Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (12 page)

The Scandals of r93r ran for six months and over two hundred performances. It became legendary, not only because of its robust run, or the talents of Merman, Bolger, Vallee, and the Howards or Marshall's astonishing
blackface, but also for a small public brawl that broke out between George
White and Lew Brown in the lobby on opening night. Reports vary on what
sparked the altercation; neither was known to be a particularly calm fellow.
Brooks Atkinson wrote that it was a result of an attempt by Brown and the
other composers to get an injunction against White, who had made changes
to the show's music without their written consent. Brown and White never
worked together again.

It was with Scandals that Merman could tease George White about his earlier offer to put her in the chorus after reading Caleb Bragg's letter of introduction. These jokes were not a problem, and Ethel was as at ease interacting with the show's big-time producer as she was with its gypsies. Among the
latter was an aspiring young singer named Alice Faye, who at one point asked
Merman for a ten-dollar loan. Ethel preserved Faye's thank-you in her scrapbook.

Playbill's "Who's Who in the Cast" wrote, "Ethel Merman is considered
by George White as one of the outstanding musical comedy stars of the contemporary theatre.... Her appearance at the Palace Theatre won her new
honors and she was signed for an important role in `Girl Crazy,' her first Broadway appearance, last season. Critics and public alike hailed her as one
of the real `finds' of the decade. Mr. White plans to present her as the star of
a new musical comedy when the current `Scandals' terminates its run."42 Although White and Merman never did that next show, we do learn just how
much the star-making machinery considered her secretarial background key
in the making of Ethel Merman.

Early Film Work

Warner Bros. had been the first of Hollywood's major studios to take a gamble with sound. It was they who produced Don Juan, the first picture to use
synchronized sound in 1926, and they who caused a huge sensation the following year in TheJazz Singer, when Al Jolson said, "You ain't seen nothin'
yet!" directly, it seemed, to the audience. Other studios were sent scrambling,
and Paramount made an especially energetic push into sound, particularly
with musicals-a genre suddenly made possible by technology. Paramount
adopted stories that had been Broadway musical successes and raided its talent, luring in proven talent such as Rouben Mamoulian, Bing Crosby, and
Fred Astaire.

Despite her disappointing experience with Warners, Ethel signed on with
Paramount, and in 1930, just before Girl Crazy, she appeared in her first feature film, Follow the Leader.43 Initially, Leader had run on Broadway as Manhattan Mary, an Ed Wynn (1886-1966) vehicle in which he perfected his
comic routine as the "Perfect Fool." Gertrude Purcelle and Sid Silvers
adapted it from the stage, and the director was Paramount's Norman Taurog
(uncle of Jackie Cooper), who went on to helm a long list of short and
feature-length musicals, with stars from Ethel to Elvis Presley. Leader has
Wynn playing a former acrobat, now a bumbling waiter at a restaurant
owned by the mother of Ginger Rogers's character. There, a group of gangsters, the Hudson Dusters, force Wynn to kidnap star performer Helen King
(Merman) so that Mary Brennan (Rogers) can take her part in George White's
Scandals. (Some say that Ethel was the last-minute replacement for Ruth
Erring, the more established singer to whom the young star was now being
compared.) As Helen King, Merman gets to perform Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal's "Satan's Holiday."

Like comedy typical of the era, the humor in Follow the Leader was corny
and self-conscious, not attempting to cloak its schtick in too much naturalism; Wynn's squeaky voice alone made that impossible. Leader incorporated references to current events, situations, and individuals (e.g., Prohibition,
George White), even details of its cast members' lives. For instance, although
Ethel wouldn't appear in George White's Scandals until a year later, it was quite
plausible that she might already be its star performer. That she and Ginger
Rogers both worked together in Girl Crazy within months of Leader's release
enriches its story, especially since reports varied on just how well Rogers handled the lesser-billed Merman's success in the play. And the presence of
Rogers's fictional mother in the movie was not far from real life, since Mother
Rogers exerted very tight control over her daughter's career.

