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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Ethel Merman

Getting a kick

Nicky Haslam on Geoffrey Mark's biography of Ethel Merman

Miss Merman was indeed the biggest star of the American musical theatre for over 60 years. The greatest song-writers dreamed of her voice, with its perfect pitch, its hear-it-in-the-gods carrying-power, its crystalline diction and unique vibrato, performing their work. All Tin-Pan Alley, from Irving Berlin via the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim, wrote vehicles especially for Ethel, the latter giving her, in Gypsy, an iconic number, ‘Everything’s coming up Roses’. Ethel was initially fazed by that title. ‘Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?’ she wanted to know.

This streak of naivety was typical of her. ‘Is Tab Hunter gay?’ she asked her co-star Jack Klugman. ‘Ethel, is the Pope Catholic?’ he said. ‘Yes’ she replied unhesitatingly. Arthur Laurents, the playwright and Merman’s friend and frequent collaborator, found her ‘endearing, and despite a life spent in saloons, childlike’. Mind you, he added, ‘four-letter words were as at home in her mouth as saliva’.

The filthy talk came later; the boombox notes first formed in baby Ethel Agnes Zimmermann’s mouth in a large house, replete with all the latest gadgets of the 1900s — indoor plumbing, steam heat, even a telephone — in Astoria, at the time the more affluent part of Queens, Long Island. In these genteel surroundings Ethel Agnes, from a tot on, trilled lustily to parental applause, which nurtured ‘a healthy ego and a confidence uncommon in a child’. She sang her way through schools, churches, colleges, summer camps, lodges, concerts, and, inevitably, local saloons. There her first profanities were encountered, along with cigarettes and liquor and the charleston. Mama Zimmermann was dismayed — as well as by her daughter’s somewhat excessive dress sense: ‘Anything Ethel can’t actually wear, she carries.’

Pretty soon, in those days before microphones, the vibrato vibrated across the East River to Manhattan and up to Cole Porter’s Waldorf Towers eyrie ‘down in the depths of the 90th floor’ as he put it in an early song he wrote for Ethel. Porter considered hers, along with Lee Wiley’s, to be the voice most suited to his music. In the early 1930s she introduced many Porter classics, most famously ‘I get a Kick out of You’. He believed the way Merman paused between ‘the most’ and ‘fabulous kick’ made the song. Soon Irving Berlin came up with two smashes for her: the gun-toting Annie Oakley, followed by ‘Call Me Madam’.

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