Ethel Merman: A Life (36 page)

On January 13, 1974, Mom Zimmermann’s long struggle came to an end, as she slipped away quietly in her room at Roosevelt, where she had returned sometime earlier. The fact that her mother’s suffering had ended was of little consolation to Ethel. Mom and Pop had always been there for her, through all the betrayals, real or imagined, of so many other people in her life. She had never suffered the slightest schism with Mom, never felt the need to escape from her loving devotion, and the sense of loss that swept over her now was overwhelming.

Agnes Zimmermann’s funeral was not particularly well attended. Among the mourners were Lionel Larner and Benay Venuta, who was appalled by the small turnout.

“Lionel, look at this place,” said Benay. “It’s empty. It’s a disgrace.”

“Well,” said Larner, “you can’t go through life telling your best friends to go fuck themselves and expect them to turn up at your mother’s funeral.”

Agnes Zimmermann was cremated and her ashes sent to rest with Ethel Jr.’s at the Evergreen Shrine of Rest in Colorado Springs. To friends Ethel often commented that one day the entire family would all be there, together for all time. It was a thought that seemed to provide her with some degree of solace.

In the mid-1970s, Ethel’s highest-profile engagements were confined to television:
What’s My Line?, The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson, and a ninety-minute CBS special,
’S Wonderful, ’S Marvelous, ’S Gershwin,
hosted by Jack Lemmon. By now, she had entered a period of vocal decline. Perhaps it was partly a slackening of her musculature because she was no longer singing eight performances a week. Perhaps, too, it was because after years of singing the same material, she was no longer emotionally connected to it, and the result showed in the voice. The climactic notes that had once seemed so effortless now sounded aggressively pushed out. At this point, it was no longer inaccurate to refer to her as a “belter.”

In June 1974 she toured Maryland with Carroll O’Connor, star of television’s most popular comedy series,
All in the Family.
Ethel was delighted to have O’Connor sharing the bill with her;
All in the Family
was one of her favorite shows, and secretly she may have hoped to be invited to make a guest appearance. She and O’Connor played the Painters Mill Music Fair, the Shady Grove, and the Melody Fair before O’Connor had to return to California to begin shooting the new season of
All in the Family
. Ethel’s guest shot on the show never materialized, but she did maintain a friendship with O’Connor and his wife, Nancy, one that had its rocky moments.

One night when the O’Connors were in Manhattan, they took Ethel to the Café Carlyle, one of New York’s most elegant supper clubs, to hear the brilliant cabaret singer Bobby Short perform. The evening was a disaster: Ethel horrified the O’Connors by gargling with wine while Short was singing. The next day, when she called the O’Connors to thank them for the evening, Nancy O’Connor lit into her. “Ethel,” she said, “you are the first lady of the American musical theater, and that behavior is just not acceptable. How would you like it if someone did that to you?”

In fact, odd, inexplicable incidents such as the one at the Carlyle had been cropping up for some time. When Ethel was invited to a cocktail or dinner party at someone’s house, she often seemed shy and reserved. Whenever she was accompanied by Tony Cointreau and James Russo, she insisted that they sit on either side of her, so she wouldn’t have to make conversation with any of the other guests. At other times she exhibited behavior that seemed incongruous for the carefully brought-up daughter of Edward and Agnes Zimmermann. One night, Ethel was having dinner at Dorothy Fields’s apartment. Also present were Mr. and Mrs. Harold Rome, Burton and Lynn Lane, and the actress Shirley Booth. Dinners at Dorothy’s were elegant affairs, with the best food and wine served. After the meal Dorothy always liked to have her guests gather around the piano and perform. On this particular evening, Shirley Booth got up to sing “Love Is the Reason,” which she had introduced in Dorothy’s 1951 show with Arthur Schwartz,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
It was a charming number, and although Booth was no singer, she delivered it with the same quirky comic verve that had delighted the show’s audiences. Everyone applauded. Then came Ethel’s turn. She got up and in clarion tones launched into her own version of the same song. Lynn Lane remembered all of the guests being horrified. No one knew what to say; no one would even attempt to fathom why Ethel had pulled such an ungracious stunt in the home of one of her dearest friends.

