Ethel Merman: A Life (35 page)

The show’s original director, Gower Champion, had rehearsed all the other replacement Dollys, but when Merrick persuaded Ethel to take over, Champion bowed out, saying he couldn’t bear putting one more star through her paces. He passed on his directing chores to the stage manager, Lucia Victor, and his wife, Marge Champion, who worked with Ethel for two weeks prior to the opening. When Marge arrived at rehearsal, she found that certain problems had already arisen. Victor complained that Ethel was taking her opening number, “I Put My Hand In,” at a deadly slow pace. Marge agreed but wisely chose not to confront Ethel on the matter. It was clear to her from the outset that Ethel was exceptionally nervous about taking over a part that had been a Broadway hit with six other actresses.

“I tried, in every way, to be supportive of her anxiety,” recalled Marge, “and to assure her how really perfect she was for that show.” In two weeks’ time, Ethel’s confidence had grown, and her performance gained in rhythm, color, and bite. To Marge, she caught something that eluded a number of the other Dollys: she could play not only Dolly Levi but Dolly Gallagher, the Irish colleen who had married a Jewish man.

“This steamroller suddenly happened to the show,” recalled Marcia Lewis, who played Ernestina Money. “We went from the littlest audiences you could imagine in the St. James Theatre to absolute pandemonium around the block. Ethel taught me how to plant. I used to watch her so closely, and she would find where she wanted to stand—which of course was dead center down front—and you could almost feel her roots being put down through the floor. She looked to the left and the right and the balcony, but that spot man had her there, and that’s where she stayed.”

When Ethel unveiled her Dolly at the St. James Theatre on March 30, 1970, the audience was in a frenzy of anticipation. The moment she made her entrance, pulling down the newspaper she is reading as the trolley car chugs onstage, the entire crowd jumped to its feet for a prolonged ovation. They were all standing again when, in Dolly’s famous red gown and plumed hat, she appeared at the top of the Harmonia Gardens staircase just before launching into “Hello, Dolly!” John Montgomery and David Evans were the two actors positioned at the bottom of the staircase as she descended, singing the number. “She came down the steps, and they just wouldn’t stop,” Montgomery remembered. “David Evans was across from me, and we were looking at each other. I was trembling, and David started crying. As the number got going, they screamed and applauded all through it.”

The title number, in fact, played beautifully into the sentiment attached to the occasion; many of the lines were weighted with double meaning. When Ethel sang “IT’S SO NICE TO BE BACK HOME WHERE I BELONG!” the audience erupted in cheers for more than a minute. They had the same response to similar lines, such as “DOLLY WILL NEVER GO AWAY AGAIN!” and “TOMORROW WILL BE BRIGHTER THAN THE GOOD OLD DAYS!” at which the orchestra had to come to a full stop, waiting for the applause to subside.

There was a third standing ovation for her at the finale, one that went on and on. In between, all her numbers were greeted with such ecstatic cheers that some of the opening-night critics complained that they couldn’t make out all the words. Both of the new numbers, especially “Love, Look in My Window,” were enormous hits with the audience; they would have the distinction of being the last songs Ethel would introduce. Taking Lucia Victor’s advice, Ethel smiled while she sang “Love, Look in My Window,” so as to ease the tear-jerking nature of the song. But anyone, friend or fan, who knew of the heartbreak Ethel had experienced in the last decade could hardly have helped being moved to tears when she sang:

 

Love, look in my window,

Love, knock on my door,

It’s years since you called on me.

How I would love hearing your laughter once more

So if you should ever be in the neighborhood…

 

The
New York Times
responded to Ethel’s return by writing her a series of love letters. Walter Kerr called her voice “exactly as trumpet-clean, exactly as pennywhistle-piercing, exactly as Wurlitzer-wonderful as it always was. Right from the first notes, the first words…you know it’s all still there, dustproof, rustproof, off and aloft and ringing.”

Ethel’s presence in
Dolly!
was like a transfusion for the sagging show. In a season where the other big musical hits were the decidedly second-rate
Applause
and
Coco,
starring, respectively, Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, two of the most unmusical stars ever to have crossed a Broadway stage,
Dolly!
rode high. Even in the midst of such a triumph, Ethel Jr. was ever present in her mother’s thoughts. Helene Whitney recalled going backstage to see Ethel on
Dolly!
’s opening night. The first thing Ethel did was clasp her hand and say, “Helene—she didn’t commit suicide.” To Whitney, Ethel offstage had none of the drive and fire that she remembered from the three shows they’d done together. Now she seemed tired, defeated, and overwhelmingly sad.

