Ethel Merman: A Life (22 page)

Although Ethel had dated wealthy men before, such as Walter Annenberg and Al Goetz, she had never really circulated with members of society, as she was now doing. If she was simply showing off a bit—proving to herself and the world that there could be an exciting new chapter in life after Bob Levitt—she didn’t take any of it too seriously, and the acquisition of a few upper-crust friends certainly brought about no change in her demeanor, her language, her love of sharing a good dirty joke. She remained resolutely herself, and her new set seemed to delight in her rambunctious, bawdy style. And no one, no matter how socially influential he might be, could make her do something she didn’t feel like doing. Around this time columnist Leonard Lyons reported that the social arbiter Elsa Maxwell had approached Ethel with a hefty commission to perform at the society debut of the daughter of one of New York’s most prominent families. Ethel found the whole thing distasteful and turned Maxwell down flat. Shortly afterward the Duchess of Windsor threw a party at the recently opened restaurant Gogi’s LaRue. When the duchess asked her if she’d mind singing, Ethel got up and trumpeted “I Get a Kick Out of You,” along with several of her other hits. (Her reward was a letter from the American Guild of Variety Artists reprimanding her for performing in public at no charge. Ethel dismissed this nonsense: if a friend as good as the duchess wanted her to do something, of course she would do it—as long as the friend responded in kind when it was Ethel’s turn to ask a favor.)

Another popular companion of Ethel’s during this period was Jimmy Donahue. The grandson of retail magnate F. W. Woolworth, Donahue had exhibited a spoiled, willful nature from childhood. His father, Jim Donahue, was a compulsive gambler who once lost $900,000 during the Palm Beach season of 1931 and who later committed suicide. Ethel admired Jimmy’s devotion to his mother, Jessie, and to his first cousin, Barbara Hutton, to whom he was “shield, sounding-board, escort, and confidant.” Gay at a time when such matters were seldom discussed openly, Donahue allied himself with many top society ladies, but his relationship with the Duchess of Windsor was much more complicated: she was passionately in love with him. Once, during a row, the duchess reportedly screamed at him, “And to think I gave up a king for a queen!” Gaunt and sunken-faced, Donahue had the appearance of an “epicene gigolo” and drank far too much, often becoming hostile and argumentative when inebriated. Still, Ethel adored him, and when he was sober, she found him one of the most kindly and cultivated men she’d ever known.

Charlie Cushing and Jimmy Donahue might have been good company, but what Ethel really longed for was another all-consuming, serious love affair, like the one she’d initially enjoyed with Bob Levitt. At forty-three she felt in perfect health, and she had kept her figure. She considered herself an excellent catch, and for all her professional success she did not feel complete without a man in her life. She still had enormous faith that another great romance, possibly even a great marriage, lay ahead.

On October 20, 1951,
Call Me Madam
celebrated its one-year anniversary on Broadway with an elegant party at the chic restaurant L’Aiglon. There she was introduced to a roughly handsome, broad-shouldered, six-foot-four man named Robert Six. He had an easy, pleasant, unpretentious manner, and he behaved like a thorough gentleman, paying proper attention to Ethel but never fawning over her. She was attracted to him immediately, and it appeared that he felt the same way about her. Ethel had been too busy socializing and speaking with reporters to eat much at the party, and after the festivities broke up, she and Six headed to a nearby Hamburger Heaven, where she spent the next several hours finding out all about him and his background.

It turned out that Six was nothing less than the president of Continental Airlines. Their attraction made complete sense: they had in common tremendous ambition and a will to succeed. Like Ethel, Six was entirely self-made. A high-school dropout, he had led a rather hardscrabble existence in his early years, working as a seaman, a bill collector, and at other odd jobs. But his great passion was flying, and at a fairly young age he had run a charter service in California that soon went bust. Other flying enterprises included a few years in the Far East as a pilot for China National and part ownership of an airmail route from Texas to Colorado; in between times he’d put in a stint as district circulation manager of the
San Francisco Chronicle
before he got his hands on enough money to found Continental. It was a rather patchy background for a major airline executive, but Ethel was pleased with the idea that Six seemed to have done it the hard way. Unlike Bob Levitt, he’d seen many of her shows and professed great admiration for her as a performer.

