Ethel Merman: A Life (15 page)

While she was pregnant, Ethel had insisted that once the baby arrived, she would take a year off from performing. It was time for her to put her home life first, she maintained, and she sounded serious. But the reality of being at home, steeped in one domestic crisis after another, riding herd on Little Bit’s nurse and the rest of the household help—most of whom had a way of coming and going very quickly—took its toll. With the exception of her appearances singing for the troops, Ethel had been idle for more than six months—by far the longest stretch of unemployment in her professional career. She and Bob had barely had any time at all to have a romantic life together before they were saddled with the immense responsibilities of parenthood, and frequently their tempers flared. They had at least made peace over the subject of income. Although Bob’s salary of $200 weekly was considered good money in the publishing business, it paled next to Ethel’s earning power. Bob claimed not to be bothered by this, and they had worked out an arrangement by which his salary would go toward basic family and household needs; if Ethel required the luxury items that living like a star always requires, she would pay for them herself.

When it became obvious to all that Ethel’s confinement was causing discord at home, she and Bob talked it over and agreed that she should begin to shop around for another show. There was no lack of offers, including one that had been floating around for some time,
Birds of a Feather,
with unpublished songs by the Gershwins. Ethel was delighted at the prospect of doing another show by the man who had launched her career, but the book, by Bella and Samuel Spewack, never pulled itself into shape, and the project languished.

Then there was
Jenny Get Your Gun,
a property that had first been brought to Ethel’s attention while she was still pregnant with Little Bit. It had a fancy pedigree: songs by Cole Porter, book by Dorothy and Herbert Fields. Vinton Freedley was supposed to produce it, but when he listened to the songs Porter had written and the idea the Fieldses had for a script, he told them bluntly that he thought they were all off on the wrong foot. Hurt and angry, the threesome decided to look for another producer. Porter’s suggestion was Mike Todd.

Born in dirt-poor circumstances in Minneapolis, Todd had been a hustler from childhood. He’d always been obsessed with making money and had worked at a variety of colorful enterprises—from hawking potato peelers at a carnival to promoting a floating crap game that netted him ten cents a pot. His first venture into show business was hardly auspicious: at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, he produced a number known as the Flame Dance, in which a beautiful girl clad only in a moth costume danced closer and closer to a flame until it burned off her clothes and she ran stark naked into the wings. But by 1939, Todd had hit the big time, producing
The Hot Mikado
on Broadway, with an all-black cast headed by Bill Robinson. Most of his subsequent stage ventures weren’t as high-toned. “I believe in giving the customers a meat and potatoes show,” he said. “Dames and comedy. High dames and low comedy—that’s my message.” In 1942 he demonstrated this credo with the big, splashy Broadway hit
Star and Garter
, starring Gypsy Rose Lee and lots of gorgeous girls. It made a mint, but by now he had won and lost so many fortunes it all seemed familiar. “I’ve never been poor,” he said, “only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is a temporary situation.”

Todd had none of Freedley’s reservations about
Jenny Get Your Gun:
the team of Porter, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, and Merman was good enough for him. A key part of Todd’s style was investing a great deal of energy into putting the gaudiest, most exhilarating show possible on the stage, but he did not interfere with the creative process. He handed the directorial reins to his friend and collaborator Hassard Short, who had staged both
The Hot Mikado
and
Star and Garter.

Ethel immediately took to Todd’s high-octane personality and loved his common streak—he said “tink” for “think” and “dem” for “them.” But he was shrewd and, in his own way, quite sophisticated; the critic George Jean Nathan once characterized him as “an Oxford man posing as a mugg.” Best of all he was a whiz at coping with the shortages imposed by wartime conditions. Time and time again, Todd wangled a way of getting substitutes for elaborate set and costume elements that looked good onstage but could be had on the cheap.

