Ethel Merman: A Life (7 page)

Ethel’s instincts about material once again proved unerring. She listened to “Hosanna,” her solo number in the first act, tried it out, and didn’t think it was right for her. Her other solo in act 1, “(Ladies and Gentlemen), That’s Love,” was much more her style and worked reasonably well. Then she had “My Song,” a duet with Rudy Vallee in the second act. Brown and Henderson agreed with her about “Hosanna,” went back to work, and came up with “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” In Ethel’s exuberant performance, it provided the musical high spot that the first act was desperately missing, and the production team knew that at last their show had a fighting chance.

Despite his former dismissal of her, Ethel admired White’s professional style. As an ex-performer himself, he had developed an astute eye for what was wrong with a scene and how to fix it, and Ethel happily took direction from him. His hands-on management style impressed her; on some days he even sold tickets himself at the box-office window. In the end White was so delighted with Ethel that he gave her the coveted eleven-o’clock spot: she simply came out and sang a batch of her favorite songs. They weren’t by Brown and Henderson, but it didn’t matter, as the rules of revue were anything but strict.

Although the
Scandals
didn’t give Ethel a book part, like Kate in
Girl Crazy
, she scarcely minded: despite the enormous boost that the Gershwin show had given her, she still thought of herself as a singer more than an actress. She was thrilled to be part of such an important Broadway institution as the
Scandals,
which went to Newark, and then to Brooklyn for additional fine-tuning, before reaching Broadway’s Apollo Theatre on September 14, 1931. John Mason Brown in the
New York Post
called the new
Scandals
“by all odds the best musical show that has struck this town since
The Band Wagon.
” The
New York Herald Tribune
stated that White “finds himself the proprietor of the brightest and richest revue he ever owned.” The presence of opera baritone Everett Marshall seemed to add a certain legitimacy to the show. His big number, “That’s Why Darkies Are Born,” was singled out for particular praise, although some reviewers felt that the latter was compromised by the excessive staging, which included showgirls dressed up as angels. (One critic felt that this effect “had no particular bearing on the song, but raised the uneasy suspicion that the taste elsewhere evinced was the result of a happy accident.”) Again Ethel received plenty of enthusiastic praise. The
New York American
found that “Ethel Merman has been called in to croon things in her lusty way, whereby she seems to take all Newark and Nebraska into her confidence in one fell whoop [
sic
].”

Despite the show’s success, it was to be the sole partnership of White and Ethel. There would be only two more editions of the
Scandals,
in 1935 and 1939, after which White settled into quiet retirement in California, emerging only occasionally to produce an old-fashioned girlie show.

Shortly after the 1931
Scandals
opened, Ethel’s old, staid life and her new, exciting one came together: the Secretary Club of America presented her with a miniature solid-gold typewriter and named her America’s Most Successful Secretary.

There was no question that Ethel enjoyed every minute of her success. One night during the
Scandals
run, she and some friends ducked into Les Ambassadeurs, where only a short time earlier she had appeared with Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. On this particular evening, Helen Morgan was the headliner. At some point in her program, Morgan announced that she was going to sing two numbers made famous by Miss Ethel Merman in
George White’s Scandals.
It was, as Ethel pointed out, “a gratifying moment for an ex-secretary from Astoria.” Still, Ethel didn’t lose her head, having already seen enough to know that fame didn’t usually last long, no matter how much talent you might have. Money-conscious as ever, she wanted to set aside as big a nest egg as possible. She calculated that in her first twenty-two months in show business—coinciding with some of the worst days of the Depression—she had earned a total of $100,000. Since she worried that her luck might not last indefinitely, she continued to double at the Central Park Casino during the
Scandals
run, still watching every penny, still commuting to and from Astoria.

The
Scandals
closed in March 1932, after a 202-performance run. Beginning on April 24 Ethel was back at the Palace. In vaudeville, as in radio, there wasn’t the great gulf between “high” and “low” culture that would eventually blight the American entertainment scene; at the Palace, Ethel’s co-players ranged from comic Jack Haley and comedienne Patsy Kelly to Metropolitan Opera soprano Frances Alda. Many offers of Broadway shows soon followed, including one by the Gershwins that never materialized. Ethel sifted through the possibilities but didn’t say yes until she was approached by Buddy DeSylva and Laurence Schwab.

