Broadway Babylon (42 page)

D
OLLY
!
OF COURSE RESURRECTED
and expanded Carol Channing’s stardom and gave her a signature role she could and would return to again and again—
ye-es!
Unfortunately, she wasn’t lucky or versatile enough to follow it up with another hit, unlike Angela Lansbury after Jerry Herman’s subsequent megahit
Mame
. Following assorted showbiz efforts, Channing in later years did a sequel of sorts to
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, titled
Lorelei
, besides touring extensively as Dolly.

Once Channing made a hit as Dolly, everyone wanted to play her, it was so clearly a star vehicle and so easily adjusted to the personality of its diva-of-the-month’s run. Ginger Rogers was flashy and arrogant. Martha Raye was droll but not enough in character. Betty Grable was charming and eager to please—some said too sweet to play the conniving widow. Pearl Bailey got away with stereotyping the first black Dolly. Phyllis Diller tried to shake her standup-comedy image by playing it relatively straight.

Ethel Merman was Ethel Merman, and that was enough. She agreed to return for three months only, to close the run. It turned out to be her Broadway swansong.

“Dolly is a star herself,” David Merrick had proclaimed, “and she needs a star to play a star.” He foresaw an endless procession of Dollys after the formula proved viable.

Expectations were high when Ginger Rogers took over the role, but her swanking and attitude soon turned many in the company off, and she began missing several performances, in contrast to the very professional Channing. At that time, Actors’ Equity required posting a notice in the lobby or making a pre-performance announcement if a performer was not going on. Merrick opted for the latter, with the announcer welcoming the audience and stating that the role of Mrs. Levi—the word “Dolly” was not used—would tonight be performed by Bibi Osterwald. Just as Bibi’s last name was starting to be said, the conductor gave the downbeat and the box-office window slammed shut.

This became known as The Ginger Rogers Cue. Although patrons who’d come to see Rogers were at first disappointed, Osterwald’s performance was said by many aficionados to be the best of all stage Dollys. (She eventually got to star regularly in the show.) Alas, via a non-collision of talent and timing, the singer-actress never became a star. It was Osterwald who complained to Equity about Merrick’s ruse, and henceforth a performer’s absence had to be made clear both from the stage and in the lobby.

“When Ginger left,” recalled a backstage insider, “she was relieved. By then, it was too much for her. And we, the crew and cast, were also relieved.… She made some of us homesick for Carol!”

Another ex-movie star, and a much more comedic one, was brought in: Martha Raye, aka The Big Mouth. “Perfect show for me,” she cracked. “Set in the 1890s—when I was an ingénue.”

Raye’s jollity was mostly for show, as Melodye—her only child (who so far hasn’t written a book)—could attest. Martha was the only Dolly with whom the affable, almost fatuous Jerry Herman did not get along. When she took over Dolly, he was in hospital with hepatitis. He’d routinely worked on the score with each new actress, rehearsing and changing keys, etc. Herman described himself as “sick as a dog;” he was unable to meet with Raye but sent a “gorgeous telegram” proffering an apology. On her opening, he sent “a magnificent bouquet of flowers” to her dressing room.

Neither the telegram nor flowers were acknowledged, and during her run Raye made no attempt to contact Herman, who when let out of hospital recuperated at his summer home on Fire Island. Still weak and confined to a wheelchair, Jerry was taken to lunch at a local restaurant where sat Martha Raye with three gay friends or associates (her final husband was openly gay and decades her junior).

In his wheelchair, Herman rolled over to Raye’s table to introduce himself. She gave him an icy stare, then pouted, “You’ve never been to see me.” He explained, “I just got out of the hospital,” where he had been for months. He wondered if Raye had received his wire and flowers, and asked, “Didn’t you know that I was very, very ill?”

She snapped, “Well, I thought you could have spared
one
evening.”

The amazed and deflated composer wrote, “After that, I
never
went to the St. James Theatre to see her.”

P
EARL
B
AILEY DELIBERATELY TRIED TO SLOW
Dolly’s pace. “She lazily led an all-black cast,” observed theater buff Ethan Mordden. She also had attitude to spare. “There’s a line in the show,” her leading man Cab Calloway later noted, “ ‘a damned exasperating woman.’ That is Pearl all over, except I might use a stronger word than ‘damned.’ ” A professional singer, Bailey took fewer liberties with the songs than, say, the offhand Rogers or the idiosyncratic Channing. But one of Pearl’s idiosyncracies was claiming that God was onstage with her during a given performance.

