Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (84 page)

Still, Ethel ushered in the sixth decade of her career with high-voltage
energy, still doing concert tours and performing at different events across the
country. One invitation was extended by Frank Sinatra, now a die-hard Republican, who asked her if she would perform at Ronald Reagan's presidential inauguration. Merman was thrilled to be asked. Levitt recalls his dismay over how much his mother admired Reagan; she liked his traditional and
conservative values and what she perceived as his personal integrity. Levitt
adds that she was especially impressed by Reagan's long-term, stable marriage
with the former Nancy Davis."

Reagan was inaugurated on January zo, 1981, and the show featured a
pyramid-like stage at the center. That evening, Ethel mounted the stairs and
serenaded the new president, who beamed in obvious appreciation. It was
here, in singing "Everything's Coming Up Roses," that Ethel broke one of her
professional vows, uncharacteristically modifying the lyrics at one point to
"everything's coming up jelly beans," a favorite treat of the new president. The
crowd applauded wildly, none more so than Reagan himself.

Just prior to this, Bob Jr. left his home in Hawaii to spend the year in New
York City. "Privately," he says, "I came to celebrate my mother's fiftieth Broadway anniversary and to try to woo her to move back to Maui. I had my first
warm family experience there; there was family harmony." He hoped that with
neighbors on the island such as Jim Nabors and Carol Burnett, his mother
might be enticed into moving back there with him. But Ethel was not going
to leave Manhattan, and Bob realized that, although they "loved the idea-if
not the practice, of being with each other," that vision was a fantasy. Now,
when he looks back on the earlier times when he'd been the "bad boy" and
had abused either his mom's trust or her money, he says, "What I regret the
most about those stories is not the ill deeds and bad moves within them, but
more, how much opportunity and trust was lost in those moments that we ...
needed for living a more fulfilling life of Mother and Son."13 So he stayed on
the West Coast and she on the East. They enjoyed a number of visits and vacations together in New York and in Northern California, where Levitt would
be spending much of his time with a new partner. One particularly special vacation they took together was in Southern California, on Catalina Island,
where Ethel had filmed We're Not Dressing nearly fifty years earlier.

Everything's Coming Up Merman

In r98o, Airplane! the spoof of the 197o disaster film Airport, was released.
Ethel's cameo as Lieutenant Hurwitz, the traumatized soldier who's convinced he's Ethel Merman, had taken a quick two hours to shoot and earned
her fifteen hundred dollars. Cowriter-codirector Jerry Zucker recalls her as "a sweet lady" who was unusually cooperative. Ethel had made only one stipulation, he said, which was to use her own hairdresser. ("When she arrived,
she had the familiar Merman beehive-which made us wonder why she
needed a hairdresser.")14 It is a great appearance for Merman fans; it is a hysterical cameo, and it speaks volumes to her playfulness. "I enjoyed that she
could make fun of her own persona (e.g., her roles in It's a Mad Mad World
and Airplane)," one fan wrote me.15 Even people who don'tlike Merman love
the Airplane! appearance. Two men of very different backgrounds (neither of
whom was especially interested in Merman or her music) told me they have
the scene committed to memory and think it's one of the funniest moments
in an extremely funny movie.

By now, Merman was becoming an affectionate pop-culture reference
point. In Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), a film noir parody directed and
written by Carl Reiner, Ethel's colleague in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
and The Art ofLove, Steve Martin stars as a private eye who's hired on a case.
The picture intercuts clips of actual 1940 films noir into the story, giving the
illusion that gumshoe Steve Martin is getting advice from the likes of
Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, and others. At one point, after a femme
fatale slips a Mickey Finn into his drink, Martin starts to mumble about a
boat full of dangerous Germans, and as his speech blurs, "Germans" become
"Ger-mermans," then the "Ger-mermans" becomes "Ethel Mermans," and
finally he asks the beautiful woman if she wants to join him at an Ethel Merman concert.

