Ethel Merman: A Life (27 page)

The children’s relations with Bob Levitt became even more emotionally charged in light of the fact that Six was rapidly revealing himself to be something of an ogre as a stepfather. He was especially mean-spirited and belittling where Bobby was concerned, and although Ethel often fought with him over the issue, she was hopeful that peace would eventually reign; the last thing she wanted was for Ethel Jr. and Bobby to suffer the fallout of yet another broken home.

In the intervening years, the intense pain of Ethel’s divorce from Bob Levitt had been ameliorated to the extent that the two of them were once again on reasonably friendly terms. There was seldom any trouble about visiting rights—he usually had Ethel Jr. and Bobby every summer at his home in East Hampton, Long Island—and he and Ethel relaxed into something closer to the old, joking relationship they had enjoyed in the early days of their courtship and marriage. But Bob was also a continued source of sadness for Ethel. His career had seesawed dramatically. At the time of his divorce from Ethel, he had still been with the Hearst Corporation, as associate publisher of the
American Weekly
and the comic weekly
Puck
. In mid-1953 he became publisher of both publications and was given a vice presidency, but by 1955 he had been fired from the company. He took a job with Screen Gems, the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, but lasted there only a short time before being named president of California National Productions, an NBC subsidiary that produced television films. He managed to hang on there until December 1957, when he once again found himself unemployed. To Ethel, Bob “just seemed to go haywire,” but the real trouble was that his problems with depression and alcohol had never received proper attention.

On top of everything else, he had bad luck with women. For a time he dated the beautiful movie actress Linda Darnell, but she had her own battles with alcoholism, and the relationship soon ended. In 1952 he married Sherry Shadburne, but their life together was a rocky one. To some of Ethel’s friends and colleagues, Sherry seemed rather flashy and cheap. She had a habit of dolling up Little Ethel in gaudy clothes, including rhinestone shoes, that her mother deemed inappropriate. In 1956, Levitt divorced Sherry, and late the following year he married Barbara Kazanjian. Ethel hoped that he might at last find the happiness that had so far eluded him, but, conversely, she had begun to have serious regrets about the fact that their own marriage had not endured. Ethel worried about Levitt, and she may have made some of her concerns known to Six, who was far from a sympathetic audience. More and more she began to wonder whether Levitt might have been better off if she had stayed married to him.

On January 28, 1958, Ethel’s worst fears for Levitt were realized when he was found dead in his Long Island home. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office announced that the cause of death was an overdose of barbiturates, and there was no confusion whatsoever about whether it was an accident. Nearly twenty bottles of drugs and sleeping pills were found around the house, which made it appear that Bob had long been planning his suicide, accumulating a store of drugs until he had enough to do himself in. (Bob had been relying heavily on barbiturates for some time; following a lengthy investigation into his death, a New York pharmacist named Joseph Sachs had his license suspended for six months and was fined $2,000 for selling “habit-forming, dangerous, and new drugs without prescriptions.”) Levitt left a note stipulating that his estate was to be split between Ethel Jr. and Bobby, except for a house in Sag Harbor that he’d bought a number of years earlier; in an unusual bequest, this was left to Lulu Wyche, a maid who had cared for the family. No bequest whatsoever was made to his third wife.

Ethel was devastated. Again her black-and-white view of the world had left her completely unequipped to deal with anything as complex as Bob’s death. She simply could not and would not permit herself to fathom the conflicting, tormenting forces that had led him to such a sad end. Her grief was tinged with anger; in her autobiography she refers to Bob’s suicide as “this horrible thing.” Mostly what she felt was bottomless sorrow and guilt; she could not help but wonder if the tragedy would have occurred had their marriage survived.

