Merv (3 page)

The exhilaration of performing in front of an orchestra is something that, even today, I have trouble describing in words. This much I can tell you—after doing it for more than fifty years, I still feel it. The moment those violins come in I get a physical sensation of…I suppose the only word for it is
joy
. That wonderful feeling passes right through my body, the way Judy Garland’s voice passed through me whenever I saw her perform.

It was also during this time—for better or worse—that I began my lifelong association with coconuts.

In those days, the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel was the hottest nightspot in Hollywood. And when we were in town, the Freddy Martin Orchestra
was
the Cocoanut Grove. I sat in front of the band every night—occasionally I’d shake the maracas—watching with amazement as every movie actor I’d ever seen on the screen came through those doors. Say a name and they’d appear, as though conjured up by some musical magic—Elizabeth Taylor, Bing Crosby, Lana Turner, Doris Day—it was a nightly parade of stars.

Of all the celebrities who came into the Cocoanut Grove, perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most unusual, was Howard Hughes. When we played there he was in the audience every night, and I really do mean
every
night, of what were sometimes three-month-long engagements. He always had a fabulous girl with him, although it was rarely the same girl twice. And although his date was dressed to the nines, Hughes always wore beat-up old sneakers and a tattered sport coat. A creature of habit, he would first order a dish of vanilla ice cream and then he would invariably request the same song, a rhumba that I sang in Greek called “Miserlou.” (Down the road it would become clear that these habits were the first inklings of Hughes’s obsessive-compulsive personality, but back then he only seemed like a harmless eccentric.)

For someone so famous and powerful, Howard Hughes was almost painfully shy. Maybe it was because I was so young, but for some reason he felt comfortable with me. I can’t say that we ever became friends, yet night after night he’d see me out front and he’d stop to request his song. I liked him.

Years later, Noah Dietrich, who was Hughes’s assistant for twenty years, wrote an extensive biography of his former boss. When he appeared on my talk show, I hadn’t yet read the book.

With great seriousness, as if he was telling me something of extreme importance, Dietrich said, “Merv, do you realize that you were Howard Hughes’s favorite singer?”

After Dietrich made this shattering pronouncement, he clearly expected me to be impressed. I wasn’t.

Puzzled, he asked, “You’re not thrilled?”

“Well, not really,” I replied, knowing that would inevitably lead to the next question: “Why not?”

“Noah, the man was
deaf
. Maybe he liked me because he couldn’t hear me.”

In 1950, I recorded a novelty tune called “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.” I sang the whole silly song in a cockney accent and, don’t ask me why, but it shot to number one on the Hit Parade. All of a sudden I had real
fans
, not just people who enjoyed my singing. The song was so popular that when we got to Los Angeles, rather than doing our usual stand at the Cocoanut Grove, we were booked into the Palladium, a ballroom with a capacity of 10,000. I will never know what Elvis or the Beatles went through, but those Palladium shows gave me a taste of it. Thousands of screaming girls chanting “We Want ‘Coconuts’!” is an image that you never forget. Backstage, I even met the president of my newly created Hollywood High School fan club, a skinny girl with a big voice and a marvelous laugh whose name was…let me see if I can remember it…wait a minute…oh yes, her name was Carol. Carol
Burnett
. Go figure.

Without even knowing that I was doing it, I had transformed the Freddy Martin Orchestra from a dance band into a show band. The success of “Coconuts” prompted Freddy to commission pieces that were written especially for me, like “Back on the Bus,” the story of a band on the road. Unlike “Coconuts” (which, when I hear it now, makes me cringe), “Back on the Bus” was an
intentionally
funny song with very witty lyrics. The audience waited for it every night.

It was certainly an appropriate song for me, because for most of the four years I was with Freddy Martin, I basically lived on a bus. My seat was always directly behind the driver, which allowed me to carefully observe the ingrown hairs on the back of his neck. (In case you’re curious, they were in the shape of a checkerboard square.) There was one stretch where we did seventy-four one-nighters in seventy-four days as we traveled east across the United States. I may not have seen the country before, but I was certainly seeing it now. And I loved it.

Well, most of the time. There was a tradition among traveling musicians that I wasn’t made aware of until the band was safely out on the road and I was a long way from home. Bluntly speaking, the boy singer was used as bait. Here’s how it worked. I’d be sitting downstage near the audience, with the band behind me, when all of a sudden I’d hear a trumpet player say, “Hey, Merv, get me
that
one. The one in the white blouse.”

We were doing a one-night stand in the coal mining town of Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, a couple of days outside New York. I was onstage singing as dozens of young couples twirled across the dance floor below. Suddenly, there was an urgent whisper in my ear, “Red dress.” It was the voice of the saxophone player, one of the lead wolves in our traveling pack.

Dutiful lamb that I was, I spotted Miss Red Dress and started smiling at her, as if she were the only girl in the room. The problem was that she was dancing with her boyfriend at the time. Whenever he’d swing her around so that he was facing the stage, I looked away. As soon as his back turned toward me again, I continued putting the look on his date. This went on for a good ten minutes and she was clearly getting my message. And so was her boyfriend’s best buddy, a big hulking fellow who looked like he could dig coal with his bare hands. I watched the whole thing play out right in front of me, like a horror movie in slow motion. Big Lenny comes lumbering right out on the dance floor and starts talking to his friend and pointing up at me. The band is playing and I’m singing, trying to pretend that I’m not seeing any of this. Then the boyfriend starts yelling at his girl, and she’s shaking her head back and forth, as if to say, “Don’t blame
me
. I didn’t do anything. He was the one looking at me.” At this point they had both stopped dancing. Other people were starting to look up at me and point.

