Ethel Merman: A Life (26 page)

The Boston notices also indicated a hit in the making. “Boisterous and hilarious,” wrote the
Boston Advertiser
, adding that Ethel was “never better in her life.” But the quality of the show was not improving significantly, and Ethel knew it. So did Lindsay and Crouse, who frantically reworked scene after scene, to little effect. An atmosphere of desperation prevailed, perhaps best personified by the ever-anxious, ever-perspiring Abe Burrows, who stood in the wings with a stopwatch; if a certain number of seconds elapsed without a laugh, he insisted that the authors insert one.

By the time
Happy Hunting
got to New York, the advance sale amounted to $1.5 million, but word had reached Broadway gossipmongers from the road that
Happy Hunting
was several notches below the Merman standard. During rehearsals at the Majestic Theatre, Arlene Dahl was frequently present backstage, and her stunning green-eyed, red-haired beauty seemed to rankle Ethel. One day Dahl was decorating Lamas’s dressing room in his favorite color scheme of black and white, with shades of red. Ethel passed by the open door, stopped, surveyed the nearly finished result, and said to Dahl, “It looks like a bordello. Well, he’ll be right at home!” Later, Dahl remembered, her renovation of Lamas’s dressing room met with favorable comments and even wound up being photographed for a couple of magazine layouts. “Ethel called in a designer,” said Dahl, “and had him redo her dressing room a couple of times. Not once, but twice. So childish.”

But on opening night, when Ethel made her entrance, all the backstage tensions and the show’s mediocre quality suddenly seemed unimportant. The ovation was deafening. This was more than an opening; it was a homecoming, a warm and ecstatic welcome back from the queen’s self-imposed exile out west. When she finished “Gee, But It’s Good to Be Here,” the song’s title seemed to take on a double meaning.

This was Broadway, expressing its love for one of its own. The screams and cheers reached a fantastic pitch, and for a while there seemed to be few worries. “Mutual Admiration Society” was warmly received, and the first act bounced along at a reasonably merry pace. But the faults of the leaden second act could not be hidden, even before an audience of well-wishers in the mood to welcome Ethel back to her rightful home. The new musical had worn out its appeal long before the final curtain descended. Standing at the back of the Majestic, Anna Crouse was in tears, “because you could tell that they were sitting there hating it.”

The critics, delighted to have Ethel back, were generally kind. After allowing that the score was “hardly more than adequate,” the
New York Times
’s Brooks Atkinson wrote that Ethel was “as brassy as ever, glowing like a neon light whenever she steps on the stage, full of self-confidence and band concert music…. Welcome home, Miss Merman. The neighborhood is always a little more jaunty when you are here.” John McCain, writing in the
New York Journal-American
, called Ethel “ageless and individual; she can still sell a song better than anybody in the business. This new Russel Crouse–Howard Lindsay is by no means the happiest material she has ever dealt with, neither is the score by Matt Dubey and Harold Karr, but it doesn’t matter. Big Merm just simply gets out there and takes charge. She swaggers and struts. Her numbers can be heard comfortably in Hohokus, NJ, and when she delivers a joke line, she will come down in the audience and hit you with the juvenile if you don’t laugh. She is plainly the greatest.”

Although she was disappointed in the way the show had turned out—forever after she would refer to it as “a jeep among limousines”—Ethel was determined to make it a hit, as much for Six and their fellow investors as for the sake of her own theatrical reputation. “If you watched her,” recalled Mark Zeller, “she did the same thing exactly every night. She did her work in such a way that she needed to depend on things being the same. She couldn’t deal with distractions, because it threw her. When someone was out front who was important to her, there was an extra charge, and it seemed like a different performance, but if you looked at it, she did exactly the same thing. It could be her cousin—not necessarily someone famous. But there was an emotional charge.”

Jack Dabdoub, a member of the ensemble, remembered the impact that Ethel’s voice could have on audience members. One night a little suntanned man was sitting at the front of the orchestra section, smiling and smiling as the show began. “He looked like he was anticipating Ethel coming onstage,” said Dabdoub. “And then she sang ‘Gee, But It’s Good to Be Here,’ and of course that high note on ‘Here’ was a money note for her. And I looked out in the audience, and this nice little man’s face crumbled, and he reached in his pocket, and I realized he had a hearing aid. And the rest of the show, he had his hand inside his coat whenever she was onstage.”