The bitter arguments with Bob, the drinking, the suspected infidelities—all of his failings were now not forgotten but simply put aside. Bob had been a wonderful man, she insisted, and a great love of her life; in time he would graduate to
the
great love. In order to give her feelings a tangible weight, Ethel always carried around two mementos of him. After Bob’s estate was probated, she was informed that his personal jewelry was to go to her. Years earlier she had given him a stunning set of cuff links and studs, made of crystal, diamonds, and onyx. She took them to her favorite jeweler and had them made into a bracelet, which she wore frequently. There was also a handsome Omega watch, engraved with Bob’s initials; Ethel had it refitted with a solid gold band and wore it every day.

This low point in her life was only made worse by Six’s callous and insensitive behavior. If Ethel had had serious doubts about her third marriage before, they were confirmed by Six’s actions on the day Bob Levitt’s body was discovered. Trying to control herself as best she could, Ethel gathered Ethel Jr. and Bobby together and broke the news that their father was dead. Bobby burst into tears and ran into his bedroom. When Ethel got up to console him, Six took her firmly by the arm and told her that if she made any move to comfort the boy, he would walk out the door and never return.

O
ne morning in 1958, several months after
Happy Hunting
had closed, Mark Zeller ran into Ethel while crossing Fifth Avenue. She was carrying a script under her arm, and she looked jubilant. “Mark,” she crowed, grabbing Zeller’s hand excitedly, “I have the greatest script—
finally!”

It was Arthur Laurents’s book for a new show called
Gypsy,
and it was the most unusual and substantial project Ethel had yet been offered. After
Happy Hunting
she had finally tired of playing blowsy, diamond-in-the-rough musical-comedy parts, and she was eager to show that she could do something of a serious nature—hoping, no doubt, that she would be able to blot out people’s memories of
Happy Hunting. Gypsy
came along just when she needed it most.

The show had begun with
Gypsy,
a memoir by America’s striptease queen, Gypsy Rose Lee. Much of the book was taken up with the very funny (if heavily embroidered) account of Gypsy’s early years, when, as Louise Hovick, she traversed the country with her sister, June (who grew up to be the actress June Havoc) and their mother, Rose, trying to break into big-time vaudeville. Shortly after it was published in 1957, the book came to the attention of David Merrick, who had in recent years become one of the most powerful producers on Broadway. Merrick glimpsed its possibilities as a stage musical and wasted no time in buying the theatrical rights.

On Broadway, Merrick was a law unto himself, a relentlessly brutal, tough, yet undeniably imaginative producer who would go to any lengths to guarantee that his shows succeeded. With the 1954 Harold Rome musical
Fanny
, he helped to revolutionize the way in which Broadway shows were promoted. He went into overdrive to sell it on radio and television, and he even had stickers slapped up in public restrooms posing the question “Have you seen
Fanny
?” Purists were shocked, but Merrick’s strategy worked: despite middling notices,
Fanny
became a hit. In 1957, when his production of John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
was slipping at the box office, Merrick paid a woman $250 to get out of her seat, climb up onstage, and slap actor Kenneth Haigh, playing the troubled hero, across the face. The story was picked up by newspapers everywhere, and
Look Back in Anger
played to full houses for months. Merrick could be insulting to the show’s creators if there was trouble during out-of-town tryouts. He was particularly hard on actors, whom he generally regarded as dirt under his feet. He considered himself a bold and creative producer but was not an enthusiastic member of the theatrical community as a whole, in part because he felt that few of his colleagues could match him for brains and talent. “There’s a horse’s ass for every light on Broadway,” he once said dismissively.

For
Gypsy
, Merrick had joined forces with a coproducer, Leland Hayward, who had Jerome Robbins under contract. Robbins was the man Merrick wanted to direct and choreograph
Gypsy.
Robbins and Arthur Laurents had recently collaborated on
West Side Story,
a show that had enlarged the scope of what had been deemed possible in musical theater. They’d fought bitterly during rehearsals, and Laurents was not keen to collaborate with Robbins again, especially after he read Gypsy Rose Lee’s book and found little to interest him. It was only after a chance meeting with Selma Lynch, a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Gypsy’s hard-driving stage mother, Rose Hovick, that he became interested in the story’s possibilities. Robbins had conceived of
Gypsy
as a kind of colorful, affectionate tribute to the long-gone world of burlesque, and had even signed up a string of novelty and animal acts. Laurents had other ideas: to him the truly compelling story was not so much Gypsy as Rose, a willful, resourceful woman who would stop at nothing to see that her two young daughters met with show-business success. (While they toured the vaudeville circuit, staying in a series of flea-bag hotels, Rose would frequently lift various items, justifying her actions by snapping, “What they charge us for this room—they
owe
us that ashtray.”) Rose did in fact have a great deal in common with David Merrick.

