Ethel Merman: A Life (13 page)

The “wacko” group of players also included Betty Grable, the vivacious blond dancer making her Broadway debut after a discouraging nine-year stint in Hollywood. Grable was funny and unpretentious, always cracking jokes with the stage crew and chorus members, and her foul mouth could give Ethel’s a run for its money. Also on board was Charles Walters, a dancer who had been kicking around Broadway for years and would soon go to MGM, where he would enjoy great success as a choreographer and director. The chorus was full of ravishing women, including Helen Bennett—a top photographer’s model who, according to Cecil Beaton, had the world’s most perfect bone structure—sugar heiress Geraldine Spreckles, Adele Jergens (“She was screwing around all over the place,” said Lewis Turner), and Janice (later Janis) Carter, who, like Walters, would soon head for Hollywood.

Du Barry Was a Lady
moved on to Boston, where the show had a good run, although the content proved a challenge to Back Bay sensibilities. The
Boston Transcript
warned, “It is scarcely an entertainment for children” while the
Boston Globe
observed that “But in the Morning, No” was sung “to the accompaniment of raised eyebrows here and there in the audience.” The songs and jokes were all in solid shape, however. The audience loved “Friendship” so much that they wouldn’t let the stars off the stage, and Porter had to come up with additional refrains overnight.

When
Du Barry
opened at Broadway’s 46th Street Theatre, on December 6, 1939, it was disappointing to the cast to face a somewhat tepid audience reaction and mixed notices. In the
New York Times
, Brooks Atkinson found that the material “comes a little short of expectations, having only one idea in its comedy and that a disconcerting one. Fortunately, Miss Merman and Mr. Lahr are the people to make vulgarity honestly exuberant.” But word of mouth made the show a sellout by week’s end, and the principals could all relax, confident that they had a hit—all except Lahr, that is. On opening night Louis Shurr popped by Lahr’s dressing room to congratulate him on what looked to be a long run. “Yeah,” Lahr responded glumly. “But what do I do next year?”

The New York run of
Du Barry Was a Lady
was one of the highest times in Ethel’s life. Her romance with Billingsley was still raging. Night after night, elegant presents, all courtesy of Sherman, arrived at her dressing room at the 46th Street Theatre. At one point he presented her with a ruby-and-diamond bracelet with
FROM SHERM
engraved on one side,
TO MERM
on the other. Friends continued to caution her, but as far as Ethel was concerned, the bracelet was proof of his devotion. Surely the next turn of events would be his separation from his wife, Hazel.

Ethel felt even more confident when Billingsley gave her his most extravagant gift yet—a yacht. Mom and Pop Zimmermann were uneasy with such ostentation, but Ethel was delighted. Frequently she would tell Dorothy Fields to meet her at the Seventy-ninth Street Marina, and the two of them would take off for an afternoon of sailing up and down the Hudson, with a superb champagne lunch provided by Billingsley.

Sometimes, though, his generosity jeopardized the show. Frequently he would send over cases of champagne and trays of hors d’oeuvres for the cast to consume during intermission. The result, as the weeks went by, was an increasingly chaotic and sloppy second act, until DeSylva stepped in and put an end to the intermission festivities.

When it came to holding the show together, Ethel functioned as the company’s chief policeman. During a long run, a play’s ensemble effort always deteriorates, and
Du Barry
was no exception. One cast member whom Ethel observed from a somewhat critical distance was Betty Grable. Over the years Ethel would acquire a reputation for being tough on the beautiful girls in her shows. But it wasn’t Grable’s looks or popularity with the rest of the cast that unnerved her; it was her fondness for cutting up onstage. “Grable was happy to have a job,” remembered Lewis Turner. “But she hated doing the same thing every night. It was just so boring to her. She would try to make everyone screw up somehow.” One night, in the middle of a scene, Grable whispered in Lahr’s ear, “How would you like to stick your cock up my ass and make some fudge?” Turner recalled that Lahr “couldn’t remember the next line. The audience didn’t know what was going on. He was hysterical.”

