Ethel Merman: A Life (3 page)

In the fall of 1920, Ethel entered William Cullen Bryant High School. By now she was certain that she wanted to be a singer. Much as they had encouraged her musical abilities, the Zimmermanns remained skeptical about the security of a singing career. Mom Zimmermann in particular tried to steer Ethel in the direction of teaching, since Ethel’s cousin Agnes Sharkey had done well enough for herself as a schoolteacher. But Ethel hated the thought of teaching; she had a better idea. William Cullen Bryant offered what was then known as a commercial course, intended to provide apt young students with proper secretarial training. Ethel decided that this was the best path for her, and her parents gave her their full support.

From the beginning, Ethel loved the commercial course. She excelled in typing and the Isaac Pitman method of shorthand, scoring 95 percent and above. All her life she was proud of her secretarial—or, as they were then called, stenographic—skills. Long after she had become a stage star, interviewers would frequently mention that she always typed her own correspondence. Hammering out her own letters brought forth her sense of perfectionism; the recipients of those letters often noticed that there was seldom a single typographical error to be found.

Ethel enjoyed her time in high school, easily making friends and doing well in most of her courses, with the exception of history, which she hated. She wasn’t much for athletics, apart from swimming, but she threw herself into a variety of other activities. For a time she was literary editor of Bryant High’s news magazine,
The Owl.
She also participated in speakers’ club and student government, first as a council member of the Bryant Union, later as a member of its executive committee. When she wasn’t in school, she often dropped by Ross’s Music Store on Steinway Street, trying out the new song sheets that came in each week. During her years at Bryant High, she made two close friends, Martha Neubert and Alice Welch, whom she met in bookkeeping class. Early on, Alice had been orphaned, and the Zimmermanns welcomed her almost as one of their own.

Ethel loved movies, and often on Saturdays she and Martha and Alice would get dressed up and head into Manhattan for lunch and an afternoon double feature at one of the big movie palaces. Oddly, her interest in live entertainment was still restricted to vaudeville; she never thought about attending a Broadway show. Nor was she drawn to reading: picking up a novel, even a newspaper, just made her sleepy. Her manner of dress was a little flashy, and her outfits were typically tarted up with bows and ruffles and frills. And, like that of many other city girls in the twenties, her language often teetered on the edge of what was acceptable for young ladies. But if she chafed at conventional boundaries at school or when she was out with her friends, at home Mom and Pop’s word, as always, was law.

At the end of her four years at Bryant High, Ethel completed the commercial course successfully and graduated with the class of 1924. She was only sixteen, a bit young to be a high-school graduate, and it is possible that she was one of the students who took advantage of one of the standard tests of the time that permitted exceptional students to skip one grade. Her high-school yearbook noted that she “intends to enter the business world,” and her senior-year quote was “Wherever joy and laughter abound / There is Ethel to be found.”

She lost no time in registering with an employment agency in Long Island City and in less than two weeks landed a job as a stenographer at the Boyc-Ite Company on Queens Boulevard. In her memoirs Ethel gives an indication of the degree of her enthusiasm for the job: “Boyc-Ite was an anti-freeze for automobiles. My salary was all of twenty-three dollars a week.” She was a five-day-a-week working girl now, surrounded by other five-day-a-week working girls, and it is possible that dreams of singing stardom had never seemed more remote.

Her tenure at the Boyc-Ite Company turned out to be brief. With her fellow stenographers, she frequently ate at a neighborhood restaurant patronized by people who worked at other local businesses. One day she made the acquaintance of Vic Kliesrath, a partner in the Bragg-Kliesrath Corporation. Word had gotten around that Ethel was an unusually capable stenographer, and in no time Kliesrath had offered her a job with his company. It paid five dollars more a week, but the real value that the job would hold in store for her was initially not at all apparent.

A
fter Ethel had become a Broadway star, the press often intimated that she had spent her earlier years in complete obscurity. This was far from the case: the six years that passed between Ethel’s graduation from Bryant High and her Broadway debut are a record of a determined young woman slowly building her name in New York music circles.

