Ethel Merman: A Life (37 page)

Ethel was inconsolable. She wept bitterly, railing to Fabray and Rose Marie about the unfairness of life, and how she did not understand what the world had become.

Like Bobby, Barbara had been drawn to Eastern religions and philosophies. At the memorial service for her, which was held in Santa Monica, various people spoke of the importance of not mourning her loss; she had, it was explained, simply passed on to a higher plane of existence, and it was important for those who survived her to keep peace and joy in their hearts. Ethel was as appalled by the sentiments expressed as she was by the overpowering smell of incense and the fact that the guests were all asked to remove their shoes. In the case of Barbara’s death, as in so many other instances in her life, Ethel could respond only with anger and bewilderment. After the service she wept in Rose Marie’s arms. Apart from her grief over Barbara, she was deeply concerned about her son. “I don’t know what to do about Bobby,” she said over and over again. “He’s just lost.” Her anxiety over Bobby’s lifestyle would intensify in the years to come; some of Ethel’s friends claim that Bobby lived on a raft in Hawaii for a time in the 1970s.

Perhaps it was this string of personal catastrophes, amplified by Ethel’s inability to process them on any transcendant level, that led to an increase both in her drinking and in the intensity of her temperamental outbursts. Ethel remained most comfortable with her old, nonprofessional friends—the ones from her Astoria days—partly because she believed that they accepted her completely for who she was; the question that they might use her or manipulate her for their own benefit was a moot one. She didn’t see Josie Traeger as much, because Josie had moved to Florida, but she kept up with Josie’s sister, Anna Freund. Frequently she spent the weekend with Anna at her modest, neat-as-a-pin home in Islip, Long Island, and at one point she even talked about taking a little apartment there so they could spend even more time together. But several of her professional friends found themselves all but banished.

Her relationship with Benay Venuta was a particularly complicated one. While she relied on Benay for company, it is likely that part of the reason Ethel felt comfortable around her was that Benay posed no real threat to her professionally—in the world of Broadway, Benay was a respected working performer but something of an also-ran. For her part, Benay later admitted to Barbara Seaman, Jackie Susann’s biographer, that she had loved Ethel as one might love a difficult relative but had found her coarse, bigoted, and narrow-minded. In Benay’s own words, she felt that many would not have been so enamored of Ethel had they known what “a sad, dull, middle-class lady” she really was. The two women had had minor altercations over the years, but none as cataclysmic as the one that occurred in the 1970s during a party Benay was throwing for jewelry designer Donald Stannard. Earl Wilson, the well-known syndicated columnist, and his wife, Rosemary, were among the invited guests. Ethel had been drinking during the evening and at one point she cornered Benay in the foyer.

“I’ve got something to tell you, and you’re not going to like it,” she said.

“Then, Ethel, don’t tell me,” said Benay. “Everybody’s having a good time.”

But Ethel had opened the door, and nothing would prevent her from charging through it.

“You’d have never gotten Earl Wilson here if you hadn’t told him it was a party for me,” she snarled at Benay. Then she turned to Stannard. “Nothing against you, Donald,” she said, “but he wouldn’t come to a party for you.” She saved her exit line for Benay: “I’m sick of you using me,” she hissed, then grabbed her coat and walked out.

What followed between the two women was a silence that ended only a couple of years later when, out of the blue, Ethel called Benay and invited her over for cocktails. Benay showed up, intending to ask her what the scene at the Stannard party had been all about. When she saw Ethel, however, she thought better of it, certain that Ethel had been drunk and wouldn’t even recollect the incident.

Despite the fact that these chaotic episodes were multiplying, Ethel’s life remained for the most part precise and orderly. Thanks to wise investments and good counsel from her financial adviser, Irving Katz, she had plenty of money. She had always handled her own correspondence—she’d recently graduated to an electric typewriter that had cursive script—and paid her bills the minute she got them. At the time of her marriage to Bob Six, she had created a corporation, American Entertainment Enterprises; the bulk of her salary was funneled into it, and AEE paid most of her bills. Although Ethel was always insistent about picking up the check when she joined friends for drinks or dinner, she’d never been in the habit of throwing her money around. While she was touring, her needs were relatively simple.

