Ethel Merman: A Life (5 page)

Together Ethel and Siegel worked out an act, and Lou Irwin got them booked on the renowned Keith vaudeville circuit, opening in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in June 1930. As their tour wound down, Irwin informed them that their next appearance would be a high-profile one: they were to play seven weeks at the Brooklyn Paramount, where they would perform several shows a day, in between screenings of the latest Paramount feature films. Ethel was thrilled to have a job that would last practically the entire summer and later recalled that she and Siegel “broke up the place” for the entire run at the Paramount.

Around the same time, Paramount signed her to make her first feature film,
Follow the Leader,
based on a popular musical comedy,
Manhattan Mary.
Heading the cast was Ed Wynn, the stage’s beloved “Perfect Fool,” in his first talkie, while newcomer Ginger Rogers had the female lead. Ethel, a last-minute replacement for Ruth Etting, played a musical-comedy star, the intended victim of a kidnap plot that goes awry. Although she did have one song—“Satan’s Holiday,” by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal—she doesn’t seem to have had much affection for the movie, which is scarcely mentioned in her memoirs.

One engagement that Ethel had been lusting after was the Pavilion Royale, a tony club in Valley Stream, Long Island, where many big names went to try out—for no salary—new acts before facing the more demanding audiences in Manhattan. Irwin secured them a booking there, and Ethel scored a hit with Siegel’s uptempo arrangements of “Singin’ in the Rain” and the lusty “Sing You Sinners”—such a hit that they were put on salary for regular Saturday-and Sunday-night engagements, which they performed after appearing all day at the Brooklyn Paramount. For Ethel this turned out to be another big step up in class: one night she got a chance to sing with one of the most popular bands around, Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.

Ethel and Siegel’s notices at the Paramount were so good that Irwin soon was able to get them booked at the Valhalla of vaudeville houses—the Palace. Ethel could hardly believe that she was about to land on the stage of the theater where only a few years earlier she had first seen the Marx Brothers, Nora Bayes, and many other great performers. It would bring her the biggest salary she had earned yet—five hundred dollars a week—and she couldn’t wait for the engagement to begin. And then, one night toward the end of the run, Broadway producer Vinton Freedley came to the Paramount and heard her sing.

B
y the time he heard Ethel at the Brooklyn Paramount, Vinton Freedley had become established as one of Broadway’s most successful musical-comedy producers. Nothing in his background indicated that he might carve out a career in the theater: he was born in 1891 into a prominent Main Line Philadelphia family, and it was expected that he would become a lawyer. He buckled to family pressure up to the point of studying law at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, but once he graduated, he immediately started scrambling for acting jobs. In those days of honey-toned matinee idols, his squeaky voice proved a major handicap, and early on, he flubbed an audition with the great stage actress Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske. By Freedley’s own admission, he was never much of an actor, but during the five years that he spent touring the United States, he picked up an enormous amount of knowledge about stage direction, lighting, script doctoring, and all other aspects of production. In 1923 he joined forces with the successful Broadway producer Alex A. Aarons. For Freedley the partnership came with a built-in advantage: Aarons had an association with George Gershwin that stretched back to his production of Gershwin’s 1919 musical
La, La, Lucille
. In 1924, one year after they formed their partnership, Aarons and Freedley produced Gershwin’s new
Lady, Be Good!
, the show in which Gershwin truly found his jazz-based voice. It ran for 330 performances, and the Aarons-Freedley team stuck together, producing many more Gershwin works—
Tip Toes
(1925),
Oh, Kay!
(1926), and
Funny Face
(1927)—in addition to other musical hits. Aarons and Freedley were smart producers: most of their shows came in at around $60,000 and earned their investments back in fourteen weeks or less. The partners were so successful that by 1927 it felt natural enough for them to open their own Broadway theater at 250 West Fifty-second Street. They dubbed it the Alvin—a conflation of the first syllables of both their first names.

The Aarons-Freedley-Gershwin team did much more than make money; it helped establish American musical comedy as a viable and popular genre. Prior to the 1920s, operetta had been the favored musical style on Broadway. Audiences loved the lavishly upholstered productions, the reassuringly old-fashioned plots that dealt with romantic intrigues among European royalty, the thundering choruses of soldiers and peasants. Best of all, there were the lovely, lyrical melodies—easy to listen to and easy to remember but just “legit” enough to satisfy people’s cravings for something on the highbrow side.

