Ethel Merman: A Life (32 page)

Largely to avoid bad press, Ethel and Borgnine kept up appearances until August 3, when Ethel moved out of the house and into a hotel. Eventually she had her belongings repacked and returned to the apartment at the Park Lane. On November 18, Ethel won an interlocutory divorce decree in Santa Monica Superior Court. Deeply embarrassed and hurt by the abrupt failure of this marriage, Ethel barely discussed it with anyone in the years to come. When she did, she briskly dismissed it, in true Greatest Generation fashion, by saying, “It all came down to dollars and cents.”

The collapse of her fourth marriage brought Ethel an avalanche of unwanted publicity and carved a major chasm right through the middle of her life. It quickly became part of show-business lore, providing Middle America with all the evidence it wanted that performers were volatile, self-centered people who had no business being married in the first place. In Hollywood and theater circles, the thirty-eight-day marriage became a running joke, as legendary as a ballyhooed Broadway musical that winds up running for one night. “Over with faster than the Borgnine-Merman marriage” became a shorthand way of defining failure.

For Ethel it seemed that an irreplaceable part of her life was over. To admit this to herself was unbearably painful and sad, for she was a woman who needed to love and be loved; her Broadway success, staggering as it was, would never be enough to satisfy her. Always she had before her the example of what she considered the ideal marriage, and it sickened her to think that the daughter of Edward and Agnes Zimmermann was a four-time loser. She felt betrayed, angry, and afraid, but not completely without hope. “She never stopped wishing,” said Tony Cointreau, “that she would find another person to love. She told me it was something she prayed to God for every day.”

T
he mid-1960s marked the beginning of the most bitterly unhappy period of Ethel’s life. After the cataclysmic marriage to Borgnine, one disappointment seemed to follow another. To her closest friends, she was beginning to reveal a sadness and loneliness she had not exhibited before. There were also numerous professional setbacks. More than anything she continued to want movie roles and a TV series of her own. But by 1965 she was fifty-seven, and looked very much a middle-aged lady—never the most marketable commodity in Hollywood. One of the properties she pursued was
A House Is Not a Home,
in which she would have played the notorious madam Polly Adler, but eventually the role went to Shelley Winters. Ethel did receive an offer from producer Ross Hunter for another madam role, this time in a comedy he was preparing for Universal,
The Art of Love.
For years Hunter had been making a great deal of money producing lavishly upholstered films such as
Imitation of Life
(1959) and
Midnight Lace
(1960), and Ethel was pleased to be asked to appear in one of his pictures. Her role as Madame Coco was definitely a supporting part, but since the leads were being played by Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, then very hot names in television, the film seemed a good bet. Decked out in a variety of wigs in shades ranging from orange to pistachio, Ethel stole what there was to steal of the film. At one point she was called upon to sing a French song. “I can’t even say ‘Oui,’” Ethel told a reporter, “so I had to learn the song phonetically.” It was released in mid-1965 to thumbs-down reviews and very little box office.

Not long after her split from Borgnine, Ethel received an invitation to take her club act to the Hilton in Sydney, Australia. Roger Edens was available and enthusiastically agreed to be her pianist (along with Eric Knight), even going so far as to waive his fee. For Ethel the two-week engagement was a delightful reunion with Edens, and she was further cheered when audiences turned up in big numbers and the Australian press gave her warm notices. As she returned home through the Far East, Ethel pondered the fact that for a rich and successful woman she had really seen very little of the world; her travels abroad had basically been confined to her 1955 appearance at the Royal Variety show and her 1960 grand tour of Europe with Bobby and Benay. As it happened, Bobby was experiencing a case of wanderlust himself. Since Ethel had been cheated out of seeing the Far East on her honeymoon with Borgnine, she agreed to finance a trip for the two of them. They flew out of Los Angeles in mid-August 1965 and landed in Tokyo, where Bobby took in a performance of the Grand Kabuki. Ethel insisted, as she had in Europe, on having a chauffeur and an English-speaking guide to take them from place to place. Once they’d spent a few days in Tokyo, mother and son headed for Kyoto, then Osaka, Hong Kong, Agra, Jaipur, Bombay, and Moscow—where they saw Laurence Olivier perform
Othello
in Russian with the Moscow Art Theater—then Leningrad and Helsinki. In her memoirs Ethel makes little of this trip. The few anecdotes she recorded are show-business-related: about a performance of
My Fair Lady
in Russian and running into celebrity photographer Jerry Zerbe on the flight from Moscow to Leningrad. The trip seems to have been primarily a chance for Bobby to expand and deepen his knowledge of foreign production styles and techniques. Bobby was eager to get on with his career, and after their return he took a job at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut.

