Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (81 page)

Together on Broadway was a historic, momentous evening for Broadway.
Ticket prices (unscalped, that is) ranged between $25 and $15o and were sold
out as soon as the first ad appeared. "Even Lauren Bacall had to stand by until
almost curtain time," Ethel later remembered.40 The divas' entrance was
playfully dramatic: Martin was dressed in a large sailor suit as Nellie Forbush
(from South Pacific), Merman was Mama Rose, and the pair came crashing
through paper circus hoops to Stephen Sondheim's song "Send in the
Clowns," an effective and neutral choice, since it came from a show that neither had performed in, A Little Night Music. Together Ethel and Mary sang
many of the tunes they'd done on the Ford 50th Anniversary Show twenty-four
years earlier, reprising the now-famous medley in full. At one point, they appeared as two "Dollys" on the arms of Cyril Ritchard, "Captain Hook" from
Martin's Peter Pan. For three hours, they sang to ovation after ovation; one
audience member describes "audience bedlam" when Ethel launched into
"Gee but It's Good to Be Here" and "Blow, Gabriel, Blow "41 "There was
such an outpouring of love," Ethel reflected later, "I felt as if they were unconsciously repaying us for all the years we'd sacrificed our social lives to give
performances and shown up when we were ill or someone near and dear to us
was ailing."42 Reviewers dug deep for praise, recognizing the joyous weight
of the evening.

In 1973, Ethel Merman and Mary Martin had appeared in the trendy
Blackglama fur ads in which celebrities were put into poses appropriate to
their persona, with the tagline "What becomes a Legend most?" Merman's
and Martin's images could not have been more different. Mary Martin is
wearing a short-length light-colored fur jacket, without slacks or skirt, legs
clad simply in dark stockings. She is shot from the side, legs together, giving a slightly coy look to the camera in a pose that recalls her breakthrough
hit, Porter's "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." Merman, by contrast, looks
as if she were sweeping across the room, not standing still so much as
caught midmovement. Her longer, asymmetrical black fur coat is shaped
almost like a bell pepper, with her legs and arms outspread, head tilted up,
and a beaming face-clearly enjoying herself. Perhaps it was a way for
Merman to have some fun with the upscale glamour of the Blackglama
campaign.

After Together on Broadway the two stars wrote each other in letters filled
with the ingenuous affection and pride each felt for the other; Mary, as she
often did, referred (deferred?) to Ethel as "Dear Queen"; Ethel's note to Mary
enthused about how great it was to work together again. 41 Correspondence
between them had been strong for years, and they still kept sending each
other notes, gifts, and plants whenever the other was sick, if one of them
made an appearance, or if there was a family event of note. Ethel and Mary
also shared a passion for needlepoint; Mary made the patterns, and Ethel did
the stitching. Ethel kept the needlepoint work all over her apartment on
many pillows and cloths and displayed some of her work in the 19th Biennial Exhibit of Amateur Needlepoint of Today in 1975. (Kaye Ballard has a
pillow that Ethel did "with two frogs doing something rude" on it.)44

Mary Martin was the only Broadway musical star whose career and stature
came close to rivaling Ethel's. In fact, the two were never rivals, although fans
and the press salivated for a bloodthirsty rivalry between them, the kind of
competitive diva situation Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand had mocked
up with their "I hate you" comments/compliments. Divas Merman and Martin were competitive, to be sure, but they were too professional to feed into
any petty rivalry. And besides, their mutual respect was very much ingenuous. There were enough differences between what each of them did that competition wasn't as ferocious as it might have been: yes, Mary Martin toured
as Annie Oakley, but she could never have pulled off Mama Rose, just as
Merman could have played Peter Pan or Maria von Trapp only in some wild,
parallel universe. Ethel assessed their distinctive styles in her second autobiography:

I like to look after myself.... I enjoy keeping a part of my time for myself
alone. And if anyone shoves me, I'll shove back. Mary is just the opposite. Not
that she is without convictions or bland. Her way is just quieter. Nobody
pushes her around, because she always sees to it that she has someone looking
after her interests [notably, manager-husband Halliday]. She has by delegating responsibility retained a lovable fey quality (Is it any wonder that Peter Pan
is her favorite role?) to which audiences respond. She also has it in real life....
One matinee afternoon during the Broadway run of South Pacific, Richard was
indisposed and could not accompany her to the theater as he always did. The
apartment doorman secured a taxi for Mary, and when she got in she told the
driver that she wanted to go to South Pacific. Pressed for the name of the theater, Mary, who had been playing in the show for a year, couldn't recall it. In
all that time, she'd just never bothered to look, depending upon Richard to
get her there.45

