Ethel Merman: A Life (17 page)

On April 19, 1945, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel
had opened on Broadway, and it quickly became another runaway success for the composing team.
Carousel
was adapted from an unusual source, Ferenc Molnár’s
Liliom,
and its dark-hued story of death and redemption had distinctly operatic overtones. The main character, the hot-tempered, violent carousel barker Billy Bigelow (played by John Raitt), was the kind of antihero the musical stage had never seen before—not even in
Pal Joey.
Billy’s “Soliloquy” near the end of the first act was essentially a dramatic scena.
Carousel
barreled through the door opened by
Oklahoma!,
and critics and other observers were abuzz about the possibilities presented by this new kind of musical drama and where it all might lead.

Not only was
Annie Get Your Gun
being created against a backdrop of tremendous change, but several of the show’s principal talents were experiencing a kind of homecoming after a significant absence. Ethel was returning to the stage after having been away for nearly two and a half years, the longest hiatus she’d ever had on Broadway.
Annie
was Joshua Logan’s first show after several years of army service. Irving Berlin, too, had been immersed in the service, producing his phenomenally successful revue
This Is the Army
and supervising productions of it all over the world. Because the bulk of his stage career had been spent working in the revue format, and because
Annie
’s Wild West setting felt alien to him, Berlin was not entirely sure he was the right man for the job. His last Broadway book show had been
Louisiana Purchase,
but Rodgers and Hammerstein had subsequently proven themselves unmatched masters of that form. Berlin was, even in the best of times, nervous and fussy about his songs, constantly worrying whether they were of good enough quality, and
Annie Get Your Gun
found him at his most self-critical.

It was clear to Rodgers and Hammerstein and to Logan that Berlin was turning out a superb score at record speed, but the composer needed constant reassurance. He had written one number, a show-business anthem called “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” that was a simple tune—so simple that his secretary turned up her nose at it—but when coupled with his bouncy, jubilant lyrics, it sounded like an instant classic. The first time Berlin played it for Rodgers and Hammerstein and Logan, they were all (they thought) properly enthusiastic. Later, when he played an extra verse he’d written, he felt that their response was cool, and he promptly went home and tossed the song aside. When Logan and the producers found out what he’d done and protested, the music was recovered only with some difficulty by Berlin’s judgmental secretary.

As they constructed the book, Dorothy and Herbert followed the life of the historical Annie Oakley only in the loosest sense. Born in Darke County, Ohio, in 1866, Annie had been fascinated by guns from an early age. As a child she had picked up a forty-inch cap-and-ball rifle and fired it; the kick was so great that the butt of the gun broke her nose, but in the years that followed, she kept on shooting. At fifteen she met Frank Butler and squared off against him in a match that required them both to shoot live birds out of a trap. Annie won the hundred-dollar prize, and her fame quickly spread. She had remarkable skill: she could hit two-inch flying balls over her shoulder by sighting them in the gleaming surface of a bowie blade. Annie became a star whose celebrity spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she even gave two private performances for Queen Victoria. In 1901 Annie was seriously injured in a horrible train wreck and underwent a series of operations, but she continued to shoot well, living until 1926.

The Fieldses’ book for
Annie Get Your Gun
was funny and tart but strictly conventional: its Annie Oakley is a rough and rowdy, fun-loving country girl who gets a job performing stunts in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where she falls in love with the show’s star marksman, Frank Butler (the rich-voiced Ray Middleton). Frank’s idea of a wife is someone soft and yielding (Berlin provided the lovely tune “The Girl That I Marry” to show the audience what Frank means), and the raucous Annie doesn’t seem to qualify. But she becomes the show’s star attraction and is soon being billed as “The Greatest Rifle Shot in the World.” Business is so good that Buffalo Bill’s company finally reclaims the ground it has lost to the rival show, run by Pawnee Bill. As Annie’s fame grows, Frank, enraged to think that she has played him for a sucker, decamps to Pawnee Bill’s company. The ending is anything but progressive: counseled by Chief Sitting Bull (Harry Bellaver), Annie purposely loses to Frank in a sharpshooting contest, thus ensuring that she will become his wife.

