Ethel Merman: A Life (16 page)

It was upstaging, pure and simple, and Ethel would have none of it. Tensions built, and Ethel complained to the stage manager, Sammy Lambert, on more than one occasion. “Paula didn’t stop doing it,” said Lou Wills Jr., “so she was fired. Everybody was talking about it.” Laurence, for her part, steadfastly maintained that she was never fired but that she gave her notice on May 31, 1943. She went on to appear in Kurt Weill’s
One Touch of Venus
that fall, and she appeared in many other productions over her long career. But true stardom was elusive, and in theater circles she remained perhaps best known as the woman who crossed Ethel Merman. “It was very traumatic for Paula,” recalled Betty Garrett. “But it was very foolish of her to do that.” At Ethel’s insistence, Betty Bruce was promoted to be Laurence’s replacement.

Something for the Boys
continued to play to sold-out houses, and columnists constantly cited it as a perfect example of wartime entertainment. The run of the show was a happy period for Ethel. She loved being a mother, and although like most stars she employed a nurse to look after Little Bit, she wound up supervising nearly every move the woman made and spent a good deal of time with her baby daughter. Late afternoons in particular were sacrosanct: that was when Little Bit rose from her nap and had a solid hour of playtime with Ethel before Ethel had to leave for the theater. Although it was Bob who read all the books on child rearing, Ethel took raising her daughter as seriously as she did preparing for a new show. Eventually Bob would feel that she didn’t make any great distinction between the two things; she approached them both with equal diligence.

It had now been five years since Ethel had set foot in Hollywood. Perhaps she had not expected the interval between films to last this long, especially as she racked up one Broadway success after another and was now viewed as the undisputed queen of musical comedy. But the movie studios could not have been less interested in acquiring her services, even when the films they made of her stage hits with other actresses in her roles didn’t pan out particularly well. In October 1942, MGM released its version of
Panama Hattie,
starring Ann Sothern, who was at least an acceptable replacement for Ethel. The
New York World-Telegram
didn’t agree, calling Sothern “a little china doll making an amusing attempt to be as tough as Ethel Merman was in the stage version,” while the
New York Herald Tribune
called the film “a sorry job of switching a show from the stage to the screen…. There is only one Ethel Merman.” These comments were echoed ten months later when MGM brought out the movie of
Du Barry Was a Lady.
This time Lucille Ball, with her newly dyed “strawberry pink” hair in glaring Technicolor, took Ethel’s role. While many reviewers hardly bothered to comment on Ball’s presence, the
New York Telegraph
took a tougher stand: “One sure does miss Ethel Merman in a show like this. There ought to be a law or something.” Outwardly Ethel paid little attention to Hollywood’s repeated snubs, claiming that she had never liked working there and was perfectly happy playing to enthusiastic audiences on Broadway. Then, in 1943, she did get paged for a movie, and she didn’t have to leave New York for it: it was
Stage Door Canteen,
an all-star extravaganza in which she sang one song, “Marching Through Berlin.”

When
Something for the Boys
closed, on January 8, 1944, Ethel decided to do something she’d done only once before: go on tour with it. As it turned out, her time away from New York was short: she played Philadelphia only, where the show was a big hit, grossing an astonishing $35,000 in its second week. She had declined to continue for a good reason: she was pregnant. It was a cause for rejoicing, but she lost the baby in April. Joan Blondell—the future Mrs. Mike Todd—took over the part of Blossom in Chicago and played the rest of the tour.

While Ethel always looked back on her experience in the show with great fondness,
Something for the Boys
does seem in retrospect a kind of swan song. Only two months after the show reached Broadway,
Oklahoma!
opened at the St. James Theatre. The “integrated” musical, a concept that had fleetingly appeared over the years, was now pronounced the path of the future. Musical numbers, it was thought, had to flow organically out of the plot and action, rather than being stuck in as all-purpose tunes. That this turn of events was inevitable seems clear if one looks closely at the reviews for
Something for the Boys.
The
New York Herald Tribune
thought the show was “bright, but it shares the structural weakness of many large-scale musicals in that its dance numbers are not convincingly integrated in [
sic
] the plot.”

