Ethel Merman: A Life (29 page)

Gypsy
’s opening night, May 21, 1959, finally arrived. Among the avalanche of congratulatory telegrams was one that Ethel would have reason to remember. It was from producer Frederick Brisson, husband of Rosalind Russell, and it read:
DEAREST ETHEL GLAD YOU ARE BACK AND IF YOU NEED AN UNDERSTUDY I KNOW WHERE YOU CAN GET ONE GREAT GOOD LUCK FOR THE BIGGEST HIT EVER LOVE FREDDIE BRISSON.

From the first downbeat, everything on
Gypsy
’s opening night went magnificently. Laurents had devised a stunning entrance for Ethel, one that took the audience by surprise, signaled in an instant that
Gypsy
was something daring and unusual, and quickly assumed its place in theatrical history. As Baby Jane and Baby Louise are onstage, rehearsing for Uncle Jocko’s amateur kiddie show, Rose comes marching down the center aisle of the theater shouting instructions while the girls go through their routine: “SING OUT, LOUISE: YOU’RE BEHIND, HONEY, CATCH UP, CATCH UP!” Gone were the glamorous outfits of Mainbocher and Irene Sharaff: since Rose was down on her luck, Ethel entered wearing a ratty coat and carrying a big, vulgar purse and a little dog named Chowsie, so named because, like Rose, he loved Chinese food.

One number after another was ecstatically received, and Ethel remembered every detail and nuance that Jerome Robbins had spent hours drumming into her. At the end of the first act, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” sent the audience out into the lobby both shaken and elated. They couldn’t imagine what this monster stage mother was going to try next; as for the song, it already sounded like a classic Merman anthem, right up there with “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

The triumph wasn’t entirely Ethel’s. The numbers for the other characters also went over, especially Paul Wallace’s showstopping “All I Need Is the Girl,” Sandra Church’s striptease to “Let Me Entertain You,” and “You’ve Gotta Get a Gimmick,” the hilarious comedy song for the trio of strippers (Faith Dane, Chotzi Foley, and Maria Karnilova) that no star in her right mind would have had cut. But tension built backstage as the night neared its end. “Rose’s Turn” had to surpass everything else that had come before it; otherwise the whole point of the show would be lost. Could Ethel sustain her energy and concentration and pull off this diabolically difficult number?

The instant she opened her mouth—“HERE SHE IS, BOYS! HERE SHE IS, WORLD! HERE’S
ROSE
!”—there was never any doubt. “She wasn’t tired at all,” remembered Marie Wallace, who was making her Broadway debut as one of the showgirls. “She just stood up there and sang out.” During the early part of “Rose’s Turn,” Ethel, imitating Gypsy’s bumps and grinds, shimmied back and forth, showing off her fabulous legs as she wrapped the stage curtain around herself in time to the music. She might be poking fun at Gypsy’s silly strip numbers, but Rose’s emotional pain came through with raw power. It was counterpoint, just as Robbins had hoped, and it was so beautiful, so mesmerizing, that several of the showgirls, banded together in the wings watching, suddenly began to cry. At the end, the applause for “Rose’s Turn” was shattering.

And so were the next day’s notices. Writing in the
New York Herald Tribune
, Walter Kerr called
Gypsy
“the best damn musical I’ve seen in years,” a quote that Merrick instantly slapped across the show’s newspaper ads. The reviewer for the
New York Mirror
wrote that “Stephen Sondheim has set revealing lyrics to a zestful score by Jule Styne, and Jerome Robbins has worked the wordage and music into a nostalgic saga of heartbreak and triumph.” But the real heroine of the hour was Ethel. Richard Watts in the
New York Post
wrote that “her incomparable ability to belt out a song has long been one of the joys of the theater, but she is likewise a brilliant actress, as
Gypsy
proves. By playing the ruthless mother mercilessly but adding her own quality of humanity, she makes the dreadful lady terrifying but somehow gallant and even pathetic.” In the
New York Times
, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Since she acts the part of an indomitable personality, she gives an indomitable performance, both as actress and singer.” But the most perceptive comments came from the
New Yorker
’s Kenneth Tynan. He had two minor quibbles: first, the lack of a strong male vocal presence, and second, that the second act revisited some of the territory of the first, as we watch Rose try to make a star of Louise just as she did of June. About Ethel’s performance, however, he had no reservations: “Miss Merman not only sings, she acts,” wrote Tynan. “I would not say that she acts very subtly; Rose, after all, with her dreams of glory, her kleptomania, her savage parsimony, and her passion for exotic animals and Chinese breakfasts, is scarcely a subtle character. Someone in the show describes her as ‘a pioneer woman without a frontier,’ and that is what Miss Merman magnificently plays.” (Interestingly, Tynan objected to “Rose’s Turn,” with its intensely introspective section, since he felt, “Once Miss Merman has started to sing, nothing short of an air-raid warning should be allowed to interrupt her.”)

