Ethel Merman: A Life (4 page)

The next evening after work, Ethel showed up at Mills publishing house on West Forty-seventh Street to audition for Mayo. Knowing that he was a prominent figure in Hollywood, she was terrified. But Mayo thought that this iron-lunged girl would come off well on film and offered her a six-month contract with future options, starting at $125 a week. There was no need to go to California; filming would take place in Warners’ Brooklyn studio, which would allow her plenty of extra time to pursue bigger singing opportunities in New York. It sounded much better to Ethel than the pittance she was making at Bragg-Kliesrath. So she immediately gave notice to Caleb Bragg and got ready to make her first stab at films.

For Ethel it was the beginning of a lifetime of disappointment in the movie business. She had expected to begin filming right away, but weeks rolled by without a single assignment. The checks from Warners arrived regularly and were turned over to Pop and Mom, but Ethel’s contract stipulated that she was not allowed to work for anyone but Warners, and she grew more and more irritable over her inactivity. After a few months, the studio finally gave her two days’ work in a short film,
The Cave Club,
in which she wore a leopard skin and got chased up a tree. Then it was back to sitting around the apartment in Astoria, waiting for the phone to ring. The time weighed heavily on her, until Ethel finally called Lou Irwin and asked him to obtain a release from her Warners contract—a gutsy move, given that the country was in the throes of the Depression. Instead he cut a better deal with Warners: she would remain under contract for short films but would be permitted to do outside work in nightclubs. The first booking Irwin got her, early in 1930, was impressive, and it was even on Broadway—not in a theater but in a little club over the Winter Garden Theatre, called Les Ambassadeurs. The club’s star attraction was the trio of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante—Clayton as in soft-shoe dancer Lou Clayton, Jackson as in baritone Eddie Jackson, and Durante as in Jimmy Durante.

Only a few years earlier, Clayton, Jackson, and Durante had been packing them in at the Silver Slipper on West Forty-eighth Street. At the time it was something of a risk to run any sort of club, as Prohibition had been introduced in 1920, and the only way to serve liquor was to do it on the sly. Even so, Broadway was riddled with clubs and cafés where a drink could be had. Some of them were dives, but in the elegant surroundings of the Crillon and the Lido, among others, society swells could sip martinis and champagne and—often thanks to the protection of the mob—be reasonably confident that they wouldn’t be rounded up in a police raid.

All had gone well for Clayton, Jackson, and Durante until one night in the fall of 1928, when a waiter at the Silver Slipper unknowingly served a drink to a customer who was operating undercover as a Prohibition enforcement officer. The Silver Slipper was closed, and Clayton, Jackson, and Durante were briefly out of work. But when Les Ambassadeurs opened a few months later, the trio was hired, and their loyal audience from the Silver Slipper showed up in big numbers. Not long after they opened, Ethel was engaged for a limited run as their girl singer.

Jimmy Durante and Ethel were friends from the start. Jimmy’s father was a barber on the Lower East Side, where Jimmy was born, the youngest of four children, in 1893. His parents insisted that he study classical piano, but he saw himself as more the ragtime type, and by his teens he was playing for dances on the Lower East Side and out at Coney Island for seventy-five cents a night. Later he played in a band at Harlem’s Club Alamo. By the 1920s he had opened his own business, the Club Durant, and eventually joined forces with Clayton and Jackson to create one of the hottest acts in vaudeville. Durante was known as a soft touch who aimed to be all things to all people. Once he told George Raft, then a struggling hoofer having trouble making ends meet, “Any time you’re busted, kid, go right into the register and help yourself.” By contrast, Lou Clayton, who also acted as Durante’s manager, was a tough businessman who provided the muscle of the organization and reined in Durante’s excesses. Eventually Durante worked Clayton’s shrewdness into his act. “I’m really a lucky guy to have a manager like Lou Clayton,” he would say. “But tell me, folks, how much is three hundred percent?”

