Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (51 page)

With the Denver location so convenient to Los Angeles, Ethel knew that
a home base there wouldn't intrude on her family life as much as one in New
York. "I do miss my Mom and Pop," she said.5 (They were afraid to fly.)
She wrote and called on a regular basis, sending postcards when she traveled or using hotel cards and stationery, circling pictures of the rooms she'd
stayed in.

Merman's public learned something important about her when she moved
west: Ethel Merman was not so enslaved or entranced by her Broadway successes that she was unable to walk away from the stage. To her fans she explained, "Oceans of hooey have been spilled about living up to the `Show
Must Go On' slogan. To me, that's an overplayed cliche. Show biz is no more
important than any other business. In other business, there's no question
about `going on.' The work goes on in spite of toothache, heartache, and losing loved ones. There's no point of singling out show biz and making a big
dramatic thing about it."6

Six Acres

And so Mr. and Mrs. Robert Six, Bob Levitt Jr., and Little Ethel moved to
26 Sunset Drive in the prosperous, exclusive Cherry Hills suburb less than
eight miles from Denver. Their 5.8-acre lot quickly earned the nickname "Six
Acres" from Little Ethel. Their home cost seventy-nine thousand dollars, a
price publicized with puzzling frequency, and it had been built in 1927 in
the Tudor style. It was massive-Levitt Jr. compares it more to a castle than
a home, replete with a dungeon-basement. Its twenty-eight rooms included
eleven bathrooms; its floor plan included two two-story wings, in between
which was a large midsection that served as a living room and area for entertaining. The area featured a large fireplace and was topped off with a
vaulted, wood-beamed ceiling, and adorning the house in general was plenty
of hand-carved oak and stone. Ethel, along with decorator Ed Stanton, had
the beige walls painted turquoise, crimson, and white and covered one of the
living room windows in a bright floral print. There was a large, twelve-foot
couch and, scattered around the home, five television sets. Ethel combined
her small art collection of Renoirs and Monets with Six's.

Along with the Merman-Levitt family came the dreaded Miss Kopeman,
the black poodle, Midnight, and Little Ethel's menagerie of small animals,
including Uncle Ned and other birds, whose feathers were the worse for wear
after the trip. The family was unable to move in right away, awaiting approval
by the Cherry Hills Land Association, whose dozen members controlled the
area's utility, water, and road facilities-and controlled the kinds of people
who could "buy into" the elitist enclave.? On the list of undesirables were
Jews, and the moment that the last name of Ethel's children came up, the association balked, and, as Bob Jr. says, "the grown-ups had to figure some way
around the `no, No Jews' problem."' While appeals were made, the family
lived in a nearby rented property that Ethel dubbed "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to
the press because of the proprietor's name.9 If, in the early to mid-'30s, Merman's public persona was bathed in a relaxed, even playful ethnic mix in the
musical styles and performance of the time, now the realities of racist America, on whose values communities like Cherry Hills were founded, were anything but relaxed or playful.

The newlyweds kept their financial matters separate, just as Ethel had
done with Levitt. Monthly bills were totaled up and divided between them,
with Ethel paying for the children's expenses. On this front, Ethel had met
her match with Six, who counted pennies every bit as much as she did. Both
were prosperous businesspeople who had acquired their wealth through their
own hard work, and both guarded their fortunes carefully. In all probability,
Ethel was constitutionally incapable of merging finances, but her painfully
scrupulous arrangement with Six would prove to be a sore spot and source
of bitterness to come, emerging in her final autobiography in petty tales
about her third husband's cheapness.

For the moment, however, everything was great. The Sixes threw a
housewarming cocktail party on December it, 1953. Ethel enjoyed the clear
Colorado sky and the fresh start she had with a new home, a new husband,
and, she hoped, a new career before the cameras. She made appearances at
local events, posing with Colorado business leaders and politicians with a
sharpshooting rifle, ever Annie Oakley, hosting parties-which she did not do in New York-and attending events with Six's business associates and
community leaders, who were delighted to have a Broadway legend in their
midst.