Their show was called
Humpty Dumpty,
and it was another revue—sort of.
Humpty Dumpty
could not have been more self-referential: its plot hinged on the pitfalls of putting on a revue. The main backer was played by dialect comic Lou Holtz, and its various numbers aimed to spoof famous figures in American history, including Betsy Ross, Miles Standish, and Abraham Lincoln. Initially no one seems to have thought that a spoof of Lincoln sounded like a particularly bad idea, and DeSylva had high hopes for the show. To write the score, he had hired Nacio Herb Brown and Richard Whiting, both of whom had left Broadway for Hollywood, where the sound revolution had kept them busy turning out movie musicals.

In the 1930s, when the financial stakes were so much lower than they were to become in future decades, musicals were often thrown together quickly. In many cases the book and score didn’t exist in any kind of reasonable form when the stars signed their contracts, and sometimes the show was still being written while rehearsals were under way. Work was fast, frenetic, and often trial-and-error.

Humpty Dumpty
was a prime example of such a show, and Ethel recalled that “no word has been invented to describe” the condition of the original book. Rehearsals began in August 1932, and on September 12,
Humpty Dumpty
opened in Pittsburgh—and promptly closed. Ethel was furious. She hadn’t had a failure yet, and now it looked as if her perfect record had crumbled. Assembling the dispirited company for a passionate pep talk, DeSylva told them, “Ladies and gentlemen, I know this show is going to be a hit. We just have to work it over again. We’ve got great songs, great performers, but there’s something wrong. We’ve got to keep working. We’ve got to take a chance.” In a split second, he knew he had the title for his beleaguered production.
Humpty Dumpty
was rechristened
Take a Chance,
and the determined company headed back to New York.

For several weeks frantic rewriting went on. A number of cast members were dropped, including Lou Holtz, who stayed on to help rework the piece. Most of the historical episodes were scrapped. The book, still extremely loose, now focused on a pair of tinhorn gamblers (Jack Haley, Sid Silvers) who leave the small-time carnival circuit behind in hopes of finding bigger pickings in the legitimate theater. Their lady friend aspires to be a singer, and her love interest, a Harvard man (baritone Jack Whiting), having distinguished himself in productions of the Hasty Pudding Club, decides to try his luck as a show-business professional. As in
Girl Crazy
, Ethel was cast as a tough nightclub singer. It was a secondary role, but she had the best songs: “You’re an Old Smoothie,” a duet for Ethel and Jack Haley, and “Eadie Was a Lady,” a blowsy comic saga of a loose woman that owed a little to “Sam and Delilah” and a little to “Frankie and Johnny.”

The only one not participating in the show’s overhaul was Richard Whiting, who had lost heart, despite his admiration for Ethel. His daughter, the distinguished pop singer Margaret Whiting, remembered, “My father told me later she was a shining star. She could be tough, but she could be magical. She came out on the stage and took a bow and then she went on with it. She was like a royal lady.” Already Richard Whiting was plagued by a worrisome heart condition and high blood pressure—he would die in 1938 at forty-six—and he missed his wife and daughter in Hollywood. “I’ve never gone through a thing like that, where everything was falling apart,” he said later. “I’m writing for pictures now, and it’s much easier.” He begged DeSylva to let him return to California. DeSylva and Ethel both demanded that he stay, but Whiting held firm. “I’ve given you three or four good songs” he said. “Let me go.” When DeSylva refused to take no for an answer, Whiting countered that there was only one composer who could finish the show: Vincent Youmans. With that, he said good-bye to New York and to
Take a Chance
.

Youmans was brought in and provided five new songs, including a raise-the-rafters number for Ethel called “Rise and Shine.” Roger Edens, meanwhile, had gone to work on “Eadie Was a Lady,” preparing a hilarious middle section that gave the number even more sardonic bite. In tone it resembled some of Mae West’s risqué songs from the movies. From the first performance, audiences were stunned when Ethel, wearing a red dress and black boa, sashayed onto the set of a New Orleans supper club and began to sing about Eadie, her “sister in sin.”

By November 5 the still-wobbly production opened in Wilmington, Delaware. The reviews were much better than anyone had expected, with the
Wilmington News
noting that Ethel “just about walked away with the show.” Then came more reworking in Philadelphia and Newark. But
Take a Chance
had to face New York sometime, and when it did, at the Apollo Theatre on November 26, the reviews gave no indication of its troubled history. Percy Hammond in the
New York Herald Tribune
headlined his review “Here Are Happy Days Again” and called
Take a Chance
“fast on its feet, quick-witted, insolent, and full of pleasing sounds. It contains everything that Broadway craves, from smut to sentiment.” Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
found it “fast, loud and funny…. Ethel Merman has never loosed herself with quite so much abandon into ballads and pagan revival numbers.”