Even though Broadway's influence may have been waning nationally, its
history and legends were still robustly celebrated in plenty of venues around
New York. One was Forbidden Broadway, the annual parody of skits, legends,
and songs, which had its beginnings in the gay piano bars of Greenwich Village that were popular in the '8os (the Duplex, Eighty-Eights, the Monster,
and later, Rose's Turn). The show caught on and eventually made it to offBroadway, a symbol of well-earned success (and of gay culture's mainstreaming). One year, Ethel caught the send-up of her famous medley with
Mary Martin and loved it. Recalls Cointreau, "She was too shy to go backstage to compliment the performers. I had to go with her before she'd go.,, 16

For the most part, Ethel was leading a relatively quiet life. She still lent a
hand to various charities, churches, and theater groups; one very publicand celebrated-event occurred on May to, 1982, when she did a second
benefit for the Museum of the City of New York. This time the venue was
Carnegie Hall. The evening, Ethel Merman at Carnegie Hall, was produced
by Anna Sosenko, the same producer of Together on Broadway. As invitations promised viewers, "We are sure this will be ... magical.... Please be with
us for this night that will make theatre history." 17

The American Symphony Orchestra accompanied Ethel that night under
the baton of her favorite conductor, Eric Knight. Ethel arrived onstage in a
dress designed by Barbara Matera-semiformal, knee-length, sequined, and
lavender, her favorite color, with shoes to match-and opened with "I'm Just
a Lady with a Song." After some talk with the audience, she sang a medley
including "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries," "It's De-Lovely," "Doin' What
Comes Natur'lly," and "I Got Rhythm." "There's No Business Like Show
Business" was her finale. Merman then shared the stage with ASCAP president Hal David, there to give her the ASCAP's prestigious Pied Piper Award
for lifetime achievement in the musical field. (The only prior recipients had
been Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and Fred Astaire.) When Ethel accepted the statue from him, she said gratefully, "You know, they say you're
only as good as your material," before giving a more Mermanesque quip, "I
can get a lamp made out of this!" Accompanist Jule Styne ended with "Everything's Coming Up Merman." The event raised sixty thousand dollars for the
museum's Theater Collection, and a proud Bob Levitt escorted his awardwinning mother to the party afterward.

The following morning Clive Barnes wrote his now-famous, open love letter. "Dear Miss Merman," it begins,

How do I start? I know I'm far too old to be writing a fan letter.... But I just
had to write and tell you how fantastic I thought your Carnegie Hall debut was
last night.... You were a strange muse for the likes of George Gershwin, Cole
Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jule Styne. You also became the embodiment of musical comedy when people knew what musical comedy was. Your voice was the
clarion call for a kind of theatre.... Not everyone liked your voice, you know.
In fact, I don't think anyone actually liked your voice. It was a voice the happy
majority-blissfully including me-love, and a mealy-eared, frost-bitten minority, hate.18

Another gratifying appearance involved a second reunion with Mary Martin. In the early 198os, Martin had taken over as host of a popular PBS talk
show called Over Easy, which was geared for older audiences.'9 It was an ideal
format for Martin's casual charm and warmth, and she attracted viewers easily. When Mary asked Ethel to appear in the spring of 1982, Ethel happily
packed her bags and flew to San Francisco to tape the show. For two days,
the two of them rehearsed "Anything You Can Do" and enjoyed themselves so much that Ethel extended her visit. In her autobiography, Martin said that
during the visit, she screwed up the courage to ask her friend if she had ever
really said, "Mary Martin's okay-if you like talent." " `Of course not,' said
Ethel. `A press agent dreamed it up.' "20

The episode of Over Easy delighted fans of both stars, and Hollywood
also took note. Would Mary Martin and Ethel Merman agree to perform together again for the Oscar Awards ceremony next spring? They accepted.
That engagement, though, wouldn't take place. In September 1982, Martin
was in a terrible car accident in San Francisco that killed her manager, Ben
Washer, and gravely injured actress Janet Gaynor, who later died of com-
plications."i Martin herself was seriously injured, and her recovery lasted
months. Ethel called and wrote affectionate notes urging her friend to a
speedy recovery.

Diminished Health

Ethel's own health was relatively good, although her eyesight was diminished.
In 1981 she'd been diagnosed with macular degeneration, the retina disorder
that usually leads to blindness. Levitt remembers being in Los Angeles when
his mother was on a break, and "when it came time for Debbie Reynolds to
rehearse her number the lights came on, the intro music began, and the set
appeared," with large images of Reynolds lowered onto the set. "Mom said,
`What's with the bunnies?' I replied, `They're not bunnies, they're big caricatures of Debbie Reynolds.' Mom, swallowing her disgruntledness [sic]
about her ever-worsening vision, said, `Oh.' And then, bouncing back,
added, `Same thing.' "22 Borrowing a big-print typewriter from the Lighthouse for the Blind, Bob typed out his mother's address book in big print so
she could read it with a magnifying glass. Entries for some people were still
listed by function-D for dates, T for her throat doctor-and she kept
scrupulous records of everything. "She even wrote out a recipe for [a] grilled
cheese sandwich," says Cointreau.23 But when she was taping TV shows,
Merman no longer could read her lines. One time, Bob remembers, when
they were out at a restaurant, her friend Lucille Ball yelled when she saw her,
"Hi, Ethel!" and Ethel was looking everywhere for the bright red hair and had
to call out, "Lucy! Where are ya?"24