In September 1974 Ethel played a two-week engagement at London’s Palladium. Ticket sales were spotty, but her disappointment in the public reception was offset by the fact that Bobby had come along as her stage manager. By now Bobby was living in Bolinas, California, a tiny town just north of San Francisco. If Bobby had been seeking a place to drop out of sight, he could not have done much better than Bolinas, which had long been famous for the antisocial nature of the people who lived there; repeatedly over time, road signs on Highway 1 directing motorists to Bolinas had been pulled up by the locals. To close friends Ethel worried about the reclusive life Bobby was leading, and she longed for him to rejoin the mainstream, but as time went on, he became more and more isolated, living very simply and working at odd pickup jobs.

She was also somewhat disturbed by a recent professional turn of events. On September 23, 1974,
Gypsy
had returned to Broadway in a major revival at the Winter Garden Theatre. This time around, Arthur Laurents directed the show himself, but Ethel did not reprise her triumph as Rose. Instead the part went to Angela Lansbury, who in 1966 had capped her career with her delightful performance in Jerry Herman’s
Mame.
Her stage career since then had foundered, with the flops
Prettybelle
and
Dear World,
and she was looking for a way to spruce up her stature on Broadway. The part of Rose seemed just the ticket. In a round of press interviews, Laurents was quite vocal about the fact that Lansbury’s conception of Rose was much closer to the one he had always envisioned, in large part because, unlike Ethel, she was a trained actress who would be able to delve deeper into the role’s darker dimensions. In particular he was proud of the impact that “Rose’s Turn” had in Lansbury’s hands, and he came up with a chilling device for the end of the number: as the audience applauds, Rose, dazed by the thought of being the center of attention at long last, keeps bowing and bowing, even after the ovation has died away. “With Angie it was really a marvelous ending,” said Laurents, “which you needed an actress to do. You couldn’t have done it with just a singer.” Ethel was wounded by these sentiments, and it came as no surprise that she did not deign to attend the revival. Nor can one imagine her being pleased when, a few months after the show closed in January 1975, Lansbury won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.

Ethel continued appearing on television, which brought in good money for minimal effort on her part, but in the end she didn’t find the work especially fulfilling. Despite her protestations to the contrary over the years, she was a star of the theater; like Mary Martin and Carol Channing, she gave her live audiences a charge that could not be fully captured on film or tape. There was another problem with on-screen appearances: Ethel was beginning to look her age. She had put on weight, and her face had developed a distinct jowliness that she’d inherited from Mom Zimmermann. Gus Schirmer urged her to get a face lift, but the thought of cosmetic surgery frightened her, and she demurred, insisting, “I don’t want to look like a Ubangi!” Instead she tried to update her image by getting a new haircut, with bangs. James Russo laughingly called it her Toni Tennille look, and it was not particularly flattering.

A new musical remained out of the question, but there was another possibility that she had only occasionally tapped into: performing as a soloist with symphony orchestras. It was to be her next major career move, and her last. The project began with Eric Knight, Ethel’s nightclub pianist, who had for some years been writing arrangements for the acclaimed Boston Pops Orchestra, led by its popular music director, Arthur Fiedler. Bill Cattell, the interlocutor between Boston radio station WGBH and the Boston Symphony Association, asked whether Merman might ever be interested in appearing with the Pops. After thinking it over, Ethel decided she liked the idea, and Knight quickly found himself pressed into rescoring her nightclub act (five saxes, three trumpets, three trombones, guitar, bass, drums, and piano) into a string-heavy symphonic setting. At their first meeting, Merman and Fiedler kept their distance from each other, but as they began working together, they warmed up. At the Boston Pops concert in May 1975, Ethel’s performance consisted of the medley of her old hits she’d been doing for years, and despite the fact that she was now backed up by a symphony orchestra, not one element in her performance had changed. Everything was still in place; audience members who had seen her do this act for years could practically move their lips along with her when she told the story of having been cast in
Girl Crazy,
finishing with, “And you know, ladies and gentlemen, you never change a note in a Gershwin tune.” As encores she did “They Say It’s Wonderful” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Despite the fact that a distracting wobble had crept into her voice and she had to reach a bit more for the climactic notes, slightly distorting the vowels, she was in thrilling form, her intonation remarkably solid. The only thing that was new was her gown, in her new favorite color, lavender. She had admired the Chinese red gown in the same style that Kay Armen had worn in a concert; when Armen told her that she’d gotten it from a Lebanese wholesaler in New York, Ethel paid him a visit and ordered half a dozen copies in various colors.

