Ethel Merman: A Life (33 page)

Although Ray Middleton was still capable of reprising Frank Butler, the role eventually went to Bruce Yarnell, a virile, good-looking actor with a terrific singing voice. Both Rodgers and Ethel had wanted someone young and sexy, and Yarnell certainly filled the bill: he was ten years old when Ethel had opened in the original
Annie
. Yarnell was known as a western hero, having appeared on NBC’s
The Outlaws
, but his own typecasting amused him. “I can’t ride,” he once said. “I can’t draw. I can’t shoot. I can’t lasso. The only thing I can do is sing.” Ethel persuaded Benay Venuta to play the second female lead of Dolly Tate. Jerry Orbach, who had scored great successes in
The Fantasticks
and
Carnival!
, was luxury casting for the part of Charlie Davenport. Apart from Ethel, the only holdover from the original
Annie
was Harry Bellaver, repeating his role as Chief Sitting Bull.

Berlin and Dorothy Fields sat down to work on the show and reshaped it considerably. Some numbers and a couple of secondary characters were dropped altogether. More than anything else, Berlin wanted another hit song to come out of this revival. One day he turned up with “An Old-Fashioned Wedding,” a comedy duet in which Annie and Frank disagree about how they’ll be married: Frank wants a simple ceremony, but Annie holds out for something grand. “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” was written in the contrapuntal style that had worked so brilliantly with “You’re Just in Love.” Ethel was sure from the moment she heard the new song that it would land with the audience.

The production, with designs by Paul McGuire and costumes by Frank Thompson, was on a much grander scale than the original
Annie
. Berlin was in a state of elation during rehearsals, watching the action as he sat at a table, bouncing his hands up and down. There were a few bumps in the road, of course, particularly when Bruce Yarnell’s wife, Frances, alienated Ethel by telling her, “I’m so glad that you’re Bruce’s
leading lady
.” Franz Allers, the conductor, likewise rubbed her the wrong way with his autocratic style; often during rehearsals they clashed in a war of tempos.

Annie
had its out-of-town tryout at Toronto’s massive O’Keefe Center. There one of the local critics wrote a sharp review attacking Ethel for attempting to revive the show at her age. Ethel was deeply wounded by the writer’s comments, but her age had definitely been a point of some discussion as the show was being assembled. There’d been some talk of her wearing a chin strap in order to pass as a younger Annie, but Ethel rejected the idea out of hand. “Jesus, they know what I look like!” she informed Rodgers. “They wanna come and see Merman. If they don’t, they don’t! I’m not worried.”

Overall, though, it was a happy company. Often Ethel invited Jerry Orbach, Ronn Carroll, and several other cast members to her hotel room, where they would play word games well into the night. On one particular night, Yarnell tossed back one drink too many and passed out on the daybed in Ethel’s suite. To the delight of the other company members, Ethel bent over him, unzipped his pants, and pulled down his trousers so that when he woke up, he would wonder what had happened during the night.

Jerry Orbach was particularly impressed by Ethel’s eye for detail. “She would dumbfound people by saying, ‘The third light on the second balcony rail should be pink, and it’s amber,’” he recalled. “She had all-around expertise.” Even more important, her voice was in excellent condition. After thirty-six years in the theater, it had naturally darkened slightly, from a trumpet to a trombone, but its power was undiminished and the pitch was as true as ever.

Annie
was by now part of show-business legend, and when it opened in New York on May 31, 1966, both the audience and the press welcomed Ethel back ecstatically. Although there were moments in the first act when she seemed to be pacing herself slightly, every solo of Ethel’s was cheered at length, but the real showstopper was the new song. As “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” was encored again and again, Ethel pulled out all the stops by beating on Yarnell’s chest to try to make him listen. In fact, the song was reprised so many times that some of the critics had to exit before the final scene to file their reviews by deadline.

