Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (42 page)

Ethel Merman can lay no claim to great beauty, glamour
or "legit" vocal quality, but she is a dynamic baggage with
syncopation in every breath and gesture and a voice with
the hard, clarion forthrightness of a jazz trumpet.

Time, October 28, 1940

She yelled for an ice bag and fought off attempts to stash
her away in a hospital. Then she took the stage at the
Waldorf party and, as usual, toppled the walls. When
she was done, she took a cab to the hospital.

Scrapbook clipping by Bob Considine, November 14, 1949,
reporting that Merman suffered an attack of appendicitis just before
she was scheduled to sing at a Banshee Luncheonette. Above it,
in her handwriting, "This never happened."

By this point, Ethel Merman seemed to symbolize both wholesome, American dynamism and New York brashness, and however contradictory those
things might appear, at the time they merely revealed the breadth of her impact. Scrapbook clippings attest that in the years between Annie Get Your Gun
and Call Me Madam, no one disputed her reign as Broadway's great queen.
Moreover, her image had more range now than ever before. If Annie Oakley
had added softness to her persona, Sally Adams had given her sophistication,
maturity, and class.

Still, "I Got Lost in His Arms" has never gone down as a Merman classic
the way that "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun" and "There's No Business
Like Show Business" have. Annie may have softened the Merm, but as vocal
scholar Henry Pleasants says, by then "it was already too late."' Her image
had already "hardened," the same word Barbara Geary uses to describe the
public's conception of her grandmother. Bawdy and tough, onstage and off-that was the Merman legend that gelled, one that she would never
shake, even after death.

Despite this hardening, the cracks and contradictions of Ethel's public
persona had started coming into relief in the 1940s. "People disagree on many
points in Ethel's character," an interviewer of the time noted. "She is stingy
with money or extremely generous, depending on who's talking. She is difficult and temperamental-or the best working companion in show business.
But nobody denies Ethel's strong will. Her work comes first, absolutely."2

And so although her status as the winningest star of musical comedies was
affirmed and celebrated more than ever, less sympathetic aspects of Merman's
onstage characters-and, now, her offstage personality-were raising eyebrows and starting to polarize people in ways that her early career had not.
The postwar press was presenting Ethel Merman with less uniformity, and,
as the contradictions around her intensified, boundaries between her public
and private personae began to criss-cross as well. People knew that she had
begun a family life with Levitt and their children, for instance, but while the
papers were running pictures of Bobby and Little Ethel playing with Dorothy
Kilgallen's children, they were also printing pictures of Ethel alone in clubs
with hard-core partyers like Bankhead. Yes, she swore in front of her young
children; no, she never did. All of this was both the source and the result of
competing interpretations of Merman, and the tensions would provide the
basis for interpretations and reinventions of Ethel to come. With the very
same stories in their hands, fans and media could produce a delightfully
irrepressible Ethel or a coarse, nasty egotist.

To be sure, tensions had always existed. In the 1930s, at the same time that
the media offered up Ethel Merman as a girl-next-door and a dutiful daughter, she was portraying hardened women of experience onstage. Here was a
young singer who couldn't cook but was dishing out recipes to women's magazines, giving instructions on preparing lavish turkey dinners at home.

Still, as late as DuBarry, the press did not confuse Merman with the characters she depicted, except in affectionately calling her "Eadie" and the like.
No one saw her as DuBarry or maintained that DuBarry gave any insight into
the real Ethel. But the brashness of roles like DuBarry was starting to wear
off on the person the press wanted to believe Ethel Merman was offstage.
One report, for instance, claimed that Merman "went prima donna" just before the opening of Red, Hot and Blue!: she "ripped off all the clothes and hats
designed for her by a couple of Madison Avenue top-notchers and demanded
a complete new wardrobe."3 The tall tale likely emerged from a small incident: Ethel wanted a bustle (with a hen in a nest, for laughs) removed from a gown she wore during one of the numbers. "Any audience that gets a laugh
out of me gets it while I'm facing them," she told Vin Freedley. She was also
displeased that the gag might overshadow the musical mood of the song.4

