Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (83 page)

Twenty years after Gypsy, Kip Cohen of A&M Records contacted Merman
to see if she would be interested in recording a disco album with them. Ethel
thought it was a great opportunity for something new and took one day to
say yes. The Ethel Merman Disco Album was produced by songwriter-arranger
Peter Matz (1928-2oo2), whose work had intersected with hers before when
he composed the theme song for You're Gonna Love It Here.

Ethel spent two days at A&M's Studio B in Los Angeles laying down the
vocal track, singing with minimal accompaniment; the instrumentation was
laid down after she finished her session. While she was there, Ethel was introduced to A&M's disco star Donna Summer ("She Works Hard for the
Money" and "Hot Stuff"), and the press released a photo of the two in wide
syndication. Reportedly, Summer greeted Merman with, "If I'm the Queen
of Disco, You're the Disco Diva."'

Though hardly the music of Merman's heritage, disco's synthesized, repetitive style was actually not unsuited to her-after all, her voice, with its innate sense of rhythm, could practically syncopate itself-and A&M label
owner and trumpeter Herb Alpert enthused, "It's almost as if disco was made
for her."' But the response to the venture was sharply and wildly divided, and
people remain touchy about The Disco Album today, loving it, hating it, celebrating it, wanting to downplay it, championing it, and so on.

In its review, the New York Times wrote: "The results are not quite so embarrassing as might have been feared."3 Others called the enterprise out of
touch, the singer and her producers oblivious to changes in popular tastes.
Some found the idea of a septuagenarian singer trying to update herself
through disco nothing short of ludicrous. For many musical theater purists,
Ethel Merman had betrayed her "audience" and sold out: "Et tu, Ethel?" ran
one review.4

Giving fuel to this hostility was Ethel's voice, which was not in peak form.
Although she still hit the pitches very well, and to Cointreau, her "soft voice
in `I Got Rhythm' was very powerful,"5 her vibrato was relatively open, and
the voice had a wobble and a harshness to it that wasn't there in earlier years.
The disco recording shows the late-life voice that people parody as the "Merman" belt today, forgetting that she ever handled ballads and complex jazz
without a trace of harshness or vibrato and with absolutely clear diction.

The Ethel Merman Disco Album is a fun if strange LP, full of disconnects
and incongruities. Unlike disco recording artists such as Summer, Thelma
Houston, and the Bee Gees-and the countless pop, folk, and rock singers
who were suddenly cutting disco albums-Ethel chose songs that were not
contemporary. It is indeed strange to hear "Alexander's Ragtime Band" performed to a disco beat and instrumentation. Yet despite the strangeness, there
are some points of connection: "Alexander," first released in the early r9ros,
was riding the ragtime wave sweeping the country, when ragtime generated
some of the same criticisms that disco faced sixty years later. Traditional white
critics feared that left unchecked, the ragtime fad could lead to mass hysteria, simplemindedness, and the wholesale enslavement of white women, and
in the 1970s, disco was accused of being numbingly repetitive, too commercial, artificial, decadent-just as its urban, gay, and African-American consumers were believed to be. For critics, the dance-halls of both ragtime and
disco were nothing more than dens of iniquity where drugs and illicit sex
mingled freely. For all this critical opprobrium, though, both genres were
widely popular: ragtime was one of the country's earliest forms of massdistributed pop music, and disco was an important expression of a number
of urban cultures that were repudiating the bogus authenticity of rock or the
saccharine taste of pop. Disco, in fact, remained popular for most of the
'7os-until about the time of Merman's LP, alas.

She promoted the album with characteristic zeal, appearing on Merv
Griffin's and Johnny Carson's talk shows, talking to national and local
print journals, confiding to reporters that "she loved the beat" even if she
"didn't understand the lyrics" to the disco songs she knew. 6 When columnists asked her what Irving Berlin thought, she told them that the ninetythree-year-old composer had said that her disco rendition of "Alexander's
Ragtime Band" was the best version he'd ever heard. To the reviewer who
asked if she'd do another disco LP, she said, sure, she was ready; she'd had
a blast and "there are plenty of showtunes left." "She loved making that
album," recall both Levitt and Cointreau.7 She saved the promotional
T-shirts that said "Disco Diva."8