Ethel was elated by the success of
Gypsy
. She loved receiving the parade of celebrities—Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Robert Young, Katharine Hepburn—who beat a path to her dressing room after the show to pay her homage. Her success also provided a wonderful distraction from the problems with Six, who was now spending most of his time in Colorado anyway. On June 3, 1959, Ethel arranged to get the night off from
Gypsy
to catch a night flight to Denver so she could attend Ethel Jr.’s graduation from Cherry Creek High School.

Ethel returned to the cast and continued with the run. Her relationship with Jack Klugman remained as congenial as ever, but she was growing more and more displeased with Sandra Church. A misunderstanding at an Actors’ Fund benefit performance of
Gypsy
led to a major breach between the two actresses. Church was irritated by a bit-part player’s drawing out all her lines for maximum attention, and she complained to the stage manager about it. Somehow it got back to Ethel that Church had leveled the criticism at her. Merrick and Hayward both called Church aside, demanding to know how she could have done such an insensitive thing to a great star and insisting that she apologize. Although Church felt she had done nothing wrong, she reported to Ethel’s dressing room to discuss the matter and was refused admittance by the dresser. There followed a chill between the two women that took months to thaw.

Then, in August, real trouble came. Ethel’s throat doctor, Stuart Craig, had warned her early on in
Gypsy
’s rehearsal period that he feared the songs were keyed a bit too high for her and that she might possibly suffer vocal distress as a result. Ethel insisted she could perform the score with no difficulty and ignored Craig’s advice. Then, at a Saturday-night performance in August, a blood vessel in her throat hemorrhaged. Craig put her on a sustained period of vocal rest, and her standby, Jane Romano, took over. Insiders predicted huge losses, but
Gypsy
did well enough during Ethel’s brief absence, in part because Romano’s salary was a fraction of her own. The critics came back to review the show and gave Romano warm notices. Unfortunately, she believed her own press and hit Merrick and Hayward with demands for a salary increase. This kind of behavior didn’t sit well with Ethel, and Romano was quietly dropped from the show.

By the time
Gypsy
reached its 176th performance in October, it had grossed a record sum of $1.7 million. One week in January 1960 brought a box-office take of $86,400, believed to be a single-week record at the time. As the run continued, the inevitable accusations that Ethel was walking through her performance began to surface. Again ticket buyers were warned not to attend matinee performances, because the star noticeably took down the voltage. (The matinees in
Gypsy
were especially tricky, because the mothers in the audience tended to take a dim view of the character of Rose and withhold applause.) Opinions vary on whether Ethel’s performance did lose some of its bite as the run went on. For Sandra Church the answer is yes. “Jerry made her act as no one did,” said Church, “until slowly and surely, she stopped and slipped back into what was not acting.” Jack Klugman disagrees: “People said she walked through the show. She
never
did. I was there.”

With Ethel’s success in
Gypsy,
NBC decided to build an entire television spectacular around her. She had done plenty of guest shots on all manner of variety shows, but
Ethel Merman on Broadway
would place her in the center ring. The program was to be sponsored by Ford Startime, and she was given three popular leading men: Fess Parker (television’s Davy Crockett), comedian Tom Poston, and blond movie heartthrob Tab Hunter. One sketch featured Ethel as a pistol-packin’ mama in pursuit of Parker, while another presented her as a garrulous American tourist confronting a member of Her Majesty’s guard (Poston) at Buckingham Palace. Finally she played a patient of psychiatrist Hunter who decides to try some role reversal. (They wind up singing “You’re Just in Love.”) Unfortunately, the sketches were of execrable quality—forced and unfunny. The only high point came at the end of the hourlong telecast, when Ethel sang her big medley of showstoppers. The program did yield one memorable anecdote. Ethel was quite taken with Hunter and began a casual flirtation with him that met with a chilly response. She began to get frustrated, until one night during
Gypsy
she asked Jack Klugman if Tab Hunter was gay.

