Ethel Merman: A Life (39 page)

Abrahams and the Zuckers belonged to the Mel Brooks school of comedy, piling up one genre-spoofing idea after another. They came up with a scene in the psychological ward of an army hospital, in which a shell-shocked officer named Lieutenant Hurwitz is suffering from the delusion that he was Ethel Merman. Abrahams and the Zuckers thought what would really make the joke land was for Ethel Merman herself to play Lieutenant Hurwitz. The offer was floated out to Gus Schirmer, and Ethel agreed to do it.

Shooting her brief scene in
Airplane!
required of Ethel only a single day’s work, and she thought little more about it, but when the film was released in 1980, it was a huge box-office hit, and Ethel’s scene turned out to be an audience favorite. Even college students who had only a vague idea of Ethel’s career got the joke and laughed uproariously. Ethel was delighted with the attention generated by her cameo shot; again she thought it was an example of “good exposure,” and this time she was right.

Barbara and Michael were by now college age, and it looked as if Barbara was going to be part of the third generation of Ethel’s family to pursue work in the theater: in the late 1970s she became a pupil at the Dell’Arte International School of Musical Theater. Following that she spent some time at the Edinburgh Festival.

Ethel was guardedly supportive of her granddaughter’s theatrical endeavors. Earlier, when Barbara had acted in high-school plays, Ethel had tried to be present whenever her schedule permitted. Barbara had played the part of the housekeeper, Frau Schmidt, in a school production of
The Sound of Music
, and when she was trying to raise a fake window onstage, it came off in her hands. She gamely recovered by saying, “Oh, stupid window,” and instantly won her grandmother’s approval for having such onstage savvy. Another time Barbara had played Martha, the repressed lesbian schoolteacher in Lillian Hellman’s
The Children’s Hour
. “It really wasn’t her cup of tea,” said Barbara Geary. “She sat in the front row. She had a giant charm bracelet, and you could hear the clink of it from the stage. I thought, okay…Gramma’s not really into this one.”

By the early 1980s, Barbara was living in New York. Apart from getting Barbara an interview with a friend who was a director of commercials, Ethel didn’t go out of her way to forge professional connections for her granddaughter, and Barbara didn’t expect her to. “I wasn’t really into doing commercial theater at that point,” Barbara said, “so I didn’t really ask her for help. The kind of theater that I wanted to do was not what she liked or understood.” Michael in the meantime had entered the Florida Institute of Technology as a photography major. Subsequently he moved to the Florida Keys, driving a tow truck for a time and picking up other miscellaneous jobs to support himself.

In the summer of 1980, Ethel flew to Hamilton, Ontario, to appear on the syndicated television series
The Palace
, starring Jack Jones. Eric Knight was along as her conductor, and their segment went well. At the curtain call, Ethel came out to take her bow and found herself standing onstage next to Marty Allen, the rotund, frizzy-haired comedian who was Jones’s sidekick on the show. As a joke Allen began twisting garlands of roses around her feet. Suddenly Ethel tripped and hit the stage with a horrible thud. She lay perfectly still on the stage floor, and by the time Knight hurried down from his seat in the second balcony, she still had not moved. The cast and crew dithered over her, fearing the worst, as the show’s doctors tried to revive her. After several minutes Ethel regained consciousness but refused to consider being hospitalized, screaming at the doctors, “GET AWAY FROM ME!” She seemed somewhat disoriented for several hours afterward, and by the next day, when she and Knight flew back to New York, her face was badly swollen and bruised. On the plane ride, she wore a kerchief and dark glasses and spoke barely a word to Knight.

Ethel refused to consider a lawsuit, but back in New York she did submit to a series of X-rays. Although no fractures were revealed and little more was said about the accident, her behavior became more erratic than ever. A few months later, she and Knight were scheduled to perform in Monte Carlo at Princess Grace’s annual gala to benefit the International Red Cross. Knight’s wife, Joan, came along, having paid her own way. Ethel seemed chilly and distant on the plane ride over, and once they were in Monte Carlo, she summoned Knight to her hotel room.

“How dare you bring your wife to this job on my coattails?” she demanded.

Knight was stunned that she would treat him this way after a sixteen-year working relationship. He took a moment to recover himself and then he let her have it.