If the book wasn’t exactly the last word in sophistication, it did the job and delivered the laughs, and any weakness it did have was lessened by Berlin’s superb score. In addition to his rigorous artistic standards, Berlin set great store by a song’s commercial success. As critic John Lahr has suggested, he may have observed how enthusiastically audiences had embraced folk musicals such as
Oklahoma!
and
Bloomer Girl,
but whatever the source of his inspiration, Berlin surpassed himself with the score for
Annie Get Your Gun.
He freely admitted that he hadn’t a clue about how to compose backwoods music, and, to his credit, he didn’t try, although “Doin’ What Comes Naturally” and “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” both establishing songs for Annie, have a jaunty, country feel. Berlin had long been associated with songs that were sweetly sentimental (“Always”), patriotic (“God Bless America”), or jaunty (“Puttin’ on the Ritz”), but never had he come up with anything so downright hilarious as “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun.”

Berlin never lays Annie’s backwoods manner on too thick: it’s country filtered through a Broadway showstopper sensibility. In the marvelous “Moonshine Lullaby,” sung by Annie to her little brothers and sisters on a train, she ends on a gentle, sweet note, then picks up her rifle and shoots out the overhead light.

There was something new for Ethel in this score, too: in addition to her usual uptempo numbers, Berlin decided to expand her range and gave her two stunning, wistful ballads, “They Say It’s Wonderful” and “I Got Lost in His Arms.” These weren’t torch songs—Ethel had sung plenty of those in the thirties—but plaintive expressions of a yearning human heart, without a trace of Cole Porter’s dry-eyed wit. Not that Ethel sang them in a plaintive way, exactly. For the most part, she would not return to the sweeter style, with its occasional dip into soprano mix, that she had used in numbers such as “Make It Another Old-Fashioned, Please” and “I’ll Pay the Check.” From this point on, no matter what the emotional temperature of the songs, she generally sang one way: the big, stentorian Merman way, if with great precision and depth of feeling. As she aged, it seemed to be what nature dictated. It felt comfortable, and audiences were thrilled by it. Her brassy delivery led critics and fans alike to describe her as Broadway’s biggest belter, but “belting” isn’t really an accurate description of her style. True belting takes many forms. At one time it was most commonly a pushing up of the chest voice to the highest part of the range; most often it is simply an aggressively forward, speech-based singing in which the breath isn’t so much lofted as it is hurled forth. Ethel’s vocal production was so even throughout her range that she didn’t need to resort to any technical trick. Her naturally forward placement, strong resonators, superb command of breath support, and solid physique helped her to sing like an operatic tenor: the sound moved up through her chest and resonated in her head, with true tenorlike ping on the high notes. As Karen Morrow, the big-voiced Broadway singer of the 1960s, observed, “Ethel’s sound was hers. I don’t think she ever strove to achieve it. She never made any adjustments—she just never got in the way of it.”

Rehearsals for
Annie Get Your Gun
started on February 25, 1946. On the first day, Joshua Logan came up with a wonderful piece of business for Ethel that would provide her with one of the indelible moments of her career. They were rehearsing the scene in which Annie lays eyes on Frank Butler for the first time. The Fieldses’ script indicated, “She looks at him and in a second falls in love with him forever.” This was tricky, and not much help, as stage directions go. Logan solved the problem brilliantly: he thought Ethel should let her entire body deflate, like a puppet whose strings have been snipped, while keeping her eyes fixed on Ray Middleton. “Her mouth dropped open, her shoulders sank, her legs opened wide at the knees, her diaphragm caved in,” wrote Logan. Miraculously, Ethel captured exactly what he wanted on her very first try. “Later,” said Logan, “we dubbed it ‘the goon look,’ and it won for me the eternal devotion of everyone, including myself. It seemed to be the catalytic moment—the moment at which the play became a hit.”