Geraldine Spreckles committed a more serious infraction. One night she conned several of the showgirls into blowing up a few packages of condoms, writing their names on them, and sticking them underneath their hoopskirts. When the transition from the Club Petite to the court of Louis XV took place, all the girls came out singing, “
Mesdames and Messieurs, écoutez-vous
,” and lifted their skirts to reveal the bouncing balloons. “After the curtain came down,” said Turner, “they pulled everybody together. And then Ethel Merman came out and said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re doing. This is a job like any other job you go to. It’s like being a plumber or carpenter or anything else. You come to this theater and you come to work. And you don’t pull this kind of shit.’”

Midway through
Du Barry
, Ethel did something unusual for her—she missed a number of performances. She was out on more than one occasion. The exact nature of her illness is not clear. Ethel normally enjoyed robust health even during the longest of runs, and in some circles it was rumored that she had become pregnant by Billingsley and had to have an abortion. Her part was taken by her understudy, Betty Allen, whom she thanked with a gift of a big yellow-topaz ring set in gold, and later by Gypsy Rose Lee.

By the summer of 1940, Ethel was preparing for her new show,
Panama Hattie
. The winning team from
Du Barry Was a Lady
took an encore: producer Buddy DeSylva, book writers DeSylva and Herbert Fields, director Edgar McGregor, choreographer Robert Alton, designer Raoul Pène du Bois.
Panama Hattie
was a departure for Ethel in one respect only, but it was a crucial one: This time she wouldn’t be sharing the spotlight with a star comic like Durante or Lahr.
Stars in Your Eyes
had been a step forward for her as an actress and comedienne, but in a way
Du Barry
had been a step back: she had handled the songs while the real meat of the comic situations was given to Lahr. DeSylva had noticed that she’d been chafing a bit in
Du Barry
and decided that this time he would build the whole show around her. As plans for the project got under way, Ethel grew more and more excited: she seemed to sense that
Panama Hattie
was the start of a whole new phase in her career—as a solo star who had no need of a strong male lead.

Panama Hattie
was in no way revolutionary; it was just another of Porter’s well-crafted musical comedies. Its heroine was Hattie Maloney, the tough but goodhearted operator of a popular cabaret in Panama City, the Tropical Shore. Whether intentionally or not, DeSylva and Fields seemed to have used Ethel’s own life as the basis for the character: Hattie was a flip, raucous gal with bows on her shoes; the script indicated that “she’d wear two hats at a time, if she could, and she usually rattles from inexpensive jewelry.” Hattie has plans to marry the Philadelphia blueblood Nick Bullett (a stand-in for Walter Annenberg?), but their romance is sabotaged by a jealous admiral’s daughter who wants Nick for herself. There was also a comic subplot about three sailors who discover a stockpile of explosives, part of an espionage plan that Hattie helps foil.

Panama Hattie
was fully cast by midsummer. James Dunn, an all-purpose leading man from the movies, was signed to play Nick. Dunn was amiable enough, but a fairly nondescript actor—the better not to detract from Ethel. The rest of the cast was anything but anonymous: Arthur Treacher, the screen’s perfect butler, was brought out to play Nick’s perfect butler, Vivien Budd. Phyllis Brooks, in the throes of a much-publicized romance with Cary Grant, played Leila, the admiral’s daughter. A frenzied, manic young nightclub entertainer named Betty Hutton was signed for the comic part of Florrie, who develops a mad crush on Vivien.

The real heart of the show, however, was Hattie’s relationship with Nick’s worldly eight-year-old daughter, Gerry, played by Joan Carroll. Porter had written a duet for Hattie and Gerry that was quite different from anything he’d done before. Porter wrote primarily with passion and wit, and often with a combination of the two, though seldom with openhearted sentiment. But DeSylva and Fields had come up with a lovely scene that required a sentimental number. It came in the first act, when Gerry coaxes Hattie to tone down her appearance by cutting the bows off her shoes and removing her jangly bracelets, to “walk plain…without the bouncing.” Porter provided a beautiful song, almost in the style of Irving Berlin, about the unlikely pair’s burgeoning friendship, and everyone had to hear “Let’s Be Buddies” only once to know it would be the hit of the show.