Ethel was also starting to say words and phrases backward, and when she
tried to repeat them correctly, could not. At times, she wasn't able to recognize old friends, and once, in 1979 while taping a PBS special, Musical Comedy Tonight, with Sylvia Fine, she looked at the music for Porter's "Anything
Goes" and reportedly told Fine that she'd never seen the song before. Less
than an hour later, she recognized it without incident and recorded it flawlessly, but it was cause for alarm.25 Friends and colleagues knew something
was not right.

Merman's 1985 biographer, Bob Thomas, interviewed a number of her
friends and colleagues who commented on Ethel's growing erratic, sometimes hostile, behavior in her later years, another possible indication of medical problems. Ethel was questioning the motives of longtime friends and colleagues and was cutting ties or firing more and more associates. Although
Thomas writes sympathetically about Ethel's confusion and lapses of memory, he doesn't connect Ethel's increasingly strange behavior with the health
problems that would soon strike, instead painting a picture of a woman
whose vicious side had gone haywire with bitterness and age, someone who
was scattering her trusted friends and coworkers like so many rabbits with a
shotgun. Friend and colleague Russell Nype, for instance, told Thomas that
he had a falling-out with Merman was because he "got tired of trying to deal
with a twelve-year old mind";" Merman and Mitzi Gaynor were no longer
like "mother and daughter"; and Ethel had withdrawn the trust she'd had in
her friend of fifty years, Benay Venuta.

Many of these fallings-out were not accidental. "Benay wanted to be Ethel
Merman," says Tony Cointreau, with some sympathy, adding, "That was a
problem with a lot of Ethel's female friends." He maintains that Ethel was
letting go of many of her associates at the time for a reason. "She was absolutely right about most of these people," he says. "A lot of people used her.
And Ethel was not capable of letting b.s. fly. She wouldn't let it pass, like
many people do. She had the same laser-beam focus on that [issue] that she
had [when she was performing] onstage."27

In January 1983 Ethel Merman sat down with TV host Gene Shalit to shoot
an in-depth interview in which she recounted the stories of her life: Gershwin's advice against taking singing lessons, working with Porter and Berlin,
being single after four failed marriages. Tapes show her at once relaxed and
professional, filling the time with the usual stories and down-to-earth responses she'd been offering the press for decades. Producer Marie Marchesani
remembers, "The Gene Shalit interview was for a special exhibit of the
MCNY that Mary Henderson [of the museum's Theater Collection] put together, called `Show Stoppers.' The video played in a darkened room at the
museum. Ethel sat and watched it, occasionally looking down and sad at parts.
28
[But] she loved it," recalls Marchesani of watching it with her on March 15.

Three weeks later, on April 8, 1983, Ethel was preparing for a flight to Los Angeles, where she was going to tape her part of the tribute to Irving Berlin on
the upcoming Academy Awards. Mary Martin was still on the mend and
wasn't going to be sharing the stage with her, so Ethel was scheduled to go
on as a solo performer, doing "There's No Business Like Show Business." In
her Surrey apartment, she was busy packing, making calls, jotting notes to
colleagues. In a quick memo to Marchesani, Ethel wrote, "Dear Marie, The
enclosed is self-explanatory [a postcard from Robert Gardiner outlining plans
for an engagement in Richmond, Virginia]. I'll be in touch upon my
return-am leaving in about two minutes. I'll arrange for the tickets. It's the
opening of the new performing arts center." The writing is uncharacteristically shaky, especially the last two lines.29 According to Ona Hill-who did
not share especially warm feelings with the star-Ethel called her in New Jersey to report that she was feeling "dizzy" from a bad headache and was planning to call a cab to go the hospital; Ona was not to worry about whatever
she might read in the papers the next day, Merman purportedly told her.30
To friends and family, Ethel never mentioned making this call.