Ethel Merman: A Life (8 page)

Ethel does come off very well in the film—in all her scenes she shows superb comic timing, and her personality never seems too large for the screen, a criticism that would haunt her throughout her career. But the success of
Kid Millions
was ultimately of little value to her personally. Once again it was a case of no contract, no momentum.

W
hile it is often argued that Ethel Merman was launched into superstardom by Cole Porter’s 1934 musical
Anything Goes,
it would be more accurate to say that it was that show that cemented the Merman image of the softhearted tough girl in a way her previous shows had not. What is indisputable is that the production that proved to be a crucial turning point in her career had a difficult birth.

The idea for
Anything Goes
came from Vinton Freedley. It had been only four years since he’d featured Ethel in
Girl Crazy,
but in that time his position had slipped considerably. This was partly due to the conditions that existed on Broadway in 1934, as the Depression had severely undercut producers’ potential for commercial success. As recently as the 1928–29 season, Broadway had been in terrific shape, with a total of 224 productions opening. Many of them closed quickly, but performers weren’t necessarily in a cold panic about finding their next job; usually they were certain that another show would come along soon enough to take its place.

But by 1930–31, the season of
Girl Crazy,
the total number of Broadway shows had dropped to 187, and by 1933–34 it had declined further, to 125. Actors, directors, composers, and writers had fled to Hollywood, with its lure of big money and security, like people in a crowded theater trying to find the fire exit. In the meantime Freedley’s lucrative association with the Gershwins had run aground. Sam H. Harris had produced the brothers’ 1931 Pulitzer Prize winner
Of Thee I Sing.
The following year the producing reins were handed back to Freedley with
Pardon My English,
but it was a dismal flop, and he never again worked with either the Gershwins or with his partner, Alex Aarons. Battling illness and dispirited by the turn in his fortunes, Freedley took an ocean cruise, which gave him the inspiration for a new show, a musical to be set on a luxury liner.

To a precision worker like Ethel, it must have been disconcerting to stand by and watch the haphazard way in which a show’s book was often assembled. Since the musicals of the time were primarily lightweight, song-driven star vehicles, it was not unusual for the book to be the last component to be pulled together. A substantial story was not deemed essential or sometimes even desirable, as it might detract from the score and the stars. Ethel may have thought that the writing of the book for
Take a Chance
set a new standard of chaos, but
Anything Goes
threatened to surpass it. Freedley believed in hiring his stars first and only then building the piece around them, so not a comma had been committed to paper when he pitched the show to Ethel and to the two men who would be her costars, William Gaxton and Victor Moore. The brash, dynamic Gaxton and the timid, fey Moore were already a team in the public’s mind, having starred as President Wintergreen and Vice President Throttlebottom in the Gershwins’
Of Thee I Sing
and
Let ’Em Eat Cake.
All three stars gave Freedley a tentative yes, especially after he had dropped the possibility of Cole Porter’s composing the music. Now all Freedley had to do was find someone to write the book, and he settled on Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, two seasoned pros whose successful track record ranged from Kern’s
Leave It to Jane
(1917) to
Girl Crazy.

Bolton and Wodehouse undertook
Anything Goes
in far-from-ideal circumstances. By now tax troubles prevented Bolton from leaving England for the United States, and Wodehouse was disinclined to abandon his haven in France, so Bolton cobbled out a treatment after consulting with Wodehouse by telephone. What they submitted wasn’t a finished script at all, but a lengthy, unfocused outline of scenes with a few passages of dialogue—a framework that could give Cole Porter a rough idea of where to hang his tunes. It featured some nonsense involving a low-ranking public enemy on board a ship and a lot of chases and disguises, but there was practically nothing to Ethel’s part.

Freedley was horrified when he saw how little Bolton and Wodehouse had come up with. But as they were distinguished theater writers, and since Freedley didn’t want to undercut his long association with them, he decided to keep their names on the project and get someone else to do an overhaul of the book. His first choice was the show’s director, Howard Lindsay, who didn’t see how he could manage to direct and write the entire project himself. Lindsay told Freedley that he would agree to rework the book only if he could have a collaborator.