Although Ethel was always at her most vulnerable with men, it seems to have taken an unusually long time for the scales to drop from her eyes where Sherman Billingsley was concerned. Eventually, however, the realist in her had to surface and take over. One illuminating moment came when Dorothy Fields confronted Billingsley about the affair and told him that she knew he would never leave Hazel and the children. Billingsley’s response was to ban Fields from the Stork Club. Ethel, always a loyal friend, was angry that Dorothy had been treated this way in what she thought of as “her” establishment. At the same time, gossip columnists, including Billingsley’s close pal Walter Winchell, were dropping broader and broader hints in the newspaper about her relationship with Billingsley. The capper came when Hazel Billingsley became pregnant again and Ethel began to comprehend what being cast in the role of home-wrecker might do to her career. Hazel had many friends in theater circles, and Ethel worried that public sympathy might well be with Hazel and against her. (Years later the public’s reaction to the Ingrid Bergman–Roberto Rossellini affair and the Elizabeth Taylor–Eddie Fisher–Debbie Reynolds triangle would show that she’d had reason for concern.) Ethel finally confronted Billingsley angrily, telling him in no uncertain terms that she was not about to spend the rest of her life as a married man’s mistress. To friends she confided, “I’m not gonna be somebody’s sweetheart!” With deep regret, and after many nights of crying into her champagne, she called off the affair.

Sherman Billingsley didn’t rate a “Fing!” from Ethel, but the experience had left her deeply wounded, and she thought it best to take a hiatus from the Stork Club. Had she possessed much talent for introspection, she might have taken a close look at the pattern she had been repeating thus far and made some vital connections that would have benefited her in the future. She was, in certain crucial ways, a case of arrested development: the adored only child whose profound emotional connection to her parents had created in her a kind of childlike view of the world around her. It was admirable that Mom and Pop Zimmermann had brought her up to be honest, straightforward, hardworking, thrifty. But her simplistic approach to life and its problems did not always work to her advantage in the sophisticated and often treacherous world of show business. Life was filled with ambiguity, but Ethel could not or would not bring herself to acknowledge it. “She was on the up-and-up every second,” observed Lewis Turner. “This lady didn’t know anything else.” An honorable trait, certainly—but also one that would lead her down the blind alleys of intractability, rage, and loneliness. If her refusal to bend, to answer in anything but the strongest yeses and nos, would help her forge one of the greatest careers the theater has ever known, it would also bring her tremendous disappointment and pain.

After her breakup with Billingsley, it might have been wise for her to sit back and take stock before jumping into another romance. Instead she promptly took her first fling at marriage.

From the start of rehearsals, Arthur Treacher and his wife, Virginia, always called Ethel “Hattie,” and she began seeing a good deal of them after rehearsals. One evening she was invited to their apartment for cocktails, and there she met Treacher’s agent, William Smith, who worked for the Feldman-Blum Agency in Hollywood. Publicist Julian Myers, who later worked with Smith at 20th Century Fox, recalled him as “a New York character in the best sense. He didn’t have a subdued voice. He was bigger than life. He was part of the international radio scene, and anything promotion-wise he could deliver with a snap of his fingers. He had his little empire consisting of Bill Smith…. He was intelligent and well-connected, but he didn’t have a lot of time for other people.”

Bill Smith was tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair and a tough demeanor. He was reasonably good-looking, although he gave the impression that he could easily run to fat. Much of the time, he chomped on a big cigar, and he had a salty vocabulary to match Ethel’s. She liked him well enough, though she did not feel any great sparks. She reminded herself that she had felt nothing
but
sparks with Billingsley, and that had not turned out favorably. She also reminded herself that she was thirty-two—well along, at the time, for a woman still to be unmarried. Smith had several things going for him: he was respected in the agency business, he had an independent income from his family in Brookline, Massachusetts, and best of all he was single. Ethel and Bill and the Treachers quickly became a steady foursome around town.

Panama Hattie
had its out-of-town opening at New Haven’s Shubert Theatre on October 3, 1940. One of the show’s attractions was an unusually talented collection of chorus girls: Janice Carter, from
Du Barry Was a Lady
, was back this time, with a step-out number, “Who Would Have Dreamed?,” and the dancing chorus included future Hollywood notables June Allyson, Lucille Bremer, Doris Dowling, Vera-Ellen, and Betsy Blair. Often the girls stood in the wings listening to Ethel sing “Let’s Be Buddies” with Joan Carroll, or her big second-act solo, “Make It Another Old-Fashioned, Please,” a number that Porter had set to a beguiling beguine melody: