Ethel Merman: A Life (19 page)

It was true: Bob was getting fed up with Ethel’s blunt, uniform approach to handling all her problems. He felt oppressed by the strictness with which his wife managed her life and hemmed in by her inability to change her opinion of anything or anyone. Although she wanted to present the image of a successful, happy woman to the rest of the world, she failed to make much distinction among the components of a successful woman’s life: a responsible and attractive husband, well-behaved children, a nice home and wardrobe, a thriving career—all were pursued with the same dogged determination. She loved Bob and the children deeply, and if one of them got sick, no more attentive wife or mother could be found. While she was anything but cold or selfish, she had little talent for genuine empathy. It was very difficult for her to get inside the minds and hearts of her family and intuit what they might be thinking or feeling. Ethel lived her life moment to moment; she had never taken much in the way of a broader view. She was, in many respects, the embodiment of the Greatest Generation—all common sense and work ethic and full speed ahead, never looking to the side.

Being between jobs on Broadway only amplified these tendencies, and with the situation at home rapidly deteriorating, Ethel began to look forward to the day when she could go back to work.

B
y the time her next show,
Call Me Madam,
opened, Ethel had made one of the most important transitions of her working life. A superficial look at her career might lead to the conclusion that she had started at the top and stayed there. This was true in a sense, when her swift rise is compared with the decades-long struggle that most performers endure. But Ethel’s life on Broadway had actually been a series of segues, most of them too subtle for the general public to notice.

In
Girl Crazy
she had gone from unknown to sensational young discovery; in
Anything Goes
from revue artist to crack singing comedienne in a book show; in
Panama Hattie
from a star comic’s leading lady to a star who carried the show; in
Annie Get Your Gun
to a character star capable of greater dramatic dimension. Now, with
Call Me Madam,
she would cross over from Broadway star to Broadway institution—from Ethel Merman to “The Merm.” Her nearly three-year run in
Annie Get Your Gun
had clinched her status as one of Broadway’s legends. From this point on, as far as Broadway was concerned, she was nothing less than a national treasure.

Not that everyone in America got Ethel’s message. Many in the West, the Midwest, and the South—people who had never experienced her live, thanks to her dislike of touring—regarded her from her records and TV appearances as crass, vulgar, and loud—the vocal equivalent of a rusty saw. Those who had not seen her perform onstage were, of course, less likely to accept her as a recording artist. In the words of cabaret entertainer Klea Blackhurst, her singing was anything but “make-out music.” Ethel had made a few recordings that had done well, namely her 1940 Decca disc of selected songs from
Panama Hattie
and the original cast album of
Annie Get Your Gun.
In 1950 she was put under exclusive contract to Decca, where over the next few years she cut a number of singles, mostly novelty numbers and knockoffs of other people’s Broadway hits, such as “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
and “Love Is the Reason,” from
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
with lyrics by her pal Dorothy Fields. But she and Ray Bolger had a hit with Bob Hilliard and Dave Martin’s nostalgic comic ditty “Dearie,” paired with another novelty tune by George Wyle and Eddie Pola called “I Said My Pajamas (and Put On My Prayers).” This single, recorded on January 4, 1950, and released one month later, sold two hundred thousand copies in its opening weeks. Later singles, with Bolger and on her own, were disappointments. At a time when the recording industry was dominated by smooth-voiced female vocalists such as Jo Stafford, Dinah Shore, Helen O’Connell, and Margaret Whiting, Ethel seemed destined to remain an acquired taste to the record-buying public.

Nor did Hollywood regard her as anything but unmarketable, the latest evidence being MGM’s screen version of
Annie Get Your Gun,
which was released in May 1950 and became one of the studio’s biggest successes, grossing over $8 million. The film had a strife-ridden production: Judy Garland had been assigned the part of Annie, but her personal difficulties had built to a peak during filming. When the project fell seriously behind schedule, in no small part due to Garland’s inability to function properly on the set, MGM fired her and replaced her with a supporting player from the Broadway production of
Panama Hattie
—none other than Betty Hutton. At no point does anyone at the studio appear to have considered asking Ethel to repeat her stage triumph on film, and the picture’s overwhelming success must have stung. To the press, however, she always denied that she cared about missing these Hollywood opportunities.

