Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (65 page)

In May, Ethel was on television again, in a special honoring Cole Porter.
Once more, she tried to lure her old friend out of seclusion by telling producers that she would appear only if he did, but he wouldn't budge. Ethel
performed anyway, and the show was well received by critics-a warm, nostalgic tribute to a musical giant.

The Fable Winds Down

After a year and a half, Gypsy's drawing power was starting to cool slightly.
Variety reported that it was pulling in $53,500 out of the possible $82-,goo it
could at the Broadway, and so, in the summer of 1960, the producers relocated it to the smaller Imperial Theatre, where it stayed until the end of
Ethel's contract in March 1961.80

While Gypsy was being moved to the Imperial in July, Ethel went to visit
Ethel Jr. in Colorado, where she was acting in a local production of
Brigadoon. On July to, she headed for Europe with Benay Venuta and Bob
Jr. (Ethel circled what she and Bobby ordered from the Pan Am menu.)8 i The
trip included a visit to Florence, where Ethel attended a performance of Liliana Poli. She and Bobby also spent four days in London, where, after she
landed incognito in her trademark big dark sunglasses and kerchief, a photographer found her; Ethel saved the tabloid clipping.82 There she took in the
premiere of Ross, in which Alec Guinness portrayed adventurer T. E. Lawrence.
Pop and Agnes saved various postcards, photos, and souvenir pamphlets of
the places Ethel visited, stayed, and shopped.

In the fall of 196o during her time off from Gypsy, Ethel stumped vigorously for presidential candidate Richard Nixon. On the Wednesday before
election day, she sang at three different downtown rallies, in addition to performing her matinee and evening show. Although Nixon lost, Ethel accepted
an invitation to perform at JFK's pre-inaugural ball. ("Why shouldn't I sing
at the gala? I helped put them in debt," she quipped, referring to the Democrat's campaign deficit.)83 Smart remarks aside, though, Merman was delighted and proud to be part of the event.

At the time, Frank Sinatra was still an avid Democrat and coproduced the
extravaganza with President Kennedy's brother-in-law Peter Lawford. By
agreeing to perform for scale (two hundred dollars) on Leland Hayward's upcoming CBS TV special, The Gershwin Years, Sinatra was able to negotiate
the releases of guests such as Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn (then in
Becket) from their Broadway runs for the day. But that earlier inaugural event
did not go smoothly. A blizzard upset people's travel plans, and Ethel was separated from her luggage. Forced to perform in her street clothes-a respectable but plain wool suit-a displeased Merman told Leonard Bernstein to explain what was going on to audiences before she sang "Everything's Coming
Up Roses." To her, the situation compromised professional standards; yet, to
one of the musicians playing, she was just a badly behaved diva. "Ethel Merman was furious," she said. "And she wasn't shy about making her dissatisfaction known!"84 But none of this hurt her performance, and after her last
notes, Sinatra cooed, "Absolutely glorious, Ethel!"85

When Ethel teamed up with Sinatra a few months later for The Gershwin
Years, they were joined by Maurice Chevalier, Julie London, and other
guests. The special aired the following year on January 15, 1961, with Richard
Rodgers as host. Ethel promoted it in advance interviews by reminiscing
about working with the Gershwins and the importance of the Gershwins'
music to her career. On the special itself, she sang a medley from Of Thee I
Sing. A few reviewers grumbled that more time should have been spent conjuring up the lost era, presumably to situate younger TV audiences, but the
overwhelming response to the show was strong, and Ethel was well received.

Ethel turned fifty-three the day after the Gershwin tribute aired, and she
saved the oversized birthday card that the cast of Gypsy again gave her. January gave her another special moment when Judy Garland flew in from London and "was given Miss Merman's house-seats on the aisle." The reporter
added, "She didn't know the star made her entrance into the show from the
rear of the theatre. Merman stopped at Judy's seat, embraced her, then went
up onstage."86

Gypsy's run was now drawing to a close, and Ethel did not extend her contract. Jimmy Gardiner threw her a farewell cocktail party at the Sherry
Netherland on March 19, for which he had a red-inked "One for the Road
with Ethel" printed on cocktail napkins stapled to the invitation. Attending
were Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Lucille Ball, Elaine Stritch, and Bob
Jr., whose note said, "Dear Mom, You were the prettyest [sic] girl at the
party!!! Love, Me." On March 25, 1961, Gypsy closed, but not before a number of critics and reporters remarked that Ethel was as solid and powerful for the nth time as she had been opening night. To close out the last show, the
orchestra played "Auld Lang Syne."17

