Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (7 page)

By the time she hit the big time, the letter of introduction had assumed
legendary proportions. In 1937, a newspaper story ran called "Ethel Once
Wrote Own Reference":

The writer ventured to predict quite confidently that, given the chance, she
would quickly prove herself a performer of starring caliber, a name to conjure
with in electric lights, a potential draw for the cash customers of both the
Broadway sector and elsewhere....

Miss Merman, the records show, has made good on the predictions of the letter, but it must not be supposed that Mr. Bragg, fine gentleman that he is, had
really foreseen these potentials in her. For it was none other than Ethel herself
who had composed the letter, typed it, and brought it to him for signature.54

Once her career took off and Merman's image as a plucky broad took
hold, the fiction of the stenographer-with-unbounded-ambition was easy for
people to swallow. It was the Depression after all, when working people
across the country were looking for lucky breaks, even if only in fantasies and
tall tales. In Merman's case, the story only ripened with age. Fifteen years
later, Wolcott Gibbs revised it to say that she had left White's office "in disgust" after he told her, "All I can give you is a job in the [chorus] line."
"Nope," she retorted. "Not in any line."55 By that point, Merman's fame for
gutsy ripostes was well entrenched, and Gibbs updated the story to reflect it.

Merman's background as a stenographer infuses the myth of her as a practical, self-sufficient, and professional woman. She came by that image honestly, making use of her secretarial skills throughout a half-century career, taking shorthand in meetings, run-throughs, and rehearsals and then typing up
script changes. Ethel always kept elaborate personal business records, a date
and address book (including everyone's birthday and a list of escorts arranged
under D, for dates), and typed up guest lists for parties she'd attended and
the menus of fancier dinner engagements. When her father started the scrapbooks, Ethel dated and identified the materials she passed along to him. "She
answers everything [she] gets, her bills and everything, takes care of them. If
she gets a note or present or anything, she sits there and in longhand writes
it out," said accompanist Lew Kessler.56 Merman never hired a personal secretary but answered her own fan mail; well into her seventies, if an interviewer prompted her, she would scrounge up a typewriter and bang out the
keyboard exercise: "One of the boys quickly threw the large javelin beyond
the maximum distance and won the prize."

Ethel's sense of self-sufficiency and work ethic infiltrated her public persona as well. There was no reason to distance herself from it, and she never
did. (Later in life, financial adviser Irving Katz told her she didn't need to
work another day in her life. Proud as that made her, Ethel never stopped
working or wanted to.) From the start, the autonomy that Ethel's business
and secretarial skills gave her pleased her, and, indeed, she had an independence that few female stage stars of the time had. During the Depression, the
image of honest, hardworking Ethel inspired countless young working
women across the New York City area. Half a century later, that image endured as the septuagenarian Ethel awed audiences by criss-crossing North
America in concert and television appearances. Merman was a workhorse, reliable, matter-of-fact, down-to-earth. Today, any devoted Ethel fan knows
about her job before she entered show business; as one gypsy who worked
with her in the 19505 said, "Ethel never forgot her roots."57

Venues for Young Singers

Along with other nascent forms of the Broadway musical, revues such as
George White's Scandals provided important venues for popular singers of the
time. These shows introduced hits to audiences, and in the 19zos, radio and
electric phonographs enabled songs to reach a mass audience almost instantly. This was a period when new songs spread quickly, especially in New
York. "The world was so much smaller then," says singer Klea Blackhurst
today. "People forget that, or that [Lew] Brown, [Ray] Henderson, and
[Buddy] DeSylva were the Beatles of their time. Their songs were everywhere
and were enormously popular."58 Ethel Merman's New York was the New
York of Irving Berlin, Yip Harburg, Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Jerome
Kern, the Gershwin brothers, and Cole Porter.

At this early stage in the development of what we know as the Broadway
musical, popular songs were rarely tied to particular stories, characters, or settings. They could be easily dropped into club performances, radio shows, and
even other stage, club, and cinematic productions. New York song and stage
still enjoyed a relatively strong hold on popular culture. By the end of the
'zos, motion pictures began to encroach on the national reach of the Great
White Way, to be sure, but still, many of the country's new hit songs, trends,
stars, and stories were getting their start there.