Changes in the Family

Pop was well enough to spend the summer of 1977 in New Jersey, but that
fall his health deteriorated, and he was admitted into Roosevelt Hospital. Edward did not want to stay there any longer than necessary, so he moved back
into his Manhattan apartment, which Ethel had "converted into a tiny hospital, with twenty-four hour nursing care."46 Pop Zimmermann had always
said he expected to make it to one hundred, and he almost did, passing away
on December 22, 1977, at the age of ninety-eight. Toward the end of his life,
Ethel wrote, he spoke more and more of seeing Agnes again; "tears would
course down his cheeks and he'd talk about joining Mom."47 His ashes joined
hers and Ethel Geary's in Colorado. In Kenilworth, family members and
caregivers planted a red maple tree in the yard to commemorate him, and the
tree still flourishes today.

Most everyone remembers Pop as an affectionate, warm fellow and remembers that it was Agnes who had the tougher side. Neighbor Al Koenig
remembers a time when Agnes, with her sharp eye-guarded to the point of
suspicion-failed to locate a silver frame and promptly accused him, Shreve,
or Hill of taking it. "'That's funny, that's real funny. It was just here,' she said,
looking at each of us."48 (Ethel had the frame all along.)

Throughout the '7os, grandson Bob was still the rebel, and the political
differences between him and the other family members weren't bringing
them any closer together. Agnes and Edward were lifetime Republicans;
Bob's own political inclinations went in the opposite direction. During the
1972 election, he recalls, Pop-now blind-asked for a Nixon campaign button, and Bobby complied by pinning a "Fuck Nixon" button to his lapel,
causing his mother to hit the roof. Of course Levitt's rebellions against his
mother and grandparents-even adolescent pranks like the button-were
but a moment in a specific time of American history, when generational,
racial, and economic divisions were pulling far more than families in entirely
different directions. But the tensions may have been experienced more profoundly in the Levitt-Zimmermann clan, given the compounding factors of
Merman's great celebrity and the considerable violence, tragedies, and noncommunications they suffered as a family.

As the '7os wore on, though, the mother-son relationship saw some softening, and Levitt and Merman seemed intent on at least trying to accept and
respect each other more. Today, Bob expresses his gratitude for all that his
mother did (and attempted to do) for him with an exceptional degree of
openness, candid critique, and forgiveness.

You're Gonna Love It Here

Before Pop's passing in December, Merman experienced a number of lighter
milestones and activities in 1977. She was the celebrity "team leader" on The
Match Game, the popular TV game show hosted by Gene Rayburn. (Regular Charles Nelson Reilly remembers the fun he had working with her.) More
important, the year saw You're Gonna Love It Here, Merman's second stab at
her own sitcom on television. Written by Bruce Paltrow (Gwyneth's father),
the half-hour pilot features Merman as "big Broadway star" Lolly Rogers, another brassy broad with a name somewhere between Lola Lasagna and Dolly
Levi. Lolly has a busy life; she's preparing for a fifteen-city tour in Mame.
When an undepicted daughter and son-in-law are jailed for tax evasion, Lolly
has to find a home for her smart-mouthed grandson (who tells grandma
things like "your peroxide has gone to your brain") and convinces her unmarried son, Peter, a New York press agent with "crazy hours," to take in the
boy. The pilot follows the ambivalence of uncle and nephew as they adjust
to their new union. Peter is played by Austin Pendleton, who'd played Motel,
the tailor in Fiddler on the Roof, on Broadway, bringing a light touch of Jewish luster and humor to Merman's TV family.

The show was never picked up; said Ethel later, it lacked "zing." But it was
put together with considerable forethought: had Love It Here gone forward,
Ethel's role could easily have been scaled back to that of featured guest star
to accommodate her schedule or wishes, or it could have just as easily been
moved in the other direction, giving her the lead. But in most ways, You're
Gonna Love It Here is standard '70s sitcom family fare, filled with mouthy,
disrespectful kids, with a slightly more adult and cynical version of domestic
life than sitcoms of the '5os and early '6os. The nuclear TV family was no
more; by the '7os, it was fractured, with one or two parents usually missing
and alliances patched together across different blood and generational lines.
Authority figures were flawed (Beaver Cleaver's dad would never have done
jail time), and character behavior and language were more irreverent. Love It
Here seems far more relaxed than Maggie Brown, even though it was no less
formulaic for its time than Maggie had been for its.