“Ethel, I don’t need you to bring my wife to Europe. My wife came with me for the International Red Cross when I was conducting Carol Lawrence, and Carol never said anything.” Knight was so piqued that he considered resigning then and there, but in time Ethel withdrew and seemed to be trying to make up for her gaffe. They performed together with the Seattle Symphony, and she handed Knight a birthday present of fifty dollars, something she had never done before.

Deep down Ethel was beginning to have a gnawing feeling that Broadway had begun to forget about her, or at the very least to have taken her for granted. The year 1980 marked her fiftieth anniversary in the theater, and few in the Broadway community seemed to notice or care. One who did was Bob Schear, who took it upon himself, without telling her, to try to have a Broadway theater renamed for her. He went first to the owners of the Alvin, where he was turned down flat. (It was later rechristened the Neil Simon.) He also met with rejections from the owners of the Imperial, the St. James, and nearly every other theater in town. Finally he tried the owners of the Apollo, which had recently been remodeled. The owners were enthusiastic about the idea, and it seemed sentimentally fitting—the Apollo was the theater where Ethel had performed both
George White’s Scandals
and
Take a Chance.
With the deal all but signed, Bob went to see Ethel to tell her the good news he thought was certain to please her.

Ethel was incensed; the idea flopped with her on every conceivable level. For one thing, she hated surprises of any kind. For another, the idea that someone would try to drum up support for her without her knowledge, as if she were a charity case, infuriated her. Finally, the fact that it would be the Apollo, and not one of the more prestigious theaters, that would be named after her was an insult.

“DID I EVER ASK YOU TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT NAMING A THEATER AFTER ME?” she railed at Bob. “WHO THE HELL GAVE YOU PERMISSION TO DO THAT—AND THE GODDAMN APOLLO? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ME? YOU THINK THAT THEATER’S GOING TO BE THERE IN TWENTY YEARS? MARK MY WORDS—
IT ISN’T GOING TO BE THERE!
”

As it happened, she was right: the Apollo closed only a few years later.

Schear wrote to her attempting to assuage her anger. In response Ethel wrote him a letter, typed on her own electric typewriter:

 

Dear Bob—

Thank you for your letter of September 28th. I appreciate you having my interests at heart and I think part of the success that I have been fortunate to achieve has been because I have had such nice friends.

All good wishes,

Ethel

 

She open-copied the letter to her financial adviser, Irving Katz, and did not speak to Schear again for nearly a year.

In the fall of 1980, Ethel was on hand at the New York State Theater for an all-star gala honoring Beverly Sills at her final operatic performance. The opera was New York City Opera’s production of
Die Fledermaus,
and in the famous act 2 party scene a collection of Sills’s show-business friends and colleagues each did a special turn. Before this, however, the audience had to endure the first part of
Fledermaus
’s act 2, which was given an extremely arch and unfunny performance, with Kitty Carlisle in the trouser role of Prince Orlovsky. In the dressing room she shared with Mary Martin and Eileen Farrell, Ethel sat with her hands folded across her stomach and her feet propped up, staring at the television monitor as the act dragged on. Finally she pronounced the whole performance “shit” and asked Farrell how long it was going to go on.

Things didn’t get much better once the stars began parading across the stage, as there were too many opera stars offering up painfully labored versions of pop songs—notably Leontyne Price’s “What I Did for Love.” Walking off with the whole show were Mary, with a stunning rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” and Ethel, with “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” At the party afterward, Ethel admitted to a reporter that she had never actually seen one of Sills’s operas. (Her enthusiasm for the art form however, continued. Her current favorite was the magnetic American baritone Sherrill Milnes, whom she heard in his Met performances of
Rigoletto
and
Macbeth.
She had started to pick up some of the terminology associated with opera singers, and after one of her concerts jokingly asked Bob Gardiner, “What was better tonight—my head voice or my chest voice?”)

In the early 1980s, Ethel and Knight were still keeping up a busy concert schedule, although Ethel had become something of a harder sell on the symphony-orchestra circuit. Almost always her concerts were attached to a subscription series, and how well she drew often depended on the venue itself. She was a smash at the Hollywood Bowl, but at a place like Red Rocks in Colorado ticket sales were sluggish. More and more, Bob Gardiner would have to spell her name to the orchestra booking managers who weren’t entirely sure who she was. Gardiner recalled this period as “the beginning of the end” of the glory days of American symphony orchestras.

