Ethel Merman: A Life (30 page)

In July 1960, Ethel had a monthlong vacation, and she spent it taking her first grand tour of Europe, accompanied by Bobby, as well as Benay Venuta. The trio traveled in style in a chauffeur-driven car with a separate station wagon carrying all their luggage. Bobby had been dreaming of seeing the great European cathedrals and art treasures, and he went out every day in pursuit of them. He was joined by Benay, who, being a talented painter herself, had a passionate interest in visiting all the museums. Ethel, for the most part, regarded Europe as a place to shop and go to nightclubs. She even passed on seeing the Sistine Chapel, despite Bobby’s pleas for her to join him.

The same year, 1960, brought great changes to Ethel Jr.’s life. After her graduation from Cherry Creek High School, Ethel Jr. had entered Colorado College in Colorado Springs. She was only seventeen and not at all sure what she wanted to do with her future. At times she expressed a strong desire to be an actress, and she did participate in college stage productions, including
Brigadoon
and
Summer and Smoke
, in which she played the love-starved spinster Alma Winemiller. At other times she talked of pursuing a degree in veterinary medicine. Ethel showed little concern that her daughter seemed pulled in several directions simultaneously. Aimless enthusiasm, she reasoned, was part of being young.

During her freshman year at Colorado College, Ethel Jr. met an attractive fellow student, a senior from Wayne, Pennsylvania, named William Geary. They fell in love, and by the end of the school year Ethel Jr. discovered that she was pregnant. She informed her mother of the news. It would have been a golden opportunity for Ethel to explode in moral indignation, as many other mothers of the period might well have done. But she had not forgotten her own past; this was exactly how she had come to marry Bob Levitt. Instead of assigning blame to her daughter, Ethel provided her with loving support and had good things to say about William Geary, whom she found an amiable and responsible young man. In the interest of keeping the press temporarily at bay, news of the marriage was not made public until September 1960.

On February 20, 1961, Ethel Jr., now residing with Geary in Colorado Springs, gave birth to a seven-pound, five-ounce daughter, Barbara Jean. Big Ethel delighted in being a grandmother, and as soon as she could arrange a brief time away from
Gypsy
, she flew to Colorado to be with her daughter and granddaughter. Prior to the arrival of the baby, Ethel Jr. had seemed the happiest of housewives. Big Ethel had spent the Christmas holidays of 1960 with the Gearys and marveled at her daughter’s ability to turn out a sumptuous, multicourse Christmas dinner. As a new mother, though, Ethel Jr. seemed less able to cope. She was barely eighteen, with no staff to help her, and initially she seemed overwhelmed by the responsibilities of caring for an infant. Again Ethel assumed that all would be remedied once Ethel Jr. got used to the routine.

Around this time, Ethel’s principal professional concern was whether or not she would get to play Rose in the screen version of
Gypsy
that Warner Bros. would eventually produce. That question had been on her mind from the moment the show opened. Jacqueline Mayro, who played Baby June, remembered one night when she was running a 104-degree fever and was kept out of the show by her mother. It happened to be a night that Mervyn LeRoy, the director assigned to the picture, and several Warners executives were going to be in the audience. Soon a call came from assistant stage manager Ruth Mitchell: “Miss Merman doesn’t care how sick your daughter is. She wants the full original cast on tonight.”

Had Ethel really wanted to hedge her bets, it might have been best for her corporation, MerSix, to purchase the rights. But she had good reason to believe that she had the film in the bag. Mervyn LeRoy came to see her backstage time after time, always assuring her that she didn’t need to worry: no one else would be playing Rose on-screen.

Just to be safe, however, she agreed to do something she had never done before: she would head up the national company in a nine-month cross-country tour. Those who were aware of her aversion to taking a show on the road were astonished. But Ethel knew that
Gypsy
was the high point of her career, and she wanted to share it with a wider audience—especially since she thought such a move might help her when she starred in the film version. People across the nation would buy tickets to see her onstage, then line up again at the box office when the movie was released.

And then, while the show was nearing the end of its Broadway run, the news was announced: Rosalind Russell would play Rose in the Warners film. It was the most stunning shock of Ethel’s career; she had naïvely thought Mervyn LeRoy to be a man of his word. Jack Klugman recalled that Ethel was heartbroken: “Mervyn LeRoy came to see the play nine times and said, ‘Ethel, I would never do this picture without you. This is your legacy.’ All that stuff. I was there. He was an SOB.”

