Ethel Merman: A Life (28 page)

It was a story that became part of Broadway legend, and it also set the tone for her relationship with Sondheim and Laurents as the show evolved. Sondheim, still smarting because she had vetoed him as composer, thought that she had learned her material like “a talking dog.” Jerry Robbins, whom Ethel affectionately called “Teacher,” would act out a scene or a song for her, and she would follow, mirroring him. While some actresses would have balked at learning material this way, preferring to discover the dramatic meaning for themselves, Ethel was a willing and pliable pupil; her trust in Robbins was absolute. Years later Sondheim complained that “Rose’s Turn” suffered from Ethel’s inability to approach it as a trained dramatic actress would. That said, he grudgingly gave her her due. “I thought in the first act,” he observed, “which required her comic skills, she was nonpareil. In the second, where it required dramatic skills, it needed someone who had more experience playing drama. There was something less fulfilled in the second act than there was in the first. The reason that I wrote ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ the way I did was that I doubted that she could handle that scene as an actress. So I wrote a song of the type that she had sung all her life, like ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow,’ which only requires a trumpet-voiced affirmation. I thought that we would let Herbie and Louise, in their reactions, give the scene the drama. But the intensity that Ethel put into it came as a surprise.”

In all the years that have passed since
Gypsy
was born, both Laurents and Sondheim have frequently criticized Ethel for what they considered her lack of intellect. “Brains was not her forte,” said Sondheim. Nor, for that matter, was coddling Sondheim, trying to win him over and make him her friend after she had nixed him for the show’s music. Mary Martin might have operated that way; Ethel had no time for the theater’s version of office politics. She worked as hard on Rose as she had ever worked on anything in her life, certain that she had the juiciest role of her career.

“Ethel was dumb,” agreed Laurents. But, like Sondheim, he recognized her native shrewdness. “I said when I met her, are you aware that Rose is a monster? She said she was, and she would do anything I wanted her to do. And she did. She was no fool
that
way. When it came to the tough part, ‘Rose’s Turn,’ Jerry did it for her. Counted it out—five, six, seven, eight—and she followed him. She didn’t think good mother, bad mother. She thought the way most stars thought, and, I think, the way many stars
still
think: ‘I want the audience to like me.’”

As usual Ethel had cast approval. There were two neck-and-neck contenders for the part of Louise: Suzanne Pleshette and Sandra Church. At the last of Church’s five auditions, Ethel sat in, and when she heard Church sing her plaintive solo, “Little Lamb,” she burst into tears. Church got the job, but having heard of Ethel’s reputation for being tough on actors, she told her agent that “Little Lamb” would no doubt be the first song to go. The other principal part was Herbie, Rose’s put-upon boyfriend, who gives up his candy-selling business to go on the road as the manager of June’s act. A number of top character actors were considered, but Robbins was intrigued by the idea of putting Jack Klugman in the part. A talented actor who had earned a small name for himself in the theater and on live television dramas, Klugman had no singing voice whatsoever and had never imagined he would be considered for a musical.

“I had to sing at the final audition,” Klugman remembered. “Jule Styne didn’t want me at all. He used to say, ‘Jack, is this a talkathon?’ But Ethel wanted me, and she made me get up with her and sing ‘Small World.’ And she sang the first part so quietly that her voice cracked. I was mesmerized; there was so much love in it when she sang. And I picked up the second chorus, and I sounded like Pinza.” That night Robbins telephoned Klugman at home and said, “You got it! And it was the way you sang that did it.”

Rehearsals got under way on February 11, 1959. Gypsy Rose Lee was an occasional visitor, recording the show’s progress with her movie camera and feeling, as she later admitted, “like a ghost at a banquet.” She hoped the show would be a hit, since her contract specified that she owned a piece of it. Ethel, too, had arranged a sweet deal, under which she would pull in 5 percent of the gross before the payoff to investors, and 7 percent thereafter. Also, her contract stipulated that Merrick and Hayward pay her board, lodging, and miscellaneous living expenses, since she had taken a furnished apartment at the Park Lane Hotel on Park Avenue for the run of the show and was still claiming Colorado as her primary residence. (This was later the source of a dispute, in which the Internal Revenue Service unsuccessfully tried to deny her claim for her travel expenses in New York.) Signing on for
Gypsy
had meant leaving Ethel Jr. and Bobby behind in Colorado, under the supervision of a governess and Six—on the increasingly rare occasions when he was home. It was a difficult decision on Ethel’s part, but she knew that
Gypsy
presented too good an opportunity to pass up, even if it meant enduring the longest separation from her children she had known.