Yet professionally Ethel had not mellowed at all. She still insisted that everyone around her give 100 percent to the show, and she flew into a rage if she felt that someone was slacking off. “She was playing a matinee one day,” said Biff Liff, then an associate in the Merrick office, “and she was pissed off at something, which she was usually. She told me to get my ass down to the theater and fire the stage manager. She was unhappy about something. She said the guy up in the booth was drunk, because he didn’t know how to put a spotlight on her. She said, ‘Fire everybody! They don’t know what they’re doing!’ I thought to myself, ‘That will be a day in heaven, if I could ever fire a stagehand.’ But she was a pro from beginning to end. She gave every night and was just terrific.”

With such a success, Merrick wasn’t about to let her off the hook after three months. More than anything he wanted her to beat the record-breaking run of 2,717 performances established by
My Fair Lady
some years earlier. Although the hot, humid summer in New York had sapped her energy, Ethel agreed to extend the run, and
Dolly!
did not close until its 2,844th performance, on December 27. Broadway had a new all-time champion show, and Ethel could be proud that it was she who’d helped make it so. Since Merrick had backed out of throwing a closing-night party, Ethel hosted one herself, at the Grenadier, near the United Nations. At the end of the evening, feeling no pain, she got up and sang “I’ll Pay the Check” from
Stars in Your Eyes
, which moved the entire cast to tears.

Dolly didn’t keep her promise about never going away again. The last performance of
Hello, Dolly!
marked the end of Ethel Merman’s forty-year conquest of Broadway. Hers was a record that no other star would ever come close to matching, but it was something even larger than that: Ethel’s departure was nothing less than the end of the kind of Broadway she had helped create. Over the next decade, the great old-fashioned star vehicles would not disappear, and musical comedy would certainly continue to indulge in nostalgia: witness the huge success of
No, No, Nanette
in 1971 and
Irene
in 1973. But however profitable these shows were, they took a decided backseat to the musicals being created by Stephen Sondheim. Beginning with
Company
in 1970, Sondheim devised a new kind of show, one with a brittle sophistication and intellectual content that far surpassed anything that had been attempted in the past. The critics, for the most part, gave him their seal of approval, and the 1970s became the Age of Sondheim. In
Company, Follies, A Little Night Music,
and
Pacific Overtures,
a big, well-trained, traditional musical-theater voice was not nearly as important as the ability to communicate the tensions, anxieties, and quirks with which the songs were really concerned. As a result, “character” voices became more important than ever; merely passable singers such as Alexis Smith, Glynis Johns, and Hermione Gingold were elevated to belated Broadway stardom, while such vocal powerhouses as Karen Morrow, Nancy Dussault, Eydie Gormé, and Mimi Hines fell by the wayside as the shows, not the singers, became of paramount importance. The directors of musicals gained ever more importance, too, none more so than Harold Prince, who staged the Sondheim shows, and the extraordinary Michael Bennett, who would revolutionize the Broadway musical with
A Chorus Line,
a kind of ensemble docudrama about the struggles of Broadway gypsies. If
A Chorus Line
was the way of the future, it looked as if stars would no longer be absolutely necessary.

Ethel’s response to the new Broadway was outwardly one of cool detachment. She didn’t exhibit much interest in following most of the new shows or in gossiping about people she knew in the theater. The steady distance she kept from Broadway surprised even some of the friends who’d known her for a long time. Whenever she appeared on television talk shows, the big question, “Will you ever do another Broadway show?” was inevitably asked and just as inevitably answered: “Broadway’s been pretty good to me, but then I’ve been pretty good to Broadway.”

Still, it is difficult to believe that the shift in Ethel’s behavior around this time didn’t have something to do with the fact that the biggest part of her career was behind her. She had always been quick to drop those she suspected were disloyal or trying to manipulate her, but now her temper grew worse. Part of her trouble was alcohol. For years she had been drinking Almaden on the rocks, but now she’d switched to vodka, which she drank straight, and she could become quite belligerent after she’d had a few. Unfortunately for her, she enjoyed keeping company with others who drank and encouraged her to do so. Chief among these was Goldie Hawkins, proprietor of Goldie’s New York, a popular piano bar at 232 East Fifty-third Street frequented by the Broadway crowd. Goldie had elevated sycophancy from a hobby to a vocation: like Sherman Billingsley, he made sure that celebrities kept beating a path to his door by always giving them the royal treatment. Ethel became the joint’s leading regular, and fans often popped in hoping that she might even be persuaded to get up and sing a few of her famous songs. Often when she was at Goldie’s, however, Ethel was in no condition to be singing at all. On these occasions she could become loud and argumentative, and if an eligible man was present, she had a way of becoming disconcertingly coquettish in an attempt to seduce him. Goldie Hawkins set the pattern for many of the gay men who became hangers-on in the years that followed by urging her consumption of alcohol. A heavy boozer himself, he seemed to delight in the belligerent, tough-talking side of Ethel that inevitably appeared—as if he were conjuring up the legend he so desperately wanted to believe in.

