Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (8 page)

Even back then, Ethel's performance style seemed the theatrical equivalent
of her matter-of-fact personality: she just planted her feet onstage, faced the
audience, and sang. It would become a defining trait for over fifty years. But
in the 192os and '3os, it was hardly idiosyncratic. Theater and opera singers
alike were trained "just to face forward and sing to the proscenium."74 This
approach, of course, was required for technical reasons: before theaters were
amplified or performers miked, in order to project one's voice and be heard
over the orchestra, belting was almost a physical necessity. A singer's movement was similarly constrained. In opera, physical movement had to be carefully blocked; in musical theater, it was kept to an absolute minimum, often
restricted to upper-body gestures.75 Even popular orchestrations of the period tended to highlight strings over the brass section to facilitate hearing the
voices onstage.

Belting

For as much as the world associates Ethel Merman with belting, there is no
public record of that term used in connection with her before 1952. This is
not to say that belting didn't exist, but that it was not named as such. "The only
way to fill the theater," says singing voice specialist Jeannette LoVetri, "was
to shout, or to sing like an opera singer, because those resonances seemed to
project all the way to the back row. Before the advent of amplification, the
performers who had the strongest, the clearest, and the most dynamic sounds
were the ones you could hear, and those were the people that `worked."'76 Vocal specialist Linda Carroll explains, "The cultivation of voices such as
[those of] Kate Smith and Ethel Merman occurred during a time when there
was no difference between concert singers, opera singers and popular singers
in the elements of training," adding that the same tension between bel canto
and canto declamato applies to the popular crooners of the 194os and the
rock-and-roll "screamers" of the 1970s.77

Belting is a bit like pornography: everyone recognizes it, but defining it is
altogether another thing. "Most people associate belting with some kind of
louder singing that's closely associated with speech," says LoVetri. Many
people think of belting as a chest sound that kicks into gear at the high end
of a singer's comfortable range. "One of the things that you hear in a belt
voice like Merman's when they're up high is a lot of tension, and the tension
sounds exciting. It reminds people of a yell, and when do human beings yell?
We yell when we're excited, whether out of fear or joy."78 Klea Blackhurst disagrees: "That just makes it a speech quality."79 What she finds important is
how belting involves the entire body and requires the kind of extreme effort
that classical trainers teach against, their belief being that only a relaxed body
can produce full sounds. "Belting is an incredibly physical way to sing," says
Blackhurst, adding, "but you can't make it look that hard. If you do, it looks
mannered."80

If, as Blackhurst says, belting is a highly physical form of singing, it is also
connected to the body in other, more abstract, psychological ways. In contrast to belting, people tend not to associate physical exertion with, say,
crooning or jazz scat singing. Moreover, because to belt means to lay a force
or blow on something else, "the strict dictionary definition of belt requires
an interaction between performer and listener,"81 an impact that is experienced in physical and visceral ways. So it made sense for the press to write of
Merman, in 1940, "When she walks, it's like a swing band in a jam session.
And when she sings, she makes your ears tingle ... her voice dances in your
ears and rings down along the bloodstream."82 Or, in 1955, "She is not just a
voice, but ... she gives the sort of all-out performance which is rarely seen.
Judy Garland and Al Jolson are the only other entertainers this reviewer has
seen who gave themselves, body and soul, to the audience."83 Without that
emotional force, belting techniques are just tricks; without that sense of personality, impact, and the relationship between performer and audience, belting does not exist. 84

During the premike and preamplification era, projection was less of an
issue in nightclubs and other informal musical venues than in the large theater and opera houses. Singers could move a bit more in these smaller spaces, although there, too, the style remained essentially the same: performers sang
straight out to the audience. In Yiddish theater, for instance, performers made
no attempt to naturalize their performance but just put the music out there,
acknowledging the audience and its response with a relaxed style and interactions. There, one could find a lot more swaying shoulders, especially among
female singers of the time, from whom greater bodily display was expected.