Take a Chance
was a hit, and “Eadie Was a Lady” became the latest song sensation around Broadway. The
Times
even took the trouble to reprint its lyrics in their entirety.

Although she didn’t fully grasp it, Ethel had, in just three shows, completely rewritten the rules for girl singers on Broadway. With her cocky, hip-swinging walk, her shoulders rolling from side to side, her hands thrust out as if to grab the audience or, alternatively, thrown up over her head, she was unlike any Broadway star anyone had experienced before. She had a raw energy that up to now had been found only in a handful of male performers. Like Al Jolson, she possessed a genius for selling a song, an infallible instinct for what made a number work. There had been other brassy female singers before, but never one with such a cold-eyed command of the stage, such a powerful vocal apparatus, such a knack for making a song sound like ordinary conversation—admittedly, conversation at earsplitting volume.

Ethel stayed with
Take a Chance
until it closed, on July 1, 1933, after 243 performances. That made her record three hits in a row, and for the first time she decided to take a show on the road. A few weeks later,
Take a Chance
opened in Chicago with the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson standing in for Jack Haley and Sid Silvers. Ethel brought Pop and Mom with her and set them up in an apartment. At the time the city was playing host to the World’s Fair, which had taken for its theme “A Century of Progress.”

Ethel’s stay in Chicago was short, and she later claimed that the chlorine in the city’s water supply irritated her throat and forced her withdrawal. But she can hardly have been happy about playing opposite Olsen and Johnson—especially Johnson, who, as one critic noted, would take a gag and practically choke the life out of it in his trademark manic style. After two weeks Ethel was happy to head back to New York, where she hoped to sign on to another show. But not long after arriving, she decided to branch out in another direction—west, to Hollywood.

E
thel took her first stab at Hollywood in the fall of 1933. Lou Irwin, whose business interests were increasingly focused on the West Coast, had arranged a contract for her with Paramount Publix. Once the studio had been known as Famous Players–Lasky, the same company at which Ethel had once caught a glimpse of Alice Brady and other stars in Astoria. Earlier on, it had developed a major distribution wing by acquiring Paramount Pictures Corporation, and now it was one of the biggest film factories in Hollywood, with a roster of stars that included Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins, Sylvia Sidney, and W. C. Fields. Ethel was uneasy about being so far away from home on her own, so it was decided that Mom Zimmermann would accompany her. Mom had never been separated from Pop for any length of time in their entire marriage, but she felt the need to support Ethel in this exciting and somewhat intimidating new venture. They traveled west by train and, like most newcomers to California, were stunned by the miles and miles of orange groves that paved the way to the Pasadena station. Once in Los Angeles, they moved into a Hancock Park apartment building called the Ravenswood, where Paramount’s number-one female star, Mae West, also resided.

At the time the recommended road to success for a Hollywood novice was to sign a standard seven-year contract with a major film studio. These contracts were loaded down with options, almost all of them on the studio’s side; an unlucky actor might find himself unceremoniously dropped at any moment. For the independent-minded stage actor, long-term Hollywood employment could seem a kind of human bondage, and some of them did their best to negotiate time off to return to the theater. This didn’t always work out to their benefit. “I had a stupid contract,” recalled Jane Wyatt of her early days in Hollywood. “I was supposed to come out in the summer and then go back to New York in the winter to do plays. But of course it didn’t work, because they wouldn’t have the picture ready, and then you’d miss the play.”

But the seven-year contract did have its advantages: in general, the studios worked overtime promoting their contract players, gradually building their names before the public. Most actors found that such benefits outweighed the annoyances. If the scripts were not always what they hoped for, they were well paid, got to live in luxurious surroundings, and acquired an avid army of fans that they might never have dreamed of during their Broadway days.

Ethel, however, wasn’t offered a seven-year contract. Instead Paramount handed her a one-picture deal, which she enthusiastically accepted. She figured if Hollywood wasn’t to her liking, the relationship would be over with in one picture. If she did like it and managed to make good, the studio would ask her to stay on longer.

The one picture was called
We’re Not Dressing
, based on a 1903 J. M. Barrie play,
The Admirable Crichton
. The director was Norman Taurog, under contract to Paramount, who had also directed Ethel’s feature debut,
Follow the Leader
. (In the interim he had won an Academy Award for his direction of the 1931 Jackie Cooper hit
Skippy
.) The cast was impressive: Paramount’s hot singing star Bing Crosby had the lead, up-and-coming comedienne Carole Lombard was cast opposite him, and George Burns and Gracie Allen had the second leads. The songs were by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon. The problem was that
We’re Not Dressing
, a knockabout farce centering on a gang of eccentrics marooned on an island, wasn’t very good basic material. Ethel might have been surrounded by some of the studio’s top talent, but she couldn’t quite see how
We’re Not Dressing
was going to give her much of an opportunity to shine.

