Ethel Merman: A Life (23 page)

B
efore the closing of
Call Me Madam
, Ethel received the best news she’d ever had from Hollywood: 20th Century Fox had agreed to let her reprise her role in the film version the studio was preparing for 1953 release. In the past neither Ethel nor her agents had expended much energy to secure the film versions of her Broadway successes, and perhaps on some level she even understood why MGM had felt she was too old and not sexy enough to play Annie Oakley on the screen. But Sally Adams was not a role that depended on youth or sensuality, and Irving Berlin, no doubt feeling that he owed Ethel a great deal because she had kept
Annie
and
Call Me Madam
running for so long, lobbied hard with Fox’s studio chief, Darryl Zanuck, to get Ethel the part. He pointed out that her earlier films for the studio had not shown her off to great advantage and that if she were presented as she was, not in a diluted version of herself, she would click with a movie audience, just as she had captivated Broadway. Although Zanuck might have more predictably gone with an established film star like Rosalind Russell or the studio’s own Betty Grable, he listened and pondered, and eventually he came around to Berlin’s way of thinking.

The screenplay had been in development for much of the year, and at a script conference on April 2, 1952, Zanuck seemed pleased with the progress being made, though he had some reservations about the satirical element. “I am desperately afraid of too much emphasis on the tongue-in-cheek attitude,” he noted, and pushed screenwriter Arthur Sheekman to put greater depth of feeling into the scenes between Cosmo and Sally, to make them “not quite so flip and musical comedy.” With characteristic perceptiveness he also felt that the picture should not be stylized. “This is a
personality
piece,” he dictated in a memo. “It is not a
spectacle
piece…. Nothing on a grand scale, or we will lose the personality story.” Revisions took place over the summer of 1952, and slowly a script emerged that was more focused and streamlined than the Broadway original. There were the usual interferences from the Breen office: Sally’s line to Pemberton, “I’m the Madam, and you’re just one of the girls,” had to be softened to “I’m the Madam and you’re just one of the…boys.” By September 5 the final shooting script had been approved, and Ethel was on her way to Hollywood, where she had booked a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Ethel arrived on the 20th Century Fox lot amid much ballyhoo, as several of her biggest fans in the press, including Louella O. Parsons and Radie Harris, had gone out of their way to publicize her work on
Call Me Madam
. The film’s producer, Sol Siegel, took the studio party line that the picture would have been unthinkable without Ethel. She was given one of Fox’s top directors of musicals, Walter Lang, and Betty Grable, just coming off a ten-year run as the studio’s number-one box-office attraction, insisted that Ethel be given her dressing room. A top-flight cast was assembled: George Sanders, who possessed a surprisingly good, mellow baritone, was ideal for Cosmo. The gifted Donald O’Connor, who had just had a big hit at MGM in
Singin’ in the Rain,
was a wonderful foil as Kenneth (leaving Russell Nype out in the cold), and the lovely dancer Vera-Ellen, who had once backed Ethel up in
Panama Hattie
, was an excellent choice for Princess Maria.

From the start, Ethel was delighted with her director, the genial, workmanlike Lang. Born in Memphis, Lang had begun his creative life as a painter. He’d arrived in Hollywood in the 1920s and become a busy director during the silent era. After taking a break to concentrate on his painting, he returned to Hollywood and signed with Fox in the mid-1930s. He went on to turn out some of the studio’s greatest successes, from the Betty Grable vehicles
Moon Over Miami
(1941) and
Mother Wore Tights
(1947) to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original screen musical
State Fair
(1945) to the Clifton Webb comedy
Sitting Pretty
(1948). He directed comedy with verve rather than style or sophistication, and his efficient work habits—his films consistently came in on schedule and on budget—made him a great favorite with studio bosses. Actors also liked working for him, because he seldom lost his temper. Barbara Hale, who starred opposite James Stewart in Lang’s 1950 comedy
The Jackpot,
remembered the director as “a gentle genius.”

