Ethel Merman: A Life (2 page)

F
rom the beginning of her career, Ethel Merman showed impeccable timing: she came along just when Broadway was ready to embrace her. The first half of the twentieth century was an age of electric, outsize personalities in the world of entertainment, and a great many of them were New York City born. In our era of musical theater, onstage helicopters and falling chandeliers have taken the place of eleven-o’clock numbers, and many new productions emphasize a grandiose physical production rather than the character of an individual performer. Thus, as time passes, we may have to squint a little to get a clear picture of what has come to be known as Broadway’s golden age, roughly the 1920s through the 1950s. In the ’30s, when Ethel Merman leaped to stardom, musicals were unashamedly star-driven. Al Jolson, Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor, Bert Lahr, and Victor Moore belonged to a generation of performers who dominated the productions in which they appeared. Despite the intermittent presence of what came to be known as “integrated” musicals, such as Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse’s polished works for the Princess Theatre in 1915 and Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s landmark
Show Boat
in 1927, what people mostly wanted to see was the new Jolson show or the new Cantor show, or the latest edition of the
Ziegfeld Follies,
which might offer several major names for the price of a single ticket.

Broadway’s big personalities were the ultimate expressions of how far New York itself had come. From the beginning of the century, the town had been reinventing itself at a feverish pace, throwing off its last vestiges of gentility and becoming tougher, harder, sharper, louder, bigger. As it did so, it was embedding itself in the national consciousness in a more visceral way than it had ever done before. It was becoming for the rest of America what Joan Didion would later call “an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.” Ethel Merman’s lifelong love of New York stemmed from her memories of the days when the city was at its zenith, filled equally with promise and with rewards.

Major construction abounded in the early years of the twentieth century, when many of what would become New York’s most famous landmarks were being born before the eyes of an amazed public. The Pierpont Morgan Library, the Knickerbocker Hotel, the Queensboro and Manhattan bridges, and Gimbel Bros. Department Store were all unveiled in its first decade. The IRT, four years in the making, had opened in 1904, with a five-cent fare. Coney Island’s Dreamland amusement park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Manhattan Opera House were new. In October 1907, a little more than three months before Merman was born, the Plaza Hotel opened, with prices for single rooms going as high as $25 a day.

Far removed from all this activity was Astoria, Long Island City, a quiet enclave of Queens just across the East River from Manhattan. Today, populated largely by Muslims and Greeks, with a smattering of Irish, Astoria still feels slightly removed from the center of things. But during Merman’s childhood and youth, the atmosphere was practically countrified. Long Island City had been founded in 1870 via the pulling together of six separate settlements—Astoria, Ravenswood, Hunter’s Point, Dutch Kills, Bowery Bay, and Blissville—into one large community. Even at the turn of the century, the ambience was largely rural. When the tide rolled in, Hunter’s Point often became a swampy quagmire, and occasionally a fisherman who wandered out on the marshlands ran the risk of being swallowed up and never heard from again. Dropped into this setting were a few substantial mansions belonging to some select families who desired a more secluded environment. A ferry transported commuters from Manhattan to Long Island City’s Front Street, but the construction of the Queensboro Bridge in 1908 soon put it out of business.

This was the peaceful, insular world into which Ethel Merman was born on January 16, 1908, to Edward and Agnes Zimmermann. According to Ethel, she was delivered at the family home, a three-story frame house at 359 Fourth Avenue, Long Island City. (There is some confusion here: her birth certificate lists her birthplace as 265 Fourth Avenue. Was she perhaps born at a neighbor’s house, or was the alternate address simply a clerical error?) “Pop,” as Ethel always called him, was friendly and effusive. Pop took tremendous pride in his German heritage, and his great passions included playing piano at his local lodge and with various pickup orchestras, and having an occasional glass of scotch. At the time of Ethel’s birth, he made his living as a bookkeeper; later he became an accountant with James H. Dunham & Co., a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods firm, where he remained for the rest of his working life. Mom Zimmermann balanced her husband’s outgoing personality with her own strong element of reserve. Her family hailed from Scotland, and throughout her life she retained a solid core of old-fashioned Scottish pragmatism. A thread of steel ran through Mom: she always exercised caution, standing back and taking the measure of a person or a situation before committing herself. Occasionally she felt it necessary to rein in her husband when he became too gregarious, but for the most part she kept a low profile, quietly and efficiently running the household while Pop commuted to Manhattan each weekday. Years later Ethel would admit that the thought of displeasing Mom terrified her. Much as she loved her mother, she seems to have regarded her as a stern authority figure, while her relationship with her father was more relaxed.

