Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (36 page)

Ethel kept her usual busy balancing act as the show was being prepared,
attending balls (e.g., the annual ball for the press photographers of New York
in February), benefits (Red Cross), and hospital tours. She didn't see as much
of her young children as she had intended. Rehearsals for the show were
scheduled for February 18 and began a week later, one day shy of Buffalo Bill
Cody's one hundredth birthday anniversary.

From Tryouts to Opening Night

Tryouts were in New Haven (March z8) and Boston (April z). The first problem was that the show ran too long. Too much ground was covered in the first
act, presenting the naive Annie, then the infatuated Annie, the successful
Annie, the romantically involved Annie, the broken-hearted Annie. Even
after adjustments were made, the first act remained much longer than the second, and Ethel, with no time for encores, could only blow kisses to an excited New Haven audience after singing "Anything You Can Do." (This was
a song that both Ethel and Hammerstein liked as it was, but Berlin insisted
on making some last-minute changes, which Merman, in an uncharacteristic move, agreed to adopt the same day. When the new version failed to ignite, "Anything" went back to the way it had been done before. Ethel's instincts were seldom wrong.)

Audiences loved her. In Boston, she received the following note: "Yesterday in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Mr John F. Royal was teasing me
a bit in your presence about our `great' art and yours. Believe me I am convinced that your performance of A Oakley is one of the greatest samples of
theatrical art I have seen since a long time. In every respect: singing, acting,
sincerety [sic] of conception-it's wonderful."23 It was signed by Herbert
Graf, the stage director of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. So
much for hillbilly music.

The show faced plenty of challenges and small curses: the unexpected
death of Jerome Kern, the sudden change in orchestrators. In Boston, Ethel
caught her finger in the gun catch and tore it open. She continued to sing all
of "I Got Lost in His Arms" and, after the scene, saw the house doctor, who
dressed her bleeding hand in the wings. Another crisis involved the theater
where the show was scheduled to open in New York. Song ofNorway had left
the Imperial (moving to the Broadway) so that Annie could open there on April 25. One day, after a dress rehearsal, the cast left, and as the crew was
hoisting the show's heavy sets, a girder pulled right out from the brick wall,
and things came crashing down with a tremendous boom. "If that girder had
fallen during rehearsal, I don't know how many people would have been
creamed," said Ethel.24 The building's license was revoked immediately, and
the Shuberts were forced to close it down for two weeks. Annie was quickly
moved to Philadelphia from April 30 to May it.

On May 16, 1946, a drizzly rain was falling on New York when Annie Get
Your Gun opened at the restored Imperial Theatre at 8:30. Top-price tickets
were a soaring $6.60,25 the highest charge for a Broadway show since Oklahoma! In contrast to its warm receptions in New Haven, Boston, and
Philadelphia, the show faced a distinct chill during the first act in New
York. The $350,000 musical had had extensive advance publicity; perhaps
the opening night audience was expecting a sophisticated, Rodgers and
Hammerstein-styled affair? "What they got, to their initial dismay, was a
knockabout Irving Berlin musical filled with bits, routines, shtick," writes
Berlin's biographer.26 Recalled Merman, "During the interval everybody must
have reassured everyone else that it was okay to laugh, because when the audience returned it turned out to be a responsive group."27

She could not have understated it more. So successful was opening night
that one critic proposed that May 16 should be made annual "Merman Day."
Annie Get Your Gun would go on to make its producers a small fortune; Merman's annual income during the run was estimated at about $244,400.

Reviews were positive, and once again it was Merman all the way. "The
big news about Annie Get Your Gun is that it reveals Ethel Merman in her best
form since Anything Goes," wrote Ward Morehouse. "Miss Merman, now
wearing buckskins as the redoubtable sharpshooter from the Kentucky [sic]
hills, is her own hearty, brassy, noisy self. She shouts the Berlin music with
good effect. She often comes stridently to the aid of a sagging book. She has
a great time all evening."28 "Ethel is the shining star, and she's a new Ethel
Merman, better than ever," wrote Elsa Maxwell.29 Everyone loved her singing,
and her acting was garnering praise as well. Wrote Robert Garland, "She's no
longer Miss Merman acting like Ethel Merman. She's Miss Merman acting
like Annie Oakley."30 Musicals historian Stanley Green concurred: gone were
the days when she played only a "big-hearted dame [incapable of] romantic
expression."31

Ethel appreciated what the role did for her: "I have to thank Irving Berlin
for making a lady out of me."32 And it wasn't just his lyrics: ballads like "I
Got Lost in His Arms" conveyed the change musically and gave Ethel a softer, vulnerable side missing from her earlier characters. The show "projected a less
abrasive Merman,"33 giving her more emotional and dramatic range, and
Ethel openly thanked Josh Logan and the Fieldses as well as Berlin for that.