Ethel seemed unusually edgy throughout the first few days of production. During filming of the picture’s opening number, “The Hostess with the Mostes’,” she repeatedly fumbled a phrase. Shaken, she turned to Lang and said, “Guess I’ve got to feel that I’m reaching through to the audience, and I can’t seem to get even a glint out of the camera lens.” The woman who claimed not to have a nerve in her body throughout twenty years of Broadway opening nights now seemed quite apprehensive. In the first few days, she studied the rushes obsessively, trying to learn how to build a performance for film. Lang was delighted with her work, but Ethel didn’t relax her vigilance and continued to examine the rushes during the entire shooting schedule.

Filming progressed smoothly; Ethel even got along well with the notoriously difficult George Sanders. And despite her disappointment that Russell Nype was not signed to re-create the part of Kenneth Gibson, she adored working with the brilliant Donald O’Connor. They were wonderful in their scenes together, particularly the big comedy duet “You’re Just in Love.” Ethel responded to O’Connor’s natural buoyancy and charm with a performance of great wit and color. O’Connor, for his part, returned the compliment. He’d often had occasion to observe that the great show-business personalities tended to remain the same on screen and in life; it was difficult to tell where the public persona of Bob Hope, for example, left off and where the private one began. It was nice for paying audience members, thought O’Connor, to see someone off-screen who appeared exactly as she did on—that way they could never be disillusioned. But O’Connor was delighted to discover that the private Ethel was entirely different from her showbiz persona. At big Hollywood parties, she seemed almost shy. O’Connor found her genuine, real, and all too human.

Since Denver was comparatively close to Los Angeles, Bob Six was a frequent visitor throughout the shooting, which wrapped shortly after Thanksgiving. Rosemary Clooney threw Ethel a grand farewell party at Romanoff’s, where the guests included Joan Crawford, Jack Benny, Barbara Stanwyck, Ann Sothern, Joan Fontaine and Collier Young, and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

After spending the Christmas season in New York, Ethel, ever the staunch Republican, attended the inauguration of the thirty-fourth president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. (“They Like Ike” had proved prophetic.) When she returned to California on business, Six was with her as often as possible, still as solicitous as ever. Sometime earlier he had begun to press her for a more serious commitment. Ethel was enjoying her exciting life on the town with Six and saw no reason to rush into marriage, but as the months clicked by, there was no way to disguise, either to the world or to herself, how deeply in love she had fallen. Six appeared to have a bright future, and as far as Ethel could tell, he was completely attentive to Ethel Jr. and Bobby. He looked like a solid bet, and when he kept asking her to marry him, she eventually consented. While they were both in California, they traveled to Mexicali, a Mexican border town where they could get a quick, no-frills marriage without being bombarded by an avalanche of publicity. They were wed there on March 9. Six, concerned that the announcement of their union might hurt the film’s chances at the box office, thought it best to keep the whole matter a secret for the time being. Also, he said, he had numerous business affairs that were going to occupy him intensely for the next few months. Better to wait until the summertime, which was the prime season for weddings anyway, before broadcasting the news.

His pragmatic, businesslike approach to the matter of marriage might have sent off some alarm signals for Ethel had she not been so blindly in love. In her professional life, Ethel’s vulnerability might never reveal itself, buried as it was under the thick armor of genuine self-confidence she possessed. Men were another matter: Ethel in love was Ethel at her softest, most pliable, and eager to please. Never before had she seemed as starry-eyed about a man as she did about Six, and without thinking twice about it she happily agreed to keep the marriage under wraps.

Why Ethel was not present for the world premiere of the screen version of
Call Me Madam
, at Los Angeles’s Fox Ritz Theatre on March 4, is not clear. Perhaps for all her studying of the rushes and her guarded optimism about the end result, she was simply terrified of failure. The premiere was a Hollywood opening night in the grand old style. Five thousand fans were jammed along both sides of Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile, and celebrity guests included Joan Crawford, Jane Powell, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Clifton Webb, Dorothy Lamour, and Decca Records’ usurper of the role of Sally Adams, Dinah Shore. The only star from the film present was Donald O’Connor. The Hollywood press raved about
Call Me Madam.
“If anything,” wrote Louella Parsons, “Ethel is better than behind the footlights, slimmer, prettier, funnier, and a one-woman riot….” With such a reaction, Ethel felt confident enough to show up for the film’s New York premiere at the Roxy, where the critical reaction was overwhelming. The
New York Times’
s Bosley Crowther found her “better than ever—in spades!…There should really be no need for 3-D pictures when there are people like Miss Merman still around.” “Miss Merman has appeared in previous movies, of course,” observed the
New Yorker
’s John McCarten, “but as I recall them, they didn’t give her much elbow room. I hope the boys in Hollywood are now aware that she can fill all the room they can provide.”

