Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (37 page)

Even today, something about Merman's public persona doesn't fit in,
something that was not quite straight, not quite middle class, not fully glamorous or credible as that "pink and white girl," something, in short, that the
story line of Annie can't contain. It's not her losing to Butler or her desire to
please him that most people remember-as we'll see in a moment-but
rather her open spirit and force. Even in the show's romantic moments, she
was far from the sweet thing that Butler swooned about: when Annie decides
to go after him, she proclaims, "I'll wear my long, low-cut in the front dress;
I'll show him a thing or two!"

That mix of ethnic, economic, and regional associations of Annie and her
other shows stuck to Ethel in ways in which it seldom clung to other stars of
her caliber. With the significant exception of Fannie Brice, most of the ethnically marked female performers with roots in the early musical comedy on
the East Coast rarely went on to do much outside of comedy. But many of
these associations stayed on with Ethel, even after the ethnic conventions of
comic performance had changed.

Annie and Its Impact

After Annie Get Your Gun, Roger Edens said that "Merman wasn't a star, she
was an institution."44 As Annie Oakley, she conveyed not only good old getup-and-go but also an updated version of Horatio Alger, and, for a country
still recovering from World War II, it was exactly what was needed. The fact
that the show featured a female sharpshooter added to its novelty, and that
image was, moreover, fitting for the times. The war had generated a number
of new images of women, not the least of which was Rosie the Riveter, and
contemporary audiences could accept the idea of a woman holding a gun, of
helping out the country, if not on the battlefield, at least in the munitions
plants. Annie Oakley was a displaced Rosie, a self-sufficient working woman
who could succeed in a man's world, just as women had been permitted to
do during the recent war, for a few years at least.

Indeed, as we saw with the ad for the toy atom bomb, the shadow of World
War II was hanging over the show. While it was still in preparation, Ethel accepted an invitation to a "Victory Ball" on November 1, 1945, where she joined
high-ranking military guests to benefit the Westchester Victory Fund. Before,
during, and after the show's run, Ethel continued her benefits for hospitals,
the Red Cross, refugees, and various official military efforts. Because Annie Get
Your Gun was set a half century earlier and was not about war, it managed to
displace contemporary anxieties it might have provoked about the war, about
guns, and, especially, about women performing men's tasks. It took an idealized moment in the American past in which things appeared simpler-people,
gender roles, pleasures, and ambitions-to keep the fantasy rolling.

The original Annie has a huge place in the hearts of those who saw it. Stage
and TV star Kaye Ballard recalls, "The very first musical I saw was Annie Get
Your Gun. She was the best."45 A New York audiologist remembers, "Ethel
Merman was so upbeat and came on so strong. I'd heard `Anything You Can
Do' as a kid at camp one summer and I adored it. The line `Can you bake a
pie? Well, neither can I' tickled me. It was so silly, I just loved it."46 Loyal fan
Marilyn Cantor was equally smitten: "Oh, I think I saw Annie at least thirty
times during its three-year run. And every time I saw it, Merman never missed
a beat."47 Its impact was recorded as far away as Queensland, Australia, where
a woman reported to the papers that Ethel's recording of "Anything You Can
Do, I Can Do Better" "broke a iz-inch mixing bowl in two pieces."48 Today,
New York City Opera singer and Merman fan Jill Bosworth considers Annie
Oakley to be Merman's quintessential performance, because it wasn't a typical Merman role. Consider "I Got Lost in His Arms," she argues. "It was not her kind of role, but she made it her own through sheer force. Her New York
accent is everywhere in the songs."49 Not everyone agrees. Another musical
theater aficionado calls "I Got Lost" "ridiculous" from Merman's mouth; yet
his partner insists it makes no difference, since Merman's persona fit the overall show and character.

