Ethel Merman: A Life (11 page)

This was one of the few major mistakes of her career. In those days it was standard practice for the top theater stars to play out the season in New York, then take the play on tour, for they understood the importance of developing a national following. Almost always the strategy was beneficial: the Broadway theater still had a high national profile, thanks to the extensive coverage it received in newspapers, magazines, and on the radio. In most of the major U.S. cities, and even in many of the not-so-major ones, there was a healthy ticket-buying market that jumped at the chance to see Katharine Cornell, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, or Helen Hayes, live. But it would be fifteen years before Ethel would again consent to take a show out of town, even briefly.

Maybe
Red, Hot and Blue!
simply got off on the wrong foot and stayed there.
Anything Goes
had been created out of such chaos that everyone seemed to have viewed success as a necessity and pulled together to make the show a hit.
Red, Hot and Blue!
was marred by infighting from the start. There is no question that the whole experience left Ethel feeling frustrated and fatigued. She knew that she didn’t want to start another Broadway show immediately, and once again her thoughts drifted to Hollywood.

I
n the summer of 1937, Ethel was distressed to learn of her friend George Gershwin’s illness. For some time he had complained of headaches and dizziness, and his behavior had grown increasingly erratic, to the point that his sister-in-law, Ira’s wife, Leonore, often had to cut up his food for him. On July 9, while staying at the Los Angeles home of songwriter E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, Gershwin passed into a coma. He underwent a five-hour surgery at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to remove a brain tumor, but the operation was a failure, and he died on the morning of July 11.

Ethel was devastated by this loss. The man who had so generously handed her her first big opportunity had been silenced, and it was agonizing for her to imagine what great accomplishments might have been ahead of him. On August 9 a memorial concert was held at Lewisohn Stadium in upper Manhattan. It was an appropriately democratic site for this most democratic of composers, as Lewisohn had a long and admirable history of offering low-priced concerts to the general public. It was also sentimentally fitting: Lewisohn was where George had made his conducting debut in 1929, leading the New York Philharmonic in performances of
An American in Paris
and
Rhapsody in Blue.
The memorial was a distinguished gathering before a crowd of twenty-thousand musicians: Harry Kaufman played the Concerto in F, while Anne Brown, Todd Duncan, Ruby Elzy, and the chorus of
Porgy and Bess
sang selections from Gershwin’s folk opera. Ethel, conducted by Ferde Grofé, performed “I Got Rhythm,” “The Man I Love,” and, perhaps most appropriately, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”

At this point Ethel’s attention was yet again turning toward the movies, and it was Lou Irwin who was responsible. More and more, Irwin had been working on West Coast projects, and by mid-1937 he had decided to relocate there, in hopes of cutting himself in on some of the big Hollywood money. Ethel let him know that she would be willing to try the movies one more time, despite the fact that they mostly had proven inhospitable to her, and Irwin went to work trying to find her a picture deal. While she waited for him to get results, Ethel did another stage show on the Keith circuit, supporting showings of a Gene Raymond picture,
The Life of the Party.
She sang several of her famous hits, plus Gershwin’s “They All Laughed” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” An eight-day run at Boston’s RKO Theatre pulled in $32,000.

Irwin finally reported an offer from Warner Bros. to costar in
Fools for Scandal,
a comedy with Carole Lombard. The picture had already been announced in the trade papers when Irwin came up with a much better offer. Only three years earlier, Darryl F. Zanuck had merged his fledgling company, 20th Century Pictures with the artistically bankrupt Fox Studios. The new company, 20th Century Fox, had gotten off to a strong start, with a roster that included Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, Tyrone Power, and ice-skating star Sonja Henie, whom Zanuck had signed up the previous year and put into a musical called
One in a Million.
It made a fortune, and Zanuck had instructed his staff of writers and producers to work overtime developing more Henie vehicles. It was one of these that Irwin had lined up for Ethel. She wasn’t wild about the film’s title,
Bread, Butter, and Rhythm
. But it was a big-budget production, and at $210,000 a year Henie was Hollywood’s highest-paid star, so Ethel eagerly signed on—especially after Irwin worked out a deal with 20th Century Fox for future picture options. In early October, Ethel, accompanied once more by Mom, took the Superchief to Los Angeles, where they moved into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

In its brief existence, 20th Century Fox had already made remarkable strides and was well on its way to becoming one of Hollywood’s most important studios. In the 1930s each studio had an individual thumbprint, personified by its top stars. MGM meant plush, soft-focus glamour (Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford); RKO stood for streamlined art deco sophistication (Katharine Hepburn, Constance Bennett, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), Warner Bros. specialized in starkly lit crime dramas (James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis). At 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck would eventually delve into social-problem pictures such as
The Grapes of Wrath
(1940) and
Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947), but during his company’s early years he settled for making sunny musicals and historical dramas, often with a homespun, rural setting.

