Ethel Merman: A Life (40 page)

In recent years Ethel had taken to brooding about the collapse of her marriage to Bob Levitt, whose stature in her memory as the great love of her life had only increased with the passage of time. It was not enough that she wore his ring and gold watch; Ethel wanted to feel a greater degree of closeness with her favorite husband. How she accomplished this was extreme: she arranged for his body to be exhumed and cremated, the ashes deposited in an urn that she kept in her bedroom closet. To her friends she insisted that it was a wonderful balm to be able to feel Bob’s presence in her apartment—so much so that she sold the chapel she had purchased in Colorado and had the remains of Ethel Jr. and Mom and Pop Zimmermann shipped to her apartment. It was, as none of her friends needed to be told, the act of a deeply lonely woman.

As always, Ethel could lash out with no warning if she felt that a friend had betrayed or manipulated her. When Varney asked her to allow the Surrey apartment he’d decorated to be photographed for a story in
Architectural Digest,
Ethel agreed. She had always liked Varney and had supported his work through the years, dutifully attending his various showings and exhibitions. Unfortunately, Varney did not show up to supervise the
Architectural Digest
shoot, and as strangers marauded through her apartment, moving all her furniture around to get the best possible shot, Ethel felt the welling up of her least favorite feeling—that of having been used—and her friendship with Varney subsequently went through a cooling period.

Relations with the Surrey were not as good as the ones she had enjoyed with the Park Lane and the Berkshire. “In those days,” recalled Surrey employee Paula Palma, “we did not have hospitality training like we did later. She was used to top-grade service, and I’m sure it irritated her. She was a little gruff, but still cordial.” When Ethel’s first lease came up for renewal, the hotel tried to triple her rent. Ethel insisted that the lease specified “reasonable increase”—she did not consider a threefold hike remotely reasonable. In October 1982, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Louise Kaplan ruled that the Surrey had the right to evict her, but Ethel won in the end, when it came to light that the Surrey had neglected to sign the two-year renewal lease by the specified deadline of June 30. Still, the management of the Surrey had its ways of getting back at her through a variety of petty machinations, such as interrupting her house telephone service.

In time Ethel had chosen to overlook her differences with Benay and Bob Schear and picked up both friendships again. But not even family members were safe from her wrath, as Barbara Geary discovered during the 1982 Christmas season. Having majored in costume design and dance at Humboldt State University, she had returned to New York for the holidays, bringing her boyfriend (later husband), Jeff Sennerling, to her parents’ house for dinner. Ethel was also present, her fondness for Bill Geary never having abated over the years. Barbara and Jeff were going through a delayed, quasi-hippie period of their own, and Jeff turned up at the table with long hair and no shoes. Ethel was outraged, and the next day she called Bill Geary’s wife, Margaretta, and let her have it.

“How dare you allow them to sleep in the same bedroom?” she demanded. “He didn’t even have shoes!” She unleashed such a torrent of verbal abuse that Margaretta collapsed in tears.

When she heard what had happened, Barbara fired off a sharp, angry letter to Ethel, telling her that she had no right to treat her stepmother in such a harsh manner. Ethel refused to back down from her position, and Barbara responded by borrowing one of Ethel’s old tactics. She simply cut her grandmother out of her life. “We thought she was just being monstrous,” said Barbara. “I couldn’t just slough it off and let her have her way.”

A
lthough she had never been anything resembling a hypochondriac, Ethel monitored her health very carefully. She knew that she’d been drinking too heavily in recent years, as she had switched between vodka and Almaden on the rocks, and by 1982 she had stopped drinking altogether, never touching anything stronger than a Tab. Much of her concern over her health reflected her staunch professionalism. If a concert date loomed and she suddenly felt a cold coming on, she instantly turned up in the office of Dr. Attia requesting that he do whatever he could to ensure that she didn’t have to cancel her upcoming performance. Apart from a very mild case of hypertension, so insignificant that it didn’t require medication, and some lower back pain, Ethel exhibited only one real health problem: she had recently been diagnosed with the optical condition known as macular degeneration. Both her peripheral vision and straight-on vision were beginning to be affected—in dimly lit restaurants she often failed to recognize old friends until they were practically on top of her—but so far her eyesight had not declined to the point that it was interfering with her life in any crippling way.