Nightclubs, cabarets, and vaudeville offered other venues for singers, although only the top singers had solo shows. More typically, vocalists appeared in variety acts that interspersed popular songs with magic acts, theatrical
skits, operettas, arias, short films, and comedy routines. Stature was measured
by one's place in the program. In these early engagements, rising stars like
Merman opened before headlining acts or before a feature motion picture.
"They rotated programs," recalls Marilyn Baker, a child at the time and the
daughter of Eddie Cantor. "I would go down to Brooklyn and watch Ethel
Merman, and then this dreadful movie would come on-something with
Marlene Dietrich in it-that I didn't want to see. So I'd go out and walk
around, then get back into the place when Merman was singing again. I'd do
this all day long."59 By the mid- to late '30s, when Ethel started appearing in
her own films, other performers-often vaudevillians on the wane-warmed
up audiences for her. But by then, it was a practice on its way out-too
vaudevillian and too costly (though useful to entice Depression audiences in);
by the early 1950s, live singers seldom opened for feature films.

Living in Astoria, Ethel was in close proximity to the bustling New York
music scene. She told her first autobiographer that when a song plugger informed her that "she didn't have to do it for free," she began to be paid for
her singing appearances in the area: $7.50 for weddings and parties.60 (That
Ethel or her parents could have been this naive is unlikely.) At the Ross Music
Store on nearby Steinway Avenue, the aspiring singer received complimentary sheet music, a common practice then. Alan Eichler, grandson of proprietor Abraham Ross, recalls that sometimes Ethel came in just to copy the
lyrics.61

Back at Camp Mills in the mid-r9ros, Ethel was billed as "Little Ethel
Zimmermann." By 1927 at least, she was singing as Ethel Merman. She
changed her name soon after high school while contemplating her singing career. (She'd later crack, "If you put Zimmermann up in lights, you'd die from
the heat.")6" At first, Ethel pushed for the WASPier sounding "Alice Gardner," after a cousin from her mother's family (not the singer), but that proposition infuriated Edward. So another compromise was struck: Ethel dropped
the first and last letters of the cumbersome "Zimmermann" to become Ethel
Merman. Exactly when she did this is impossible to settle. In her first autobiography, she writes that it was 1930,63 but sheet music and club programs
reveal that this happened at least three years earlier. It is not likely that Ethel
ever performed professionally as Ethel Zimmermann.

Success as Ethel Merman was swift. In 1927 her photo appeared on the
sheet music covers for "Just Another Day Wasted Away" and "Side by Side"
and, in 1928, "After My Laughter Came Tears," incontestable signs of a growing reputation. On September to, 1928, the New York Sun ran a small photo of the performer posing with her accompanist. Other artifacts beyond the
music industry hint at her growing renown, such as a 1928 tobacco trading
card that fans could collect and swap. Eventually, these kinds of items, along
with product endorsements, would forge specific perceptions of her and
guide her evolving persona as a star, but in the late '2os, the products were
too random to lend much of a sense of Ethel as a personality.

Nineteen twenty-eight was a busy year. It saw Merman earning ten dollars for her "cabaret act" at Keens English Chop House in midtown Manhattan. A cozy, dark old tavern, Keens was "the kind of place that Charles
Dickens might have frequented in his day. "64 That same year, she sang at the
Democratic convention that nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt as governor of New York. By September 1929, the busy young singer, still in the employ of the brake company, was hired for two weeks at sixty dollars a week at
a nightspot and restaurant just below street level on 57th Street near Carnegie
Hall. The place was called The Little Russia.65

Her first autobiography gives The Little Russia as the place of Ethel's first
professional performance. Transcripts, however, reveal that Merman told
interviewer-writer Pete Martin otherwise, that her first gig was in fact at Keens.
Martin excised that from the public record, presumably because "Keens Chop
House" lacked the luster of the more prestigious The Little Russia. The facts
are corrected in Ethel's subsequent autobiography, which not only includes
Keens English Chop House but locates it at 72 West 36th Street.

