Ethel Merman: A Life (38 page)

The weekend of the concert arrived. Mary was still nervous about her appearance and marked her way through nearly the entire dress rehearsal, singing full out only on her signature number, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Ethel, on the other hand, was as unperturbed as ever, singing full voice on every single song. One thing she insisted on was being positioned on stage right (which, from the audience’s vantage point, is on the left) for their duets, which Donald Saddler felt had something to do with the fact that “when we look at the stage, because we read from left to right, our eyes automatically go left first.”

On the night of May 15, the Broadway Theatre was a scene of pandemonium, overrun by both ticket holders and people on the street clamoring to get their hands on a ticket at any cost. Even though both women understood the level of expectation surrounding the concert, neither one was prepared for the reception that greeted them when they burst through matching paper hoops to the tune of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” As had been planned, Mary was in Nellie Forbush’s sailor’s outfit from the “Honey Bun” number in
South Pacific
, and Ethel was in Rose’s ratty coat from the first scene of
Gypsy
, carrying a 1977 stand-in for the original Chowsie. The audience could not contain its excitement; the applause and cheering went on for nearly four minutes. It was, Ethel later said, “the meaning of a love-in.”

Cyril Ritchard, who had costarred with Mary in
Peter Pan
, was the evening’s host. Ethel and Mary sang all their great hits, and Mary, sadly, ran into trouble whenever she tried to sing high notes: she popped into head voice, which emerged as a thin falsetto. (She did, however, sound terrific when she tore into “A Wonderful Guy.”) It was Ethel’s show nearly every step of the way: the climax of the first half was her stunning performance of “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” It was now done at a slower, jazzier tempo, with a scat section in the middle and a finish (with trumpeter Dick Perry) so thrilling that the audience members could not remain in their seats.

After the entr’acte both Ethel and Mary opened the second half in red Dolly Levi costumes and drew huge laughs with their opening lines. “Well! Hello, Ethel!” exclaimed Mary, and Ethel answered, “Well, hello,
Maaaaaaarry
!” An all-star chorus of “waiters” from the Harmonia Gardens, including Joel Grey, Yul Brynner, Burgess Meredith, and—Mary’s son—Larry Hagman, lined the stage. Then came a reprise of the Ford show medley. Mary softened some of the notes that twenty years earlier had been full throttle, and at the end of the duet she couldn’t sustain the final high note on “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Ethel hung on to it until the double bar.

Reviewing the event in the
New York Times
, Walter Kerr left no doubt which star came out on top. “Ethel Merman is the bonfire and Mary Martin is the smoke,” he wrote, going on to add that Ethel was “too hot for Fahrenheit to measure, too bright to be stared at without a pair of those goggles that riveters wear.” In the
New York Post
, Martin Gottfried observed, “We’ve lost something and our theater has lost something. We’ve lost our capacity to adore and our theater has lost the impulse to make us adore.” In the end the benefit cleared $145,000 for the museum.

Ethel had hoped that she and Mary could perform similar programs elsewhere, but Mary, still insecure about her vocal condition, declined.

Her performing schedule permitting, Ethel had continued her weekly stint at the Roosevelt Hospital gift shop. But by now she was eager to do something even more useful. She thought she might be of greater benefit if she had actual contact with the patients and soon she was assigned to visiting rounds in the morning. She would put on one of her best dresses and high heels and go from room to room, asking the patients if there was anything she could get them—a newspaper or a magazine—or if they just wanted to talk. Sometimes they would dictate a short note or postcard to her for her to mail to a relative. More than one patient was startled out of his postsurgical stupor when Ethel barreled into his room and announced, “HI! I’M ETHEL MERMAN!” “I was always afraid that she would give them cardiac arrest,” said Tony Cointreau. “But she would come home and say, ‘My hand to God, I feel so
good
.’”

By now Pop Zimmermann seldom left his apartment at the Berkshire. He could neither see nor hear very well, but Ethel told friends that however upsetting his physical decline was, she was grateful that his mental faculties were intact. After Pop had a lengthy stay at Roosevelt Hospital in the fall of 1977, however, Ethel knew that he couldn’t last much longer. Dr. Attia permitted him to be moved back to the Berkshire with full-time nursing care, and Ethel remained more vigilant than ever. Bob Schear remembered paying a visit with her prior to the opening of the John Kander and Fred Ebb show
The Act,
starring Liza Minnelli. He first went to Ethel’s apartment for drinks, and on the way to the theater, they stopped by Pop’s apartment. The old man was lying in bed, and Ethel leaned over the railing to speak to him.

