Ethel Merman: A Life (24 page)

Rehearsals were hectic, as the duet was extremely complex and had to be timed with absolute precision. Ethel took extensive notes during rehearsals, then went home and cheerfully typed up a neat, clean copy for herself and Mary. The segment’s director, Jerome Robbins, hatched the brilliant idea of having Mary and Ethel positioned on two nightclub stools: no distracting backup singers, no choreography, just a simple setting that would allow the audience to concentrate on the singers and their songs.

Mary Martin was a more jittery performer than Ethel—most performers were—and she came close to falling apart when, hours before the telecast, Hayward reported that the conductor, Jay Blackton (a favorite of Ethel’s, and creator of the brilliant duet for the two women), and the pianist, Johnny Lesko (a favorite of Mary’s), would not be able to perform on the show, since it had just been discovered that neither one belonged to the television union. Mary was panicked and wanted to withdraw; while Ethel was upset, she resolved to do her best under trying conditions, though the disastrous final dress rehearsal, with two substitutes for Blackton and Lesko, only confirmed her worst fears. Just before airtime Hayward informed Ethel and Mary that a financial arrangement had been worked out with the union that would permit Blackton and Lesko to go on.

The duet was destined to become show-business legend on its first hearing. Millions of homes across America were suddenly converted into nightclubs as Ethel and Mary pulled off an amazing musical challenge: a thirteen-minute medley that never faltered, going consistently from one peak to another. The adrenaline kept pumping at higher and higher levels; it is difficult to imagine that many people watching were able to remain in their seats for long. Among the high points: Ethel’s captivating and highly original rendition of “You Made Me Love You,” Mary’s charming “Mississippi Mud,” the stunning “I” songs, and a counterpoint duet of “Tea for Two” and “Stormy Weather.” Both women were in superb voice, and the medley was all the more successful for having two such distinctive talents playing off each other. But in the end the greater triumph was Ethel’s; Mary, good as she was, couldn’t help but pale a bit next to such an electric presence. The duet also revealed to a wide audience the habit that Bert Lahr and several of Ethel’s other costars had complained about over the years—namely, her dislike of looking at her stage partners. While Mary reacted naturally to everything Ethel did, Ethel was mostly a laser beam of straight-ahead concentration, directed squarely at the television audience and no one else.

The reaction was an astonishing eye-opener for both stars. The Ford show was variously reported as drawing between 47 million and 60 million viewers. Never had either Mary or Ethel dreamed of reaching such a vast audience. The reviewers had nothing but superlatives for them. The
Washington Evening Star
’s notice was typical: “It is unbelievable, right now, at any rate, that anything could come along to top the Martin-Merman duet.”

The rest of the summer was occupied with preparations for the move to Colorado. It was not an easy thing for Ethel to pack up twenty years’ worth of belongings at the Century and contemplate saying good-bye to Mom and Pop Zimmermann, whom she had seen on almost a daily basis for her entire life. It was difficult for Mom and Pop, too, but they believed Six to be a worthy husband and knew in their hearts that they couldn’t stand in their daughter’s way. Ultimately Ethel’s possessions filled four huge moving vans. In September the Sixes moved into their new Cherry Hills home at 26 Sunset Drive, which they dubbed “Six Acres.” It had cost $79,000, and Ethel had put up the $10,000 down payment; Six claimed that with Continental’s growing pains his cash flow was a bit shaky, but he assured her there was nothing to worry about and handed her a promissory note for $5,000.

From the beginning, Ethel loved the twenty-eight-room Graystone Tudor, whose interiors were dominated by carved oak walls. The previous owners had favored beige and other neutral tones for the walls, but Ethel, with her great love of color, had most of the interior repainted in turquoise and several of the rooms papered in bright chintz. In a rare display of posturing, she had the library outfitted with shelves of handsome leather-bound books, although she seldom took any of them down to read.

