Ethel Merman - Later Career

Later Career

Gypsy was based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee and starred Merman as her domineering stage mother Rose Hovick, posssibly Merman's best remembered performance. The musical opened on May 21, 1959 at The Broadway Theatre. In the New York Post, Richard Watts called her "a brilliant actress," and Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times said "she gives an indomitable performance, both as actress and singer". Despite the acclaim, Merman lost the Tony Award to her close friend Mary Martin in The Sound of Music and jokingly quipped, "How are you going to buck a nun?" Shortly after she divorced Six when his affair with television actress Audrey Meadows became public, and she found solace in her work.

Throughout the 702-performance run of Gypsy, Mervyn LeRoy saw it numerous times, and he repeatedly assured Merman that he planned to cast her in the film adaptation he was preparing. Shortly prior to the show's closing, however, it was announced that Rosalind Russell had been signed to star instead. Russell's husband, theatre producer Frederick Brisson (whom Merman later called "the lizard of Roz"), had sold the screen rights to the Leonard Spigelgass play A Majority of One to Warner Bros. with the stipulation that his wife star in both films. Because Russell was still a major box office draw, with the success of Auntie Mame a few years earlier, and Merman never having established herself as a popular screen presence, the studio agreed to Brisson's terms. Merman was devastated at this turn of events and called the loss of the role "the greatest professional disappointment of my life."

Following the Broadway closing of Gypsy on March 25, 1961, Merman half-heartedly embarked on the national tour. In San Francisco, she severely injured her back but continued to play to packed houses. During the Los Angeles run, LeRoy visited her backstage and claimed Russell was so ill "I think you're going to end up getting this part." Believing that the film version of Gypsy was within her grasp, she generously gave him the many house seats he requested for friends and industry colleagues, only to discover she had been duped.

Over the next several years, Merman was featured in two films, the successful It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and the flop The Art of Love (1965), and made dozens of television appearances, guesting on variety series hosted by Perry Como, Red Skelton, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Ed Sullivan, and Carol Burnett, on talk shows with Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett, and Merv Griffin, and in episodes of That Girl, The Lucy Show, Batman, and Tarzan, among others.

Producer David Merrick encouraged Jerry Herman to compose Hello, Dolly! specifically for Merman's vocal range, but when he offered her the role she declined it. She finally joined the cast on March 28, 1970, six years after the production opened. On her opening night, her performance was continually brought to a halt by prolonged standing ovations, and the critics unanimously heralded her return to the New York stage. Walter Kerr in The New York Time] described her voice "exactly as trumpet-clean, exactly as pennywhistle-piercing, exactly as Wurlitzer-wonderful as it always was." He went on: "Her comic sense is every bit as authoritative, as high-handed, really, as her voice." The seventh actress to portray the scheming matchmaker, she remained with the musical for 210 performances until it closed on December 27. She received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance for what proved to be her last appearance on Broadway.

For the remainder of her career, Merman worked as frequently as offers were made. In 1979, she recorded The Ethel Merman Disco Album, with many of her signature show-stoppers set to a disco beat. Her last screen role was a self-parody in the 1980 comedy film Airplane!, in which she portrayed Lieutenant Hurwitz, a shell shocked soldier who thinks he is Ethel Merman. In the cameo appearance, Merman leaps out of bed singing Everything's Coming Up Roses as orderlies restrain her. She appeared in multiple episodes of The Love Boat (playing Gopher's mother), guested on a CBS Television tribute to George Gershwin, did a summer comedy/concert tour with Carroll O'Connor, played a two-week engagement at the London Palladium, performed with Mary Martin in a concert benefitting the theatre and museum collection of the Museum of the City of New York, and frequently appeared as a soloist with symphony orchestras. She also volunteered at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, working in the gift shop or visiting patients.