Out of this mess, one of the most successful writing partnerships in the history of the American theater was formed. By this time Lindsay was a twenty-five-year veteran of the stage, having started out as an actor, segued into directing, and written one play, a 1933 hit called
She Loves Me Not.
Russel Crouse was then working as a press agent for the Theatre Guild and burning to write. The Ohio-born Crouse had started in journalism while still in his teens, and it was during a stint as a sportswriter for the
Kansas City Star
that he picked up the nickname “Buck,” after the prizefighter Buck Crouse, by which he was thereafter known throughout his three-decade career in the theater. Before
Anything Goes
entered his life, his stage experience had consisted of providing the books for two flop musicals. But he was warm and funny and affable and well liked by everyone who worked with him. Among his admirers was Neysa McMein, a noted magazine illustrator who happened to be a close friend of Cole Porter’s. The story became part of Broadway legend, though Ethel was never quite sure it was true: supposedly Porter asked McMein to help him come up with a collaborator, and that night she had a dream about Crouse. Lindsay grew frantic to find him, and as it turned out, he didn’t have to look far: the Theatre Guild’s offices were on the north side of Fifty-second Street, directly across from Freedley’s headquarters. Lindsay popped the question simply by raising the window and hollering to Crouse across the street.

That night, Crouse showed up at the Greenwich Village apartment where Lindsay lived with his wife, the actress Dorothy Stickney. Cole Porter was there and played through several songs that he’d written with no real book to guide him. After hearing the score, Crouse accepted the offer, though Freedley’s terms were far from princely. He had already paid out so much to Bolton and Wodehouse that he could pay only half of 1 percent of the royalties—what amounted to about fifty dollars a week—to both Lindsay and Crouse. But since the project was so prestigious, they agreed to the paltry terms and began writing that same night. They would have to move quickly, since rehearsals started in ten days.

Within twenty-four hours, they had devised what Crouse remembered as “a beautiful story.” They went to Porter’s, and Lindsay outlined the plot while Porter, as always, served cocktails. Lindsay’s capacity, if he wanted to remain on top of his game, was two martinis, but he risked a third. The next morning neither he nor Crouse could remember the story, so they started from scratch. What they eventually came up with was a very funny script about a stockbroker, Billy Crocker (played by William Gaxton), who runs around town with a nightclub singer named Reno Sweeney (Ethel), who is sailing to London with her bevy of chorus girls. Reno is crazy about Billy, but he is really in love with the beautiful Hope Harcourt (Bettina Hall), who has plans to marry an English lord and is traveling abroad with him on the very same ship Reno is taking. When Billy realizes this, he decides to make one last try for Hope and sneaks onto the ship without a ticket or passport. Once on board he crosses paths with a minister, the Reverend Dr. Moon (Victor Moore), who is really Moonface Martin, Public Enemy Number 13, on the lam and hoping to elevate his status and climb to the top of J. Edgar Hoover’s Most Wanted list. Moonface takes a shine to Billy and offers him a ticket and the passport of his cohort Snake Eyes Johnson, who has failed to reach the ship in time to sail. But two federal agents are also on board, and they wind up in hot pursuit of Billy, who tries to dodge them by disguising himself as a chef, a Spaniard—even the wife of the president of Columbia University.

In order to help Bolton and Wodehouse save face, the story was concocted that their original script had been abandoned because it involved a shipwreck. Shortly before rehearsals were to start, an explosion had occurred on the USS
Morro Castle,
just off the coast of New Jersey; the ship had sunk, taking with it 134 lives, and it had become clear to all concerned that a musical about a shipwreck would be the height of tastelessness. This ruse worked so well that, as Ethan Mordden later admitted, it had “taken in three generations of theater historians.”