There was something inevitable about George Gershwin’s breakthrough into popular culture. The 1920s gave him the perfect climate in which to launch his new sound, because the United States was caught up in the dizzying process of reinventing itself. The nation had finally stepped out of the long shadow cast by European culture and asserted itself as never before. It was the age of a frantic new consumerism, of the explosion of advertising, an industry that had previously been relatively genteel in its scope and ambitions. Everything was suddenly being pitched to the youth market. (As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, “After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth.”) Prohibition was going strong, and with it came the growth of speakeasies. Literature was dominated by a new breed of writers—among them Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos, whose daring and provocative works made the florid bestsellers of only a few years earlier seem laughably quaint. A new sexual candor was spreading by the day; all anyone had to do was to see how many women had shortened their skirts, rolled their stockings below the knees, and thrown away their corsets, or how they openly smoked and drank. That candor was evident in the movies, too. In 1921 audiences poured into movie theaters to see Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres play out a glorified rape fantasy in
The Sheik
. By 1928 flapper ideal Joan Crawford was raising a toast in
Our Dancing Daughters
: “To myself! I have to live with myself until I die—so may I always like—myself!” Fitzgerald summed it all up nicely: “The whole golden boom was in the air, its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions, and the torturous death struggle of the old America.”

Gershwin’s early years had coincided with New York City’s rebirth as the great American melting pot. As children, George and his brother Ira had run rampant through their various neighborhoods with the children of Italian and Irish families. The city was growing up fast; with street traffic increasing and life being lived at an ever-quickening pace. It only made sense that the new music was ragtime; its infectious syncopated rhythms seemed the ideal match for the pace of the times. Songs like “Fascinating Rhythm,” “Sweet and Low-Down,” and “Lady, Be Good!” expressed the reckless youth of New York in the 1920s.

At first the new sound of Gershwin coexisted amiably enough with operetta. The two grand masters of the form, Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg, scored some of their biggest successes during the 1920s, but by 1930 they were in eclipse. Both composers had shows open that year: Romberg’s
Nina Rosa
was a disappointment, and Friml’s
Luana
was an outright flop. Depression-era economics helped put the entire genre out of business, as producers simply could not afford to back such elaborate productions and enormous companies. All of this happened just as Gershwin was about to enter his most fertile period of writing for the theater.

But it took more than music for the Gershwin shows to succeed; they needed bright, sparkling words to match their jazzy, spiky rhythms. George found his ideal lyricist in his brother Ira, who brought a startling syncopation to the English language. While George had always been outgoing and confident, Ira had been an introverted, bookish child. George and Ira’s parents had undertaken a long string of failed businesses over a period of many years, one of them a Turkish bath on Harlem’s Lenox Avenue. Ira, pressed into service as an attendant there, passively delighted in the failure of the whole enterprise, because it allowed him more time to read. With his endlessly imaginative wordplay, Ira turned lyric writing on its head, breaking up lines in unorthodox ways to create startling rhymes and using slang in American song in a way that was fresh, everyday, and elegant all at the same time. Master lyricist Sheldon Harnick perhaps summed up Ira’s gifts by saying that his entire career was an “unremitting battle against clichés.” Once audiences had fallen under his spell, they might be forgiven for wondering why it had taken so long for anyone to figure out how to write this way.

Since the words had now become so important, so much wittier and more specific than much of what had been written during the glory days of operetta, different types of singers were needed. A big, legit voice and perfect, pear-shaped tones were less critical than an ability to put the words across in such a way that everyone in the audience could easily understand them. For this reason many of the top composers wanted to write for Fred Astaire, whose singing voice might not have taken any prizes but who had a beguiling way with a lyric.

If what the Gershwins were bringing to the Broadway musical was new and exciting, the book of
Girl Crazy
, by Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan, was anything but. Its plot was really nothing more than a gals-and-gags show centering on Danny Churchill (played by Allen Kearns), a spoiled rich kid from New York whose father sends him out to Custerville, Arizona, to oversee the family’s ranch. Much of the humor of the piece stemmed from the conflict of East versus West. Danny gets to Custerville by cab—it costs him $742.30—and soon he decides to transform the family property into a dude ranch. Meanwhile his cabdriver, Gieber Goldfarb (comedian Willie Howard), runs for sheriff of Custerville—a tough job to hold on to, since all the previous sheriffs have had a way of getting themselves shot about every two weeks.

Danny’s love interest, Molly, was played by Ginger Rogers, only a few years before she would emerge as a major Hollywood star. She had two wonderful songs, “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me,” that she managed well enough. But Rogers, despite her charming stage presence, was no more a first-class singer than Kearns and Howard were. The Gershwins needed at least
one
strong voice in
Girl Crazy
, which made the casting of the part of Kate Fothergill—a San Francisco café singer who comes with her husband, Slick, to run Danny’s gambling room—critical. It wasn’t so much a part as a glorified singing spot, but it offered the kinds of songs that demanded a gutsy delivery. In the beginning Kate was to have been performed by someone listed only as “Miss Barry.” Just exactly who Miss Barry was remains something of a mystery, but it may have been Vivian Barry, who appeared in the later Gershwin shows
Of Thee I Sing
and
Let ’Em Eat Cake
. Vinton Freedley’s trip to the Brooklyn Paramount to catch Ethel’s act, however, effectively eliminated Miss Barry from
Girl Crazy
’s history.