The casting took place in an under-the-table way. A few years earlier, Frederick Brisson, producer of
The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees
, and other stage hits, had purchased the screen rights to the Broadway comedy
A Majority of One
, starring Gertrude Berg. Brisson was the husband of Rosalind Russell, and he sold the rights to Warners with Russell attached. There was one further condition: since Warners had the rights to
Gypsy
, the studio would have to use her in that film as well—otherwise no deal. As a box-office name, four-time Academy Award nominee Russell looked like a better bet than Ethel, and the studio agreed to Brisson’s terms.

Ethel was now hardly in the proper frame of mind to undertake the national tour, but a commitment was a commitment, and she refused to back out. As time went on, the idea of playing across the country became a very specific kind of challenge: she would show those fools in Hollywood exactly how Rose
should
be played, and the movie would suffer as a result. She railed about the Warners executives as “those son of a bitches” and prepared to leave New York.

Julianne Marie played Gypsy on tour, and Alfred Sander was to play Herbie, as Jack Klugman preferred not to go on the road. But Ethel was used to Klugman’s way of playing the part and very soon lost patience with his replacement, to the extent that Sander started having trouble retaining his lines. The upshot was that she pressured Merrick to get Klugman, at least for the start of the tour.

Gypsy
closed at the Imperial on March 25, 1961, after 702 performances. (Merrick, among others, always thought that the run was shorter than it should have been, considering the show’s quality, but Sondheim may have been right when he said that
Gypsy
told the audience things it didn’t necessarily want to hear.) The national tour opened in Rochester, New York, on March 29. Ethel put on her best public-relations face in a way that was somewhat unusual for her, gushing to a reporter from the
Rochester Times-Union
, “I’m really excited about coming to Rochester.” Klugman played Herbie in Rochester only, then left and was replaced by Sander, who finally proved acceptable to Ethel. The company moved on to Toronto, where the show was dwarfed in the enormous, three-thousand-seat O’Keefe Center. The cast was surprised to find the reviews mixed to downbeat, but the tour’s company manager, Richard Grayson, observed, “The quality of our notices was almost uniformly in direct reverse proportion to the size of the theater.
Gypsy
is really a musical play about five or six people. It’s not about big production numbers. So we got our best notices when we played real theaters.”

But not always. When the show came to Boston’s lovely Colonial Theatre, the
Christian Science Monitor
dismissed it as “a moderately weak musical with an immoderately starry star,” handicapped by a book that “sputters into second-act vulgarity.” But audiences everywhere loved it. On opening night at Detroit’s Riviera Theatre, the applause on Ethel’s entrance was so deafening that she had to break character and bow before the show could continue. (This moved even Ethel, who exclaimed to a reporter, “Touring! I’m sold!”) The show continued on through Cleveland and Chicago before heading to San Francisco for an August 7 opening at the Curran Theatre, where the box office had taken in $60,000 on the first day it was open. In San Francisco the audience reaction to the show was overwhelming, and the run continued until late September.

While the show was playing to packed houses in San Francisco, Ethel injured her back severely: two of her vertebrae locked while she was bending over to put something in a bureau drawer. Richard Grayson picked her up at her hotel every morning at ten and drove her to the doctor. She was in agony for much of the San Francisco run, but she didn’t miss a single performance, and was feeling somewhat better by the time the company moved on to Los Angeles for the October 2 opening at the Biltmore Theatre. This engagement presented a problem for Ethel: the star dressing room was below stage level, down a long staircase, with the rest of the dressing rooms a flight below that. Since she was still suffering some residual pain, Ethel asked Grayson to order a portable dressing room from one of the movie studios that could be placed directly on the side of the stage. Grayson explained that there was no room for such an accommodation—as it was, the crew was going to be lucky to be able to load the production into the tiny theater. “You’ve got to promise me you’ll do that,” she said to Grayson in a threatening tone. Grayson promised to do everything he could, but the best he could come up with was a makeshift arrangement with ropes and pulleys and curtains, a long mirror and a dressing table and a clothes tree. Ethel was not happy; Grayson had failed to carry out her wishes. “She never felt the same way about me after that,” he recalled. “She played every performance with this arrangement, but she felt that I was turning her down.”

