Ethel Merman: A Life (25 page)

The production wrapped on August 27, 1954, and Ethel returned to Denver to wait for the film to be edited into what she hoped would be a colossal hit. That fall she agreed to appear in an abridged version of
Panama Hattie,
to be broadcast on CBS. As with the telecast of
Anything Goes,
there were interpolations—“Ridin’ High,” from
Red, Hot and Blue!
and “I Love You,” from
Mexican Hayride
—but this time around, Ethel didn’t come off well. Her performance seemed forced and awkward, and despite her matchless rendition of “Make It Another Old-Fashioned, Please,” it was hard to argue with the
New York Times’
s Jack Gould, who thought “the show dragged badly and never achieved anything like the lilt or pep of last season’s TV appearance of Miss Merman in
Anything Goes.”

There’s No Business Like Show Business
was unveiled to the trade press in early December. Harry Brand, publicity chief for 20th Century Fox, sent a telegram to Ethel in Denver:
DEAR ETHEL: WE HAD TRADE PAPER SHOWING OF THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS YESTERDAY AND IT WAS A SENSATIONAL SUCCESS. WITHOUT EXCEPTION ALL THE BOYS SAID IT WAS GREAT AND THEY ALL LOVED YOUR PERFORMANCE. The initial reviews confirmed Brand’s report. DUST OFF ALL THE SUPERLATIVES FOR THIS ONE
, headlined the
Film Daily
review, which predicted that the film would “undoubtedly roll up enormous grosses during the months ahead.”
Motion Picture Daily
thought it “an excellent show” that was sure “to attract a huge crowd.”

But when the film went into general release, the more discriminating reviewers took exception to the story’s diffuse focus and the film’s overproduction—exactly what Zanuck had cautioned against. The
New Yorker
criticized the “seedy plot” and Johnnie Ray’s “caterwauling,” which was one of the picture’s overwhelming weaknesses; in his big religious number, “If You Believe,” Ray contorted his face and torso to the degree that people in the theater could hardly have been blamed for thinking he was having some kind of seizure.

Mitzi Gaynor and Marilyn Monroe received the most critical attention, although many reviewers praised Ethel for her warm, nicely modulated performance as Molly. She was completely believable as the mother of three and always seemed to be listening to her fellow actors. In the end it might have been better if the story had concentrated on her and Dan Dailey, with side trips to the three children. It wasn’t, as Siegel had judged, so much a case of too much story as one of too many characters, and audiences seemed to have difficulty caring about them. Adding to the trouble was the fact that the two new Berlin songs, Donald O’Connor’s “A Man Chases a Girl Until She Catches Him” and “A Sailor’s Not a Sailor Till He’s Been Tattooed,” the latter a labored, unfunny hornpipe with Ethel and Gaynor in sailors’ uniforms and sideburns, were in no way memorable.

There’s No Business Like Show Business
was the kind of homespun Americana that 20th Century Fox had churned out a few too many times. While it grossed a respectable $4.5 million, such profits didn’t mean much when measured against the huge production cost of $4.34 million. In her autobiography Ethel remarked flatly, “Somehow,
There’s No Business Like Show Business
didn’t turn out as well as
Madam.
” Fox canceled plans for a third Merman vehicle, and before long Ethel knew that her dreams of a starring career in Hollywood were not to be fulfilled. By 1957 the screen musical had mostly faded from view, and it wouldn’t be until the 1960s that it showed any genuine signs of life again.

