes to the sea.

It is hard to imagine how Bob and his mother were able to handle yet more
violence and loss. Ethel grieved deeply for the woman who had become a second daughter and attended ceremonies memorializing her. But a large part
of her response was familiar, and she shielded much of that tragedy. In her
second autobiography, for instance, Merman not only omits the incident, but
never mentions that her son had ever been married.

At the time Colby was in Los Angeles, Bob Levitt was living in the San
Francisco area, where he was working at the American Conservatory Theatre,
training actors (he was not the lighting electrician, as his mother claimed).
"Bob is an extremely gifted acting teacher," says Cointreau.29 A little later, in
1978, Bob relocated to Maui, Hawaii, to live communally on a boat with a ceremonial theater group, the Teatro Mare, or Theatre of the Sea. Life with
the group gave the young man focus, and it also gave him family. "We raised
one of my goddaughters, Bella Rosa, on our boat," says Levitt. "She started
walking on sea legs [and] when she came ashore with us, she'd wobble for the
first few minutes of walking on land. "10

Concert Years

Ethel had been doing revivals of Call Me Madam across the States for years,
most recently in Kansas City in September 1969. But in the 1970s, she began
a truly new phase of her career on the road. With her back to Broadway, Merman embarked on a fast-paced series of cross-country concerts. She said that
it was a TV special that started it. On July 4, 1976, Ethel performed with
Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops Orchestra to commemorate the
American bicentennial. Merman found the experience so enjoyable that she
decided, with her manager, to explore concert touring on a regular basis.

As Ethel repeatedly explained to interviewers, the timing was good: she
was single, with no kids at home, and Pop was well taken care of. Kathryn
Shreve, now partnered with neighbor Ona Hill, stayed on with the family
after Agnes died. Merman was free to travel, and touring gave her the opportunity to enjoy her autonomy in a new way. She could now give Americans outside New York the experience of hearing her live for the first time,
even if performing her songs without the context of a show or show character lowered the overwhelming effect Merman had on stage audiences. Still,
the electricity Ethel could generate turned many Merman agnostics into believers. "I wasn't expecting to like her," ran the typical review, "but there was
something amazing about this living legend with big hair. Her voice would
shake the rafters, but it would also reach out and grab you deep inside." Merman used the stage to full advantage, as always, lifting her arms, snapping her
fingers, and moving to the rhythm of her numbers while giving a flash of her
still-shapely legs with a snappy twirl of her skirt.

Her first concert appearance was with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra
on March 16, 1977, during which she performed a dozen hits, most from her
Broadway repertoire. She loved it. One member of the symphony, though,
who now plays with the New York Philharmonic, was less excited: he says
that Merman's offense was not unprofessional behavior or anything like that,
but he opines, "By this time, her vibrato was so large you could drive a truck
through it." The voice had indeed acquired a vibrato as well as a slightly lower register-common changes with age-but for a vocalist with a half century
of steady performing behind her, Merman's vocal health and skills remained
rather remarkable. All of her life, Merman never lost her ability to convey
lyrics clearly and powerfully.

The peak concert years were 1977 to 1979, when Ethel's itinerary included
a range of cities that would daunt a performer half her age: Dallas; Seattle;
Denver; Indianapolis; Springfield, Massachusetts; Hamilton, Ontario; Norfolk; Detroit; Kansas City, Kansas; Milwaukee; Atlanta; Baltimore; and Syracuse and Chautauqua, New York. Eric Knight was her conductor of choice,
and under his baton, her repertoire now, in contrast to the beginning of her
career, did not vary, but small matter: few singers of any generation could assemble as many hits that they could call their own. As Kaye Ballard put it,
"Ethel Merman, are you kidding? She invented the ASCAP repertory!"31
Every evening, she'd play with the local symphony orchestra in two shows of
seventy-five minutes each, going as far back for material as "Life Is Just a Bowl
of Cherries" (1931) and "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911)-all this at a time
when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had been working for over a decade;
Chuck Berry and Little Richard, for two.

Aging Pop

Ethel may have doing a good job defying Old Man Time, but the struggle
was harder for her father. Now legally blind and extremely frail, Pop told her
shortly after his ninety-seventh birthday, "I'm lucky, Ethel, to be ninety-seven
and still have all my marbles."32 He dutifully tried to maintain the scrapbooks, preserving mementos of his daughter's appearances, pasting them into
the pages with a new erraticism-the scrapbooks preceding this period testify more to his failing sight than to his daughter's career: clippings are glued
on top of others, some are cut or torn so that the references to Ethel are
obscured. By the early '70s, the duty of maintaining the scrapbooks was
increasingly shared with Pop's caregivers in New Jersey.

Summers, Ethel brought Pop out of the sweltering city to a nice, airy room
in a suburban home in Kenilworth, a block away from Kathryn Shreve,
where she, Ona Hill, Ona's sister Edna, and Al Koenig Jr., a local high school
teacher, all took care of him. They would play cards, work on the scrapbooks,
take car rides, sit in the yard, chat, listen to records ("Pop was partial to `You
Can't Get a Man with a Gun," recalls Koenig),33 and Pop would take his daily
scotch. On some days, if the Hill sisters let Edward sit around a bit too much on his own, Koenig took him out for a ride or to get some ice cream so that
he always had activities to recount to his daughter when she came. Whether
in Kenilworth or at the apartment he still kept at the Berkshire in the city,
Ethel made sure to have Pop's possessions arranged the way they'd always
been so that the elderly man could make his way around his place by touch.

