Ethel Merman: A Life (31 page)

Herman was in Merrick’s office the day the producer made the call pitching the show to Ethel. “He said that he would like to set up a time to audition it. And he went absolutely ashen. Here the great moment came, and he just turned sort of a pale gray and said, ‘Are you sure, Ethel? Are you really sure? This is so right for you.’” When Merrick hung up, he told Herman, “She says she will never do another Broadway show because she has spent her life in dressing rooms.” At that point, said Herman, “I turned the same color that he did!”

Ethel had legitimate reasons for saying no to
Dolly!
Number one, she was tired of long Broadway runs and wanted to concentrate on films and TV. Number two, while she had originated every role she had played onstage, Ruth Gordon had made a brilliant success of
The Matchmaker
less than a decade earlier; the memory of Gordon’s triumph was still fresh, and Ethel didn’t want to risk comparison. If Merrick thought he might be able to persuade her, he was wrong. And while
Hello, Dolly!
would turn out to be a history-making success, it did not have the spark and originality of
Gypsy.
Ethel never regretted her decision.

She continued to keep closer tabs on both her children. Ethel Jr. had had a second child, Michael, born on November 10, 1962. Having one child at such an early age had been a challenge that taxed Ethel Jr. to her limits, and the pressures of having two were overwhelming. “My grandmother was a very powerful personality,” recalled Barbara Geary. “My mom was extremely intelligent and fairly emotionally vulnerable. I think she inherited some of the depression stuff from her father. Gram didn’t really have time for that. Not to say that she didn’t love her, but that sensitivity and anguish she didn’t understand, and therefore she gave it no time. Her attitude was, ‘Get over it! Get better!’”

Bobby, for his part, had shown a marked interest in going into the theater—not, to Ethel’s relief, as a performer but as a director. After she finished her summer tour, Ethel joined him in Europe, where he was making the rounds of major theaters, informally studying various up-to-date production techniques before enrolling that fall as a directing major at the Carnegie Institute of Technology’s College of Fine Arts. Soon he had been appointed assistant stage manager for a school production of
As You Like It,
and he seemed eager to complete his education and get his career rolling.

Now that her children had embarked on new phases of their lives, Ethel began searching for new vistas herself. For years she had been a frequent guest on the top variety shows of Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and others. But what she wanted now, more than anything, was a series of her own. Not a variety series—those she considered a dime a dozen—but a sitcom that would allow her to show off a side of her talents that many television viewers might not know about. Her current agent, the notoriously tough and belligerent Milton Pickman, began casting around for the right project and received an agreement from a longtime Merman admirer, Lucille Ball, to film a series pilot for her production company, Desilu. The result was
Maggie Brown,
a sort of second cousin to
Panama Hattie
. Ethel played Maggie, the goodhearted owner of a nightclub in the South Pacific during World War II, who operates an illegal beer machine in her basement and tries to keep her beautiful young daughter from falling prey to the crowd of sailors who frequent the bar.

Susan Watson, who played Ethel’s daughter in the pilot, remembered that Ethel had a great deal riding on its success. “I felt that she really wanted this to happen,” said Watson. “It was a thin plot, but she was good in it. She knew where the jokes were. And yet there was a kind of—I don’t want to call it innocence, but she was so wound up in what she was doing that it was sort of like she had blinders on. I could feel that. You could see that she was eager to make it work—‘How about this?
This
would be better!’—that sort of thing.” Despite enthusiastic endorsement by Lucille Ball, CBS did not pick up
Maggie Brown
. Ethel was bitterly disappointed and frequently asked her friends and managers, “What do I have to do to get hot?”

That fall, Ethel brought her nightclub act to New York with an engagement at the Plaza Hotel’s elegant Persian Room. Comedienne Kaye Ballard recalled an incident that underlined just how alien the nightclub milieu was to Ethel. As she led up to her big show-hits medley, she told the audience, just as she always did, about Vinton Freedley casting her in
Girl Crazy.
As it happened, Freedley himself was sitting at one of the front tables. By now he was an elderly and somewhat frail man, all but forgotten, and rather desperate for recognition. When he heard his name mentioned, Freedley called out, “Ethel! I’m here!” Ethel, thinking there was a heckler in the audience, turned her gaze on his table.