As far back as the mid-1950s, Ethel had made a discovery that may have surprised her as much as it did her closest friends: she liked opera. At the recommendation of those in the know, she began attending performances by the great Croatian soprano Zinka Milanov at the Metropolitan Opera’s old location on Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway. Her interest in opera would continue into the 1970s, and she could be seen from time to time sitting in a box for Milanov’s performances. On one of these occasions, she told her escort, stage director Michael Manuel, “She’s like me—been around forever and knows what the hell she’s doing.” Ethel tended to enjoy performances by big-voiced sopranos like Milanov and Joan Sutherland: no-frills, stand-and-sing divas with amazing instruments. In the spring of 1966, when the Variety Club International was planning a New York tribute to Britain’s Prince Philip, then touring the United States, Ethel urged the event’s producer, Jule Styne, to include Milanov, whom she considered “one of the great ladies of the Met.” Milanov wanted to sing “O mio babbino caro,” but she was unceremoniously dropped from the show at the last minute, and never got to be part of a chorus line of stars, including Lillian Gish, Arlene Francis, Kitty Carlisle, and Ethel, decked out in costumes from
Hello, Dolly!
singing “Hello, Philip!”

Ethel was less enamored of Maria Callas. When the quixotic soprano returned to the Met for performances of one of her great roles, Puccini’s Tosca, in 1965, Ethel was present but was shocked to learn that Callas had skipped a supper-dance in her own honor at the chic restaurant the Four Seasons. Ethel registered her disappointment with a reporter from the
New York Post:
“Imagine that broad not showing up.”

On February 10, 1966, an event occurred that would have significant and enduring impact on Ethel’s professional reputation: Bernard Geis Associates, a small but enterprising Manhattan publishing firm, brought out Jacqueline Susann’s novel,
Valley of the Dolls
.

Having faced the fact that her acting career was dead and not likely to be resurrected, Susann had turned to writing some years earlier and in 1963 had published her first book,
Every Night, Josephine!,
a gently amusing memoir of her pet poodle. But
Valley of the Dolls
was quite a different matter from
Josephine!
It was a cliché-ridden and salacious yet undeniably fast-moving and engrossing novel about three young women who enter show business and gradually lose their way in a maze of pills, alcohol, and abusive men. Nothing quite like it had ever appeared before: there were sexual encounters every few pages, and Susann made liberal use of “screwed,” “balled,” “humped,” “tits,” and various other four-letter words then unheard of in a book released by a mainstream publisher.
Valley of the Dolls
also boasted scenes of drug addiction, anal penetration, abortion, and sex in a swimming pool, all set against a glittering show-business background in a story that spanned twenty years.

Valley of the Dolls
was a pure roman à clef, and not remotely a subtle one. Neely O’Hara, the singer/dancer who becomes a pill-addicted star, was clearly based on Judy Garland; Jennifer North, the body beautiful with no talent, was a composite of such ill-fated sex goddesses as Marilyn Monroe and Carole Landis; and Anne Welles, the prim New Englander who becomes a famous model and television personality, was Jackie’s cleaned-up version of herself.

If Ethel had been any kind of reader at all,
Valley of the Dolls
was the kind of book she might have picked up, and it probably wouldn’t have taken her much more than a paragraph to realize that Helen Lawson, the aging, hard-as-nails Broadway star, was a character all too obviously based on The Merm.

The resemblance of Helen to Ethel could not possibly have been coincidental. Helen is a foul-mouthed, tough-talking dame who is the reigning queen of Broadway musicals. When we first encounter her, she is rehearsing a new show called
Hit the Sky,
and she gives her withering opinion of one of its songs: “It stinks! It doesn’t say anything…. The tune’s okay, but you’d better tell Lou to come up with a better set of lyrics.” Like Ethel, Helen drinks champagne on the rocks and has a Renoir in her apartment. Like Ethel, she has a collection of leather-bound classic books that her attorney has provided as set dressing, but she insists, “You’ll never convince me people actually read that shit. I tried a few pages once…. Christ!” Like Ethel, Helen has great vulnerability where men are concerned; she is always looking for love and threatening to quit the stage as soon as she finds it.

