Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (22 page)

Stella's solo singing career starts to dive. But a happy ending is forthcoming, in Carnegie Hall, where Alexander's band has been scheduled. Aleck's
snobby former music teacher is in attendance, lending his prestige and approval to the new swing-jazz sensation. Stella rides aimlessly in a cab (driven
by John Carradine in a terrific cameo), listening to the radio broadcast of the
performance. Unbeknownst to her, the cab driver recognizes her and coaxes
her into the hall, where she reunites with Aleck and the band.

Zanuck was intensely involved in developing Alexander's script, as was his
wont, making literally hundreds of specific suggestions to Kathryn Scola,
Lamar Trotti, and Richard Sherman to make the story more economical, to
create a "boffo" impact, and to clarify character motivations. What he
wanted was "a really great human interest story."15 Aleck, he said, was stuckup and boring. Of the first revised draft, he wrote, "I take an instant dislike
to Alex, and I love Charly [sic]-it's ok to love Charly, but to dislike Alex
is dangerous-he seems dull-self-centered." The musical numbers gave
Zanuck nothing to worry about, and his enthusiasm for the project was solid
from the start: "I think this picture has an opportunity of being the best picture of 1937."i6

Irving Berlin was very involved from the beginning and in fact drafted the
movie's initial story line with Richard Sherman. Zanuck wanted a biopic
about Berlin, an angle that did not interest the songwriter: "I was so concerned about not having this story resemble my life in any way that I purposely made the character of Don Ameche (Charlie) a songwriter." Berlin's
demurral was partly out of modesty, but he was also eager for his songs to
stand on their own merits, for "the old songs [to] come through as popular
songs that the band was playing rather than having them written for any
character in the story."17

And that was how the film was received. Wrote the Hollywood Reporter,
"While box offices may recently have been reflecting audience disfavor for
musicals, this picture, with at least 25 numbers, is by no means a musical in
the accepted film sense. Rather is it [sic] the aggrandizement of the evolution
ofAmerican popular music and a monument to Irving Berlin, who made that
music so distinctive that his songs alone are a record of three colorful decades
ofAmerican life. So perfectly are this film story and the music interwoven that
it seems that, in its construction, the songs themselves wrote the script."18

Despite her earlier complaints about working for the movie business, Merman was delighted to be invited back. She and Agnes had rented a house; Fox
put Ethel on a diet and lightened her "naturally dark hair ... to a more flattering auburn," a color she retained for much of her life.19 Principal photography began on January 3r, 1937, and three months later, the last retakes were
finished. During production, Tyrone Power gave Ethel pointers on how to
deal with watching the daily rushes, which she hated: "You have to think of
the person on the screen in the third person," he told her. The shy side of
Merman was at work. After filming wrapped, Ethel stayed in Los Angeles to
record the picture's songs for about three weeks, finishing on May 13.

Alexander's Ragtime Band marked the first time Ethel worked with Irving
Berlin. "I'd only seen her in the Follies," he told George Eells later. The movie
reunited her with Jack Haley from Take a Chance, Ameche from Happy Landing, and Alice Faye, who'd borrowed ten dollars from her as a chorus girl in
George White's Scandals. That loan was now ironic, a harbinger of Ethel's career in pictures. The studio producers had deemed Faye, the blond ingenueand the lesser singer-as stronger box office; Ethel later called her Fox's "little
girl on the lot ... their bread and butter at the time."20

Ethel's Jerry Allen combines two different characters from earlier script
drafts. Ruby was a tough-as-nails singer capable of defending herself physically, and Evelyn was a wealthy English widow who became Aleck's paramour
and benefactress. Evelyn steps aside romantically, as Jerry does in the final
film, when she realizes Aleck is still in love with Stella. Ruby and Evelyn are
highly incongruous characters, but neither one of them is eligible for the
romantic prize. And so Ethel portrayed Jerry, the two of them combined, in
another of Hollywood's not-get-the-guy roles for her.