“She carried on as if she was preaching or giving you a revelation,” said Calloway assistant Cyril Jackson. “She’d go on at length, never coming to the point, except how she and God were close personal friends and She, He, or It was apparently an avid theatergoer who’d blessed Pearl’s interpretation [of Dolly].”

More effective than anticipated was Phyllis Diller. Herman had worried, once producer Merrick made the decision to cast most any female box-office
name between forty and death, that the comedienne in the fright wig might make a “wild, crazed” caricature of Dolly. “She could have made funny faces or slipped in a few of her raunchy stories.” Rather, she enacted Dolly simply and honestly, if unspectacularly.

Dolly had long since proven less a role than a performance, less a character than a force of nature. It’s almost impossible to believe she was ever a retiring, reclusive widow, at least since
The Matchmaker
was musicalized. Possibly the most convincing Dolly of all was Tony- and Oscar-winning actress Shirley Booth in the 1958
Matchmaker
film (costarring Shirley MacLaine and Anthony Perkins, who briefly donned drag, which he declined to do again in
Some Like It Hot
, thereby handing Jack Lemmon one of that actor’s biggest hits). Booth had the maturity, charm, push, and demureness to be credible as a personable (but non-diva) widow returning to life and romance. However, since the advent of
Hello, Dolly!
Wilder’s nonmusical play has remained dormant, unrevived due to comparison with its tuneful, exclamation-marked twin. Ironically, though, musical ability is not an absolute requirement for an actress-diva playing Dolly!

When Barbra Streisand nabbed the movie version that she’d gone after, she gave an over-the-top performance at times reminiscent of the ageless Mae West (who paranoiacally threatened to sue) that was widely criticized but now seems apt and inventive. How can you overdo Dolly? Besides, what a change to hear the beautiful music beautifully sung.

Another irony: although Carol Channing had beaten Streisand for the 1964 Best Actress (Musical) Tony, it was Barbra who got the rare chance to reprise her Broadway triumph on the screen, earning a Best Actress Academy Award (split with Katharine Hepburn) for
Funny Girl. Hello, Dolly!
’s record of ten Tony Award wins held until
The Producers
overtook it in 2001, winning 12 Tonys.

Other Dollys in varied venues and productions from London to Vietnam included Mary Martin, who proved typically uncomfortable with the character’s aggressive, self-starting qualities, and Eve Arden (
Our Miss Brooks, Grease
), who seemed a bit schoolmarmish and detached in the part. Additional Dollys were former B-movie stars Dorothy Lamour and Yvonne De Carlo, and Joanne Worley from TV’s
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
.

Assorted songs got dropped along the way. For the movie version, Streisand requested a new opening song, a “list song” with complicated, showy lyrics (“Just Leave Everything to Me”), to establish her hyperkinetic character. Babs also wanted a love song of sorts (“Love Is Only Love”) to sing in a romantically lit solo scene that featured her in sexy deshabille and firm young cleavage, which belied the widow’s claim that she’d been in seclusion lo these many years since the death of Ephraim Levi. But what Streisand wanted,
Streisand got—directed by Gene Kelly, who added yet more dancing to the lengthy musical film. David Merrick, who had a financial interest in the movie, reportedly agreed to pay big bucks at the last minute if Jerry Herman could quickly compose what became “Love Is Only Love.”

After Herman presented the song, everyone was happy. It was beautiful and it didn’t even sound rushed. Unbeknownst to Merrick and company, Herman had composed it but never used it for a prior musical. By the time of the 1969 Streisand movie Angela Lansbury was a close friend of Jerry’s via
Mame
, and was familiar with the song. She happened to sit next to David Merrick on a cross-country flight when he shared the “new” song and she innocently admitted having heard it some time before, much to Merrick’s fury.