But the characteristic of Helen’s that seemed to strike the strongest chord with readers was her professional toughness. Early in the novel, we see her cruelly arrange the firing of an attractive ingenue who she has decided is getting too much attention. Readers, especially those in the theater community, jumped on this episode as a perfect chance to connect the dots from Helen to Ethel, and as
Valley of the Dolls
steadily climbed the bestseller list—it was number one on the
New York Times
list for a record-shattering twenty-eight weeks—it became common knowledge that Helen was Ethel scarcely disguised. Even the rhythm of the names—Helen Lawson / Ethel Merman—was the same. To her closest friends, Jackie delighted in the unflattering portrait of Ethel, and several industry insiders wondered if Ethel would take the catfight to the next level by suing Jackie, but Donald Preston, the novel’s editor at Bernard Geis, wasn’t worried. “Really, people don’t do that,” he said. “It’s a very difficult thing to prove. Bernie Geis wished that Merman would have sued. He thought that would have made the book!”

Ethel didn’t pursue any legal action, and on the rare occasions when an interviewer cautiously inquired about the resemblance between herself and Helen Lawson, she responded briskly that she hadn’t read the book—that she didn’t read trash. The following year, when the movie version of
Valley of the Dolls
was released, Susan Hayward played Helen, complete with a Brooklyn accent that seemed perilously close to Ethel’s Queens one.

The rest of Ethel’s career would be a look back, not ahead. On January 16, 1966, she turned fifty-eight. She had been a star in the theater for thirty-six years, a record all the more remarkable when measured against the careers of most of her contemporaries in Hollywood, who had managed to stay at the very top for only a few years. In the movies, to be forty was for most women a time of quiet desperation, of taking stock and reshaping their careers, swallowing their pride and accepting mother and character roles. Because her vehicles had been so carefully tailored to her talents, and because most of them featured such top-quality musical material, Ethel had been able to put off dealing with the age bridge—which was much less considerable on Broadway than in Hollywood. But now it seemed unlikely that she could ever again play a genuine romantic lead. Even her diehard fans began to believe her when she told the press, over and over, that she was finished with Broadway.

There wasn’t much more she wanted to do in any case. By the mid-1960s, the quality of Broadway musicals had dropped off markedly. Cole Porter had died in 1964. Jule Styne was to reach another peak in his career with
Funny Girl,
then do a slow fade. Irving Berlin’s
Mr. President
in 1962 was a dismal, old-fashioned flop, and while Richard Rodgers kept trying until his death in 1979, his career really did not survive the loss of Oscar Hammerstein.

The 1960s was a decade littered with expensive failures:
Greenwillow, Tenderloin, Donnybrook!, Sail Away, Subways Are for Sleeping, All American.
Of course there were still flashes of brilliance, such as Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s score for
Fiddler on the Roof
or John Kander and Fred Ebb’s for
Cabaret.
But in general a decline had set in. Attending a Broadway musical had not yet become an outrageously expensive proposition—the ticket prices were still generally under $10—but events had been set in motion that would eventually make going to the theater an elitist rather than a popular pastime. In the 1960s Broadway theater owners acquiesced to the demands of Local One, the stagehands’ union, agreeing to set minimum quotas of stagehands, whether or not they were needed—a move that would in future years help to send the cost of Broadway shows skyrocketing.

Another developing trend that affected sixties musicals was the casting of big movie and television names, regardless of their singing ability or significant stage experience: Robert Horton in
110 in the Shade
, Maureen O’Hara in
Christine,
Vivien Leigh in
Tovarich,
Anthony Perkins in
Greenwillow
—all were inferior shows that didn’t survive despite their star wattage. Big-and small-screen names were also unaccustomed to the physical demands of an eight-a-week run: witness Lucille Ball’s collapse from exhaustion that necessitated the closing of the potentially lucrative
Wildcat.

Ethel couldn’t understand this turn of events. To her way of thinking, if they couldn’t sing, they had no business doing a musical. For those who could sing—Mary Martin in
Jennie,
for example—if they couldn’t get the right material, what was the point? They were only damaging the reputations they had so carefully built up. Ethel’s standards remained high, and as she said repeatedly, Broadway had been good to her, but she’d been good to Broadway. If this was the new Broadway, they could do without each other.

And then she received a call from Irving Berlin. Still smarting from the failure of
Mr. President,
Berlin had hit on the idea of reviving his biggest smash,
Annie Get Your Gun
—but only if Ethel agreed to do it. Despite the fact that she was pushing sixty, the idea of bringing
Annie
to a younger theatergoing generation appealed to her. And to give the project true nostalgic weight, it would be produced by half of the original producing team, Richard Rodgers, by now the head of musical theater projects at Lincoln Center. The revival was set to open at the New York State Theater, the new home of New York City Opera, in May, at the end of the 1965–66 season.