On top of everything else, she didn’t like the treatment she was getting at the studio. They were blunt in their assessment of her looks, and first they cut her hair short, then only to insist that she wear a long, dark wig. Every choice they made was further indication that they didn’t know what to do with her. Because she wasn’t under a long-term contract, as most of her co-players were, she later commented that having a one-picture deal at Paramount “was like being in on a pass.”

In
We’re Not Dressing
, she was given two comic solos. One, “It’s a New Spanish Custom,” wasn’t much, but the other, “It’s the Animal in Me,” was a big production number with camels, kangaroos, monkeys, and elephants, all trained to execute some rather complicated choreography. “It’s the Animal in Me” was a catchy, lively tune, and Ethel’s one chance of emerging from the picture with any credit.

Shooting dragged on through the Christmas holidays. It was the first Christmas that Ethel had been away from Pop, and she grew even more miserable. She was seldom invited to parties and spent most of her evenings at the Ravenswood having dinner with Mom. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that her Broadway success counted for very little in the film capital. She was hardly the first stage star to have her eyes so abruptly opened to the ways of Hollywood. Helen Hayes, whose reputation in the theater had already been established when she came to California on an MGM contract in 1931, remembered that early in her stay she was invited to a grand-scale Hollywood party at the home of decorator Billy Haines. “It was so extravagant and wonderful,” Hayes recalled, “and yet everyone had a hunted expression. They told me, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky to be in the theater.’ They were all complaining. And I finally said to Billy, ‘It surprised me. I thought everyone would be so happy out here. You’re secure, you have this great money coming in. These beautiful contracts with the big companies promoting you. I don’t understand why nobody is happy about it.’ And Billy said, ‘Out here, you’re only as good as your last picture. And everybody is scared to death of what the next picture will bring.’”

Tired of having her achievements overlooked, Ethel got a little testy with the Hollywood press when it was suggested that her performing style owed something to Mae West’s. Although they occupied different floors of the Ravenswood, West had not been particularly friendly, and Ethel got even by telling reporters that it was she who had started the Mae West vogue, not the other way around. “I was singing ‘Eadie Was a Lady’ all dressed up with the wiggly hips an’ everything before Mae West’s first picture,
Night After Night
, came out,” Ethel said, “…so I shall always claim Mae sailed to glory on my vogue.” In fact, West’s style was fully evolved by the time of her big stage successes of the 1920s, long before she hit Hollywood. But Ethel’s rewriting of history was a good indication of her defensiveness over her treatment in Hollywood.

After her first true vacation—several weeks’ rest in Cuba—Ethel returned to New York. The question of whether to continue living in Queens had been on her mind for some time. For one thing, Astoria had lost much of its peaceful ambience; during the 1920s the borough of Queens had grown 130 percent. For Ethel the commute from Astoria to Broadway had also become impractical, so she set up her first Manhattan residence, a large apartment in an elegant art deco building, the Century, at 25 Central Park West. She needed the space, since Pop and Mom, along with the pet terrier, Scrapsie, were all moving in with her.

As Ethel’s fame grew, columnists began to hound her for details about the men in her life. She was discreet to the point of being closemouthed, especially in Hollywood, where the press machine was so intrusive and overpowering. Her stock answer to such personal questions was that her professional commitments kept her too busy to consider a serious romance. In fact, she had dated several men since achieving stardom. Her most serious beau was Al Goetz, a Wall Street whiz kid with the firm of Ungergleider and Goetz, whom she had met while appearing in
Girl Crazy
. He was upfront about his situation: he was married, but he and his wife were legally separated. This wasn’t good enough for Mom Zimmermann, who viewed him with suspicion from the start, though Ethel did her best to quell her mother’s fears. After all, she could do much worse: Goetz was an attractive enough man about town with important connections. Pop, for his part, believed that the romance with Goetz had distinct benefits. From the time she hit stardom, Pop had urged Ethel to make sure she got what was coming to her financially and warned her not to let anyone take advantage of her. Pop thought Goetz had done a remarkable job of investing Ethel’s money, and even Mom had to agree. Even though the nation was suffering an intense economic crisis, Ethel was able to keep it all at a safe distance, thanks to Al’s wise counsel. As her fortunes grew, so did her feelings for Goetz. In time she was confiding to Josie Traeger, Alice Welch, and her other closest friends that she had fallen in love for the first time. But as the romance intensified, months, then years rolled by, and Mom became ever more skeptical, since Goetz still showed no sign of divorcing his estranged wife.