On January 14, 1983, just two days before her seventy-fifth birthday, Ethel was delighted to receive a congratulatory telegram from President Reagan:
THERE’S NO DAY LIKE A BIRTHDAY/ NANCY AND I HOPE THAT YOUR SPECIAL DAY COMES UP ROSES AND HAPPY MEMORIES/ HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND MAY GOD BLESS AND KEEP YOU FOR MANY MORE.

There were many projects on the horizon, the most intriguing of which was a major feature film to be based on her life. Producer Lester Linsk had obtained her permission to pursue the idea, and Ethel looked forward to what he might come up with. She had also been scheduled to appear with Mary Martin on the Emmy Awards telecast in September 1982. But earlier that month, Mary, in San Francisco for her talk show,
Over Easy,
was badly injured when a drunk driver hit the taxi in when she was traveling with her manager, Ben Washer, and her close friend Janet Gaynor. (Washer was killed, and Gaynor never really recovered from her injuries, which led to her death in 1984.) “Millions of people will miss seeing us on the ‘Emmys,’” Ethel wrote to Mary, “but
I
will miss us most of all—I was anxiously looking forward to our duet together. Get well, we’ll do it again. Much love, Merman.”

In the spring of 1983, Ethel was still maintaining the usual busy round of activities. In February she had sung a successful symphony engagement at the Peabody Auditorium in Daytona Beach, Florida. Her next major date was the April 11 Academy Awards telecast, in which she was to perform a medley of Irving Berlin songs. While in Los Angeles she was hoping to get down to Rancho Mirage to visit Mary Martin in her new home and see how she was doing postrecovery.

Two weeks before she was scheduled to leave, Ethel ran into
New York Post
gossip columnist Cindy Adams at Gallagher’s Steak House on West Fifty-second Street.

“What are you doing, Ethel?” Adams asked her.

“Whaddya mean, ‘What am I doing?’” snapped Ethel. “What the hell is it with you? You act like you don’t expect me to be doing
anything
. I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my whole life. I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I’m going to be on the Oscars. I’m also going to be on the Tonys. I’m set for both telecasts. How do you like that for doing?”

A few days prior to her trip, however, Ethel telephoned Dr. Attia, sounding much more distraught than he’d normally heard her sound. “I’m very anxious about this performance,” she said. “I’m having difficulty writing.” The following day she called the doctor again. “I’m having difficulty with my speech,” she said, the concern in her voice almost palpable. “Words are not coming out.”

This conversation took place on April 7, the day she was to leave for Los Angeles. She was in her apartment, having finished packing her trunks. As was her custom, everything had been carefully hung—including the gown that Bob Mackie had specially designed for her to wear on the Oscar show—and all the drawers were precisely labeled with their contents. When she was finished speaking with the doctor, she called Tony Cointreau and James Russo to tell them good-bye, then lifted the receiver of the house phone to request a bag pickup.

On the other end of the line, the concierge heard a muffled cry and then a loud thud. Fearful that something was wrong, the hotel staff sprang into action. When they rushed upstairs to Ethel’s apartment, they found her lying in front of her door in a semiconscious state. She had managed to unlock the bolts on the door before she became powerless to do anything at all. Irving Katz, her financial adviser, was telephoned and came immediately to the Surrey. The decision was made not to summon an ambulance; instead Katz rushed her to St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital in a taxi.

