Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (78 page)

One of Broadway's longest-running musicals, Hello, Dolly! had been written
with Ethel Merman in mind for the part of Dolly Gallagher Levi, widow
of Ephraim Levi, trying to land "half-a-millionaire" in the form of one Horace Vandergelder. The show, a musical version of Thornton Wilder's The
Matchmaker was called Dolly Levi: The Exacerbating Woman before becoming Hello, Dolly! The book was by Michael Stewart, and Jerry Herman did
the score. MCA's David Harker had sent Ethel a copy of The Matchmaker almost as soon as her tour with Gypsy had ended late in 1961, asking if she
would be interested in helping this become a musical. No, she wouldn't: she
had sworn off of long-term runs.

A decade later, David Merrick, who owned rights to the material, tried to
get Merman back, and when he approached her, she demurred, telling him
that she always opened in new shows and although Hello, Dolly! was a new
musical, its initial dramatic lead was played by Ruth Gordon, and Ethel believed that the role should stay linked to her. Her second reason was familiar: Ethel's long runs on Broadway were behind her. "Sure, Broadway's been
good to me," she'd frequently say, "but I've been pretty good to it"-at times
adding, "From now on, I'm living for Ethel."

The first musical that New York songwriter Jerry Herman ever saw was the
original Annie Get Your Gun: "It honestly changed my life.... I couldn't have
been more than fifteen or sixteen.... I came home, and I remember being
able to play-because I play by ear-four or five songs that I had never heard
before in my life. I thought, `What a gift ... what a lovely gift this man
named Irving Berlin has given me!' It made me want to do the same thing."'
Born in the early'3os, Herman was a relative baby on Broadway when Merrick approached him to work on Dolly! Herman had done Nightcap in 1958, a very
well-received revue, but his only show on Broadway had been Milk and
Honey in 1961. Partly because of this record and partly because Milk and
Honey contained as much Yiddish music as it did, Merrick gave him a homework assignment: produce some full-out "American" songs for Dolly! Over
the course of a weekend, Herman generated four tunes, and Merrick, impressed, kept him on. Three of those songs stayed with the final show.

Herman knew how to write memorable, hummable tunes, the kind that
could be released as singles-like "Hello, Dolly," which for some reason Herman never expected to be a hit. After Dolly! Herman went on to write Mame
(another musical with a strong middle-aged woman), whose score, he said,
wasn't written with anyone in mind, despite the theater world's legends of all
of the actresses supposedly approached early on for the role, from Merman
to Garland to Bette Davis. It was in fact Angela Lansbury who, in 1966,
introduced Mame to Broadway; after Mame, Herman wrote other shows,
notably La Cage aux Folles in 1983.

Merrick eventually found his first Dolly-Carol Channing-and when the
show opened on Ethel's fifty-sixth birthday, January 16, 1964, at the capacious
St. James Theatre, it was a smash, going on to play continuously for nearly
seven years. When Charming took it on the road, she was replaced in New
York, in succession, by Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey (in an all-black production), and Phyllis Diller. Artist Al Hirschfeld commented on Broadway's most famous rotating door by doing a cartoon of
Merrick as a scowling ringmaster holding up a hoop through which Channing, Bailey, and Merman all cascaded. (The producer had even approached
Jack Benny to do the role in drag, opposite George Burns; evidently Benny
was amenable but couldn't commit himself for more than a week.)' Mary
Martin toured in Dolly! when it played for audiences in London, Tokyo, and
war-torn Vietnam.