After the release of
There’s No Business Like Show Business,
Ethel returned to Denver, where the following months passed quietly. While working hard at being a model 1950s wife and mother, she guested on CBS’s
The Shower of Stars
and
The Toast of the Town.
Apart from them, her principal project for 1954–55 was working with Pete Martin, an editor at the
Saturday Evening Post,
on a series of articles about her life that was soon to be published by Doubleday as a full-length autobiography. The book’s eventual title,
Who Could Ask for Anything More?,
seemed to be a kind of summing-up. But Martin, an astute writer and editor, discerned immediately that Ethel was a study in conflict, both personally and professionally. Those closest to her, from her good chum Alice Welch to her father and mother, insisted to Martin that she was happier than she’d ever been. But while Martin found Ethel pleasant, she also seemed strangely remote. He had collaborated with both Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on their memoirs and found them delightful, but Ethel seemed to have little perspective on her spectacular career. When he probed for revealing anecdotes about the shows in which she had appeared or the many brilliant artists she had worked with, she had surprisingly little to say. Throughout much of 1955, Martin was in a state of mild panic, wondering if he was going to be able to turn in a manuscript that was in any way acceptable to his editors. In the end,
Who Could Ask for Anything More?
did a good job of capturing Ethel’s voice and covering the basic facts of her career, but it failed to plumb any aspect of her life in depth. Overall, the book put forth a relentlessly shoot-from-the-hip attitude. Typical was Ethel’s observation, “The way I get it, people make their own luck by putting out everything they’ve got, and the more they put out, the more luck they have.”

When
Who Could Ask for Anything More?
was published in the summer of 1955, reviews were generally quite respectful. “Ethel on paper is as brash, brassy and breezy as Ethel onstage,” wrote the
Pittsburgh Press.
A few critics were more on target.
Best Sellers
observed, “Ethel Merman’s [book] exposes the reader to such a pitiless blaze of sunshine that he begins to think of mad dogs and Englishmen and long for just a bit of shade, if only for variety.”

In September 1955, Ethel continued her pursuit of the mass media by agreeing to appear on CBS’s highly rated
Person to Person,
hosted by Edward R. Murrow.
Person to Person
was a popular series that caught celebrities at home in their “natural” surroundings; the trouble was that given the series’ rather starchy format, the celebrities usually seemed anything but natural. Ethel’s segment was no exception. She greeted Murrow on the balcony of the house at Six Acres. The camera then followed her into the library, where she interacted rather formally with Six. (“How are you?” Six asked, and Ethel curtly responded, “Fine.”) The children also seemed uncomfortable. Bobby, appearing quite cowed, repeatedly referred to Six as “Mr. Robert,” while Ethel Jr., when asked by Murrow what she wanted to do when she grew up, seemed to be giving a pint-size press conference: “Well, Mr. Murrow, I like acting, but I don’t sing. I like writing, and I’ve thought about being an airline stewardess. I think that would be fun.” During her interview Ethel continued to hew to her own party line regarding her decision to turn her back on the stage.

“I gather,” said Murrow, “you’ve given up Broadway and the bright lights to live in the shadows of the Rockies. How do you like it?”

“I just love it here,” said Ethel. As if to complete the carefully prepared picture of domestic bliss, Rocky Mountain style, Six was observed grilling steaks marinated in garlic, soy sauce, and fresh ginger.

To the casual observer, it was all remarkably convincing. Ethel seemed to relish going to bed early, getting up in time to see the children off to school, shopping at the supermarket, heading up the local Easter Seals drive, participating in events sponsored by the Denver Chamber of Commerce, and dashing off in her new four-seater Thunderbird to meet her girlfriends for lunch. Many reporters beat a path to the door of Six Acres, always armed with the same question: would she ever return to Broadway? Always the answer was the same: an unequivocal no. “Broadway has been good to me,” she was fond of saying, “but I’ve been good to it, too.”

To her best friends, she confided that she missed her parents terribly, and occasionally she let it slip that Denver was not all it might be for a woman accustomed to Manhattan’s stores and restaurants. “We’ve got maybe one really good store out there,” she said in mid–1955, “but nothing up to the Bonwit, Bergdorf Goodman standard.”