Something for the Boys
was to be Ethel’s final collaboration with Cole Porter. Perhaps the changing atmosphere in the theater threw the composer slightly off his game; certainly, his next several shows were not up to the quality of the ones he had written for Ethel. He wouldn’t return to form until
Kiss Me, Kate
in 1948, when he surpassed himself, brilliantly.

Nineteen fifty brought Porter’s
Out of This World
, starring Charlotte Greenwood as the goddess Juno, a role that sounds as if it might have been composed with Ethel in mind. But for the next several years, the girls, comics, and topical gags of the Porter-Merman shows would begin to seem increasingly quaint. It had been a great and glorious era, and Ethel would remain forever nostalgic for it. But she could not afford to ignore the advances that the American musical was making as it prepared to enter a new kind of golden age. And she could have no way of knowing that her greatest professional triumphs were still to come.

T
he January closing of
Something for the Boys
wasn’t especially well timed, as it left Ethel to spend much of the year at home, with not much to do except look after Little Bit and meet friends for lunch. For many women it would have seemed an enviable existence, but Ethel tended to grow irritable if too long a period elapsed between projects. By now Bob had been promoted to the rank of major, and his officer’s duty occupied an increasing amount of his time. Following the miscarriage she suffered in April, Ethel grew more and more anxious. It represented a failure to her—a thought that she found difficult to bear in any dimension of her life. Although by no means a hypochondriac, Ethel could be somewhat nervous about her state of health, and she began to worry that she might not be able to have another child.

It has often been said of women in show business that they are far too self-absorbed and career-obsessed to make good mothers. But in the 1940s that criticism did nothing to stifle their desire to have children. No matter what the level of their professional accomplishments, most women were socialized to think of themselves as incomplete without a husband and children. Ethel was no exception. She believed that having children would help complete the picture of a solid, well-ordered life that she wanted to present to the rest of the world. Most of all, she wanted to give her own children the same experience that she had had growing up with Mom and Pop: that of feeling completely loved and supported. She reasoned that to achieve it would require hard work—the same kind of hard work that she put into her performing career—and with her customary all-or-nothing determination, she set out to become the best wife and mother she knew how to be. But the subtleties and intricacies of the role escaped her. Onstage, she could give precisely the same performance night after night, but at home, she had to be sensitive to the changes that came, unpredictably, minute by minute. Often she didn’t succeed, and when she didn’t, she searched for somewhere to place the blame. More and more, Bob became the object of her wrath, as she fumed that he didn’t take his family duties as seriously as she took hers.

Perhaps Ethel felt that Bob’s military duties occupied him too much and made him insufficiently supportive when she needed him most. Whatever the case, the tensions between them escalated, and by June of 1944 they had embarked on a trial separation. It was of short duration: within a month they were back together, and Ethel let it be known that she was ready to do another show in the fall.

On September 18 she began rehearsals for
Sadie Thompson,
a musical version of the Somerset Maugham short story “Rain.” It had already enjoyed one highly successful Broadway adaptation, a drama by John Colton and Clemence Randolph that opened in 1922 and ran for 648 performances, providing Jeanne Eagels with her greatest triumph. Set in a hotel in Pago Pago during the rainy season, it told of the conflict between Sadie Thompson, an American hooker on the lam, and the puritanical but hypocritical Reverend Davidson, who sets out to save her soul at any cost. It seemed to producer A. P. Waxman a terrific basis for a musical, and he hired Vernon Duke, who had written standards such as “April in Paris” and “I Can’t Get Started,” plus the groundbreaking black musical drama
Cabin in the Sky,
to write the score. For the lyrics Waxman chose Howard Dietz, an old theater hand who had provided the words for the great songs from
The Band Wagon
(1931), including “Dancing in the Dark” and “I Love Louisa.” A few months earlier, Duke and Dietz had collaborated on a flop show for Vinton Freedley called
Jackpot,
but under the direction of Rouben Mamoulian, who had helmed the brilliantly successful
Oklahoma!
the year before,
Sadie Thompson
seemed to be an all-but-guaranteed hit.