The next day Vincent Canby’s notice in the
New York Times
set the tone for all the others. “Little Sure Shot is older,” he wrote, “but she also is more mellow. Most important, the pipes sound as true, if not quite so loud, as they ever did. And that implacable, straightforward thrust towards a comic situation can’t be stopped by anything—neither by time nor by a first-night audience whose love threatened to turn the show into a noisy devotional service.”
Newsday
thought that the revival seemed “a lot better than most of the current musicals that assail our ears and dull our other senses.”

Despite the sniping of some Broadway veterans who called the show
Granny Get Your Gun
, the box-office response was tremendous. After the professional disappointments of recent years Ethel was pleased to be back in New York with a hit, and she was in gleeful, wicked humor throughout the run. One of her favorite targets was Benay. One night Benay reported to work at the theater and told Ethel how she’d been getting crank telephone calls from someone who breathed into the receiver and hung up.

“Benay, this sounds terrible,” said Ethel. “I would get yourself a car service. It sounds like you’ve got a real crazy there.”

That night Ethel pulled Ronn Carroll aside and urged him to telephone Benay late at night. “I don’t care what you say to her,” she whispered, “but end the conversation with, ‘Go fuck yourself!’” Then she laughed uproariously.

Despite the advances Jerome Robbins had made in her acting technique in
Gypsy,
Ethel now fell back on her old habit of facing front and selling her lines directly to the audience. One evening she noticed Jerry Orbach doing some piece of business on one of her joke lines. She went to the stage manager, Bill Ross, and complained. Ross watched carefully at the next performance, and when Ethel came offstage, he said, “Ethel, he’s just reacting, punching up your joke.” “You tell Jerry and EVERYBODY ELSE,” Ethel demanded, “I don’t react to
their
jokes, and they don’t have to react to
mine
.”

The show was supposed to fold after its five-week engagement at the State Theater, but it was extended by another eight weeks; then Rodgers decided that a road tour was called for. For the most part, Ethel enjoyed the tour although, as always, there were moments when she had to assert herself. The Philadelphia run coincided with an extreme heat wave. On the first day at the Forrest Theatre, Ethel found the temperature stifling and called for the house manager. “Miss Merman,” the officious manager informed her, “I come in here every day at four-thirty and turn on the air-conditioning. It will be fine.” Ethel stared him down and said nothing. The following day the theater was again uncomfortably stuffy, and again Ethel summoned the house manager. “It’s hotter than hell,” she snapped. “Miss Merman,” he said, in a tone even more glacial than the one he’d used the day before, “I come in here at four-thirty and turn on the system. Everything will be all right.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Ethel. “Well, I was here at four-thirty today, and
no one
was here. You throw another log on the air conditioner or you can get yourself another girl singer!”

During the Philadelphia run, Ethel caught a bad cold that soon developed into pneumonia. One night, the other actors arrived at the theater and discovered her lying backstage on a cot, seemingly unable to speak. Her understudy assumed that she would be going on, retired to her dressing room, and emerged in her Annie Oakley costume. Ethel looked up at her. “Forget it, kid,” she said, and got up and sang the entire show in what Ronn Carroll remembered as “this terribly sweet, non-Merman voice.”

Frequently while the show was on the road, Ethel and some of the other cast members were invited to postperformance parties at the homes of local theater patrons. At one of these affairs in Detroit, the hostess approached her and said, “I hope you don’t mind. I have a piano player. I hope you’ll sing.”

“Sure, honey,” said Ethel. “My fee is ten thousand dollars. I’d be happy to sing for you.”

The resultant publicity from the tour was so intense that Rodgers decided to bring
Annie Get Your Gun
back to New York, where it settled in for several months at the Broadway Theatre, playing to overflow houses. In March 1967, NBC aired an abridgement of the show, filmed in color, of which only the audio section appears to have survived. Annie or Granny, Ethel had once again shown everyone who was the Queen of Broadway.

