Ethel Merman: A Life (12 page)

Dorothy Fields had been born into the business—her father was Joseph Fields, of the famed comedy team Weber and Fields. For years she had worked in Hollywood, and in 1936 she became the first female songwriter ever to win an Academy Award, for her lyrics to Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight” from the Astaire-Rogers film
Swing Time
. She was taking a health retreat at the Arrowhead Springs Hotel when Schwartz reached her; the telephone was brought to her while she was having a mud bath, and she instantly said yes. The team went to work and in a short time had come up with a loosely structured spoof of the labor-union movement in Hollywood.

To direct, Wiman engaged Joshua Logan, who earlier that year had leaped to the forefront of Broadway directors with three hits,
On Borrowed Time, Knickerbocker Holiday
, and
I Married an Angel
. The troubles that were to haunt the new show cropped up almost immediately, when Logan took a look at the script. Ignoring the runaway success of
Pins and Needles
, he decided that a musical comedy about the left wing—“the red side,” as he called it—sounded like box-office poison. He insisted that the union angle be omitted almost entirely, and he began to work with McEvoy to retool the book as a general Hollywood satire. It was eventually called
Stars in Your Eyes
, and Ethel and Jimmy Durante were signed on for the leads. There was some concern that the thorny question of billing that had delayed
Red, Hot and Blue!
would recur, but Schwartz appealed to Durante by reminding him that Noël Coward had allowed Gertrude Lawrence to be billed before him in
Private Lives
. Durante figured that if Coward, as both actor
and
playwright, could be that magnanimous, he could, too.

The book was in terrible shape when Ethel signed on, but eventually Logan and McEvoy pulled together a story about a young intellectual (Richard Carlson) who arrived in Hollywood with dreams of making a movie about the labor problems among sharecroppers and coal miners. But his ambitions to create serious art are trampled by a variety of Hollywood types, including Jeanette Adair (Ethel), the temperamental number-one star at Monotone Pictures, who sets her sights on the writer. Logan had taken the idea from his old friend James Stewart: several years earlier, Stewart had arrived at MGM, a young, green contract player, and had immediately fallen under the gaze of Norma Shearer, queen of the MGM lot. Shearer was so taken with Stewart that she insisted he travel around town in her yellow limousine. Not wanting to offend the wife of MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, Stewart complied, but he hid on the limousine floor so his friends couldn’t see him. Durante was to play the comedy lead of Monotone Pictures’ “idea man”; the supporting cast included Mildred Natwick, a distinguished stage actress making her musical debut, and the talented young comedienne Mary Wickes. The show was heavy on dance, and the corps de ballet included future notables Alicia Alonso, Nora Kaye, Maria Karniloff (Karnilova), and Jerome Robbins. Dwight Deere Wiman seemed unworried about the changes in the book; he was more concerned that the show provide a good showcase for his new protégée, the beautiful Ballets Russes star Tamara Toumanova. And Arthur Schwartz had written successful revues but had yet to compose a book show that found an audience.

In rehearsal Ethel once again amazed her colleagues by how hard she worked. To Dorothy Fields, her first line readings were almost perfect. She never overplayed her hand in the comedy scenes, making every connection absolutely right. Ethel was no towering intellect, Dorothy observed—she didn’t read much, and she didn’t keep up too closely with current events; most of her conversation was gossip about people in show business. That was fine with Dorothy, who loved Ethel’s bawdy, raucous wit. The two women admired each other’s professionalism and work ethic. When she was younger, Dorothy had taken Jerome Kern’s advice that to be a successful songwriter it was necessary to rise early, around 6:30
A.M
., and be ready to sit down at the piano by 8:00. She wrote daily from early morning through to 3:00 in the afternoon—as she put it, until her wastebasket was filled up. To her friends she was a warm, refined, hospitable woman who loved her craft. Ethel took to her right away, and Dorothy returned the feeling, becoming close enough to get away with calling Ethel “Mermsey.” Later on she would say that Ethel had the greatest discipline of any woman she ever met.