Six was frequently on the scene during the run of the show, and whatever was happening privately, it seemed to the members of the company that she was still very much a woman in love. She called him “Big Bear” and still acted downright girlish in his presence. To Helene Whitney, now appearing in her third consecutive Merman show, Ethel seemed more relaxed with the company than ever. Frequently during the big ensemble numbers, she would turn her back to the audience and try her best to break up the girls in the chorus. Much of the time she was making a dig at Fernando Lamas, whom she had not forgiven for the business of the tight white suit. She was as generous as ever, throwing lots of parties for the cast. At one of these, Virginia Gibson recalled, “Some of the kids were saying that they had seen Mary Martin in
Annie Get Your Gun
. And they were saying, ‘Oh, but she is not as good as
you
,’ and carrying on. So I said, after one glass of wine, ‘Well, I love Mary Martin.’ And there’s a deathly silence. And she looks at me and says, ‘I agree with Virginia. I love Mary Martin, too.’ She didn’t like to be BS’d.”

Several months into the run, Ethel decided that something had to be done to spruce up Karr and Dubey’s listless score. In particular, she’d had it with “This Is What I Call Love” and “The Game of Love.” She saw to it that they were replaced with two fresh numbers, respectively, “Just a Moment Ago” and “I’m Old Enough to Know Better,” but neither one came from the workshop of Karr and Dubey. They were written, at Ethel’s request, by her old pal Roger Edens, who, because of his exclusive contract with MGM, didn’t take credit but used his good friend Kay Thompson as his “front.” Although the new songs were not outstanding, they were far better than what they replaced, and they gave the show a much-needed lift. Still, going back for another look at the show with its new material,
Variety
warned its readers that “not even the new songs or a top-form Ethel Merman can hide the fact that
Happy Hunting
is uninspired musical comedy.”

Despite the fact that she received a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical (losing to Judy Holliday in
Bells Are Ringing
),
Happy Hunting
brought Ethel little pleasure. And an incident with Gene Wesson, a member of the supporting cast, brought her a dose of frustration and anxiety. Wesson was being screen-tested for the role of John Barrymore in a forthcoming biopic,
Too Much, Too Soon
. In order to look convincing as the aging Barrymore, Wesson dyed his brown hair with touches of gray. Ethel noticed and objected immediately, and the show’s management ordered Wesson to restore his hair to its original color. With such an important film opportunity hanging in the balance, Wesson refused, and suddenly he found himself fired. (To compound his problems, Errol Flynn got the part of John Barrymore.) In an interview with Sheilah Graham for her popular syndicated column, Wesson pointed to Ethel as the one responsible for his dismissal from the company, and Ethel lost no time in filing charges against him with Actors’ Equity, under the rule that forbade any union member to take action detrimental to another union member. When Equity sided with her, issuing an apology to her on Wesson’s behalf, the actor filed a $100,000 damages suit against the union on the grounds that it had “improperly censured” him as a result of Ethel’s complaint and that he faced professional ostracism. Eventually Ethel was subpoenaed for an appearance in New York State Supreme Court in connection with the case, but her lawyer, again Paul O’Dwyer, argued that since she was not a party to the suit, she could not be subpoenaed in the matter. The case dragged on before it was finally resolved in Equity’s favor. Wesson never again appeared in a Broadway show.

The run ground on, and the troubles with Lamas never really dissipated. He and Ethel were still not on speaking terms, although for the most part they kept their differences out of view of the rest of the company, until one night an onstage spat brought matters to a rather bizarre and inexplicable head. The end of the show had been blocked with both Ethel and Lamas downstage; he was to turn her around and walk her upstage while she delivered an aside to the audience over her shoulder. At this particular performance, Ethel’s tight-fitting dress suddenly split all the way down her back. The rest of the company stood in the wings wondering what was going to happen. Lamas saved the situation by deftly pulling off his polo coat and draping it over Ethel’s shoulders so they could finish the scene. “It was the most gentlemanly, wonderful thing,” recalled Mark Zeller, “and a perfect opportunity for her to say thank you, to end this silly business.” Instead, once they were offstage, she turned on Lamas with the full-voltage Merman fury, accusing him of spoiling her exit. Eventually Equity reprimanded Lamas—surely at Ethel’s prodding—for various alleged offenses, including stepping on her lines, obstructing her curtain call, and ignoring notes from stage manager Robert Downing.