Laurents set to work with a fire in his head, and though Robbins clung to the idea that
Gypsy
should unfold as a parade of vaudeville and burlesque routines, Laurents insisted that that part of the story was incidental. He stressed that
Gypsy
was really about “the need for recognition, a need everyone has in one way or another.” In a short time, a powerful story line emerged about Rose, a domineering stage mother who dreams of stardom for her talented daughter June. Although she succeeds in building June into a popular headliner on the prestigious Orpheum Circuit, the girl rebels and runs off to get married. Rose’s response is to focus all her energies on her older daughter, Louise. No matter that the girl lacks June’s singing and dancing abilities: Rose will not give up until her baby becomes a star. And Louise does just that, though not exactly in the way Rose had hoped. Quite by accident she steps into a strip number in a seedy Kansas City burlesque house and in time transforms herself into Gypsy Rose Lee, the wittiest and most elegant stripper in America.

Of all Broadway musical books,
Gypsy
’s may very well be the best crafted, the leanest, the sharpest, the funniest, the most disturbing and revealing. Much of its swift pace and strong point of view no doubt stem from the fact that Laurents knew exactly where he was going along the way, because he had the sense to write the ending first. What he devised was quite unlike any other musical finale: Gypsy has finally had enough of her mother’s interference and, in an angry confrontation scene in her dressing room, tells Rose that she has to let go and let her live her own life. Yet for Rose this seems all but impossible. After a lifetime of scheming and sacrifice, how can she simply step into the background now? If she is to be cast aside, what has her entire life been about, up to this point? Rose’s armor begins to melt: for the first time, she examines her own youthful dreams of fame and applause and the life she has spent enslaved to her own desperate, gnawing need to be noticed. It would be a scene and, eventually, a song, that would serve as both emotional breakdown and moment of truth, giving
Gypsy
the final piece of weight that Laurents had sensed the show needed.

The immediate problem was finding the right composer to do justice to the story. Irving Berlin was approached and refused: his shows revolved around sunnier themes, and
Gypsy
was too dark and disturbing for him. Cole Porter, ill and defeated—his right leg had recently been amputated, and it seemed to drain the last bit of spirit out of him—also passed on the project. Stephen Sondheim was Laurents’s idea. Somewhat hurt that his lyrics for
West Side Story
had been largely overlooked in the shower of praise for Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins, Sondheim was not eager to accept another lyric-writing job; he wanted to branch out as both composer and lyricist, and Laurents thought that the bittersweet flavor of
Gypsy
’s story would be ideally suited to his highly individual talents. Sondheim agreed, but Ethel didn’t. She admitted that Sondheim was clever, but having rolled the dice with Harold Karr and Matt Dubey on
Happy Hunting
, she wasn’t in the mood to be generous twice in a row. In the end the job went to Jule Styne, an unusual choice in the sense that he had penned a lot of big, romantic hits with Sammy Cahn, such as “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “Time After Time.” True, he was a proven commodity on Broadway, with successes like
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
Bells Are Ringing
to his credit, but these were lighter, comedic shows. Could he really capture the deeper, darker tones of
Gypsy
? Robbins wanted him, and after he swallowed his pride and auditioned for the job, so did Laurents. Sondheim was angry and disappointed, and for a time it looked as if he would withdraw from the project altogether. But the sage counsel of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, prevailed, and Sondheim signed on as lyricist only. Styne, Sondheim, and Laurents worked closely together, and the entire book and score were finished in an astonishing four months.

