Ethel Merman by Wolcott Gibbs

  It is even possible to get along with none of the accepted gifts at all, substituting for them some quality so hard to define that it is usually just called personal-ity. Helen Morgan's talent, for instance, fitted no pattern. She was not beautiful nor very bright and her sad little voice belonged in a speakeasy, providing synthetic tears for the synthetic gin. All she had was the faculty of communicating a vague, enormous melancholy, but it was enough, at least for the peculiar temper of her time. Un-orthodox triumphs like hers, however, are rare; the quadruple threat is the ideal. The fact that Miss Merman can triumphantly carry a show all by herself is an imposing mystery, since, at first glance, she would seem to be even more limited than most of her sisters. Ethel Merman is s feet 51/2 inches tall. When she first appeared on Broadway she weighed 118 pounds, but now 130 seems more probable. She has an abundance of black hair; long-lashed, dark-brown eyes; a nose that has a rather Jewish cast, although she is not, and a generous mouth that is usually ajar, displaying handsome teeth, a little out of line along the bottom row. These conventional details, however, haven't much to do with what really makes her a figure of rare and irresistible humor on the stage before she even opens her mouth. It is partly a matter of structure and arrangement. Artists, in an attempt to impose some kind of order on the human body, have stated that, ideally, the female head is one-seventh the length of the whole figure, though in fashion drawing this is reduced to one-tenth for the purpose of achieving that unearthly grace. Working from photographs, since it is hardly practicable to apply a ruler to a lady piece by piece, statisticians have estimated that Miss Merman's head accounts for a little more than one-sixth of the total, making it measure about a foot, or nearly four inches beyond the length attained by less ambitious girls. Since the width is proportionate, it can safely be said that she has an almost record face. To borrow a useful phrase from Ring Lardner, it
is a sleeper jump from her hairline to her chin and another none from ear to ear. The features on this plane are whimsically designed.  The arching brows she offers to the public are a little higher than the ghostly traces of her own and give her a perpetually astounded air, heightened by her bright, round eyes, and her mouth, squared off by art likewise expresses a constant pleased surprise. Nature obviously intended her to have a rather inexpressive face and  the look of intense vivacity that usually adorns it is as comic and unnatural as the look of glassy distinction worn by the odd celebrities in those whisky advertisements.
 Her figure diminishes rapidly from her wide, square shoulders to her pretty feet so that, as one critic noted, the effect is curiously foreshortened, as if you were looking down at her from a stepladder. She walks with a rather jaunty swing, an appearance of elbowing her way through a crowd that may have been borrowed originally from Jimmy Durante, but now has a bustle unmistakeably her own. Sometimes it amuses her to waddle like a duck, usually when the scene would normally call for classic grace, ands and then she kicks one foot up in the air in queer, perfunctory gaiety. Miss Merman's voice somehow defies studious analysis. One critic, generally more at home at the Metropolitan Opera House than the Imperial Theatre, recently spoke of it with respect. "It is a big, well-focused contralto," he began carefully. "You might say it goes on a straight line." At this point, however, his educated man-ner deserted him. "Hell, it's quite an organ," he said. "Got ping, you know what I mean. I guess she's got leather or something down there." Others have mentioned her exactp itch (when she sharps or flats it is invariably for her own humorous purposes), her extraordi-nary sense of rhythm and the enunciation that, without the hideous grimaces that usually disfigure the precise vocalist still makes every intricate syllable clear all over the house. Whatever her qualities, she acquired them without training, never having taken a formal lesson in her life. She has never learned to breathe according to the rules, simply doing so whenever she happens to feel like it, and she has had no experience with those elocution-class favorites like "The rain in Spain falls gently on the plain" that are guaranteed to make any young woman talk like Lynn Fontanne.
of everything she has sung, up to Annie, Miss Merman has named I Got Rhythm as her favorite fast song, Mississinewah as the funniest song generally, I Get a Kick Out of You as the ballad that affected her most, and Eadie Was a Lady as the best character piece. A good many people might dissent mildly from this selection, especially from the omission of You're the Top, which certainly involved the greatest amount of stylish reference ever crowded into one lyric, but they were all fine songs and the words from them still bring back very cheerful memories to those who first heard that stirring and jubilant trumpet in the days when we were all certainly in far better shape. While Miss Merman has certainly been fortunate in her authors, she has a firm mind Of her own and hasn't hesitated to veto ideas that don't appeal to her. Once, for instance, Cole Porter thought it might be a good idea to incorporate some topical references in a song. The show was in a late stage of rehearsal and anyway she wasn't much impressed with the news item he had in mind. "Listen," she told him firmly, "I'm not going to go louse up my lyrics just because some big dope did something." When she refused to appear in Sadie Thompson the only show she ever declined, her objections were largely based on a difference of opinion with Howard Dietz about lyrics. He had a verse that amused him involving the word Malmaison, but Miss Merman was not convinced. "What's it mean?" she asked. He told her that Malmaison was a famous kind of lipstick and she went away, but obviously still doubtful. The next day she came back and delivered her ultimatum. "Hey, Howard," she said. "That Malmaison. I asked twenty-five other dames and none of them ever heard of it either. It goes out." It didn't, but Miss Merman did. About the only time she has ever lost in such a contest, in fact, was when she was in Hollywood, and the forces of purity proved too much for her. "One look at you and I get hot pants" was nervously altered to "One look at you and I get that way" and "feet" was substituted in a line that once ran genially: "Oh, she started a heat wave, by making her seat wave." Neither of these alterations struck her as an improvement, but, after all, she wasn't God.