The Los Angeles run was not a happy one for other reasons. Here Ethel had been especially determined to show “those son of a bitches” a thing or two about playing Rose. When the company arrived in town, the duplicitous Mervyn LeRoy resurfaced. He came to see her and requested as many house seats as he could possibly obtain for his friends and colleagues. He told Ethel that although it had not been announced, Rosalind Russell was seriously ill and was almost surely not going to be able to play Rose in the movie. “I think you’re going to end up getting this part,” he confided to Ethel, whose dream of recording her performance on film was suddenly given new life. She decided to follow LeRoy’s advice and play Hollywood politics, down to ordering a full bar and cocktail glasses so she could properly entertain the studio brass after the show. All too soon she found out that LeRoy had misled her yet again. She was furious with herself for being taken in a second time, and she finished
Gypsy
’s run in a foul humor. After that the tour closed in St. Louis, and she retreated to New York to spend Christmas with the two people who had never let her down: her beloved Mom and Pop.

D
uring
Gypsy
’s run, Ethel made the acquaintance of an attractive young man named Tony Cointreau. His surname was both exotic and familiar-sounding, and she soon found out why: Tony’s father, Jacques Mercier-Cointreau, was chairman of Cointreau, Ltd., the company that manufactured the famous orange-flavored liqueur. Tony was charming, with impeccable manners. He wanted to become a pop singer, and from the time Ethel met him backstage at
Gypsy
, she offered him her steady encouragement. She was delighted by his graciousness and gentle wit, and she promptly introduced him to Ethel Jr., who dated him briefly before she went off to Colorado College. Tony had the quality that Ethel prized above all else: trustworthiness. As their surrogate mother-son relationship developed, Ethel realized that this was one person who was not out to use her, who wanted nothing from her but friendship.

The same could hardly be said of another person she met around this time, a husky-voiced, flashy brunette named Jacqueline Susann. The daughter of the prominent Philadelphia portrait artist Robert Susann, Jackie had been in New York since the late thirties, when she landed a bit part in, and was promptly bounced from, Clare Boothe Luce’s hit
The Women
. Jackie had struggled and failed as both an actress and a playwright. For years she had floated around the fringes of B-level New York show business, as a television hostess and a commercial spokeswoman, and she showed up frequently in Broadway nightspots such as Toots Shor’s and Danny’s Hide-a-Way, because her husband, Irving Mansfield, was a Broadway press agent and a radio and TV producer. She was a shameless sycophant and a desperately devoted fan of Ethel’s. Jackie saw
Gypsy
again and again and was overwhelmed by Ethel’s performance, but she was not content to admire from afar. She had become friends with Benay Venuta, still Ethel’s closest professional friend, and through Benay managed to get herself introduced to Ethel. Soon Jackie was dogging Ethel’s every step.

Initially Ethel liked her well enough: Jackie was bright and irreverent and showbizzy, with a sharp, bawdy wit. Since the troubles with Six had worsened, Ethel had started to relax her strict rules about drinking too much after a performance, and once the final curtain fell on
Gypsy
, she and Jackie and Benay were seen out together in various after-hours spots.

To several of Ethel’s friends, Jackie’s motives seemed transparent. “Jackie had a terrible mouth,” said Tony Cointreau. “She became friends with all these stars—Judy Garland, Ethel—through her husband, and then she would go to the ‘little people’ and say the most horrible things about them. That’s when I first met Jackie. She was talking to the ‘little people’ and saying these horrific things about Judy and Ethel, and she didn’t know that I knew Ethel.”

All too soon Ethel grew uncomfortable with Jackie’s obsessive behavior and began trying to put some distance between them. Jackie’s reaction was to come on stronger than ever. Too late Ethel realized that she had become the object of a crazed star crush. It all built to a frenzy one night after a performance of
Gypsy
. Jackie and Irving were out at a restaurant with Ethel and Benay when Jackie, having had far too much to drink, exploded in a rage at Irving and turned a table over on top of him. Ethel, mortified, got up and left, shouting at Jackie that she never wanted to see her again. Jackie, undeterred, followed Ethel to the Park Lane and stood in the hallway outside her apartment in the early-morning hours, hammering on her door and screaming, “Ethel, I love you!” until Ethel was forced to have the Park Lane’s security team remove her.