It was at The Little Russia that Merman caught the eye of future agent Lou
Irwin. Impressed, he sent his card over and asked to sign her up. "Since I was
underage, Mom and I went over after working hours and we made a deal with
Lou to represent me for nine years."66 Irwin arranged singing jobs for her at
Les Ambassadeurs, the rooftop club at Manhattan's Winter Garden Theatre,
where Merman preceded headlining comic trio Lou Clayton, Eddie Jackson,
and Jimmy Durante with songs like "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling." Irwin
also secured a booking at the Pavilion Royal on Long Island and at the Palace,
where Ethel had seen her favorite singers as a child (by now, the Palace was
one of the last active vaudeville houses in the city).67 Ethel also had engagements at Keith's 86th Street Theatre and at the Ritz Theatre in Elizabeth,
New Jersey.

During this period of the late 192os, Ethel performed with piano man and
arranger Al Siegel (1906-66). Siegel enjoyed a long if uneven career as accompanist, arranger, and coach for singing stars such as Betty Hutton, Dorothy
Lamour, Martha Raye, Grace Moore, Virginia O'Brien, ShirleyTemple, Benay
Venuta, and Betty Grable (whom, according to Lindsay and Crouse, Siegel discovered)." Siegel enjoyed his biggest successes on Broadway, moving to
Hollywood in the 193os after some health problems and finally turning his
hopes to television in the 1950s. "He had a good eye for talent," recalls Roger
Edens. At the time Siegel met Ethel, he was coaching a number of female
singers in New York, including ex-wife Bee Palmer/Bea Wayne. Some speculate that Siegel coached all of his clients to do the things that later became Merman trademarks: holding a note for as long as possible, adding grace notes. He
may also have encouraged the extensive hand and arm movements that would
become key to Ethel's delivery.

Exactly when Siegel and Merman paired up is not known. Edens claims
Siegel found her "singing in a little cellar"-probably The Little Russia-and
that Lou Irwin introduced them. Clippings show that as early as 1928, Merman and Siegel performed in a cabaret act together for a good portion of the
year. Merman later insisted that she and Siegel had worked as a team for only
four or five months, beginning in 1930. Their relationship would prove
volatile, ending in a mysterious break in 1930 or 1931, after which Ethel refused
to discuss Al Siegel for the rest of her life. Periodically, the threat of lawsuits
erupted, usually launched by him at Merman. The bone of contention was
how much Siegel had actually shaped Merman's performance style and was responsible for her success. Ethel said he did nothing but accompany her; Siegel
claimed more. Both claims seem reasonable. Given Ethel's considerable raw
talent, it is unlikely that Siegel shaped the voice itself much. "Her voice was
already her own and not really his style," recalls Edens. "She has one basic
thing that is strictly Merman, and that is projecting a song."69 Lew Kessler
agrees. Regarding Merman's ability to sustain long notes, for instance, he says
Siegel "just happened to find something.... a lot of arrangers think of things,
and he just arranged the number and it clicked. It just happened to work....
he could have thought it up for some other dame and nothing would have
worked."70 Still, it is easy to infer that Siegel exerted some influence on the precelebrity Merman, given that he arranged material for other singers to transform them into hot new "girl singers." With Ethel, as Kessler says, his techniques just "clicked" in a way that they didn't with his other clients.

One of their early documented performances together was at the Ritz in
Elizabeth, New Jersey. "A new singing team has come into existence," said
Variety's review, "with interesting arrangements by Siegel. And the girl can
sing." 71 They performed at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, and on Sunday nights, Siegel accompanied her at the Pavilion Royal, where each was
paid $25 for their first night there. She was such a sensation that the following week they were paid $75 apiece, and the week after that, $15o.

Merman's repertoire was fairly standard for the time, and in that way, she
was like any number of white girl singers trying to make it big. For, although
Ethel is considered unique today, Klea Blackhurst maintains that back then
"she wasn't unique. She was singing hugely popular songs, the same repertoire as anyone else."72 At the same time, Ethel was savvy enough not to box
herself in with too limited a repertoire, telling one reporter, "A few blues are
all right, but to get by you've got to give them some sweet, dreamy things,
too. They're going back to the sentimental ballads of thirty years ago. And
how they beat their hands together when you sing one of them!"73 She moved
with ease from ballads, torch songs, and slow sentimental tunes to numbers
of great speed and lyrical complexity. But not all her shows were so varied.
When she was at the Pavilion Royal, for instance, she performed the torchy
"Little White Lies," "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling," and "Moanin' Low," the
last made famous that year by Libby Holman.