The androgynously named Jerry is a real pal, one who gets Aleck to "snap
out of his daze" after the war. She tells him, disingenuously, that she's not the
marrying kind when she sees that his heart is elsewhere. Of course, Ameche's character does the same thing with Stella, but at least he had been allowed a
romantic and even marital relationship, whereas Ethel's character is kept to
the sexual sidelines. Rather than be the subject of "A Pretty Girl Is Like a
Melody," for instance, Jerry sings it. She performs in men's tails and top hat
in "My Walking Stick," a delightful number in which she prances on top of
sixteen top hats (silk-covered iron molds) lined up between chorus line members. (If it sounds familiar, it should. Berlin had originally written the piece
for the Fred Astaire movie Carefree, but Astaire said it too closely resembled
his earlier "Top Hat" number and had it removed. Merman is now doing
Astaire, tails and all!) Ethel recorded two other numbers that were deleted
from the final print, "Marching along with Time" and "Slumming on Park
Avenue. "2' And in the film it is "cuddly" Alice Faye who sings the eponymous
"Alexander's Ragtime Band."22

As part of the band's Parisian performance, Ethel/Jerry sings "Pack Up
Your Sins (and Go to the Devil)." The four-year-old Breen office was not
amused. Swing, like ragtime and the blues before it, had often been called
"devil's music," and so the radar was up. (In 1937, the Daughters of the American Revolution were so outraged at bandleader Vincent Lopez for arranging
patriotic American songs to swing that they issued an appeal to President
Roosevelt for his censure.) A protracted dialogue between the studio and the
censorship office ensued: Breen wrote to Fox's Col. Jason Joy, "The lyric to
`Pack up your sins and go to the devil' may possibly be offensive to religiously
inclined people. It contains one Code violation, the phrase `No one gives a
damn.' Also the line `H-E double-L is a wonderful spot' may be deleted by
censor boards."23 Lyrics were modified, but concerns remained:

We have received and read the additional lyric for the song `Pack up your
sins.' ... As we wrote you on Feb i8th, it seems to us that the general flavor of
this song is unfortunate, and will give offense to religious-minded people, and
others. We recommended at that time that you avoid using it in this picture.
We again repeat this recommendation, inasmuch as it seems to burlesque one
of the fundamental tenets of the Christian religion. This song would therefore
seem to be not only questionable from the standpoint of general audience sensibilities, but also a violation of that clause of the Code covering the treatment
of religion in pictures.24

The lyrics were tinkered with some more, and Breen signed off on it, reluctantly, but not before Fox producers assured that Ethel Merman wasn't going
to do anything devilish in performance. (This was a singer who had recorded a bluesy ballad, "Satan's Li'l Lamb," in 1932.) The final product was, at best,
a missed opportunity and, at worst, pathetic. Ethel/Jerry stands on a small
platform surrounded by rising "smoke," made by forcing the steamlike
vapor of dry ice from the large troughs containing it. She has a sequin leotard on over dark stockings, all cloaked under a large dark cape-the kind a
devil might wear-along with some asbestos she and the chorines wore for
protection against the dangerous vapor. In nearly four minutes, Ethel moves
only once, at the very end, when she raises her arms straight overhead. That's
it. What should have been a vibrant, bouncy production number isn't. But
she is very fetching in her horns.

Of note is Ethel's rendition of "Heat Wave," first written for the 1933
show As Thousands Cheer, in which it was made famous by Ethel Waters.
Based on a record-breaking heat wave New York had experienced, the song
takes the perspective of an animated weather forecaster who blames the heat
on "southern winds" and on a woman whose "seat waved." (The chorus
agrees, "She certainly can can-can.") In the initial rendition, Berlin's lyrics
gave the heat wave a Latin source, and the music (especially its rhythms)
shows a Latin calypso influence. "Heat Wave" was further racialized by its
own history. As Thousands Cheer broke a bit of a race barrier by giving Ethel
Waters star billing along with whites Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb, who
sometimes refused to appear with her at events. (In addition to "Heat
Wave," Waters sang "Suppertime," the showstopping number about a lynch
victim.)

Like most of its other numbers, Alexander's Ragtime Band adapts "Heat
Wave" to a swing style, though without its normally strong rhythmic patterns. But it's the song's racialization that really changes. First, it is performed
in the bastion of upper-crust European-American culture, Carnegie Hall.
Singing it, Ethel is clad all in white and eschews the "animated" style of Waters's meteorologist (and Merman's own usual performance style, for that
matter). Moreover, the all-white male and female chorus members are wearing strangely anachronistic costumes that conjure up the antebellum South.
What this has in common with a New York heat wave is left for the viewer
to imagine; production notes do not explain the decision.