Ethel ended the short-lived friendship with Jackie, but Jackie’s intense fixation on Ethel had become well known, and some Broadway insiders speculated that the two women really might have had a brief sexual relationship. This appears to have been nothing but speculation: there is no hard evidence that Ethel was ever sexually involved with another woman. Although she tossed around the terms “fag” and “dyke” casually, she had no deep-seated issues with either male or female homosexuality; this was simply her coarse way of expressing herself. Over the years she enjoyed friendships with many prominent gay women in the business, including actresses Mary McCarty and Fannie Flagg, among others, but as she once told Tony Cointreau, “I just never could go that route. I always liked a man’s most desirable part.”

Where was Ethel to go after
Gypsy
? It had provided her with the pinnacle of her career, and she knew that she would have to choose her next move carefully. Plans were afoot for her to make her London debut as Rose, but the production never materialized. Ethel always claimed that she didn’t do a London run of the show because Jack Klugman and Julianne Marie were not available, but it is more likely that she simply did not care enough about taking
Gypsy
abroad.

The loss of the
Gypsy
movie to Rosalind Russell continued to be an open wound, exacerbated when Warner Bros. released the film in the fall of 1962 to middling reviews. Although Russell had a few effective moments as Rose, her performance too often seemed like a broad stand-up comedy routine, and the decision to alternate her own gravelly singing with the dubbed vocals of Lisa Kirk made Rose sound like a case of musical split personality. The
New Yorker
dismissed it as “thoroughly repellent.” In his
New York Times
notice, Bosley Crowther devoted most of his space to praising Ethel’s performance in the original. “That tornado of a stage mother that Ethel Merman portrayed on Broadway…comes out little more than a big wind in the portrayal that Rosalind Russell gives her.”

Such reviews were cold comfort to Ethel, who would continue to look on losing Rose on film as the greatest professional disappointment of her life. But she did receive consolation in the form of another movie job. Stanley Kramer, who had made a considerable name for himself in Hollywood as the producer/director of serious pictures that dealt with controversial themes such as nuclear attack (
On the Beach
) and the Holocaust (
Judgment at Nuremberg
), was eager for a change of pace. He was assembling a big, expensive picture called
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,
which would be a tribute to the days of the great slapstick filmmaker Mack Sennett. The plot was really just an excuse for a series of screen-filling sight gags: while traveling through the California desert, a random collection of motorists witnesses a fatal car accident. In his final minutes, the driver of the car (played by Ethel’s old pal Jimmy Durante) lets it slip that he was on his way to collect a fortune—“350,000 big ones”—buried at a site in Santa Rosita State Park that he refers to only as “the Big W.” The witnesses all take off in search of the money, stopping at nothing to sabotage one another along the way.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
was an enormous, $9.5 million production with a top-line cast. The principal scavengers were played by Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Sid Caesar, Edie Adams, Jonathan Winters, Terry-Thomas, Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, and Dorothy Provine, with Ethel rounding out the cast as Berle’s overbearing, loudmouthed mother-in-law, Mrs. Marcus. Spencer Tracy was the police chief who keeps the whole crowd under surveillance, and there were cameo appearances by a host of famous comics, including Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, ZaSu Pitts, Buster Keaton, Ben Blue, and Andy Devine.

The various slapstick routines were extremely tricky to stage and shoot, and the filming, much of which took place in the extreme heat of Southern California, stretched on for months. Having so many big comedic talents gathered for one project proved a challenge for Kramer. Ethel was indulgent of the rampant egos surrounding her on the set and got to be friendly with Edie Adams, with whom she often rode back to her hotel at the end of the day’s work. “I used to do a take-off on her in my act,” said Adams. “I would hold a note, and the trumpeter would hold the note with me, and I’d pull out a gun and shoot the trumpeter. Fortunately, she thought it was very funny.” Occasionally, as they were piling into the car to leave the location, Ethel would mutter to Adams, “I think I’ve had enough of comics for one day.”

Still, she liked the part of Mrs. Marcus, and the rushes looked promising. There was one particularly funny scene in which she berated both Berle and Provine from the backseat of a car; on-screen she had never displayed such breathtaking comic timing. She was also delighted when her costars threw a party for her at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Around 150 Hollywoodites were invited to the formal dinner, and Ethel was asked, as she so often was at affairs in her honor, to sing. She obliged with “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” The
Los Angeles Times
observed, “For filmdom functions, it wasn’t such a mad, mad, mad, mad party. Very sedate.” But Ethel seemed pleased as she gasped, upon making her entrance, “Nobody ever did anything like this for me before!”