One interviewer took a misstep and caught a glimpse of the star's fury:

"I know flappers were supposed to be unconventional and wild," Merman was
saying, "but if they think a flapper was that way what do they think of girls
nowadays? They sure travel at a faster rate than we ever did.... Huh? [to another question] Listen. I never had an outright proposition in my life." Miss
Merman, the grown-up flapper, got her breath and looked out the window,
and pretty soon she was smiling again and being the gay, gracious chatelaine.
But the look she flashed there for a minute-whew! It would have pleated a
battleship.5

It was with Annie Get Your Gun that the press started to blur the lines
between Ethel and her stage role in earnest, if only to focus rather innocuously on her and Annie's "natural" skills and energy. Yet it was also around
this period that Ethel's private and public lives started to give her allAmerican image a run for the money-even as that image continued to
make her one of Broadway's wealthiest women. Yes, she was still the nice
daughter who loved her folks, but now, after fifteen years in show business,
words like nice and sweet were rarely used to describe her (unlike Mary
Martin, for instance). As for Merman's inexhaustible energy, the press was
not lauding her stamina anymore but using it to transform her into a
powerhouse that crushed everything in its path, box office records, eardrums, and costars. "Ethel Merman Merely Mows 'Em Down," ran one review of the show. 6

Such assessments never occur in a vacuum. In many ways the contradictions attributed to Merman reveal more about changing cultural values than
they do about Merman herself. Ethel was always a lightning rod that reflected
changes in the social landscape, and in her (and responses to her) we see
evolving attitudes toward family, sex, celebrity, class, and age. For instance,
although Merman's affairs with married men had never made the scandal
sheets, now that she was a married mother, the press was intent on pointing
up differences and similarities between "Miss Merman and Mrs. Levitt"hardly singular treatment, to be sure. Still, when combined with other tensions emerging with more regularity, these stories made "Ethel Merman" into
a more complex figure, more three-dimensional than she had been before or
that many today believe her to have been. Some of the stories have found their way into her larger-than-life legacy; others have not. Others still, such
as whether she swore in front of the kids, show that Ethel Merman was simply mortal, a woman trying to enjoy her career and maintain the semblance
of a normal family life.

Ironically, one change emerged from a lack of change. Once the success of
Annie had subsided, there was a sense that no matter how much she was at
the top of her game, Ethel's successes were so familiar as to almost become
old news. Thus, for all her celebrity and precisely for being at the top of her
game, columnists evoked Merman less as "breaking news" than as a lesson in
reliable old familiarity.

Because Merman was so established, her success so inevitable, some members of the press and some of her colleagues searched for some sign of imperfection and weakness. Her record was impeccable: seven shows by the
time of Annie Get Your Gun, and none of them box office failures. Perhaps
the only place to hunt for blemishes was in her personality or offstage deportment. It is impossible to ascertain which press attacks were provoked by
Merman's perceived crassness and which were a result of simple resentment.
The point is that, by now, negative claims and observations were increasingly
out of Ethel's control, and she no longer had the tight, close reins over the
press that she had before.

These shifts were abetted by changes in the postwar landscape beyond the
entertainment world. There was a widening gap between public and private
spheres: private and family lives were more guarded, seen as off-limits, and in
the process became more attractive to gossip columnists. Media and reporting
styles were changing as well. Gossip columns were more aggressive, intruding
more openly (and with less discretion) into the private lives of their subjects.
Celebrity was less a guarantor of respect, awe, or discretion; now it was prey for
hunters to expose. When Merman's star was being groomed in the 1930s, gossip columnists such as Ed Sullivan, Louis Sobol, Dorothy Kilgallen, George
Sokolsky, and Hedda Hopper ruled the press. All were New York-based, and
Ethel easily and openly fostered their goodwill with small favors (thank-yous
for favorable remarks; small gifts when they were in mourning). Again, although the practice was not uncommon, it shows that Merman knew how
much of a role these media personnel played in sustaining not only her career
but also her very image and reputation. But now, gossip had become more of
a cutthroat business and, as such, was less dependent on cordial relations with
celebrities or producers than it was on nurturing anonymous "sources." The

wider practice of national syndication also made local sources, relationships,
and communities less crucial to their writers.