When Merman came onboard as the seventh Dolly, Herman reintroduced
two songs that had been dropped when she first turned the show down,
"World, Take Me Back" and "Love, Look in My Window," tunes that showed
a softer side of her. Recalled Herman, "Both of them stopped the show cold."3

To play Cornelius Hackl, Ethel procured friend Russell Nype; Jack Goode
played Vandergelder. And so on March z8, 1970, the Ethel Merman Dolly!
opened at the St. James. So thunderous was the applause that Ethel uncharacteristically needed a moment to regain her composure. Countless theater reviews said that their Ethel was "back where she belonged." Ethel was the
only Dolly to perform unmiked, and when Detroit News theater critic Jay
Carr reported otherwise, she wrote to correct him. The issue was a small blip.
Most cities simply reveled in the Ethel Experience. "Like Brunnhilde, sans
horned helmet, she plants herself solidly at stage center and cheerfully bellows chorus after chorus in a contrary contralto that can still crack a water
glass at to paces. Dolly Levi? Hell, she is Annie Oakley, aiming at the customers in the last row of the balcony; an institution, like the Statue of Liberty or Winged Victory."4 Some sneaked in a few racist and anti-Semitic hits,
noting that Streisand "had given Dolly a sense of greed [in the film] and Pearl
Bailey a lack of inhibition," whereas Merman gives the character "a gentle
touch."5 Said Walter Kerr in the Times, "Missing Merman in the role would
be like waiting until ... Bernhardt had called it quits with Camille. You've
got to come when the siren calls."6 That year, Ethel received the 1969-70
Drama Desk Award.

Hello, Dolly! was trading in the kind of musical theater of Broadway's
golden age, which was well over by the 196os and certainly before 1970. By
now, few musicals were attempting to emulate the old-time spirit and earlier
ways of show making; this was the era of the "message musical"-with the
significant exception of Funny Girl, in which Barbra Streisand played Fannie
Brice and which opened the same season as Dolly! Ever since its opening in
1964, Dolly! had been a feel-good show for a nation reeling from the assassination of President JFK and moving into tumultuous times at home and
abroad.

Like Gypsy before it, Dolly! was pure show biz, but unlike Gypsy, it was not
ambitious, just an old-fashioned good time. Set further in the past than
Gypsy-the 189os-it depicted marriage and courtship rituals that were so far
out of vogue as to seem charming rather than out-of-step, as Rose/Merman's
motherhood had been for some. Dolly! offered a welcome salve for Broadway,
with all its principal characters middle-aged and cast with celebrated "oldtimers," whom audiences were delighted to pay to see onstage. Merrick's biographer calls it "the last of the innocent American musicals, the last musical to reflect the unbounded optimism that characterized America before it
plunged into the Vietnam war." 7

Merman accepted the role because Merrick's terms were good, and so was
the show, with character and songs ideally suited for her. As the last in a long
line of ethnically mixed figures that influenced Merman's on- and offstage
persona, Dolly offered her a way to give some unintended commentary on
her career. Like the Irish Gallagher, Ethel was a gentile who had become "Jewish" by choice, through marriage. (And by the time the show came out,
Ethel was referring to the late Bob Levitt as the love of her life.) Also, playing Dolly Levi gave Merm a chance to-voluntarily and publicly-enact a
Jewish identity, rather than deny it, even if that motivation was the furthest
thing from the star's mind.'

From the start, Merman had been insistent that the run be kept short,
signing on for just three months. When the three became six and, then in
September, when it became was clear that Dolly! would surpass My Fair
Lady's record run for a musical comedy, she agreed to stay on until just after
Christmas, to help make musical history. Said the press, "She's all set to break
the long-run musical record. `That's mainly why I'm back,' proclaims the star
whose intuitive sagacity about being in the right show at the right time ranks
only a little lower than her calliope pipes as a show world wonder. "9 But "her
reward for staying on and helping Merrick break the record," writes Merrick's
biographer, "was a closing night gift of two bottles of indifferently chosen
champagne."1° Hello, Dolly! closed on December 27, 1970, indeed surpassing
My Fair Lady's 2,717 performances with its 2,844. Merrick knew that, with
Ethel Merman, the new record had been guaranteed and that many other
Dollys would follow her-strong, iconic actresses all. Recognizing what kind
of personality the role needed, Merrick, when asked about future casting
prospects, shrugged his shoulders, "Mae West? Liberace?"11