Dr. Attia wasn’t on duty when Ethel arrived at the hospital. The procedure that needed to be performed was the injection of dye into the cranium in order to track the circulation in the brain, but at the moment there was not a physician present who could supervise such a procedure. Instead Ethel was given a CAT scan without contrast. The initial diagnosis was a stroke, but when Dr. Attia finally appeared on the scene, he arranged for a second, proper CAT scan, performed by staff neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Schick. What the second test revealed was an enormous, stage-four tumor of the brain, much too large to be considered operable. The news came as a shock to all concerned, since Ethel had had none of the classic symptoms of a brain tumor: no headaches, no vision problems other than the normal ones associated with her macular degeneration. By now she had lost her ability to speak, and for all those close to the family it was like the rerun of a nightmare—she seemed to be going down the exact same path her mother had traveled.

Bobby, who by now was once again living in California, returned to New York immediately and impressed both friends and the hospital staff with his constant devotion to his mother. For some of the physicians, his attitude occasionally verged on interference, as when he discovered a doctor in Japan who was performing experimental treatments on patients with brain tumors. Bobby became insistent on flying Ethel to Japan, hopeful that she might revive under alternative methods of treatment, but Dr. Attia talked him out of it, certain that she would never survive the plane trip. The only hope for even partial recovery was a round of radiation, which the doctors were all but certain that so large a tumor was bound to resist.

For the next several weeks, Ethel was confined to the institution she had generously served for more than ten years. Gus Schirmer did not want the true nature of her condition to be revealed to the public, and every few days there appeared optimistic reports on her supposed progress. On April 26 the
New York Times
ran an item stating that she had been “delighting fellow patients at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital with morning song sessions.” It was also reported, incorrectly, that she had undergone surgery to remove the brain tumor and that her recovery had been “going smoothly.”

The truth was that she was suffering from an aphasia similar to the type that had felled her mother. She could communicate only in guttural moans. When she tried to speak her name into a tape recorder as part of her physical therapy, it came out “Ethel Methyl.” Her television was turned to Channel 5, with a note attached to it that said, “DON’T CHANGE THIS CHANNEL.” One day
There’s No Business Like Show Business
was shown as an afternoon movie selection, but the film scarcely seemed to register with Ethel.

Her hair had fallen out, and with her eyes clouded in sorrow, her bloated face a study in torment, she looked nothing like herself; it was almost impossible to tell whether the person lying in the bed was a man or a woman. Dropping by to visit her, some friends initially thought that they’d wandered into the wrong room. Certain visitors she recognized; others she met with a blank stare. Now recovered from her injuries, Mary Martin came to visit her and held her hand for a long time, offering warm encouragement—but Ethel was not persuaded that she would get better.

Perhaps out of the need to bestow some kind of poetic touch on the terrible fate that had wreaked havoc on a woman who was considered a titan in her industry, a number of her hospital visitors concocted fanciful stories about their bedside conversations with her. Ann Miller insisted that Ethel had said to her, “How could this happen to me? I’ve always been a nice person.” In fact, she could not utter more than a word or two, and those only with staggering effort. One of the words she used in the presence of Tony Cointreau was “terrible.” She said it over and over—“terrible, terrible”—staring off into the distance at nothing, her voice choked with agony.

She wanted more than anything to be at home, which was where Bobby wanted her, too. Eventually the doctors agreed that she would do just as well at the Surrey, provided she had twenty-four-hour nursing care, since she still was unable to bathe or feed herself. By midsummer she was back in her apartment; the doctors prescribed heavy doses of the steroid prednisone to try to keep the tumor in check. Bobby coordinated all the arrangements between the hospital and the Surrey, even joining her hospital bed with the big brass bed that she’d had for so long. He also did his best to sustain the illusion that Ethel was making a speedy recovery, writing to Mary Martin in San Francisco that Ethel was healing and slowly regaining her energy. In fact, the prednisone treatments did restore her power of speech.

But only for a brief time. At the Surrey, she became a virtual prisoner, at the mercy of the decrepitude that she had always feared would overtake her life. There were occasional outings in Central Park. She remained estranged from Barbara, who described herself at the time as “not mature enough to make the gesture to her.”