The studio’s films were filled with bright, affable, uncomplicated performers like Henie, Don Ameche, Cesar Romero. (Sometimes the relentlessly chipper atmosphere could be a little irritating; reviewing the 1941 musical
Weekend in Havana
, Pauline Kael found everyone on the Fox lot “beaming with fatuous good will.”)

Happy Landing
(the new title for
Bread, Butter, and Rhythm
) was cast in this genial mode. It was a fluffy bit of nonsense about a madcap playboy flier (Romero) and his manager (Ameche) who make an emergency landing in a Norwegian village. The playboy dallies with a local maid (Henie), who takes him seriously and follows him back to the United States, where he deputizes his manager to give her the brush. Ethel was cast as Romero’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, given to throwing chairs and lamps when she doesn’t get her way. She got a couple of middling songs, “You Appeal to Me” (which called on her to imitate Garbo at one point) and “I’m Hot and Happy in Love,” in which she pulled out the old “I Got Rhythm” trick of holding a note for several bars. She was fit and trim, and she had gotten the Hollywood treatment—penciled eyebrows and gowns by Royer. Aside from a foot injury she suffered when she took a fall during a skating sequence, she enjoyed the filming. She got some extra publicity through her studio-arranged dates with Cesar Romero. It must have amused Ethel, coming from the world of Broadway, to watch Hollywood pretend that Romero wasn’t gay.

The movie wrapped on December 11, 1937, and Ethel returned to New York in time for Christmas.
Happy Landing
was edited quickly and put into release in January 1938. The
New York Times
thought it had “pace, humor, spectacle, and a pleasant, if minor, score.” Most of the critics concentrated on the stars and gave Ethel short shrift, but Louella O. Parsons did allow that “the Broadway torch singer gives a good account of herself as the jealous fiancée.”

By the time
Happy Landing
was playing to enthusiastic audiences, 20th Century Fox had already exercised its option and put Ethel into another picture. On this one she got lucky: her new assignment was the studio’s number-one prestige production for 1938, the musical extravaganza
Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
The picture had been a pet project of Zanuck’s for some time. Knowing that he could never compete with a powerhouse like MGM when it came to building stars, Zanuck decided to concentrate on developing the best stories. Here he showed that he was, after so many years, still a writer at heart. A studio like MGM might put a high quotient of inferior scripts into production, confident that their stars could get the public to buy them. Zanuck, on the other hand, sweated over his properties. In endless story and script conferences, he hammered away at his writers to polish, refine, fix up credibility gaps, do anything they could to make audiences
believe
what they were seeing.

Initially Zanuck envisioned
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
as a biography of Irving Berlin, but the composer shied away from the idea. Instead it was decided to use the Berlin song catalog to tell a fictional story that had close parallels to Berlin’s own life. In addition to Berlin himself, many screenwriters worked on the project, although in the end only two, Kathryn Scola and Lamar Trotti, were credited. For months nothing in the development of the story was to Zanuck’s liking. He saw it as “a story of an imaginary character, ‘Mr. Alexander,’ who could start humbly with an idea about music and who could finally end up after a number of years in the highest musical temples.” What finally emerged was a plot about “legit” violinist Roger Grant (Tyrone Power), who finds his real musical voice in ragtime. With his best friend, composer Charlie Dwyer (Don Ameche), he puts together a band. They attract attention with the tune “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and take it for the name of their group. The two friends fall in love with Stella Kirby (Alice Faye), the band’s saucy singer, who leaves them behind when she gets a crack at Broadway stardom. The band dissolves, World War I intervenes, and eventually everyone is reunited when Alexander’s Ragtime Band gets a chance to play Carnegie Hall.

Although the plot was essentially simple, it had great sweep, moving from the Barbary Coast in 1911 to New York in the late 1930s. The intrusion of war and Stella’s desolation after she leaves the band and marries Charlie, even though she doesn’t love him, gave the film a touch of darkness unusual in movie musicals of the time.