In terms of the work she was called upon to do, Ethel’s new job at the Bragg-Kliesrath Corporation was no more exciting than the old one had been. Bragg-Kliesrath Corporation had introduced the B-K Vacuum Booster Brake for trucks, a kind of precursor of the power brake. (Ethel later claimed that if you pumped the brake too hard, “you’d go right through the windshield.”) Much of the technical jargon used by her bosses was lost on her; she simply took dictation and typed up correspondence at breakneck speed.

By this time Ethel was searching for musical work more aggressively. A few nights each week, she took the subway to Manhattan and went from one music-publishing house to another, picking up the newest song sheets. The publishers knew that hungry young singers like Ethel could be of value plugging their latest songs, in the event that they happened to pick up a few club dates. As a result it became company policy to give many aspiring singers sheet music free of charge.

Ethel had also signed with a couple of minor-league agents who specialized in small-time bookings, mostly weddings and parties. But Ethel wasn’t fussy. It gave her a chance to sing, after all, and at least some degree of exposure. She reasoned that you never knew who might be a guest at one of the parties, and she grabbed as many of the five-and ten-dollar jobs as she could round up.

Then there was radio, which did more than any other medium to send music to the masses. A survey of the
New York Times
radio logs of the mid-to late 1920s reveals hundreds of long-forgotten names with brief radio slots. Shows featured dance bands, organists, string quartets, sopranos, tenors, whistlers, diction instructors who demonstrated “setting-up exercises” over the air—all of them live. During the first few months of 1927, Ethel joined their ranks with a regular fifteen-minute late-afternoon spot on radio station WPCH in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Her new job at Bragg-Kliesrath may have meant an increase of five dollars a week, but it also presented her with a problem. The company required its stenographers to punch a time clock, and when Ethel had been out late singing the night before, it was difficult for her to get to work on time. Soon she managed to con a few of her officemates into punching the clock for her while she slept in as long as she dared.

Shortly after her arrival at Bragg-Kliesrath, Ethel was made confidential secretary to the company president, Caleb Bragg. It is possible that Ethel knew Bragg by reputation before taking the job, because he was something of a celebrity sportsman. Born into a wealthy family in Cincinnati, Bragg had attended Yale, where he became entranced by the world of auto racing. From the start he had proved himself a natural at race-car driving, scoring many important victories, including the Fourth International Grand Prix in 1912. During World War I, his interest in cars gave way to a passion for flying, and in 1916 he made his first solo flight. By the following year, he had begun a string of flights that broke records for both altitude and speed. Later Bragg joined forces with Vic Kliesrath, and together they invented the vacuum booster brake. By the 1920s they had incorporated as Bragg-Kliesrath and opened their headquarters in Long Island City.

Vic Kliesrath was friendly and no-nonsense, the kind of boss who remembered the stenographers’ birthdays and frequently took them to lunch or had them to dine at his home. By contrast, Bragg was, to Ethel’s way of thinking, “ultra-chic.” He was also chilly and remote, not the sort of person she could warm up to right away. Office decorum of the period was strictly observed: he was always “Mr. Bragg,” and she was always “Miss Zimmermann.”

Working for Bragg offered a few clear advantages. He was embroiled in so many business projects that he kept irregular office hours; he was frequently late, and there were many consecutive days when he didn’t show up at all. Often, when Bragg telephoned to say he wouldn’t be coming in until late morning, Ethel would leave her desk, run to the ladies’ room, peel down to her slip, and catch a quick nap on the cot. When Bragg was on his way, one of the other stenographers would signal her, and she would be dressed and back at her desk just in time for her boss to appear.

Ethel always gave the impression that she hadn’t been the most precise of stenographers, because Bragg’s dictated letters were so crammed with technical minutiae that she couldn’t get it all down. But decades later Mom and Pop Zimmermann clearly remembered a day when Bragg had dictated a long, multipage document full of mechanical terminology, to be sent to a patent attorney. Afraid that Bragg would become irate if she botched the job, Ethel showed a draft to Kliesrath, who looked it over and pronounced it letter perfect.