During her early years, Ethel grew up surrounded by family. The house on Fourth Avenue was owned by Agnes Zimmermann’s widowed Scots-English mother, Mary Gardner. It was one of six houses on a private street with no commercial traffic, in a neighborhood peppered with families of German extraction. The Zimmermanns lived on the top floor, and the ground floor was rented out. Grandmother Gardner shared the second floor with another daughter, Agnes Pickett, along with Agnes’s husband, Harry, and their son, Claude.

Since Claude was only a little more than five years older than Ethel, the two cousins spent a great deal of time together; Ethel recalled that they were “more like brother and sister than cousins.” They often climbed trees in the orchard near Grandmother Gardner’s house, and occasionally they went to the L. A. Thompson Amusement Park (later renamed Playland) at nearby Rockaway Beach. A few years later, Grandmother Gardner sold the house, and the Zimmermanns moved to a residence that Ethel recalled as “a beautiful fifth-floor walk-up” at the Windsor apartment building, 29-08 Thirty-first Avenue. After the move she and Claude saw less and less of each other.

Throughout Ethel’s career it was widely believed that she was Jewish. In fact, Pop had grown up in the Dutch Reformed Church, while Mom’s family was Scotch Presbyterian. Shortly after the Zimmermanns were married, they discovered a little Episcopal congregation at the Church of the Redeemer at 30-14 Crescent Street in Astoria. They liked it enough that they became Episcopalians, remaining so the rest of their lives. Ethel was baptized and went to services for years at the Church of the Redeemer, a modest stone building that was homey and inviting. Her parents were strict about church attendance: on Sundays she spent virtually the day there, going to morning services, followed by Sunday school, the four-thirty prayer meeting, and Christian Endeavor, a children’s study group, in the evening. Eventually, however, she fell away from the parish, for a very personal reason: she wanted to be a chorister, and the Church of the Redeemer did not accept mixed choirs. Later, perhaps as a nod to Pop Zimmermann’s past, she switched to attending services at the Dutch Reformed Church, where she was guaranteed a place in the chorus.

The belief that Ethel was Jewish was a subject on which she could become downright snappish. There is no persuasive evidence that she harbored any significant degree of anti-Semitism, but it is clear that she did not like being thought of as Jewish herself. Perhaps she simply resented being taken for something and someone she was not and felt compelled to set the record straight.

The Zimmermanns were devoted to Ethel, working hard to see that she would eventually develop into their idea of a well-brought-up young lady, and she returned that devotion. Ethel was in many ways an extreme example of a certain type of only child, one who grows up with such a strong level of parental praise and support that she seldom questions herself or her motives. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of
Merman,
her 1978 autobiography, written with George Eells, is that she seems never to have found the slightest degree of fault with either of her parents.

That pattern is in fact typical of many of the twentieth century’s great female performers. An intense parental bond, particularly with their mothers, appears in the memoirs of Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Joan Sutherland, Helen Hayes. Ethel always—especially later in life, in the light of her own failed marriages—held up her parents’ relationship as a model one, an assessment that was shared by those friends of hers who spent a good deal of time around the Zimmermanns. According to her old friend Tony Cointreau, “Ethel always felt that Pop and Mom’s adoration for each other spilled over to her. Home and child. This perfect union made this thing that was the focus of their lives. And Ethel always included them. They always came first.”

If Mom was the ultimate figure of authority, it was Pop who took great care to nurture Ethel’s musical gifts. Her remarkable facility for singing revealed itself early on. Pop would accompany her on his upright piano at home, teaching her one song after another. Ethel’s debut came at age five, when she appeared with Pop at the keyboard at Astoria’s Republican Club, to which her parents had belonged for a number of years. She was invited back repeatedly, always specially presented as “Little Ethel Zimmermann.” Within a couple of years, she was being invited to sing at weddings and various church functions, where her listeners were always amazed by the size and power of her voice. Supportive as they were of Ethel’s talents, the Zimmermanns never thought to find her a voice teacher, probably because they had yet to envision show business as anything resembling a viable career.