The bulk of Merman's work with Paramount, however, was in one- and
two-reelers from 1930 to 1933. These short movies would be shown before feature films or in mixed programs interspersed with live acts in a revuelike
structure of mixed spectacles. Most shorts ran for about ten minutes, just
long enough to sketch out the slimmest of stories and contain two or three
songs. The work was hardly taxing for Ethel, and she shot most of these
shorts while she worked on Girl Crazy, Scandals, and Take a Chance at the old
Paramount Studios around the corner from the family home in Astoria. Each
movie took about a day of her time, and in all, Merman appeared in Her Future, Devil Sea, Be Like Me, Ireno, Roaming, Old Man Blues, Let Me Call You
Sweetheart, Time on My Hands, You Try Somebody Else, and Song Shopping.

The most innovative ones were produced by the New York animation studio of Dave and Max Fleischer, whose films combined animation with liveaction photography, something that mainstream studios rarely explored
until decades later. The Fleischer Brothers routinely inserted popular performers like Cab Calloway and Rudy Vallee into their cartoons. Paramount was able to get the singers to appear at reduced rates by booking their
live acts into the company's film theaters shortly after the shorts were released, enhancing visibility for everyone concerned. In their Let Me Call You
Sweetheart, Time on My Hands, and You Try Somebody Else, Ethel was the featured guest star of their animated flapper heroine Betty Boop, who had also
hosted Calloway and Vallee. For the most part, Ethel was rarely required to
"interact" with animated portions. You Try Somebody Else, for instance, starts
with live-action footage of Ethel on a house porch, singing the eponymous
song, whose lyrics suggest that she and her lover should try new partners and,
when the experiment fails, they'll "be together again." Ethel isn't giving a terribly emotional performance, resembling a schoolteacher recounting a story
more than an emoting vocalist. But even though she moves little, there is a
twinkle in her eye. The song "You Try Somebody Else" is equally cut adrift
from the animated action, which follows a goofy prisoner, released and then "brought together again" in jail after Miss Boop frustrates his attempt to
burgle her home. Merman, still on her porch, closes the film, exhorting viewers to sing along as the bouncing ball jumps atop the lyrics on the bottom of
the screen. After a few verses, cartoon hieroglyphics replace words (a drawing of an eye standing in for I), lending a goofy, surreal air to the proceedings. Time on My Hands also features crazy, creative animation (fish, worms,
Betty Boop as a mermaid under water) sandwiching Ethel, who sings the title
song while seated on the hands of an oversized clock, poised and quietly
glamorous, quite unlike Harold Lloyd, whose famous dangling-from-a-clock
sequence of Safety Last! (1923) the setting evokes.

In Song Shopping (1933), Ethel was given featured billing and performs
without La Boop. This short gives a wonderful sense of what Merman's performance at the time might have been like. It opens and closes with animated
follies of music-making animals at a "song shop," where notes are made out
of swatted flies and watermelon seeds, broken records spit out of a meat
grinder, mice's curled tails become G clefs, and so forth, and we see a clever
cartoon take on the mass production of popular songs. After this introduction,
the live-action footage of Ethel begins, accompanied by Johnny Green, now
a rehearsal pianist, arranger, and conductor at Paramount. She sings Coslow
and Harling's "Sing, You Sinners" and then introduces Green's own "I'm
Yours" as one that the audience can follow along with the bouncing ball. After
this, Ethel playfully tells Green, "Here's one they'll sing, one you didn'twrite!"
and reprises "Sing, You Sinners" in a more syncopated, animated rendition directly facing the camera. Song Shopping is a rarity for showing Merman not as
a character but as singer Ethel Merman, enjoying banter with Green and lighting up the number with her lively style. Song Shopping is a rarity in another
way also, having been long unavailable for viewing.44

Paramount also distributed Ethel's other, non-Fleischer shorts. The stories
hew more or less to the same formula: a down-and-out young woman about
to be sentenced for a crime or forced to cope with a philandering husband,
an absent lover, or an overbearing father, but thanks to a last-minute change
for the better, the situation ends on an upbeat note. This narrative movement, slim as it is, allowed each short to include different types of songs to
be performed; in most, the first song was a plaintive, blues-inflected ballad
and the second is a rousing cheerer-upper, the musical corollary to the thin
story's happy ending (in Be Like Me, Ethel sings the same piece two different
ways). The tales are predictable fare for Depression-era theatergoers, who
might identify with the first Ethel, down-and-out, only to be cheered up by
the second one.