Like many other enterprising businessmen of the period, Caleb Bragg was dazzled by the world of show business and had the means to play on the fringes of it. He had made the acquaintance of a number of leading actresses on Broadway, including Gertrude Lawrence and Hope Williams. It often fell to Ethel to send flowers to one of these celebrated stars, and it was always one of the parts of her job that did not appeal to her; she thought that she was at least as talented as the quavery-voiced Gertrude Lawrence. But she was also canny enough to realize that Bragg’s interest in the stage might possibly work to her advantage, and on two occasions it almost did.

The first incident took place on a pleasant Saturday afternoon on which the Kliesraths were hosting a party in a Port Washington restaurant for some of their employees. Ethel turned up in a red-and-black dotted-silk dress, a new black Milan hat, and black shoes. At some point, Bragg arrived unexpectedly, enthusing to anyone who would listen about his speedboat, the
Casey Jones.
He asked if anyone wanted to go for a spin. Several people did, and he spent an hour or so speeding small groups across Manhasset Bay to the Connecticut shoreline and back to the restaurant.

When it came Ethel’s turn, she climbed into the boat, accompanied by the company’s switchboard operator, Bessie Sullivan. On the return trip to Port Washington, Bragg decided to demonstrate his prowess behind the wheel and began passing, at high speed, the other boats in the harbor. Suddenly the
Casey Jones
ran into a log and overturned. Ethel lost her purse, and she and Bessie were drenched. Bragg swiftly got both the girls aboard his houseboat, the
Masquerader,
which he had anchored in the bay. Ethel remembered it as being as elegant as a lot of New York apartments, fully equipped with a complement of servants. While the girls were waiting for their clothes to dry, Bragg lent them each a pair of silk pajamas and a bathrobe and invited them to join the party he was giving on board later that day.

At dinner Ethel found herself seated next to Ruth Selwyn, wife of the stage and screen producer Edgar Selwyn. Ruth was a producer as well, with an eye toward working on Broadway. She was as pretty as she was smart, and she had a strong, independent spirit. Ruth was often quoted as saying that she found the theater “a fascinating game” that a woman could play just as easily as a man. She was just the sort of tough, determined woman that Ethel admired, and during dinner Ethel did her best to pitch herself to Ruth. She told the producer that she aimed to be a professional singer and stated frankly that she thought she was as good as a lot of the women performing at the Palace. Ruth was amused by this display of brash self-confidence and made vague promises of casting her in a show, should an appropriate part come along.

Until that point the self-absorbed, introverted Caleb Bragg had had no idea of his secretary’s singing ambitions, and it seems that Ethel viewed her dunking in Manhasset Bay as an opportunity to press him to use some of his theatrical connections to help her along. Soon she had asked him to write a letter of introduction to one of the biggest names on Broadway—George White, who for years had produced a popular series of revues called
George White’s Scandals
, spotlighting a wide array of comics, musical talent, and, always, a lineup of beautiful girls.

At the time some of Broadway’s biggest-ticket items were revues. The lushest and most extravagant of all, the
Ziegfeld Follies,
popped up in a new edition each year from 1907 to 1925, and intermittently thereafter. There was the
Earl Carroll Vanities
, whose cycle began in 1923 and ended in 1940.
The Passing Show,
which took off mostly from the year’s headlines, dated all the way back to 1912. Many big stars got their starts in these shows, even if they only danced in the chorus: Joan Crawford was discovered by a Hollywood scout while hoofing in
The Passing Show of 1924.

A native of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, George White had led a rough-and-tumble life. By age seven he was earning money as a newspaper peddler, and by fourteen he had cracked into show business as a buck-and-wing dancer in burlesque and later in vaudeville. In 1911 and again in 1915, he danced in the
Ziegfeld Follies
before breaking into producing his own shows. When his first
Scandals
opened in 1919, its initial review was headlined,
GEORGE WHITE’S SCANDALS PROVES A BUCK DANCER SHOULD STICK TO HOOFING
. That night White cried himself to sleep, but in the end the show proved to be such a hit that he reportedly made $400,000 from it. (Later he lost the whole amount betting on the horses; the press reported that he had dropped $100,000 on a single race.) His fortunes had continued in the same now-he’s-up, now-he’s-down manner ever since, but he always managed to pump more money—most of it his own—into another edition of the
Scandals,
and by the spring of 1928 he was preparing yet another version.

