Ethel Merman: A Life (10 page)

“Probably that part you’re writing for me,” snapped Ethel.

With
Red, Hot and Blue!
stalled, Ethel decided that this was a good time to make her first Atlantic crossing. She had been feeling restless and ill at ease, mostly because her romance with Al Goetz showed no signs of moving in any particular direction. She booked passage for Mom, Pop, and herself to sail on the SS
Normandie,
the plan being to visit London and Paris, then come back to begin rehearsals for the new show in the fall.

On August 7 a smiling Ethel, decked out in a fur coat despite the summer heat, waved to photographers as the
Normandie
set sail for London. It was a starry crossing: also on board were Fred Astaire, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, and silent-film star Laura LaPlante. Unfortunately, during the voyage Pop became gravely ill—with what, it has never been clear, since Ethel didn’t see fit to provide the press with details. When the ship docked in Southampton, Pop had to be carried off the boat on a stretcher and immediately moved to the hospital. Ethel and Mom checked in to the Savoy, but they spent most of their time at Pop’s bedside. For the next few weeks, they monitored his condition constantly, doing practically no sightseeing at all, but Pop was slow to rally. September arrived, and the start date for
Red, Hot and Blue!
loomed. Heartbroken at having to leave her ailing father, Ethel sailed for New York aboard the
Queen Mary
on September 7, leaving Mom behind to manage things.

Once Ethel showed up for rehearsals, she wondered why she had hurried home. She had entered into
Red, Hot and Blue!
with the understanding that it was her show. Much as she had loved being part of
Anything Goes,
Reno Sweeney was not the star spot by any means; both Gaxton and Moore had had much more stage time than she had, and occasionally she had felt that she’d been hired to keep the audience in its seats with a song while Moore and Gaxton got ready for the next scene change. Now she discovered that Lou Irwin had failed to specify in her contract that she got top billing in
Red, Hot and Blue!
She didn’t want to yield the number-one spot, but neither, as it turned out, did Jimmy Durante. Finally someone—it appears that it was Linda Porter—suggested crisscross billing, with the names to be switched from left to right every two weeks. It was a democratic decision that mollified everyone, and at last rehearsals could begin.

Porter had come up with some top-notch material for her. “It’s De-Lovely,” a duet with Bob Hope, was a lightning-paced alliterative patter number that traced a romance from courtship to middle-aged parenthood. The birth of the couple’s son is especially memorable:

 

Those eyes of yours are filled with joy

When Nurse appears and cries, “It’s a boy!”

“He’s appalling, he’s appealing,

He’s a pollywog, he’s a paragon,

He’s a Popeye, he’s a panic, he’s a pip, He’s de-lovely!”

 

There was also “Ours,” a list number in which two lovers gently clash over where exactly their romance should continue to be played out. He imagines them on “the white Riviera under the moon” or in a Venetian gondola, but she wants to stay closer to home:

 

Ours, the glitter of Broadway, Saturday night,

Ours, a box at the Garden, watching a fight,

Ours, the mad brouhaha of the Plaza’s Persian Room,

Or, if this fills you with gloom,

We can go and admire Grant’s Tomb.

 

And Ethel’s big first-act closing number, “Ridin’ High,” was a finger-snapping ode to joy, with lots of sustained high notes and one of Porter’s famous name-dropping patter devices:

 

What do I care

If fair Tallulah possesses tons and tons

Of jewels from gents?

Or, if someone observes

That I haven’t the curves

That Simone Simon presents?

I’m doin’ fine,

My life’s divine,

I’m living in the sun

’Cause I’ve a big date

With my fate,

So I rate

A-1.

 

On
Red, Hot and Blue!,
Ethel worked for the first time with a young pianist named Lew Kesler. Porter had great faith in Kesler’s judgment and talent, using him in one show after another for many years, and Ethel soon grew to like him, too. Kesler was young and brash, with kinky red hair and a smart mouth. Because he had Porter squarely behind him, he often made loud, critical comments in rehearsal about one or another performer. Ethel thought he was funny, and in time Kesler became her musical right arm, rehearsing with her in the theater lobby while the dancing chorus went through its paces on the stage. Their friendship got off to a rocky start, however. From the beginning Ethel was very strict about the keys for her songs. Cole Porter believed that she could sing much higher than she did, but she reasoned that she would be onstage knocking her brains out for months—why should she be forced to sing anything higher than C above middle C? At this particular rehearsal for
Red, Hot and Blue!,
she was about to go through “It’s De-Lovely” with Kesler, and she asked that it be transposed to the key of B, which would make it easier for her to sing. The key of B is a tricky one for transposition, as it contains five sharps, and Kesler struggled along, banging out wrong notes and not getting the right harmonies. When Ethel finished the song, she turned to him and said, “For Christ’s sake, will you take the Vienna rolls off your fingers?” Kesler thought he was about to be fired, but instead it marked the beginning of a long professional association; Ethel liked people who could take her harshest jabs without dissolving in tears.