Dorothy and Herbert Fields spent the next few months working on the book. One day they read in the newspaper that Lucille Ball had discovered she was picking up radio signals in her dental fillings. It sounded crazy enough to belong in musical comedy, so they added it to their plot about three distant cousins named Hart—Harry, a street vendor; Chiquita, a burlesque artiste; and Blossom, a Rosie the Riveter type—all of whom inherit a ranch in Texas near an air force base. They turn it into a hotel for military wives, but their enterprise runs into trouble when the authorities suspect them of running a bordello.

During World War II, topicality was highly prized in both movies and the theater; audiences wanted their entertainment to comment, one way or another, on the challenges and heartaches of wartime.
Something for the Boys,
as the show was now called, gave them their money’s worth, as a sampling of its dialogue demonstrates:

 

SOLDIER
(admiring Blossom’s legs): Boy, look at those drumsticks!

BLOSSOM
: How would you like a kick in the teeth from one of those drumsticks?

SOLDIER
: How do you like that? And this is the womanhood I’m fighting to protect!

BLOSSOM
: And this is the womanhood
I’m
fighting to protect!

 

Something for the Boys
went into rehearsal in the fall of 1942, a period when Broadway was experiencing a drought of splashy musicals. A few shows that had opened at the end of the previous season—notably Todd’s own
Star and Garter
and
By Jupiter,
featuring Benay Venuta as Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons—were doing well, but wartime economics dictated that many of the more recent musicals be rather downscale revues, such as
Keep ’Em Laughing
with William Gaxton and Victor Moore and
Laugh, Town, Laugh!
starring Ed Wynn. With
Something for the Boys,
Todd was determined to bring razzmatazz back to Broadway. He spent the princely sum of $158,000 on the production, which was extremely complex. It featured twelve sets, so elaborate that they would have to be shipped in five freight cars from New York to the out-of-town tryout in Boston. There was even a spectacular final bit involving an onstage bomber, aimed right at the audience, that got tossed around in a thunderstorm.

Ethel pronounced Porter’s score the best he’d ever written. It wasn’t, in fact, top-drawer Porter, but it did give her a generous helping of catchy numbers, including “He’s a Right Guy,” “Hey, Good-Lookin’” and a song that showed off Porter’s passion for poking fun at current trends: “The Leader of a Big-Time Band” spoofed American women’s newest heartthrobs—the Benny Goodmans and Harry Jameses:

 

When, in Venice, Georgia Sand with Chopin romped,

Her libido had the Lido simply swamped,

But today who would be buried in the sand?

Why, the leader of a big-time band.

When Dorsey starts to tilt

That horn about,

Dear Missus Vanderbilt

Bumps herself out,

So, if, say, you still can play a one-night stand,

Be the leader of a big-time band.

 

Something for the Boys
was cast from strength. Allen Jenkins, the Brooklyn-accented cabdriver of dozens of Hollywood movies, played Harry the vendor. In the role of Chiquita the striptease artist was a dry, sharp, horse-faced comedienne named Paula Laurence, who had earned acclaim in nightclubs and in the Broadway comedy
Junior Miss
. The tricky production was beautifully paced by Hassard Short. A gentle, soft-spoken Englishman, Short had begun his career as an actor—his high-water mark had been playing opposite Laurette Taylor in her great hit
Peg O’ My Heart
—and his keen understanding of actors and their problems ensured a smooth rehearsal process.

For the out-of-town opening of
Something for the Boys,
Ethel was back at the Shubert Theatre in Boston. The first night, December 18, 1942, played to a packed house and enthusiastic notices. “Undoubtedly the season’s first smash musical hit,” proclaimed the
Boston Herald
, adding, “Ethel Merman has never looked better, nor sung with more verve and bounce.” The show took in $9,000 during its first three performances at the Shubert, then moved on to New York, where it was to open at the Alvin Theatre. The occasion was a satisfying one for Ethel, as she moved into the star dressing room, recalling the days during
Girl Crazy
when she had to dress on the fourth floor. Her relationship with Porter remained as affable as ever. The composer would go over a song with her, then inevitably throw up his hands and say, “Oh, just do whatever you want, darling.”