Ethel was cast as Gerry Allen, the peppy singer who takes Stella’s place in the band. She doesn’t show up until the last third of the picture, but she is given plenty of screen time, with lots of Berlin tunes to sing: “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “Say It with Music,” “Blue Skies,” “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil,” “Heat Wave,” and two new numbers Berlin had written for the film, “My Walking Stick” and “Marching Along with Time,” the latter of which was cut before the film’s release. Berlin was knocked out by Ethel’s renditions of his songs and immediately began talking about writing a show for her.

Alexander’s Ragtime Band
was in production for sixty days and was a happy experience for Ethel. Jack Haley, who had appeared with her in
Take a Chance
, was in the supporting cast, and she enjoyed working with him again. The studio saw to it that she was presented to good advantage, putting her on a strict diet and lightening her dark brown hair to auburn, a change she liked so much that she kept it that color for years. Unfortunately, she seemed curiously muted in her dialogue scenes, the result of Henry King’s constant efforts to tone her down. In “Say It with Music,” she was coached to abandon her natural diction and use “pretty” vowel sounds instead. Elsewhere she performed with the expected Merman magic.

In later years, those who attempted to explain why Ethel never quite took off in Hollywood often argued that she was just too big for the screen. This was a misdiagnosis. What really held her back in films was that she failed to grasp one of the cornerstones of screen acting: the camera has to move in on the performer, picking up on her unspoken thoughts and feelings. Alice Faye, for example, wasn’t really an actress, but she understood film technique, and the hardest heart in the audience would melt when she sang a sentimental ballad and cast her limpid eyes upward. In most of her movies, Ethel didn’t show many signs of inner life. She spit out her lines and threw herself at the camera, instead of letting it come to her.

Nevertheless,
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
was a high spot in her movie career. Thanks to the performances, the great care taken in presenting the musical numbers, and the adroit and sensitive editing of Barbara McLean, it had the feel of an important picture. In overall quality and scope, no MGM musical of 1938 could touch it. When it was released in August of that year, the critics cheered it. The
New York Times
said that it “demands recognition as the best musical show of the year.” The
Hollywood Reporter
called it “a turning point of the industry and a new trend in the utilization of music in story telling.” Merman fan Louella Parsons thought it featured Ethel’s “best acting part.” The press preview in Hollywood was a major event, with Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Paul Muni, Constance Bennett, Janet Gaynor, Jack Benny, and Irene Dunne all in attendance. That night Ethel received a congratulatory note from 20th Century Fox executive Sol Wurtzel: “I think your performance in
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
is the first real step toward success in motion pictures which you so well deserve.”

If that was indeed the attitude of the studio bosses, they should have come up with a better project for Ethel’s next movie.
Straight, Place and Show,
filmed in the summer of 1938, was a half-witted comedy featuring the Ritz Brothers; Ethel had a couple of forgettable songs and pined after the leading man. For years she tried to forget that she had ever made it.
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
, meanwhile, was setting box-office records: it took in $3,848 in its opening day at Loews State, New York, and would eventually gross over $3 million. But
Straight, Place and Show
was a loser.

“I liked to be in control. You couldn’t be, in films.” Ethel’s explanation for her decision to quit trying to make it in Hollywood was only shorthand for the real problem: she had been typed as the sharp-tongued girl who doesn’t get the guy, and she knew that in Hollywood you never reached the top playing that kind of role.

By the fall of 1938, with
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
pulling them in at the box office, Ethel had lined up her next Broadway vehicle. Its source was actually another show, Harold Rome’s 1937 hit
Pins and Needles
, a left-leaning spoof of international politics created by members of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. Arthur Schwartz, the brilliant composer of immortal songs such as “By Myself,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “You and the Night and the Music,” was casting about for a new project. In discussions with the producer Dwight Deere Wiman, Schwartz began batting around the idea of having a leftist composer like Harold Rome go to Hollywood on a movie contract; the comedy would grow out of the situation of a flaming liberal trapped inside Hollywood’s capitalist machinery. Wiman liked the concept and began developing it. Along the way, novelist and screenwriter J. P. McEvoy was signed to create the book. For the lyrics Wiman and Schwartz turned to the talented Dorothy Fields, whose colloquial stylishness had matched up beautifully with the music of Jimmy McHugh and Jerome Kern.