Lyrics were cleaned up, with the cause of the blistering temps traced back
to a woman waving her feet, not her seat. Reasonably, Ethel found this absurd. Fox seemed intent on domesticating both the song and the Merman
image, which had scarcely been WASPier before this picture. As she later told
the press, people at Fox had been "ordered to `keep (this girl Merman) down.'
I don't blame them."25 By bleaching "Heat Wave" of potential racial color and sexuality, Fox opted for a bouncy, if neutered, performance, one that was
probably all the more racist for its alterations.

Perhaps it is not a surprise that no people of color appear in Alexander,
although whites perform in blackface in the army scenes. But ethnic, class,
and racial markers certainly appear as a means of gauging the band's professional success. Over the course of the film, Aleck's band goes from "playing the devil's music" at "a noisy, smoke-laden dive, the lowest of the low,
on the Barbary Coast,"" to Carnegie Hall, bringing swing music into respectability; that's why Aleck's stuck-up music teacher needs to be present,
to approve.

Audiences found Alexander's Ragtime Band to be a fun jaunt down memory lane. No question about it, though, as one critic wrote, it was "honoring
a form of music that was already on its way out."27 Berlin and Merman
seemed to be aware that the material was dated when they talked about the
film. Merman, for instance, promised it would give audiences "a new ragtime ... forget all about swing. It is done for!"28

Nostalgic or not, Alexander's Ragtime Band had recouped its negative
cost within a month of its release. It generated quite a bit of mail from fans,
many believing these to be the best performances of Faye and Power, the
ones against which later performances would be measured. Fans adored
what they called Ameche's "Christian values" and his perfect teeth. The
movie's success was such that a St. Louis woman named Mary Cooper
Oehler (later Dieckhaus) filed suit against Fox, claiming it had taken her
unpublished story "Love Girl" as the basis for Alexander. Lawsuits like that
were (and remain) common, and Fox referred to her as the woman who suffered from "plagiarism complex,"29 an unkindness that was not unwarranted: Oehler and her associates fudged dates and names on documents
such as her copyright requests. Miraculously, she won the initial court decision, but Fox overturned it-two years, several lawyers, and a Pinkerton
agent later. Oehler appealed the decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court, which refused to hear the case.

Alexander's gala premiere was in Los Angeles on May 24, 1938, at the
Carthay Circle Theatre, followed by an enormous party at the Trocadero.
It opened in full release a week later. Merman received telegram after telegram of congratulations, from Fox executive Sol Wurtzel's ("I think your
performance in Alexander's Ragtime Band is the first real step toward success in motion pix which you so well deserve") to loyal fan Mary Cantor's.
Louella Parsons loved it, calling it "one in a million";30 Ruth Arell wrote,
"Yes, when Ethel sings, you understand fully why they named that highspeed gasoline `Ethyl.' She's got the same high-grade, anti-knock, long-wearing
quality."31

Straight, Place and Show

Ethel had made it up the LA ladder, attending a bon voyage party for Darryl Zanuck and his wife, who were about to leave for Europe on the deluxe
liner La Normandie, before she herself returned east to New York. After a
week there visiting her parents, she returned to Hollywood to complete her
third Fox picture, which was scheduled to begin shooting on May 23.
Straight, Place and Show was a vehicle for the Ritz Brothers, Fox's vaudevilleschooled team whose pun-filled high jinks paved the way for later trios, such
as the Three Stooges. At the time, Harry, Al, and Jimmy Ritz (tame in their
private lives) were a sort of second-tier Marx Brothers, and like other specialty
acts contracted with the studios, Ritz Brothers movies were spit out with regularity, with story lines so mechanical as to be almost incidental. Studio execs
were more concerned with showcasing their physical antics and verbal gags.

Straight, Place and Show was a horse race caper that capitalized on the great
popularity of racing at the time; Ethel's scrapbooks include a column that described and then placed odds, racetrack style, on stars. (Earlier, in 193z, an ad
for B. F. Keith Palace's show used a racetrack form, listing performers as
horses, among them a young "Ethel Herman.")32 To publicize the picture,
Ethel made at least one recorded appearance at the Santa Anita racetrack.