"Both Kathryn and Lucy [Ona] were so good to Pop," said Ethel, "that they
have become almost like sisters to me. 1134 When Ethel visited, they gossiped,
had tea, and, circumstances permitting, went antiquing or flea marketing.
Ethel felt at home with them, and their loyalty and reliability meant a lot to
her. (After Pop passed, Ethel still went out to Kenilworth for visits, and when
Shreve became ill some years later, Ethel bought her a wheelchair that the retired nurse was unable to afford.) Still, it was a business arrangement: their pay
for looking after Pop was seventeen dollars a day. One day, Koenig recalls,
Merman came out to New Jersey with an LP she'd just released: "Here," she
said, "here's today's pay!" Ona, he reports, was not amused.35

Even before Pop began losing his sight, Ethel was doing charity work for
organizations that helped the blind and the visually impaired, such as the
Lighthouse International Organization and the "Fight for Sight" campaigns. Although she'd been doing this since the'3os, her zeal for this kind
of charity work had greater focus and personal motivation now. On
Wednesdays, Ethel also began volunteering at the Roosevelt Hospital gift
shop, a decision she'd made when she and her father were spending so much
time there while Agnes had been ailing. Finding herself restless, Ethel said,
"After a few weeks I asked whether I could be of some service. At first they
put me on escort duty, taking patients in wheelchairs and on stretchers ...
but as Mom faded I reached the point where I couldn't bear seeing people
on stretchers."36 So she moved into the store. Bob Levitt recalls, "She liked
working with regular folks, and she really loved working with the cash register and having daily receipts."37 ("If I hadn't been a singer or a secretary,"
wrote Merman in her second autobiography, "I think I'd have loved being
a saleslady.") Needless to say, sales at Roosevelt's gift shop shot up, but Ethel
was not thrilled about the attention she got, especially when the hospital decided to move the shop closer to the entrance on the ground floor, where
there was more traffic. Still, she took it in stride. One day she wrote, "I was
riding an elevator, wearing my Pink Lady uniform, with this middle-aged
couple. The woman looked me over and then asked, `Has anyone ever told
you that you look like Ethel Merman?' Before I could answer, the man piped
up. `Ethel Merman just wishes she looked like you.' I grinned and said, `I
am Ethel Merman."138

Ruth Munson, a New Yorker born two years before Ethel, was another volunteer at the hospital at the time. She remembers that, in addition to doing
her work in the gift store, Ethel would visit all the entertainers who were patients at Roosevelt. And "anybody who didn't have anybody, people on their
own, she would visit them too." Ethel sang to them, she remembers. "You
know, she could sing very low, very sweet." Munson vividly recalls not liking
Ethel's hair ("Oh, it was terrible, so scrawny"); and she also had an opinion
of what caused the Borgnine marriage to fail, stressing what a "sad, tragic"
life Merman had had. At the time of our interview, Munson was still pushing gurneys for Roosevelt Hospital on Mondays and Wednesdays; she was
ninety-five when we spoke.39

After her mother passed away, Merman had a small ivy garden put into
Roosevelt's 9th Avenue entrance with a plaque commemorating Agnes Zimmermann, and on November 3, 1976, an ailing Pop was able to attend its dedication ceremony. (By 1974, he had suffered two massive heart attacks.) The
garden was set off from the street by a short black iron fence, and with this
memorial Ethel was not only able to commemorate her mom but could also
acknowledge the good care that Agnes had received at Roosevelt. Today, at
the beginning of the twenty-first century, the bronze plaque and small garden no longer exist, casualties of Roosevelt Hospital's having moved several
city blocks from its original site; all that remains of the hospital's initial location is the Surgery Theatre, which was preserved by the city as a historic
building. In the Volunteer Service Department, however, people today still
have stories of when Ethel Merman worked there.

With Mary Martin Together on Broadway

Ethel continued doing benefits for other charities, such as the Easter Seals
and a number of groups and organizations involved in preserving theater history. In the fall of 1976, Arnold Weissberger approached her to do a benefit
for one of them-the Museum of the City of New York, a small gem located
on the city's Museum Mile on upper 5th Avenue. Weissberger, chair of the
museum's board of directors, had the idea to reunite Ethel and Mary Martin
for an evening together on Broadway. There was some question whether
Martin would agree to do it, since her husband, Richard Halliday, had died
recently, and even before, she'd not been performing much. But she agreed,
as did Merman, and Together on Broadway was planned for Sunday, May 15,
1977, at the Broadway Theatre. Produced by Anna Sosenko, the event was careful to give the stars equal treatment. Its program was designed with the
same exact balance as the record jacket for their 1953 TV appearance had
been: turn the program one way, and Merman is the cover girl with top listing; the other, and it's Martin. Every detail is identical: the size of their
names, page layout, design, et cetera.