Something for the Boys
opened on January 7, 1943, to the sort of notices that were by now standard for a Merman-Porter show. “One of the song and dance delights of the season,” reported the
New York Herald Tribune,
while the
New Yorker
stated, “There is nobody quite like this Merman, or even a reasonable facsimile of her.” Ethel’s belief in the show was vindicated when the first five performances pulled in $20,655 at the box office. Despite the fact that not one of the score’s songs became a breakaway hit, the company played to standing-room-only audiences for weeks.

It was only after
Something for the Boys
had opened successfully that some of the most interesting events connected with it took place. Ethel was no less given to extremes than she’d ever been: even now, at the peak of her fame, she tended to regard people as being either with her or against her. During rehearsals for
Something for the Boys,
she became extremely fond of two young actresses in the show. Betty Bruce, a tough, funny tap dancer, made Ethel break up with the pornographic lyrics she invented for the symphonic hit “Holiday for Strings,” and in time would become one of her closest female friends. Betty Garrett, who played the supporting part of Mary Frances and also served as Ethel’s understudy, was warm and unpretentious and outgoing, one of the most popular members of the company. She had a solo at the start of the second act, “I’m in Love with a Soldier Boy,” written for the New York opening when Garrett’s other number, “So Long, San Antonio,” proved unworkable. “I’m in Love with a Soldier Boy” was a sweet, tender ballad about wartime romance, and it provided the audience with a respite from the general rambunctiousness of the rest of the show. Although in no way outstanding as a song, it stopped the show night after night. Chorus dancer Lou Wills Jr. felt that it went over “because so many in the audience had men overseas.” Ethel was to make an entrance immediately after the number, but the applause was so great that she often called Garrett back to take a bow.

Friends assured Garrett that no understudy for Merman ever got the chance to go on, but midway through the run, Ethel came down with a bad cold, complicated by laryngitis. Garrett took over as Blossom for a week and gave a wonderful performance, one that paved her way to Broadway stardom in
Call Me Mister
a few years later. “I was so frightened,” recalled Garrett, “and Ethel called me. And she said, ‘How ya doin’, kid?’ I told her how nervous I was. And she said, ‘Listen, kid, if they could do it better than you,
they’d
be on the stage and
you’d
be in the audience.’”

But if Ethel looked on Betty Garrett and Betty Bruce as angels, there was another woman in the company she chose to cast in the role of demon. Initially, Ethel had gotten on well with Paula Laurence. It was clear to many in the company that Laurence was fiercely ambitious, but she performed wonderfully, and her second-act duet with Merman, “By the Mississinewah,” was a bona fide showstopper. Clad in fringed dresses, pigtails, and beaded, fur-trimmed moccasins, Ethel and Laurence played a pair of Indian squaws who share a man and dream of the day they will both be reunited with him and be able to plan a life together—all three of them:

 

BOTH
: By the Miss-iss-iss-iss-inewah,

CHIQUITA
: There’s a husband who me adore,

BLOSSOM
: Me more.

BOTH
: By the Miss-iss-iss-iss-iss-inewah,

CHIQUITA
: There he waits in a wigwam built for four,

BLOSSOM
[spoken]: Are you expectin’ too?

 

Its suggestive lyrics unfolded over Porter’s many refrains; the published version would have to be cleaned up considerably. During rehearsals, Hassard Short, busy with the big dance numbers onstage, had asked Lew Kesler to rehearse it with the two women upstairs in the theater, and together they had all worked out some hilarious pieces of business that never failed to land with the audience. The invention didn’t stop once the show had opened. Ethel accidentally dropped a moccasin onstage one night, and the audience roared; soon Laurence was picking up the moccasin bit and using it to milk applause. Another night Ethel got a huge laugh by swinging her braids back and forth; soon Laurence was copying her.