Ethel Merman: A Life (18 page)

“If anybody,” Bob complained, “asked you how you spent the morning after this great triumph, they just wouldn’t believe it.”

“Well,” said Ethel, “I guess that’s right. But that goddamned guy isn’t going to cheat me out of those goddamned peaches.”

With
Annie Get Your Gun
having generated a huge advance sale, Ethel knew she was going to be committed to the show for many months—just how many, she could never hope to guess. She settled into her familiar routine of waking up late and answering mail and returning telephone calls with the efficiency of the Wall Street secretary she easily might have become. She oversaw the household (which sometimes involved getting down on her hands and knees and scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom floors herself, since she never hung on to a housekeeping staff for long). Much of her clothes shopping she did at Wilma’s, on Fifty-seventh Street. It was a place known for somewhat flashy fashions and had a reputation for catering to the mistresses of wealthy men, but Ethel’s own wardrobe was fairly conservative: blue and black dresses off the rack, or specially made evening gowns running as high as $500. She spent time with the children and had an early supper of lamb chops and green salad on a tray before leaving for the theater in the early-evening rush-hour traffic. She expended so much energy onstage every night that she saw no reason to take up any other form of rigorous exercise, although she was always fond of walking in the city and did a great deal of it. She smoked a moderate amount, tried never to drink except after a show and then often only after the Saturday-night performance, when she was known to toss down one glass of champagne on the rocks after another. She took great care to stay away from air conditioners, people with colds, and all other occupational hazards familiar to singers. Her health was excellent; she took such good care of herself that she seldom picked up a virus, and when she did, it was usually of the one-day, in-and-out variety.

Backstage she concentrated on her work, and although she was never hostile to her coworkers, she didn’t mix with them much. “She did her job, she did it perfectly, and she expected the same of everyone else,” remembered Helene Whitney, a chorus member in
Annie Get Your Gun
. To some actors in the supporting cast, Ethel appeared to have the cold-blooded, methodical detachment of a factory foreman, and she never grew so comfortable during the course of the run that she stopped policing company activity. Once, when featured player Danny Nagrin announced that he was going to march in the Communist Parade with his wife, choreographer Helen Tamiris, Ethel exploded:

“You march in that parade, and you’ll never get a job anywhere else I work. I don’t care what you do anywhere else. But not in my show. I’m an American citizen, and I’m proud of it. And if you don’t like working here for a very good salary, Mr. Nagrin…”

Nagrin didn’t march in the parade, and Ethel’s strong feelings on the subject never changed. On April 29, 1950, she would serve as Queen of the Loyalty Day Parade down Fifth Avenue, which she did as a way of undermining the Communist Parade.

Ethel held everyone in the company to the same high standard, even the children. One of the juvenile actors in the show, Warren Berlinger, was already an autograph hound at the age of eight. With so many big-time stage and film stars coming to see the new hot-ticket Broadway musical, Warren’s autograph book was getting filled up quickly. One night he spotted Walter Pidgeon, the suave leading man of
Mrs. Miniver
and
Madame Curie
, sitting up front and decided to sneak out through the stage door to get his autograph. Pidgeon obliged. Unfortunately for Warren, Ethel had seen him slip out into the audience. As the curtain was about to rise for the second act, Ethel beckoned to him to come over to her.

“We never, ever do that,” she said firmly as Warren froze in abject terror. “
We
never, ever do that,” Ethel repeated.

“I’m sorry,” stammered Warren.

“All right,” said Ethel. “But
remember
.” And she took her place for the second act.

At other times she moved even more swiftly. One night a chorus girl with the unlikely name of Truly Barbara turned to talk to one of the chorus boys while Ethel was in the middle of singing “I Got the Sun in the Morning.” Nothing in the theater ever escaped Ethel’s hawk-eyed attention: if a chorister’s hem was half an inch too long, if a pink gel wasn’t in place, if a clarinetist was playing flat, she would make note of it. That night, as Ethel came offstage, she cornered Charles Atkins, the stage manager, and said, “Get rid of her.” That was the end of Truly Barbara. As Warren Berlinger recalled, “That story went right through the entire company. We all knew that when Miss Merman was onstage, you’d better focus or you were out of there.”