“Ethel! It’s me—Vinton!”

Ethel’s smile remained fixed on her face. “HI!” she bellowed, and went right on with her patter.

In November,
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
was launched with a massive four-day press junket in Hollywood, attended by some 250 journalists from every major U.S. city, as well as from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Like all the principals, Ethel made herself available for interviews. The total cost of the junket was estimated at around $280,000, but it was considered worth it by Kramer and United Artists, which anticipated getting $3 million worth of free TV exposure. The studio couldn’t control the reviews, of course, which were mixed. The
New York Times
found it “wild and hilarious all the way” and praised Ethel’s “brass-lunged, bargain-basement champion mother-in-law,” but
Newsweek
found it “redundant, ridiculous, and too insistent” and thought that the slapstick scenes revealing Ethel in her bloomers approached “outright disgust.” In the end even the worst notices didn’t matter: with so much star power and heavy promotion, the film was practically a guaranteed hit, and Ethel delighted in its success, especially as it came on the heels of
Gypsy
’s cinema failure.

Soon after, Ethel returned to television for a series of guest shots:
The Red Skelton Hour, The Lucy Show,
and a pair of appearances on
The Judy Garland Show,
one of which turned out to be history-making: she shared the stage with both Garland and the red-hot rising star Barbra Streisand, who had just made a big hit on Broadway in
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
and was about to star in the new Jule Styne–Bob Merrill show
Funny Girl
. Those who knew Streisand in the early days of her career maintain that she was a true diva from the beginning, and her behavior on this occasion clinched it. She appeared quite chilly toward Ethel, who in turn nearly steamrollered her. When she asked Streisand what was next for her and Streisand mentioned
Funny Girl,
Ethel spoke over the top of her: “WONDUHFUL! WONDUHFUL! WHO’S THE COMPOSAH?” When Streisand mentioned Jule Styne’s name, Ethel exploded with, “HE WROTE
GYPSY
! YOU’RE IN GOOD HANDS, GIRL!” The three women then joined forces for “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Streisand barely knew the lyrics, and Ethel sailed right past her. Even so, Ethel recognized a brilliant talent when she heard one, and in years to come she would be generous in her praise of Streisand.

Ethel also had nothing but kind words for Garland. The problems of getting the deeply troubled star to submit to the rigors of a weekly television show were chronicled in Mel Tormé’s memoir
The Other Side of the Rainbow,
and certainly there were many guest stars who resented the chaotic conditions of appearing on Garland’s show. But Ethel always defended her, often saying, “You can’t speak against that girl. She’s a great talent, and she’s very, very sick, and she needs our understanding.”

One of Ethel’s close friends around this time was Temple Texas, a six-foot-two blond beauty and onetime actress who was now a successful publicity agent. Temple was Ethel’s kind of woman: bawdy, boozing, and fun-loving, and Ethel delighted in her company. On November 20, 1963, at the home of Temple and her husband, agent Joseph Shribman, Ethel met Ernest Borgnine.

No glamorous leading man, Borgnine was a hefty forty-six-year-old character actor who had come up the hard way, playing small parts on Broadway before being typecast as a heavy in Hollywood films. He’d startled audiences with his convincing portrayal of Fatso Judson, the sadistic sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra’s Angelo Maggio to a bloody pulp in
From Here to Eternity,
and two years later he had his breakthrough role in
Marty,
a quiet drama about a lonely Bronx butcher for which Borgnine received the 1955 Best Actor Oscar.

Winning the award hadn’t brought him all he might have expected. With his offbeat looks and persona, he was difficult to cast, and his starring career in Hollywood was spotty. His reputation as a screen heavy had also spilled over into his private life. His first marriage, to Rhoda Kemins, ended in divorce in 1958, with his wife charging that he’d beaten her. On the set of the film
Badlanders,
he met Mexican actress Katy Jurado, and they were married a year later, but their relationship was stormy; in 1961 the press reported that they’d gotten into an argument in a nightclub that culminated in his slapping her. He and Jurado were divorced in 1963—the same year he met Ethel.

