Ethel Merman: A Life (21 page)

The result of Berlin’s seclusion at the Taft was “Something to Dance About,” a swingy tune for Ethel and the ensemble. It was pleasant and likable, but not the second-act showstopper so desperately needed. Having admired Russell Nype’s style and professionalism, Ethel said, “What I’d like to do is a number with the kid.” Berlin went back once more to his hotel suite. Buck Crouse, who had the room above Berlin’s, heard him working all night on an infectious melody. Crouse hoped for the best, and he wasn’t disappointed when, a day and a half after his self-imposed seclusion, Berlin turned up with “You’re Just in Love.” Like his old 1914 hit “Play a Simple Melody,” it was a counterpoint tune—sedate and melancholy for Russell Nype, brassy and bold for Ethel. After she heard it, Ethel predicted, “We’ll never get off the stage.” She was right. When
Call Me Madam
opened in Boston on September 19, the song received seven encores. At some performances Paul Lukas, who appeared in the scene that followed, had to step out onstage and wait while the number was still going, just to cue the audience that the show had to keep moving.

Call Me Madam
played to standing-room-only audiences for its entire Boston run.
Variety
reported that the show grossed $37,300 for its first seven performances, and though reviews were better than they’d been in New Haven, they were still decidedly qualified. The
Boston Record
found that for all the money spent on it, the show offered “only an occasional flash of inspirational fire.” For the New York run, the $7.20 price tag for the best seats didn’t cause any lull at the box office: by the time it came into New York,
Call Me Madam
had earned a record advance sale of $1 million. As much as $200 was being offered for some tickets, and the
New York Daily Mirror
reported that scalpers were asking $400 for opening night.

A few days before the opening Ethel uttered a remark that quickly became part of Broadway legend. Lindsay and Crouse, realizing that the book did not show them at their best, were continuing to refine and polish their lines. They stopped only when Ethel said, “Boys, as of right now I am Miss Birdseye of 1950. I am frozen. Not a comma!” Always willing to do whatever it took during the rehearsal and out-of-town tryout periods, she knew that sooner or later the show had to be fixed—otherwise how could she be expected to do her best work? Forever after, when a show was in its final stages of previews, “Miss Birdseye” became Broadway code for no more tinkering allowed.

Call Me Madam
opened at the Imperial on October 12, 1950. In the audience that night were Joan Blondell and Mike Todd (who only a few years earlier had pronounced Ethel a has-been), Sylvia Fine and Danny Kaye, Dorothy and Richard Rodgers, Nedda and Joshua Logan, and Linda and Cole Porter. The show was ecstatically received by the audience, and, predictably, “You’re Just in Love” was the hit of the evening. Years later Russell Nype stated that he felt it was probably “the greatest musical comedy duet that’s ever been written.”

Brooks Atkinson, in the
New York Times
, found that
Call Me Madam
was one of Berlin’s “most enchanting scores: fresh, light, and beguiling, and fitted to lyrics that fall out of it with grace and humor.” The
New York Post
called Ethel “indescribably soul-satisfying. In addition, she is a comedienne of rare skill, who combines richness and warmth with her humor. Miss Merman, the illustrious American institution, is one of the joys of the world.”

The critics, justifiably, complained about the book, but these reservations were not enough to prevent
Call Me Madam
from becoming an enormous success. The only real canker in the rose was the loud and long objection to the high ticket prices and the avalanche of publicity over the huge advance sale. Nearly every reviewer mentioned the drum beating that had preceded
Call Me Madam
’s arrival in town; Ward Morehouse, writing in the
New York World-Telegram and Sun,
felt that “there hasn’t been anything with more of a ballyhoo since Sarah Bernhardt trouped the land in tents.”

With colossal hits like
Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific
, and now
Call Me Madam,
there was no longer the standard expectation that a show would come in at the start of the season and play through only to its end. Suddenly the possibilities of success had rapidly expanded. Now there was serious money to be made on Broadway, and the industry’s marketing and publicity machine beefed itself up accordingly. Many in the theater who were in a position to call the shots found themselves getting a little greedier. In the future, the core members of a show’s creative team would begin to ask for a bigger cut; in terms of how business was done, the Broadway musical was beginning to suffer a kind of loss of innocence. Ethel all too willingly adapted to this turn of events: she knew how much Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein had made from
Annie Get Your Gun
while she was the one out there onstage carrying an extremely strenuous show on her back and keeping it running for nearly three years. Now, with
Call Me Madam,
she had insisted on receiving 10 percent of all profits from the show, including road companies, film sale, and all subsidiary rights. In time,
Call Me Madam
would make her richer than ever.