In marked contrast to Maggie, though, You're Gonna Love It Here banks
heavily on Merman's New Yorkness. Before the show even begins, the opening credits appear over an aerial view of Manhattan's skyscrapers while Ethel
sings Peter Matz and Mitzi Welch's jaunty title song. The theme is sustained
throughout the episode; at one point, when the unhappy grandson opines,
"My home is in Philadelphia," Grandma Ethel replies, "Philadelphia is only good for out-of-town tryouts." The shift in locale not only made the show
more compatible with Merman's image but also reflected a change in TV
comedies. Earlier family sitcoms, especially from the '5os, standardly took
place in unidentified generic suburbs so as to appeal to an invisible "everyone," but by the '70s, after the sitcom had been firmly established as a TV
staple, producers were turning to regional differences as a way to differentiate their otherwise standardized product. This hadn't occurred overnight; in
between, there'd been Mayberry, RFD and The Andy Griffith Show (in the
not-too-deep South). The Beverly Hillbillies banked on another generic
formula-the improbable "match," in this instance among people, class, and
place; there was also Lucy and Desi's interethnic marriage and the odd pairing of Eva Gabor's and Eddie Albert Jr.'s cross-class characters on Green Acres.
Regional and class differences were no longer erased in favor of a white-bread,
suburban middle-class soup, but could be counted on for flavor, as if from a
spice rack. Areas and regional "types" provided the main source of gags, suggesting in some cases that not much had changed from silent film culture or
stage shows such as Girl Crazy, which, like The Beverly Hillbillies in the '6os,
used "country rubes" in exactly the same way.

You're Gonna Love It Here references other features of Merman's established
persona. Lolly's planning a tour as Mame, a role Ethel never played but could
easily have brought to life. There is also Lolly's down-to-earth demeanor and
her quirky contradictions: in some situations she is unbothered by propriety
(beating her young grandson at poker); in others, she shows outright scandal
("Chinese takeout for breakfast?"). Lolly wears Ethel's take-charge attitude like
a glove: in the middle of arguing with her son during a fitting, for instance,
she barks in split-second timing to the tailor, "I wanna show more leg!"

The show makes some noteworthy, though surely unintentional, references to Ethel's personal life. Some seem to mirror events; others contradict
them. Not since Gypsy had a Merman vehicle offered up so many possible
analogies, even if the show's small viewership left them hidden from sight.
With a curious frankness, Lolly says, "As a parent I'm hit and miss." When
Peter complains, "What do I know about raising a kid?" she responds in singsong, "There's nothing to It/ Didn't I do it?" almost like her rhyming games
with Bobby. The TV mother-son relationship is affectionate, as it was between Merman and Levitt, but tensions are evident as well. Trying to get
Peter to take the child off her hands, Lolly pulls out all the stops with faux
theatrics, turning into a cliched Jewish mother: "Didn't I spend my entire life
sheltering you, protecting you, sacrificing my entire career for you.... [fake
sobs] I've been too generous."

Merman plays it to the hilt and is very funny. But in addition to the
private Ethel that her role vaguely invokes, one can see a certain sense in
which Mama Rose's ghosts haunt the edges of the role. A few of Lolly's
lines nearly suggest a public response to Rose, if not to Ethel's own experiences with motherhood, by being more relaxed, more "hit and miss" in
her approach to child rearing than the severe model Rose offered twenty
years earlier.

Visually the show made a few modest attempts to capture "the real"
Ethel, notably, in scenes inside Lolly Rogers's apartment, where we see photos of a young Ethel Merman barely discernible on top of her piano. Although in some ways this isn't unlike Merman's actual apartments, whose
walls were covered with photographs and career mementos, in other ways,
her fictional abode couldn't have resembled Merman's less. By now, Ethel
was residing at the Surrey Hotel on 20 East 76th Street, after a somewhat
public dispute with the owners of the Berkshire about increases in rent and
service charges. When she moved into her eighth-floor unit, Ethel had the
stove taken out of the kitchen, keeping a small toaster-oven in which she
could reheat Chinese takeout or cook chicken hot dogs, about all the food
preparation she cared to do. Again, it was a modest residence, just three and
a half rooms. In the foyer she kept her miniature Christmas tree, whose tiny
lights were illuminated all year long; in the lime-green living room was a
fireplace whose mantel held a clock she'd been given by the Civic Light Orchestra of Pittsburgh. A ceramic basset hound named George guarded the
room at ankle height, and all over the apartment Merman kept her needlepoint work, some of it in the bed pillows alongside her beloved Raggedy
Anns and Muppet friends.