Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman was an American singer and actress. Known for her distinctive, powerful voice, and her leading roles in musical theater, she has been called "the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage." She performed on Broadway in Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun, Gypsy, and Hello, Dolly!
She is also known for her film roles in Anything Goes, Call Me Madam, There's No Business Like Show Business, and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Among many accolades, she received the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in Call Me Madam, a Grammy Award for Gypsy, and a Drama Desk Award for Hello, Dolly!
Merman introduced many Broadway standards, including "I Got Rhythm" from Girl Crazy, "Everything's Coming Up Roses", "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries", "Some People" and "Rose's Turn" from Gypsy, and the Cole Porter songs "It's De-Lovely", "Friendship", and "I Get a Kick Out of You", "You're the Top", and "Anything Goes". The Irving Berlin song "There's No Business Like Show Business", written for Annie Get Your Gun, became Merman's signature song.
Early life
Ethel Merman was born January 16, 1908, in her maternal grandmother's house in Astoria, Queens, but she later insisted that the year of her birth was 1912. She was an only child. Her father, Edward Zimmermann, was an accountant with James H. Dunham & Company, a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods company, and her mother, Agnes Zimmermann, was a schoolteacher.Edward had been raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and Agnes was Presbyterian. Shortly after they married, they joined the Episcopal congregation at Church of the Redeemer, where their daughter was baptized. Merman's parents were strict about church attendance and she spent every Sunday attending morning services, Sunday school, afternoon prayer meetings, and evening study groups for children.
Merman's parents insisted she have an education with training in secretarial skills, in case her entertainment career failed. Merman attended P.S. 4 and William Cullen Bryant High School, where she pursued a commercial course that offered secretarial training. She was active in numerous extracurricular activities, including the school magazine, the speakers' club, and student council, and frequented the local music store to peruse the weekly arrivals of new sheet music.
On Friday nights, the Zimmermann family took the subway into Manhattan to see the vaudeville show at the Palace Theatre, where Merman saw Blossom Seeley, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, and Nora Bayes. At home, she tried to emulate their singing styles, but found her own distinctive voice difficult to disguise.
After graduating from Bryant High School in 1924, Merman was hired as a stenographer by the Boyce-Ite Company. One day during her lunch break, she met Vic Kliesrath, who offered her a job at the Bragg-Kliesrath Corporation for a $5 increase above the weekly $23 salary she was earning, and Merman accepted the offer. She eventually became personal secretary to company president Caleb Bragg, whose frequent lengthy absences from the office to race automobiles allowed her to catch up on the sleep she had lost the previous night when she was out late singing at private parties.
During this period, Merman began performing in nightclubs, first hired by Jimmy Durante's partner Lou Clayton. At this time, she decided the name Ethel Zimmermann was too long for a theater marquee, her next ambition to sing in. She considered combining Ethel with Gardner or Hunter, which was her grandmother's maiden name. Her father strongly disapproved of these considerations, so she abbreviated Zimmermann to Merman to appease him.
Career
Early career
During a two-week singing engagement at a club in midtown Manhattan called Little Russia, Merman met agent Lou Irwin, who arranged for her to audition for Archie Mayo, a film director under contract at Warner Bros. He offered her an exclusive six-month contract, starting at $125 per week, and Merman quit her day job, only to find herself idle for weeks while waiting to be cast in a film. She urged Irwin to cancel her agreement with Mayo; instead, he negotiated her a better deal allowing her to perform in clubs while remaining on the Warner Bros.'s payroll. Merman was hired as a torch singer at Les Ambassadeurs, where the headliner was Jimmy Durante; the two became lifelong friends. She caught the attention of columnists such as Walter Winchell and Mark Hellinger, who began to give her publicity. Soon after, Merman underwent a tonsillectomy, which she feared would damage her voice, but after recovering, she discovered it was more powerful than ever.While singing in vaudevillian revues on the Keith Circuit, Merman was signed to replace Ruth Etting in the Paramount film Follow the Leader, starring Ed Wynn and Ginger Rogers. Following a successful seven-week run at the Brooklyn Paramount, she was signed to perform at the Palace for $500 per week. During the run, theater producer Vinton Freedley saw her sing and invited her to audition for the role of San Francisco café singer Kate Fothergill in the new George and Ira Gershwin musical Girl Crazy. Upon hearing her sing "I Got Rhythm", the Gershwins immediately cast her, and Merman began balancing daytime rehearsals with her matinee and evening performance schedule at the Palace. Merman introduced the songs "Sam and Delilah" and "Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!" as well as "I Got Rhythm" in the show.