Ethel settled in, assured of yet another very long run.
Call Me Madam
had opened twenty years, almost to the day, after her spectacular debut at the Alvin in
Girl Crazy
. No other stage performer had ever come close to matching her remarkable record of hit shows. It seemed impossible for her to fail professionally.

At home, however, Bob’s drinking episodes and his absences became more and more frequent, and the marriage she had initially been so sure of was rapidly dissolving. Nothing, not even a new hit show, could prevent her from facing up to that fact.

C
all Me Madam
helped usher in a glorious season on Broadway: that year’s dramas included Tennessee Williams’s
Rose Tattoo
, Clifford Odets’s
Country Girl
, and Lillian Hellman’s
Autumn Garden
. Leading the way for musicals were
Guys and Dolls
, which opened only a few weeks after
Call Me Madam
, and
The King and I
, which opened in March. In terms of artistic achievement both of these shows easily overshadowed
Call Me Madam
, and it came as no surprise when
Guys and Dolls
, with all its brilliant exuberance and evocative lyric writing, swept the fifth annual Tony Awards, winning for Best Musical, Best Score and Lyrics, Best Book, Best Choreography, Best Actor in a Musical (Robert Alda), and Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Isabel Bigley).
Call Me Madam
, however, was not entirely left out of the Tonys: Russell Nype was voted Best Featured Actor in a Musical, and Ethel had the honor of being named the season’s Best Actress in a Musical. It was the first time she’d been in the running, as the awards had been in existence only since 1947, one year too late for her greatest triumph,
Annie Get Your Gun
, to be considered. But awards did not mean as much to her as they did to many other performers. For Ethel the old cliché was a truism: her work, and the best possible execution of it, was her greatest reward.

Guys and Dolls
would run for 1,200 performances,
The King and I
for 1,246. The public’s taste in musicals continued to grow in sophistication: each year musical innovation and the underpinning of a strong story seemed to become a little more important. While the old-fashioned gags-and-girls shows that had so proliferated when Ethel started would largely disappear in the next decade, in the early 1950s they were still in evidence—witness
As the Girls Go
, with Bobby Clark, and
Ankles Aweigh
, with Betty and Jane Kean. They opened, played the better part of a season, amused a lot of tourists and businessmen entertaining out-of-town clients, and closed forever.

The 1950s were not kind years, professionally, to many of Ethel’s closest colleagues. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse would never have another blue-ribbon hit again, as they turned their attention to middling star vehicles such as
The Prescott Proposals
, starring Katharine Cornell, and
The Great Sebastians
, with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. After the hit revue
Two on the Aisle
in 1951, Bert Lahr would not appear in another musical until
Foxy
in 1964. Jimmy Durante had not played Broadway in years, preferring the lucrative worlds of radio and television. Although Cole Porter had several more hits in the 1950s, such as
Can-Can
and
Silk Stockings
, they were not up to the quality of his earlier shows, and his worsening physical condition led him to give up writing altogether in 1958. And, most surprising of all,
Call Me Madam
would be Irving Berlin’s last Broadway show until the ill-advised
Mister President
in 1962.

But in 1951 the wolf was not yet at the door where old-fashioned Broadway entertainment was concerned, and to the general public the musicals still represented a world of glamour and excitement and prestige. Many of the top tunes on
Your Hit Parade
continued to come from Broadway shows, and Broadway stars frequently appeared as guests on the nation’s top variety programs on both radio and television. Americans knew who they were and what kind of shows they had appeared in, and they welcomed them into their homes. The great divide created by the rise of rock and roll, which would grow wider and wider in the decades that followed, as “high” and “low” cultures became increasingly alien to each other, had not yet struck the American entertainment scene.

