Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (62 page)

Sondheim was understandably chaffed by the decision to give him the job
of lyricist at a time when he wanted to develop his career as a composer. Taking on Gypsy would mean interrupting A Funny Thing Happened on the Way
to the Forum, which wouldn't debut until 1962. "The worst thing about being
a lyricist is that everyone else is in rehearsal, whereas you are back at the hotel,
trying to fix those two terrible lines."10 Sondheim asked his mentor Oscar
Hammerstein what to do, and Hammerstein advised him to take the job,
that the experience would be worth it. Instead of writing Madame Rose,
Hammerstein told him, you write for Madame Rose as played by Ethel Merman: "It's not so much that you tailor the material, but you hear the voice in
your head whether you want to or not."11 On signing, Sondheim was compensated in part by receiving a larger percentage for the lyrics than was standardly given: "My guess is that I had two and a quarter, going to two and a
half once the show made a profit. I don't remember what shows grossed in
those days, but let's say it was $ioo,ooo. That amounts to $2500 a week, or
$2250. That was a lot of money for those days, when theater tickets cost four
dollars and ninety cents.""

Laurents, meanwhile, was working on the book and checking in with
Gypsy Rose Lee from time to time to verify the accuracy of events and characters. Every time, he says, she'd give him different accounts, different lines
and details, and was clearly much more focused on a good tale than on historical fidelity. For example, when he invented the character of Herbie, she
said, "I wish I'd thought of him for my autobiography!"13 Laurents quickly
realized that he had carte blanche; all that Lee insisted on was retaining Gypsy
as the title.

With sister June Havoc, however, things were not so simple. Havoc was
understandably peeved with the unflattering and dismissive treatment her character received in her sister's account; and it was not much better in the
final show, which urges audiences to pull for Louise from the very start. Later,
when June runs off to elope, it's as if she's fallen off a cliff; audiences would
have no way of knowing that "Baby June" turned into a successful musical
star in her own right. Producers worked overtime to deal with Havoc, although correspondence shows that they were prepared to proceed even if she
refused to sign the release. Havoc went through Laurents's book, and for the
most part he agreed to her changes. (He refused to accommodate her request
to say that she was thirteen when she left the show, however.) Just to hedge
his bets, Merrick decided to change her character's name from June to Claire
at one point, a decision Dorothy Kilgallen reports as having been made at
Havoc's insistence.14

Ethel Prepares

Ethel's desire to widen her range as an actress was no secret in New York, and
gossipers wrote that Ethel had said to Gypsy Rose Lee, "I've read your book.
I love it. I want to do it. I'm going to do it. And I'll shoot anyone else who
gets the part.1115 (This anecdote, likely apocryphal, already has Merman
channeling Rose's bulldozing determination.) The pleasant and rewarding
working experiences Ethel enjoyed with Hayward ("My favorite producer,"
she inscribed a copy of one of her plays to him) made her decision to sign on
very easy. "She's the easiest person in the world to get along with so long as
you tell her the truth," Hayward told the press. "You must never stall her. If
you kid her, you're dead. Of course, like any one else, if Ethel is unhappy,
she's very difficult." Of the role itself, he said, "I told her that if she played
the part she couldn't go back to other types of roles, but she laughed, and
asked me who was kidding whom? She knows she is no longer a romantic
leading lady." 16

Laurents recalls his first sit-down with Merman late one afternoon at
Sardi's: "'Rose is a monster,' I told her. `How far are you willing to go?' 'I'll
do anything you want me to,' she said." 17 Ethel told the same story in interviews at the time, that she was in fact willing to do as much as it took, accurately predicting that Gypsy would show off her acting skills as nothing had
before. Laurents was privately skeptical, however, about her talents as an actress, especially a dramatic one. He later said that, to him, Ethel Merman was
"a voice, a presence, and a strut, not an actress." 18 In public, Laurents treated
Merman with respectful care. "Knowing that she went along with my ideas was tremendously helpful in writing the book," he told an interviewer. "I
have more admiration for her than any actress I've ever worked with. She is
very professional and a terribly nice woman. She doesn't equivocate, and
that's what wins over sympathies of audiences."i9