Girl Crazy opened on October 14, 1930, at the Alvin Theatre, where it ran for 272 performances. The New York Times noted Merman sang "with dash, authority, good voice and just the right knowing style", and The New Yorker called her "imitative of no one." Merman was indifferent to her reviews, prompting George Gershwin to ask her mother: "Have you ever seen a person so unconcerned as Ethel?"
File:Ethel merman ragtime9.jpg|thumb|left|Merman with Tyrone Power in the trailer for Alexander's Ragtime Band
During the run of Girl Crazy, Paramount signed Merman to appear in a series of 10 short musical films, most of which allowed her to sing both a rousing number and a ballad. She also sang at the Central Park Casino, the Paramount Theatre, and a return engagement at the Palace. As soon as Girl Crazy closed, she departed with her parents for a vacation in Lake George in upstate New York, but after their first day there, Merman was summoned to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to help salvage the troubled latest edition of George White's Scandals. Because she was still under contract to Freedley, White was forced to pay the producer $10,000 for her services, in addition to her weekly $1,500 salary. Following the Atlantic City run, the show played in Newark, New Jersey, and then Brooklyn before opening on Broadway, where it ran for 202 performances.
Merman's next show, Humpty Dumpty, began rehearsals in August 1932 and openedand immediately closedin Pittsburgh the following month. Producer Buddy DeSylva, who also had written the book and lyrics, was certain it could be reworked into a success, and with a revamped script and additional songs by Vincent Youmans, it opened with the new title Take a Chance on November 26 at the 42nd Street Apollo Theatre, where it ran for 243 performances. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times called it "fast, loud, and funny" and added Merman "has never loosed herself with quite so much abandon." Following the Broadway run, she agreed to join the show on the road, but shortly after the Chicago opening, she claimed the chlorine in the city's water supply was irritating her throat, and returned to Manhattan.
Merman returned to Hollywood to appear in We're Not Dressing, a screwball comedy based on the J. M. Barrie play The Admirable Crichton. Despite working with a cast including Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard, and Burns and Allen, under the direction of Academy Award-winning director Norman Taurog, Merman was unhappy with the experience, and she was dismayed to discover one of her musical numbers had been cut when she attended the New York opening with her family and friends. She also appeared on screen with Eddie Cantor in Kid Millions, but her return to Broadway established her as a major star and cemented her image as a tough girl.
Anything Goes was the first of five Cole Porter musicals in which Merman starred. In addition to the title song, the score included "I Get a Kick Out of You", "You're the Top", and "Blow Gabriel Blow". It opened on November 21, 1934, at the Alvin Theatre, and the New York Post called Merman "vivacious and ingratiating in her comedy moments, and the embodiment of poise and technical adroitness" when singing "as only she knows how to do." Although Merman always had remained with a show until the end of its run, she left Anything Goes after eight months to appear with Eddie Cantor in the film Strike Me Pink. She was replaced by Benay Venuta, with whom she enjoyed a long but frequently tempestuous friendship.
Merman initially was overlooked for the film version of Anything Goes. Bing Crosby insisted his wife Dixie Lee be cast as Reno Sweeney opposite his role as Billy Crocker, but when she unexpectedly dropped out of the project, Merman got the part. From the beginning, it was clear to Merman the film would not be the enjoyable experience she had hoped it would be. The focus was shifted to Crosby, leaving her in a supporting role. Many of Porter's ribald lyrics were altered to conform to the guidelines of the Motion Picture Production Code, and "Blow Gabriel Blow" was eliminated, replaced by a song, "Shang Hai-de-Ho", which Merman was forced to perform in a headdress made of peacock feathers while surrounded by dancers dressed as Chinese slave girls. The film was completed $201,000 over budget and 17 days behind schedule. Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune described it as "dull and commonplace", stating that Merman did "as well as possible", but she was unable to register "on screen as magnificently as she does on stage."
