Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (34 page)

As a comedienne, Miss Merman is as American as the
Fourth of July. Hers is a sense of humor which ought to
sport a raccoon coat, wave pennants, wear slacks, or
send a juke box about its business . . . Miss Merman is
Broadway's idea of its own Beatrice Lillie. The difference
between the two of them as entertainers is the
difference betweenTimes Square and Mayfair. . . . The
one is as much the mistress of nuance as the other is of
noise. Both are incredibly professional . . . and equally
hilarious.

WARD MOREHOUSE, "Broadway after Dark"

I was captured by the air of surprise and complete
disbelief with which she portrayed . . . Annie Oakley,
and the superbly ingenuous delivery of her lines in a
kind of a Bronx-Hillbilly dialect while looking into my
heart with a frankly baffled stare.

Esquire, 1946

Annie Get Your Gun secured Merman's place as an all-American icon who embodied the vitality and can-do spirit of a nation. It also confirmed her reign
as queen of Broadway; a typical review ran, "Annie Gets Her Gun and Drills
a Bull's Eye in Broadway."' The show became one of the most successful popular shows of twentieth-century musical theater, and since its 1946 premiere,
it has been in endless local productions, tours, and revivals on Broadway and
around the world. Ticket sales outstripped all of Merman's previous hits and
convinced Irving Berlin that it was the best Merman show ever. Only Gypsy rivals Annie's impact on American culture and Merman's place in it, and
when you ask fans today which is their favorite show or set of songs, it's a
dead heat between the two.

The story is straightforward. It begins with the arrival of Col. Buffalo Bill's
Wild West Show outside Cincinnati, Ohio, one summer day. The show
boasts that it's "got the stuff that made the Wild West wild," including "the
world's greatest sharpshooter," Frank Butler, and plenty of bloodthirsty Indians to stage "historical" battles. To promote it, sales manager Charlie Davenport puts up notices at the town inn, challenging the best local shot to a
sharpshooting contest with Butler. Enter Annie Oakley. Merman entered less
voice first than "shot first"; wearing a buckskin dress and moccasins, "bumpkin" hair and dirty face. Annie spots an artificial bird on the hat of Frank Butler's assistant, Dolly, and shoots it off. When Dolly explains, "It's not an eating bird, it's a wearing bird," Annie doesn't get it. She understands the world
of nature and, with her "clan," a group of unscrubbed kids, sings "Doin'
What Comes Natur'lly," which good-humoredly details the basic know-how
of the uneducated folks at home. Annie takes up the show's challenge, boasting, "I shoot like a man!" but when the tall, handsome, supremely selfconfident Frank Butler steps out, his charm locks Annie in its spell. Her eyes
go wide as saucers, and the rest of her falls slack-jawed and limp in what
quickly became known as Ethel's "goon look." After this, Frank sings "The
Girl That I Marry," describing the wifely traits he seeks, and Annie, not finding herself in any of his criteria, then sings "You Can't Get a Man with a
Gun."

Annie wins the sharpshooting competition, to Bill's bemusement and
Frank's chagrin. Eager to increase revenues, Bill and Charlie convince Frank
to let Annie join the show; a woman shooter will be a "novelty," they say. Butler concedes, as long as he remains the main attraction. The men encourage
Annie to join them by exhorting their livelihood in "There's No Business
Like Show Business."

The show continues its Midwest tour by train. Eager to be worthy of
Frank's attentions, Annie slowly transforms her appearance and demeanor
to become the kind of gentrified girl that Frank has described. He starts to
warm to the ingenuous young woman, and they duet with "They Say It's
Wonderful." Charlie and Bill suggest to Annie that she be part of the act to
boost sales (sagging, thanks to rival Pawnee Bill's Wild West show), convincing the lovesick woman that Frank will be pleased if she surprises him
in a dazzling new performance. And so Annie unveils her new routine, in
which she shoots lights on a pole from a moving motorcycle. She is an immediate sensation, but Butler, furious over what he views as an attempt
to upstage him, quits to join the rival Pawnee Bill Show. Distraught, Annie
is comforted by Chief Sitting Bull, who was bowled over by her performance. "Papa Bull" reads Frank's good-bye letter to the illiterate woman and
decides to adopt her as his tribal daughter in an elaborate Native ceremony
("I'm an Indian Too").

Buffalo Bill and crew go on an undepicted European tour in which Annie
is a hit. But because of the unpaid command performances, the troupe fails
to pull in much-needed money, and Annie is still preoccupied with Frank.
Bill, Charlie, and Sitting Bull, now manager, all recognize the need to pair
the two sharpshooters, not just for Annie's happiness, but also for the fiscal
health of the show, all information that is telescoped at the beginning of the
second act, which opens on a cattle boat on their trip back to the States. Their
plan is to merge with the rival Pawnee Bill to boost their dwindling fortune;
Pawnee Bill and Frank Butler, meanwhile, entertain the same scheme.
Pawnee Bill throws a lavish party at which they hope to seal the deal, and
Annie makes a grand entrance in an evening dress with a bodice covered by
medals she's garnered from Europe, whose stones are worth a small fortune.
Ultimately she offers to sell them to help the merger. When Frank appears,
they embrace passionately but quickly grow competitive (singing "Anything
You Can Do, I Can Do Better").