In her autobiography Ethel praised her leading man, Ray Middleton, and said that she enjoyed working with him. He was a fine performer with a stunning voice, but others in the company remember a certain coolness between the two stars. “He was full of himself,” said Berlinger. “Miss Merman and Ray Middleton had no camaraderie that I could notice. There was no ‘You were wonderful, no,
you
were wonderful.’ Nothing like that at all.” Helene Whitney remembered that Ethel, old-fashioned as always, had taken great offense when Middleton struck up an affair with a chorus girl who was a romantic interest of Richard Rodgers’s. “The scuttlebutt,” said Whitney, “was that she eventually got him fired for that.”

But Ethel could be kind and thoughtful, too. One night at an onstage party after a performance, someone asked if she would mind singing a few numbers from some of her other shows. Many stars are prickly about being asked to perform when they aren’t being paid to do so, but Ethel seldom had such qualms. “This was after she’d had two shows,” remembered Don Liberto, “and she said, ‘Okay! LEW!’” Lew Kesler sat down at the piano, and Ethel proceeded to sing several of her hits, including “I Got Rhythm,” with all the famous gestures. “The whole thing was for us,” said Liberto. “I thought that was great of her.”

Annie Get Your Gun
was the kind of smash that the theater seldom saw. It was still a runaway hit in the summer of 1947, but by then its star was feeling less than her best. For some time she’d been suffering from hemorrhoids, and the pain and discomfort were increasing by the week. She wasn’t missing any performances, but getting through the show each night was becoming more and more of a challenge. Finally, in September of that year, her condition worsened to the point that she had to drop out of the show. Her doctors told her that the problem was aggravated by her fondness for champagne and recommended immediate surgery. Ethel agreed, and her understudy, the talented Mary Jane Walsh, who had introduced “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” in Rodgers and Hart’s
Too Many Girls
, took over as Annie. Although Walsh was getting $750 a week, a huge salary for an understudy, she wasn’t a box-office name, and Rodgers and Hammerstein fretted while the show fell into a slump during Ethel’s two-week absence. (A few weeks later,
Annie
went on a cross-country tour, starring Mary Martin, and cleaned up wherever it went.)

While Ethel was recuperating at Doctors Hospital, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen came to interview her for her radio program. William Weslow, a dancer from the
Annie
company, was visiting when Kilgallen turned up with a recording crew. “Dorothy said, ‘What are you in here for?’” recalled Weslow. “‘I hear you’re in here for appendicitis.’ And Ethel said, ‘No, you dumb ass! I’m in here for hemorrhoids!’ That part of the tape didn’t go out.”

By the end of March 1948, Annie had grossed over $4.5 million, and ticket sales showed little sign of tapering off. Rodgers and Hammerstein pleaded with her to stay with the show for another season, but Ethel had no interest in doing so. It was the most physically demanding musical she had yet done, and she was feeling drained. But the producers were ruthless businessmen and kept hammering away at her, stressing how important a continued run was to the welfare of the company members. This touched Ethel’s soft spot, and reluctantly she agreed to an added season, with the proviso that she be allowed a six-week vacation beginning July 5, 1948. It was only the second vacation she had taken, and Rodgers and Hammerstein balked a bit before finally giving in.

Mary Jane Walsh again took over, and this time receipts sank precipitously, from $36,000 a week to $22,000. During Ethel’s six-week rest at the Colorado Hotel, a mountain resort in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Rodgers and Hammerstein persuaded cast members to take a salary cut in order to compensate for the losses at the box office. When she came back in August, Ethel was furious about this turn of events and resented that the producers’ penny-pinching ways had made her feel personally responsible for the sacrifices inflicted on the rest of the company. The upshot was that the cuts were instantly reversed, but she never forgot or forgave Rodgers and Hammerstein for their niggardly behavior. Like Berlin they were making a fortune—far more than she was—from a show that she was responsible for putting over to the public. In later years she had only to hear mention of their names to cut loose with a stream of profanity.