From the start, Borgnine courted Ethel with the fervor of a lovestruck teenager, and she succumbed. She paid no attention to friends’ warnings of his marital past or to the nine-year age difference between them. She knew that for a woman in her mid-fifties, there weren’t going to be many more chances, and she decided that at last she had found the ideal man. “I can see where she fell hook, line, and sinker,” says Tony Cointreau. “Borgnine was so charming—a million watts. I thought, ‘This is the most perfect couple God ever put together.’ They even looked right together.” Although Borgnine was starring in a hit television series,
McHale’s Navy,
he flew from California to New York to be with Ethel as often as possible. On one of his visits, during the week between Christmas 1963 and the New Year, he popped the question, and Ethel said yes. To reporters she laid it on thick: “I’ve never been in love, really in love, before. For the first time in my life, I feel protected.” As she had with Bob Six, she attempted to play the devoted wife who was willing to take a backseat to her husband: “Wherever Ernie is working is where I’ll be.”

Their relationship continued at a peak of intensity throughout the first half of 1964. To Eric Knight, a pianist in some of her club appearances (and later, her principal conductor), she seemed the picture of the radiant bride-to-be. Knight recalled one evening when he and his wife invited Ethel and Borgnine to dinner at their Manhattan apartment: “We’re sitting on two chairs, and they’re on the sofa, and Borgnine starts his Italian wooing: he takes her shoe off and starts kissing her toes! She ate it up. He gave her the treatment.”

In February 1964, Ethel took time out from her new romance to make her official London debut, at the famed cabaret Talk of the Town. The nightclub, a rebuilt version of the old variety theater the Hippodrome, had opened in 1958 and quickly became one of London’s hottest spots. Ethel was in magnificent vocal shape, her notices in the British press were glowing, and audiences flocked to the show, delirious at their first opportunity to hear her live. Again one of the high points was Ethel’s blazing rendition of “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.”

Upon her return from London, Ethel and Borgnine set a date for their wedding: June 26, 1964. Ethel busied herself with the immense chore of shipping her furniture and paintings out to California, where the couple planned to live in Borgnine’s spacious Beverly Hills home. Ethel was still very much the secretary: she monitored the packing herself, taking precise inventory of each of the boxes and affixing labels to them that described their contents. To friends she bubbled with excitement about her impending marriage; later she would claim that privately she was beginning to have doubts.

On June 26, wearing a flowing chiffon dress in three shades of yellow, Ethel married Ernest Borgnine in the garden of his house. Five hundred friends were in attendance, including Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lucille Ball and Gary Morton, and Vivian Vance. There were already storm warnings before the ceremony began. Granddaughter Barbara Jean, now three and a half years old, innocently pulled a carnation off the trellis that had been set up in the garden, causing Borgnine to lose his temper and scream at her. It was a tense moment, and there was more to follow: In midceremony Bobby, who was tossing Barbara Jean up in the air, misjudged his strength, and the child accidentally dislocated her shoulder. Immediately after the vows were spoken, Ethel accompanied the little girl to the emergency room of a local hospital.

The Borgnines had long planned to spend their honeymoon on a three-week tour of Japan, Hong Kong, and Honolulu. Only at the last minute did Ethel discover that Borgnine had not financed the trip—it had come his way in the form of a paid publicity junket. With her enormous sense of pride and fair play, Ethel was outraged, feeling that her groom had deceived her. The bickering began on the plane trip to Tokyo and gradually intensified. Exactly what happened once the couple arrived in Tokyo is not known, since Ethel would remain reticent about the details of her honeymoon for the rest of her life. But several of her friends over the years indicated that some sort of violent episode may have taken place. “He had hit her,” said Eric Knight. “She told me this.”

All that is really known is that Ethel spent only a day or so in Tokyo before flying back to California. There, in the house in Beverly Hills, she faced yet another humiliation—the maid. Ethel later told reporters that she had “objected strenuously to that woman.” She may have had her reasons. Many years later, Barbara Jean Geary was working on a film set in Portland, Oregon, where she met a man who had been an assistant director on
McHale’s Navy
. “He told me that the real story was that Ernest had a script girl from
McHale
that he was having an affair with the whole time he was courting my grandmother,” recalled Barbara. “He installed her in the house as a maid, and she discovered that, and that was why she left.”