I don’t think that I’ve ever sung so fast in my life. After what seemed like an eternity, the music finally stopped. Unfortunately this also meant that I could now
hear
what was being said to me. Some of it was pretty ugly—and quite specific: “Come down here, pretty boy. Let’s see how cute you look with that microphone shoved up your…”

Obviously I survived, but the only reason I didn’t need medical attention was that the entire band (including the now sheepish saxophone player) surrounded me as we walked out of the ballroom. The coal miners may have been tougher, but they were unarmed. All the musicians held their instruments over their heads like weapons, fully prepared to whack anybody who came near us.

Finally, we arrived in New York where we played the Strand Theater on Broadway (now the Warner Theater) and I realized one of my dreams by singing at the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf-Astoria. Even as I continued to work with Freddy, I also began to have a bit of success on my own. My girlfriend at the time was a beautiful young redhead named Judy Balaban (her father, Barney, was president of Paramount Pictures). Life seemed endlessly interesting and exciting to me then, as it does when you’re young. (Actually, life still seems that interesting to me now. You know the old expression, “you’re only as old as you feel”? That’s not quite true. Sometimes I feel older than dirt. What
is
true is that you’re only as old as you think. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that I’m the oldest kid they know.)

One of my first solo gigs in New York was as a guest singer on what was then the top-rated radio program in the country,
The Big Show
on NBC.
The Big Show
was hosted by a woman whose picture can be found in the thesaurus next to the phrase “larger than life”—the outrageous, caustic, bawdy (“but never
boring, dahling”
) Miss Tallulah Bankhead.

Before I go on, you need to be familiar with the backstory here. At the same time that I was booked to appear on her radio program, Tallulah Bankhead was also involved in one of the biggest celebrity-scandal trials of the era. Her maid had been charged with stealing from her and, very reluctantly, Tallulah was forced to testify in the case, thus opening the door to testimony about the lurid details of her personal life.

Compared to, say, the O.J. trial, this was a celebrity case with quite a lot of funny moments. In fact, Tallulah was warned repeatedly not to laugh during the testimony of the other witnesses because her throaty guffaw would break up the entire courtroom, including the judge. But she couldn’t control herself. “Oh your honor,
dahling,”
she’d say to the judge, “really, I am sorry.” She was eventually banished from the courtroom except for when she had to give her own testimony. (By the way, do you know how I knew that O.J. was bad news long before the rest of the world found out? Simple. Sophia Loren once told a story on my show about how Simpson hadn’t paid up when he lost to her in poker. In other words, “the rules don’t apply to me.”)

Okay, back to
The Big Show
. At the afternoon rehearsal, everybody gathered around a large table to go over that evening’s script. Let me tell you who else was there that day: Ethel Merman, Phil Silvers, and Loretta Young. And fresh from her matinee performance in New York Superior Court, our host, Miss Bankhead.

Now, everyone in that room knew that in court Tallulah had been accused of being a flagrant pot smoker. Anyone else would have been on her best behavior, knowing that the slightest impropriety would surely make its way into print. But not Tallulah. Draped in a full-length mink coat, she sauntered leisurely into the room (late, as usual, which guaranteed her an audience) and stopped in front of the NBC orchestra. She looked at Meredith Willson and the hundred musicians seated behind him, paused for effect, then in that gruff Southern voice that earned her the nickname “the Alabama Foghorn,” she asked, “Has anybody got a reefer?”

After the waves of laughter finally subsided, Ethel Merman resumed telling a story to Phil Silvers that had been interrupted by Tallulah’s grand entrance.

“So, Phil, I was just saying that I bumped into that singing teacher we used to have.” She mentioned his name and Phil Silvers said, “Oh
him
. I thought he was dead. He’s a son of a bitch.”

Loretta Young, who was very religious and quite proper, said, “That will be one dollar for the swear box.” Phil Silvers dug into his pocket, pulled out a dollar, and put it in a cardboard shoebox that was sitting in the middle of the table.

“Well, honey,” continued Ethel, “you remember that little rat who was our first manager? I thought he was dead too, but I saw that lousy bastard in Sardi’s just last week.”

Like a missionary among heathens, Loretta was undaunted. “Ethel,” she said, primly, “that will be another dollar for the swear box.”

And so it went, back and forth like a tennis match for about ten minutes, until the shoebox was stuffed with cash. Tallulah had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout these exchanges until, finally, she could stand it no longer.

“Loretta,
dahling,”
she drawled, “how much will it cost me to tell you to go
fuck
yourself?”

Loretta slumped down in her chair as if she’d been struck. And that was the end of the rehearsal.

Along with my solo gigs in New York, I still had a steady job with Freddy Martin. In fact, we even landed our own weekly television show on NBC. In early television, every show had a single sponsor. Ours was Hazel Bishop lipstick, which was a very famous brand in the fifties—“Won’t smear off. Won’t rub off. Won’t kiss off.”

“
The Hazel Bishop Show
featuring the Freddy Martin Orchestra” originated live every Wednesday night at ten o’clock from the Center Theater in New York. (Now remember this detail; you’ll be tested on it later. The Center Theater had a giant movie screen above the stage so that the studio audience could see everything in close-up, just like the audience at home.)

There actually
was
a Hazel Bishop. She was the laboratory technician who had discovered a revolutionary no-smear formula for lipstick. Unfortunately for her, there were also a few problems with her product that hadn’t quite been worked out yet. One particularly annoying side effect was that after putting on the lipstick, a girl’s lips swelled up as if she had been kissed by a bee. The band got free samples without realizing any of this and we gave them out to all our wives, girlfriends, mothers, and sisters. It wasn’t pretty. Of course we couldn’t say anything negative about the lipstick without offending our sponsor.

Every week those of us who were soloists were required to do a commercial with the spokeswoman for Hazel Bishop (not Hazel herself). Inevitably, my turn came to do the commercial.