Walter Winchell

It was Walter Winchell who personified the new, hard era of gossip, even
though his career had started well before the war. His work showed the
best and the worst of new reporting trends. Born in New York in 1897 to
Jewish immigrant parents, Winchell's working-class roots would be a
source of personal and public contradictions, just as Ethel's were to her. As
a child, he sang and danced in vaudeville, giving him not only an insider's
view of the entertainment world but also an awareness of the gritty realities of the people inhabiting that world. Winchell worked in Hollywood
as a screenplay writer and an actor, and he was the subject of Sweet Smell
of Success by aoth Century-Fox, whose films, like Winchell's work itself,
were often torn from the headlines and relied on the lives of regular people.
(Biographer Neal Gabler calls Winchell's "a column run for the masses in
their own vernacular.")7 His clipped, staccato writing self-consciously reflected the patter of the street; his creative slang was both contagious and
influential. It was Winchell, for instance, who coined the term "the Big
Apple."

He used the rough tactics of the street too. At once fearless and selfserving, Winchell thought nothing of blackmailing other reporters or sources
to "make" or break certain stars. He cooperated with the House Un-American
Activities Committee, turning people over for questioning. During the
blacklist era, columnists were under pressure to cooperate, and most did:
Sullivan, Jack O'Brian, Hopper, Sobol, Sokolsky-basically everyone but
Kilgallen. (As Victor Navasky puts it, "For [them], the line between namedropping and name-naming was so thin that they ended up as adjuncts of the
blacklist process.")' Winchell also had an extremely ambivalent relationship
to New York's subtle but very real anti-Semitism, at a time when Jews were
barred from many of Manhattan's nicer residential areas and when some
turned to careers as entertainers to leave behind their Jewishness. At times
militating against anti-Semitism, at times capitulating to it, Winchell embodied an era's ambivalence.

Merman's scrapbooks contain few notes to and from Winchell, many
fewer than for Kilgallen, with whom she had genuinely cordial relations. One
can only guess about this, but perhaps Winchell viewed Merman as too established and redoubtable to mess with, yet also too homespun for his slick
crowd. In all likelihood, Merman and Winchell held each other at slight remove, respecting each other's power but not eager to capitulate to it. Says
Ethel's son, "I'm actually fascinated by my mother's self-protective deference
to Walter Winchell. It contrasts dramatically with the more relaxed `mutual
admiration' that she shared so openly with women who were married to presidents and women who sat on thrones."9

Ethel recognized the media's role in putting out Ethel Merman lore and
legends into the public eye and even acknowledged her own part in their production in an interview by Robert Garland in summer of 1947:

"Which interview you want?" she asks.

"Which interviews you got?" ask I.

"The old reliable three ... The Sure-Shot Merman in which I never had a
failure. The Doin' What Comes Naturally one in which I revamp the `I Got
Rhythm' stuff of `Girl Crazy' Days. And the Wife-Into-Mother-IntoHomebody-One in which I also loathe the country[side]."

"I've used them all," I say...

"So has everybody ... but they're true enough.... I guess there isn't any
interview today."10

Changes in Popular Culture

For the musical comedy, new trends in popular music proved tough to negotiate, and for the most part, Broadway dealt with them by ignoring them.
Musicals of the 1950s were only beginning to exploit rock (it would be another two decades before it really clicked), and in general, rock and roll split
audiences generationally more than popular music had before. This too influenced theater audience demographics: Tin Pan Alley was out, swing was
out, and Broadway show music, though widely available through cast recordings and new media outlets such as television, was losing its grip on the current hit scene. Berlin's and Porter's efforts had lost their impact, and even in
the world of musical theater, it was Rodgers and Hammerstein who were
mopping up. Call Me Madam was one of Berlin's last hits, and it was Merman's last before Gypsy.