Strong Women and Monster Mothers

Rose was not the only dominant woman on Broadway that season; that same
year saw a revival of Lysistrata on the boards. In fact the entire decade had
been filled with them, especially in musicals, whose stars were powerhouses
in themselves. Mary Martin in South Pacific, Gwen Verdon in Damn Yankees,
Rosalind Russell in Wonderful Town, and even Judy Holliday in Bells Are
Ringing had audiences in the palm of their hands. Of course, Ethel was no
stranger to playing strong figures, but by the late '5os, the lambent feminist
spark of her roles like Annie Oakley had exploded into something larger and,
presumably, scarier. And that scary thing was mother. For Mama Rose partakes of more than the musical comedy traditions of the decade's strong female leads; in her, we see the time's conflicted attitudes toward motherhood
reach a fever pitch.

Although Philip Wylie's Momism offered an extreme manifestation of it,
some of the misogyny circulating in the United States seemed to take aim at
mature women, career women, and mothers. It can be detected in an August
1958 interview with Leland Hayward, when Gypsy was being written, in
which the producer discusses his work on the picture The Old Man and the
Sea. The interviewer writes that Hayward believes that Americans have already lost out in the world struggle "because we let ourselves get too soft....
Our culture is against the male. I think women are more honest and realistic and less sentimental than men. But I don't think as a rule American
women are as attractive as other women. We ruin them by spoiling them. We
men have corrupted them by killing ourselves working for them. They are
now 6o [percent] of the population, live several years longer than men, own
8o per cent of the wealth. In another zo years they will own everything. I am
a pessimist about what they will do with total power, when they get it."88

Hayward's remarks, in their casual (though unjoking) expression of his
concern about women's supposed dominance over men, establish just how
routine that anxiety was and how unproblematic its public articulation was.
Two decades earlier, during the Depression, gendered anxiety didn't play out
much (men and women were not pitted against each other; anyone was lucky
just to have a job), nor did it during the war, another time when a certain autonomy was expected of most women. But after the war, it seemed that women were damned if they worked outside the home ("they will own everything") and damned if they didn't ("We ruin them by spoiling them").
"Smothering-mother" Madame Rose was more off-putting and threatening
than working women could have been in those earlier periods, and probably
she could not have been invented in those times. Like the increase in timeconsuming recipes in women's magazines, there were now more articles
about the psychological hazards of child rearing, especially if the mom
worked outside the home: if mothers were "training" the country's youth and
the kids came out wrong, who was to blame? Countless films of the time reflect these anxieties, Hitchcock's Psycho (i96o) most violently,89 but putting
the blame on mom quickly became a staple of pop psychology that has lived
on for decades.90

Rose received more than her fair share of blame, and she still does, even
when there is a sweetness giving cover to the barbs. Laurents describes her
as "a mythic mesmerizing mother, a monster of a mother sweetly named
Rose."' To Keith Garebian she "is a larger-than-life representation of
American Mom-ism, that syndrome that so bedevils many a generation
that feel smothered by the hand that rocks the cradle.... Yet Rose is not
grotesque, she is a human being, subject to her own chimeras of pain and
travail."'

As huge a triumph as Gypsy was for Merman, especially in reinvigorating
her iconic place on Broadway, the less adoring side of Mama Rose also took
its toll on her, particularly in terms of what the public imagined her to be in
her public and private life. As one review put it, "The view of America as the
prime matriarchy, hog-tied and talked to death by mothers, wives, mothersin-law, and female executives, is powerfully embodied and voiced by Ethel
Merman."93 Another critic famously referred to the show as "the Medea of
Musicals."'To be sure, Gypsy was not alone in attracting such comments; another article of the time was entitled "Mother-It's Murder / Stage Holds Up
Mirror to a Tarnished Image," calling the mothers of several recent Broadway shows "a traumatic experience to her little ones and perhaps to the more
sensitive members of the audience." But why some authors took aim at Ethel
Merman personally is harder to fathom: "Miss Merman was given every opportunity one recent night to give America a stirring Mother's Day message
by denouncing the likes of Madame Rose and coming out for the Mom who
bakes apple pies and has a kindly light in her eyes. But she declined. `Why
should I say anything bad about Madame Rose?' Miss Merman said. 1195

So Ethel Merman was a bad mother for not hating Rose, and hate Mother
Rose you evidently should: "If West Side Story is about how bigotry destroys you," writes Ethan Mordden, "Gypsy is about how your mother destroys you.
This show is The One That Got Away With It, shattering a cultural given,
that all mothers are nurturing, loving and self-sacrificing. Gypsy is about a
mother who is a selfish, stupid, destructive piece of junk."' It could be said
that in Merman's career, Rose is a sort of bookend to Annie Oakley, at once
Annie's complex counterpart and her unhappy outcome, a cautionary tale of
what happens when career women try to fuse personal reward and family life
with professional success.