In fact, the genuine happiness of the early years of her relationship with Six was beginning to harden into a carefully constructed façade. Inactivity never agreed with Ethel; she habitually became restless and disgruntled when too much time elapsed between professional engagements. Continental Airlines was beginning to take off in a big way; all Six’s hopes for the company looked to be on the brink of coming true. The result was that he was often in New York on business, leaving Ethel virtually alone in the big house. Six had a driving concern for his business interests. “Bob was a brilliant businessman,” said his future sister-in-law, Jayne Meadows, “and he was
all
business.” But having given up her own lucrative stage career to devote time to him and the children, Ethel was beginning to tire of his single-minded pursuit of financial success. Often when he was in New York, she would arrange to speak with him by telephone at an appointed time, but more often than not the scheduled conversation never took place. She began to try tracking him down, usually for the purpose of confronting him. He in turn began to resent being disturbed at the Ritz Towers or any of the other places he favored in Manhattan. Brutal quarrels, via telephone, frequently ensued. Ethel’s worst fears began to surface: her history with Bob Levitt suddenly seemed to be repeating itself.

As always when faced with a personal dilemma, she sought to lose herself in work. In November 1955 she made her London debut, performing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” at the Victoria Palace’s royal variety show, with the queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret in attendance. In March 1956 she made her first attempt at a nonsinging role when she appeared in a half-hour condensation of George Kelly’s
Reflected Glory
on the popular CBS anthology series
GE Theatre.
Perhaps it was the subject that struck a chord with her:
Reflected Glory
deals with a successful actress forced to choose between career and family. The kinescope of this telecast appears not to have survived, and Ethel refers to it rather dismissively in her autobiography, indicating that she did not feel her performance made the grade. But clearly her appetite to play serious parts had been whetted, because shortly afterward she made another dramatic appearance, on an episode of another anthology series,
The U.S. Steel Hour.
This time she was cast in an original teleplay by Mort Thaw called “Honest in the Rain,” in which she played Libby, an aging spinster who tries desperately to conceal from her drab, middle-aged fiancé the fact that she is a compulsive gambler who has lost their entire joint savings account by playing the horses. The hourlong live telecast traced Libby’s efforts to win back her losses, which only sends her further into debt. Ultimately she is picked up in a police raid and has to tell her shocked fiancé the truth.

It is tempting to see certain parallels between Libby’s life and Ethel’s own. Libby’s closest relationship has been with her mother and father, and she began gambling as a way of filling the hours after they died. The fiancé, Henry, also seems to be primarily a source of anxiety: “Does he love me or does he only need me?” Libby wonders. “I need. But Henry isn’t ready—he isn’t ready to be needed.”

Ethel was badly photographed in the segment, looking haggard and far older than the character’s supposed age. Although she performed with heart and conviction, the reviews seemed designed to discourage her from any further dramatic outings.
Variety
found that the drama was “overboard on corny sentimentality” and that Ethel gave “a superficial walk-through of a poorly conceived part.”

No films of interest presented themselves—
Pal Joey
would eventually go to Rita Hayworth—and Ethel began to grow more and more restless. In the late winter of 1956, she gave an interview to the
New York Times
in which she casually mentioned, “I may be back on Broadway in a musical next season.” By April it was official: Ethel would return to Broadway the following fall. To the press she maintained that all was well at home in Denver. “This is strictly a one-show deal,” she insisted.

The name of the new show was
Happy Hunting
. Her old friends Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse had signed on to write the libretto. The score was to be written by newcomers Harold Karr (music) and Matt Dubey (lyrics), and she told reporters that she was looking forward to it very much.

H
appy Hunting
was a musical brought to life for all the wrong reasons. The wellspring of the show was Robert Six’s greed and ambition. He had already grown dissatisfied with his marriage to Ethel Merman, Retired Broadway Star. To his way of thinking, if he had gone to the trouble of marrying Ethel Merman, she should remain in the limelight; there was much greater dollar-for-dollar value to Continental in having her in the full glare of the public eye. Now that Hollywood had once again turned its back on her, Six began prodding her to think about returning to Broadway. With that, her lovely dream of domestic quietude began to crumble.

