Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (52 page)

Ethel continued to paint her family life in bright colors. When the New
York World Telegram asked her, "Would You Marry Your Mate-If You Had Another Chance?" Ethel replied, "Which one? I've been married three times.
My only regret is I did not marry my present husband, Robert Six, first. I feel
I wasn't married until I married Bob."23

Autobiography I: The Dame She Was

In 1954, Merman published her life story, "That's the Kind of Dame I Am,"
in four installments in the Saturday Evening Post. They were actually written
by Pete Martin, a Post writer who had ghosted autobiographies for Bing
Crosby, Bob Hope, and other film stars. The Post's Merman series was illustrated with personal and professional photographs of Ethel and her family
and written in the brassy language and with the gusto people had come to
expect of her: "I've sung some hard-boiled songs in my life and I've acted
some hard-boiled roles, but I'm a soft-boiled gal."24

The Saturday Evening Post was a popular weekly whose wide circulation
enabled it to find its way into middle-class and suburban homes all across the
country. Most readers were likely to have known Ethel as a name, a voice, a
celebrity image that they experienced through TV, radio, or recordings and
not as a musical star experienced firsthand. Publishing the memoirs in the
Post gave her a chance of exposure far beyond New York and might also help
boost her film career too.

The month-long series of articles was excerpted from a book published by
Doubleday in 1955, Who Could Ask for Anything More? (in the United Kingdom, Don't Call Me Madam). The less bawdy American title reconnected her
to the Gershwin song crucial to securing her fame; it also gave an indication
of how Ethel wanted her professional achievements-and present domestic
life-perceived. Who could ask for anything more? This may well have been
how she was wanting to view life at that point: there was much to be grateful for, even if the book's dreamy depictions of Six had little to do with the
realities of living with him.

Pete Martin based Who CouldAsk forAnythingMore? on taped interviews
conducted with Merman, her family, friends, and associates. ("If Pete Martin hasn't interviewed you yet about Ethel Merman you're the only one he's
missed," ran the Hollywood Reporter at one point.)25 Ethel gave him access to
photographs from her own collection, and his task was made even easier by
the copious materials she and Pop had kept in the scrapbooks over the years,
clippings that enabled Ethel, the book's narrator, to cite reviews, lines, and
articles as if from memory.

With these materials in hand, Martin had the task of transforming remarks that Ethel's colleagues and reviewers had made about her into her own,
first-person voice. Typical are lines like "There's a belief in some quarters that
I am one of the symbols of Broadway"; and "Then I love something Buddy
DeSylva said: `Watching Merman in a show after she's got her lines and her
songs and her stage business all set is like watching a movie after it's been
filmed and edited. After that, no matter how many times you see it and hear
it, it's always the same"'; and "Irving Berlin once said, `If you write lyrics for
Ethel, they better be good, for if they're bad everybody's going to hear them
anyhow.' And Cole Porter said I sound like a band going by.""6

Unfortunately, the net effect of this created a sense of name-dropping that
put off more than a few reviewers, who concluded that the book's "author"
was self-aggrandizing and self-absorbed: "After Ethel's book, printers must be
about out of personal pronouns." 27 "It is difficult to believe that Ethel Merman, as dynamic a stage personality as Broadway has ever produced, could
possibly be the dull-witted, tiresome egotist offstage that this book makes her
appear to be.... Add to it the inclusion, in quotes, of almost every bouquet
that has been thrown her way in the last zs years and one comes up with the
sum total of what is to be found in this book."28 Thick-skinned and thorough, Ethel kept even those reviews.

To interviewees, Pete Martin often presented himself as a writer with a
problem on his hands: people weren't responding enough to help him out.
To the estranged Bob Levitt, he complained that his interview with Ethel's
old friend Josie Traeger for information on her youth was a waste of time; to
Lew Kessler he said, "Cole was a great disappointment"; and to everyone, he
agonized over how to represent Ethel's fallout with Al Siegel, about which
Ethel consistently remained mum. And he was especially surprised to find
Ethel less forthcoming than he had hoped. "I can't get anything out of this
girl; other people, like Bob Hope, just need a prompt, but you can't get her
to say anything. It's not like she's uncooperative, she's.... but she just
doesn't seem to like to talk about herself."29 Martin might not have realized it, but his remark was on the mark: Ethel Merman was uncomfortable
boasting.

Reviewers responded with the predictable stream of adjectives: lusty, uninhibited brash. Some found the book rambling and disjointed; others found
it refreshing. Responses were similarly mixed about Ethel's apparent lack of
modesty-some admiring it, others finding it boorish-and that strange mix
of attitudes appears even in the same review: "Miss Merman ain't my type of
woman; she scares me. [But her book] is well worth reading." 30

Despite its "Mermanesque" style, the voice in Who CouldAskjor Anything
More? was not at all Ethel's voice but Pete Martin's rendering of what he
thought "Ethel Merman" should sound like: "I'm a dame who can take a
naughty situation and make it seem as plain and natural as bread and butter.
At least, I've been told that I can. "31 His autobiographies of Crosby and Hope
had been written in styles appropriate to them and their public personae:
Crosby's was breezy, whereas Hope's was clipped and filled with one-liners.