“HI, POP!” she said, speaking at the top of her lungs so he could hear her. “JUST CAME IN TO SAY GOOD NIGHT. WE’RE GOING TO SEE JUDY’S LITTLE GIRL.” Then she added quietly to Schear, “Hold his hand. He’s trying to talk to you.”

Schear obeyed. Pop seemed unresponsive, until Ethel said, “WANT ME TO SING A LITTLE SOMETHING?”

The old man nodded, and Ethel sang one of his favorites, “Moonshine Lullaby.”

On December 22, 1977, Edward Zimmermann died. As difficult as her mother’s death had been for her, Pop’s passing hit her even harder. She had always been, to a great extent, a daddy’s girl, and friends and relatives believed that her brash and exuberant nature had its source in Edward’s outgoing and confident personality. Bob Levitt, years after his divorce from Ethel, once commented that he had always felt that Edward was a cipher who had lived through Ethel and her success for his entire life. Perhaps there was a grain of truth in that observation, but mostly Edward had felt something that Levitt could probably never have fathomed: the undiluted, unconditional love of a father for his only child. As the decades rolled on and Pop remained the one man who never failed to love and protect her, Ethel had returned his devotion with an even greater intensity.

Edward Zimmermann’s ashes were sent to rest alongside his wife’s in Colorado Springs, and again Ethel repeatedly told her closest circle that someday she would join them. Over the next few years, there were those who felt that she seemed almost in a holding pattern of anticipation. Perhaps it was just a state of confusion, an overpowering feeling of emptiness that had descended on a woman whose long, long childhood had finally come to an end.

O
ne night after attending the theater, Ethel and Bob Schear were on their way to Joe Allen’s, the popular actors’ hangout on West Forty-sixth Street. As they walked up Eighth Avenue, a marquee for one of the gay porn theaters was all lit up with the title of the current film:
ANYTHING GOES
.

“Would you get a fuckin’ look at that marquee?” Ethel laughed. “This is what my life has come to.”

What her life had really come to, professionally speaking, was an occasional television appearance stuck in between a steady round of symphony engagements. The wobble in her voice that had been noticeable a few years earlier had miraculously receded, and she consistently sounded in excellent voice. As Eric Knight succinctly put it, “She always produced.” The heavy schedule of orchestra concerts also enhanced her ability to handle an audience. Once, at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, the outdoor summer venue of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a violent storm erupted. Ethel turned around to see the orchestra’s entire string section fleeing offstage, all the players clutching their expensive instruments. She turned back to the audience and said, “I thought the thunder was the timpani. Look what happens when I sing! Some people break glasses. I start a storm.” After the wind died down, she returned to the stage and sang the entire program, to an ecstatic ovation. Much as the fans in the audience loved her, though, she had a rather ambivalent attitude toward them; after forty years of being at the top, she had naturally developed a certain cynicism toward her public. Often when it was time to sign autographs, she exited via the stage door carrying her purse and a shopping bag in one hand and holding her escort’s hand with the other. “Sorry, can’t sign anything!” she would say. “I’ve got both hands full!”

She went to the theater, though not as often as might have been expected, and she didn’t care much for most of what she saw. Or heard. She was disgusted by the fact that amplification had completely changed the experience of the Broadway musical. Well into the 1970s, a “sound designer” was often credited in a show’s
Playbill
, though the results were highly variable: it was often impossible to tell from what point onstage a particular sound was originating. Also, orchestrations were becoming ever thicker, louder, and less and less grateful to the singer. In Ethel’s day, orchestrators had seen to it that certain sections of the music receded, giving the singer a chance to present the vocal line to maximum effect. From the late 1970s, many orchestrators would pour on a wall of sound without regard to the vocal line, assuming that the singer’s amplification could be magnified until the words could be made out clearly.

Sitting through
The Act
with Liza Minnelli in 1977, she suddenly grabbed Bob Schear’s arm and whispered, “She’s fuckin’ lip-synching!” At the curtain call, Minnelli took her bows bathed in sweat with a towel wrapped around her neck. “Boy, her mother wouldn’t be pleased with her,” muttered Ethel. “The whole trick is to look like you weren’t working hard.”

Ethel’s most high-profile project during the late 1970s was not a TV show or a concert but a book. For some time people had been pressing her to write a second autobiography;
Who Could Ask for Anything More?
had, after all, come out in 1955 and had ended on a rather valedictory note indicating that The Merm was through with Broadway (and would remain happily married to Bob Six). So much had happened since then that Ethel was finally persuaded to give her life story another go. Simon & Schuster made the best offer, and George Eells, a show-business biographer who had written well-received books on Cole Porter and on the rivalry of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, was assigned to be her credited collaborator.

