Ethel Merman: A Life (34 page)

For Barbara Geary, looking back nearly forty years later, the tragedy seemed shrouded in ambiguity. “I think that it was kind of unintentional suicide, if that makes sense,” she said. “She had had a nervous breakdown, she was getting her life together, and then here come her two children to visit her. I can see how she might have been overwhelmed. Here they are, they need to be taken care of. ‘Am I a person who really wants to take care of them?’ Not that she didn’t love us. I think she might have been overwhelmed by her old life. We represented the stuff that dragged her down. Who knows? Only she knows.”

Her daughter’s death drained Ethel of all hope, sense, and reason. Upon hearing the news, she broke down completely. Benay Venuta agreed to accompany her on the trip west, but by the time they flew to San Francisco, where they were to meet Bobby before going on to Colorado Springs, Ethel was in a state of hysteria. A doctor contacted by Bobby gave her a strong sedative that calmed her to the point where she was at least able to think rationally. She went along with Bill Geary’s decision that the children should not learn the truth immediately. They were whisked away to the home of Bill’s sister and told that their mother was sick and in the hospital. They were not informed of her death until a week later, after the cremation and funeral had taken place. Her ashes were interred at the Evergreen Shrine of Rest, where Ethel purchased a special room that she hoped would one day be the final resting place for the entire family.

On her return to New York, Ethel barricaded herself in her apartment, spending night after night crying herself to sleep. Despite her erratic attendance record at St. Bartholomew’s, she had always been a devout believer in God, and she now began to look for ways of adding new dimensions to her spiritual life. Eventually she discovered the
Daily Word,
the monthly publication of Unity Village, which had a different reading for each day of the week. The Unity movement had been founded in 1889 and had always stressed embracing God as a way of maximizing each individual’s potential for joy and ultimate fulfillment. (This was not always as pure in motive as it sounded; during the second half of the twentieth century, Unity, with its message of positive thinking, would be sought out by many as a tool for achieving prosperity.) Ethel cared little about Unity’s spiritual teachings on a broader canvas; she only knew that the simple, heartfelt messages in the
Daily Word
brought her greater comfort than anything else had, and her grief gradually subsided to the point where she could manage it. She was especially moved by a passage that read, “The light of God surrounds me / The love of God enfolds me / The power of God protects me / The presence of God watches over me / Wherever I am, God is.” She began to feel that she was no longer alone, and the
Daily Word
would help her to find her way spiritually for the rest of her life.

E
thel’s period of solitary mourning continued. On September 15,1967, she appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, singing a song not associated with her: Gordon Jenkins’s “This Is All I Ask.” It was one of the most tender, emotionally connected performances she had ever given. For those who knew that Ethel Jr. had died only weeks earlier, “This Is All I Ask” was a study in heartbreak.

By now she had left the Park Lane and moved to the Berkshire Hotel at 21 East Fifty-second Street. Carleton Varney, an imaginative decorator employed by the brilliant interior design leader Dorothy Draper, was assigned to give her apartment a makeover. “Ethel was not a person who didn’t like what she had,” observed Varney, and the new apartment featured many of her favorite pieces from the Park Lane, including her big brass bed, her enormous faux-Tiffany chandelier, the beautiful bar she’d had with her for years, a set of large marble urns, an imposing Victorian chest of drawers, a handsome rocking chair where Pop Zimmermann always sat, and her collection of paintings, including Edseid’s
Ladies at the Footlights,
which always hung over her mantelpiece. The first thing she did at the Berkshire was to have the stove removed from the kitchen. Since she didn’t cook, she considered it a waste of space; a hot plate would do for boiling water for tea. She instructed Varney to outfit the bedrooms with great walls of storage space, since she liked to slide back the doors and see all of her sequinned gowns and fur coats lined up neatly in a row. She also had a little artificial Christmas tree sitting year-round on a table by the front door. She plugged the tree in every night and told her friends that looking at it gave her comfort, just as reading the
Daily Word
did. But no spiritual discipline could fully erase the terrifying emptiness that she felt in the wake of Ethel Jr.’s death.

Once again work proved to be her salvation. According to Tom Korman, who had succeeded Milton Pickman as her agent, she wanted to work as often as possible, so long as the terms were good. Korman lined up a string of guest appearances for her on a number of high-profile series: the popular sitcom
That Girl,
starring Marlo Thomas; the smash-hit action spoof
Batman,
in which she played Lola Lasagne, the loudmouthed girlfriend of the arch-villain the Penguin (Burgess Meredith); and, most curiously, on
Tarzan
, in which she did a two-part stint as a missionary.