The children were placed in schools and got settled into their new environs. Ethel Jr. particularly delighted in her new home, whose grounds were overrun with chipmunks, black squirrels, and lots of other wildlife. Big Ethel seemed to make the transition to Rocky Mountain suburban matron with surprising ease. For years she had been developing a certain impatience with the demands of her Broadway audiences, and at last she felt she had given them their due; they could ask no more of her. She said often that she didn’t miss live performing; all she wanted to do now was make the occasional television appearance and one or two movies a year. Fox was preparing another vehicle for her, and there were also some rumblings of interest from Columbia Pictures, which owned the rights to Rodgers and Hart’s
Pal Joey
and was mulling over the possibility of having Ethel play the older-woman part of Vera Simpson. Everything seemed to be just as Ethel wanted it, and to interviewers she presented the confident picture of a woman who was mistress of her own fate. She told reporters that she had no intention of returning to Broadway. She was going to have a conventional, happy life at last.

Having made this bold public declaration about being through with live audiences, Ethel lost no time in accepting two performing engagements. The first, in August, was an outdoor appearance with the Denver Symphony Orchestra in the huge amphitheater at Red Rocks. It seemed an effective way of establishing good-neighbor relations in her new home, and locally her stock went skyrocketing. In October she introduced a brand-new show at the Dallas State Fair. Presented by Charles Meeker Jr., it was a revival of the big, old-time vaudeville program. Included on the bill were the ace tumbling team Los Gatos, the Wiere Brothers slapstick comedy act, veteran hoofer George Murphy of movie fame, and Ethel’s good friend Russell Nype, who joined her for “You’re Just in Love” and got a solo spot of his own.

On very little notice, she had paged her old friend from the pit of
Girl Crazy,
Roger Edens (who had since been busy writing and arranging for MGM musicals), to whip up an opening number for her. Called “A Lady with a Song,” it was a bold statement of her down-to-earth performing style, for an audience that might not know a great deal about her.

Edens had also written “You’re in Texas,” a comic number in which she sang of her trepidation in bringing her own show to an area that had its own ideas about “culcher.” Then she lit into a selection of songs from her Broadway shows (“I Get a Kick Out of You,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business”), as well as a few associated with Judy Garland (“Over the Rainbow,” “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”). Clad in a form-fitting pink gown for the afternoon shows and basic black for evening, she knocked out her audiences and the critics, too.
Dallas Morning News
critic John Rosenfield felt that “only one other artist has been able to duplicate the Merman excitement in performance. And this was the late Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso, whose plenitudinous splendor of voice and exuberant directness of style could always set an audience on fire. Miss Merman does the same thing by almost the same means. Her voice is phenomenally big, rich, rangy and steady. She, too, can abandon herself to the mood of a tune and still seem to be holding equally much in reserve.”

At first it seemed that Ethel’s master plan to become a television and movie star was going to work out beautifully. In January and February of 1954, for a pair of appearances on NBC’s splashy variety show
The Colgate Comedy Hour,
she was paid $50,000—the kind of money that she could have made on Broadway only by doing the eight-a-week grind for several weeks. One of these was the result of Leland Hayward’s paging her to reprise her Reno Sweeney in a cut-down presentation of
Anything Goes.
Joining her were Frank Sinatra as Billy Crocker and Bert Lahr as Moonface Martin. In order to fit the one-hour time slot, the book scenes were trimmed to nothing, with some characters, like the ingenue Hope Harcourt, eliminated. With its interpolations from other Porter shows, such as “You Do Something to Me” and “Just One of Those Things,” this was hardly textbook
Anything Goes
. Still, Ethel got to slam across “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Anything Goes,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” in her trademark style, and the segment was well received.

All of this was really just marking time while Ethel awaited the project she was banking on most. By the summer of 1954, her new film for 20th Century Fox,
There’s No Business Like Show Business,
was finally ready to begin shooting. Ethel was delighted when she learned that the producer was to be Sol Siegel and the director Walter Lang, with whom she had worked so harmoniously on
Call Me Madam
.

Like
Alexander’s Ragtime Band,
the new picture was conceived as a cavalcade of Irving Berlin songs, from the early days of his career to the present. What Darryl Zanuck wanted was a story about a kind of “royal family” of show business, whose triumphs and trials are viewed over a period of several decades; as with the earlier film, Zanuck hoped the format would make an effective prism through which the songs could shine. While he wanted the story to reflect a degree of seriousness, above all he stressed that it was to be “a showmanship venture; it is not a solo picture for anyone. Like
Call Me Madam,
it will have five or six roles of almost equal importance, where each star will have an opportunity to do what he or she does best.”