They, moreover, were as impressed by her as she was appreciative of them.
In Logan's memoirs, he recalls the moment in the first act when Annie first
catches sight of Frank Butler:

The script read, "She looks at him and in a second falls in love with him forever." I felt that the only way I could show such an abrupt change was to have
her collapse inwardly and outwardly as if she were a puppet whose strings had
been cut quickly. I told Ethel to keep her eyes fixed on Ray but to let everything else in her body and mind go. She tried it. Her mouth dropped open,
her shoulders sank, her legs opened wide at the knees, her diaphragm caved
in. It was an unforgettable effect ... and it won for me the eternal devotion
of everyone, including myself.34

Again he praised Merman's innate acting know-how, telling Pete Martin he
was awed by her ability to make transitions "without asking for cerebral reasons for those transitions."35

Theatergoers and critics were equally captivated, something evident even
in the backhanded compliments: "Miss Merman is the country's most authentic comedienne. There was a time when Miss Merman's shouts and stage
exercises seemed merely strident: last Thursday they were as tamed leopards,
in leash by an actress who can not only project humor when it is written but
create it when it is not.... Annie's humor was forthright, and apparently authentically American, a spirit which Miss Merman eminently preserved."36
For Newsweek, Merman was "a sort of backwoods Beatrice Lillie. Practically
every gesture she makes and every word she utters is funny, whether intentionally or not. She paddles around in moccasins and a tattered dress and is
amusing in a pathetic sort of way."37

In June 1946, men's magazine Esquire took another angle, that of besotted critic. Noting the collective crush American men had on film star Ingrid
Bergman-currently starring on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson's Joan of
Lorraine-the writer states, "I would like to get in on it too, except that the
girl I love best isn't Miss Bergman, but Ethel Merman." Building up to what
he acknowledges might be an odd romantic preference, he says,

I will tell you something strange, namely that this big and somewhat beamy
girl with the moonface, flat nose and black-eyed-Susan orbs, who walks like a cowpoke and whose singing is a kind of a lusty, strident yell, can get me all
choked up in those moments [in Annie Get Your Gun] when the book calls for
her to pretend to be sad and unhappy because she has been temporarily
thrown over by the man she loves. She just gives one sort of forlorn look and
a little sag, and I feel much sorrier for her than I ever do for Miss Bergman in
her troubles; I want to climb right up on the stage and put my arms around
her and comfort her.38

Other reviews used equally colorful prose to different ends. Reminding
readers of the historical moment-and putting Merman at its boisterous
middle John Mason Brown wrote, "Even before the atomic bomb, there
was Ethel Merman." (In Ethel's 1945 scrapbook, an article on the play's development is printed on the same page as an ad for a toy atom bomb.) Brown
continued, "The Big Crash came in 1929. Being financial, it resulted in a depression. The Bigger Crash followed the next year [Ethel's debut in Girl
Crazy]. Since Miss Merman was responsible for it, its victims knew only pleasure." With Annie, she "not only gets her clay pigeons; she gets her man, too.
Since she is played by Ethel Merman, Annie also gets her audiences. She gets
them with an accuracy the real Annie Oakley would have admired.... She
shoots from the hips; from the tonsils, too."39

Merman took her success in stride. She said, the day after Annie opened,
"I'd got up early.... I'd gone over the grocer bills and called to complain
about being charged for two cans of grapefruit juice when I'd only received
one."40 Ethel's attitude toward her work was not blase, just matter-of-fact.
More than a personality trait, that worldview shaped the way she ran her
life.

