Read Ethel Merman: A Life for Free Online

McHugh and Dorothy Fields’s “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” from the 1930 show The International Revue , sounds uncannily Mermanesque. (Ethel herself had had her eye on a part in The International Revue and showed up at the producer’s office to audition for it. McHugh and Fields had come up with another terrific song for the show, “Exactly Like You,” which she loved immediately, but the producer told her that they were looking for a Gertrude Lawrence type. In fact, Lawrence wound up playing it, but the show flopped.)
     
     
    Elated to be on a regular bill with a team as famous as Clayton, Jackson, and Durante, Ethel felt that she had finally been lifted to a whole new level in show business. But her happiness didn’t last long: she had to bow out of the act when she developed a recurrence of the tonsillitis that had plagued her off and on for years. This time the situation was serious, and her doctor informed her that she would have to undergo a tonsillectomy.
    Ethel was frightened, for she knew about the risk that the operation had posed for other singers. The procedure turned out to be a highly delicate one, and the surgeon later told her that her tonsils had decayed so badly that they’d crumbled away to nothing when he tried to remove them. So many stitches were required in her throat that it was uncertain whether she would be able to sing again.
    After two weeks of being as quiet as possible, Ethel confounded the doctors when she opened her mouth to sing and found that her voice had returned full force. If anything, she was able to produce even more volume than she had before. The suspense of waiting to see if her voice could be salvaged had taken its toll on Ethel’s nerves, though, and Lou Irwin recommended that she leave town for a while. He had lined up a booking at a popular nightclub in Miami called the Roman Pools Casino, at $300 a week for a six-week guarantee. It was to be her first real time away from home unchaperoned, and Pop and Mom Zimmermann sent her with their blessing, provided that she wired home as much of her salary as possible, so Mom could bank it for her.
    Ethel proved a popular attraction with the audiences at the Roman Pools Casino, once again trotting out her rendition of “Moanin’ Low,” which she torched while wearing a black satin dress, black fishnets, and spike heels. The engagement at the casino had advantages above and beyond the good salary, for when she wasn’t performing she often made her way to the roulette and blackjack tables. In her memoirs she admitted that she “got to know the guys who hung around there,” sitting next to them while they gambled the night away. After a couple of hours of keeping some of the casino’s high rollers company, Ethel found that they often turned over half their winnings to her—a kind of unwritten code of the time. She spent part of these “tips,” as she called them, on sprucing up her wardrobe, while the rest went home to Astoria, along with the part of her weekly salary that she had agreed to put into savings. By the end of the second week, Mom Zimmermann had called her demanding to know how she could possibly be sending home $600 when her weekly salary was half that.
    At the end of the run, Ethel returned to New York, where Lou Irwin had found a pianist to work with her. Al Siegel was an arranger and a singer’s coach with a good eye for talent, and Irwin thought he might be helpful in refining her singing. He was also the former husband of popular singer Bee Palmer, whom Ethel had heard on a number of occasions. Ethel would always dismiss the impact Siegel had on her style, but for years there were many in show business who believed that he’d helped her develop some of the highly individual vocal characteristics that became her trademark. (One person who rejected that theory was Roger Edens, the gifted pianist/arranger/songwriter who became Ethel’s friend and collaborator for forty years. Edens felt that