Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (87 page)

Impersonations

Mimicry and impersonation don't always give the impression of homage, and
some performances done in Merman's image don't escape the whiff of ridicule. These are often the campier Ethel Mermans, versions that invoke not just the
voice but also the characteristics attributed to her character and look. Most
typically, the performances take her appearance from later years, big bouffant
hair, full figure, and colorful dresses and jewelry. Blackhurst explains why this
particular Ethel remains stuck in the popular imagination today: "What
eventually got remembered about her is what she looked like and sounded
like late in life. People aren't really listening; they're remembering her hair
style on Ed Sullivan, which she shouldn't be memorialized for." 13

Some of the incarnations suggest that Merman herself resembled a drag
queen. Interestingly, as gay theater historian John Clum observes, Merman
was "not good" when she did male drag ("A Sailor's Not a Sailor ..."); she
was better in "female drag, [as] a pumped-up version of a sassy, tough
woman."" A&E's Biography episode addressed the "camp icon" part of Merman's legacy, showing the kitschy, quasi-drag performance she did as a
braided "Swiss Miss" performing a verse of "Alexander's Ragtime Band,"
from There's No Business Like Show Business. Ethel's relation to subsequent
drag performers is complex.

Clum maintains that when drag queens "do Garland," it's "an homage":
"You can't parody Garland.... You can only imitate the physical mannerisms, but not as the sort of parody one does with Merman or Channing," 15
suggesting that some degree of ridicule-whether affectionate or barbedalways works behind Merm impersonations. It's a curious assertion, given
that many drag queens meticulously research "their" Merman in order to
portray details accurately in a meaningful homage, not a send-up. David, a
drag actor in the American Southwest, says, "Oh, I would never do Ethel on
the spur of the moment. I would need to go back and look at how she moves
her arms, hands, her whole body. She's been done to death, and done so
badly it's a shame.""

One impersonation of Merman that had special resonance for her son was
produced collectively:

I don't enjoy the experience of watching impersonations of my mother as
much as I enjoy their "reasons for being." Ethel Merman is everybodys Ethel
Merman, but she's only one (living) person's mother, and that's me. When it
comes to viewing impersonators, I try to get into a "mermish" frame of mind,
but no matter how I approach it, Mom always trumps Merm, and all the impersonations I've seen to date have evoked a slightly uncomfortable, "funny
feeling" when I see them. Nothing awful. Sometimes even entertaining. But
still-it's never quite comfortable for me. Not since my mother died. When
she was alive it was different.

The single exception to this is the Ethel Merman Chorus based here in the
[San Francisco] Bay Area. Watching a whole chorus of Ethel Merman "impersonators" lifted me way beyond any feelings I ever had watching one person imitate my mother. Presenting their tribute through over-the-top humor,
with everyone singing their hearts out in full voice a la Ethel Merman, the chorus's many impersonal persons capture some of the essence of my mother's astounding style and bravura better than any single-person impersonation I've
ever seen.17

There is something about impersonating Merman that many people find
irresistible. Mention her name, and the most casual fan will give you the
brassy voice, perhaps peppered with a saucy anecdote or two. "It is the easiest thing in the world to imitate a caricature of Ethel," says Tony Cointreau.
He remembers Merman's response to a show they attended in which Carrie
Fisher impersonated her. Poking him, Ethel asked, "Is that me?"18

Queer Fantasies

More than the actual details of Merman's personality as life story, it's her assumed attributes that matter to people. Fans use them as reference points, a
sort of celebrity glue that lets them form some kind of community with others. Merman's own heterosexuality hasn't stopped queer perceptions of her
from taking on a life of their own, giving people a way to overlay her iconic
"toughness" with various sexual meanings and expectations. Merman is an
especially pivotal magnet for the cultures of gay male "musical queens," but
she is no less important among women of all sexualities. Unlike queer icons
such as Garbo, Dietrich, Doris Day, and Barbara Stanwyck, Ethel hardly
transgressed conventional gender roles, but something about the earthy autonomy that Merman conveyed in performance gives her a strong, unconventional sexual edge. Said Bob Fosse, "Everyone thought Ethel was butch
and maybe a lesbian, but she wasn't. And everyone thought that lovely little
Mary [Martin] was Miss Femme, and she was-except next to her gay husband." Clum agrees, "There's always something butch about Merman," as
does Stacy Wolf, who found in Mama Rose a Jewish butch performance.19
For one lesbian fan, Ethel gave her a way to connect to other women: "In
about 1987, I placed a personal ad in the Washington Blade (the local gay
paper in Washington, DC).... I included Ethel Merman as one of my
`likes' in the ad. One woman wrote back saying how much she enjoyed
Ethel's rapport with Lucy [apparently confusing Ethel Merman with Ethel Mertz, the character on I Love Lucy]. Another woman wrote back who was
also a fan of Ethel Merman's. We became friends and exchanged tapes of
Merman records. "20