Mama Rose Equals Ethel Merman

"Ethel was so strong and overwhelming onstage that people believe she was
that person. It was the role of Mama Rose that shaped the way the public perceived who Ethel really was," reflects Tony Cointreau.97 Indeed, Rose was
everything that Ethel Merman was assumed to be at this point in her career:
brash, vulgar, obsessed by her career, and oblivious to the feelings of others.
Merman's determination and drive, her rough mouth and tough style were
the "real" Ethel Merman, right?

Arthur Laurents believes that Merman's "personal qualities made her right
for Rose: not very bright but shrewd, common but charismatic, able to defeat you before you could get a swipe at her and pure Rose, a walking, exuberant advertisement for Self-ignorance is bliss."98 There was Rose-and,
evidently, the big star who portrayed her-clueless, defiantly stubborn,
unwilling to see the truth around her: that her kids had grown and her career
was stuck in the past.

Ethel was assertive about standing up for herself and in exacting a good
performance from colleagues. She made her demands overtly and would not
be underhanded or devious about them. Merman was also known to dish out
invective if she felt used or betrayed, and that side could be unpleasant and
vulgar. But as Tony Cointreau notes in deliberate understatement, "It's interesting that in twenty-five years, I never saw that [abrasive, vulgar] side. She
wasn't like that." He added, "The only times offstage that Ethel would ever
go into that [brash] stage persona was when there was a chance for a good
joke." 99

Bob Levitt says today that the legacy of his mother has produced a "cartoon caricature" of Merman's vulgarity and love of off-color jokes. Her vulgar side, says Levitt, "did exist, but it was a small fraction of her true humor."
She had an almost juvenile love of dirty jokes, he says, but "it was a kid's delight my mom had in them. She thought they were just so funny, and she
would say, `Oh, isn't that awful?!' after telling them."100 Levitt understands
those) ekes as coming from a place of innocence, a place of almost juvenile
pleasure and enthusiasm, and a way for his mom to break from the rigidity
of her parents.

As for Gypsy, Hayward says, "It was Ethel who saw the book as a story for
the mother, not the kids,""' and Merman took that view seriously, refusing
to tell her stage father to "go to hell." She played Rose without irony and
never viewed her as a monster, telling the press, "She yells and screams but
she loves her children. Everything she does, she does because she loves too
much."102 The actual Rose was nothing like this, as Gypsy Rose Lee wrote in
her memoirs: "Mother had been many things, but she had never been
`nice.' . . . Charming, perhaps, and courageous, resourceful and ambitious,
but not nice."103 But there is a compelling force to Ethel's compassion for
Rose, and later in 1965, when she was a guest on Gypsy Rose Lee's San Fran-
cisco-basedTV talk show, she said of Rose, "How can you not love her? She's
a mother.""' Lee simply smiled and agreed.

As Rose, Ethel was able to produce some of the "mother love" she wanted
to bring to the complex role. As the letter from the female fan on the ocean
liner revealed, Rose was not Medea for everyone, and Merman's own presence in the role led one reviewer to comment that "she was rather like the
mother of us all (if mothers had such talent)."105

Arthur Laurents was able to catch a glimpse of the more innocent side of
Ethel during an exchange while working on Gypsy. When he asked Jack Jugman if Tab Hunter was gay, "Jack replied, `Is the Pope Catholic?' `Yes,' said
Ethel, waiting for the answer. Not bright, no, but endearing and despite a life
spent in saloons, childlike."106 Laurents's appreciation, of course, is offset by
the saloon jab (and he writes this after saying that "four letter words were as
at home in her mouth as saliva"), but divas are often swiped at at the same
time they are adulated. Even so, Laurent's note about Ethel's childlikeness is
on the mark, as Levitt and Cointreau both maintain; Cointreau, in fact, wonders if Ethel's nonresponse to Klugman's gag might have been intended as
a joke.107