Eells came to the Berkshire armed with a tape recorder and a notepad and worked with her in five-hour sessions. Whether Eells found her an easier subject than Pete Martin had is not documented, but he did have the benefit of spending many hours at the Museum of the City of New York, where Ethel had donated her many scrapbooks, tapes, and other career memorabilia.

Rather than pick up where Pete Martin had left off, Eells correctly assumed that the first book was ancient history and started from the beginning of Ethel’s life. The result was a mixed bag. While the main events of Ethel’s career were efficiently chronicled, the second book, titled
Merman—an Autobiography,
had little more depth than its predecessor, and it lacked some of the punch and personal flavor that Martin had added. When it was published in the spring of 1978, it received its biggest burst of attention from a chapter entitled “My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine”—which was followed by a blank page. It had been Ethel’s idea, and though the executives at Simon & Schuster had been reluctant to approve it, she insisted it would be the one thing about the book that readers would never forget. Once again her career instincts were correct: to this day the blank page has given
Merman
a kind of immortality among show-business memoirs. The press was mostly positive—the
New York Times
’s review had the feeling of a teacher giving a passing grade to an average student, but it complained that “her straight-from-the-shoulder manner keeps some cool distance between her and the reader.” The book was selling briskly: at the Chicago Marshall Field’s alone, she signed 606 copies.

By mid-June 1978,
Merman
had sold over 39,000 copies and was in its third printing, giving her good cause to gloat. When she appeared in bookstores to sign copies, she was often approached by fans who wanted her to sign other memorabilia. Usually she refused: she was there to sign her book, and that was all. In Dallas one admirer brought an original pressing of the audio recording of her 1953 Ford show with Mary Martin. When he told her that it was a collector’s item listed at $200, Ethel responded, “My book is number eight on the bestseller list in Chicago. That’s what I care about.”

By the early 1980s, many more of Ethel’s show-business friends and contemporaries had passed away, and she was acutely aware that she was the possessor of much more past than future. Dorothy Fields and Betty Bruce had both died in 1974. Nearly all of her male costars—including Bert Lahr, Eddie Cantor, Paul Lukas, George Sanders, and William Gaxton—were long gone. Jack Haley passed away in 1979. Even Bruce Yarnell, her much-younger costar from the
Annie Get Your Gun
revival, had died in 1973. For Ethel the past was not bathed in the rosy glow of nostalgia; paradoxically, she seemed at times almost bitter about the fact that she had worked so hard, while insisting that it was the only honorable way for anyone to pursue her career.

She refused to indulge in sentimentality about most of the people she’d worked with, but, as always in the Merman Book of Rules, there were a few exceptions. In 1979, while in Los Angeles for a concert, Ethel paid a call on her old friend Jimmy Durante, who had suffered a debilitating stroke and was confined to a wheelchair. Temple Texas drove her out to see Durante, and Ethel was devastated when she saw him in such a frail condition. She maintained a good front, standing up and singing several of the songs from their two shows together,
Red, Hot and Blue!
and
Stars in Your Eyes
. But on the way back to Temple’s house, Ethel broke down, crying so hard that Temple had to pull off to the side of the road. “Why Jimmy?” she said over fand over. “Why such a wonderful guy? Why do some people have to go through that?”

Since she was still in exceptional voice, Ethel found herself becoming more and more concerned with the question of maintaining her name before a rapidly changing, youth-oriented public. She didn’t want to settle for being a once-a-year guest on
The Merv Griffin Show
, reminiscing about her glorious past; she longed to do unusual projects that would permit her to connect with a new audience. In 1979, A&M Records came to her with a creatively bizarre idea. The disco craze had been going strong ever since the record-breaking box-office success of 1977’s
Saturday Night Fever
, and its influence had even been reflected in performances by the older generation. On her syndicated talk show, Dinah Shore could be heard singing the occasional number to an updated, disco accompaniment. Even the old
I Love Lucy
theme song, by Harold Adamson and Elliott Daniel, had been given the treatment with a popular single, “Disco Lucy.” A&M’s vice president of artists and repertoire, Kip Cohen, wanted to know if Ethel would be willing to record an album of her old Broadway hits set to a disco beat. Ethel, always looking for “good exposure,” discussed it with Gus Schirmer and quickly said yes.