It was in this environment that Tallulah Bankhead’s famous radio program,
The Big Show
, was launched, in November 1950. Airing on NBC Sunday evenings from six to seven-thirty,
The Big Show
aimed, through quality writing, music, and production values, to recapture some of the audience that had been lost to television, which had become a national obsession far beyond the wildest imaginings of most. By the beginning of 1950, there were 4 million television sets in use across the United States, a number that would mushroom to 21 million in the next two years. Rather than ignore the phenomenon, as the big movie studios had attempted to do in the beginning, the producers of
The Big Show
set out to offer the new medium some stiff competition. On the first show, Bankhead’s guests included Jimmy Durante, Jose Ferrer, Danny Thomas, Fred Allen, Frankie Laine, and, on a night off from
Call Me Madam
, Ethel, Russell Nype, and Paul Lukas. A key ingredient of the show’s format was having Bankhead swap barbs and insults with her guests. Take the following exchange with Ethel:

 

BANKHEAD
: Ethel, I suppose you must have been bothered by hundreds of friends calling up to get tickets for themselves. Of course, I wouldn’t dream of bothering you about the two I’ve been trying to get…

MERMAN
: Oh, it’s no bother at all. I happen to have two tickets with me. But they’re way back in the fourth row, and knowing your eyes…

 

Ethel proved so adept at this sort of banter that Bankhead invited her back again and again during the run of
Call Me Madam
. At a staggering weekly production cost reported to be around $50,000,
The Big Show
would last only until 1952, but while it endured, it made a big noise in the dying days of radio.

As the months rolled by, the audience’s love affair with
Call Me Madam
and its star continued to swell. Sheldon Harnick, then a young lyricist who had recently moved to New York, recalled sitting in the last row of the Imperial’s second balcony—all he could afford—for one performance. Ethel came out for “The Hostess with the Mostes’,” planted her feet, and began to sing. “She opened her mouth and that trombone came out, and I thought, ‘Now I understand the legend of Merman,’ Harnick remembered. “Even that far up, it just engulfed me.”

The Broadway musical was in full, spectacular flower, and Ethel must have wondered if it could go on forever. If Hollywood continued to ignore her, New York provided her with more love and acclaim than she could possibly hope to absorb.

Ethel’s standby in
Call Me Madam
was again the reliable Mary Jane Walsh, but when Walsh decided to get married and move upstate, her job was taken over by twenty-five-year-old Elaine Stritch. A brilliant young comedienne who had been making a name for herself in New York revues, Stritch had yet to click with the public. She had certain things in common with Ethel: shrewd comic timing, a tough way of delivering her lines, and a highly individual singing style (though the raspy-voiced Stritch could never hope to compete with Ethel’s clarion tones). Stritch also had fierce ambition, which did not go unnoticed by Ethel. “I’ve always suspected that Stritch’s glands worked overtime,” Ethel wrote in her memoirs, and throughout her life she maintained a somewhat guarded, tongue-in-cheek attitude toward this brash actress seventeen years her junior. Privately she wrote off Stritch as a mean drunk. Certainly she acknowledged Stritch’s fearsome talents, but she wasn’t about to let her get near the part of Sally Adams if she could help it. “A role is a very personal thing to an actress,” Ethel wrote. “You don’t want someone else fooling around with it any more than you do with your toothbrush.” Each night, Stritch popped by Ethel’s dressing room at the Imperial at half hour with a wry, “I gather you’re well.”

In her dazzling one-woman show,
Elaine Stritch at Liberty
, created with John Lahr, Stritch told a story about standing by for Ethel in
Call Me Madam
that drew one of the show’s biggest laughs. Stritch recalled a particular performance when Ethel was onstage singing “Can You Use Any Money Today?” while being heckled by a loud, drunken man in the orchestra section. She tried to continue with the number but found it next to impossible with the constant, earsplitting interruptions of “ATTA GIRL, ETHEL, LAY IT ON ME, SWEETIE POOPS!” Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she left the stage in the middle of a lyric. While all the chorus girls remained frozen in place, Ethel went into the wings, down the stairs to the front of the house, back down the aisle, over to where the heckler was seated, and proceeded to force him bodily out of the theater before hurrying back for the end of the number.