There was something else about Six that Ethel responded to, something that may have been more important than any of his other qualities: he was tough. “She loved tough, masculine guys,” said her longtime friend Bob Schear. “That was very important to her. She told me that she liked it when gay men didn’t
seem
gay.” In many ways Bob Six came much closer to fulfilling Ethel’s dreams of ultimate masculinity than anyone else ever had. In the early stages of their acquaintanceship, she continued to date Charlie Cushing and a few others, but soon she and Six were seeing each other so regularly that their names frequently popped up in the gossip columns.

In the meantime she kept playing
Call Me Madam
to full houses. The press items on her romance with Six only helped fuel the box office, as did a stunt that Leland Hayward had dreamed up. At her solo curtain call, Ethel brought an actor onto the stage who bore a stunning likeness to Harry Truman and insisted that he take a bow with her. No mention was made of the actor’s identity, but it was in fact Irving Fisher, a Broadway veteran who had, only four years earlier, played Truman in Moss Hart’s play
Christopher Blake
. Although some in the audience may have been duped into thinking that Fisher was really the president, most understood that it was a joke and relished it. It was an audacious public-relations stunt, and it paid off, as many ticket buyers came back again and again, hoping to catch another glimpse of “the president.”

One aspect of the show proved to be a major disappointment for Ethel. In those days a musical’s original-cast album was always recorded on the Sunday following opening night. As backer of the show, RCA was eager to record
Call Me Madam
and although Ethel had signed an exclusive contract with Decca, it was assumed that some sort of deal would be worked out, permitting RCA to borrow her for its recording. But negotiations bogged down, and RCA issued its album with the entire original cast
except
for Ethel, who was replaced by the rather pallid Dinah Shore. Decca, not to be outdone, went ahead and recorded its own version of the show with Ethel and a faceless group of supporting players (including crooner Dick Haymes). As an ensemble it had none of the zing of the original company. The result,
Ethel Merman: Twelve Songs from Call Me Madam
, did well enough, but the simultaneous presence of two albums obviously undercut sales for both.

For most actors, keeping a performance fresh and alive throughout a long run at some point becomes a challenge. It was less of an issue for Ethel than for most performers, thanks to her way of locking in her reading and never varying it. Audience members who went back again to see her in both
Annie Get Your Gun
and
Call Me Madam
were amazed by how utterly consistent she remained—too consistent, some complained. For several years many of Ethel’s fellow actors had felt that she always gave a brilliant performance in the opening weeks of a show, then tended to go on automatic pilot for the rest of the run. “We all do it,” said her understudy, Helene Whitney. “It becomes very mechanical. There’s no way that doing a show for eighteen months or two years does
not
become mechanical, because you cannot expend that emotional energy every single night.” It was often said of Ethel that she tended to walk through the matinee performances, partly because she found matinee audiences inattentive and unresponsive. If they weren’t going to show their respect by giving her their full concentration, why should she beat her brains out for them?

