Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (76 page)

Life was not going smoothly for Ethel Jr.-wanting to be called Nicole as
she made her push for greater autonomy-and the marriage with Bill Geary
deteriorated quickly. "All I remember is my parents fighting," recalls Barbara,
"and then they separated. My father was weeping when he left, and told me
how sorry he was, but he just couldn't stand being so unhappy anymore."60
Ethel Geary was treated for depression and insomnia, and, without clear options in sight, she drank. Says Barbara, "I had to help out with my brother.
We would walk the dog in the middle of the night because no one else had.
We were little wild children. No one told us anything. My brother and I
would come home from school and the family dog would be gone. Or we
were moving again. There'd be no explanation."61 Some were the result of Ethel Sr.'s interventions, some her father's decisions, but the net effect was a
chaotic-though not at all unloving-home life. Grandma tried to help out
and would give things to them and their mother, but always with instructions
and strings attached, says Barbara.

When Ethel and Bill Geary divorced, Bill was given primary custody of
the kids, to Little Ethel's great distress. Big Ethel was understandably concerned about her daughter's lack of direction and tried to help where she
could, pulling strings so that Little Ethel, now living in Los Angeles, could
find work in theater, something Big Ethel had never pushed on her but an
interest young Ethel developed on her own. In a 1965 revival of Call Me
Madam, for instance, Ethel Jr.!Nicole played the small role of the ambassador's secretary, Miss Phillips. (Merman's costar remained Nype, still a good
friend along with his wife, Diantha.) Despite her occasional forays into acting, young Ethel seemed to experience this particular job-and much of her
mother's help-as a form of domination over her. When the two appeared
together on a Johnny Carson show, she started a spat that prompted Carson
to cut the interview short.

Merman was intent on getting her daughter's life on track and tried to put
a happy face on the situation. In a guest-authored column called "Memo to
Teen-agers" in a syndicated newspaper magazine, she wrote:

Last June, my daughter Ethel graduated from high school, and before we even
had time to frame the diploma, she came to me and said: "Mom, I want to be
an actress." Well, at first I thought she was kidding. She'd been a sensational
student, and I'd always had fond dreams of her going on to bigger things in
college.... But she wasn't kidding-she had it all figured out. "I'll go to college for one year," she said, "because I think I owe that much to the man I
marry some day. But then I want to be an actress. And, Mom, I want to do it
all on my own." "Well, angel," I said, "that part I like anyway."62

The article containing this revised bit of history was called "How to Be a Hit."
Along with a lovely picture of Ethels Sr. and Jr. was the following advice:

Ethel Merman belts out a few rules for success:

Stand tall [and "do it on your own"]

Give it all you've got ["whatever part you get"]

Be yourself...

Go ahead on your own-The guy who marries the boss's daughter just
winds up with two bosses.

Don't "stay on too long" .. .

... Work hard, loaf hard. Take the money you save on sleeping pills and put
it into A.T.&T.

In the fall of 1963, her brother, Levitt, started college at Pittsburgh's Carnegie
Mellon University (later Carnegie Tech) as a student in the drama program.
He never graduated but was able to bring the experience he acquired there to
his subsequent work at different theaters across North America, including the
Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and the Theatre of the Sea in Hawaii. As a young adult,
Bob's sardonic edges, considerable intelligence, and ability to detect b.s. kept
him at arm's length from many things, including, it must be said, his mother.
The '6os, of course, were a tumultuous time for anyone to come of age, a period of social upheaval and intense, layered challenges to authority and official policy in general. This was a time when "the generation gap" was a common expression and defining oneself against one's parent was extraordinarily
easy to do, especially if one's parent was as strong and iconic as Ethel Merman.