Her Future (1930) takes place in one location: at the side of a judge's
podium. A young Ethel stands with downcast eyes, awaiting a verdict for an
unnamed crime. She wears a dark dress and cap and the long, knotted pearls
of a flapper. In this short's rare moments of dialogue, the lawyer of Ethel's
character tells the judge that this is her first crime and that his client has confessed to it. The judge looks down and instructs her, "Explain to the court, in
your own way, why [you are] here." Merman responds by singing "My Future
Just Passed," a tale of broken illusions that makes numerous references to God.
The judge decides to release her, and when he asks her her plans, she launches
into "Sing, You Sinners," recounting a trip to Dixie, where the "darkies" know
how to harmonize. "Bless mah song," she sings. "If you wanna be saved, you
gotta behave." Merman, who has respectfully removed her hat for the performance, maintains a persistent animated smile, raises her arms overhead and
to the side, turning her hands inward at the wrists in an evangelical delivery
she will perfect four years later with Cole Porter's "Blow, Gabriel, Blow."

The next short, Devil Sea (1931), starts off on an equally grim note: an
older man reports to Ethel's character that her man has been lost in a sea
storm. She responds by performing Vernon Duke's bluesy "Devil Sea." In
midsong she addresses the sea directly in the spoken song popular at the time
(think Al Jolson): "What's another tear to you/ It's just another drop of
water." Merman moves her hands slightly here, as if to mimic the undulating waves of the sea. And then, the same man returns with the good news that
her lover is alive, and Merman bursts into the jazzy, upbeat "I've Got My
Man" with much more animated hand movement, entering into a call-andresponse with undepicted horns.

Director Casey Robinson (1903-79) had made two-reelers with Helen
Kane before he directed Merman in Roaming (1931), a film for which young
Johnny Green supplied two songs. Ethel plays Mary Rock, daughter of Colonel Rock, whose traveling medicine show she shills. It opens with Mary
guiding a horse-drawn wagon through a wooded area singing "Hello, My
Lover, Goodbye," in which she laments her inability to find love because of
her life on the road. Her second number is an exuberant "Shake Well Before
Using," in which Mary invites a grumpy audience to buy the family product,
so that they can smile as she does.

When a local man flirts with Mary, he is ordered away by her father, who
chides her for her romantic yearnings: "Remember, you're a show girl, and to
these yokels that means you're an indecent girl." The prediction proves true
when the same man pounces on Mary after the show. Yet as the Rocks leave
town the next day and he stows away on their wagon, Ethel/Mary forgives him just as abruptly as Merman discovered that her partner was still living in Devil Sea. Sophisticated, these things are not; delightful, they are.

Old Man Blues (1932) is the least Mermanesque of the shorts. This is the
one that evokes operetta, with all dialogue sung and Merman nearly trilling
several lines. Once again the action occurs on a single set, a fog-shrouded
woods with an eerily ethereal quality. (Max E. Hayes did set design.) Beginning with a close-up of "Helen and Paul" carved into a tree and then revealing to us that the tree no longer stands, this is Ethel's only one-reeler that
shows the passage of time and, in that regard, offers a bit more complexity
than the others. A tall enigmatic man in a long dark robe and hat (Hal Forde)
appears beside Helen, Ethel's character, and the two duet in "Old Man
Blues," in which this villainous figure tells her that now that her man is gone,
he will always be there to laugh at her distress. She has "sent for him," he informs her, by sending her man away. No, she sings, he "wasn't sent off, he
just went off-why, I'll never know."

Ethel's delivery here is about as close as she came to light opera, and a
number of singers, vocal coaches, and other professionals maintain that Ethel
could have had a career in that world. "Judging from the recordings she made
in the thirties," says Gary Wedow, chorus master of the New York City
Opera, "Merman would probably have made a good opera singer."45 Operetta's appearance in this film is curious, for, by the late 19zos and early'3os,
it seemed one of the few forms of American popular music that was a holdout of "pure" white European culture. Although its popularity was on the
wane, it hadn't vanished entirely, especially in Hollywood, thanks in large
part to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Its overlap with Merman is
restricted to this brief film.