Over and over she stated, “All I want is to travel first class and have my own bathroom.”

Her taste in entertainment was relatively simple and straightforward, too. She enjoyed going to club acts performed by her friends, and as she still knew nothing about cooking, she loved going out for dinner. But her favorite places were anything but high end. Maxwell’s Plum on Manhattan’s East Side was a spot she frequented, but she could most often be seen at Goldie’s New York or at Mayfair, a little restaurant on Fifty-third Street and First Avenue that served simple fare: chicken, burgers, roast beef. She almost always had roast chicken, accompanied by several glasses of Almaden on the rocks. At King Dragon, her favorite Chinese restaurant (“Let’s go to the Chinks,” she would say to Tony Cointreau and James Russo), she would have chicken chow mein, which she declined to share with any of her guests. While dining out, she was treated like royalty, and at Mayfair, frequented largely by gay men, she was always the center of attention. At King Dragon the owners cooed over her: “Missy Merman!” they would say. “We just love Missy Merman!” They also concocted a drink for her called the Merman Stinger: one part brandy, two parts Galliano, one part fresh lime juice, served straight up.

Ethel was still in demand on television, and during the mid-1970s she turned up most frequently as Johnny Carson’s guest on
The Tonight Show
. Her most notable appearance on the show came in 1976, when she electrified the audience with a blazing rendition of “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” with Carson’s brilliant bandleader, Doc Severinsen, performing the trumpet solo. Whenever she appeared on
The Tonight Show
, her routine was the same: no matter how tumultuous the audience reaction, she gave an almost casual bow, then strode over to the couch to sit with Carson and his sidekick, Ed McMahon, and chat. Usually, as she began talking, the applause was still swelling, and if it lasted long enough, she would occasionally make another simple bow. But she never milked the applause, never seemed desperate for the audience’s attention.

The television appearance that may have meant the most to Ethel was her guest shot on
The Muppets
, the enormously popular syndicated series starring Jim Henson’s worldly-wise puppets. When people asked her why she was going to do the show, Ethel replied with total ingenuousness, “It’ll be good exposure!” At sixty-eight, she was keen to connect with the younger generation of television viewers, most of whom had never seen her in the theater. Ethel was quite effective on
The Muppets
, especially when she did something new for her—a soft, slow rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” which she sang to Kermit the Frog. At the end of the episode, when she gently patted the Muppets on the head, she showed an almost childlike delight. After the taping the producers gave her a Kermit doll, a Miss Piggy doll, and a Fozzie Bear doll. Ethel was delighted with the gifts, and kept the dolls in a miniature brass bed by her own bed at the Berkshire.

She still hungered for a television series of her own, something that seems to have annoyed Benay Venuta over the years. “But you don’t have to be Lucille Ball,” Benay had always said. “Isn’t it enough that you’re number one on Broadway?” Perhaps it was to Benay, but not to Ethel, and Gus Schirmer finally wangled her a role on a pilot for a CBS comedy series,
You’re Gonna Love It Here.
Ethel was to have a recurring role as a musical-comedy star who dumps her orphaned grandson on his bachelor uncle (played by Austin Pendleton). Ethel showed her usual flair for comedy, but the script was a poor one, and she wasn’t surprised when CBS passed it over for the fall lineup of 1977.

By far her most spectacular performance of the mid-1970s came, unsurprisingly, in her natural habitat. Attorney Arnold Weissberger had hatched an idea for Ethel to appear with Mary Martin in a one-night-only concert to benefit the Theater and Music Collection of the Museum of the City of New York, a treasure trove of theatrical memorabilia housed on 104th Street and Fifth Avenue. Both stars were intrigued by the notion of reuniting twenty-four years after their history-making appearance on
The Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show,
and soon all the contracts were signed, with the concert date set for May 15, 1977, at the Broadway Theatre. Eric Knight was Ethel’s conductor, John Lesko was Martin’s, and Jay Blackton served as music director. Ticket prices ran up to $150, and after an advertisement was placed in the
New York Times
, the entire theater sold out almost immediately.