To Logan, Ethel seemed a consummate actress who moved easily from the comedy scenes to the tender moments. In the Schwartz-Fields song “I’ll Pay the Check,” in which Jeanette Adair realizes that she can never make the young writer fall in love with her, Ethel was achingly poignant. Logan would demonstrate a piece of business that he had concocted for her, and Ethel would write it on her steno pad. “She took everything down in shorthand,” said Anna Crouse, who worked as Logan’s assistant on
Stars in Your Eyes
. “That was supposed to be
my
job, but she was so much faster!”

Ethel also again demonstrated her unerring instincts about whether new material was going to work. One of the political numbers left over from the show’s original conception was “My New Kentucky Home,” a satirical ditty in which the sun, the moon, and the stars functioned only during union hours. It was a clever song—so clever, Ethel thought, that it was dragging the show down, but Schwartz was mad to have it in. Anna Crouse later recalled the first hearing of “My New Kentucky Home” at the New Haven tryout. “Ethel said she would try it in New Haven,” said Crouse. “And she didn’t dog it or try to do anything to say to the audience, ‘I’m not enjoying this.’ But it had little to do with the rest of the show, and it just lay there. She was a good sport to do it, although she herself knew, better than Arthur did, that it wasn’t going to work.” Schwartz and Fields saw her point, sat down to work, and came up with a replacement number, “A Lady Needs a Change,” which was a hit from the instant it went in.

In New Haven,
Stars in Your Eyes
ran much too long, and Logan made nearly a half hour’s worth of cuts. The show moved on to Boston, where many of the cuts were gradually reinstated. By the time it opened at Boston’s Shubert Theatre on January 17, 1939, the curtain didn’t come down until midnight. Still, the
Boston Herald
thought the show gave “every indication of proving a big, popular success” and was “a field day” for Ethel. Logan made more drastic cuts, but this time his hacking seemed to inflict significant damage on the show’s delicate balance of humor and pathos, and it never quite recovered.

Stars in Your Eyes
opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre on February 9. Several of the big scenes scored strongly with the audience, in particular one in which Jeanette tries to seduce the young writer in her studio dressing room, where he gets progressively drunker on champagne. Just as he is about to move in for the big kiss, he spots a copy of his favorite book,
Alice in Wonderland,
and asks Jeanette to read it aloud to him. When Ethel opened the book, she took a perfectly timed pause, then boomed the title of the opening chapter: “DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE.” There was a great rolling laugh in the audience. Fade-out. Then the lights came back up to indicate the passing of time. “CHAPTER TEN,” blasted Ethel. “WHO STOLE THE TARTS?” Logan recalled that she gave the line such a shot of electricity that the audience was screaming with laughter. By the time she slammed the book shut and tossed it across the room, they were wildly applauding.

Another audience favorite was Jimmy Durante’s duet with Mildred Natwick, “Terribly Attractive,” which they performed in a prop auto in front of a screen with a running film. As they raced through traffic, nearly driving off the cliff roads, members of the audience in the front row shrieked in terror; it was almost like an early example of Cinerama. The big eleven-o’clock number, “It’s All Yours,” with Durante and Ethel trotting out one hoary vaudeville joke after another, was also a smash. From the wings someone would throw out a telephone, which Durante would answer, saying, “Hello, is this the
meat
market? Well, tell my wife to
meet
me at five o’clock!” They do a buck-and-wing exit, then come back to do another refrain. Logan would recall it as one of the most thrilling numbers he ever saw on any stage.

The reviews were mixed for the show but excellent for the cast. “As for Miss Merman,” offered the
New York Herald Tribune
, “she sings as fascinatingly as ever and plays with a comedy skill far greater than she has shown us before.” Burns Mantle, in the
New York Daily News
, thought the show “gives Merman a chance to be something more than a response to song cues, and she, with Joshua Logan’s help as a director, takes complete advantage of her chance.”

It looked as if
Stars in Your Eyes
would run through the season, but, unfortunately, no one had reckoned on the impact of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which offered a staggering array of good reasons not to attend a Broadway musical. Tourists were more interested in taking in the Heinz Food Pavilion, Eleanor Holm in Billy Rose’s
Aquacade
, or other family-oriented fare, than they were in plunking down their money for a musical spoof of Hollywood. Ethel always claimed that she never appeared in a Broadway flop, but on May 27,
Stars in Your Eyes
closed with a disappointing run of 127 performances and $1,300 owing in refunds.