When Levitt reflects on his mother's parenting today, he says the problems
she faced were a built-in effect of her celebrity and class, and these things helped
produce what he calls a "disservicing to the kids," such as when she hired Koppi
or shuffled him off to boarding school when he was still grieving over the death
of his father. But Levitt says there was never any outright neglect, abuse, or lack
of love from his mom. (His niece Barbara says much the same thing; in her experience, "Ethel really didn't know what to do with kids" and was someone
simply accustomed to an adult world.)63 As Bob was growing up he found himself looking to sources beyond the family for guidance, finding his bearings
through people like Venus and Duddy Duddleson. "My emotional experience," he says, "I got in solidarity with regular people.... Mom did the same
thing," referring to her relationships with people like Anna and Fritz Panzer and
their daughter Carol Freund (old friends from Queens) and his mom's old
coworker from the days at Bragg, Josie Traeger.64

Bob stepped up to help his sister after her divorce, hiring an attorney to
help her obtain her share of their late father's inheritance, which was being
withheld from her, ostensibly because of her emotional problems. This enabled her to leave Los Angeles, where she'd been living, and return to Colorado. It gave her a certain amount of freedom and the autonomy to consider
her options without being under pressure from her mother or from Bill
Geary. After a long stay at a dude ranch, Little Ethel moved into a small place where she could ride. Soon after, she reenrolled in Colorado College. This
was 1967. The bonds and affection between brother and sister remained: her
nickname for him was Burt; he called her George.

Young Ethel still struggled in her Rocky Mountain sanctuary, but she was
very intent on getting her act together and especially on regaining custody of
Barbara and Michael. In the summer of 1967, she convinced Bill, who was living in LA, to give her the kids for a month. Beginning July 24, she rented a
two-bedroom cabin in Green Mountain Falls, where the three of them stayed.
Toward the end of the visit, locals saw Ethel's distress grow at the prospect of
having to relinquish them to their father again.65 The morning before they
left, Barbara and Michael awoke to find their mother still sleeping in the next
room, and they weren't able to wake her up. Barbara, age six, ran out of the
cabin to find the nearest grown-up, a woman named Carol Friesen, there on
her honeymoon. Friesen was waiting in the car while her husband checked
them out of the Green Hill Motel and remembers the girl approaching her and
saying, "Can you help me? I can't wake up my mama, and she's all blue." She
accompanied Barbara up to the cottage and found the stiff body of Ethel Six
Geary; she also remembers that vodka and medicine bottles were scattered
around the room but no note of any kind. Mrs. Friesen called the fire department, and at 10:30 the county coroner arrived and pronounced Ethel Geary
dead, giving the time of death as between 12:30 and 1:3o A.M.

Mrs. John Geary, Bill's sister-in-law, came to identify the body. Friesen remembers a black limo pulling up and the two kids being whisked away, and
that was it.66 On the scene, Detective Sgt. Franklin Ripley of the sheriff's office told Friesen that Ethel Geary had been upset ever since her February divorce and that people in the area understood their custody battle had been
especially nasty. Ethel, he said, got the kids just one month out of the year,
and he told Friesen that Barbara and Michael were supposed to go back to
Bill Geary the following day.

There was no evidence of any foul play, but the El Paso County coroner
had to make the call about whether Geary's death was a suicide. After performing the autopsy, Dr. Raoul Urich determined that the cause of death was
an accidental overdose, a fatal interaction of drink and pills. His report noted
that traces of three different prescriptions had been found in Geary's body,
and although no single medication exceeded the limits of the doctor's prescriptions, their combination was lethal. Not only were the medications prescribed by different doctors, but they included diet pills (speed). "There was
no question it was an accident," Tony Cointreau says today. "This was at a
time before people knew just how deadly those interactions were [between drugs and alcohol]. A lot of people died that way."67 Bob recalls that his sister had had her prescription levels upped precisely to be better equipped to
handle her children's visit.

Ethel Sr. flew immediately to Colorado with friend Benay Venuta. In her
memoirs, she writes that Bob Jr. took care of the final arrangements; Levitt
says that he didn't.68 There was no memorial. Daughter Barbara recalls that
at first, she and Michael were told that their mother was sick and staying in
the hospital, but a little later, Bill Geary and a priest went with them to a park
where they told the children the news. Barbara recalls the priest's involvement
being a little strange, since "we hadn't gone to church in ages," but imagines
he attended for her father's moral support.69 Geary's cremated ashes were
placed in a family alcove in a small mausoleum in the Colorado Springs area,
and Merman started an Ethel Merman Geary Scholarship at Colorado College, asking people to make donations there in lieu of flowers.