Merman had personal reasons to long for the part. She was eager to put
the unpleasantness and poor performance of Happy Hunting behind her, and
what better way than a powerhouse of a new show? Even more important,
though, was getting past the experience with Six, the man for whom she had
left New York and for whom she had, in a sense, left Ethel Merman. She had
been used, financially and socially, cheated on, and there had been Six's appalling physical and emotional abuses. It had taken awhile, but she was now
prepared to declare the marriage a loss and move on. Says her son,

One of the ways I see that period is as Mom taking back her power that Bob
Six had tried to contain and control in our castle at Six Acres. Gypsy brought
Ethel back to her own world where she was a queen and though Bob Six tried
his best to play the king in her realm, by that time Mom was painfully immersed in her reality that whatever kind of kingly husband she'd hoped Bob
Six would turn out to be-he wasn't doin' so good, to say the least.... Once
Gypsy started happening, from the get-go Mom was back on top and "Jumbo"
had gotten shrunk to number two.20

Merman first announced that she was working on Gypsy on the November i1,1958, Eddie Fisher Show.21 Rehearsals began early next March. By then,
Robbins had already been working for nearly a month with dancers and set
designer Jo Mielziner and was going "slightly cuh-razy, trying to cast three
June Havocs and three Gypsy Rose Lees because Laurents's book calls for
them to appear at three different stages of their lives."22 The role of the adult
Gypsy came down to two young actresses, Sandra Church and Suzanne
Pleshette. "Suzanne was perfect for the second act because she could be a
strong, sexual, fearless woman. But the first act called for an asexual, yearning, timid girl: that was Sandra."23 So twenty-four-year-old Sandra Church
got the part. Baby June and Baby Louise were played by Jacqueline Mayro
and Karen Moore, respectively.

Casting Herbie took awhile. The producers approached stars like Robert
Alda before finally turning to Jack Klugman, a nonsinger known mostly for
his turn in 12 Angry Men (1957) and for TV appearances, including a small
part in Kiss Me Kate. Klugman's greener status and relaxed, everyman persona
made him a perfect match for the hard-to-partner icon. Tony Randall recalled what his future costar on The Odd Couple told him about working
with Merman. Jack didn't know his way around Broadway musicals, and
Ethel "introduced" him by singing a number of songs from her shows for
him, giving him a history lesson all alone in the theater. It was a generous side
he didn't see at first. "I was certainly aware of her fearsome reputation," Jugman recalled about the early days. "And so I kept my distance. I'd call her
Miss Merman." Then, one day, she said, "What's this Miss Merman stuff?"
and he said, "I don't want to be disrespectful, you're the star." Merman:
"Have I ever acted the star with you?" Soon she'd taken him in as a confidant,
and Klugman became close to her family as well. She even dropped the discretion performers usually maintain when discussing their preferred colleagues, telling reporters long after the show had closed that lack Klugman
was her favorite costar.24

A solid dramatic actor, Klugman did not have the panache of a romantic
leading man and also lacked Merman's commanding stage presence. In a way,
those differences, coupled with his distinctive, nonsinging voice, gave a real
pathos to their stage relationship, but at the same time, as Laurents notes,
casting Klugman as Herbie removed what he called their "very sexual sub-
text,"25 although traces of it remain in "You'll Never Get Away from Me."
Klugman, moreover, was fourteen years younger than Ethel, so theirs was a
less credible romantic relationship that way. And, more important, the RoseHerbie relationship has only a supporting role in Gypsy's story, whose real
pathos depends on the mother-daughter pairing.

Klugman brought out Ethel's affectionate, generous side, and she was
able to boost his confidence about his role and his singing, even though
he'd been ready to throw in the towel: "I just wasn't very good. I was totally humiliated [at the audition] .... Jerry asked me to sing `Small World'
with her and I warned them, `If she belts it, I'm going to walk right out!'
Well, she sang it so softly that her voice cracked-there was so much love
in it, such concern, that I picked up and sang the second chorus and
sounded like Pinza.... When I got home, they called and told me I had
the part."26

Most of the show and songs were written during the fall of 1958. Ethel was
so taken with Styne and Sondheim's work that she got them to perform the
songs at Cole Porter's apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria in an attempt to get
the ailing composer to start working again. By this time, Porter was almost a
total recluse, relying increasingly on painkillers and drink after the death of
his wife, Linda, and the amputation of his leg. Said Sondheim to biographer
Meryle Secrest:

We went for dinner up in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, Jule,
myself, Merman and Anita Loos. By then he was being carried around by his
strong servant piggyback. My memory is that when we sang "Together," the
song from Gypsy that has a quadruple rhyme "wherever I go, I know he
goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds and no
egos / Amigos"-and when I said "amigos," I heard him go "Ali!" right in the
corner of the room. It's a very Cole Porter line, because he would use these foreign languages for rhyme, for effect, and he didn't see it coming."