There were still offers of Broadway shows, but always she said no—especially to ideas as unappealing as a musical version of Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
. The world of popular music was no longer dominated by the solidly tuneful, reliable standards of Cole Porter, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers, and Irving Berlin, as the perpetual evolution of rock and roll had completely reconfigured its landscape. Ethel thought all of this was a fad that couldn’t possibly last—but she was wrong. Step by step the new sound was shaping much of what was being done on Broadway. In 1968, Burt Bacharach and Hal David would open
Promises, Promises,
a show written entirely in the style of their Top 40 pop hits. Later in 1968,
Hair,
the first rock musical, became an era-defining Broadway hit. (Ethel was less disturbed by
Hair
’s use of four-letter words than she was by what she considered the cast’s sloppy comedy technique. “They don’t know how to sell a gag,” she complained. “You gotta face front and throw it right out there!”) Purists were shocked by it, but the effect of
Hair
was widespread. More and more musicals began reflecting the new pop culture, and heavily amplified sound became standard practice on Broadway. In the future, more and more Broadway shows, from
How Now, Dow Jones
to
The Grass Harp,
would forsake traditional musical theater for the jangly, contemporary sound of music heard on television theme songs and commercials.

Ethel reacted to this movement by turning her back on it. Since the revival of
Annie Get Your Gun
had ended up being such a smash, she decided to defy the new era by resurrecting another of her old hits. Early in 1968 she received an offer to star in
Call Me Madam
on the winter-stock circuit. By now the heyday of stock was past, having been undermined by changing audiences and the success of television, but it still proved to be a viable avenue for many old-time stars, particularly those whose film careers had faded. Audiences flocked to see how their favorites were holding up—whether it was Joan Fontaine in
Private Lives
or Sylvia Sidney in
Arsenic and Old Lace
or
Brigadoon
with Ann Blyth or
Auntie Mame
with Gypsy Rose Lee. Since Ethel loathed touring and demanded top production values, the prospect of appearing in stock had never appealed to her, and initially she said no to the idea. (Tom Korman recalled that her first response was always no.) But when nothing else of interest had presented itself and she knew she needed a distraction from brooding about Ethel Jr.’s death, she eventually agreed.

Call Me Madam
opened for a two-week run at the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on March 25, then moved on to Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse. After a hiatus it returned that summer to the St. Louis Municipal Opera and Kansas City’s Starlight Theatre. Then she took the show on the circuit run by John Kenley, a highly regarded producer whose company, the Kenley Players, was generally thought of as the Tiffany’s of summer-theater companies.

Kenley was one of the producers for whom actors loved to work, because he paid his stars enormous salaries and did his best to guarantee the public quality productions—sometimes he even managed to get his hands on the sets from the Broadway original. Over the years he had honed a formula that had proved consistently successful: he would book huge theaters, keep the ticket prices low, and wind up filling every seat in the house.

Since Kenley’s production of
Call Me Madam
would have minimal rehearsal time, as was the custom in summer stock, Ethel called on two actors who had played the show with her on Broadway: Russell Nype and Richard Eastham. While her relationship with Nype was as warm as ever, she clashed with Eastham immediately when the actor went behind her back to request above-the-title billing with her. “She cut him dead,” recalled Arthur Bartow, who played Pemberton Maxwell on the tour. “She would not talk to him. She would not ride in the same car with him.”

John DeMain, the conductor for the Ohio run, remembered a conference with the Kenley choreographer over “Something to Dance About.” The decision was made that the Kenley dancers simply weren’t up to the elaborate choreography required for the number, so certain cuts were made. In rehearsal Ethel was supposed to come back in for the final chorus, but she missed her cue. “So we did it again,” said DeMain, “and again she didn’t come in. She had a sense of how long she waited offstage, and she hadn’t waited long enough. She wasn’t listening to the music! So she got rather testy. And we played it uncut, and she was fine. I told the choreographer he would have to stay up all night and think up choreography to cover the cut, because she couldn’t learn it
with
the cut.”

Cast in the role of the princess was Donna McKechnie, who got off on the wrong foot with Ethel immediately. She had two numbers, “It’s a Lovely Day Today” and “The Ocarina,” in which the princess’s dance role had been expanded. One day as she was rehearsing “The Ocarina,” Ethel and Russell Nype strolled in and sat down front. McKechnie decided to show off a bit but was deflated instantly when Ethel suddenly boomed, “WHO DID SHE FUCK TO GET TWO DANCE NUMBERS?”

Only a few years later, McKechnie would achieve Broadway stardom in
A Chorus Line.
At the time of
Call Me Madam,
however, she was just a struggling dancer—specifically, a dancer who perspired a lot. McKechnie played
Call Me Madam
during a typically hot midwestern summer, suffocating underneath a heavy wig and makeup. Ethel didn’t spare her as much as a hello on the way from dressing room to stage. One night the stage manager knocked at McKechnie’s dressing room and handed her a note. It was from Ethel, asking that she stop sweating so much onstage; the star found it very distracting.