By Christmas of 1948, it was announced that
Annie Get Your Gun
would close, but an upsurge in the box office over the holidays kept the show hanging on for a few more weeks. The run finally ended on February 12, with a staggering total of 1,147 performances. “I felt as if I had been freed,” Ethel later wrote. In terms of stamina alone, her record was impressive: for the entire run of nearly three years, she had taken only two vacations and missed two performances on account of illness.

Tired and feeling the need of a good long rest, she looked forward to spending some time with the children and with Bob. She told her new agent, Sonny Werblin, to cast around for something reasonably nontaxing. Werblin got her a guest spot on Milton Berle’s hit variety television series,
Texaco Star Theater
. It had premiered on NBC in 1948 and had quickly become one of the top-rated programs in the industry. Ethel, looking smashing in a shoulder-length bob, sang terrific renditions of “I Got Rhythm” and “I Get a Kick Out of You.” She joined Berle for “Friendship,” from
Du Barry Was a Lady
, fluffing the lyrics when Berle purposely broke her up, and she also did a tribute to Tin Pan Alley, in which she appeared as a high-stepping flapper, complete with cloche, singing DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson’s “Varsity Drag.” Also for NBC she did a half-hour radio series,
The Ethel Merman Show
, a comedy, with songs dropped in around the weekly plot. It bowed on July 31, 1949, but received poor notices and limped along for only a few months before going off the air. Again Ethel seemed unable to conquer any entertainment field other than Broadway.

Ethel wasn’t overly concerned about the failure of the radio project, but she was becoming extremely uneasy about her home life. Since
Annie Get Your Gun
had closed, she and Bob were having increasingly frequent arguments. Part of the trouble was that he was spending more evenings away from home. He had always been able to put away a good share of alcohol, but his drinking had recently grown out of control.

Alcoholics do not become alcoholics overnight. It is a disease of encroachment: a once-a-month night out can turn into a twice-a-month, then once-a-week, bender. All too soon liquor can dominate nearly every night of the week. Such was the case with Bob. By now he was working for the
American Weekly
, the
Journal-American
’s Sunday supplement, and socializing a great deal with his cronies, who included the hard-drinking restaurateur Toots Shor, William Hearst Jr., and Herb Mays, an executive at
Good Housekeeping
. The postwar era was all too conducive to late nights out. It was a time, according to David Brown, “when many people were on the town because we were all cooped up during the war, and the town was alive with, not the sound of music, but the sound of testosterone. Hearst was a crony kind of company in those days. Bob was a night person to some degree, and very funny. There was a bar across the street from the Hearst Building called the Parisienne, and everyone gathered there, and lots of booze was taken there by the Hearst employees.”

With Bob out carousing, Ethel grew increasingly suspicious that he might be enjoying the company of other women. One night when she had an engagement of her own and knew that Bob would be out with newspaperman Jack O’Connell, she grumbled about it to David Brown, who assured her that O’Connell was a good friend and that she shouldn’t worry—everything would be fine.

“Fine?” snapped Ethel. “Levitt would fuck a snake!”

Nanette Fabray had by this time moved into the Century, and she later recalled that in the summer of 1949 many people in the building were aware of the Levitts’ marital spats. “Because there was no air-conditioning,” recalled Fabray, “everyone’s windows were open to the courtyard. We could hear them going at it for hours. Finally people would scream, ‘SHUT UP!’ You could hear her in Long Beach. She never listened to what he had to say. He would come back with something that was a reasonable explanation or question of his own, and she absolutely wouldn’t listen to him.”

Perhaps Ethel was also disappointed in Bob professionally. His ambitions, part of the reason she had initially been attracted to him, seemed to have waned. “He never really amounted to a great deal,” said David Brown. “Yes, he was at Hearst as a marketing guy, but he wasn’t a star in the publishing business. He wasn’t a big shot, although he could trade on the name of Hearst, and did. And Ethel was the star of stars.”

Bob and Ethel’s marriage had probably been destined to fail, for the simple fact of the great intellectual gulf that existed between them. Although Ethel was now keeping up with current events, she paid closer attention to the gossip columns and industry news than she did to the world of international politics. Her favorite topics were show business and her husband and children. Many of her close friends, Dorothy Fields among them, believed that these shortcomings became tiresome and all too predictable for Bob and that, in turn, Bob’s keen intellect and wit became an irritant to Ethel.