She remained a puzzlement even to some people in show business. Shortly after moving to New York from California in 1940, dancer Marge Champion saw Ethel for the first time, in
Panama Hattie.
“I didn’t have a clue to what Ethel Merman really was,” said Champion, “because I was not a New Yorker. I couldn’t look through New York eyes. I didn’t have a New York perspective until after I moved here, and then it took me a while. Even when I saw her in
Annie Get Your Gun,
and she leaned back and sang, ‘I GOT LOST IN HIS AAAAAAAAAAAAAHMS!’—
lost in his arms?
I thought, ‘Well, he wouldn’t put his arms around that!’”

One factor that kept Ethel from being widely accepted outside of New York was the ongoing perception of many that she was Jewish. “She seemed like the darling of the Bronx, Brooklyn, whatever,” Champion recalled. “And, for me, coming from another part of the country, that said ‘Jewish.’ That’s wrong. It can be Irish, Italian, anything. And who cares what it is anyway?” But many people in rural areas and small cities perceived Ethel to be the essence of Jewish New York show business—and for them, unfortunately, that was a negative.

But if much of the rest of the country had reservations about Ethel, New York audiences loved her more than ever. And when it was announced that she and Irving Berlin would reteam for another Broadway show, the excitement around town was palpable.

The genesis of
Call Me Madam
came in the summer of 1949, when Ethel, Bob, and the children were once again vacationing at the Colorado Hotel. Also staying there were Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney—Ethel had recommended the hotel to them as an ideal quiet getaway. One day, while looking out the window of his room, Lindsay spotted Ethel poolside. He watched the way she walked, the way she plopped herself down in a deck chair, and found himself thinking that this had to be the most American American woman he’d ever seen. He happened to have been reading a magazine article about Perle Mesta, the freewheeling society hostess whose down-to-earth charm and bottomless reserves of cash had been of enormous aid to the Washington political scene.

Lindsay called down to Ethel that he’d just had an idea for her next show: it would be about Perle Mesta.

Ethel, who was never much interested in following society news, and certainly not society news from Washington, shot back, “Who’s Perle Mesta?”

Quickly the writers gave Ethel some of the background for what would become her next role. Mesta started life as the daughter of a rich Oklahoma oilman. She married well, to Pittsburgh manufacturer George Mesta, who left her a widow at age thirty-six. She moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where she became actively involved in women’s rights and was an early champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. Her loyalty at this time was strictly to the Republican Party, but after moving to Washington, D.C., in 1940, she allied herself with the Democrats. Mesta became one of the capital’s most enchanting hostesses, in part because of the unpretentious spirit of the parties she gave. She could make even the stuffiest, most reticent politicians and diplomats feel instantly comfortable. One of her favorite figures was the equally no-nonsense Harry S. Truman, and she threw her support behind him wholeheartedly. In 1949 he rewarded her with an appointment as the first-ever U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, a distinction that landed her on the cover of
Time
magazine.

Fourteen years had passed since Ethel had last worked with Lindsay and Russel Crouse in
Red, Hot and Blue!,
and in that time they had achieved undreamed-of success: their
Life with Father
opened in 1939 and ran for 3,224 performances, becoming the longest-running dramatic play in the history of the American stage. In 1941 they had switched to producing and scored another massive hit with
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Returning to playwriting, they came up with
State of the Union
, a biting comedy-drama about political infighting and corruption that earned them the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for drama. But their 1948 sequel to
Life with Father,
naturally enough called
Life with Mother,
had failed, and they were looking for another hit. A vehicle for Ethel seemed a sure bet.

In the years that followed the chaotic creation of
Anything Goes
and
Red, Hot and Blue!,
Lindsay and Crouse had developed a highly methodical way of working. In the case of
Life with Father,
they spent two years discussing and planning the play’s architecture before they committed one word to paper. Once they sat down to write, they finished the dialogue in only seventeen days. For the script of
Call Me Madam,
they did not allow themselves such a generous amount of time. The two worked at fever pitch, Lindsay with his sure theatrical savvy and Crouse with his keen sense of comedy, but they found that the book was not easy to assemble. Early on, they had approached Irving Berlin, their first and only choice to write the songs, and as the project moved forward, all three creators expressed some concern that the plot be carefully handled, in case Perle Mesta should take offense and pursue legal action. Then there was Ethel, who threw them a curveball by announcing that she wasn’t looking for another musical but a meaty dramatic role. As work on the book progressed, Ethel conceded that she would sing a little—maybe two or three songs. Eventually she came around to accepting the idea of
Call Me Madam
as a full-scale musical comedy, but her resistance didn’t make the playwrights’ work any easier.