McKechnie’s Merman experience did have a happy ending. Toward the end of the run, she got a job on Broadway and gave her notice. On her last night with the
Call Me Madam
company, McKechnie noticed that when Ethel was onstage with her, she was making a little clucking noise with her throat and crossing her eyes. McKechnie thought for a moment that she was having a stroke. She ran offstage and told the stage manager of her concern. It was Ethel, honoring an old vaudeville custom: when a performer left the company, his fellow actors paid tribute to him by trying to break him up onstage.

Still deeply depressed by her daughter’s death, Ethel kept the company members at an even greater distance than she normally did. But she occasionally indulged in lighter moments, especially when she and John Kenley sat up late at night talking after the show. “It was drinky-poo, drinky-poo,” said Kenley. “And she did love her men. We used to have these amazing, graphic conversations about her men. And years later when I saw her and we were talking about something of a personal nature, I said, ‘Oh, now, Ethel, you and I never did get personal.’ And she said, ‘What in the hell are you talking about? What was all that stuff we used to talk about if it wasn’t personal?’ And I said, ‘No, Ethel. That wasn’t personal. Clinical. Clinical, darling.’”

In 1969 it was announced that Ethel would return to the Kenley circuit in
Gypsy,
again with DeMain conducting. Unfortunately, she found out that John Kenley was planning to economize by cutting a couple of scenes, including one of her favorites, the one in the Chinese restaurant when Rose steals the silverware. Ethel declared that she would deliver the original
Gypsy
in all its glory or she wouldn’t deliver it at all; she was not going to let Kenley palm off a bargain-basement version. She nixed the tour and was replaced by Jane Kean. Later, Ethel complained to DeMain that Kenley “wanted to do some kind of high-school production” of her favorite show. Perhaps she simply didn’t feel up to returning to such a demanding part ten years after she had created it. And surely, the dressing room scene with Gypsy, to say nothing of “Rose’s Turn,” would have been all the more grueling for her in the wake of her daughter’s death.

In late 1968 and 1969, Ethel concentrated on television appearances, with guest shots on
Hollywood Palace, The Carol Burnett Show,
and several of the then-popular talk shows. One week in the midwinter of 1969, while serving as cohost of
The Mike Douglas Show
in Philadelphia, she received a surprise on-air visit from Barbara Jean and Michael and burst into tears in front of the television audience. She stood back and beamed with pride as Douglas brought Michael forward and egged him on to do a rain dance he’d learned in WEBELOS.

Try as she might to persuade the press and public that she’d “had it” with Broadway, Ethel’s level of activity in the late 1960s was not sufficient to keep her fully engaged; she had too much vitality, too much drive, and she needed a more demanding outlet than the occasional guest spot on television. This period of professional restlessness in her life coincided with an offer from David Merrick: it wasn’t a new show but one that had been running for six years and one she’d initially turned down—
Hello, Dolly!

Ethel’s original concern about not wanting to be compared with Ruth Gordon, creator of the role of Dolly in Thornton Wilder’s
The Matchmaker,
now seemed a moot point. Carol Channing had created the musical Dolly back in 1964 and, an inspired clown, had made the part her own. When she left the show in August 1965, a long parade of actresses had come in as replacements: Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, and Phyllis Diller. (The touring Dollys included Mary Martin, Eve Arden, Yvonne De Carlo, and Dorothy Lamour.) All had something individual to bring to the part, and Merrick reveled in the publicity value that came from announcing the next star to assume the role. (This was the beginning of a trend that would one day transform Broadway yet again, when a show became not so much a vehicle designed for a particular performer as something any viable star could be plugged in to; it was the show, not the star, that endured.)

Ethel’s interest in
Dolly!
was piqued when she learned that Jerry Herman had originally written two songs for her that had never been used. They had been tailored to her voice, but since Channing was no vocalist, they had to be dropped. Once Ethel heard and liked the new/old songs—“World, Take Me Back” and her favorite, “Love, Look in My Window”—she agreed to become the seventh Broadway Dolly. The press announced that it was to be for a limited run only: from April through June 1970.

Before she went into
Dolly!,
Ethel dropped by the St. James Theatre one night to see Phyllis Diller in the show, which had been playing to rather sparse houses. Afterward Diller asked her if she was going to wear a chest mike—now a fixture on Broadway—when she took over the part. “No,” answered Ethel, “we just want to keep it in the theater.” (In fact, she did wear a body mike in
Dolly!
because it was part of the sound design: since the rest of the cast was being miked, Ethel would have sounded conspicuous without one.)