Ethel’s encores now included, to piano accompaniment, “What I Did for Love” from
A Chorus Line
and a tender version of Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Audience reaction was nearly always enthusiastic, but Gardiner had the impression that Ethel no longer derived any deep enjoyment or satisfaction from her concert appearances. Although she usually remembered to thank the audience “from the bottom of my heart,” it was, according to Gardiner, part of the script, uttered by rote. “She always thanked Eric,” recalled Gardiner, “and she always perfunctorily thanked the orchestra. You never got the impression that anything really came from the heart.” For Ethel it was just her job—not an occasion for wearing her heart on her sleeve.

The tensions between Ethel and Eric Knight continued to build as they went from one engagement to another in the early 1980s. They performed “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” at the presidential inauguration of Ronald Reagan, hosted by Frank Sinatra. Then came a booking with the Philadelphia Orchestra and, with the American Symphony Orchestra, another benefit for the Museum of the City of New York, held on May 10, 1982, at Carnegie Hall. It was Ethel’s belated Carnegie debut, a landmark occasion that was further sweetened by the fact that onstage after the concert she was to receive the Pied Piper Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Society of Composers and Publishers. Only three performers had received the honor previously: Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and Fred Astaire.

During the concert Ethel did something she’d never done before: she neglected to introduce Knight to the audience. Whether it was done out of spite or because she legitimately forgot is questionable. When ASCAP’s president, Hal David, reminded her that she should introduce him, she immediately rectified the oversight, but in Knight’s mind it had been an intentional slight, and it spelled the end of their eighteen-year working relationship.

The reviews of the Carnegie Hall concert were, as usual, superb. In the
New York Times
, John S. Wilson wrote, “Miss Merman’s performance was, as it always has been, larger than life. The broad gestures may seem awkward, her phrasing may twist a tune to wind it up for the delivery of a wallop, and she may suddenly dance into little tripping fairy steps that nobody else could get away with. But with Miss Merman, this is all part of her blatant mystique.” In the
New York Post
, Clive Barnes wrote his review as—literally—a love letter, ending it with “P.P.S.—Do you know—I heard and understood every damn word you sang.”

Although Ethel was anything but a constant theatergoer, she dutifully went to see her close friends perform. It didn’t matter to her whether the venue was Broadway, the straw-hat circuit, or a nightclub. When Carole Cook’s husband, Tom Troupe, starred in
Same Time, Next Year
at the West-bury Music Fair, Ethel trekked out to Long Island twice to see the show. She showed up for all of Cointreau’s club engagements, often bringing an entire table of friends along with her and always picking up the check at the end of the night. Occasionally she could be spotted at a Broadway opening night. On August 25, 1980, accompanied by Tony Cointreau and James Russo, she attended the Broadway opening of David Merrick’s new musical,
42nd Street.
It was her kind of show—tuneful, rousing, fast-paced, and old-fashioned—and she enjoyed it immensely. At the curtain call, Merrick gravely stepped to the front of the stage and announced that the show’s director, Gower Champion, had died earlier in the day. It was a moment of overwhelming shock both for Jerry Orbach and the actors gathered onstage and for the audience. Ethel was shattered by the news and immediately expressed her concern for Champion’s girlfriend,
42nd Street
leading lady Wanda Richert.

Other shows inspired either indifference or outrage in her. When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Cats
was opening on Broadway in 1982, she received an invitation to a cocktail party that Josh and Nedda Logan were hosting for Webber. She sent it along in the mail to Cointreau, scribbling on the card, “WANNA GO?” Then, having circled Webber’s name, she wrote, “WHO THE HELL IS HE?” When John Kander and Fred Ebb’s
Woman of the Year
reached Broadway in 1981, Ethel was in the first-night audience. Ethel’s opinion of Lauren Bacall’s musical abilities had not changed since
Applause
eleven years earlier. As Bacall barked out her first few lines, Ethel, seated in the third row of the orchestra on the aisle, bellowed, “JEEZUS!” “People onstage heard it,” said the show’s conductor, Donald Pippin. “
I
certainly heard it.” At intermission Ethel came breezing into Bacall’s dressing room, despite the doorman’s attempts to prevent her from entering. As a dazed Bacall looked on helplessly, Ethel said, “Honey, I have to have a drink,” and went to the bar to fix herself one. After she tossed it back, she said, “Oh, that’s just what I needed. Okay—see you onstage, second act!” and barreled out of the room without saying a word about the performance. According to Pippin, “Bacall was, for the first time in her career, absolutely speechless.”