Robbins, Laurents, Merrick, and Hayward all smelled a substantial hit in the making. Everyone was happy—everyone except Sondheim, a rather withdrawn, melancholy presence during rehearsals, and June Havoc, who objected to the way her family was portrayed in Laurents’s script and refused for months to sign the release allowing her name to be used in the show. (Havoc later relented, but her feelings about
Gypsy
were always confused and complicated; in particular she was not fond of Ethel’s no-holds-barred interpretation of Rose. The real Rose, she pointed out, had been a charmer and a seductress. Or, as she memorably put it, “Ethel was a calliope. Mother was a clarinet.”)

With so many temperamental talents on board for
Gypsy,
there was bound to be friction. Robbins was as much of a monster as ever, taking out his frustrations on those least able to defend themselves. One of Robbins’s prime targets was Lane Bradbury, who played June. Robbins had favored Carol D’Andrea, the original June, who had worked with him in
West Side Story.
But when Merrick fired her, her replacement, Bradbury, suddenly found herself Robbins’s special victim. As ever, Ethel was exempt from Robbins’s tirades. She proceeded as she always had, leading the company in her usual brisk, businesslike way and maintaining a healthy distance from most in the cast.

One person she decided was worthy of her time was Jack Klugman. Their friendship, however, almost didn’t get off the ground. Like Virginia Gibson in
Happy Hunting,
Klugman initially thought it best to keep apart from Ethel. “So for the first several days when we rehearsed, I didn’t talk to her,” Klugman recalled. “I would never say hello unless she said it first. And finally one day, she said to me, ‘You’re a moody son of a bitch, aren’t you?’ So I said, ‘Well, you’re a star.’ And she said, ‘Have I been a star with you?’ And I said, ‘No.’ So she said, ‘Well, then. Cut the shit.’”

Klugman, coming from a serious theater background, also had difficulty adjusting to Ethel’s peculiar way of rehearsing—namely, her habit of throwing her lines out front. “She would never look at you onstage. And as an actor, of course, this bothered me. So I went to Jerry Robbins and said, ‘Jerry, I can’t play this way. You’ve gotta have some control over her.’ And one day we were going through a scene, and she said her line out front, and I purposely didn’t say anything. And after a couple of moments, she turned and looked at me, and then I gave her my cue. And she looked at me for a long time—the longest five minutes in the world—and she doesn’t say anything. And I thought, ‘Well, she’s going to kill me right here.’ She knew exactly what I was doing. But then she went on, and from then on she always looked at me when she gave me the lines.”

After all the sets and costumes had been packed off to Philadelphia for the out-of-town tryout,
Gypsy
had its first hearing in front of an audience: this was the time-honored “gypsy run-through” for people in the theater community before a show went out of town. Comedienne Carole Cook was in the audience that day and watched, amazed and exhilarated, as the cast, clad mostly in capri pants and blue jeans, gave a thrilling performance of the show. Robbins was on hand to narrate scene changes and stage directions, which the actors would mime. “I swear it was the best performance I saw of
Gypsy,
” said Cook. “It was so
raw
.” When Paul Wallace, as Tulsa, the chorus boy June runs off with, came out and performed his dazzling song-and-dance solo, “All I Need Is the Girl,” many in the audience were sure that Ethel would see to it that the song was dropped. “Everyone always said that about her, going way back to the beginning of her career,” said Cook. “But anytime I saw her, other people had great numbers.”

When
Gypsy
opened in Philadelphia at the Shubert Theatre on April 18, it was too long and received mixed reviews. Far more troubling, though, was the tension in the company. Jerry Robbins’s heinous treatment of Lane Bradbury reached its peak in Philadelphia, when he got mad at her for forgetting a piece of stage business and intentionally hid the batons she was to use in the “Dainty June and Her Farmboys” number. Bradbury was forced to mime the action of twirling the batons, with tears streaming down her face for all in the audience to see. Ethel, who had also taken a dislike to Bradbury for the simple reason that she didn’t think she was very good in the part, made no move to intercede. Besides, she was having her own troubles with Sandra Church, who by now was romantically involved with the much older Jule Styne, a relationship that unnerved Ethel. “She didn’t care for anyone who she thought was competing with her,” said Klugman. “Sandra was going with Jule Styne, and Ethel didn’t like it, because that meant that Sandra had a little clout.”