Ethel hand-delivered Bragg’s letter to White at Forty-second Street’s Apollo Theatre, where the
Scandals
were always staged and where White gave her the once-over. He had high standards of feminine beauty and was known for dismissing chorus girls who didn’t make the grade as “dog faces.” Ethel was far from being a stunning beauty, but she had definite sex appeal and a very good figure, with perfectly shaped legs. When White asked her if she would like a spot in the chorus line, Ethel, who had never for a moment seen herself as a chorus girl, told him she was looking for a solo singing spot. The producer coolly replied that Frances Williams was handling the songs in that year’s revue. Ethel thanked him and left, determined to wait until a decent solo-singing opportunity presented itself. Until then she would stick with the nighttime club dates.

Once she began stepping up her professional appearances, it didn’t take Ethel long to figure out that “Ethel Zimmermann” was too cumbersome for a marquee. She tossed around other family-tree possibilities on her mother’s side, such as Gardner or Hunter, the latter being Grandmother Gardner’s maiden name. Pop Zimmermann considered this a betrayal and said so, loudly. After thinking it over, Ethel excised the first syllable and the final consonant and came up with “Merman,” a name she always claimed to have coined.

For months she continued her routine of working days at the office and picking up as much night work as she could manage. One place that booked her repeatedly was Keen’s English Chop House, near Pennsylvania Station. She would appear in a dress made of satin or taffeta and sing her own version of one of the popular standards of the day. One of her biggest hits was Walter Donaldson’s “Little White Lies,” and she sang it so often that her photo wound up on the song’s sheet music. (She would also be pictured on the sheet music for other popular songs, including “Side by Side” and “After My Laughter Came Tears.”)

In September 1929, only a few weeks before Wall Street collapsed, Ethel got a slight career boost when she was signed to perform at Little Russia, a below-street-level club on Fifty-seventh Street off Sixth Avenue. Unlike the one-night stands she was accustomed to, this booking was for two solid weeks, every night except Sunday, for $60 a week. Little Russia was a noisy joint, and Ethel was frustrated that the clientele seemed more intent on talking, drinking, and eating than on listening to her sing. There were, of course, no microphones, and, like many of her predecessors, including Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson, she had to learn how to project over the racket.

Various showbiz types regularly tramped down the stairs to Little Russia, hoping to catch any new acts of promise. One night a theatrical agent named Lou Irwin dropped by and heard her sing. Irwin knew the club scene well: he had a reputation in the business for securing more nitery bookings, from New York to Chicago, than any other agent. He sat and listened in amazement to the girl with the big, clear voice who could be heard over the din of clanking plates and couples calling out for fresh drinks. He gave her his card and told her that he represented Helen Morgan, who only two years earlier had reached the apex of her career as Julie in
Show Boat.
To Ethel that sounded like heady company, and she asked what he had in mind for her. Irwin told her that his good friend Archie Mayo, a busy contract director at Warner Bros., was going to be in New York the following day, scouting out talent for Warners short films, and that he wanted Mayo to hear her.

This was the best opportunity Ethel had yet been given; talking pictures had recently taken the country by storm. Crude experiments at synchronizing sound effects with films stretched back to the glory days of D. W. Griffith. But in 1926, Warner Bros. joined forces with Western Electric and created the Vitaphone Company to produce background sound components for motion pictures. In a series of short subjects and one major feature,
Don Juan,
the sound was recorded on disc and matched, reel by reel, to the film. Frequent projection snafus rendered synchronization all but impossible, but in 1927, after further refinements, Warner Bros. used Vitaphone in
The Jazz Singer,
the largely silent picture that featured musical interludes and snatches of dialogue.
The Jazz Singer
broke box-office records everywhere and launched the sound era in earnest. Disc-to-screen synchronization underwent continual overhauls, and by the early 1930s it would be supplanted by the motion-picture sound track. At the time Ethel signed with Warners, Vitaphone short films had already become a successful way of introducing performers to a wider public, and many of the actors and singers in New York were shooting them during the day while appearing on Broadway at night.