In contrast, over the next few years, Ethel continued to enjoy a great warmth and closeness with many friends, both old (Josie Traeger, Martha Neubert, Alice Welch) and young (Tony Cointreau and his partner, James Russo). But to others she seemed increasingly irritable, more and more given to angry, violent outbursts and confrontations. As the decade rolled on, some would find that her deep sadness, her unquenchable anger, her growing sense of isolation, all rendered her more like Helen Lawson than even Jackie Susann might have imagined.

B
y the mid-1970s, New York would reach its all-time nadir of livability. Burglaries and muggings were rampant, Harlem was a squalid and frightening place that had lost practically every shred of its former glory, prostitutes and junkies had taken over much of Times Square, and many ordinary New Yorkers were afraid to use the parks, which had become havens for criminals and drug dealers. The city’s sad decline was reflected in many of the period’s plays and films—everything from Jules Feiffer’s
Little Murders
and Neil Simon’s
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
to Alan J. Pakula’s
Klute
and Martin Scorsese’s
Mean Streets.

Ethel was angered at and resentful of the changes in her beloved city, which were causing her to feel increasingly alienated from the mainstream of life. On January 16, 1971, she turned sixty-three, and she continued to suffer setbacks that made her feel ever more vulnerable. Her apartment had been hit during a burglary at the Berkshire, and she’d been robbed of many of her cherished possessions, including much of her jewelry collection.

Then, early that year, Mom Zimmermann, who had been growing increasingly frail over the past months, suffered a severe heart attack. Ethel was devastated. Her connection with her parents had never lessened in intensity; as one relationship after another had failed her, it had only become closer. Barbara Geary felt that Ethel’s involvement with Mom and Pop Zimmermann was so overpowering that there was really no room for anyone else to get close to any of them. During Mom Zimmermann’s recuperation at Roosevelt Hospital on West Sixtieth Street, Ethel was a dutiful daily visitor. Pop Zimmermann was also succumbing to old age, as his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where it was hard for him to navigate on his own. Still, his memory was keen and his wit as sharp as ever, and Ethel maintained her long-held habit of joining him for a drink before dinner, whether she was staying in or going out. Pop loved scotch, and he looked forward all day to the early evening, when they would spend an hour talking together over a cocktail.

All these changes, both in the world at large and close to home, served to sour Ethel’s general outlook. It was now more than ever the case that her lack of inner resources proved detrimental to her. True, she had proved that she could forge through the collapse of her marriages and the tragedy of losing her daughter by marching straight ahead and absorbing herself in work. But apart from reading her devotions in the
Daily Word,
she had little ability to process the transitions in her life on any deeper level. Her reactions were too strong, too instantaneous, too briefly considered, and, in most cases, too irreversible to bring her any genuine level of inner peace and understanding. As people age, their lives generally grow either larger or smaller. Ethel’s had begun to shrink.

One source of genuine pleasure that remained was her grandchildren. In her worst moments, she denigrated her grandmother status. “Grandmother—what does that mean?” she asked Mary Henderson, curator at the Museum of the City of New York. “It’s nothing—just a word.” Still, she felt a great sense of responsibility to her grandchildren, and it did not diminish when Bill Geary remarried. Wherever she was, she telephoned Barbara Jean and Michael every week, keeping close tabs on them. In the spring of 1971, the children showed up on a segment of Ralph Edwards’s long-running television program
This Is Your Life,
which surprised celebrities with a half-hour “live” biography in which friends, family members, and coworkers turned up to pay the subject tribute, all secretly arranged in advance with Edwards. The trap was set for Ethel on the set of
The Merv Griffin Show,
where she was appearing singing “World, Take Me Back” and “Love, Look in My Window.” When Edwards made his trademark move—ripping the cover off a photo album—and proclaimed, “ETHEL MERMAN—
THIS
IS YOUR LIFE!,” Ethel dissolved in tears. She was so overcome with emotion that the taping of the program had to be delayed for several minutes while she got herself under control and the location changed from Griffin’s set to Edwards’s. Among the surprise guests were Josie Traeger, Goldie Hawkins, and Benay Venuta. All gave touching and heartfelt tributes, with the exception of Benay, who came off as a relentless self-promoter. Ethel was joyously tearful throughout, but when Barbara Jean and Michael came out, she collapsed altogether. It was a rare moment for the public to see the warmhearted, unabashedly sentimental side of Ethel.

