Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

January 16, 1908– Ethel Merman:

“I can hold a note as long as the Chase National Bank.”

It seems that our current president is reconsidering the idea of putting the image of woman on the $20 bill and just. Do you remember back in the innocent summer of 2016, some moderator even asked that nutty group of Republican Presidential hopefuls for their choices. They all answered with “my mother”, except for the man who eventually got the nomination who suggested that any Fat-Pig-Dog-Slob would do. It was decided that brave Harriet Tubman would boot Andrew Jackson off the $20 note. My sources tell me that Treasury Secretary, billionaire banker Steven T. Mnuchin, favors Eva Braun for the $100 bill.

For me there was only one choice for a woman on currency and today is her birthday.

I saw Ethel Merman live on stage twice. First, in 1970, on Broadway in Hello, Dolly!, in a role written for her that she finally played six years after the musical originally opened. Her Dolly Levi was A+. Merman received several ovations the evening. I was lucky enough to be in the house. I was also in the audience for her concert at The Dorothy Chandler in 1979, in support of the release of The Ethel Merman Disco Album.

Born Ethel Agnes Zimmermann, she was a bookkeeper’s daughter from Queens, who worked as a stenographer by day and sang at local parties by night.

Eventually, Merman acquired an agent who got her some cabaret gigs in Manhattan. After one of her engagements, the 22-year-old singer actually had George and Ira Gershwin ask her to come to their studio and sing some songs they had written for their new Broadway musical, Girl Crazy. At the end of the audition George Gershwin stated: “Miss Merman, if there’s anything you’d like to change, I’d be happy to do so.” Merman replied: “No, these songs will do very nicely.”

Girl Crazy opened in the autumn of 1930, and when Merman sang I Got Rhythm, holding the C above middle C for sixteen bars, the audience went wild and demanded 10 encores. Afterward, at the opening night party, Merman took the subway home to Astoria, but the next day she went to lunch with the Gershwins who showed her the rave reviews and explained that she was now a great big Broadway star. George Gershwin told her: “Never take a singing lesson”. She never did.

Merman, as you know, had a huge brassy belting-voice, but she also possessed impeccable diction. Every word, every syllable, could be heard in every seat in the theatre, and this was decades before the use of microphones on stage. It was this skill that made her especially appealing to composers and lyricists. She was absolutely adored by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, and even Igor Stravinsky.

Merman couldn’t read music but she was able to memorize a song after hearing it a few times. Cole Porter:

“She can sing anything. But, I really tailor-make my songs for her because I know her range so well.”

Her best note was A above middle C and Porter often ended phrases on that note. Porter knew he could trust her to handle his complicated rhythms and he loved the fact that she could sing: “Flying too high with some guy in the sky is my idea of nothing to do…” in one breath.

Producers adored Merman too. Her poor understudies, she never missed a show. She demanded a big salary, but once the contract had been signed, she was utterly reliable and professional.

Among the shows written for her by Cole Porter: Anything Goes (1934), Red, Hot And Blue (1936), DuBarry Was A Lady (1939), Panama Hattie (1940), and Something For The Boys (1943). Irving Berlin gave her Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Call Me Madam (1950). Her greatest triumph, and for me the top musical of all time was, of course, Gypsy (1959).

Merman had a long stage career, from Girl Crazy in 1930 to Hello, Dolly! in 1970. She was still belting out There’s No Business Like Show Business when she was in her 70s. She released that disco album that I mentioned and The NY Times reviewed it saying: “It’s not quite so embarrassing as might have been feared”.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Not particularly pretty or sexy, Merman was also a bit dim. She never read a book, and when someone asked “Is the Pope Catholic?”, she helpfully supplied the answer: “Yes”. Her favorite drink was champagne… on the rocks.

Merman did her own bookkeeping and she accounted for every dime. Her first agent, Lou Irwin said:

“Three things are important to Ethel. The first is money, and the second is money and the third is money.”

She disliked travel and once said that her idea of exercise was sunbathing.

Merman married four times, never happily. The first two husbands were physically abusive. Her final marriage, to fellow actor Ernest Borgnine, ended after five weeks. In her memoir, Merman (1978), the chapter titled My Marriage To Ernest Borgnine consists of one blank page. The Borgnine marriage was short, but it was turbulent. There is a story about how she came back from filming one day and announced to her husband: “The director said I looked sensational. He said I had the face of a 20-year-old, and the body and legs of a 30-year-old!”. Borgnine replied: “Did he say anything about your old cunt?” and Merman replied: “No, he didn’t mention you at all.”

She had two children by husband number two, but devoted little time to them. That part of her story is tragic. Her daughter died of a drug overdose in 1967 and her son was killed in a shooting in 1975.