While some critics made note of the film’s occasional longueurs in the second half,
Call Me Madam
was generally branded an enormous success as a movie musical. In later years Ethel took great pains to portray the movie as a smash, but although it did well, playing to great business in the metropolitan centers, it underperformed in smaller towns and rural areas. (Again Ethel’s refusal to tour in her Broadway shows may have been a factor.) In the end,
Call Me Madam
was 20th Century Fox’s fourth-biggest grosser for 1953, with a take of $2.85 million (though that figure is less impressive when one takes into account the production cost of $2.46 million).

By June, Bob Six at last was ready to announce that he and Ethel were married. It was all but an open secret by this time, as Six had been closing in on a deal to purchase a large house on a vast estate in Cherry Hills Village, a posh suburb of Denver, and the press naturally concluded that he was buying it as a home for his new family. As soon as the Sixes had come clean, Broadway insiders were buzzing about the possibility that Ethel might leave her beloved New York for a life out west, but for the moment she remained silent on the subject. Only to her closest friends did she confess that the thought of being a proper married lady in Colorado held great appeal for her. She thought that bucolic Cherry Hills would be a wonderful place to raise the children, especially Ethel Jr., who, after years of spending family holidays in Glenwood Springs, loved the outdoors and had a great tenderness for all kinds of animals. Ethel also admitted that the long runs of
Annie Get Your Gun
and
Call Me Madam,
with only minimal time off, had left her exhausted. She’d worked hard and pulled her weight and made her producers and composers a great deal of money. Why should she have to apologize to anyone for wanting to leave Broadway behind?

While the Sixes were still negotiating for the property, however, a singing offer came up that she could hardly turn down. It came from Leland Hayward, who had just been engaged to produce a television special commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Ford Motor Company. Conceived as a panoramic view of American life through the first half of the twentieth century, it promised to be the most ambitious undertaking that the still-young medium had attempted. Hayward designed it as a bountiful mixture of drama, song, dance, history, and fashion; underlining the show’s bigger-is-better approach was the fact that it would be telecast simultaneously on two networks, CBS and NBC, all of it live. The talent that Hayward had lined up included pop singer Eddie Fisher; famed contralto Marian Anderson; Kukla, Fran, and Ollie; crooner Rudy Vallee; rising young comic Wally Cox; CBS commentator Edward R. Murrow; and Broadway’s Mary Martin. Hayward was intrigued by the notion of Mary and Ethel performing together, and as the showstopper for the entire telecast he wanted a special duet consisting of songs they’d both made famous. While some discouraged Hayward from the notion, predicting that Broadway’s two biggest musical stars would never consent to appear together on the same program, he knew that Mary and Ethel had admired each other for years. (It is part of theater lore that Ethel reportedly once said of Mary, “She’s okay…if you like talent.”) After secretly promising each one final approval of the project, Hayward got them both to sign on.

The cost of the Ford show was staggering for the time—$500,000—but the corporation’s chief executive, Henry Ford II, believed that such an important anniversary warranted the expenditure. In the end, Mary and Ethel each got separate assignments as well: Ethel was to sing a Dixieland arrangement of Irving Berlin’s perennial “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and also to appear in a sketch as a World War I doughboy, in which she sang “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” while Mary acted in a touching scene from Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
and performed “The Shape,” a hilarious solo spot that surveyed changes in women’s fashion over the past fifty years. The stars were to appear together twice: in a rather routine and pointless pantomime of “Your Folks and My Folks,” an old vaudeville routine, and the big medley that Hayward had dreamed up. After some discussion it was decided not to limit the duet to their Broadway hits; in fact, very few of the numbers that each singer had made famous wound up in the finished product. Instead, Ethel’s “I Got Rhythm,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and Mary’s “A Wonderful Guy” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” were dropped in and around a cornucopia of popular chestnuts such as “The Sheik of Araby,” “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” and “Melancholy Baby.” One segment of the duet featured, at Ethel’s suggestion, a collection of “I” songs: “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain,” “I Love a Parade,” and so on.