Many songwriters had tried to lure Ethel back to the stage by sending her their scores, in either complete or partial form. Even Irving Berlin had tried to cajole her into doing a show he had partially written called
The Last Resorts
. Always the answer was no. Harold Karr and Matt Dubey, then, were extremely lucky to find her in a receptive mood when they flew out to Denver and auditioned their songs for the show that would become
Happy Hunting
. Ethel was not overly impressed, but in the face of Six’s enthusiasm she agreed to consider the project. Six hammered away at her, telling her that he thought the score, even in its incomplete form, sounded like the basis for a tremendous hit.

Other pressures were brought to bear, too: Jo Mielziner, who had designed
Stars in Your Eyes
and
Annie Get Your Gun
, wanted to produce as well as design the show, and he worked overtime trying to persuade her that she should commit to it. So did Abe Burrows, one of Broadway’s hottest directors since his success with
Guys and Dolls
and
Can-Can
. Six began canvassing several of his business associates to put up money for the show, and when Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse expressed interest in writing the book, Ethel found herself outnumbered. Since it was so important to Six that she sign on, she decided to be a good wife and gave in.

Her own motives weren’t entirely innocent. Like Six, she was driven partly by avarice. Anna Crouse felt that her decision to do
Happy Hunting
showed “one of her weaknesses. She said, ‘I don’t like these big composers getting all this money.’” Ethel reasoned that taking a chance on an unknown team might work to her advantage financially; it would be easy enough to refuse to do the show unless she gained leverage over the songwriters on the percentage of the show’s profits. She was also beginning to worry a bit about her finances. Although she was well fixed for the moment, a great deal of money was going out, and not much was coming in. When they married, she and Six had agreed to split all expenses fifty-fifty, but in recent months she felt that she had been burdened with more than her fair share. Whenever the family flew anywhere on Continental, the airlines billed Ethel for three-quarters of the fares—for herself, Ethel Jr., and Bobby. There were many other bookkeeping habits of Six’s that she was beginning to question, and she thought the best solution for the time being might be to return to work.

Harold Karr and Matt Dubey had a small reputation as special-material writers for nightclub performers, but neither one could remotely be called an exceptional talent. What they had was the particular brand of enthusiasm specific to amateurs; Karr, in fact, was a dentist who had long dreamed of writing a Broadway hit. (That same season Betty Comden and Adolph Green reportedly used him as the basis for their comic character Dr. Kitchell, the sad-sack dentist who longs to be a composer, in their hit show
Bells Are Ringing
.)

Lindsay and Crouse came up with a topical-themed plot based on Grace Kelly’s much-publicized wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco; clearly, they were hoping that lightning would strike a second time, as it had when they based
Call Me Madam
on current headlines. The end result in this case was a dead-end variation on the by-now-crusty-with-age formula of Ethel Merman musicals: brassy American dame remains true to her own code and comes out on top in the end. Lindsay and Crouse threw together a story about Liz Livingston, a rich, boisterous American widow from Philadelphia who desperately wants to get her pretty young daughter, Beth, into society but has consistently been snubbed by Philly’s Main Line crowd. Mother and daughter show up in Monaco expecting to be invited to the big wedding, only to find out that once again they have been excluded. The mother meets the handsome heir to the Spanish throne and determines to win him for her daughter, thus guaranteeing their entry into the aristocracy, but winds up falling for him herself.

Abe Burrows felt that the most important part of directing a show was to cast it properly. Finding a leading man for
Happy Hunting
proved tricky: Burrows needed an actor with sex appeal and charisma, yet someone who was willing to take a backseat to Ethel. For a time Georges Guétary, the French performer who had sung “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” in MGM’s 1951 Oscar-winning film
An American in Paris
, was considered. But Six and his fellow backers felt that a bigger name was needed, and eventually, ex-MGM contract star Fernando Lamas was signed for the part.