Conscious of the momentous nature of the occasion-very likely the last
time that La Merm would be in a Broadway show-one fan attending the
Sunday afternoon finale committed every detail to memory: "Merman gave
an abridged curtain speech after that Sunday matinee, `I don't know about
you, but I'm going out for some Neapolitan ice cream!' and backstage confessed that she was too emotional to continue her remarks."12

Settled but Indefatigable

Ethel was now living at the Hotel Berkshire on Madison and 52nd Street, in
an apartment that was quite modest for someone of her stature. The walls and
shelves were covered with mementos of a long career-framed pictures of her
with the Duke of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth, Bobby Kennedy; signed photos
of Gershwin, FDR. Her royal blue bedroom featured a heavy Victorian bureau that Dorothy Hammerstein had given her in 1941 and that Ethel had had
shortened to move in. An interviewer described the large Victorian brass bed
as being covered with "bright chintz coverlets and a sleeping doll collection." (Merman enjoyed her dolls.) Also in the bedroom was a crystal chandelier,
porcelain lamps, and a writing and bill-paying desk-the last had reportedly
belonged to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, something she'd bought on one
of her antiquing forays. The living room was red, white, and blue, allAmerican even when not trying to be. The reporter summed up, "Her taste
is lady like, but honest and strong, dashed through with imaginative twists
and turns that make it pure one of a kind Merman; who doesn't allow one
smidgeon of artificiality to creep into her surroundings-or her life."13
Everyone close to the offstage Ethel speaks of her in just those terms; she was
"real people" is nearly everyone's description of her.

One of the challenges Ethel faced in her personal life in the '70s was her
aging parents. Both in their nineties, Agnes and Edward Zimmermann had
followed their daughter to the Berkshire Hotel; they resided on the seventeenth floor, Ethel on the fourteenth. Pop was relatively healthy but was losing his sight; Agnes was much more frail and, in 1971, not long after her
daughter had finished Dolly! suffered a severe heart attack. When Agnes was
released from the hospital, Ethel hired a full-time nurse, named Kathryn
Shreve, to help Pop take care of her mother and enable them to continue living independently. Shreve, a retired nurse living in Kenilworth, New Jersey,
had been recommended by the family's former physician. When Merman
first called her to ask if she'd be interested, Shreve declined. "An hour later
she called back and said she had always been fond of Mom and Pop and she'd
take the job," said Ethel. "There was only one problem-she had a dog. I was
so happy to get her, I told her, `I don't care if it's a Great Dane, just come.' 1114
The arrangement worked out well, and Ethel became genuinely fond of
Shreve, who became much like an extended family member.

Aware that it had been lucky to lure Ethel back on the boards for Dolly!
the entertainment world began to pay homage to a performer whose career
had intersected, in some form or another, with all of the giants of twentiethcentury music and musical theater: George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter,
Irving Berlin, Vernon Duke, Buddy DeSylva, Dorothy Fields, Jule Styne,
Jerry Herman, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, Roger Edens, George
Abbott, Josh Logan, Lindsay and Crouse, Leland Hayward, David Merrick,
Jimmy Durante, Bing Crosby, Eddie Cantor, Bert Lahr, Ray Middleton,
Ginger Rogers, Alice Faye, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and others. At
times, she was received with such praise that TV recordings show an Ethel
Merman who, while clearly honored, registers a little embarrassment, a
shy discomfort on her face. For as much as Ethel enjoyed-and, indeed,
demanded-respect, she really was uncomfortable about generating a fuss, and when she thought people were going too far in their enthusiasms or were
intrusive in making them, especially offstage, she became uneasy or even
unpleasant. Most of the time, though, she just took it like a pro.

When Merman was asked to revive Gypsy in London, she turned it down
because of her parents' health, even after the producers offered to fly them
over with her. A special honor occurred at the April 1972 Tony Awards, in
which Ethel appeared not as a presenter but as the recipient of a lifetime
achievement award. Half a year later, in October, Ethel was inducted into the
Theatre Hall of Fame. Two years after that, in 1974, she played London for
two weeks at the Palladium Theatre, and in August 1977 she played the Hollywood Bowl.