Red, Hot and Blue!
had its premiere at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on October 7, 1936. Even though it was much too long—the final curtain didn’t fall until after midnight—the audience loved it. Durante scored the comic high point with a hilarious routine in which, as both a criminal on trial and a prosecuting attorney, he cross-examined himself. The book was still sketchy—in fact, the entire show, with its wild comic interludes and specialty dances, was really little more than a dressed-up revue. Ethel found herself “stuck” onstage a good deal of the time, and she said, “What are we gonna do?” so many times that the audience must have stopped paying attention. But her songs went over in a big way. While “It’s De-Lovely” was the hit of the evening, the audience also responded warmly to “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye,” although Freedley, who had never liked it, began making noises about having it cut.
Red, Hot and Blue!
moved on to New Haven, where Porter finally gave in to Freedley’s harangues and wrote a song to replace “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye.” In doing so he gave credence to the adage that all the best songs are written out of town. The new number was “Down in the Depths,” a torch song for “Nails” that ranked with the best work Porter had ever done. After taking the verse to outline her shaky position—a socialite with lots of money and swell surroundings but no man to share it with—“Nails” launched into the funny and moving refrain, which showed Porter’s matchless gift for inner rhymes and unforced alliteration:

 

While the crowds at El Morocco punish the parquet

And at ‘21’ the couples clamor for more,

I’m deserted and depressed

In my regal eagle nest

Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.

 

While the show was still out of town, Ethel ran into trouble with Bob Hope. It was a scenario that would recur with many performers—stars, bit players, and chorus girls—during her career. Being a quick study, Ethel had no trepidation about having new material thrown at her, and she never failed to astonish her coworkers with the speed with which she could pick things up. She had one hard-and-fast rule, however: once the show was a week away from opening night in New York, she refused to learn anything new. Composers, book writers, and directors, so often unable to keep themselves from fiddling with the show right up to opening, could do their best to talk her into trying a new scene or tune, but she never budged. One week before New York, there was no more fooling around. If it wasn’t right by then, it was
their
fault, not hers.

Ethel’s insistence that things fall into a fixed pattern extended to the stage deportment of her costars. Nothing could make her flash with anger more quickly than an actor who suddenly decided one night, without a word to anyone else, to change a line or deliver it from a different spot on the stage. In “It’s De-Lovely,” Bob Hope had a habit of deviating from the staging and ad-libbing to the audience. One night Ethel turned in mid-refrain to find him lying on the floor, grinning up at her—definitely not part of the staging. Once offstage she didn’t lower herself to confronting Hope; instead she went directly to Freedley and told him to be sure that it never happened again.

Red, Hot and Blue!
opened on October 29, 1936, at the Alvin Theatre. Many of the reviewers found Porter’s score below his usual high standard (although Porter claimed that they said this about nearly every score he composed, with the exception of
Anything Goes
) and Lindsay and Crouse’s book far less funny than the one they’d whipped up for
Anything Goes.
The
New York Herald Tribune,
referring to the plot about the waffle-iron brand, found that “the anatomical jokes grow a trifle feeble upon occasion.” For the stars, however, there was nothing but praise. John Mason Brown found Ethel “Broadway made vocal; Broadway given a melody of its own, and having found a perfect way of putting it across.” The
Brooklyn Citizen
wrote, “Of all performers, from Cornell on down, there is none more poised, more sure of registering with audiences, whether she is handling dialogue or projecting songs in the low-down and blue style which is her own.” Perhaps Bob Hope’s stage etiquette hadn’t improved after all: the
Brooklyn Eagle
wrote that in his scenes with Ethel, he seemed “never to care about anything but a couple of little jokes he has in mind.”

During the show’s run, a new man came into Ethel’s life: Walter Annenberg, scion of one of the most prominent families from the Philadelphia Main Line. The family business was publishing, specifically Triangle Publications, which was responsible for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the immensely successful
Daily Racing Form,
among other titles. Educated at the exclusive Peddie School in New Jersey and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Annenberg had started at Triangle in a minor post in the company’s bookkeeping office.

If his background wasn’t quite what Ethel was accustomed to—she remembered that when he took her to meet his family, it was the first time she’d eaten off a gold service—she was attracted to Walter, and she admired the way he constantly sought creative ways to improve Triangle’s standing in the business world. Annenberg shared the conservative political leanings that Ethel had inherited from Mom and Pop, and she delighted in the way he loved to play the man about town. They were seen so often around New York’s hottest night spots that the columnists began tagging them as a couple to watch. In the end it turned out to be a fairly short-lived romance, the kind Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein had in mind when they wrote “All in Fun.” Annenberg would go on to found
Seventeen
magazine in 1944. In 1952 he determined that the fledgling television industry needed a national publication and, against great opposition, launched
TV Guide.
It became his biggest success, and he eventually built its paid circulation up to 20 million. Later still, he became President Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain. Ethel saw him now and then socially for years and never regretted that she had broken it off with him.

For the first several weeks,
Red, Hot and Blue!
played to sold-out houses, and it looked as if it might run beyond the season. But early in 1937, the box office began to drop off, and within a few months Freedley decided to close the show and send the company to Chicago, where a long run was anticipated. It was booked to open at the Grand Opera House, Chicago’s home to many of the top touring shows, but the theater wasn’t prepared for some of the show’s technical challenges, and the opening had to be postponed. The delay gave rise to gossip that all was not right with the show, and Ethel recalled that once it opened, “the public acted as if we were under quarantine.”
Red, Hot and Blue!
closed in two and a half weeks. It was a disappointment to the entire company, perhaps most of all to Ethel. It must have crossed her mind that she had yet to set the world of show business on fire outside New York City. But if her failure on the road unnerved her, she reacted with typical shortsightedness: if the road didn’t like her, to hell with the road.