Ethnic Ethel

With Annie Get Your Gun, Merman's relationship with different ethnic figures continued to inform how the press and the public viewed her. One Annie
reviewer wrote, "She has an abundance of black hair; long-lashed, darkbrown eyes; a nose that has a rather Semitic cast, although she is not Jewish,
and a generous mouth ... nature obviously intended her to have a rather inexpressive face, and the look of intense vivacity that adorns it is comic and
unnatural."41 This was not the first time Merman had been described as looking Jewish; an interviewer during the time of Alexander's Ragtime Bandwrote,
"Ethel is prettier in real life than she is in movies. She's Episcopalian. She looks Jewish. Weighs 118 pounds, has dark brown hair and brown eyes with
long black lashes."42

Ethel was not the only one to generate an appearance of Jewishness in
Annie Get Your Gun. In a stereotype ofJewishness-and Native AmericansSitting Bull "begins to resemble more and more the earlier, self-consciously
theatrical Jewish stage comics."43 As Papa Bull becomes involved in the business aspect of Wild Bill's show, he reveals "instincts" for things entrepreneurial, advising, among other things, "Never put money in show business!"
Whether as Jew or Native, his role had another function too, that of the nonAnglo sidekick who helps and watches the white couple form, a role that various nonwhite "ethnics" filled over time, from Indians to Jews-or here, the
two fused together, just as had happened in Girl Crazy, where Willie
Howard's Yiddish Goldfarb could magically communicate with the Navajos
of Arizona.

In old musical comedy, ethnic figures like this were novelty characters,
rarely played for anything but laughs. On this point there is little difference between Ethel disguised as a Chinese woman in Anything Goes and
her work with Cantor in blackface or when she dressed up as an Indian
with Paula Laurence in Something for the Boys. Her exaggerated portrayal
of backwoods Annie Oakley-saying "cain't" instead "can't," giving
stricken goon looks, and her difference from the "pink and white" girl
Frank describes-is imbued with racial, ethnic, and regional overtones.
Ethel was able to utilize these traits in singing Berlin's songs, adding a hiccup to her grace notes at the end of "too" and "Sioux" in "I'm an Indian
Too," a Buddy Holly before his time. Later, she did the same thing in Call
Me Madam when she needed to convey her character's middle-American
roots.

Ethel's foray into nonwhite ethnicities shows the way that New York's musical worlds offered a fantasy in which ethnic, social, and national differences
were believed to come together in one big American melting pot. From Girl
Crazy on, Ethel had been in shows with stories of ethnic, national, and religious minorities and outsider groups who were guided into the mainstream
of white, middle-class, Christian America. And it would be an error to say
that the trend stopped with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, since the
idea of integrating outsiders into a community endured, now with much
greater dramatic gravitas and never as a source of gags. It has continued to
this day, with shows still featuring unfairly outcast characters (ailing, overweight, cross-dressed, puppets) whose successes enable them to be folded into
mainstream, ethnically integrated America.

Aligned with nature and "doin' what comes natur'lly," Annie and
Panama Hattie, like other characters of Ethel's, were comfortable cavorting
with the locals in their story worlds. Annie and each of these other shows
shepherd their principal woman into the more urbane, genteel worlds of
adulthood and heterosexual partnering. For Ethel, her on- and offstage images traded in being able to move in and out of those worlds. In other words,
no matter how high her level of prestige and success, people were always able
to place Ethel Merman alongside so-called regular people-people of color,
munitions workers, folks down on their luck, illiterate children. Ethel could
easily give off the image of bucking standard adulthood and grown-up restraints. At Annie Get Your Gun's second anniversary party in June 1948, the
child players played the show's adult parts and vice versa. Newspapers ran a
photo of Merman good-naturedly kicking around in a frilly white toddler's
dress.

Annie transforms this unconventional girl into the pinker and whiter feminine woman of Frank's fantasies, just as it transforms the character's natural
skills to fuel the money-making machine of show biz. That success has its
costs; the ending reveals just what Annie had to lay down in order to be romantically, economically, and culturally successful. At the same time and
even as Annie forsakes her gun for Frank, there is something about Ethel
Merman playing Annie that makes it difficult for her to be the docile girl
Frank dreams of. For even in Annie, the show that "made a lady out of her,"
Ethel Merman never epitomized genteel/gentile femininity.