One of the more aggressively queer reinventions of Ethel Merman is given
by Madge Weinstein, a male podcaster. Madge is a fictional mix of flamboyance, pathos, and flatulence in a deep voice, strong New York accent, and
attitude. In a 2004 podcast, Madge relayed her fantasized encounter with
Ethel Merman, opening with "How I fell in love with a very famous person."
Here is some of the printable dialogue: "I had seen Gypsy three times and had
worn out my record needle playing it.... Ethel Merman was hot.... I
knew she was a dyke too, having married and divorced Ernest Borgnine in
less than a year. And I saw the way she looked longingly at Gypsy Rose Lee
in the show."

Madge sees the name of Ethel's daughter at her father's Bronx funeral
home and goes insane. More insane is what follows: Arriving alone at the funeral home, Ethel Merman makes eye contact only with Madge ("a knowing
gleam is how I'd describe it"). Madge says, "I felt love.... I pictured us growing old together." At a coffee shop, Merman gives Madge a rose pendant that
she was planning to give her late daughter for Hanukkah, explaining, "because you remind me of her." Madge asserts, "Ethel was the love of my
life ... she taught me to be strong, to deal with life, and she taught me to be
weak, in order to love."

"Madge" makes no attempt to professionalize her account, nor does she
try to authenticate the story (e.g., the time and place of Little Ethel's death).
It's a tale of hokey erotics that has an appalling crudeness and a strangely
poignant pathos that ascribes the fictional lesbianism and Jewishness to
Merman so many others have. But more than anything, Madge's podcast
knows it's "made up," it's a rewriting of Ethel's history to bring the icon into
Madge's own life. This small bit of Web culture (and Ethel is everywhere on
the Web) suggests that Ethel Merman could be the mother or the lover
of us all .21

Remembering Her Voice

Because Ethel Merman is indistinguishable from the Broadway musical, part
of the pleasure people take in reinventing her is in considering her performing other kinds of music. For instance, when Blackhurst introduces her rendition of one of Merman's ballads on Everything the Traffic Will Allow, she says, "Now, for make-out music, I know that Ethel Merman usually isn't on
the top of the stack of most people's CD changer." Merman herself gave
people the chance to speculate about the big voice of the stage performing
music from other worlds when she released The Ethel Merman Disco Album.
Twenty years later, in fact, when that LP was re-released on CD, a reviewer
mused about a possible "Ethel Merman Hip Hop CD" coming out soon.
Other fantasy CDs, culled informally from fans familiar with the recording
Merman Does Merman, include "Merman Does Mitchell" (Joni) or "Merman
Does Carmen."

When Ethel's friend Roger Edens composed "Lady with a Song" for her,
he acknowledged the gap between the typical Merman repertoire and opera
in his lyric "you wouldn't want to see me/ play Mimi in Bo-he-me." Yet,
plenty of vocal experts believe Merman's voice was good enough for opera,
and during her lifetime she had plenty of fans in high musical places.
Among them was Igor Stravinsky. Lillian Libman, the composer's personal
manager and press representative from 1959 until his death in 1971, recalls,
"Ethel Merman was one of Stravinsky's favorite `legit' stars, and when we
went to see Gypsy, I had to secure seats that practically made us members of
the percussion section so that he could satisfy himself that her voice-`What
an instrument! It could fill Madison Square Garden without a microphone!was capable of conquering the liveliest combination of sound."22 When Arturo Toscanini heard her sing "I Get a Kick out of You" and proclaimed
"Castrato!"23 he gave Merman entree into not only a different musical world
but a differently gendered one as well. Tenor Luciano Pavarotti told Merman that he admired her tessitura, to which the George Eells Ethel added,
"Whatever that is."