Barbara suggests her mom's death was like a "willful accident."70 She believes that just before her mother died, she had lost her optimism about being
able to move forward and make a new start. In a certain sense, Barbara says,
she believes that her mom did kill herself, but "not in a deliberate way or to
make a statement," because she would never have done that with her children
right there. Merman understood it this way as well, writing, "No mother contemplating such an act would have brought her children to her and then have
left them behind."71 Cointreau agrees and says that at the time, young Ethel
was "less depressed than frightened about getting her life back together and
back on track."72

Given the circumstances of Geary's death-and the whiff of celebrity scandal around it the media widely reported it as a suicide. Merman denied it,
taking the uncharacteristic step of writing or phoning to correct erroneous press
reports. Her scrapbooks are understandably silent on the topic; the one exception is a March 30, 1968, clipping that retracts an earlier report, apologizing to
Merman and stating a correction that Ethel Jr. died "after a brief illness."73 Still,
for the rest of Merman's life, rumors of Ethel Jr.'s purported suicide dogged her,
and some people went so far as to claim that late in her own life, Ethel confided
to them that her daughter did deliberately die by her own hand.74

Losing Ethel was the biggest tragedy of Merman's life, as it would be for
any mother. Bob believes that afterward, his mom-again, like so many
others-preferred the fantasies she had about her two children over their actual realities, overstating Bob's professional accomplishments, for instance, or
failing to notice that her daughter's "hair was on fire." Barbara Geary says that
after her mom's death, "Grandma created a kind of shrine based on her mem ories of young Ethel. She'd only discuss her as a child. I remember once when
I was a kid chasing butterflies, she said, `You look so much like your mom!'
That was the sort of way she remembered my mother."75 After the death,
Ethel began to turn more deeply to religion for solace and was even briefly
taken in by a corrupt TV evangelist. She kept a lock of Ethel's hair in her possession and would often speak to her daughter's ashes when they were later
removed from the mausoleum, finding great comfort in knowing someday
she would be able to join her and Bob Levitt again. "She was always convinced she'd go to heaven," said Bob.76

Ethel showered Barbara and Michael with the same punctual devotion she
did her parents, calling them weekly in Los Angeles, where they lived with
Bill Geary. Says Barbara, "She'd take us out, and we'd get sent home early. I
remember going to places where there were usually just adults. My brother
and I didn't have anything to do, and so we'd get in trouble," just as Bob
Levitt remembered his childhood. Barbara remembers being too young to
have a sense of who her grandmother was or the extent of her fame in the
'6os. "I remember going to Lucille Ball's house and swimming with her and
the kids. It was no big deal-Oh, here's this other red-head. I see her on TV
too; that's just like Grandma!" 77 (It was later, during a Call Me Madam revival, when she first had a sense of her grandmother as a big star and personality.) The Geary family stayed in Los Angeles until the early 1970s, when
they moved to Pennsylvania, closer to Bill's family. Bill Geary remarried several months after Ethel's death to the governess/au pair whom he'd hired to
look after Michael and Barbara. In the early zooos, after his retirement, the
couple relocated to Sweden, his wife's birthplace.

That Girl and Lola Lasagna

When Little Ethel died, Merman canceled all of her professional obligations, withdrawing from rehearsals for a George Cohan tribute (replaced by
Kaye Ballard). At the time, Merman had just wrapped filming three television appearances.

On September 7, the first of Ethel's two guest appearances on Marlo
Thomas's popular comedy series, That Girl, aired. In this show Thomas
played Ann-Marie, a young woman trying to make it as an actress. At the heart
of the series was Ann-Marie's relative self-sufficiency as a single professional,
the kind of role Mary Tyler Moore would develop in her '7os series. Satellite
characters included Thomas's steady beau, Donald, and her two parents.

Ethel guested as herself. Ann-Marie is trying out for a walk-on in a show
with Merman. She's shocked when selected ("let's use ... that girl!"), and
tongue-tied and starstruck when trying to approach Ethel. Donald catches the
star alone in her dressing room, eating a hamburger for dinner, and invites her
over for a home-cooked meal. But Ethel hates what they're planning, macaroni
and cheese, so she ends up making stuffed cabbage, arguing with Ann-Marie's
dad about how to prepare it: "If you think this is yelling, you ain't heard nothing yet!" After eating, Ethel chats with her hosts: "It was never easy for me," she
starts. "I remember my first gig. I sang `After You've Gone' and was fired for
being too loud! Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous?" The advice she
passes on to Ann-Marie: "Always let 'em know you're enjoying yourself. And
reach out to the audience, sing!"-vintage Merman.