I
N 1970, SEVEN YEARS
into
Hello, Dolly!
’s run, Ethel Merman took over the part that had been created with her in mind. Her three-month engagement stretched to nine, but she was delighted, even relieved, to be back where she belonged—starring on Broadway. When she’d declined Dolly, she’d apprised Merrick, “I have spent my entire life in a dressing room, and I have had it with that life.” She wanted freedom, for example, “to be able to go to dinner parties at eight o’clock at night, like everybody else does, instead of always eating in the middle of the night.” Eventually the inactivity had palled.

The two songs Herman had specifically tailored to Merman were finally publicly performed: “Love, Look in My Window” and “World, Take Me Back.” According to Jerry, Merman played Dolly as “tough and funny, but lovable underneath.” Her leading man, Jack Goode, felt, “Miss Merman is the perfect Dolly—a career girl who comes out of retirement and shakes up everybody around her.… She’s the most exciting thing to ever happen to this wonderful show.” Some less-partial observers believed that Merman, like Channing, more than made the role her own, trampling it with the force of her unrestrained persona. Either way, audiences came, eager to see and hear. Carol Channing later wrote of “Ethel’s greatness in my part.”

Merman revealed that the other reason she’d originally rejected Dolly was that she’d always created the roles she played and feared that if she did
Hello, Dolly!
she’d be viewed as following in Ruth Gordon’s
Matchmaker
footsteps. Ethel was well known for her competitiveness with other females. The night of Merman’s final performance, Carol Channing and accompanying photographers showed up at the theater for pictures of the first and last Dollys, together, as the record-breaking show came to a close.

“I knew you’d make certain to be here tonight, Carol,” glared Ethel before refusing to pose with her and shutting the door on her. (Carol later crowed that the
New York Times
instead ran a photo of her alone, the original Dolly.)

Even though Ethel had said no to Dolly, she resented Carol’s success in the part. Channing recalled that once she became Dolly, whenever she’d encounter Merman socially, “I would say, ‘Hello, Ethel.’ And she would look right and left of me, wondering where my voice came from.”

Of course, Carol had the last Dolly laugh, outliving Merman and repeating the role on and on. But at a price. Whereas the ghost of Ethel Merman has lingered over every
Gypsy
revival including that of 2003 with Bernadette Peters, Channing lingered in
Hello, Dolly!
—the only musical most people can associate with her. The inevitable comparisons with newer Roses invariably favor Merman, while each new Channing
Hello, Dolly!
has diminished in everything—including supporting casts (the original featured Eileen Brennan and Charles Nelson Reilly)—everything but chutzpah. Theatre historian Ethan Mordden has termed it “build[ing] an evening around the glamour of guts.” It became less about viewing a scintillating star in a dazzling musical than going to see—so you could say you had—Carol Channing in her signature role. Or
Hello, Dolly!
with its signature star.

Mordden, to name one, considered the re-stagings “good show biz, but bad musical comedy.” He decried the lack of a curtain fall after the show’s end. Rather, the musical reprises, the cast’s strutting and posing, and the calculated buildup to Carol’s/Dolly’s appearance in Her Song insures that the “audience rises in salute as if they, too, have been directed by Gower Champion.”

It remains to be seen if
Hello, Dolly!
will survive time and Carol Channing, whose final Broadway run in the part (see accompanying sidebar) didn’t last as long as expected.
Gypsy
survived Merman partly due to substance, partly because it challenges actresses and often elevates them to new thespic heights.
Dolly!
doesn’t so much challenge as accommodate, and though it’s a nostalgic, gaudy musical that serves as a holiday for the senses in an increasingly colorless and cookie-cutter time, much of its substance turns out to be image and public relations. As with the story behind Carol Channing’s plate, recounted by veteran columnist James Bacon:

“Do you know about Carol Channing’s famous silver plate? She once asked me if I had seen her ‘plate,’ and I stared at her teeth, then said no. She said, ‘My silver plate, diddums, from David Merrick.’ So she dragged out this famous plate that everyone had seen but me, and it was impressive, and engraved—‘Congratulations, Carol, on the $8 million gross for
Hello, Dolly!
David Merrick.’

“Years later, I’m talking with the producer himself, and I mention his gift to Carol, and he snorted, ‘Gift, my eye! I sent her the message, but it was Charles Lowe—her P.R. man and husband—who got the silver plate and had my message engraved onto it.’ Whatever that plate cost Lowe, he’s gotten over a million dollars in publicity out of it. Maybe $8 million.”