Ethel had casting approval, and a number of girls read for the part of her daughter, Beth. Several were highly sophisticated, which, unfortunately, was not the point: the role of Beth wasn’t supposed to be a Grace Kelly, but more on the order of Debbie Reynolds. One of those who tried out was Virginia Gibson, a promising, fresh newcomer with a few Hollywood films to her credit, among them
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
. At Gibson’s final audition, Ethel was sitting out front, and the creative team wanted to know if she needed to see Gibson dance. “I don’t know anything about dancing,” Ethel responded. “You say she can dance, that’s fine with me.”

Gibson won the role, but she was carefully instructed by her agent on how to behave. “When I went to rehearsal,” Gibson recalled, “the agent said, ‘Don’t talk with her. Just say good morning and then sit down.’ So I would say, ‘Good morning,’ and I would sit on one side, and she was on the other side. And one day she came over to me and said, ‘Why don’t you come over and sit with me?’ They all acted so afraid of her. That’s what I don’t understand.” Although Gibson allowed that Ethel could no doubt be difficult, she felt that “there was no BS with her. Everything was straight out—just honest and straightforward.”

Ethel was to pay a high price for her desire to exert financial leverage over her composing team, since the score was unquestionably the weakest of any show she had ever accepted. Her ballads never really paid off. One waited in vain for her first-act closer, “This Is What I Call Love,” to hit home, and the same was true of her second-act solo, “The Game of Love.” She struggled to make them work by the sheer force of her personality. The Merman magic was there, but it was diminished, because the material wasn’t on the level to which she had become accustomed.

Rehearsals for
Happy Hunting
got off to a bumpy start thanks to a tactless remark by composer Harold Karr. Reportedly, while Ethel was singing one of her numbers on the first day of rehearsal, Karr delivered a chilling verdict: “If I’d wanted it sung that way, I would have written it that way.” After a terrifying silence, Ethel turned to Burrows and, pointing at Karr, said, “That man is never to speak to me again.” None of the surviving cast members interviewed for this book recalls the incident, but Virginia Gibson remembers that Ethel was unhappy with the score from the start. Karr and Dubey had a way of growing quite defensive if one song or another didn’t meet with Ethel’s satisfaction, and although they would go off to try to polish their work, they didn’t have the ability to come up with great showstoppers under pressure. Ethel was especially displeased with her opening number, and she complained until it was replaced with the rousing “Gee, But It’s Good to Be Here.”

The show’s one good piece was a duet for Ethel and Gibson called “Mutual Admiration Society,” and of all the tunes in the score it seemed to be the one most likely destined for hit status, but even it had a difficult time. Burrows had staged the number to be sung by the two women in profile, face-to-face, until Dubey objected, “Oh, Miss Merman—your voice is going to go into the wings.” Another terrifying silence. Then Ethel, in a cold fury, responded, “My voice will
never
go into the wings.” The staging remained as it was.

Rehearsals limped along, hampered by the quality of the music. “Happy Hunting,” a lavish ensemble number for the second act, refused to be pulled into focus. Ethel grew increasingly uncomfortable with the material. Mark Zeller, a member of the ensemble, recalled that the new songwriting team “didn’t give the impression of being conscious of other writers. They seemed very self-aggrandized in a way, confident about who they were, almost like someone who writes a great song in college. I would say stuff was asked of them that they couldn’t deliver. They would come in [after being asked for rewrites] and look a little funny, and there was nothing fixed. It was a real puzzle.”

As the out-of-town premiere in Philadelphia loomed, Ethel began to panic. She was at a crucial age for an actress—forty-eight—and she knew that starring parts on Broadway would not continue forever. Because Six and so many of his business cronies had invested in
Happy Hunting
, she felt more responsible than ever for delivering a big, big hit. Always the best judge of her material, she knew instinctively that she was saddled with a potential flop. The book that Lindsay and Crouse had come up with, entirely dependent on rather crude and obvious joke setups, was no more distinguished than the Dubey and Karr score. Asked by the Duke of Granada whether she knows the difference between Bourbon and Hapsburg, Liz Livingston replies, “Sure. One’s whiskey and one’s beer.” When the duke mentions that one day he will be King Jaime, Liz observes, “You’ll be the first Hymie that ever was a king.” The musical numbers did not grow naturally out of the script; they were dropped in, with a resounding thud.