The Lindsay and Crouse script was sharp and sassy and contemporary, a perfect match for the score Cole Porter had devised. Unlike Ethel, Porter had not been a smash from the beginning. Born to comfortable circumstances in out-of-the-way Peru, Indiana, in 1891, he entered Yale in 1909. There he ran with a sophisticated crowd that included actor Monty Woolley, while writing a great number of football songs and shows for the Yale Dramatic Club. His first attempt at a Broadway musical,
See America First,
came in 1916, and closed after fifteen performances. With World War I still raging and the United States now fighting in it, Porter went to Europe, eventually enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. In 1918, while serving with the American embassy in Paris, he met the beautiful and wealthy socialite Linda Lee Thomas, whom he married the following year. The Porters lived abroad for several years, becoming part of the rapidly expanding café society. Porter continued to write, occasionally turning out a popular tune, but he didn’t fully hit his stride until 1928, when his fourth Broadway musical,
Paris,
became a success. One of its songs, “Let’s Do It,” gave Broadway its first real taste of Porter’s diamond-hard wit. In a line that began with Kern and moved through Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins, Porter worked to scrub away the layers of starch that had built up in the years when operetta was king. And nothing, not even the casual, democratic charms of the Gershwins, had prepared audiences for the man who wrote:

 

Old sloths who hang down from twigs do it,

Though the effort is great,

Sweet guinea pigs do it,

Buy a couple and wait.

 

Porter punctured Americans’ puritanical attitudes toward sex in a way that neither enraged nor alienated his audiences. Instead it disarmed and delighted them. There was something else daringly new about Porter: he wrote about desire with a white-hot intensity that had never before been imagined. In
Gay Divorce
(1932), the Broadway show he composed just before
Anything Goes,
he expressed that desire with amazing directness:

 

Night and day, under the hide of me

There’s an, oh, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me,

And its torment won’t be through

Till you let me spend my life making love to you

Day and night, night and day.

 

Soon after they began working together, it became a commonplace for people to remark that Porter and Ethel seemed an unlikely combination. The Yale man steeped in art and classical verse, and the girl who hardly ever opened a book; the soigné man whose friends described his life as one long “frantic flight from boredom,” and the upbeat girl who doted on simple pleasures; the man who prized elegant food and wine, and the girl who thrived on hamburgers and frankfurters; the man who had frequent relationships with other men yet remained devoted to his wife, and the girl whose sexuality was thoroughly uncomplicated; the impeccably tailored man, and the girl who loved loud hats and flashy jewels; the man who had seen much of the world, and the girl who had scarcely been out of New York—they did seem on the surface to be an odd pair. What mattered was what lay beneath the surface: a determination to share their talents with the world, a consummate professionalism, and most of all a clear understanding of themselves, with no apology for what they weren’t. (Given Ethel’s deep attachment to her own past, she must have loved it when Porter served fudge from Peru, Indiana, at his most elegant dinner parties.) The admiration that Ethel and Cole had for each other never flagged. Porter often said that Ethel sounded “like a band going by,” and Ethel loved singing his songs, both the soulful and the risqué ones.

At first, however, Ethel wasn’t entirely sure that Porter’s musical style was quite right for her. She had no reason to worry, since Porter had seen
Girl Crazy
and her other shows and made a careful study of her voice. He determined that A-flat, B-flat, and C above middle C were the best notes in her roughly octave-and-a-half range, and many of the songs he would write for her would hover around one of those central notes, often ending on it. He loved to flat a sustained note for her, because of the exciting sound she made. And noting her ability to toss off the end of a song with great abandon, he grew fond of writing extended “tag” endings that allowed her to show off a little. But Ethel was wary enough of Porter’s new style to insist that Freedley give her contractual approval of every single number. Throughout his career Porter was famous for never wanting to rewrite a song. Usually, if a performer objected to a particular piece, Porter threw it out altogether and started from scratch, as he felt that rewriting drained the life from it. But his admiration for Ethel was so great that he swallowed his pride and agreed to her demands. Even more surprisingly, he bowed to her second stipulation: that he go to the Century and play all her songs for Mom and Pop Zimmermann’s approval. Porter, no doubt amused by Ethel’s parental devotion, showed up at the apartment, where the Zimmermanns gave thumbs-down to only one song, “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” a big, brassy revival-type number in the second act. It was Ethel’s least favorite as well: she found the melody too rigid, not fluid enough. After studying it, Porter realized she was right and rewrote the melody, and the song stayed in the show.