And then rehearsals began. The role of the blowsy Sadie, who thumbed her nose at conventional morality, seemed a natural for Ethel, but this was unlike any musical she had attempted before. It wasn’t a girls-and-gags show; the second act featured a big montage sequence involving young Sadie and a chorus of inner voices, and there was a ballet called “The Mountains of Nebraska.” To Ethel it all seemed a little high-toned. And there was another major problem. She found she couldn’t retain the lyrics; to her, they just didn’t scan. Since she had throughout her career been letter-perfect in rehearsal, she was sure it was all Dietz’s fault.

Ethel took the lyrics home. Having great respect for Bob’s literary efforts—he had written her reams of poetry during their courtship—she asked him to give them a once-over. He did, and Ethel gleefully showed up for rehearsals with his “improvements” in hand and pronounced that
these
were the lyrics she would be singing. Dietz objected strenuously, but Ethel wouldn’t budge. One lyric in particular had vexed her by making mention of something called “Malmaison.”

“What the fuck is Malmaison?” Ethel demanded, not about to sing something she didn’t understand. When Dietz assured her it was a kind of lipstick popular in Paris, Ethel went out and randomly questioned over twenty women, none of whom had heard of Malmaison. She continued singing Bob’s lyrics in rehearsal, until Dietz told her that if she couldn’t sing the songs as written, she’d have to go. She resigned on September 30, to be replaced by the rising actress June Havoc.
Sadie Thompson
opened on November 16, 1944, and quickly closed. In his memoirs Dietz did express some regret: “The show would have been a perfect vehicle for Merman and there is little doubt that had she played Sadie it would have been a hit, but my pride which went before the fall couldn’t take it.”

Walking out on
Sadie Thompson
was not something Ethel did lightly, and it appears that her decision caused her some anxiety. After all, she was thirty-six and had been a star for fourteen years, a long reign by Broadway standards. She was fully aware of the impact of musicals such as
Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark,
and
Oklahoma!,
shows that explored more serious themes. Then there was
On the Town,
which opened in December 1944. With music by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green,
On the Town
presented the freshest view of New York life since the Gershwins had burst onto the scene. Everything about it seemed to point in a blazing new direction for the musical, especially the dances, which were choreographed by Jerome Robbins, who had been in the chorus of
Stars in Your Eyes.
Privately Ethel may have worried that her kind of show, with its basic plot, raucous comedy, and splashy, belt-’em-out numbers, was in danger of going out of style.

Although Ethel may have professed otherwise, Hollywood’s continued lack of interest in her was a sore subject. Adding to her frustration was the fact that so many supporting players in her shows had gone out west with great success. Mary Wickes, from
Stars in Your Eyes,
was a popular character actress in films such as
The Man Who Came to Dinner
and
Now, Voyager.
Lucille Bremer and June Allyson, from the chorus of
Panama Hattie,
were playing leads in big-budget MGM musicals. Betty Hutton was now one of Paramount’s biggest attractions in pictures such as
And the Angels Sing
and
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
. And Betty Grable was the queen of the 20th Century Fox musical and Hollywood’s number-one female box-office draw.

After Ethel pulled out of
Sadie Thompson
, no other show of quality was offered. In early 1945 she discovered that she was pregnant again. After her miscarriage a year before, she didn’t want to take any chances and forced herself to lead as quiet a life as possible. Bob was delighted—at last she seemed able to settle into a comfortable domestic routine, and he enjoyed the many evenings they spent together, playing with Little Bit and having endless card games. Ethel’s professional activity was confined to radio appearances and continuing to entertain the troops at Camp Shanks.

On August 11, 1945, Ethel and Bob’s second child was born at Doctors Hospital. This time it was a boy, and they named him Robert Daniels Levitt Jr. That made a namesake for each of them. Since Bobby was a cesarean birth, as Little Bit had been, Ethel anticipated a lengthy, uninterrupted recovery period.

As it happened, though, she was being pestered to do a new show before she was even released from the hospital. In those long-gone days, ideas for shows often came from odd and quite unexpected places. A case in point: One evening Dorothy Fields and her husband were having dinner at ‘21.’ Sitting next to Dorothy was a woman who worked at Pennsylvania Station’s Traveler’s Aid bureau. The woman was talking about the many soldiers who came through very late on their way back to the camp after a night on the town. In particular she was describing one young soldier who had come in recently, quite drunk after being out at Coney Island, where, at one of the arcades, he had won everything he could possibly win in the shooting galleries. As the women rattled on about the sharpshooter, something suddenly sprang into Dorothy’s mind: Merman as Annie Oakley. A few days later, at a meeting with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Dorothy asked them what they thought of the idea. They weren’t interested in composing the show, but they agreed on the spot to produce it.