On April 2,
Annie Get Your Gun
began a three-week engagement at the Shubert in Boston. The show was in remarkable shape early on, and the critics found little to carp about, although the
Boston Globe
reviewer did point out that the second act could use a comedy number to balance the preponderance of love songs. At the first seven performances in Boston, the box office took in $32,000, and the remainder of the run quickly sold out. Annie moved on to New Haven’s Shubert, where the response was equally ecstatic. Everyone was certain that they had a hit on their hands as they prepared for the New York opening at the Imperial Theatre on April 25. But while the scenery was being hung, it proved too heavy for the Imperial’s walls. A girder buckled, and the scenery had to be moved out while the walls were repaired and reinforced, which meant a lag of two weeks—a potentially devastating amount of time, financially, for the producers. Management scrambled to find an available theater out of town and quickly came up with the Philadelphia Shubert, where
Annie
played during the interim—again to wild audience response and great notices.

Finally, on May 16, the show opened in New York. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Logan, and Berlin were all nearly giddy with excitement; the only one remaining cool and concentrated was Ethel. And then the unexpected happened. From the time the curtain rose, the opening-night audience seemed frozen. Nothing—not the hilarious “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” not the ravishing “They Say It’s Wonderful,” not the surefire “goon look”—registered. Laughs were stifled and applause polite. Logan was in a panic. Backstage at intermission he ran up to Ethel wringing his hands and demanded to know how she’d been able to get through a near-hostile first-act audience.

“Easy,” she snapped, echoing almost exactly the advice she’d given Betty Garrett in
Something for the Boys.
“You may think I’m playing the part, but inside I’m saying, ‘Screw you! You jerks! If you were as good as I am, you’d be up here!’”

Ethel’s no-fuss attitude was apparently the right one to have. As Logan remembered, “The second act went roaringly.” Oddly, the reviews the next morning seemed to reflect the cautiousness on the audience’s part. While Ethel’s personal notices could not have been improved upon, many reviewers were curiously ambivalent about the show. The
New Yorker
carped that
Annie
was “burdened with a book that makes it appear, contrary to legend, that the celebrated Miss Oakley led a rather monotonous life—just love, love, love, diluted now and then with a little rifle practice.”
Time
dismissed it as “a great big, follow-the-formula, fetch-the-crowd musical. It bothers with nothing artistic or bizarre…. Irving Berlin has written more tuneful music in his time; the dances are lively but not spectacular; the book is much like April weather.” Brooks Atkinson, in the
New York Times,
called Berlin’s score “routine” and “undistinguished,” noting that “I Got the Sun in the Morning” was “as close as he comes to imaginative music writing.”

It seems inconceivable today that Berlin’s magnificent score should have elicited such a tepid response. In fact, he was being judged not on the quality of his songs, which was stunningly high, but on his participation in a show that looked backward, not ahead. He had hefty consolation, however, in the fact that every single one of Ethel’s songs became a hit—a much higher than average yield for a Broadway show;
Annie
added overwhelmingly to Berlin’s personal wealth.

Meanwhile the notices for Ethel were up to her usual standard. “By the time she is finished with either a song or a part she possesses it completely,” wrote Atkinson, “and very nearly possesses all the other performers and has, at least, a lien on the scenery.” The
New Yorker
’s critic admitted that Ethel could make him laugh “just by coming out on the stage.” And the
Saturday Review
offered perhaps the warmest words of all: “Miss Merman
is
Broadway. She is Broadway with its flash in the flesh; Broadway making noon of darkness and ready to turn each night into New Year’s Eve.”

The morning after
Annie
opened, Bob Levitt was lounging in the apartment at the Century with all the reviews spread out in front of him. It seemed to him that he’d never read such ecstatic praise for any Broadway star. But Ethel didn’t have time to look over the notices carefully, for she was on the telephone with the manager of their local grocery store, demanding to know why she’d been charged for a can of peaches that hadn’t been delivered the day before. As much as Bob tried to distract her with the reviews, she wouldn’t be put off her mission, and she spent some time haggling until the manager finally relented and agreed to send over an extra can of peaches.