“Is the pope Catholic?” Klugman shot back.

Ethel thought for a moment, looked puzzled, and said, “Yes.”

By the fall of 1959, it was clear to Ethel that her marriage to Six had deteriorated beyond repair. During the Christmas holidays, she had a brief vacation scheduled, and she and Six had promised Ethel Jr. and Bobby that they would spend it in Montego Bay, Jamaica, getting some sun, swimming, and snorkeling. For the sake of the children, Ethel and Six managed to maintain a truce during the trip, but the tension between them was excruciating. For some time Ethel had known about Six’s infidelities while he was on the road; soon she would discover that he was having a serious relationship with television actress Audrey Meadows, famous as Alice Kramden on
The Honeymooners
. When news of Six’s romantic exploits began making the gossip columns, Ethel felt deeply hurt and humiliated. In a heated exchange of letters, she and Six decided to go their separate ways.

Six was out of her life, but not with a Fing! When someone merited a Fing!, it meant that Ethel had placed that person in Coventry and she was not about to revisit the matter. With Six, her sense of betrayal cut too deeply for her to be able to dismiss him so decisively. Following her marriage to Six, she had boasted both privately and publicly that she no longer needed Broadway; to paraphrase
All About Eve
’s Margo Channing, she now had something better to do with her nights. Now she realized, bitterly, that the Broadway audience was the one constant in her life, the one anchor that had never failed her. She was a fifty-two-year-old woman with three failed marriages behind her, and she knew that the odds of finding another great love were slim. She kept up her brisk, no-nonsense front. Privately she felt a welling up of anger and sadness that would only intensify in the years to come.

Accompanied once again by her lawyer, Paul O’Dwyer, Ethel obtained a quickie divorce in Juarez, Mexico—the very scene of her split with Bob Levitt.

A wave of disappointment swept over the company with the presentation of the 1960 Tony Awards.
Gypsy
was nominated in eight major categories, including Best Musical, Best Actress in a Musical (Ethel), Best Featured Actor and Actress in a Musical (Klugman and Church), though not, inexplicably, for Laurents’s brilliant script. But
Gypsy
failed to take home a single Tony. The night’s big winners were Jerry Bock’s
Fiorello!
and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Sound of Music
, whose star, Mary Martin, was given the Best Actress prize that many had automatically assumed would go to Ethel.
The Sound of Music
probably owed its multiple wins to the sentimental vote, since Oscar Hammerstein was ill and died in August of that year. Because Martin was a friend as well as a performer she admired, Ethel said very little about losing the Tony, other than the often-quoted “How are you going to buck a nun?”

After
Gypsy
had played about eighteen months, Sandra Church left the cast. She and Ethel had long since patched up their difficulties, and a civil atmosphere prevailed once again, but everyone in the company knew that Ethel was much happier with Church’s replacement, Julianne Marie.

Another replacement, Alice Playten, who succeeded Karen Moore as Baby Louise, remembered a telling incident when she was introduced to Ethel at her first run-through. “She took my hand and she said, ‘Do you know about the laugh line?’” Playten recalled. “It was this line: Louise asks, ‘Mama, how come I have three fathers?’ and Rose would say, ‘Because you’re lucky.’ It got a laugh every night. I saw the Broadway revival with Tyne Daly, and I thought, ‘They don’t know about the laugh lines.’ I think Miss Merman’s humor and delivery of comedy lines was perfection. She could trust material. Everybody else digs into these lines like they’re something to be mined.”

Apart from
Gypsy,
Ethel’s only other activities at this time were appearances during Richard M. Nixon’s presidential campaign. When he lost in November 1960 to John F. Kennedy, Ethel was asked to perform at the January 20, 1961, inaugural and happily agreed. Even though she was a staunch Republican, she was first and foremost a patriot and regarded it as her duty to show up.