Initially Ethel seemed pleased that her new show had attracted the presence of a big, handsome movie star like Fernando Lamas. He was a stunning, sexy Argentine leading man with a strong voice, and he had shown off both qualities in films such as
The Merry Widow
(1952) and
Rose Marie
(1954). His MGM contract had expired in 1954, the same year he married Arlene Dahl, one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses. With his peak Hollywood years behind him, he was looking for a worthy Broadway vehicle, and
Happy Hunting
seemed just the ticket.

While some company members thought Lamas pompous and humorless, others found him pleasant and companionable. As Virginia Gibson recalled, “Well, I just thought
movie star
. And his wife, Arlene Dahl, was always around and dressed to the nines. Merman was a big star, but she never had that movie-star thing that they had.” Lamas’s professionalism, however, remained in question. Early on, he loudly objected, in front of the entire company, to Ethel’s familiar habit of throwing her lines out front rather than directly to him. On another occasion, when the show was being tried out in Philadelphia, supporting player Seth Riggs and several of the other actors were reporting to work when suddenly a ravishing blonde pulled up in a convertible and called out to Lamas. The actor turned to his fellow company members and said, “Tell them I’ll be an hour late for rehearsal.” According to Riggs, “He jumped over the side, didn’t even open the door, and they went off.” Lamas was also bored by the ritual of the stage manager’s sharing his notes at the end of each day’s work. One day in his dressing room, he was stark naked, washing off his stage makeup, and looking, Riggs recalled, “like a monster from the deep.” The stage manager, Robert Downing, appeared in the doorway with a sheet of notes, and Lamas suddenly exploded, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Then he flung himself out of his chair and, still buck naked, chased Downing out onto the stage, screaming, “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

Unfortunately for Lamas his reception at the Philadelphia opening put Ethel on the defensive and gave credence to the by-now-widespread rumors that she could be tough on other players who tried to steal the spotlight. Incredibly, the trouble seems to have stemmed from the white suit that Irene Sharaff had designed for Lamas to wear in the show. Lamas’s penis size was already the stuff of Hollywood legend, and he had requested that Sharaff design his costume to be as tight as possible, so he could show off his endowment. The result didn’t satisfy him, and he ordered the pants to be recut for maximum effect. His ploy worked. On opening night in Philadelphia, he stepped out onstage in the dazzling white suit, with a matching California coat tossed around his shoulders. A chorus of gasps, from both women and men, swept over the theater. “Nobody looked at Merman,” said Riggs, “and she was furious.”

Bob Ullman, then working as a publicist for Karr and Dubey, also recalled Ethel’s pique. “Lamas was no big talent,” said Ullman. “He wore no underwear, and he was hung like a horse.” Several of the company members heard Ethel scream at the stage manager in the wings, “I had people out front! I know what’s going on! You tell him to wear a goddamn jockstrap!” But Lamas, whose movie-star status made him a costar with more clout than usual in a Merman show, refused to alter a thing. At the time, Arlene Dahl was in New York with her husband; Dahl remembered that “Fernando used to call Ethel ‘the Mack Truck.’ He’d say, ‘She’s run all over her leading men, but not me.’”

Ethel did a slow, deep burn while the reviews came in. Given the rickety condition of the show, the critics were surprisingly kind: the
Philadelphia Inquirer
complained that the show had “too much plot,” but the
Philadelphia Daily News
said that “Miss Merman brings a formidable zest to everything she does.”
Variety
admitted that the show had its “sodden spots” but felt that over the course of the six-week tryout it would shape up to be box-office gold once it reached Broadway. The best news was already coming from the cashier’s windows: the Philadelphia run was sold out from the start, and during the show’s second week there the box-office take was $60,280—a new house record for the Shubert.