Merman has been criticized as being a less than inspired interpreter of ballads, but preparing for this column and listening to her recordings, I was drawn to They Say It’s Wonderful from Annie Get Your Gun. She gives this one a deep, haunting tenderness, a quest for love unobtainable. In the three-minute number, she wistfully sings: “I can’t recall who said it. I know I never read it. I only know they tell me that love is grand, and the thing that’s known as romance is wonderful, wonderful, in every way… so they say.” This was recorded when her most dreadful marriages were still to come, and that plaintive “so they say” became her romantic destiny.

For me, the best thing about Merman was her exuberance and a willingness to make fun of herself. At 72-years-old, she appeared in the film Airplane! (1980), playing a wounded soldier so traumatized that he believed he was Ethel Merman, and she leapt from his/her hospital bed singing Everything’s Coming Up Roses.

I have read gossip claiming that she was lesbian and Jewish, but I have found nothing that points to either being true. The writer Jacqueline Susann once stood outside her door yelling: “Ethel, I love you!”, but Merman never showed the slightest interest in women. Susann claimed the character Helen Lawson in her novel Valley Of The Dolls was based on Merman.

Although many of my younger acquaintances have never heard of her, Merman remains a Gay Icon to gay guys of a certain age and is much beloved by drag artists. For decades, there has been an Ethel Merman Choir, consisting entirely of Merman impersonators, in San Francisco.

As a kid, I thrilled to her appearances on dozens of television shows, guesting on variety series hosted by Dean Martin, Ed Sullivan, and Carol Burnett, plus talk shows with Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett, and Merv Griffin.

Merman was disappointed that her film career never came close to matching her triumphs onstage:

“If you don’t exist in, for, and through the movies, well, you don’t exist at all.”

In 1984, when Merman moved on to that great baby pink spotlight in the next world, I lit a candle for her while listening to the original Broadway cast album of Gypsy. I do an outstanding imitation of Merman singing I Will Survive. Ask me to do it for you sometime.

Join me in my campaign to put Merman’s likeness on American currency! #MermanOnTheFifty.

“Broadway has been very good to me. But then, I’ve been very good to Broadway.”

CNN, via YouTube

January 17, 1922– Betty White:

“My muffin hasn’t had a cherry since 1939.”

I am so old that I remember Betty White from her guest appearances on the hit game show Password (1961-1976) from when I was seven-years-old. White has been with me for most of my life. But, her television career is even older than I am. Starting in 1949, she was host of Make-Believe Ballroom a local Los Angeles show spanning five and a half hours of live ad-lib television six days per week for four years.

In 1951, she was nominated for her first Emmy Award. In 1952, White co-founded Bandy Productions, creating the sitcom Life With Elizabeth (1953-55) with White in the title role, followed by another sitcom Date With The Angels (1957-58).

1959, via YouTube

She made her film debut as a Senator in the 1962 drama Advise & Consent. Although her performance received terrific reviews, it would be her single movie appearance until Hard Rain in 1998.

Starting in the 1950s, White began a two-decade run as host and commentator on the annual Tournament Of Roses Parade broadcast on NBC and appeared as a guest on talk shows and daytime game shows. As she became even more popular than ever on CBS’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show, NBC decided they should pull White, and all the promotion that came with her, from their parade. It was a decision that was heartbreaking for White, who said:

“On New Year’s Day I just sat home feeling wretched, watching someone else do my parade.”

In a career that has spanned more than 75 years, she has received eight Emmy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild awards, and a Grammy Award. White is the only woman to have received an Emmy in all performing comedy categories, and also holds the record for longest span between Emmy nominations, her first was in 1951 and her most recent was in 2011, that is 60 years! She is the oldest nominee of a performing Emmy. White was inducted into the Television Hall Of Fame in 1995.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, as Betty Marion White, the only child of a homemaker and a lighting company executive, in her memoir If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t), White explains that her parents named her “Betty” specifically because they didn’t like the nicknames derived from “Elizabeth.” Not Beth, Liz, or Ellie; she’s Betty.

White can’t remember the name of the show she made her screen debut on in 1939:

“I danced on an experimental TV show, the first on the west coast, in downtown Los Angeles. I wore my high school graduation dress and our Beverly Hills High student body president, Harry Bennett, and I danced to the Merry Widow Waltz.”

Before her television career, White worked in theater, on radio, and as a model. During WWII, she joined the American Women’s Voluntary Services, delivering supplies via PX truck throughout the Hollywood Hills, while at night she danced with sailors and soldiers at the Hollywood Canteen.