To the world she was now Mrs. Robert F. Six, not Miss Ethel Merman.
("Call Me Mrs. Six," ran interview titles.) This seemed the role to play for
Six as well as for herself; at any rate, Merman fueled that perspective in interviews. And Bob Six's biographer, who didn't interview her, wrote that
Ethel now "played ping pong with the children, cooked her husband's favorite dishes, and got involved in Six's considerable activities on behalf
of the Boy Scouts.... She did her own shopping at a nearby supermarket, learned to garden and got to enjoy hunting and fishing in the
mountains-or claimed she did."" Six Acres had given Ethel the opportunity to play a traditional wife who, within limits, was eager to please and
let the man be the boss. She was still a woman of no small fortune, however, and so many standard domestic duties were passed along to others,
and by this point, Ethel was making few public claims of being able to
cook, as publicists had claimed in the 193os.11 Ethel never took to hunting or fishing, and her son says she never even played ping-pong with the
kids. Still, Ethel thrilled to the idea of playing mom and publicly reveled
in the pleasure the family's new environs brought to her children, Little
Ethel in particular.

Bob Levitt Jr. calls life in the Colorado outdoors "the biggest liberation"
he could have had as a boy, and, after a year and a half, Koppi went back to
Germany! It seemed a delirious freedom for the young boy. "Denver gave us
an escape into nature. At Six Acres, I could ride my bike wherever I wanted;
there was Little League, A&W. It was a regular American life-except our
house was a castle," a castle filled with proscription and prejudice. is Bobby's
first good friend there was a Mexican boy, the son of their neighbor's chauffeur, and when the two boys were told they could no longer play together,
the class and racial prejudices of the community hit home with weighted
force. Many of Bobby's friends had been from tract homes in Hampton Hills,
another part of town, he remembers, along with the community's rigid pecking order, which was absorbed by the children, who singled out kids from
farms for the worst ridicule and abuse.

Such distasteful prejudices and violence informed the family's life there,
even in Bobby's joyous "escape into nature." Although his stepfather never
taught the boy to hunt, Six gave the young boy a number of guns, and Bobby
would go outside on his own, in his words, to "kill helpless creatures [squirrels, rabbits, birds, other small prey] wantonly and indiscriminately."13 It may have been freedom, but it was chaotic and unguided, filled with ruthless violence. Needless to say, the United Nations of Animals dissolved.

Little Bob and Ethel were still united against the tyranny of the adults
around them, but they played separately more, with their respective groups
of friends from school. Young Ethel was still passionate in her love for animals and was not favorably impressed by her stepfather's enthusiasm for
hunting or for jumbo's elaborate collection of animal heads and trophies.
Bob recalls a party she threw with some of her high school friends, and one
of them put a cigarette in the mouth of a huge swordfish, stuffed and
mounted with lifeless glass eyes on the wall. Her stepfather, unsurprisingly,
hit the roof. "Messing with jumbo's trophies was a sneaky hand's way of disrespecting the Big Man himself, behind his back, and that cost Ethel the right
to have any more parties ... Jumbo [the brother and sister's secret nickname
for their stepfather] ran a tight, no slack ship when it came to `respect and
disrespect.' 1114 Little Ethel took an almost instinctive dislike to their new
stepfather and never got along with him. From the start, Bob Six did nothing to foster any closeness or relationship with his wife's children, who were
never invited to call him Dad and, in fact, were instructed instead to address
him as "Mr. Robert."

So although Koppi's departure and the Colorado wilderness were giving
the children some newfound freedom, their domestic environment was not.
The castle crackled under the repressive hand of Six, who tried to coerce the
children's respect rather than earn it. To Bob, Six's parenting skills were little
more than bullying, and he experienced the authoritative man as a "hyp-
ocrite."15 The name "Jumbo" had absolutely none of the love that infused
"Big" or "Big Bob," their endearing names for their own father, Bob Levitt.
Quite the opposite. "The many small and wonderful, early childhood meanings of him trump the size-oriented meaning of. . . `big.' The opposite was
true of Mr. Robert. His large size, his large meanness, and his large negative
impact on our hearts were, all together, the truth within our secret naming
of him. Saying the name Jumbo, for my sister and I, was something akin to
the way victims in his namesake movies say the name 'Dracula.' 1116

Worse, Mom was taking Mr. Robert's side. To ensure that Little Ethel and
Bobby heeded their new stepfather's authority, Ethel would scare them with
"Remember what happened to the last stepchildren-only the nurse made it out
alive." 17 Today he calls those words an "advisory condemnation" that contributed to the sense of the big man's threat and violence saturating their home. 18
In time, Bob's mom gave a sexual dimension to the story, making it even more
strangely ominous to the young boy. When she thought he was old enough a little later, Ethel told Bobby that at the time of the incident, Six was "boffing the
nurse," assuming her son would understand what that meant. He didn't.

I had zero information about birds, bees, sex, reproduction, procreation....
Boffing, then, was just whatever Mr. Robert and the nurse were doing instead
of saving those children, and whatever it was, it was bad, because I knew very
well what burning up in a fire would be like, and I knew what nurses and stepfathers should be doing in such circumstances; they should be doing the same
as firemen do, not boffing, whatever that was, and not running out of the
house without the children, no matter what.l9

On the surface, the family's routines weren't so different from ones they'd
had in New York. Little Ethel and Bobby took their meals early, apart from
the grownups, in the little dining room, at the kitchen countertop, or in front
of the TV. Big Ethel and Six ate later, around 7:30 or 8:oo, by themselves in
the bedrooms with trays, or they would go out. On Sundays, the main meal was
taken enfamille, and Six would grill one of his famous steaks or hamburgers.
("He and mom ate a lot of meat, like a lot of people did at the time," recalls
Bob.)" The children were carefully instructed to compliment Six's barbecuing. Whenever protests were registered, horrific scenes ensued, and so not
wanting to cause trouble, Little Ethel and Bobby participated in the ritual
while holding their tongues about jumbo and his meals.

In February 1954, the family took a vacation to Hawaii, where they stayed
at the home of Charles Boetticher. A local journalist arrived to take pictures
of the newly arrived star and her family and described the entourage. First,
he said, a housekeeper came to the door and told him to wait; then Bobby
emerged. "He had an airplane on a string and he was swinging it around his
head to make it fly," wrote the journalist. "He seemed like a normal, reasonably ornery sort of kid." After Bobby, Bob Six emerged,

wearing shorts.... I got the impression the picture-taking idea was his wife's
idea and he was still sort of confused by the whole thing.... He kept telling
us to wait till she got there and then decide what to shoot.... Ethel Merman
came out of her house with her eleven year old daughter Ethel. They were both
wearing shorts. Miss Merman-or Mrs. Six-also had on a bright red blouse
and earrings that look like Chinese gongs. I tried to decide how to describe her.
What she looked like. I finally decided she looked like a tourist.

He took pictures of the "tourist" family, and of the boxer, fox terrier, cat, and
other pets surrounding them. "Mr. Six said they came with the house. Bobbie [sic] immediately corrected him. `[The fox terrier] and [the cat],' he said, 'belong to the maid's daughter.' 1121

Family life was documented again by the press in September 1954, when
Edward R. Murrow televised one of his live half-hour Person to Person TV
shows on CBS. The shooting preparations included a sixty-foot scaffold to
enable transmitting the broadcast signal from Denver to New York, and
mikes were placed throughout the house and on each of the family members.
Everything was carefully staged in advance: audiences watched Bob Six barbecuing in a scene that prompted fans to write to question whether such
large, succulent steaks were authentic. At another point Murrow was talking
with Ethel about her latest album when, with her arm around Bobby, she
spontaneously sang a few bars of "Boy o' Mine." But it was another moment
that left its deepest impression on the underparented boy. Somehow, Levitt
recalls, Murrow had heard about an owl that he had killed, and Murrow broke
from the careful script to "bust" the young boy-"saying, `No, you mustn't
do that, son,' and there it was-suddenly and totally by surprise-a crystalclear, nationally televised boundary put up in a place where I was crazy, running wild, shooting owls out of trees." 22 It took an off-site national broadcaster to give the boy desperately needed and yearned-for paternal guidance.

Overall, the picture of the Six family broadcast into American living
rooms was one of domestic bliss, despite the tensions running wild under the
surface. Six, for his part, didn't even enjoy interviews, regardless of his outgoing personality, though he appreciated the attention they gave Continental. Ethel, more accustomed to performances, was unfazed by such events,
considering them part of her professional duties. In fictional formats, she
even continued to send up the idea of domestic bliss, just as she had twenty
years earlier in We're Not Dressing, singing "Let's Play House!" For a magazine, she wrote "Why I Would Like to Send Men to the Moon," hamming
up cliched frustrations of married life. In a TV appearance on The Frank
Sinatra Show in 1958, she and Sinatra, who had just been paired in a shortened TV version of Anything Goes, depict a married couple caught unawares
by a television camera doing an "at home with" interview a la Murrow. The
couple they portray had been up late the night before partying, the debris of
which is in evidence everywhere. The show was filled with inside jokes. When
the unseen announcer asks Ethel of her decor, "Is that a Picasso?" she responds, "No, it's a painting. You see, you can always tell from the frame
around them."