By the spring of 1934, Ethel was casting around for a new Broadway show. She still had not shaken off the difficult time she’d had in Hollywood, and the pain of the whole experience was driven home when
We’re Not Dressing
was released in late April. Her own notices were positive: the
New York Daily News
thought she had mastered “all the tricks of the clever comedienne,” while the
Daily Mirror
found her “an unusual and very effective roughhouse comedienne.” But to Ethel’s dismay, “It’s the Animal in Me” had been eliminated from the final print. No one from Paramount had bothered to notify her; she found out at the New York opening, in the company of her family and closest friends. Since she had told them all that the number was her best spot in the picture, she was doubly devastated. Norman Taurog later told her it had been cut because it detracted from the main story line, which was probably an evasive way of saying that it detracted from Bing Crosby—no matter that it had been a costly and complicated number to film. For Ethel it was Hollywood’s first real slap in her face. There would be others, far more painful and far more wrongheaded.

For now she was determined to try again, and very soon there was another Hollywood offer—this time from an unusual source. In 1930 independent mogul Samuel Goldwyn, in the process of scouting major stage talents, had signed comedian Eddie Cantor to a contract. Prior to coming to Hollywood, Cantor had been one of the great stage clowns: a skinny, eye-rolling nitwit always getting into scrapes. He was a kind of precursor to both Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, and for much of the 1920s and 1930s there were few bigger names in show business. When he pranced around in blackface or launched into one of his signature tunes, “If You Knew Susie” or “Makin’ Whoopee,” audiences went wild.

The first film Cantor made for Goldwyn was
Whoopee
, the screen version of his 1928 stage show. The movie was a big hit and led to a whole string of Goldwyn-produced Cantor vehicles. In mid-1934, Cantor was having a meeting in Goldwyn’s office when a call was put through from his teenage daughter, Marilyn. As it turned out, Marilyn was president of the first official Ethel Merman Fan Club and had kept up a steady correspondence with her favorite star. When Cantor mentioned that he and Goldwyn were discussing the next film they were going to make together—it was due to start shooting that summer—Marilyn told her father that Goldwyn should use Ethel in it. “Why don’t
you
tell him?” responded Cantor, handing the telephone over to Goldwyn.

Cantor’s precocious daughter wasn’t intimidated in the least by talking to one of Hollywood’s biggest producers. “This woman is terrific,” she enthused, “and if you don’t test her, you’ll be losing a big bet.” Goldwyn took the girl’s advice and cast Ethel in
Kid Millions
. The film was a variation on the standard Cantor formula that had worked well for Goldwyn in the past. In this one, Cantor played a simpleton who inherits over $70 million and becomes the target of money-hungry villains, including a shady song plugger (Ethel) who passes herself off as Cantor’s long-lost mother. The plot wasn’t much, but the humor was hearty and genuine, and Ethel was pleased to be cast in such a big-budget film.

Shooting on
Kid Millions
began on July 16, 1934. The best song in the movie was Irving Berlin’s “Mandy,” recycled from the 1919
Ziegfeld Follies
as a production number centered on Cantor. Again Ethel’s part was definitely secondary, but early in the film she got a good song, Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn’s “An Earful of Music,” which she delivered with panache. Cantor was fond of Ethel and took the time to coach her on some of the camera and lighting nuances that could make such a difference in how she appeared on-screen. In joking reference to
Kid Millions’
plot, Cantor and Ethel always called each other “Junior” and “Mama.” Marilyn Cantor recalled that in 1941, when Cantor was acting on Broadway in
Banjo Eyes
, Ethel came backstage and yelled, “Junior! Junior! It’s Mama!”

Kid Millions
wrapped on September 22, and the film was released two months later. Cantor’s box-office power, plus a spectacular finale set in an ice-cream factory and shot in early three-strip Technicolor at a cost of $210,000, combined to help make
Kid Millions
another hit for Goldwyn. The
New York Times
praised it as a “superior screen comedy” and judged Ethel’s performance of “An Earful of Music” to be “joyous and healthy.” In
Vanity Fair
she got what amounted to a rave: “The most important thing about the picture, however, is not Mr. Cantor this time, but the introduction of Ethel Merman as a bona fide screen comedienne and a swell gal for putting over a song—as nobody needs to be told.”