Ethel might have returned to New York in glory, but her happiness was undercut by her concern for her daughter. Casting a shadow over the past several years was her knowledge that Ethel Jr.’s life was slowly unraveling. Being both a mother and wife had simply pushed the young woman to the breaking point, and her marriage to Bill Geary had broken up in 1965, with great sadness and regret on both sides. Ethel Jr. moved to a small rental house in West Hollywood just off Melrose Place, trying to find work wherever she could get it. It was all too much for her, and her mood swings, so reminiscent of her father’s, were becoming more and more dramatic. At some point she suffered a complete nervous collapse. Very little headway had yet been made in medical treatment for the condition—the field of psychopharmacology hardly existed, and the development of antidepressants was a long way off—so Ethel Jr. was put on various cycles of tranquilizers. Once she confided to Tony Cointreau that all the heavy medication “really scares me.”

She continued to flail about, looking for some kind of career. When she first moved to Los Angeles, Ethel Jr. had had vague thoughts of supporting herself by acting in television commercials, but she quickly found that world too tough and competitive. She complained to her close friends that as long as she remained in show business, she was destined to be known as Ethel Merman’s daughter, and she began wishing that she had explored some other career route. Then she began working with a small experimental theater collective and seemed quite happy doing so. She also became romantically involved with an actor named Monty Pike, a colorful figure on Los Angeles’s fringe theatrical scene. Ethel Jr. began to think that perhaps she had found herself in the world of alternative arts and culture that Monty represented.

For Big Ethel, America in the mid-1960s seemed like alien territory. She could not understand the spirit of revolt, of questioning authority, of tearing down icons and trying to find a new path. She had lived her life in the musical theater, and she really knew very little about the world outside it. She helped her daughter financially as much as possible, paying her psychiatrist’s bills and trying to be as supportive as she could. At other times she responded to Ethel Jr.’s rapidly changing lifestyle with her usual knee-jerk abruptness, and Ethel Jr. always threw it right back at her with equal vehemence. Bobby, too, seemed to be losing his career momentum as he began to drift into the counterculture in San Francisco, where he was now living and where he eventually went to work teaching at the famed American Conservatory Theater. Ethel visited him there and was stunned by the creative acting methods that the students were encouraged to pursue. “If I had to do all of these things,” she told Mark Zeller, “I’d never get onstage.”

Bobby did win Ethel’s approval, however, when he became romantically involved with Barbara Colby, a talented brunette actress who was one of the founding members of the American Conservatory Theater. Barbara had made her Broadway debut in 1965 in
The Devils,
with Jason Robards and Anne Bancroft, and had amassed an impressive list of regional theater credits, later returning to Broadway as Kristine in
A Doll’s House
with Liv Ullmann. She had a warm, no-nonsense personality, and Ethel considered her a good, stabilizing influence for her son.

By the summer of 1967, Ethel Jr. seemed to be responding fairly well to her latest round of medication. She had grown tired of the chaotic pace of Los Angeles and longed to return to Colorado College and complete her education. At last she seemed to have hit on something she wanted to pursue professionally: teaching theater to small children. It was something that would take her out of her mother’s shadow, and she was delighted to be back in the more tranquil environment of Colorado. She talked of buying a horse and settling into the outdoor life she had long since come to love.

Her health by now was relatively stable, and once she got established in Green Mountain Falls, a little resort town near Colorado Springs, she telephoned Bill Geary to ask if he might allow the children to visit for a short while. The arrangements were made, and Barbara Jean, now six, and Michael, five, joined her at her cabin. The children slept in her bedroom at night, and Ethel Jr. took the sofa.

It was there, lying in her nightgown, that Barbara Jean found her on the morning of August 23. When Barbara Jean spoke to her mother, there was no answer. Her face had a strange bluish cast, and when Barbara Jean touched her, her skin felt cold. The child ran out to summon help from a tourist who was staying nearby, but it was too late. Her mother was dead.

In a chilling replay of Bob Levitt’s death, the police found several pill bottles scattered about, along with a couple of empty vodka bottles. The combination had been lethal, and the coroner estimated that Ethel had died around midnight. His official report, however, stated his belief that the overdose had been an accident rather than suicide, and the details of the case—the presence of her children, the fact that her life was on the upswing—seemed to bear out his verdict.