She also took the two children on lengthy vacations in the summertime. In 1971 they all went to the newly opened Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The marathon amusement park, which hadn’t yet unveiled many of what would become its most famous attractions, was tremendously exciting for Barbara Jean and Michael. Ethel accompanied them on some of the more sedate rides—she loved It’s a Small World and the Country Bear Jamboree—but she passed on the fast ones, such as Space Mountain. Generally she preferred summer holidays with a water setting, and took the children several times to Seaview, a charming and picturesque enclave of Fire Island. Ethel rented a spacious house there, watching as Barbara Jean and Michael spent day after day paddling in the surf and collecting shells on the beach. One summer was spent in Kennebunkport, Maine, and another on Saint Martin, where they stayed at Mary’s Fancy, an old plantation house that had been transformed into an elegant hotel. One day during the Saint Martin vacation, Barbara was running around on a hillside chasing butterflies, when Ethel suddenly started to weep uncontrollably. As Barbara recalled, “She said, ‘That’s just like your mother.’ She was doing that all the time. I think Mom became more golden in death than she was in life. All the difficulties were forgotten.” The family trips would come to an end by around 1974, as the children got older, but Ethel cherished them as long as they lasted.

During the early 1970s, Ethel continued making frequent appearances on the television talk shows. One topic that came up often was the fact that she had missed winning the Tony Award for her greatest role, Rose. One night while chatting with Johnny Carson on the
Tonight Show,
she stated that she had never won a Tony Award. Unbeknownst to her, the executive committee of the Tonys had already convened and agreed to present her with a special award for lifetime achievement in the theater. Soon after it was announced that Ethel would be honored at that year’s ceremony, Tony Cointreau received a telephone call from her. “Oh, my God,” she said, “I am so embarrassed. I just found my Tony Award for
Call Me Madam.
I was using it as a paperweight in my desk.” When she accepted her lifetime Tony at the show’s telecast ceremony on April 23, 1972, Ethel tactfully refrained from mentioning her earlier award.

When Ethel was unhappy about something, she was never unhappy alone. Over the years those who most consistently bore the brunt of her wrath were her managers. Her attitude toward them generally ran to various shades of contempt. Most of them she regarded as either parasites or incompetents—or both—and she treated them accordingly.
They
weren’t the talent, she reasoned; they were simply there to find her work and make her money, and she held them to the same high standard to which she held the other actors in her shows. Her feelings in this regard had probably been colored by her loss of the film version of
Gypsy
—forever after, she blamed that on her agents, who were summarily dismissed when Rosalind Russell’s casting was announced. Those who followed formed a kind of revolving door of go-getters and yes-men, most of whom were on the receiving end of Ethel’s fury in a very short time.

“I found her one of the most difficult people I’ve ever represented,” said Tom Korman. “She had such crazy idiosyncrasies. She wore blinders. When she had something in her mind, that was it, and you couldn’t change her mind. But she was so great as a performer that the minute she got onstage, I forgave her for everything she did.” Her working relationship with Korman ended when he came up with an offer for her to make a guest appearance on the popular sitcom
The Odd Couple,
playing Jack Klugman’s aunt. Ethel was incensed that her own agent would even
consider
that she would play the aunt of her onetime leading man, and very soon Korman was replaced by a refined and witty Englishman, Lionel Larner, who in recent years had become one of the top agents in the theater world.

A long honeymoon period marked Ethel and Larner’s professional relationship, but soon they, too, had their rocky moments. One night Larner escorted her to the opening of
Sherlock Holmes
, starring John Wood and Tim Pigott-Smith. After the curtain came down, he took her back to meet Wood. At Sardi’s after the show, Ethel turned the girlish charm on high voltage—too high—for Wood. They all had a drink together, and Wood suddenly said, “You know, Miss Merman, I’ve loved every minute of this, but I must make an appearance at a party upstairs.”

As Wood left their table, Ethel turned to Larner and snapped, “Faggot!”

“No, Ethel, he’s not a faggot,” said Larner calmly. “(A) he’s married, (B) he’s had an affair with one girl in the company, and (C) I think he’s having an affair with another.”

