Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (53 page)

But Merman's situation with her husband was far from extraordinary, and,
like the majority of abused women of the time, she kept the experience a secret. Bob Six was a powerful public figure, and many outsiders perceived his
authority and influence as bigger than life and something to be admired.
(One woman who scarcely knew Merman tried to convince me that by marrying him, Ethel "made it into big society. He gave her class.") And even Six's biographer believes that Six, whose hot temper he notes, could never have
been capable of physical and emotional violence. For Levitt, the many
strands of violence that Robert Six came to represent for him as a boy were
reinforced along other lines, in and outside their home in Cherry Hills:

The impact on us from the relentless family violence of military industrialist
Bob Six was our personal share of his larger impact on American families and
the people of Vietnam. Way back then, the men who orchestrated and profited from the Vietnam War were not known to my sister and I as the "patriarchs" who create and control a "military industrial complex" through waging war. We knew nothing of such complexities. But we knew very well that
"Jumbo" Six and all the men like him were the kind of men who hurt people.
From our children's perspective, jumbo and his pals were fake on the outside
and mean on the inside. We didn't know what to call it, and we certainly didn't
know what to do about it. And neither, it seemed, did Mom 43

Ethel was ill-inclined to report him; this was not a historical moment where
women were encouraged to make abusive marriages public. Before the
women's movement, before women's shelters, there were very few social and
institutional supports for women in Ethel's predicament, and spousal abuse
had not yet entered the public eye as an epidemic or even a legitimate problem. And, as the lesson of Rosie the Riveter was instructing Americans, a wife
in this postwar era should cede her economic and psychological autonomy
to her husband (never mind working-class women who never had the choice
of returning to unpaid work in the home). A man's status as breadwinner and
king of the castle was, it seemed, irrefutable. And Six Acres did not seem like
the sort of castle where challenges could be played out.

"Mom suffered male violence and covered it with a veneer appropriate to
her class," says Bob Levitt today. Lower-income women may have had no
choice but to show up to work in sunglasses and tell tales of falling down
steps, but as a celebrity, Ethel selected the response pervasive to those in the
upper class: saying nothing. Given her upbringing, the historical times, her
gender, and her celebrity, it would have been most difficult for Ethel, cautious and private to begin with, to break with the tide and publicize her domestic problems.

Although her silence may have enabled her to feel like she was protected,
it was a form of complicity that did nothing to dispel the toxic atmosphere of
the Six-Merman household. "Mom gave her collusion its own special spin,"
Bob reflects. "'Just remember [what happened to Six's last stepchildren]' was just one example."44 Despite the violence she and her family would experience
in years to come, the abuse from Six was one thing Ethel never, ever discussed.
"Mom referred to his stewardesses as his `hookers'; she would be public about
Six's sexual and economic abuse, but not his violence," says Bob.45

Even among those who knew her well, Ethel kept Six's emotional violence
and threatening behavior to herself. Her parents had had firsthand experience
with his temper, but Ethel obviously couldn't discuss her situation with them
and restricted her confidences to the most discreet and trusted of her friends.
Within that very small circle was Roger Edens. Now at MGM's prestigious
Freed unit, where he'd helped develop the career of Judy Garland, Edens was
but a phone call away. After the attack on Pop, Bob recalls, Ethel called Edens
from Denver to tell him what happened, asking for advice, asking him not
to tell anyone. And so things stayed in the family.

While class and celebrity informed Merman's silence, other postwar
changes made it easy for Ethel and Six to hide their secret of family violence
from view. Americans were leaving rural and urban areas in favor of suburbs,
which held the lure of calm, atomized living, in self-sufficient family homes.
The layout of these new suburbs reduced, if not out-and-out discouraged,
casual contact with others, and there was a physical sense in which
experiences-from the trivial to the life-threatening-could not be easily
shared. This contrasts sharply to the kind of neighborhood in which Ethel
had grown up, where residents mingled freely out of doors.

This is not to say that old neighborhoods had vanished; plenty of families still relaxed on city stoops, gossiping or keeping neighbors up to date
in informal community. And clearly, the wealthier the neighborhood-like
Cherry Hills-the greater the insulation. But what was changing was the
mass public's idea of the "ideal" neighborhood; the suburban family-untoitself now prevailed in the middle-class imagination and in mass culture
images. It was hard to imagine a daughter's big voice heard singing
throughout the neighborhood anymore. For the Levitt-Six family and others, this meant that experiences of violence could be sequestered behind
family walls and walls of psychological shame. Moreover, few structures
were in place to help expose Six's abuse, and Ethel was so much a product
of her time that over a decade later, when the women's movement emerged
(with its slogan "the personal is political") and domestic abuse entered the
public arena-along with women's shelters and protective legislation-she
would refuse to identify with "women's libbers." Curiously, as Tony Cointreau points out, Merman did not tolerate the abusive partners or marriages
of her friends.46

Ethel's attitude emerged against the backdrop of the 1950s, a contradictory, even schizophrenic, decade as far as women were concerned. These were
the sexually charged years of Playboy magazine, the aftershock of the Kinsey
Report, of mammary madness and icons like Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, and Jane Russell; it was also the time of "professional virgins" like Doris
Day and Sandra Dee and of white wives without professional careers who
maintained sanitized families on TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave
It to Beaver. Moms seemed to reign supreme. Popular press, magazines, news
and medical reports all vaunted the values of domestic motherhood.