As Ethel began to sing, Freedley watched and listened in amazement. She was far from pretty, and she was wearing an unflattering black dress, all tricked up with bows and ribbons. But with her big, bold sound, she knocked every lyric out over the orchestra, articulating every syllable perfectly. There was a tremendous electricity to her singing, and she seemed to have barrels of confidence. Freedley thought she was exactly the sort of singer likely to appeal to the Gershwins.

That day as Ethel came offstage, Freedley was waiting for her in the wings. Of course she knew him by reputation. He told her that he was producing
Girl Crazy
and that he wanted to arrange an audition with George and Ira Gershwin.

Only a few days later, Ethel was nervously riding up in the elevator at 33 Riverside Drive, where George occupied the penthouse on one half of the floor and Ira had the other half. The very scale of the building intimidated her, but the brothers greeted her warmly and tried to put her at ease. She sang two of her old standby numbers, “Little White Lies” and “Exactly Like You.” The Gershwins liked what they heard and began describing
Girl Crazy
to her. The character of Kate was to have three songs in the show: “Sam and Delilah,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Boy! What Love Has Done to Me.” George played while Ira sang, and Ethel listened attentively. Each one was a gem, and, oddly enough, they all could almost have been written with her voice in mind.

What happened next was to become a central part of the Merman legend. She always told the story exactly the same way, as if she were reciting Scripture, and to alter one word would have been blasphemy.

George Gershwin took his hands off the keyboard and said, “Miss Merman, if there’s anything about these songs you don’t like, I’ll be most happy to change it.”

Ethel was dumbfounded. Here was the greatest composer on Broadway offering to make concessions to a little-known girl from Queens. All she managed to get out was, “No, Mr. Gershwin, they’ll do very nicely.” Years later, when she was performing her act in nightclubs and with symphony orchestras around the world, she always recalled the exchange with Gershwin, and took pains to remind the audience, “And you know, ladies and gentlemen, you never change one note of a Gershwin tune.”

Ethel was signed at a salary of $375 a week, and rehearsals started immediately at the Alvin Theatre. It was a hectic time, because of the two-show-a-day run at the Palace that she and Al Siegel were playing. When they opened in mid-September, the
New York Times
called Ethel “a comely ballad singer” whose Palace debut “promises well for her debut later in the season on the musical comedy stage.” Ethel and Siegel rehearsed at the Alvin in the morning, dashed to the Palace for a matinee, came back to the Alvin to rehearse the rest of the afternoon, then went back to the Palace for the evening show. Usually there was one more late-night stint at the Alvin, where she was making a strong impression on her coworkers. She had a snappy way with her few lines, which she delivered simply and naturally, because she really believed them. She had crack comic timing, and there was nothing actressy about her. She instinctively knew the most important rule of comedy: when you try to make it funny, you usually fall flat; just play it straight, and if the scene is any good at all, it
will
be funny. It wasn’t long before Freedley was instructing the book writers to beef up the role of Kate.

In the script Kate was originally described as being something of a Diamond Lil type, but in the end the role shaped up to be the kind of part that Eve Arden would later make a career of in the movies. When Kate catches her husband, Slick, on the make, she berates him, “You promised me a divorce two years ago. And if you can ever make enough money for me to hire a lawyer, I’m gonna sue you.” Kate reassures the lovelorn Molly with some sage sisterly advice: “Men are like buses. There’s always another one coming along…. And if you wait long enough, there’ll be the same one coming back.” As the show finished rehearsals and moved on to Philadelphia for its out-of-town tryout, the word around Broadway’s bars and coffee shops was that the Gershwins had an exciting new star in the making.

Ethel was so excited she could barely contain herself—excited, but not actually nervous. Always a quick study, she had her lines down cold and felt thoroughly prepared by the Gershwins, who were completely captivated by her diligent, working-girl manner and no-nonsense attitude. Both the brothers dined out for years on one particular story: Ira had come up with some extra lines for “Sam and Delilah,” and Ethel asked him to dictate them to her over the telephone while she calmly took them down in shorthand. It was typical of her levelheaded approach to solving problems, and not the kind of thing, Ira pointed out, that just any Broadway singer would have been able to pull off.