The largely poor reviews of The Ethel Merman Disco Album show enormous prejudice involving class and taste, and some reviewers seemed to gloat
over how low Merman's star seemed to have fallen. A&M, they said, "forced"
her to appear at the New York-based discount store Korvettes to sign copies
of the LP. This is what the queen of the Great White Way had been reduced
to! Even worse, they reported, the queen was behaving poorly:

For nearly two hours, she greeted fans with the warmth of a fjord.... If you
didn't have the disco album, you couldn't meet Ethel. Those were the rules.
Here is the dialogue (some of it). Reported verbatim:

Jim Russo, Cointreau's partner, who was with Ethel at the album signing,
does not find anything real in these words. Neither does John Kenrick, a
young gay man who had waited for hours at Korvettes to get Ethel Merman's
autograph. To this day, Kenrick prides himself in being the first in line and
bristles at reports that he wasn't; one claimed an elderly woman was. The
Ethel Merman he encountered had nothing in common with the one produced by the press. After greeting the teenager warmly, he said, Ethel signed
his LP, asked how long he'd been waiting in line, and was surprised it had
been for so long. She seemed genuinely happy to be there, he recalls, although
he remembers she was frustrated by A&M's restriction allowing her to autograph only the new disco album and nothing else that fans might have
broughtin.

The experience of The Ethel Merman Disco Album gave young fans and
self-professed "musical theater queens" like John Kenrick a chance to encounter the Broadway legend firsthand. Moreover, in going disco, Ethel
seemed to be acknowledging her gay fan base in a way that she'd not done
before. Although this was not the reason she actually chose to do the LP
("Ethel just wanted to do something new," says Cointreau, "there was no
deeper motivation than that" ),10 many fans readily find in this recording a
way that Ethel Merman might be speaking to them.

Over the '6os and '70s, Ethel had good-humoredly hammed it up (Hasty
Pudding, Batman), nurturing her status as a gay man's diva. In truth, it's unlikely that Ethel appreciated or understood herself as a camp icon as such, but it's equally unlikely that she had no clue at all about her place in the hearts of
gay male fans. Today, there probably isn't a gay Merman maven anywhere who
doesn't know his way around her disco album, and other appreciators, including this author, play it at dinner parties to capture the reactions of unsuspecting guests. The Ethel Merman Disco Album remains easy to love, in all
of its full-blooded, goofy spirit. Before a CD of it was pressed in 2003, vinyl
copies were going for as much as fifty dollars on eBay and at used-record
shops, a remarkable afterlife for an LP that was not a big deal for Merman anymore than it was a big deal for her to promote it at a store like Korvettes. It
was only the press that interpreted such appearances as "beneath" the star; for
her, the appearances were fun and gave her ways to reach all her different fans.

And so in 1980, Ethel Merman was transformed anew, even as she entered
the last few years of her life. It had been exactly half a century since her debut
in Girl Crazy, and Broadway was beyond its golden days as well. On August
25, 1980, it held what was arguably its last old-time gala premiere at the Winter Garden for 42nd Street, a musical produced by David Merrick. Audience
luminaries that night included Merman, Josh Logan, Bob Fosse, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Neil Simon, Joseph Papp, Joan Fontaine, and Henry
Kissinger." But it was the end of an era, and the upcoming years would not
prove to be a boom time for the musical stage. Production costs were skyrocketing, and so were ticket prices, and although both of those trends had
been decades in the making, they'd become so excessive that most musicals
were now priced out of the range of all but upper-middle-class and wealthy
patrons or out-of-town tourists willing to splurge on recognizable, big-name
shows. Under those conditions, small innovative shows were not going to pay
off. Big-budget productions ruled the day, and unestablished works or creators were simply deemed too risky. In the 1979-8o season, for instance,
many of the musicals that "opened" were actually revivals, such as Peter Pan,
Oklahoma! and Brigadoon. By this point, Hollywood had Broadway under its
heels, at least in terms of generating wide public excitement over new shows.
And even on-screen, the musical was a genre in steep decline. Gone too was
the time when Broadway songs dominated the national scene; the trulypop-
ular music that most Americans were listening to did not come from shows
anymore, and a deep schism separated Broadway music from other popular
music. The entertainment world of 1980 could scarcely have been more
different from 1930, when Ethel opened in Girl Crazy.