“He’s a
faggot,
” said Ethel.

“Ethel,” said Larner, “if King Kong walked in here and didn’t want to fuck you, you’d call him a faggot.” Ethel laughed, and the incident blew over, but there were many similar situations. Once, at a party celebrating one of his exhibits, Carleton Varney seated her next to a fellow interior decorator at a dinner; Ethel called Varney aside, yelling, “You’ve seated me next to a fag!” before getting up and storming out. Such behavior was shocking and misleading: in her rational moments, Ethel outwardly indicated no significant degree of homophobia. But if she had to attend a social gathering, she was often hoping to find romantic male companionship. She had gay friends galore; what she craved was a lover, possibly even another husband. And as is the case for many other gay icons in show business then and now, there was a part of her that resented the homosexuals who held her in such high esteem.

One business associate who was able to stay in her good graces was Gus Schirmer, whom she described as “more my personal manager than an agent.” The scion of the famous music-publishing family, Gus had begun his career working in summer stock; after working in Los Angeles, where he represented a number of top film stars, he returned to New York as head of his own agency. He was noted for the compassion he showed his clients and for the imagination and drive with which he managed their careers. Ethel signed with him in the mid-1970s and quickly came to admire his scrupulous honesty and good humor, and Gus remained one of the few business associates about whom she had nothing nasty to say.

In the spring of 1973, Agnes Zimmermann suffered a devastating stroke that robbed her of the power of speech and left her completely paralyzed on her left side. Unable to feed or bathe herself, she remained at Roosevelt Hospital for more than eight months, and when Ethel wasn’t performing out of town, she joined Pop at his daily visits. She was deeply impressed with the care given Mom by her physician, Dr. Albert Attia, and the Roosevelt Hospital nursing staff. (Dr. Attia would soon become Ethel’s personal physician.) When Mom was finally scheduled to be released from the hospital, Ethel decided that she would need to keep even closer tabs on her parents’ situation than she had before. She arranged for the Zimmermanns to move into an apartment at the Berkshire, just a few floors below her own. The apartment was set up as a mini-hospital, with all the necessary medical machinery and a round-the-clock nursing staff, whose praises Ethel continually sang. Mom continued to suffer from expressive aphasia: she could understand what was being said to her, but, having lost the power of speech, she was unable to respond. She could write a bit, but only in a practically illegible scrawl. Through it all, Ethel remained a study in devotion and never lost patience with her mother. “Although everybody told me that Ethel was kind of tough and loud,” said Dr. Attia, “I didn’t see that part of her. I saw the concern for her parents. She had the characteristic of that sort of caring individual.” She even saw to it that the furniture in the new apartment was arranged exactly as it had been at the Century, so that Pop, with his bad eyes, could navigate easily.

When Ethel entertained at the Berkshire, she liked to have friends in for drinks and then take them all out to a restaurant in the neighborhood. “She would invite a group of us to dinner,” recalled Kay Armen, the noted pop contralto who was a good friend of Ethel’s. “First she would invite us to the hotel, and everybody would have their drinks, and Mom and Dad would be part of the party. We would go to the restaurant afterward, and Mom and Dad didn’t come. But they felt like part of the group, and everybody treated them with such respect.” One evening at the Berkshire, Armen leaned down over Agnes’s bed and clutched her hand. “Mama,” she said, “I want you to get well, so you can be up and around again, because we all love you so much.” Agnes squeezed her hand in response, and the tears began to flow down her face.

That Christmas, Ethel had a small party at the Berkshire for a few of her friends. She decided that everyone should sing a few carols around Pop’s piano. Agnes began, with great difficulty, to try to sing along, and Ethel visibly fought back tears. One of her guests, musical director Hal Hastings, remembered thinking, “Ethel was a tough, tough broad—and a little girl with her parents.”

Ethel’s sense of loyalty, like her sense of outrage, had deep roots. Her gratitude toward the staff at Roosevelt Hospital was so great that she decided to become a volunteer there. Once a week she reported to work as a saleslady—“Pink Ladies,” they were called, because of the smocks they wore—in the hospital’s gift shop, and she delighted in waiting on the relatives and friends of patients, selling them a book or a box of chocolates or a plant, ringing up the sale, and counting out the change. She approached this work with the same command of accuracy and organization she brought to her own correspondence and bill paying. It wasn’t long before word got out that one day a week Ethel could be glimpsed at the gift shop, and many fans beat a path to the hospital door just to gawk. Ethel had no patience with such sycophancy: she was there to do a job, plain and simple.