No other movie offers were immediately forthcoming, and she still had no interest in returning to Broadway, so she decided to go where the big money was—Las Vegas. In October she opened at the famous Flamingo Hotel, home to such topflight Vegas entertainers as Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Lena Horne. The hotel had opened in 1946—at a total building cost of around $6 million—most of it contributed by Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, and other prominent New York mobsters. It boasted elegant gardens and spectacular swimming pools, and by the 1950s it dominated Vegas’s strip, an enormous attraction for both tourists and celebrities. The Flamingo was memorably described by Dean Martin’s biographer, Nick Tosches, as “the pleasure dome of the new prefab promised land: a land of chrome, not gold; of Armstrong linoleum, not Carrara marble; of heptalk, not epos or prophecy.” It was to be Ethel’s first club date since her appearance at Casino in the Park in the early 1930s, and with a whopping salary of $40,000 weekly (before taxes), she was eager to make a success of it.

She didn’t, quite. Her opening was attended by a number of celebrity friends, including Judy Garland, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and Mitzi Gaynor, as well as Mom and Pop Zimmermann. She had the expert support of Russ Black and his orchestra, plus pianists Morty Jacobs and Marty Harris; with the exception of one number new to her, “A Lotta Livin’ to Do” from Broadway’s
Bye Bye Birdie
, she sang the old songs from her old shows. But attendance soon fell off, for the simple reason that Ethel was not a club performer. It was thrilling when she hurled her great songs through the expanses of a Broadway theater, but in a club setting she couldn’t quite establish the right rapport with the audience. Performers such as Frank Sinatra and Lena Horne could sell big, uptempo numbers, but they also knew how to banter, to give the impression to every single customer that they were performing for him and him alone. Ethel couldn’t manage that. Her performing style was inflexible, and she wasn’t able to alter it for a roomful of half-soused gamblers who, she suspected, weren’t giving her their full attention anyway.

On top of that, Ethel developed a case of “Vegas throat” during her Flamingo engagement. This was a common ailment for singers new to the desert climate: their voices suddenly became dry and raspy. On a live recording of the engagement issued by Reprise (which later had to be partially rerecorded), both Ethel’s speaking and singing voices sound desiccated and hoarse; by now she had also developed a habit of finishing off the final consonant in her lyrics in a way that sounded almost like she was doing a comic Italian accent (“The Hostess with the Mostes’ on the Balllllll-a”).

For the paying customers, she put up a good front and indicated that her club debut was a career highlight. “Up until last year,” she said as part of the carefully scripted banter from which she never deviated, “when I toured with
Gypsy,
my professional life was sort of confined to Broadway and Hollywood. I didn’t tour and I didn’t play clubs. My friends always used to say, ‘Ethel, you don’t know what you’re missing.’ Well, tonight I learned what they’re talking about.”

It was a good try, but the truth was that Ethel loathed Vegas. She missed New York and returned there as soon as her run at the Flamingo ended. She did, over the next few months, trot out her act at such tony spots as the Deauville in Miami Beach and Harrah’s South Shore Room at Lake Tahoe, but as Phyllis Diller, by now a veteran of the club circuit, put it bluntly, “Ethel’s act simply did not fly.” There was still television, however, and on April 8, 1963, Ethel wowed the small-screen audience with an appearance on the Academy Awards telecast, performing a medley of Irving Berlin tunes while charging down into the audience (and perilously close to the cameras). It was one of the few times anyone had performed at the Oscars while mingling with the crowd, and her stunt picked up a lot of favorable notices.

On June 4, Ethel hit the road in a six-week theater-concert tour, appearing mostly in tent shows and other summer-theater venues. She opened at the Melody Fair Theatre in Buffalo, New York, and continued through the Northeast. In Boston, critic Elliott Norton put his finger on the problem: many of the songs in her shows needed context, he observed, and added, “Although Ethel is a wonder, she is human. To entertain at the top of her bent, she needs a show.”

Actually, a show had been offered. David Merrick was producing a new musical based on Thornton Wilder’s hit comedy
The Matchmaker.
It was called
Hello, Dolly!,
and Jerry Herman, the talented young composer of
Milk and Honey,
had, with Merrick’s encouragement, written it expressly for Ethel. Herman had made a careful study of all her recordings, and the part of Dolly was perfectly tailored to her talents. With Merrick at the helm, Herman dared to dream that Ethel would sign on.