Yet beyond the paralysis, the disfigurement, the alarming weight loss, Ethel was still, on occasion, recognizably herself. One day while she was in her wheelchair being pushed around Central Park by Goldie Hawkins and her nurse, she came face-to-face with Barbara, who, though currently living in New Orleans, where she operated a theatrical-mask shop, was in New York for a brief stay. Ethel immediately turned her face away from her granddaughter. They sat in silence for several minutes. “She couldn’t speak,” said Barbara. “It was very difficult. It was a terribly awkward thing.”

To those who had written Bobby off as a self-indulgent free spirit, his vigilant care of his mother came as a pleasant surprise. He stayed with her at the Surrey, attending to her every need and running interference with the press, so the rest of the world would not find out how desperately ill Ethel really was. Dorothy Strelsin, Madeline Gaxton, Tony Cointreau, James Russo, and others in her close circle were frequent visitors. To Gus Schirmer, Ethel put up a brave front, insisting that he not book any engagements until December. But as the weeks went by, it became clear to one and all—and in time to Ethel herself—that she was not going to recover.

Soon 1983 gave way to 1984. One day Tony Cointreau came to the Surrey bearing a gift: a pillow, needlepointed with the song title “He’s Me Pal,” the number Ethel had sung as a child for Agnes and then for the soldiers at Camp Yaphank and Camp Mills. Singers who suffer from aphasia often can sing more easily than they can speak, and such proved to be the case with Ethel. She took the pillow from Tony, lifted it to her face, and began to cry softly. Then she sang “He’s Me Pal” from beginning to end.

Ethel’s seventy-sixth birthday came and went. Bobby was grateful that she was able to remain at home at the Surrey, but as she continued to decline, it was difficult to be grateful for much of anything.

Early in the morning on February 15, Ethel slipped away in her sleep. That night all the theaters along Broadway dimmed their lights in her memory.

Her death was marked in all the major newspapers and magazines, with the
New York Times
giving her obituary front-page placement with the headline
ETHEL MERMAN
,
CLARION VOICE OF MUSICAL COMEDY FOR DECADES
,
IS DEAD AT
76. The author of the obituary, Murray Schumach, observed, “Beginning in 1930, and continuing for more than a quarter of a century thereafter, no Broadway season seemed really complete unless it had a musical with Ethel Merman.” He went on to recall how “her delighted customers knew that when the ‘belter’ strode onstage, turned her round eyes on them, raised her quizzical eyebrows and opened her wide mouth, they would get full value wherever they sat. She needed no hidden microphones. Equally important, they knew that when they bought tickets for a Merman show—usually well in advance—she would be there, her face beaming, strong arms churning, regardless of snowfall or flu epidemic.” It was a touching tribute, unfortunately marred when Schumach repeated the incorrect information that Ethel Jr. had committed suicide in 1967.

But Ethel might have been even more touched by the letters from readers that poured into the
Times
that week, particularly one from Sherry Terzian of Los Angeles, a graduate of William Cullen Bryant High School. After calling Ethel the school’s “prize graduate,” Terzian went on to say, “We were not only proud of her but we also tried to emulate her. Ethel Merman became a role model for many, and the rest of us fantasized about making the transition from Bryant to Broadway the way she did.”

Bob Schear took out an ad in
Variety
that read “ETHEL MERMAN—YOU’RE THE TOP—NOW AND EVER.” Oddly, no other paid tributes appeared in the publication—not from the American Theater Wing, not from her agency, not from any of the theater owners.

Within a week of her death, the
New York Times
reported that she had left an estate of roughly $800,000, most of which would be divided among Bobby, Barbara, and Michael. There were individual bequests to friends, totaling $26,000. A sum of $5,000 and four of her Norwegian marble urns were left to Bill Geary, with a gift of $1,000 going to the Actors Fund of America. The will, which had been dated November 18, 1980, also directed that her personal effects be sold.