Another sharpshooting contest is held between the sparring lovers. On the
sidelines, Papa Bull convinces Annie that she can win either the match or the
guy-not both. She happily takes the bad gun he offers and feigns defeat.
The show ends with her and Frank reprising "They Say It's Wonderful" and
"The Girl That I Marry," then Annie leads the coupled western shows with
"There's No Business Like Show Business."

Annie Get Your Gun omitted most of the hardships of the real-life Annie
Oakley. Born Phoebe Annie Oakley Mozee (sometimes Moses) in a log cabin
in Dark County, Ohio, in 1866 (some say i86o), "Annie" was the sixth of
eight kids. At the age of four, stepfather Jake Mozee froze to death driving the
family wagon home in a storm. The young girl probably witnessed his gruesome arrival: frozen solid, still clutching the reins of the horse that had
brought the wagon home. The widowed mother and her children moved, but
when Annie turned nine, she was sent off to live with a couple who put her
to work. After they withheld food from her, whipped her, and locked her outdoors in winter, Annie ran away and went back home, helped by strangers
who bought her a train ticket. Throughout her childhood, things went better when the young girl had a gun in her hand. At the age of eight, Annie took the family shotgun to kill a squirrel in the front yard. "It was a wonderful
shot," she later boasted, "going right through the head from side to side."2

Oakley met sharpshooter Frank Butler at a shooting competition that she
won, and the two married soon after and started touring together. Their act
was much the same wherever they went: Annie's part consisted of ten minutes of shooting nonstop from either hand, hitting playing cards, pucks, or
whatever else was thrown up into the air. One legend claims that in twentyseven seconds, Oakley put twenty-five slugs through an ace of hearts without once hitting the white of the card.

Off season, she and Butler resided in Nutley, New Jersey, where they lived
a tranquil life. She retired from performing in 1913 and died in 1926. A grieving Frank Butler died less than a month later. Interestingly, the female sharpshooter who claimed, "I have always maintained that outside of heavy manual labour, anything a man can do a woman can do practically as well,"3
opposed the women's suffrage she lived to see.

Not all of Oakley's life was the fodder for a Broadway play. Laughed
Dorothy Fields, who cowrote the book, "We did a lot of research on Annie
Oakley and Frank Butler, and both of them apparently were about the
dullest people in the world. Annie Oakley in real life used to sit in her tent
and knit, for God's sake!"' It hardly mattered. Plenty of other details about
the actual Oakley helped promote the show. Boasts one souvenir program,
"Once she hit 943 of iooo flying balls in a rapid fire demonstration and at
the age of 56, using three double-barreled guns, punctured in midair six balls
sprung from as many traps!" Free theater passes-called "Annie Oakleys"were printed to look as if a bullet had scorched brown holes in the thick
stock.

Staging Annie Oakley's Story

In 1935, Annie Oakley's story was made into an RKO film with Barbara Stanwyck, but the idea of turning it into a musical comedy on Broadway came a
decade later from Dorothy Fields. "I was sitting next to my husband at Pennsylvania Station," she recalled. "Next to us was a woman from the Traveler's
Aid Bureau-that was the aid that when boys in the war came in from the
trains from Coney Island, Palisades and wherever, they could stay at the station until their trains left for camp.... She said, `I had the cutest guy in the
other night, this sharpshooter. The most brilliant sharpshooter with medals
from here to here, and he was tight as a fool. But he'd been to Coney Island and he'd won everything he could possibly win.' . . . And for the strangest
reason I just thought: Annie Oakley and Ethel Merman."5 The only other detail she had in mind at this point was that, for her entrance, Merman would
shoot a bird off a woman's hat.

Summer 1945. Fields approached Mike Todd to produce. "We had to tell
him first," she recalled. "Mike said, `Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley? She's
through, she'll never do another show.' " It was not the response Fields expected, nor was it a sentiment that Todd ever let on to Merman. "I don't
know [why he said that]," Fields said later. "He was busy being a general at
the time."6 Undaunted and spurred by the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein's shows Oklahoma! and Carousel and their interest in producing,
Fields approached Oscar Hammerstein at the next ASCAP meeting: "Ockie,
what do you think of Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley?" "We'll do it," he said.
"Tell Dick after the meeting." When Rodgers had the same reaction, the production team was set.

Ethel may have been ideal for the role of the talented sharpshooter, but
Rodgers, Hammerstein, and the Fieldses couldn't be sure of her participation. The reason: that August, she was at Manhattan's Doctors' Hospital recuperating after Bobby's Cesarean birth. Fields went in to pitch the role to
her friend two days after the surgery. "Frankly," recalled Ethel, "I was much
more concerned about my stitches than I was about a show." 7 Moreover, she
had promised her husband and young family to take a year off from the
boards. But it didn't take Fields long to convince her, and Merman was
signed on for the commanding salary of forty-five hundred dollars a week
plus to percent of the show's gross. Before the month was out, the New York
Times was announcing the deal, and five months after that, Dorothy Kilgallen reported that Rodgers and Hammerstein were purchasing a quartermillion-dollar insurance policy on their star.