One of the reasons Ethel had been against Sondheim’s composing the music was that she didn’t think he would know how to write for her voice. Styne assuredly did. He thought of her voice as a trumpet, and he wrote for it as he would for an instrument. What he came up with was an exhilarating score that felt as if it had been shot from a cannon. It played to all of Ethel’s strengths. With the exception of “Small World,” the tender siren song that Rose uses to snare the nebbishy candy salesman Herbie, all her numbers have a pulsating, relentless drive. In her Berlin and Porter shows, Ethel had usually had a smattering of ballads to balance the big uptempo showstoppers, but the majority of her pieces in
Gypsy
were written in a way that required them to be hurled at the audience. Ethel loved the songs; she wept when she first heard them. It was to be the most taxing, demanding score she would ever perform, for reasons that, at least initially, she probably didn’t truly appreciate.

Laurents and Sondheim, by now close friends, provided their work with a subtext that was rare in musicals of the period. Ethel’s opening number, the rousing “Some People,” might seem at first glance to be a standard establishing number—a bossy woman who knows what she wants, baldly stating her philosophy on how to get ahead. To Laurents and Sondheim, however, the song was really about Rose’s desire to get her hands on a plaque that hangs on the wall of her father’s house—a plaque that she will sell to help finance her dreams for June. Similarly, taken out of context, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” seemed a big, brassy paean to the power of positive thinking—just wait and see, tomorrow will be better—done in the old, electric Merman style. But it was placed in a crucial spot in the show: the railway scene, after June has deserted the act and run off to get married and Rose has decided to concentrate all her hopes on the shy, awkward Louise. Here the song becomes a chilling illustration of blind ambition mixed with megalomania, as Herbie and Louise look on in horror.

Then there was “Rose’s Turn,” the number that Styne and Sondheim had devised for Laurents’s big moment of self-revelation at the end of the show. More of an operatic scena than the standard eleven-o’clock number, it was an explosive point in which Rose confronted her own thwarted ambitions, for her daughters but most of all for herself. It was a scorching expression of Laurents’s belief that the play was really about the crying out for recognition. All her life Rose has demanded that people pay attention to her. Now, all alone on the empty stage of the theater where Gypsy is a headliner, she realizes that no one is left to listen.

There is a remarkable moment midway through “Rose’s Turn,” as the character’s brash self-confidence begins to crumble. She starts out full bore, full of the old bravado and pizzazz, as she bitterly parodies one of Gypsy’s strip routines:

 

Mama’s talkin’ loud

Mama’s doin’ fine

Mama’s gettin’ hot

Mama’s goin’ strong

Mama’s movin’ on

Mama’s all alone

Mama doesn’t care

Mama’s lettin’ loose

Mama’s got the stuff

Mama’s lettin’ go

 

Suddenly she begins to unravel, sputtering out, “Mmmmm-mmm-Mama,” then starting up again, trying to regain her momentum before breaking down entirely as she at last stops moving full speed ahead and takes stock of what is left of her life:

 

Why did I do it?

What did it get me?

Scrapbooks full of me in the background

Give ’em love and what does it get you?

What does it get you?

One quick look as each of them leaves you

All your life and what does it get you?

Thanks a lot and out with the garbage

They take bows and you’re battin’ zero!

 

It would be the most emotionally naked moment that the Broadway musical had yet experienced; Handel could not have written a more searing-rage aria. The germ of the idea for Sondheim’s lyrics stretched back to 1947, when Jessica Tandy had played the final scene of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
in which Blanche DuBois completes her mental disintegration before our eyes. By having Rose stammer “Mmmmm-mmm-Mama”—the thought of finally letting go of Louise is so terrifying that she can barely speak of it—Sondheim was providing her with a Blanche-like collapse. He explained all of this to Ethel, who listened to him at a steady emotional distance. Finally she interrupted him. There was just one thing she wanted to know: did “Mmmmm-mmm-Mama” come in on an upbeat or a downbeat?