When Ethel sang, she was able to convey movement and energy through
highly animated facial expressions. From the beginning, her startled, twinkling eyes relayed an energetic spirit and sense of pep. She drew attention to
her hands and arms by moving them out and upward to near eye level. Ethel
had jewels sewn onto the wrists of her sleeves and wore large bracelets and
rings so that she could literally twinkle while staring into her audience. This
historically based performance style remained with Merman for life, long
after it had faded from the general scene. She rarely looked at costars when
singing onstage, often infuriating them and fueling accusations of egomania.
A good example can be seen on the kinescope of her historic 1953 duet with
Mary Martin on television. True to her stage image, Mary Martin is interactive, affectionately putting her hands on Merman's shoulders and looking at
her. Merman, on the other hand, stares straight ahead nearly the entire time,
beaming her gaze at the studio audience and camera.

Again, Blackhurst puts the matter into historical context. "Ethel started
singing before there were mikes. And she never altered her performance for
a mike."85 It may appear mannered today-or even to people watching her
telecast with Martin in the 195os-but Ethel came of age in an era marked
by certain technological limitations, orchestration styles, and performance
standards. Moreover, even the material she performed, like other songs, theatrical sketches, and comic routines of the time, acknowledged the proscenium and the audience's presence through direct gazes, knowing winks and
gags, and verbal repartee with them. This was an era of show making, not one
in which songs or plays would produce a self-contained, "natural" world set
apart from the performance situation, but one where numbers were acknowledged as such.

This performance style also contributed to Ethel's association with a mix of
ethnicities. By Ethel's time, Germans had resided in the United States long
enough to be considered part of the American white mainstream, a categorization furthered by their white skin and Saxon heritage. By this time, in short,
Germans weren't considered foreign in the same way that newer nationals
and immigrants were; for instance, the more recent Greeks and Poles were
deemed less American, less "white" than their German-American counterparts.

Nonetheless, Ethel didn't always come across in the same way that other white,
gentile performers did, despite her Anglo vocal features. Her robust, direct style
had more in common with Yiddish performers like Brice (someone else who
rarely accommodated a mike) than with Marilyn Miller. And the "white ethnic" singers also tended to gravitate to songs that expressed bawdy humor,
hardly surprising from a white-dominated culture that tied humor and sexuality to nonwhite ethnicities. Here, too, Merman fit the bill.

Preparing to Launch

Despite all the attention lavished on her voice, Merman, now in her early
twenties, was not hard on the eyes. She was a very attractive young woman,
if not a cookie-cutter glamour queen, and didn't look much different than
she did as a teen. A photo dated from the mid- to late 192os shows her with
a twinkling, impish charm. Her dress, shoes, and pose convey the sense of
crisp youth and bubbly, well-groomed vitality. A little later, in the mid-'30s,
a newspaper would use the same picture with the caption "At 5'6" and 118 lbs,
Ethel's thigh reveals...." Images like this, coupled with her oft-announced
secretarial background and the constantly affirmed love of her folks, bathe
the early Merman in an astounding wholesomeness.

It was sometime late in 1929 or early 1930 that Lou Irwin arranged for
Ethel to audition at the Warner Bros.' East Coast studios. Accounts vary as
to who attended the audition, whether it was Harry Warner, Archie Mayo
(the director of the studios), or both. Recalls Lou Irwin, "Lewis Warner,
Harry's son, thought she was terrific."g6 Ethel indeed wowed them, and
Warners signed her for a six-month contract with options for another seven
(or nine) years under the studio's Vitaphone banner.87 Her contract stipulated that whether she worked or not, she would draw a salary of $125 per
week. Ethel finally quit her secretarial job: "Bragg just wished me well. That
was all." Hs But things didn't ignite, and Warner Bros. barely used her. Ethel
played a small role in the nine-minute The Cave Club, which Vitaphone publicized as a "flash," a short spectacle film, as opposed to a story-driven drama
or comedy. Publix Opinion, the official industry press sheet for Paramount
subsidiary Publix's exhibitors, gave it the following write-up:

A subject with song and dance, in two scenes-one a primitive Night Club
with Amazon gals doing their stuff-then a mystic glass[-] and one gets an
insight into night life of today, giving the idea that entertainment tastes have changed but little. The hostess, Marjorie Leach, does a Texas Guinan as she
presents the girls and speciality numbers, among which is a good adagio team.
A fair flash which has the elements to appeal in audiences of the second choice
houses ... it is not strong enough to hold the closing spot on the program.89

Ethel had shot her number at the Warner Avenue J studio, in Brooklyn.
"I acted as a mechanical rabbit for a posse of hard-breathing cannibals or ani-
mals,"90 she said later of the experience. She said she sang a "weird song" in
an elaborate jungle number "with a lot of tom toms." Unsurprisingly, Ethel
soon soured on the arrangement with Warners. She was getting paid, but she
wasn't getting anything to do. "I got tired of all that waiting around," she
said, eventually asking to be released from her contract. Irwin remembers it
differently: "Warners could have encouraged her option," but they "dropped
her. "91

At the end of 1929, Ethel, usually the model of health and energy, underwent a tonsillectomy. This surgery wouldn't become the Big Story that the
one thirty years later was, when she broke a blood vessel in her throat during
Gypsy. But even at this early stage, her voice was deemed important enough
to be a news item. As Merman (with the help of her first biographer) later
embellished, "Could be, having my tonsils chopped out had a permanent effect on my voice and made it louder. They had to go in so deep for my tonsils they severed a couple of blood vessels and I had to be sewn up."92 Again,
this seems less the real Ethel Merman talking than the voice associated with
"Ethel Merman," the public production, whose iconoclastic toughness was
being extended to her body itself, almost a Deep Throat avant la lettre. Insists Blackhurst, "She was not a freak of nature. But I do think all her vocal
styling was her choice. And that's what people wanted."93 (If Merman objected to this exaggeration or caricature of her physical attributes, she hardly
let on. As she later told Pete Martin, "Dr. Stuart Craig would say `I can't even
see your vocal cords. They must be somewhere down in your calves.' So I get
the picture that mine are different from everybody else's, at least where
they're placed.")94

A month after the tonsillectomy, Lou Irwin secured an engagement in
Miami for Ethel to "recover" at the lush Roman Pools Casino, where she was
billed as "Ethel Merman, Beautiful Talkie Star." Although Agnes liked to accompany her daughter when she traveled, functioning as nurse, escort, and
informal business agent, she did not accompany Ethel on her first trip out of
the tri-state area, probably because of the expense. Merman made $30o a week
in Miami, five times what she'd been earning at The Little Russia. During her month and a half there, she worked alongside rubber-mouthed comedian Joe
E. Lewis and, as a program indicates for the night of January 31, Grace Kay
White, Ralph Wonders, Irving Aaronson, and the Commanders. "Moanin'
Low" was still one of her big numbers.

Back in New York, Irwin booked Merman a total of three times on the
RKO Keith Palace circuit and, on September 13, 1930, she played the Palace
Theatre on 47th Street for the first time. With Al Siegel at the piano, she
opened the second act after an orchestral "Ain't Misbehavin'." All we know
about that night is that she performed a variety of contemporary hit tunes,
since program notes offer nothing more specific than "Modern Songs in
Modern Style." Ethel split her pay of $5oo a week with Siegel. The following
summer on July 20, she appeared at the Palace for a second time and was held
over the next week, practically unheard of in Palace history.95 But before
then, after the first Palace engagement, Ethel had an other gig that was bringing in cash that she didn't have to share with Siegel. She was earning $375 a
week rehearsing for a new George and Ira Gershwin show. The show was
called Girl Crazy, and it was preparing to open at the Alvin Theatre.