F
rom the time she was very young, Ethel had a strong attraction to tough guys. Few of the men in her life were tougher than Sherman Billingsley, the proudly self-made man from Oklahoma who became a major celebrity as owner of the Stork Club, for years one of the most famous nightspots in the world. Ever since she played in
Red, Hot and Blue!
, Ethel had been an occasional drop-in at the Stork after her Saturday-night shows. When she returned from Hollywood in 1938, she began going oftener, and by 1939 she was a regular. Her constant attendance at the Stork Club was not entirely due to the royal treatment she received as the Queen of Broadway Musicals—though that was certainly part of it. More to the point, she and Sherman Billingsley had fallen deeply in love.

To her closest friends, it made perfect sense, for Billingsley was her ideal type. Born on a farm in the Oklahoma Territory, he had been fiercely ambitious from the start. When he was a kid, he spent hours scrounging around the streets of his hometown, Enid, looking for empty whiskey bottles to resell to the local saloonkeepers. He picked plums, washed dishes in a Mexican chili restaurant—any kind of job he could find, he took. Before he was twenty, he had acquired a half interest in a pair of drugstores, and he later got his hands on a chain of grocery stores. Many of these businesses were a front for his bootlegging activities, which ultimately landed him a short stint in Leavenworth Prison. Following his release he moved to New York, where, after investing in real-estate ventures in the Bronx, he decided it was time to move up the social scale. First Billingsley opened an earlier incarnation of the Stork Club on West Fifty-eighth Street, then plotted a move to a tonier location, where, he hoped, his clientele would be “strictly carriage trade or nothing.” His revamped Stork Club opened in 1934 at 3 East Fifty-third Street, and quickly it became the favorite gathering spot of Broadway and Hollywood celebrities, café society, and stargazing out-of-towners.

Billingsley’s place figured prominently in innumerable magazine layouts and a number of radio shows, and eventually it became so famous that it was used for the name of a 1945 movie starring Betty Hutton. It was, for much of America, the epitome of New York elegance. For Ethel it was a place where she made some lasting friendships, including J. Edgar Hoover and his boyfriend Clyde Tolson, and Bea Lillie, who could toss back beers as fast as Ethel downed champagne.

At the Stork, Billingsley insisted on a strict code of behavior, and he wasn’t afraid to enforce it. Drunken rowdiness or even the mildest form of tasteless behavior—table-hopping was a no-no—was not tolerated and could result in at least temporary banishment. Billingsley unapologetically catered only to what he considered the best sort of people, which could include tourists, so long as they knew how to behave. He reserved the right to keep anyone on the other side of the velvet ropes. (This especially applied to blacks, whom he despised.) He went out of his way to welcome the cream of New York’s young set, especially many of the city’s most famous debutantes, notably Brenda Frazier. The father of several children himself, Billingsley kept a close watch over his young patrons, making sure that they never fell in with the wrong crowd, and often cutting their dinner checks in half.

Most of all Billingsley loved celebrities, and by showering them with gifts he guaranteed that a steady stream of them flowed into his establishment. Favorite regulars received gold and silver cigarette cases, expensive ties, cases of champagne, and bottles of Sortilège, a chic perfume whose distributorship he had acquired. “I started giving things to people because I felt so happy about their patronizing my place,” he once told a journalist, and the gambit worked with most of the celebrities he courted, including Ethel, who was soon such a fixture at the Stork Club that Billingsley assigned a waiter just to stand by to light her cigarettes.

Ethel had an intense physical attraction to Billingsley. He was a good-looking man, extremely masculine, with a low-key, soft-spoken manner and icy blue eyes. His tentative smile had a sexy charm, but there was the hint of enormous strength behind it.

What cemented his appeal for her was his uncompromising, single-minded approach to the way he ran his business. He seldom took a vacation or even a day off, and he monitored every detail of running the Stork himself: he made sure the food was fresh, hired the chefs, inspected the waiters’ uniforms to see that they were clean and well pressed. He managed his career in exactly the same way Ethel managed hers, and she thought that at last she had found her soul mate.