Berlin, ever anxious where his own work was concerned, was particularly fretful about the general climate on Broadway. The musical theater showed no sign of slowing its journey into seriousness: witness the 1949 premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
South Pacific,
a tale of racism and interracial love that earned the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the first musical to be so honored since
Of Thee I Sing
in 1931. As a nod to Broadway’s prevailing mood, Berlin had followed up his “old-fashioned smash”
Annie Get Your Gun
with
Miss Liberty.
Weighed down by a shapeless, spiritless book by Robert Sherwood, it closed without recouping its investment. Now Berlin was frantic to return to what he knew best, the old-fashioned musical comedy, but equally unsure that audiences would accept it.

By May 1950, Lindsay and Crouse were still trying to iron out a few of the book’s problem patches. While they were in the home stretch, Ethel and Bob took the children back to Colorado for a six-week rest before rehearsals began on August 14.

The cost of producing a show had escalated since the war years, and
Call Me Madam
was budgeted at a hefty $250,000. The producer was Leland Hayward, the former agent who in the preceding few years had emerged as one of the most successful producers on Broadway, with hits such as
State of the Union, Mister Roberts,
and
South Pacific.
Slightly high-strung, with a neatly trimmed crew cut and crevasselike lines in his face, Hayward was something of an enigma: he was the definition of the peripatetic producer and could carry on as many as six telephone conversations at once. He eagerly signed up clients about whom he knew little, but the passing of time didn’t necessarily mean that he got to know them better. Lindsay and Crouse, who referred to themselves as Hayward’s “common-law clients” because they had always declined to sign a contract with him, once threw a party for Hayward, inviting many of the illustrious writers and stars in his stable. When Hayward got to the party, he asked Lindsay and Crouse, in all sincerity, who these people were.

Hayward possessed a nose for what would make a good show: he had purchased James Michener’s collection of stories,
Tales of the South Pacific
, only a few days before it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and persuaded Rodgers and Hammerstein to set it to music. He had come across a series of sketches about World War II naval life in the
Atlantic Monthly
; it eventually became the long-running
Mister Roberts
. A producer, Hayward believed, could easily run aground if he sought only commercial success. “You have to stage it with love,” he once said. “Then, you have to get the best people you can. I’m considered an extravagant producer. There’s no such thing as economy in the theater. Only quality counts.”

Unlike Vinton Freedley and other producers of an earlier era, Hayward didn’t necessarily put his own money into his shows. For
Call Me Madam,
he arranged to get 100 percent of the financing from RCA and NBC, with the idea that the former would record the original cast album and the latter would have the television rights if
Call Me Madam
should be transferred to the small screen. It was customary for a show’s management to split profits fifty-fifty with the backers, but in the case of
Call Me Madam,
RCA/NBC would receive only 35 percent of the net earnings, as Hayward had assured them that the difference of 15 percent would be made up by an increase in operating profits: orchestra seats were to be set at an all-time high of $7.20.

If Hayward was a force to be reckoned with, so was
Call Me Madam
’s director, George Abbott, who was working with Ethel for the first time. A former actor, Abbott had switched to writing and directing in the 1920s and had made a name for himself as the expert director of both melodrama (
Broadway, Chicago
) and farce (
Twentieth Century, Three Men on a Horse, Room Service
) before moving into musicals. He had directed many of the great Rodgers and Hart successes, including the groundbreaking
Pal Joey.
Abbott was something of a pragmatist in his approach to the theater, which he regarded as more a craft than an art. He was extremely shrewd at assessing what would make a show a hit, and even after the rise of Method acting, with its emphasis on sense memory as a means of communicating emotion, he was not afraid to hand actors their line readings. He believed in economy onstage and worked very hard to make his productions as simple and pared down as possible. He could be dictatorial in rehearsal: everyone referred to him as “Mr. Abbott,” as nothing else was acceptable. He loved women and liked to be around the beautiful girls in his shows when he wasn’t working; frequently he gave big Sunday parties to which all the showgirls were invited. (He was much less comfortable around gay men, who normally were not invited to the Sunday get-togethers.) And he could be shockingly tight-fisted. Helene Whitney, who sang in the chorus of
Call Me Madam,
said, “He was the cheapest man this side of the Mississippi. I remember going out to a bagel place in Philadelphia, and he asked all the girls to go. We did, and we all had bagels, and he put down a dollar and said, ‘Here’s my share,’ and got up and left.”