Ethel wasn’t wild about Clayton, especially when he set her weekly salary at eighty-five dollars, a sum she considered just the right side of acceptable. But it was a high-profile booking, and she made a hit with the club’s audience. Her appearances at Les Ambassadeurs marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Durante. Onstage he could make her laugh until she cried, with his victimized Everyman who didn’t get no respect, long before the world had ever heard of Rodney Dangerfield. One writer vividly described how Durante “beat the air with his arms and cried out like a hoarse Ajax,” while another observed that his hilarious malapropisms made “the pronunciation of every word of more than two syllables a suspense-filled adventure.” Yet his act always displayed a certain degree of class that is typical of all great performers; it never stooped for laughs, never degenerated into blue humor. Offstage, Durante was a perfect gentleman, and Ethel immediately warmed to his sentimental, openhearted personality. Her affection was returned. “This girl was dynamite!” Durante later recalled. “Miss Merman is the world’s greatest salesman of lyrics. That’s for sure.”

At Les Ambassadeurs, Ethel steered clear of the comedy and stuck to torch singing. Two of her numbers, “Body and Soul” and “Moanin’ Low,” had been big hits for Libby Holman, a remarkable singer whom Ethel admired. Ethel started getting one-and two-line mentions from Walter Winchell, Mark Hellinger, and some of the other top columnists, who often compared her style to Holman’s. Ethel was grateful for the mentions, but she didn’t think that she sounded like Holman, or anyone else for that matter. She wanted to sound like herself. And right from the start, she did.

Early on, Pop and Mom Zimmermann probably didn’t realize what a favor they had done their daughter by neglecting to engage a voice teacher for her. The result was that she developed naturally, a step at a time. By the time she had cemented her stardom in the late 1930s, she was such a unique presence onstage that she seemed to have come out of nowhere. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true. In the earliest years of the twentieth century, most of the big female stars sang in a “legit,” operetta-based style. But by the late 1920s, as orchestrations relied more and more on brass and saxophone, the soprano sound had begun to fade and a new kind of big-voiced singer was needed to cut through the bolder arrangements. Ethel listened to these women on the radio. She listened, made note of the things she liked and the things she didn’t, and she learned from them.

The press had already made a case for her vocal resemblance to Libby Holman, a singer with a keen sense of phrasing and clarinet-like low tones. Holman’s own role models included Ethel Waters, and she sang with a tremendous immediacy. Her numbers sounded almost conversational, as she dipped out of her sweet top register into her compelling middle range, where she used a certain amount of talk-singing. Another popular vocalist was
Show Boat
’s sad-eyed Helen Morgan, who couldn’t remotely be described as a belter but whose singing had a plaintive urgency and carried a remarkable dramatic power. There was Lillian Roth, who achieved great popularity on both stage and radio. (Roth claimed decades later that Merman had copied her style, but that was probably more a reflection of the fact that her own success had been stymied by acute alcoholism; she never possessed an instrument that could compare with Merman’s.) There was Ruth Etting, dubbed by Walter Winchell “Queen of All Torch Warblers.” Etting had a clear, attractive voice with great forward placement. Her diction was precise, yet her manner of singing was relaxed and easy. Although she performed a lot of torch songs, there was an element of humor in her voice; at times she was reminiscent of the “Boop-Boop-a-Doop” girl, Helen Kane. When Etting sang “I’m Nobody’s Baby” or her signature hit, “Ten Cents a Dance,” she sounded like a good-time girl who didn’t take herself too seriously.

If Ethel owed aspects of her singing style to any one performer, it was probably Sophie Tucker. Born into a poor Russian-Jewish family in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1886, Tucker shouted her way through a long, long career. While her full-barreled contralto was used to good effect in such torch numbers as her signature tune, “Some of These Days,” she really owed her billing as “The Last of the Red Hot Mammas”—a title she maintained a fierce grip on until her death—to her repertoire of suggestive comic songs. Tucker was never out-and-out dirty, like Belle Barth, and as comedienne Dody Goodman, who heard Tucker several times in New York, observed, “A big fat woman like that—it’s not likely that she’d be turning many people on! People would accept it from her because she was so unlikely to do it.” As a singer, Tucker was a direct descendant of the old-time “coon shouters,” whose job it was simply to go out and sell a song at the top of their lungs. Like Bessie Smith, she sometimes made use of a very fast vibrato, and she had tremendous lift at the top of her voice. Tucker didn’t go in for nuance; with her power and style, she didn’t need it, and audiences didn’t miss it.