There was one difficulty, and it was a major one: Billingsley was married, with children. He was also a devout Catholic, for whom deserting his family seemed unthinkable. Mom Zimmermann was sure that Ethel was making a terrible mistake and gently remonstrated with her; Ethel’s romances with Al Goetz and Billingsley caused Mom to worry that her daughter was developing a pattern of going after married men. Dorothy Fields, by now one of Ethel’s closest girlfriends, warned her repeatedly that Billingsley would never leave his wife. But Ethel turned a deaf ear to all this well-intentioned advice. Billingsley had told her, over and over, how much he loved her, how much he wanted to be with her and her alone. She couldn’t believe that it wouldn’t all come to pass, if she just bided her time.

Ethel’s romance with Billingsley was a welcome distraction from the bumps in the road that her career had suffered over the past two years. The abrupt closing of
Red, Hot and Blue!
in Chicago, her failure to secure Hollywood stardom, and the relatively brief run of
Stars in Your Eyes
all had made her feel somewhat restless and uneasy, and she began casting around for another show.

After the success of
Take a Chance
, its producer, Buddy DeSylva, had gone out to Hollywood to helm the film version and had stayed to make several more pictures. But when his 1939 hit
Bachelor Mother,
starring Ginger Rogers, had covered all concerned with glory except DeSylva himself, he decided to head back to Broadway to produce the kind of success that would make Hollywood take him seriously. At the suggestion of the agent Louis Shurr, DeSylva began casting around for a property to star Bert Lahr, the brilliant stage clown who had just made a splash as the Cowardly Lion in MGM’s
Wizard of Oz
—not a big enough splash to please Lahr, however, since MGM had declined to keep him under long-term contract. DeSylva dug out an old story he’d written with Herbert Fields, brother of Dorothy, that Paramount had planned for Mae West but never produced. He and Fields went to work, refashioning it into a musical-comedy book, and Louis Shurr talked Cole Porter into composing the score.

Porter was eager to work with Ethel again, especially given the misery that had blighted his life over the past two years. In October 1937, during a riding party on Long Island, his horse had shied and rolled on top of him, shattering both his legs. He developed osteomyelitis and underwent several operations, which left him in chronic and often agonizing pain, but he bravely bore his affliction and continued to write. In November of 1938, his new show,
Leave It to Me!
, opened on Broadway and became a big hit. When the unknown ingenue Mary Martin stepped out to sing Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” the audience responded with a roar of approval: Dorothy Fields recalled that the only reception she’d ever heard to equal it was the one that greeted Ethel after she introduced “I Got Rhythm” in
Girl Crazy
.

Ethel was thrilled to be reunited with Porter, and she loved the script for the new show, which had the Mae Westian title
Du Barry Was a Lady
. In it she played May Daly, a nightclub singer at the Club Petite, and the (unrequited) love object of the club’s washroom attendant, Louis Blore (Lahr). After Louis wins $75,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes, he works up enough confidence to try to get rid of May’s boyfriend, Alex, by slipping him a Mickey Finn. But the drinks get mixed up, and Louis gets the Mickey Finn, whereupon he passes out and dreams that he is Louis XV and May is the courtesan Madame Du Barry. The jokes ranged from the topical (Louis: “I saw a picture the other day without Don Ameche in it”) to the ribald (Louis: “Every time I look at her, I feel like I’m sliding down a banister covered with peach fuzz.”).

Du Barry
was the most visually opulent show in which Ethel had yet starred. To design the scenes and costumes, DeSylva had engaged Raoul Pène du Bois, the Staten Island–born banker’s son who had dazzled Broadway four years earlier with his spectacular sets and costumes for Billy Rose’s
Jumbo
. For
Du Barry
, du Bois designed and oversaw the creation of seven scenes and 360 costumes, all completed in a dizzying three weeks’ time.