Merman's voice continues to be reproduced whenever costars reminisce:
"Singing a duet with her is thrilling and exciting-and it melts all the wax
in your ears" (Jack Klugman).24 Donald O'Connor said that after recording their duet in Call Me Madam, he couldn't hear for three days.25 Music
critic Henry Pleasants, who said that on its own Ethel's voice was "godawful," goes on to note that, like Judy Garland's, Merman's voice was somewhat limited, but both were "natural and exuberant belters." It was not their
vocal range that impressed, he writes, but the fact that "their voices sounded
bigger than they actually were.... They sang with an unfeigned ardor, with
an irrepressible joy in singing, especially when they were belting, that persuaded even sophisticated listeners to countenance and applaud sounds not
normally considered becoming to well-behaved females."26

The year after Merman's death, Bob Thomas's 1985 biography, I've Got
Rhythm: The Ethel Merman Story, appeared-surprisingly, the first one ever
on the star. The Ethel Merman that Thomas produced, he announced, was
not "the Merman that everyone knew: Shoulders squared, feet planted firmly
on the stage, tossing her defiant heart all the way to the balcony," but rather
"another Ethel Merman: frightened, erratic, explosive, a woman of great sorrows and high achievement."27 Thomas's biography is not unsympathetic,
but the sympathies take a backseat to the sensational copy they give. His research was drawn primarily from interviews with people fresh from Ethel's
late-life phase, which he labels the "Angry Years." Bob Levitt finds the portrait of his mother of the time perplexing: "Mom was as proud of herself as
ever. She never experienced her life in a diminished way.... The sense of her
being lonely, bitter, tragic, withdrawn, etc., is simply untrue to what she was
really about."28

A slightly fuller, if light, appreciation was offered in a 1999 TV bio of Ethel
Merman that aired on A&E's Biography series. The hour-long show was
hosted and narrated by Peter Graves (an odd choice for a Broadway diva but
her lead in Airplane!), who traces the arc of Merman's life with help from interviewees including Barbara Geary, Tony Cointreau, Jack Klugman, Jerry
Orbach, and Mitzi Gaynor (who judiciously does not share the dirty joke
Ethel told her when they first met).

In the early zooos, DVDs appeared for the first time of Call Me Madam,
the Ford 50th Anniversary Show, and other long-unavailable recordings. CDs
as well have been reissued and newly anthologized, ranging from Alexander's
Ragtime Band to a new collection called Mermania! One expects more to
come, since, as Al E Koenig Jr. notes, Merman's death effectively coincided
with the advent of compact discs. Merman continues to appear to us in every
tome that has been published on musical theater, but strangely she remains
the solo star of only a handful of books: after Thomas's biography, George
Bryan published a "bio-bibliography" reference book in 1992; a second bio,
by Geoffrey Mark, came out in 2005;29 and another is being prepared by an
opera critic. Ethel has many other half-lives, sometimes in odd corners: one
very tiny Ethel tribute emerged on September 1, 1994, on a postage stamp
in which a colorful,195os-era Merman joined fellow honorees Ethel Waters,
Nat "King" Cole, and Bing Crosby in a series called "Popular Singers"; at the
turn of the century, viewers could catch Ethel and Ray Middleton singing "Anything You Can Do" on TV in commercials for Tide detergent. On the
Internet on any given day, eBay offers scores of Merman memorabilia, and
dozens of fan sites are devoted to her. (Curiously, the Ethel Merman domain
has been purchased by an anonymous San Francisco resident, presumably
for resale.) Today, fans have so many options for consuming Miss Merman
that one can do so literally: there is an American gourmet chocolate brand
called "Ethel M."

Every year without even trying, Ethel's in the Tony Awards ceremony, since
celebrating the Broadway theater is impossible without her, whether referencing a show she starred in or playing a song she made famous, usually
"There's No Business Like Show Business." In 2003 the Academy Awards
ceremony-usually not a big promoter of New York culture-ran a brief
kinetoscope of Ethel performing that same song.