By April 1917 the United States was no longer able to avoid involvement in European hostilities, and Woodrow Wilson had asked Congress for a declaration of war. As the country’s involvement in World War I grew, Ethel was enough of a seasoned performer to be hired to sing at some of the local army camps used for training, embarkation, and debarkation. Her first job along these lines was probably at Long Island’s Camp Mills, and offers soon followed from many other local bases, notably Camp Yaphank, also on Long Island. (Eventually it would become famous as the place where Irving Berlin wrote—and filed away for twenty years—“God Bless America.”) Ethel sang mostly rousing numbers such as “Over There” and “K-K-K-Katie,” and the soldiers cheered for the little girl with the big, gutsy voice. But her biggest hit at the army camps was the sentimental number “He’s Me Pal,” by Vincent Bryan and Gus Edwards. She dedicated her first performance of it, at Camp Yaphank, to Mom Zimmermann, and Ethel later recalled that when she had finished, many of the soldiers were in tears.

Ethel was a good, dedicated student at Astoria’s P.S. 4. Mom and Pop made sure that she kept up with her schoolwork and made good marks. Even at an early age, Ethel had shown a natural inclination toward precision and order, qualities that helped to give her an academic edge. At school, her musical abilities went unnoticed. Later she would remember that she was never called upon to perform at school assemblies, adding, “I’m not even sure whether many of my classmates knew I could sing.”

In 1921, Ethel’s thirteenth year, life in Astoria suddenly became much more exciting when Adolph Zukor and his partner, Jesse L. Lasky, who had merged in 1916 to create the Famous Players–Lasky motion-picture company, built a large, $2.5 million film-studio complex on Thirty-fifth Avenue. Movies had by then become big business. In 1913 the United States boasted more than twenty thousand movie theaters, and the new art form was already doing significant damage to old-style theatrical road companies. Filmmaking had taken place in and around New York for years;
The Great Train Robbery,
a twelve-minute-long landmark in film narrative, was shot entirely in New Jersey. In the intervening years, filmmakers had found in Southern California a more welcoming climate, ideal for shooting westerns and other outdoor pictures. But because Famous Players–Lasky did not have a sufficiently large physical plant in Hollywood to accommodate all its moviemaking ventures, in a number of years as many as 25 percent of its films were made in New York. Famous Players–Lasky would alternately produce over a hundred films at the Astoria studio. As a young teenager, Ethel got a glimpse of many of her favorite stars—the glamorous Broadway actress Alice Brady was a particular favorite—by peering through a hole that some of the neighborhood children had pounded through the fence surrounding the studio.

She got to see her share of live entertainment, too. Pop and Mom Zimmermann had a Friday-night ritual: taking their daughter into Manhattan for a vaudeville show at the Palace Theatre, on Forty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. In no time Ethel had developed a short list of favorite vaudeville stars. There was Harry Carroll, who appeared with his wife, Anna Wheaton, and often sang one of his own compositions, “By the Beautiful Sea” or “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” Ethel also liked the singing-songwriting team of Gus Van and Joe Schenck, who broke up their audiences with Chinese or Yiddish dialect, and singer/comedian Bert Williams, one of vaudeville’s kings. Ethel laughed especially hard when Williams did his famous pantomime of a poker game: while he was hit with a solo spotlight, he did an uncanny imitation of the entire gamut of emotions involved in playing a losing hand of poker. She also delighted in the knockabout comedy of Bob Pender’s troupe, which featured an agile stilt walker, Archibald Leach, at a way station on the road to Hollywood fame as Cary Grant. Sitting in her second-balcony seat with her parents, she was thrilled by the female singers who headlined at the Palace, especially Blossom Seeley, Fanny Brice, and Sophie Tucker, and watched them carefully, studying how they breathed, how they timed their songs and comic routines, how they interacted with the audience. Often, when she came home after spending the evening at the Palace, she did her very best to imitate the singers she’d just heard. But no matter how hard she tried to emulate Belle Baker or Nora Bayes, in the end she sounded only like herself.