Curiously, the singers of the period whose sound Ethel’s most resembled were men. There was a strong hint of Al Jolson in her stentorian delivery, and she sounded even more like the popular Harry Richman, whose whole point was to project, loud and clear; Richman’s recording of Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields’s “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” from the 1930 show
The International Revue
, sounds uncannily Mermanesque. (Ethel herself had had her eye on a part in
The International Revue
and showed up at the producer’s office to audition for it. McHugh and Fields had come up with another terrific song for the show, “Exactly Like You,” which she loved immediately, but the producer told her that they were looking for a Gertrude Lawrence type. In fact, Lawrence wound up playing it, but the show flopped.)

Elated to be on a regular bill with a team as famous as Clayton, Jackson, and Durante, Ethel felt that she had finally been lifted to a whole new level in show business. But her happiness didn’t last long: she had to bow out of the act when she developed a recurrence of the tonsillitis that had plagued her off and on for years. This time the situation was serious, and her doctor informed her that she would have to undergo a tonsillectomy.

Ethel was frightened, for she knew about the risk that the operation had posed for other singers. The procedure turned out to be a highly delicate one, and the surgeon later told her that her tonsils had decayed so badly that they’d crumbled away to nothing when he tried to remove them. So many stitches were required in her throat that it was uncertain whether she would be able to sing again.

After two weeks of being as quiet as possible, Ethel confounded the doctors when she opened her mouth to sing and found that her voice had returned full force. If anything, she was able to produce even more volume than she had before. The suspense of waiting to see if her voice could be salvaged had taken its toll on Ethel’s nerves, though, and Lou Irwin recommended that she leave town for a while. He had lined up a booking at a popular nightclub in Miami called the Roman Pools Casino, at $300 a week for a six-week guarantee. It was to be her first real time away from home unchaperoned, and Pop and Mom Zimmermann sent her with their blessing, provided that she wired home as much of her salary as possible, so Mom could bank it for her.

Ethel proved a popular attraction with the audiences at the Roman Pools Casino, once again trotting out her rendition of “Moanin’ Low,” which she torched while wearing a black satin dress, black fishnets, and spike heels. The engagement at the casino had advantages above and beyond the good salary, for when she wasn’t performing she often made her way to the roulette and blackjack tables. In her memoirs she admitted that she “got to know the guys who hung around there,” sitting next to them while they gambled the night away. After a couple of hours of keeping some of the casino’s high rollers company, Ethel found that they often turned over half their winnings to her—a kind of unwritten code of the time. She spent part of these “tips,” as she called them, on sprucing up her wardrobe, while the rest went home to Astoria, along with the part of her weekly salary that she had agreed to put into savings. By the end of the second week, Mom Zimmermann had called her demanding to know how she could possibly be sending home $600 when her weekly salary was half that.

At the end of the run, Ethel returned to New York, where Lou Irwin had found a pianist to work with her. Al Siegel was an arranger and a singer’s coach with a good eye for talent, and Irwin thought he might be helpful in refining her singing. He was also the former husband of popular singer Bee Palmer, whom Ethel had heard on a number of occasions. Ethel would always dismiss the impact Siegel had on her style, but for years there were many in show business who believed that he’d helped her develop some of the highly individual vocal characteristics that became her trademark. (One person who rejected that theory was Roger Edens, the gifted pianist/arranger/songwriter who became Ethel’s friend and collaborator for forty years. Edens felt that Ethel’s style had always been her own and owed nothing to Al Siegel or anyone else. In fact, he questioned whether Ethel really had any particular style at all, or simply a natural ability to project that was frequently
confused
with style.)

More likely, Siegel’s principal contribution was as a top-notch arranger. It didn’t take long for him to observe that Ethel had an uncanny sense of rhythm, and he tried to make maximum use of it in the jazzy arrangements that he began writing for her. She likewise had an astonishing ability to project the lyrics loud and clear, and there were other little quirks and characteristics that seemed unique to her. Chief among them was her ability to sustain the decibel level of a climactic phrase. Many singers with substantial voices—Ethel Waters, for example—would slowly diminish the volume as they reached the end of a key line. But the Merman style was to keep the volume consistent, and even raise it a little, delivering a wonderful final kick. Most of all, she had her phenomenal breath support. There was no mystery in how she achieved this, as she merely filled her lungs with air when she needed to breathe. Around the time Ethel started working with Siegel, she did finally consult a voice teacher, but the results were discouraging: he told her that she would not make much progress unless she learned to breathe from her diaphragm. However, Ethel found that when she concentrated on her diaphragm, she wasn’t able to sing naturally. She thanked the teacher and never returned, then went back to her usual way of breathing.