Too weak to applaud, Cole tapped a spoon against his glass in approval.
Later, Jule Styne said that he was relieved his piano was facing the other way,
since tears were streaming down his face.

Klugman recalls the moment that "Rose's Turn" was unveiled. Styne was
at the piano, and Sondheim "sang it with such feeling and such awareness of
what it was about that I just fell apart and bawled like a baby. It was so brilliant. I will never forget that moment. When Steve did `M-m-momma,
M-m-momma,' and couldn't get it out, Ethel and I just burst into tears."

Sondheim's lyrics to "Some People" included a line in which Rose tells her
father to "go to hell." Ethel refused to do it. She also did not want to sing, "I
guess I did it for me," toward the end of "Rose's Turn." It would make her
Rose awful, a monster," explains Laurents, and that was something Merman
was loath to do.2" The team had to convince Ethel that the line was pivotal
to unlocking both the show and her character.

More extensive were group discussions about how to follow the climax of
"Rose's Turn." As Sondheim said, "A woman having a nervous breakdown
should not get applause from the audience."

To have a mad scene and then have a bow violated everything I thought I had
learned from Oscar Hammerstein, who taught me to be true to character
and ... the situation. So I forced Jule not to put a [musical] ending on it, but
to have it fade out with high screech violin sounds with those last chords when
she's screaming-not singing, but screaming-"For me, for me, for me!" And
there would be this chilling ... moment in the theatre and then, as Arthur
wrote it, the daughter would come out of the wings applauding her, and they
would go on.29

Again, they approached Hammerstein for advice. "Oscar argued that the audience was so eager to applaud Merman, who deserved her bow, that they
didn't listen to the last scene which was what the entire play is about," he told them when the show was in Philadelphia tryouts.30 "I know it's dishonest,
but please, fellows, put a big ending on that number if you want the rest of
the play to play. Or bring the curtain down there."31

"Rose's Turn" is nearly five minutes long and comes at the end of a show
in which Rose has already sung seven songs. Filled with a great deal of
movement and shifts in melody, style, and tone, it demands unusual vocal
control, timing, and dexterity. Ethel's voice was more than up to it, hitting
notes so hard on the soundtrack that she generates a yodellike sound, especially in the reprised fragments of "Everything's Coming Up Roses." Yet
unlike the comic result of those effects in Annie Get Your Gun, nothing here
was for laughs; rather, the result was intensity. "In classical singing, you
would never allow someone to do that, never. And it would be questionable from the standards of vocal health as well," says singing voice specialist Jeanette LoVetri.32 LoVetri calls "Rose's Turn" a "gut-buster," and Ethel
was only too aware of this, telling friends privately that it was a "motherfucker to sing,"33 and the singer was left uncharacteristically tired after each
performance. "Rose" is the one song that makes or breaks Gypsy and is the
yardstick by which critics and fans measure the performance of all Mama
Roses.

Ethel was amenable to most changes, up to a point. Sondheim recalls,
"Two weeks before the opening I thought that `Some People' needed a verse
because the dialogue that precedes the song is on a high pitch and the song
starts low. It needed the verse to bring it down. The cue-in is clumsy and
it would have helped the song a lot. After it was written, however, she said
that she felt it was too angry and refused to learn it."34 Flora Roberts, Sondheim's agent, called the Dramatists Guild and said, "If there's an unnamed
star who doesn't want to sing a verse, what are the writer's rights?" And the
man at the guild said, "Let's put it this way. There was a star named Ethel
Merman and she was in a show called Call Me Madam, and she sang a
dummy lyric for `Hostess with the Mostes' on the Ball' for many weeks out
of town and just as she got into New York, Irving Berlin came into her
dressing room and said, `I've finally perfected the lyric!' And she said, `Call
me Miss Birds Eye. The Show is frozen!' So for three years, she sang the
dummy lyric."35 Sure, Sondheim was told, a singer was obliged to sing the
song as it was written, but if that singer was Ethel Merman, he didn't have
a chance.