But if Ethel’s never-forgive-and-never-forget position caused a major breach with her costar, she could be quite kind to the members of the company she liked and trusted. Very late in the run of
Happy Hunting
, Virginia Gibson received a tempting offer to appear as a regular on television’s
Your Hit Parade
. Knowing that the show was soon to close and that stars were famous for not wanting to break in replacements, Gibson nervously approached Ethel with her dilemma. Ethel listened and after a moment said, “Do you think it will be better for you?” Gibson again said yes. “Well, are you going to get more money?” asked Ethel. Gibson again said yes. “Okay,” said Ethel. “You can go.”

On November 30, 1957,
Happy Hunting
closed after 412 performances. The show had become nothing more than a dreary obligation to Ethel, and she was relieved to see it come to an end. At the same time, she was concerned that such an inferior vehicle not be her theatrical swan song. “I’d like to do one more big show,” she told a reporter shortly before
Happy Hunting
closed, “and then call it finis, as far as Broadway is concerned.” Soon it was announced that she would return for the fall season in a new musical,
The Lady from Colorado
, about Katie Lauder, the Centennial State’s first titled lady. The show never materialized, and it was probably a good thing, for it sounded like a retread of the old Merman formula. With the continued move toward ever-more-sophisticated shows such as
My Fair Lady
(1956) and groundbreaking ones such as
West Side Story
(1957), the prototypical Merman vehicle was looking even more like a dinosaur. Ethel was becoming a bit edgy about her professional status. She knew she could not afford to waste her talents on another turkey like
Happy Hunting
; she needed a change of pace, something with greater dramatic heft. But such a show might not be easy to find: she was now fifty, and the Merman legend seemed carved in marble. On top of that, she had no guarantees that her voice would hold up through her postmenopausal years. The rise of rock and roll had also dramatically altered the musical landscape, and she knew that there was every chance she might not be able to hang on to her audience in this time of rapidly changing tastes.

On Broadway, more was changing than the audience’s taste in shows. The question of exactly when amplification arrived on Broadway is much debated among theater historians. Various forms of amplification had existed as far back as
Billy Rose’s Jumbo
in 1935 and Earl Carroll’s
Vanities
in 1940. By the early 1960s, the process of installing “foot mikes”—microphones positioned along the footlight troughs—was firmly in place. This period marked the beginning of what would become the steady rise of amplification on Broadway. In the 1961 musical
Carnival!
, Anna Maria Alberghetti wore a body mike, fastened to her lapel; when she turned suddenly from side to side, the sound could vary considerably, and the device gave her no end of trouble. (
Carnival
’s director, Gower Champion, was, as historian Mark N. Grant points out, an early proponent of sound enhancement.) This period also marked the beginning of the end of singers like Ethel, who could reach the last row in the balcony without the assistance of a microphone. A new generation was in the making, one that had grown up never hearing unamplified sound in the musical theater.

Despite reports that its producers had taken a $30,000 loss,
Happy Hunting
had made money. Still, it had not been the bonanza that Six had hoped for, and he made no secret of his disappointment. Nothing wounded Ethel more deeply than the feeling that she had been used, and that feeling was being driven home on a daily basis. Quarrels between the Sixes broke out with greater and greater frequency. Ethel tried her best to concentrate on raising the children, who were doing their best to cope with the growing atmosphere of hostility between their mother and Six. It was particularly hard for Ethel Jr., by now a sweet and rather shy teenager who was very conscious of dividing her time fairly between her parents. During the run of
Happy Hunting
, Virginia Gibson had taken Ethel Jr. ice-skating at Rockefeller Center. Afterward, as they sipped hot chocolate, the girl suddenly became anxious and asked, “What time is it?” “She didn’t want to be late for meeting her father,” observed Gibson. “She was very concerned with everybody.”