Church’s big strip solo near the end of the show, “Let Me Entertain You,” also gave rise to tension between the two women. According to Church, Robbins was at a loss for the right way to stage the number. “He kept trying different things,” recalled Church, “and he was going to have Ethel walk behind me in back of this see-through curtain. I didn’t want that, so I did it poorly. When I got her out from behind me, I went back to doing it well.” For her part, Ethel objected to one element of the staging of “Rose’s Turn,” in which Church came wandering onto the stage just as the number was reaching its climax. Although the idea was Robbins’s, Ethel got it into her head that Church was trying to upstage her and protested so violently that the number was sensibly reworked with Ethel alone throughout.

Though Laurents and Sondheim longed for Ethel to dig deeper into the material, she was unquestionably giving the most powerful and heartfelt performance of her life. She was particularly moving in the scene in which Herbie, shocked and disgusted by the fact that Rose has pushed Louise into a burlesque show, walks out. For Rose’s denunciation of Herbie—“You can go to hell!”—Ethel worked up genuine tears as her voice broke with emotion, providing the show with one of its emotional peaks. Certainly no other singer could have handled the role’s daunting vocal demands with the aplomb that Ethel did, but the real key to her fine performance was that she refused to see Rose as an out-and-out bitch. “Ethel played her as a heroine,” said Klugman. “Someone who sacrificed everything for her daughters. That’s how Ethel saw her.” It is tempting to interpret this as an instance of Ethel’s projecting her own life onto the character she was playing: her blind reverence for her own parents may have affected how she brought Rose to life, without her realizing it.

Laurents dismissed this interpretation as “revisionism”: “She didn’t think of Rose as a heroine—all of that came later. She did exactly what she was asked to do at the time. She didn’t question any of that. Because, you see, Rose is dumb. Like Ethel. She doesn’t calculate. She doesn’t weigh things. She just blunders right ahead. She doesn’t think about right or wrong. I didn’t like Ethel. She wasn’t really my kind of person. But I didn’t dislike her either. She was just…Ethel. When we were in Philly, Ethel was looking through the keyhole in Jule’s room to see if he was fucking Sandra Church. She didn’t think about things like that. She just did and said whatever came to mind with no thought of the consequences. In Philly we all had duty nights to take Ethel Jr. out. And Ethel would say terrible things in front of the girl. We were at the Variety Club, and the kid was eating ice cream while Ethel is tossing back the booze, and she’s saying, ‘SO! IS JULE FUCKING SANDRA? IS HE?’ Right in front of the girl.”

After the overlong show was pruned in Philadelphia—one entire number, “Mama’s Talkin’ Soft,” for Baby June and Louise, was cut—preparations were made for the New York opening. It was Ethel’s first time doing a show in the cavernous Broadway Theatre, which was too big a space for a show that really focused on the problems of three individuals, but she approached rehearsals with gusto and frequently dropped hints in interviews that Broadway was going to see an entirely new side of her—the side that knew how to act. “I’ve had people come backstage and say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know you could act that well,’” she told one reporter. “Gypsy Rose Lee herself came backstage one night and said, ‘You made me cry.’ I’ve never been given the opportunity to do this before.”

Tempers continued to flare right up to the New York opening night. Jule Styne had taken great care with
Gypsy
’s overture—it was a brilliant job, played largely by musicians from swing bands rather than Broadway’s usual orchestral suspects—and Styne was justly proud of it. But close to opening night, it was clear that the theater’s big velvet stage curtain was going to soak up all the sound coming from the pit. Styne asked Robbins to have the pit raised a little, and Robbins dismissed the request, saying, “We’ll get to it next week.” Styne exploded. “He got up onstage with Jerry,” recalled the composer’s widow, Margaret Styne, “and told him, ‘You’ve got to do this right now, and if you don’t, I’m going to throw you into the pit and they won’t hear
you
either.’”