By now the movie musical was facing hard times; fewer and fewer were being produced, and the spectacular production numbers that had prevailed in the 1940s were being scaled back. While
There’s No Business Like Show Business
was to be an important, high-budget film in DeLuxe Color and using the studio’s new widescreen process, CinemaScope, Zanuck’s memos reflected the changing times. “I think we should avoid so-called elaborate production numbers,” he wrote, “mainly because they have worn out their usefulness and audiences are becoming sick of them…. Our main aim in our music should be to strive for realism and personality effect rather than scope and size.”

The screenplay had been begun by Lamar Trotti, who died suddenly in 1952. The project was then turned over to the studio’s husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Henry and Phoebe Ephron. In a memo to the writers, Sol Siegel cautioned, “We have much more story than we need.” For the part Ethel was to play, Molly Donahue, mother of the clan of performing Donahues, Siegel suggested borrowing elements from the character of the Marx Brothers’ mother, Minnie, as “she was the business agent and the brains of the combination.” Although they were not enthusiastic about the assignment, the Ephrons did their best to give the story focus and point. When the finished screenplay was sent to Ethel in Denver, she thought it was wonderful but worried that the role of Molly might be, in terms of dramatic scope, beyond her. Siegel did his best to reassure her, but he later recalled that once again she didn’t fully calm down until after she viewed the first few days’ rushes.

Fox had assembled a top-line cast to play the Five Donahues. Dan Dailey was Terry, the bighearted father of the brood. Donald O’Connor was reunited with Ethel to play Tim, the oldest son, while pop singer Johnnie Ray, who had recently had a hit single with his wailing performance of “Cry,” was to play the younger son, Steve, who becomes a priest. Cast as daughter Katy was the studio’s popular young singer/dancer Mitzi Gaynor. Zanuck was particularly high on having signed Ray, whose screen test he judged “simply tremendous,” but Walter Lang was less enthusiastic. In November 1953 the director wrote to Ethel in Denver, “I am secretly hoping that something happens where we won’t have to use [Ray] at all.”

Also cast in the film was the studio’s most valuable property, Marilyn Monroe. Early in 1954 she had married baseball star Joe DiMaggio, gone on suspension for several weeks, and subsequently signed a new, seven-year contract with Fox. In 1953 three of her films were among the studio’s top five grossers in the United States, and two of them,
How to Marry a Millionaire
and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
had easily outdistanced
Call Me Madam.
Monroe meant the future to the studio, and although she was not happy about being cast in
There’s No Business Like Show Business,
she eventually came around and agreed to play the part of Vicky, the ambitious nightclub singer who breaks up the Donahues’ act by stealing Tim and Katy to support her in her splashy New York show.

Ethel was suspicious of Monroe from the start, and she was not surprised when Monroe proved unreliable once filming had gotten under way. Frequently she would be late to arrive once a shot had been set up, and many hours were spent waiting for her to appear. On the positive side, Ethel became extremely close to Gaynor, who called her “Mom” both on and off the set.

During filming, Ethel remained hopeful that
There’s No Business Like Show Business
would cement her new position in Hollywood. Certainly the part of Molly, in which she aged from energetic young vaudevillian to anxious mother of two sons overseas in World War II, offered her a more varied dramatic opportunity than anything she had yet attempted on either stage or screen.

Toward the end of shooting, Ethel suffered an attack of appendicitis. She was clearly in discomfort, and Sol Siegel asked her if there was anything he could do. “Don’t worry,” said Ethel, “I’ll make it. I’ve met these before.” Siegel insisted on calling a doctor, but Ethel was equally insistent that if she could just finish her afternoon’s work and relax for a few days, the company would be able to stay on schedule. Siegel was astonished. Particularly in the face of Monroe’s scattiness, Ethel’s professionalism made a profound impression on him.