In the early weeks of 1952,
Call Me Madam
’s box office began to taper off a bit, and on May 3 the show closed, with an impressive tally of 644 performances and a box-office gross of over $4 million. Ethel was relieved to be out of the show, since it meant that she would have more time to spend with Bob Six, who had been turning up in New York more and more frequently. First, however, she had to head the
Call Me Madam
company for an engagement at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. Ethel had made it very clear that she was not about to break her no-touring rule—Elaine Stritch would play Sally Adams in the national company, and Joan Blondell would take on the role at the Dallas State Fair—but the idea of taking this political-themed show to the nation’s capital appealed to her. The engagement was also a historic milestone: the National was reopening after having been shut down for four years over the heated issue of audience segregation. Before and during World War II, theater audiences in many U.S. cities had had to face segregation as a way of life: too often blacks simply were not permitted to sit with whites—or, in some cases, even attend the same performances. In Texas blacks might even be forced to sit upstairs for
Porgy and Bess
. Such practices were hardly confined to the South: during the war the great contralto Marian Anderson, on concert tours of cities in the Northwest, often had to stay at a YMCA, because no first-class hotel would accept her. After the war audience segregation became a hot-button issue, but certain theater managers, such as the National’s Marcus Heiman, refused to back down and integrate. The performers’ union, Actors’ Equity, issued a ruling refusing to let any of its members play before a segregated audience in America’s capital. Heiman fought back, with the result that on July 31, 1948, the National ceased to be used for live performances and was converted to a movie house. Now it was being reborn as a legit, integrated theater, and on May 5
Call Me Madam
finally visited the town that it had lampooned on Broadway for nearly two years.

The National, fresh from a $75,000 renovation, looked magnificent. In the audience were Irving Berlin, Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney, Buck and Anna Crouse, Ina Claire, Ray Middleton, Washington socialites Mr. and Mrs. Morris Cafritz and Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gardner, and a large contingent of senators from Capitol Hill. Possibly the only audience member who didn’t enjoy the show was the wife of Senator Robert A. Taft; with her husband off stumping for votes for the Republican presidential nomination, Mrs. Taft seemed a bit uncomfortable during the performance of “They Like Ike.”

The show came off splendidly, and afterward Bob Six threw an elegant black-tie party for 150 guests at the Chinese Room of the Mayflower Hotel. The Asian motif was temporarily redone so that the room resembled a chic French nightclub, with tiny tables, flowers, and hurricane lamps, and a sumptuous buffet. Ethel, as trim as she’d ever been, looked smashing in a ballerina-length silver-and-brocade gown. The affair lasted until past four in the morning, and even the most casual observers could see, from the way Ethel beamed at Six throughout the night, that she was a woman passionately in love. Over the next few days, photos of the smiling couple turned up in newspaper spreads across the country. To be given this kind of treatment in Washington thrilled Ethel, and she regarded the event as one of the highest points of her professional life. Best of all, she had embarked on what seemed to be another great romance.

Call Me Madam
played a four-week limited run at the National, with Richard Eastham taking over for Paul Lukas as Cosmo. Audiences were enthusiastic and even Perle Mesta made a special trip from her post in Luxembourg to attend one of the last performances.

Ethel then turned her attention to the final details of securing her divorce from Bob Levitt. She grew extremely nervous recalling the complicated circumstances of her first two divorces, and she prayed that there would be no legal hitches that might come to the attention of some enterprising newspaper reporter. She needn’t have worried. On June 7, 1952, she flew to Mexico City, where her lawyer, Paul O’Dwyer, was already waiting. Because of her own stable financial condition and because she wanted no trouble from Levitt, who knew the truth about the validity of her divorce from Bill Smith, it was arranged that he would have to make no alimony payments. Ethel received custody of both Ethel Jr. and Bobby, with Levitt reserving the customary visiting rights.

Ethel’s greatest grief over the failure of her marriage to Bob Levitt would not come until years later. At the time it seemed the only sensible thing for her to do. She and Bob had become incompatible, his career was in decline, his drinking was apparently uncontrollable. All these were facts that Ethel used as validation for her decision. But privately the grounded, upright daughter of Edward and Agnes Zimmermann was deeply disappointed that she had not been able to make either of her marriages work.

But she had great consolation, she told all her closest friends, in Bob Six. For a woman at forty-four, Six was a gift that gave her inexpressible joy. He seemed to her the most gallant of men: his hosting of the Washington party was all the proof she needed. It was best, then, that she did not know that the evening had value to Six for another reason. He would list it as a tax deduction: with the presence of so much press, including camera crews from NBC-TV, it had enormous value as a public-relations boon for Continental Airlines.