Yet this was also the period of "Momism," the invention of pop psychologist Philip Wylie, who argued that the moral fiber of American life was
being eroded because the role of mothers in psychological, social, and practical matters had become too large and too influential. America, he maintained, had become obsessively subservient to a domestic function (and a sex)
that had been wrongfully elevated: for him, even the country's obsession with
large breasts was a sign of mommy pandering. Were it not such a hateful diatribe, his misogyny would be almost comic.

Eccentric though he was, Wylie had his pulse on a simmering resentment
of women and mothers that would shape the way Ethel Merman would be
understood. Although that sentiment would culminate with Gypsy, it is evident earlier, particularly in the growing scrutiny with which she was assessed
in the '5os, both as a real mother and as a performer who depicted one.

Ethel's next movie project with Fox studio was the gala There's No Business
Like Show Business, a widescreen color musical with a six-million-dollar budget and big-name costars: Marilyn Monroe, Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor,
Mitzi Gaynor, and Johnnie Ray. Like Alexander's Ragtime Band, There's No
Business Like Show Business was planned as a vehicle to showcase Irving
Berlin's songs, lavishing attention on the movie's spectacle value and placing
story and characters at the service of the numbers rather than the other way
around.

There's No Business Like Show Business was Ethel's first of a two-picture
deal; the second was an unspecified follow-up. Buoyed by the experience of
Call Me Madam, she entered negotiations making tough demands, with her
attorneys writing Lew Schreiber, Fox's legal counsel, to say that Merman's
name must be positioned as "first costar" and that the type would be the same
size as Berlin's, whose name was part of the official U.S. release title: Irving
Berlin's There's No Business Like Show Business.

The sealing of the deal ended up becoming a family affair, with Pop notarizing the final contract between his daughter and the studio, dropping an
n as the notary Edward Zimmerman, just as his daughter had in "Merman."
Down the road, Bob Six would throw his weight around when the contracts
had to be redrawn, demanding that his wife receive an official letter concerning changes, "Otherwise, she will submit a bill ... for the expense and
loss taken due to Twentieth's postponement of the picture."' Merman knew
how to protect herself; says Eddie Cantor, "Ethel is one of the shrewdest gals
in show business. She can see the small print in a contract from twenty
paces." 2 Some of her concerns revolved around the fact that she was not
carrying the show and would be sharing the spotlight and billing with four
other "leads," of whom Marilyn Monroe was a particular concern.

Ethel's remuneration for There's No Business Like Show Business was
$13o,ooo, a high figure for someone with her less-than-"boffo" box office
record. She insisted on being paid at a rate of a thousand dollars a week beginning March 8, during preproduction and rehearsals, rather than July 6,
when actual shooting began, and even though this deviated from standard
procedure, Fox agreed. She also insisted that the studio pay for her shoes,
even for those in scenes taking place in "modern settings," when actors usually provided their own. And, Ethel notified the studio, "I would like a
clause inserted as I contemplate an Ethel Merman enterprise from promotion of certain products under an Ethel Merman label or sticker. I do not
anticipate conflict, but believe 2oth Century Fox should be notified of
this."3 In addition to Six, Ethel had her LA attorney Bob Coryell and her
agent, George Rosenberg, working on her behalf. It was during this time
that Irving Katz joined Ethel as her New York attorney and later would become her financial adviser. Their association continued for the rest of her
life.

The Story and Its Production

The story of There's No Business Like Show Business follows an old vaudeville
family who in treatments were called the Monahans; once shooting began,
they became the Donahues. Molly (Merman) and Terry (Dan Dailey) meet,
marry, and within quick succession have three children-Steve, Katy, and
Tim-who join their act, "The Five Donahues." The movie conveys this information economically in a near-continuous scene on a vaudeville stage with
placards announcing "The Three Donahues," "The Four Donahues," "The
Five Donahues," giving truncated performances of numbers, such as Berlin's
1912 "When That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam'."

Present tense, Depression America. Vaudeville falls on hard times, and so
do the Donahues. They split up their act to get by and are plagued by internal tensions. Tim (Donald O'Connor) is smitten with hatcheck girl and aspiring singer Vicky (Monroe), whom he helps out by handing over "Heat
Wave," the featured number of his mother and his family. Molly resents the
young, ambitious woman, believing she is not only stealing their hit but also
her son. Meanwhile, two of the young Donahues, Tim and Katy, splinter off
into their own group and eventually perform onstage with Vicky in New
York.