“The company for
Du Barry Was a Lady
was wacko—
completely
wacko,” recalled Lewis Turner, a member of the show’s dancing chorus. Leading the pack was Bert Lahr, whose inspired, euphoric clowning onstage masked a gloomy, pessimistic personality offstage. Lahr was a nervous performer, never quite sure, even after a show had opened successfully, whether the audience was on his side. His anxieties had not been helped by the fact that MGM had dumped him, and on top of everything else he was in physical discomfort: a condition diagnosed as spastic colon was plaguing him during rehearsals. Lahr also had doubts about the new show’s chances for success. By Broadway standards Porter’s lyrics pushed “sophisticated” about as far as possible. “When Cole got dirty,” Lahr later said, “it was dirt, without subtlety. Nothing I sang in burlesque was as risqué as his lyrics.” He was especially concerned about “But in the Morning, No,” a comic duet for Ethel and himself, in which Du Barry and Louis catalog all the things they love to do at night but avoid like the plague when the dawn comes:

 

HE
: D’you like Old Point Comfort, dear?

Kindly tell me, if so.

SHE
: I like Old Point Comfort, dear,

But in the morning, no.

 

There were further mentions, over the course of ten refrains, of “shooting,” “poker,” “Pike’s Peak,” “double entry,” and other bold double entendres. Ethel had no qualms about the lyrics. Since the days of
Anything Goes
, when she objected to the smuttiness of “Kate the Great,” she’d gained a more relaxed attitude about what was appropriate to sing onstage. She delighted in her opening number, “Come On In,” in which the ensemble sings:

 

If you go for pie, sweetheart,

Why don’t you try my cherry tart?

 

She was less pleased, however, with her costar. She had great respect for Lahr’s talent, and the two of them performed brilliantly together from the start: her sharp, streetwise dame made for a magnificent contrast with his addled buffoon. But she remained slightly wary of him, rankled, perhaps, by the fact that he commanded first billing. What is more likely is that she could never fathom his brooding personality. Because Ethel approached life as a black-and-white proposition, with little room for gray area, she remained allergic to complicated personalities. Lahr was in a Cole Porter show that looked like a sure thing, and he himself had funny lines, great songs. But in rehearsal he read his scenes almost tentatively, constantly stopping to make suggestions for honing a line or a piece of business. He never gave an all-out performance; that he was saving for the audience. Who could tell what his trouble was? Certainly not Ethel.

Lahr was also uneasy around Ethel. “She’s an individual with a special way of working,” he said. “There was nothing vicious in what she did, she is a great performer. But she’s tough.
She never looks at you on stage
.” This, in fact was a charge that Ethel’s costars would level at her throughout her career. Her method of planting herself stage center and throwing her lines straight out to the audience could be disconcerting to her colleagues, who craved
some
degree of onstage rapport with her. Lahr considered it a trick, but Ethel would have insisted that it was the style that worked best for her. It had evolved during her revue days, when she was often alone onstage, and now that she was appearing exclusively in book shows, she saw no reason to change it. Audiences loved it, so why should she?

In
Du Barry
, Porter gave Ethel a number of terrific melodies, from the heartfelt “Do I Love You?” and “When Love Beckoned” to the rousing final duet with Lahr, “Friendship,” which could be seen as an extension of their slightly edgy relationship onstage. She continued to suffer Lahr’s anxieties right up to the New Haven opening. During the second act, Louis was supposed to chase Du Barry around and over the bed. On opening night in New Haven, as they were running in circles, Lahr was so lumbering and slow that Ethel passed him. The theater shook with laughter, and the “accident” became a regular piece of business in the show. In no time Lahr was worrying about whether the audience was laughing at him or at Ethel.

But if she was not sure about Lahr, onstage she exuded greater magic than ever. Chorus member Don Liberto recalled an early rehearsal in which Ethel turned up wearing a black dress and a black cape with a little diamond necklace. “I saw this lady coming from one side of the stage to the other,” Liberto remembered, “and I said, ‘My God—
there
is a star.’ There was just something about her that was different from everybody else. Nobody could bring the joie de vivre that Merman brought on that stage. It was like every spotlight in the theater went on. You could see the sparks just coming out of her eyes. Nobody, not even Mary Martin, was like that.” Ethel’s approach to her work was simple: “Always give them the old fire, even when you feel like a squashed cake of ice.”