The Theatre: Porter on Panama

(See Cover) The Rodgers & Hart-John O’Hara musicomedy Pal Joey had most of its lyrics and all its tunes written last week; Cabin In the Sky was ready to open this week; Hi’ Ya Gentlemen was about to go into rehearsal. At this point, Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie was rocking Boston audiences with its lewd gale before sweeping on to Manhattan. Composer Porter’s shows—Jubilee, Red, Hot and Blue, Du Barry Was a Lady—are notable for being often the funniest, often the most risque in the business. Very fast, very funny and energized by the leading popular songstress of the period, Panama Hattie is easily the ripest of the crop, may well become the musical hit of Broadway’s winter if lighthearted depravity pays Mr. Porter anywhere near as well as it has in the past. The scene of the latest of his many successes is a canvas Canal Zone where morals are so loose as to be virtually detached.

Chief looseners are a trio of sailors impersonated by Rags Ragland, Pat Harrington & Frankie Hyers—the last two on leave from Manhattan’s locally famed “18 Club,” where for some years they have assisted Comedian Jack White in making that institution a sort of petit palais of honky-tonk humor and personal insult. Mr. Porter has worked with funny men before (Victor Moore, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr). But never with any so fundamentally low-down funny as these. In Panama Hattie one of them observes to his pal Ragland: “You make more cheap dolls than they do in Japan.” They also gang up on a torso-rolling lady of the cast with the suggestion: “When you get that wound up, set it for seven.”

Even a suave butler, in the person of famed Arthur Treacher of Hollywood, succumbs somewhat to the prevailing laxities. Although managing to maintain a certain propriety through an attempted seduction by Jitterbug Dancer Betty Hutton, when she cautions him “You can’t take it with you,” Butler Treacher unbends sufficiently to reply: “It wouldn’t be very safe to leave it around here, either.”

Possibly as a hedge against the Minsky tone of most of the proceedings, Librettists Herbert Fields & B. G. (“Buddy”) De Sylva have introduced a bit of innocent juvenile appeal represented by Joan Carroll, aged 8, whose part was originally intended for Shirley Temple and who should please even those who insist on worshiping at that small shrine.

The Panama locale, lusciously tinted by Designer Raoul Pène du Bois, who has also clothed a luscious chorus line in just the right places, gives Cole Porter a chance to indulge his talent for Latin-American rhythms (previous examples: Begin the Beguine, I Get A Kick Out of You}. The Porterian lyric wit is displayed in a trio and quintet titled, respectively, God Bless the Women and You Said It. The tune that seems likely to prove most durable is Panama Hattie’s response, in rumba rhythm, to temporary disappointment in love: “Make it another oldfashioned, please . . . leave out the cherry, leave out the orange, leave out the bitters, just make it a straight rye!”

The Singer of this sultry chanson is Ethel Merman, now entering the eleventh season in which her voice has sounded in brassy triumph above the joint efforts of a pit band. This time she appears as a toughly attractive feature of the Canal Zone who saves the canal locks and her boy friend from a fifth-columnist dynamiting. She is the same tireless performer who first got fervent notices when in 1930 she shouted the late George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm and Sam & Delilah in Girl Crazy. She arrived in the headlines with the Depression but has outlasted it. The undisputed No. 1 musicomedy songstress of these harassed times, pompous psychologists might say that she gives her public vicarious energy which they often sorely need. But such a diagnosis would leave out her assured, brazen art.

A dark, bouncy, oval-faced young woman, Ethel Merman can lay no claim to great beauty, glamor or “legitimate” vocal quality, but she is a dynamic baggage with syncopation in every breath and gesture and a voice with the hard, clarion forthrightness of a jazz trumpet. Where most people hum or whistle for their personal pleasure, Ethel Merman imitates (Ta-ta-ta-ta!) the trumpet part.

Whatever happens to her in silly musical-comedy plots, she can always rise above it to sing, as she does in Panama Hattie. “All the same, I’m in the pink, my constitution’s made of zinc!” Beyond her immediate swinging impact she has impeccable enunciation and a comic intuition that never overstresses such innuendoes as Cole Porter gives her.