This presented Dorothy with a slight problem: she and Herbert had just done
Up in Central Park
for Mike Todd, and he had right of first refusal on their next project. They didn’t need to worry; when they approached Todd with the idea, he dismissed it out of hand. Oddly, his main reason was that he thought Ethel was washed up, and he assured Dorothy that she would never do another show. Was his reaction the result of her motherhood or a response to the fact that she had quit
Sadie Thompson
? It seems a strange judgment, given that she had drawn very well for him in
Something for the Boys,
but it may have been an indication of how Broadway in general had come to view her in the post-
Oklahoma!
era.

With Mike Todd decisively out of the way, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Fieldses began discussing composers. The logical choice for such an all-American subject as Annie Oakley seemed to be Jerome Kern, but he had been happily settled in Hollywood for years, performing the comparatively simple task of turning out movie scores for films such as
You Were Never Lovelier
(1942) and
Cover Girl
(1944). His last Broadway musical had been
Very Warm for May
in 1939, and despite the fact that it introduced “All the Things You Are,” it had a disappointing run. Kern insisted that he had no desire to face Broadway again and that, in any case, at sixty he was too old to take on such a taxing project. But through an endless series of long-distance phone calls, Rodgers and Hammerstein prevailed, even offering to mount a revival of Kern’s
Show Boat,
and soon the composer was on board.

The Fieldses had practically nothing on paper—just the opening, in which Annie Oakley makes her entrance by shooting the bird off a woman’s hat, plus the finish of the first act. But Dorothy insisted that they waste no time in pitching the idea to Ethel and went to Doctors Hospital to visit her on what was only the second day of her recovery. Ethel was propped up in bed, green with nausea and plagued by gas pains. Amazed that Dorothy couldn’t wait until she was at home to sell her on the idea, she weakly answered that it sounded all right to her. Her enthusiasm got a big boost weeks later when the terms of her salary were set: $4,500 a week, plus 10 percent of the gross.

Dorothy and Herbert set to work on the book and finished the first act by midautumn of 1945. Kern and his wife, Eva, had left California and journeyed east so he could work on the score. Then, on November 11, while walking down the street in New York, Kern suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died six days later. Saddened and shocked as they were by Kern’s sudden death, none of the parties involved in creating the Annie Oakley musical wanted to see the project fade away. Over lunch at Louis XV on Forty-ninth Street, the Fieldses and Rodgers and Hammerstein hesitantly suggested that Irving Berlin come aboard—hesitantly because Berlin, whose last Broadway show had been
This Is the Army
in 1942, always wrote both music and lyrics, which obviously meant Dorothy would be out as lyricist. But Dorothy felt that Berlin was far and away the best man for the job and agreed to step aside as lyricist if Rodgers and Hammerstein could sign him. Berlin, who always exerted absolute authority over the projects with which he was involved, was chary about taking on a show that had originated with Dorothy and Herbert. After days of pondering, he said yes.

The Fieldses sped through the rest of the book at a quicksilver pace. For a title they switched
Jenny Get Your Gun,
the original title of
Something for the Boys,
to
Annie Get Your Gun.
From the beginning it was a hot project. Joshua Logan, eager to be reunited with Ethel after his admiration for her talent in
Stars in Your Eyes,
jumped at the chance to direct. The brilliant scenic designer Jo Mielziner, whose credits ranged from
Pal Joey
to
The Glass Menagerie,
also signed on, as did Lucinda Ballard, the inventive costumer of
I Remember Mama.
Helen Tamiris, who had earned glowing notices for her clever “Currier and Ives” ballet in
Up in Central Park,
was engaged as choreographer. She came up with a showstopping Native American dance for a song Berlin had written called “I’m an Indian Too,” and her passion for modern dance was felt at various points in the show.