The process of Mermanization is clear in changes Martin made to the
transcripts of his interviews. It's in the final book that Ethel says of her success, "The way it worked out, I made Cinderella look like a sob story. My role
in Girl Crazy, when I became a success, was handed to me on a silver platter.
After that, I went into George White's Scandals and Take a Chance, and both
of them helped me. So the way I figure it, Cindy's tale is a downbeat one
compared to mine."32 Here is how the actual interview went:

This is also where Ethel identifies The Little Russia as her first singing gig
(whereas she had told Martin that it was Keens English Chop House) and
where she claims to like bows, frilly accessories, and so forth. The change produced the Ethel Merman that the public expected. Observed Broadway
columnist Danton Walker, "La Merman's talk is as brassy as her voice, but I
suspect the language is more [Pete] Martin than Merman (I've known Ethel
a long, long time, and I never heard her talk like that)."34

It would be wrong, however, to say that Ethel was not complicit, for not
only did she sign off on Martin's final work, but she also made corrections to
promotional copy. "This is the story of Ethel Merman and her fabulous success on Broadway and Hollywood; as a personality in show business, and as
a singer known the world over for her interruption of song." Merman corrected the typo on the document, crossing out "interruption" and inserting
"interpretation." Then she added "and trumpet-like delivery" to the line,
showing her awareness of what people expected of the "Merman voice."35

Doubleday promoted the book well, and Ethel energetically attended
signings and other publicity events. A reviewer at one of the Doubleday parties expressed surprise to find a star "so courteous and considerate that she
smiled and chatted with everyone who came up to her.... she has the rare quality of making each person feel she is particularly pleased to be talking
to him."36

In Transition

Now that Ethel was quasi-retired from Broadway, her value as a news item
began to diminish. Stories about her were being pushed into smaller corners
of the page, in paragraphs that were farther down in articles like "Would You
Marry Your Mate?" in which Ethel is among a long list of celebrities asked
this question but, unlike the others, gets no photo and only a few lines. After
all, Ethel was a theatrical star no longer working on the boards, a transplant
in the West who wanted to make it in newer media and who, moreover,
seemed as resistant to changing her style of performing as they were to accommodating it. Her hopes remained characteristically high, though, and
her new situation gave her opportunities to travel, which she was now enjoying more. Freed from the grueling schedule of a long-run show, Ethel was
pursuing career opportunities as they became available, along with the hope
of achieving a seemingly normal family life. Whenever business took her or
Six to New York, they stayed at the seven-room apartment they maintained
at the Park Lane Hotel, then still on Park Avenue.

"Undoubtedly, Six was happy in those early years with his vivacious wife,"
says biographer Robert Serling,37 and Ethel radiated contentment to her
friends as well. Said Dorothy Fields: "I think she's really happy for the first
time in her life.... He's really crazy about her, [and] she's mad about him....
he's not a wise guy like Bob [Levitt], and he isn't a dope like poor Bill Smith.
[He's a] nice, big, easy-going guy, not too bright, but sweet and wonderful
with her. And he makes her feel young and he makes her feel beautiful....
She's never looked so well, so thin and so young."38

After two or three years, however, cracks became apparent, at least to some
people who knew the couple in Denver. A friend of Six claimed that Ethel
was critical of some of his closest colleagues at work, all of whom he'd personally appointed, and that he didn't take kindly to having his judgment impugned. As for Six, he didn't like it when Ethel's own work took her out of
town. "Six," writes Serling, "was a brooder capable of immense loneliness,
need[ing] almost constant companionship as he grew older."39 Business required him to travel a fair amount of time, even more than it did for Ethel,
and this began to wear on her. As his trips became more and more prolonged,
she began to grow suspicious. "Mom grew to believe that Six was using her, for her name, her money, and her connections to famous people and politicians that would be useful to his business."40 Although Six's finances, including significant oil property investments, never really suffered during their
marriage, some of Continental's worst years coincided with their years together. Whether this added to the tensions is hard to say, but it didn't stop
Six from his constant search for ways to expand, increase profitability, and
test new opportunities. For him, those things came first.

In that regard, Bob Six and Ethel could not have been more different. According to Bob Levitt Jr., Ethel may not have been the best mother in terms
of her choices or her behavior, but she was devoted in her heart, just as she
always was to her own parents. One summer, he recalls, Ethel's mom and Pop
came out to visit, a welcome treat for Bobby and his sister, who were craving
adult attention that was given to them at their own level. "Pop was the only
grown-up who played with me there. He was kind of old, but he'd throw a
baseball and we'd play catch."" During this visit, though, the violence that
infused Six Acres erupted and showed the family members' terrorized powerlessness to it. Levitt, a young boy, watched helplessly as Gram and Pop,
both in their seventies, were brutally battered by the six-foot-four-inch Bob
Six. He beat them "in the library, downstairs on the ground floor of our
house, in front of my mother, while I stood still on the balcony above, listening, trembling, and clutching a baseball bat that I didn't have the courage
to use." The next morning, he recalls "all of us pressed into silence by the
weight of big trouble, all of us pretending that [the] bruises were invisible" at
the family's breakfast counter.42

In another instance, an inflamed Bob Six pulled a loaded .45 Colt on his
wife, ramming it into her belly. Merman screamed at him, "Go ahead and
shoot! You don't have the nerve. You'll end up in the papers." Years later,
Ethel told her son that she knew Six didn't dare, if only to protect himself
against the bad publicity it would give him and his airlines. As awful as it is
to imagine Ethel Merman (or anyone) thrown into a chair with a husband
holding a gun to her, Ethel's defiant response upholds what many consider
to be the quintessential Merman, giving a defiant dare in extraordinary circumstances.