Life and Times. Ethel Merman’s pronunciation of Show-Business English brands her unmistakably as a native of parts not far from Times Square. She was born Jan. 16, 1909 in Astoria, a flat residential section of the borough of Queens, across the Triborough Bridge from Manhattan. She is the only child of Edward and Agnes Gardner Zimmerman. Her mother sings, her father plays the piano. Ethel went to Public School No. 4 in Long Island City, took a secretarial course there at Bryant High School.

During World War I, when she was 8, plump and vocal, her parents took her to Camp Mills on Long Island where they lifted her on a table to sing for recruits.

She kept on singing in amateur shows all through school. While she was a stenographer to Caleb Bragg, oldtime auto race driver, president of B. K. Vacuum Booster-Brake Co. of Long Island City, she entertained at neighborhood clubs and lodges. Once she persuaded Bragg to sign a letter of self-recommendation she wrote to George (Scandals) White; Producer White offered Ethel a chorus job, no solo singing, and she refused. In 1929 she appeared for two weeks at the Little Russia restaurant on Manhattan’s 57th Street, where Lou Irwin, an artist’s representative, heard her and got her an option contract with Warner Bros, in Hollywood.

Warner Bros, didn’t use her, wouldn’t let anyone else either. Irwin obtained her release and put her into Broadway’s Les Ambassadeurs nightclub, where the late great comedy team of Clayton, Jackson & (“Schnozzle”) Durante offered a grade of lunacy which their admirers still feel has never been equaled. Ethel was still far from feature billing and remained so until 1930, when she began to reach larger audiences. At a banquet connected with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign for reelection as Governor of New York she added The Star-Spangled Banner to her lusty repertoire. More importantly for her career, at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, where she was supported by the veteran jazz pianist Al Siegel. she began to stop the show.

Producer Vinton Freedley caught her at the Paramount, introduced her to George Gershwin, for whom she sang his newly composed I Got Rhythm. She was promptly signed for Girl Crazy, in which she was an overnight smash. Hearing that she had never had a singing lesson, Gershwin begged her never to take one. She never has. She says: “I breathe when I want to”—which is usually at the precise moment when she has turned a syncopated phrase with sinuous authority. Gershwin was so delighted with her talent that during the run of Girl Crazy he often appeared in the orchestra pit for the sole purpose of playing the piano while she delivered I Got Rhythm. Ethel kept her long-lashed eyes on the house, but she could tell when the composer was at the keyboard by his unusual inventions in the treble.

Girl Crazy was followed by a long series of Merman musicals, including Take A Chance (Eadie Was A Lady), Anything Goes (I Get A Kick Out of You}, and last season’s Du Barry Was A Lady. Ethel has also made several cinemas, most notably Alexander’s Ragtime Band, in which she gave Irving Berlin’s classic tunes the de luxe plugging she had long since conferred on melodies of Gershwin and Porter. She has had some fun in Hollywood, including one session in which, during the absence of Don Ameche from his dressing room, she helped to nail his clothing to his furniture. On the whole she is not congenially disposed toward the cinema capital. Instead of the almost invariably warm audience just across the footlights, there are cold microphones and technicians.

Before Ethel would sign a contract to appear in her first Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes, she made the songwriter play and sing the score before her and her parents. They vetoed two of the numbers. Since that time, like all Porter enthusiasts, she has been willing to accept his music, sound unheard. He calls her the “most efficient” songstress on the stage. Her efficiency includes her ability, as an ex-stenographer, to take down suggested script or lyrics in shorthand and type them for her own private rehearsal.

Last week, between Ethel Merman in one suite of the Boston Ritz-Carlton, Cole Porter and his piano in another, and the Shubert Theatre as a testing laboratory, experiments were still going forward with Panama Hattie. But Bostonians, including a certain percentage of Brahmins on a tear, crowded into the Shubert to see what, for the purposes of both audience and visiting critics, seemed a wholly satisfying finished product. Between performances Ethel Merman fortified herself with steak and walked incognito in Boston Common. She could look forward to a long Manhattan season, living with her parents in her terraced Central Park West apartment, with plenty of off-stage diversions such as prize fights, football and baseball games. And already the Boston box office was more than intimating that one of her happiest winter occupations—checking over her bank balance—would prove as pleasant as in the past.