It didn’t matter that the Pops concert was a retread of old material. The program, taped and later telecast in the summer of 1976 as part of the American Bicentennial celebration, was an enormous success for Ethel. As she slammed out the last note of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” the final song in the medley, the audience at Boston’s Symphony Hall was on its feet instantly. Ethel said, her voice nearly breaking with what seemed to be genuine emotion, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for one of the most wonderful nights of my career. I really mean that, from the bottom of my heart.”

In no time Ethel decided that she wanted to seek more work on the symphony circuit. After a particularly successful engagement with the Pittsburgh Symphony, in which she sang her hits medley and narrated Prokofiev’s
Peter and the Wolf
, conducted by film critic and TV personality Gene Shalit, she engaged agent Robert Gardiner to handle concert bookings exclusively. Gardiner, unfortunately, was another agent who was on the receiving end of Ethel’s contemptuous treatment. In Gardiner’s case it was a matter of personal dislike: she simply found him too obsequious. “Gardiner was crazy about Merman, and Merman couldn’t stand anyone who was crazy about her,” observed Eric Knight. “She looked upon them as the pure personification of ‘sycophant.’” Nevertheless, she was happy with the bookings Gardiner arranged for her, beginning with the Indianapolis Symphony in 1976 and continuing, over the next several years, with the Wichita, Nashville, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Oklahoma City, and Dallas symphonies, among many others. She commanded a good salary—$15,000 per performance—and despite the fact that she was forced to wear a body mike to carry over the huge orchestras in the cavernous halls, she much preferred concert work to nightclubs: no talking in the audience, no cigarettes, no clinking of glasses, no dishes being rattled. Even though the material was almost always the same, Ethel did insist on having ample rehearsal time in her contract: as she went from one new town to another, one new concert hall to another, her sense of perfectionism allowed no room for hitches or surprises.

Just as she was embarking on this new phase of her career, however, she was engulfed by another tragedy in her personal life, this one even more senseless than the one that had taken Ethel Jr. from her. For some time Bobby had been separated from Barbara Colby, a fact that distressed Ethel. She had been tremendously fond of Barbara, and she partly blamed their marital woes on the aimless lifestyle that Bobby was leading in Bolinas. Barbara, however, had been flourishing professionally. In the mid-1970s she had made a couple of high-profile guest appearances on CBS’s popular comedy series
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, as a hooker whom the character Mary Richards befriends while she’s temporarily jailed for refusing to reveal a news source. With her shrewd comic timing and a voice as husky as Suzanne Pleshette’s, Barbara got a favorable reaction from both the critics and audiences. The result was that she had been cast in a recurring part on
Phyllis
, a new comedy series starring Cloris Leachman, created by MTM, Mary Tyler Moore’s production company. It was the dream of many actresses, Ethel included, to land a regular role on a series, and Barbara seemed to be entering a golden period of her life.

In July 1975, Ethel flew to Los Angeles to sing a concert. On the night of July 24, she and Rose Marie went to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to see Nanette Fabray in a revival of
Wonderful Town
. Afterward the three women went out and ate two hot fudge sundaes apiece and had a good time laughing and getting caught up with one another. The moon was shining that night, and when they went out on the street, Ethel looked up at the sky and gasped, “Look at that fuckin’ moon!” Fabray made her promise to telephone when she reached the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she was staying. No phone call came, so Fabray called the hotel, where eventually she got through to Ethel’s room. Ethel then told her the horrible news: Barbara Colby was dead. She and a friend, actor James Kiernan, had been fatally gunned down in a drive-by shooting in West Los Angeles while they were leaving a yoga class they were teaching. The senseless murder—which was to remain unsolved—shattered the acting community in Los Angeles. “If there was a kinder, nicer lady,” said MTM president Grant Tinker of Colby, “I have never met her.”