|
When
Ethel Zimmerman began to get some singing gigs after graduating from high
school, she decided to shorten her last name to Merman so that it would fit
easier on theater marquees. Within a few years, the name Ethel Merman would
grace marquees with star billings for another thirty
years with the last being on the
Imperial Theatre at 249 West 45th Street
in
Gypsy
(1959). As
Ethel
once remarked, "Broadway has been very good to me.
But then, I've been very good to Broadway.
"
One of Ethel's biggest hits was
Annie Get Your Gun which premiered on Broadway at the Imperial Theater
on May 16, 1946 and ran for 1,147 performances. The Irving Berlin musical
featured several memorable songs including
, "There's No Business Like Show Business,"
and "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun."
Ethel didn't need a gun to get men,
but she needed one to keep them . She was married and divorced four times.
Her husbands were: William Smith, a theatrical agent; Robert Levitt, a
newspaper executive; Robert Six, President of Continental Airlines;
and the actor Ernest Borgnine from whom she was divorced 32 days
later.
In her second book of memoirs Merman, the chapter titled 'My Marriage
to Ernest Borgnine' consists of one blank page. According to Borgnine,
"We went on our honeymoon
from Beverly Hills to Hawaii to Kyoto, Tokyo and Hong Kong. During that time
people knew me and they would say hi. I would introduce my wife Ethel
Merman, and they'd say, 'Who?' 'You know, the great singer.' And they'd say,
'Oh sure, how do you do? By the
time we got home, it was hell on earth...And after 32 days I said to her,
'Madam, bye.'"
Ethel
was well known for her four-letter expletives. In the book
Broadway
Day and Night,
Ethel visited Harvey Firestein in his dressing room after a
performance of Torch Song Trilogy and he asked her what she thought
of the play.
Ethel replied
"I thought it was a piece of shit but everyone around me was screaming and
laughing so what the fuck." One day when she took two of her kinds to
the zoo, she complained, "You don't want to go to the zoo, you don't want
to play on the swings, what the fuck DO you want to do?" When an
actress who was late for her entrances in Annie Get Your Gun ,
Ethel
wanted her fired. When the stage manager mentioned that the actress was a
protégé of Richard Rodgers (the producer)
Ethel
replied, "I don't give a
damn--tell him to go fuck himself! I want her fired!"
Sandra Church (Louise in Gypsy) somehow got on
Ethel's bad side
during the run. When producer David Merrick asked
Ethel if she was still
speaking to Church, Merman reputedly said, "Of course I speak to her! Every
night when the curtain goes down, I say 'Go fuck yourself!"
Her
biggest professional disappointment was that she failed to earn a Tony for
Gypsy and lost out to Mary Martin for The Sound of Music. So
to reward Ethel for what many critics have called her greatest performance
as the stage mother from hell in Gypsy, we suggest serving the classic
Gypsy Cake while watching her in There's No Business Like Show
Business (1954).
|