The show left a special impact on young women and girls. Today, middleaged New York women vividly recall Annie Get Your Gun; for many it was
their first Broadway show. "I saw Ethel Merman in the original version of
Annie Get Your Gun when I was a child," said one. "What a fireball! There
hadn't been that kind of woman before on Broadway. She was out there, not
sexual, and not punished for being ambitious"50-a reading obviously enabled by a later feminist perspective. In Annie this audience member saw a
woman who didn't need a man, was self-sufficient, and, through Merman's
powerhouse performance, was her own solar system. It's a powerful fantasy,
one that has little to do with who Annie is or how she was written; as Fields's
son David Lahm notes, "These fans are projecting onto Annie/Ethel their
own independence, whether wished-for or actual."51

Other women who saw the show were frustrated by it, experiencing Annie's
capitulation to Frank Butler as a cop-out. Given how extensively contemporary American culture was trying to coax female factory workers back into the
home (recipes in women's magazines, for example, were growing more elaborate and requiring more prep time), their irritation is understandable. One
historian goes so far as to read the show in terms of pop culture's suspicion of
professionalized women in the early postwar era. That view was reflected in
articles about the historical Annie Oakley that appeared during the show, invariably describing her as a tough and competent woman who willingly gave
it all up for a guy-scarcely different from the expectations being placed on
contemporary "Rosie the Riveters" to abandon their own careers.52

Yet to view Annie's ending as sheer capitulation is to miss the point. For
as Annie, Ethel Merman ate up the stage; she was the central character
around whom absolutely everything in the show revolved. The force of both
her performance and her star power trumped everything. After all, she even
won the contest of the whispering response to "any song you can sing, I can
sing softer." And for some fans, knowing that Oakley could outgun Butler if
she wanted to was all that mattered.

For a Broadway musical, Annie's influence could scarcely have been wider,
and the country's interest in Merman was at a peak as well. But Dorothy Kilgallen might have been going too far when she wrote, "A major film company is on the verge of bidding for the screen rights to Ethel Merman's life
story."53 In the end, not only was the Merman biopic never made, but also
after Berlin, the producers, and Dorothy and Herbert Fields sold Annie Get
Your Gun's rights to MGM-in a record-smashing $650,000 deal54-Ethel
would not resume her hit role. Instead, MGM gave the part to Judy Garland,
their young star (who had earlier reprised Ethel's role in the film version of
Girl Crazy). After shooting "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly" and "I'm an Indian Too," however, Garland, beset by fatigue and addiction problems, was
let go. (Howard Keel, who played the role of Frank Butler, said it was "the
only tacky thing MGM ever did.")55 The studio replaced her with G-rated
Betty Hutton, who had played Florrie in Panama Hattie, the young woman
who spends the show chasing Arthur Treacher. Hutton may not have had the
phenomenal performing gifts of Garland, but she didn't have her risks either.
Production finished ahead of schedule and under budget, and the 1950 movie
won several Academy Awards, including best adaptation. Reviewers praised
Hutton's energetic performance, even though they inevitably admitted that
she was no Ethel Merman. Predictably, dialogue like "I'll show him a thing
or two" was excised.

If Ethel was upset, she did not say so publicly. She knew that other Annie
Oakleys could not top hers. So did Irving Berlin. One evening while he was
dining with Eddie Cantor and daughter Marilyn, Cantor teased, "You know,
I think Dolores Gray (in the London run) is doing a great job. She's just as
good as Ethel Merman." Knowing her dad was trying to get a rise out of
them, Marilyn didn't take the bait. "But boy, Irving Berlin sure did!"56 In her
well-researched 1986 dissertation on the star, Sherri Dienstfrey argues that
Merman's ego and professional experience were partly to blame for her lack
of success in Hollywood.57 As anyone who saw Ethel live will attest, she had
an absolutely magnetic presence in front of a live audience. Merman was a
performer who fed off the immediate energy and gratification audiences gave
her, and motion pictures could not reproduce that. Even when doing live
radio or television shows in front of small studio audiences, Merman, like any
performer, had to pitch her delivery to the mikes and cameras, not to the
people.

Merman was used to enthusiastic responses from New York audiences,
and her success there had been relatively effortless. She might have been perplexed about not getting the same reception in other places and with other
media. Dienstfrey maintains that, at some level, Merman was either too stubborn or too lazy to change. Like other performers who move from stage
to screen, Ethel needed to tone down facial expressions (especially as someone lauded for her mugging, as in her "goon look") and had to reduce her
voice and body movements to make them seem smaller. Given that people
are always surprised today when learning that Ethel Merman was only five
feet, five inches, it seems that that diminutiveness never gelled.