She married and divorced her first husband in 1945, After four months on his Ohio chicken farm, she headed back to Los Angeles and her career. She married her next husband in 1947, and he became her ex-husband in 1949 after he pushed her to quit showbiz. She didn’t marry again until 1963, after she fell for handsome host of the game show Password, Allen Ludden. They were a couple until his death in 1981. Their stars on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame are side-by-side.

With Ludden 1963, Wikimedia Commons

White loves the animals and is a supporter of the Farm Animal Reform Movement and Friends Of Animals. She started her own tee-shirt line whose profits go to the Morris Animal Foundation.

White’s status as a Gay Icon began in mid-80s with the LGBTQ community’s total embrace of popular The Golden Girls (1985-1992). White:

”Gays love old ladies!”

Inexplicably, LGBTQ fans from West Hollywood to Provincetown stayed home on Saturday nights between 9 and 9:30 to watch White as Rose Nyland, with Beatrice Arthur as Dorothy Zbornak, Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux, and Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo, four older women who share a home in Miami. There were even The Golden Girls nights at gay bars. The show was a real gift to the gays. The characters were iconic, the jokes were sharp, and the performances were furiously funny and focused, with the most progressive look at LGBTQ issues in network television. For a show focusing on life after 50, The Golden Girls went where few sitcoms dared.

Getty, Arthur, McClanahan, and White, The Golden Girls, NBC, via YouTube

The Golden Girls aired many LGBTQ-themed episodes. The show introduced a trans man as a Miami politician in season three, showed Sophia come to terms with her son’s cross-dressing in a heartbreaking funeral episode in season six, and went zany with people mistaking Blanche and Dorothy as a lesbian couple in season seven. The show even tackled issues that faced the LGBTQ community, like HIV/AIDS and hospital visitation rights. Truly landmark stuff for the 1980s.

There were fully drawn gay characters on The Golden Girls too, such as the memorable Lois Nettelton as Jean, Dorothy’s lesbian college friend, portrayed as warm and intelligent, and Monte Markham’s Clayton Hollingsworth, Blanche’s younger brother, who is introduced as ”just as great looking, charming and irresistible to men” as his sister. Millions of 1980s era gay kids even got to hear a sassy Sicilian mother say the words they hoped to hear from their own mothers:

”I’ll tell you the truth, Dorothy. If one of my kids was gay, I wouldn’t love him one bit less. I would wish him all the happiness in the world.”

White had a strained relationship with her co-star Bea Arthur on and off the set of The Golden Girls, commenting:

“Bea was not fond of me. She found me a pain in the neck sometimes. It was my positive attitude and that made Bea mad. Sometimes if I was happy, she’d be furious.”

After Arthur’s final credits rolled in 2009, White said: “I knew it would hurt, I just didn’t know it would hurt this much.”

Producers of the series thought of White for the role of promiscuous Blanche because she was such a hit as horny Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) Meanwhile, they wanted McClanahan for the part of naive country bumpkin Rose because of her work as the sweet, dopey Vivian on Maude (1972-79). Director Jay Sandrich was worried about typecasting, so he asked them to switch roles in the audition.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show, CBS, photo from Wikimedia Commons

We think of those Golden Girls as Gay Icons, but The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s sardonic man-hungry Sue Ann Nivens, “The Happy Homemaker”, now there was a true Gay Icon.

Mary Tyler Moore, and her then-husband Grant Tinker were close friends with White and Ludden. When Valerie Harper left The Mary Tyler Moore Show producers felt the show needed another female character and created Sue Ann Nivens. The running gag was that Sue Ann’s hard-edged private personality was the complete opposite of how she presented herself on her show. Moore suggested at a casting meeting:

“We need somebody who can play sickeningly sweet, like Betty White…”

In 2010, a group on The Facebook called Betty White To Host SNL … Please? gathered more than a million fans and so much media attention that SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels made it happen. At 88-years-old, her episode had one of the highest rating for SNL, for which many of the show’s female alums returned. White won her fifth Emmy for this performance.

White:

“Throughout my career, I’ve always portrayed characters that were humorous, but also weren’t afraid to speak their minds, especially when it came to racy or controversial topics. I think this struck a chord with the LGBTQ community. We both also share a very strong love for animals. When you combine the two, it’s a very strong match.”

In a 2011 interview, White said that she always knew her close friend Liberace was gay and that she enjoyed being his beard at parties and premieres. A supporter of LGBTQ rights, White said:

“If a couple has been together all that time and there are gay relationships that are more solid than some straight ones, I think it’s fine if they want to get married. I don’t know how people can get so anti-something. Mind your own business, take care of your affairs, and don’t worry about other people so much”.

#GirtherMovement

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