Funny as this story is, it has been questioned by several of the players from
Call Me Madam
, who tell a different version. They do recall that one night, when a drunk in the orchestra section disrupted the performance, Ethel did leave the stage in mid-number to deal with the situation. But according to Dody Goodman, she simply went out the side door, confronted the house manager, and told him, “Get him out of here, and give him his money back—and tell him we never want to see him in this theater again.” This is an infinitely more plausible version of the incident. Ethel, with her highly developed sense of professionalism, would surely never have laid hands on a paying customer (let alone a drunk who easily could have overpowered her). And, as Dody Goodman pointed out, “Elaine wouldn’t have known anyway. She left every night at half hour.”

Bob’s drinking and erratic behavior were now taking their toll at the office as well as at home. Ethel felt frustrated, helpless, and finally angry. Once again her lack of tolerance for weakness overcame the very deep love she had felt for her husband; she simply could not see how Bob could yield to his sense of inadequacy in such a self-destructive way. She was, of course, supported by Mom and Pop Zimmermann in her feelings of betrayal. Bob seemed intent on failure, on succumbing to his own diminishing view of himself. In time he lost his position with Hearst and was forced to scramble for work elsewhere. This only exacerbated the tension between husband and wife, and by May 1951 their disagreements had become so frequent and so wounding that Bob left the apartment and found a place of his own. Exactly whose idea the separation was has never been entirely clear. Ethel was fairly tight-lipped about the details, but in show-business circles it soon became received wisdom that she had thrown him out. “In later years,” said Alex Birnbaum, “I would hear how she left him. The hell she did. He walked out on her—which was devastating.”

Ethel was soon keeping company with a new clutch of friends, chief among whom were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They were, of course, one of the most discussed couples in the public eye. Back in 1936, Ethel had followed the news accounts of the duke’s ascension to the British throne, as Edward VIII, and his subsequent abdication when his family did not approve of his relationship with the twice-married American socialite Bessie Wallis Warfield Simpson. Ethel had no interest whatever in cultivating the aristocracy; she simply enjoyed the duke and duchess’s company and appreciated them for who they were—particularly the duchess, whose belligerent, domineering personality and sense of outrageous fun appealed to her. The Windsors were in turn huge admirers of Ethel, and soon they were seeing a great deal of each other on the town after theater, often with Russell Nype along to make it a quartet.

The duchess took a special interest in Nype and introduced him to many friends in her social circle. For the ex-minister’s son from Illinois, it was exhilarating to be in such company. “Life was so exciting and you were doing so many things, so many activities, and you were out socially so much,” he later said. Ethel was with him every step of the way. In the past, both before and during her marriage to Bob Levitt, she had been a bit cautious about how much socializing she did after a show. Now, whether she was relieved that the tension of Bob’s presence had been removed or she simply wanted to give the impression of reveling in her independence, she was out night after night. There were post-dinner invitations to the homes of many in the duke and duchess’s lives, and there were all of New York’s toniest night spots to choose from: ‘21,’ El Morocco, the St. Regis Maisonette, and the Stork Club, where Ethel and Nype found themselves going most often. The chill between Ethel and Sherman Billingsley had thawed some time ago, and now she was happy to be a regular at the club once more. During the war, after his rift with Ethel, Billingsley added what had become the restaurant’s elite attraction, the Cub Room. It was set apart from the rest of the club, and reserved only for A-list celebrities: Spencer Tracy, Ernest Hemingway, Alfred Hitchcock, Bing Crosby, Leland and Pamela Hayward, Helen Hayes, Hedy Lamarr, Gene Tunney, Dorothy Lamour, Rebecca West, and countless others dined and drank there regularly. Walter Winchell posted himself nightly at Table Number 50 and day after day mentioned the Stork Club in his widely read column; this ritual was immortalized in the 1957 film
Sweet Smell of Success
, with Burt Lancaster as the Winchell prototype. Ethel loved holding court there, loved the jewelry and designer scarves and Sortilège perfume and ice-cold bottles of Dom Pérignon that once again came her way.

With her new single-girl status there also came a variety of interesting men to squire her around town. Wealthy investment banker Charles Cushing became one frequent escort. Through Cushing, Ethel met many members of the social set on Long Island and in Fairfield, Connecticut, and soon she was ducking out of town after the Saturday-night performance to spend the weekend at one fashionable country estate or another. One of her most frequent hostesses was the duke and duchess’s good friend Edith Baker, whose home in Glen Cove was one of the most magnificent mansions on Long Island’s Gold Coast.