Nostalgia, which had been a key component in the entertainment industry since the arrival of
No, No, Nanette, Follies,
and
Irene
earlier in the decade, was still a potent box-office draw in New York, as shown by Town Hall’s Legendary Ladies of the Movies film-clip/personal-appearance series with Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, and other Golden Age movie queens. But even in this context, the Merman-Martin concert stood tall as the most eagerly anticipated theatrical event of the time.

Anna Sosenko, a seasoned pro at producing benefits, signed on to helm the project. Although Ethel tended to blow hot and cold with Sosenko—she didn’t entirely trust her—the two women had a great deal in common. Sosenko was a tough, unyielding businesswoman who was accustomed to getting her way and was not at all above riding roughshod over others. She had first come to prominence as the impresario behind The Incomparable Hildegarde, the elegant cabaret chanteuse whose trademark number was “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup,” which Sosenko had written for her. Sosenko had supervised Hildegarde’s engagements, picked out her clothes, even designed her lighting. This background gave her definite ideas on the subject of stars and how they should be treated. “A big theatrical problem,” she once said, “is that there are too many producers who have money but don’t know anything about theater. Theater should be run like Bloomingdale’s. The president knows merchandising from A to Z. Therefore he is able to hire the right people for the right departments.”

Sosenko immediately tried to cut corners on the benefit, but Ethel wasn’t having any of it. Sosenko and the show’s director, Donald Saddler, wanted Ethel to make her entrance dressed as
Gypsy
’s Rose, with Mary coming on at the same time, costumed as Nellie Forbush in
South Pacific.

“With Chowsie?” said Ethel, remembering the little dog she’d carried when she made her entrance in
Gypsy
.

“We don’t have money for a dog,” replied Sosenko.

“You don’t get a dog, you don’t get me,” answered Ethel. She also demanded limousine service for both Martin and herself; Sosenko had hoped to persuade both stars to travel to and from rehearsal by taxi. Mary had a few demands of her own: for one thing, she insisted on a body mike, and, reluctantly, Ethel went along with it.

Ethel and Mary were delighted to be working together after so much time. Neither woman’s sense of perfectionism had diminished, and for two weeks before the performance, they rehearsed together in a small room in Steinway Hall on Fifty-seventh Street. Mary, who hadn’t performed for the past eight years and whose husband and career architect, Richard Halliday, had died a few years earlier, was exceptionally nervous, and Ethel had to assure her repeatedly that everything would be fine once the night of the concert arrived. Ethel, on the other hand, appeared not to have a nerve in her body. As they rehearsed, she camped up the lyrics, in a tribute to her many gay friends: “Don’t know why / There’s no action in this fly, / Stormy leather!” “Merman, Merman,” Mary gently remonstrated. But as the rehearsal period went on, Ethel became very serious about the task at hand. One day as they were working, a gang of chorus gypsies who had finished their rehearsal in a neighboring studio was standing outside the room where Ethel and Mary were working, listening through the open transom. Ethel heard a noise from the corridor and went to open the door. As she did, the gypsies, who were literally standing on one another’s shoulders, fell into the room.

“HELLO!” said Ethel. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re sorry,” said one of the gypsies. “We got so excited listening to you.”

“How much time do you have?” asked Ethel. When they told her they were through for the day, she invited them in, and she and Mary did the entire Ford duet for them.

To promote the show, Ethel and Mary gave a round of interviews, including one on the popular daytime talk show
Lifestyles with Beverly Sills,
chatting about their careers and, in particular, their appearance on the Ford show in 1953. “I was in the midst of my third mistake in life,” Ethel said, referring to Bob Six, “my third marriage. They all go by numbers.” She also added that when she sang, she was never “diaphragm-conscious. I take a breath when I need to. When they start talkin’ to me ’bout head tones, I don’t know what they’re talkin’ about.”

One day after rehearsal, Ethel and Mary were riding to their respective homes in the limousine that Ethel had strong-armed Anna Sosenko into providing for them. As the limo made its way through the theater district, with its profusion of sex clubs and porn theaters, Ethel heaved a sigh and muttered, “Jesus. Just look how they’ve fucked up Times Square.”