Merman returned to Broadway for another Porter musical, but despite the presence of Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope in the cast, Red, Hot and Blue closed after less than six months. Back in Hollywood, Merman was featured in Happy Landing, one of the top-10 box-office hits of 1938 comedy with Sonja Henie, Cesar Romero, and Don Ameche. She also starred in the box-office hit Alexander's Ragtime Band, a pastiche of Irving Berlin songs interpolated into a plot that vaguely paralleled the composer's life, and Straight, Place and Show, a critical and commercial flop starring the Ritz Brothers. She returned to the stage in Stars in Your Eyes, which closed short of four months as the public flocked to the 1939 New York World's Fair. Merman followed this with two more Porter musicals. Du Barry Was a Lady, with Bert Lahr and Betty Grable, ran for a year, and Panama Hattie, with Betty Hutton, June Allyson, and Arthur Treacher, fared even better, lasting slightly more than 14 months.
Shortly after the opening of the latter, Mermanstill despondent about the end of her affair with Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsleymarried her first husband, William Smith, Treacher's agent. She later said she knew on their wedding night that she had made "a dreadful mistake", and two months later, she filed for divorce on grounds of desertion. Shortly after, she met and married Robert D. Levitt, a promotion director for the New York Journal-American. The couple eventually had two children and divorced in 1952 due to Levitt's excessive drinking and erratic behavior.
In 1943, Merman was a featured performer in the film Stage Door Canteen and opened in another Porter musical, Something for the Boys, produced by Michael Todd. In 1944, she was set to star as the title character in the musical play Sadie Thompson with a score by Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz, directed and produced by Rouben Mamoulian. The musical play was based on the short story "Rain" by W. Somerset Maugham. The serious nature of the production was a departure from Merman's string of successful musical comedies. During rehearsals, Merman had difficulties memorizing the lyrics, and she blamed Dietz for his use of sophisticated and foreign words. She had her husband tone down some of the lyrics. Dietz took exception to Merman's singing the altered lyrics and gave her an ultimatum to sing his original lyrics or leave the show. In response, Merman withdrew from the production. Commentators have speculated that Merman's departure was probably due to her reluctance to assume such a serious role in her first dramatic musical. June Havoc left her starring role in Mexican Hayride and assumed the role, instead. Sadie Thompson opened on Broadway on November 16, 1944, to mixed reviews. Havoc received almost uniformly favorable reviews. Reactions to the score and the book were mixed, with the score called "undistinguished." The show only lasted 60 performances and closed on January 6, 1945.
In August 1945, while in the hospital recovering from the caesarean birth of her second child, Merman was visited by Dorothy Fields, who proposed she star as Annie Oakley in a musical her brother Herbert and she were writing with Jerome Kern. Merman accepted, but in November, Kern suffered a stroke while in New York City visiting Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and died a few days later. Rodgers and Hammerstein invited Irving Berlin to replace Kern, and the result was Annie Get Your Gun, which opened on May 16, 1946, at the Imperial Theatre, where it ran for nearly three years and 1,147 performances. During this time, Merman took only two vacations and missed only two performances due to illness. Merman lost her role in the film version to Judy Garland, but starred in a Broadway revival two decades later at Lincoln Center alongside Bruce Yarnell, who was cast as Frank E. Butler, Annie Oakley's husband and manager. Yarnell was 27 years younger than Merman.
Merman and Berlin reunited for Call Me Madam in 1950, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical, and she starred in the 1953 screen adaptation as well, winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her performance. The following year, she appeared as the matriarch of the singing and dancing Donahue family in There's No Business Like Show Business, a film with a score written by Berlin.
Merman returned to Broadway at the behest of her third husband, Continental Airlines executive Robert Six, who was upset she had chosen to become a housewife in Colorado following their wedding in 1953. He expected her public appearances to generate publicity for the airline, and her decision to forgo the limelight did not sit well with him. He urged her to accept the lead in Happy Hunting, with a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse and a score by Harold Karr and Matt Dubey. Merman acquiesced to her husband's demands, although she clashed with the composers from the start and soon was at odds with co-star Fernando Lamas and his wife Arlene Dahl, who frequently attended rehearsals. The show opened in New York with an advance sale of $1.5 million, and despite Merman's dissatisfaction with it, garnered respectable reviews. Although Brooks Atkinson thought the score was "hardly more than adequate", he called Merman "as brassy as ever, glowing like a neon light whenever she steps on the stage." Several months into the run, she insisted that two of her least-favorite numbers be replaced by songs written by her friend Roger Edens, who, because of his exclusive contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, credited them to Kay Thompson. She lost the Tony Award to Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing, and the show closed after 412 performances, with Merman happy to see what she considered "a dreary obligation" come to an end.