Ethel Equals Annie

So close were the associations between the Annie Oakley character and the
star that fans and the press alike treated Ethel and Annie almost interchangeably. Although this had been the case since Take a Chance, when
reviewers and fans addressed Ethel as "Eadie," the degree and duration of
Annie's popularity formed a stronger, more enduring legacy. One paper ran
side-by-side feature snapshots called "The Two Annie Oakleys."58 Countless
interviews were entitled "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly," burnishing Ethel's
image as a homegrown talent, untrained and unpretentious. By now, Berlin's
phrase "doin' what comes natur'lly" had fully entered the public vernacular;
Edward Zimmermann even saved a photo from an agricultural magazine that
used it as a caption for a sow suckling her piglets. Decades after Annie closed,
"sharpshooter" Ethel posed with rifles for photo cps; as late as 1979, when she
voiced Rudolph and Frosty 's Christmas in July, a kids' animated movie, her
character was dressed just like Annie Oakley and even operated a theme
park-not so far off Buffalo Bill's traveling show.

During the show's run, family and fans of the actual sharpshooter sent
Merman mementos such as photographs and cards that the real Oakley had
shot through. For the hundredth performance on August to, 1946, she was
presented with one of Oakley's actual guns, a gold-and-silver-mounted .32caliber Winchester rifle, loaned from a Mrs. Spencer Olin. The real Annie
Oakley had used it in her 1887 European Buffalo Bill tour, the one depicted
in the show. At another point, Oakley's granddaughter, Elizabeth Butler Hall,
wrote Merman a note of appreciation.

Merman saved other mementos from the long run, including a fan letter
from writer John Steinbeck, who'd been seated behind a chatty couple who
explained all of the jokes to each other, which, he wrote, was a good thing,
because it "not only meant that we heard everything twice but we understood
everything."59 When war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower took in the show, he went backstage between acts; the delighted diva had had her scouts
sleuth out his favorite drink (scotch), and she saved his unwashed glass
afterward.

Merman produced a few singularly memorable moments of her own. One
night at the start of the second act, when Annie shoots a seagull from the deck
of the steamer, the bird failed to fall on cue, and later when it eventually did,
Merman ad-libbed, "Must be apoplexy," to howls from the audience. Columnist Earl Wilson reported that on another night, Ethel played "a big hunk"
of the show with her back to the rear wall after a dress zipper broke, exposing her back.60

Because of Annie's late start in the 1946 season, Ethel didn't have a summer break. Next year, while the show was going strong, she took a two-week
vacation early in August to undergo some undisclosed minor surgery-not
much of a reprieve. But after two years with the show, when her contract was
up, she went into discussions with Rodgers and stipulated that she wanted a
six-week vacation if she was to continue. Rodgers happily complied, so on
July 5, 1948, Ethel, Levitt, Little Bit, and Bobby went to Glenwood Springs,
Colorado, where they stayed at the ranch home of some friends and began
a lifelong love affair with the region.

So much a fixture had Merman and Annie become on Broadway that critics such as John Chapman defended her need to leave for a break: "Ethel
Merman's very nice upholstery is deceptive, for she is really made of irona trouper if ever there was one. Yet even she needs a vacation, and assuredly
she has earned it."61 When understudy Mary Jane Walsh took over in the
sweltering summer heat, however, ticket sales fell so precipitously-from a
weekly intake of thirty-six thousand dollars to twenty-four thousand-that
Rodgers begged Ethel to return early. She refused. The cast took a temporary
cut in salary in one of the few times that Ethel made a decision for which
the cast would "pay." When discussing the six-week break from the show in
her memoirs, Ethel was at pains to say that the cast supported her in her right
to a vacation. (Today, one is hard-pressed to imagine a star having to defend
her right to time off.)

Before the break, Miss Walsh's services had scarcely been used. When
Ethel underwent a minor procedure in 1947-reportedly for the removal of
a mole from her foot-an infection extended the time she had to take off, so
Walsh found herself playing Annie longer than expected: from September 29
to October it. During that time, the young actress suffered an unexpected
personal tragedy. Her fiance, Ernie Holst, the high-society orchestra leader
and violinist, died while riding in a cab with her, and that same evening, with Mermanesque toughness, Walsh performed the entire show, collapsing
afterward.