The brilliant Peter Matz was assigned to arrange—or rearrange—several of Ethel’s old songs. He immersed himself in the new sound by listening to about a hundred disco albums. He put together a bare rhythm track of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Something for the Boys,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and other pieces. Ethel studied the vocal lead sheets and rhythm tapes that Matz sent her, then came into the studio and recorded the vocals to the rhythm tracks. While she was working, she noticed what the A&M employees were wearing: T-shirts with
ETHEL BOOGIES
printed on the front in big block letters.

When
Disco Ethel
was released by A&M in the summer of 1979, Ethel gave a round of interviews to the press in which she proclaimed the album the greatest thing since 7-Up. She worked hard plugging
Disco Ethel
on television talk shows and in record stores, once again refusing to sign old
Playbill
s or LPs—just the new record, please—and sometimes she cut off her gushing fans with what the
Village Voice
’s Arthur Bell described as “the warmth of a fjord.”

Unfortunately, by the time the album was released, the disco craze had faded, almost overnight. Radio stations, having decided that the future of rock music lay in New Wave and elsewhere, gave the album minimal airplay, and
Disco Ethel
bombed, very quickly becoming the biggest joke of Ethel’s career since her quickie marriage to Ernest Borgnine.

By now, the Berkshire had gone co-op, and the new owners were in the process of removing all permanent guests from the building. Ethel, incensed at such treatment, declined to buy the apartment she’d lived in for so many years. Bobby had returned to New York to live—they were getting along better than they had in years—and Ethel had come to depend on him for many things. To her friends Frank Pescha and Bill Murdock, she wrote that “my son is here taking charge” of all arrangements for the move—wherever that might be.

In a short time, she had settled on her new home: the Hotel Surrey at 20 East Seventy-sixth Street. She rented 8D&E, an agreeable, spacious, two-bedroom, two-bathroom suite, decorated once again by Carleton Varney. She enjoyed exploring a new neighborhood and soon found two new favorite haunts, both coffee shops: the Skyline on Lexington Avenue and Three Guys on Madison.

Ethel continued to busy herself in television, filming episodes of popular series such as
Hee Haw
and
The Love Boat
(the first of several appearances). In 1979 she agreed to appear on a PBS special,
Musical Comedy Tonight!
, hosted by Sylvia Fine Kaye, which spotlighted milestone musicals by re-creating their best numbers in the original orchestrations. Ethel was the star attraction of the segment devoted to
Anything Goes
and was scheduled to sing the title number, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and, with Rock Hudson, “You’re the Top.” But in rehearsal it became evident to all concerned that something was worrying her; she insisted that she did not recognize the lyrics to “Anything Goes.” When Sylvia Kaye questioned it, Ethel became belligerent and insisted that the words she’d been given weren’t the right ones. The awkward moment passed, and Ethel retired to her dressing room. After she emerged, she sang the number with no trouble. But it was an odd, unsettling moment that cast something of a shadow over the taping.

This strange disturbance was echoed a few months later, at a party at Nanette Fabray’s house in Los Angeles. Ethel came, escorted by Gus Schirmer, and sat with him for the entire evening, refusing to mingle at all. She seemed unnaturally quiet, and at one point in the evening Fabray came over to her and asked, “Ethel, are you all right?” Ethel bristled and became hotly defensive, insisting that she was fine. Fabray let the matter rest but was left with lingering and disquieting doubts about her friend’s state of mind.

One night in a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, Sandra Church saw her sitting in a booth and went over to say hello.

“It’s me, Ethel,” she said. “Sandra—your stage daughter.”

Ethel looked at her for a long time. “You’re not Sandra,” she finally said. “You couldn’t be Sandra Church. I don’t know who you are.”

Out of the blue came an offer for a movie. In 1977 the writing team of Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker had come up with the script for
Kentucky Fried Movie,
a wild spoof of the seventies pop culture that took potshots at popular TV shows and commercials. The jokes were anything but subtle, but the film found its audience and turned out to be a sleeper hit at the box office. Now Abrahams and Zucker had come up with another script, and this time they were handling the directing chores, too. This one was called
Airplane!
, and it lampooned the airborne disaster movies—
The High and the Mighty, Zero Hour!, Airport, Airport 1975
—that had become a tried-and-true moneymaking formula in Hollywood. The talented comedians Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty were the leads, but to add to the movie’s tongue-in-cheek tone, a crazy-quilt supporting cast had been assembled, from Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Stack, all old-time stars of action movies and TV shows, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Barbara Billingsley, the mother on
Leave It to Beaver
.