Free Broadway Babylon by Boze Hadleigh

actor—his murderer will not be executed.” Justice for actors in those days was unlikely, if at all.
    No actress has ever killed in a theatre. However, not long after women were allowed to perform onstage—Shakespeare’s female roles were, of course, written to be enacted by males—two British actresses did get down and dirty. Elizabeth Barry (1658–1713) and Peg Woffington (1714–1760) each nonfatally stabbed a rival actress.
    Another fatal fellow was Irish actor Charles Macklin, born in 1700 or earlier. He died in 1797 and last performed in 1789. Apparently peaceful at home, he was quite cantankerous at work. He once caused a “violent disturbance” just by appearing on stage, and another time indirectly caused a riot via his friends’ aggressive support. When another actor once borrowed a wig of Macklin’s without permission, he poked the offender in the eye with his cane, which penetrated to the brain and killed the colleague.

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THE MERM
    E thel Merman was probably the biggest star Broadway ever produced. Also the loudest, renowned for her bold, brassy voice more than for her looks or acting—she sometimes made a bargain with a costar that she wouldn’t react to his lines if he wouldn’t react to hers. A native New Yorker, she was born Ethel Zimmerman (1908–1984), an only child who enjoyed singing and as a young adult became an almost overnight success. Ethel went from a stenographer who sang at private parties and nightclubs to a Broadway star in the Gershwins’
Girl Crazy
in 1930 with maximum confidence.
    She reportedly never had to audition, didn’t have to rise through the ranks, and was never “one of the kids” in the chorus, facts which ingrained in her a sense of predestined stardom and privilege. Seemingly nerveless, Merman once said, “Why should I worry? I’m good. If I wasn’t, I’d be an audience, not a star.”
    Her low tolerance for “excessive” rehearsal, she explained, was on account of “whenever I open my mouth to sing, it comes out swell.” “The Merm,” as she was often called—sometimes affectionately, sometimes derisively—definitely knew her own worth. In later years, when a TV talk show host commented that Broadway had been very good to her, she shot back, “Yeah, and I’ve been very good to Broadway!”
    There were two frequent misconceptions about Merman. One, that she was Jewish. In fact, the lifelong Episcopalian Republican was at times vocally anti-Semitic—also homophobic, misogynistic, penny-pinchingly cheap, greedy(she demanded extra tickets to her shows, which she then “scalped” for considerable profit), and cheerfully vulgar, even obscene.
    Two, that she was lesbian. After all, she was nearly as butch as actor Ernest Borgnine, her fourth, final, and least-loved husband. “All men are cheatin’ bastards,” she concluded upon quickly divorcing him. In fact, the Merm was heterosexual, or at least predominantly so. She may have had an affair with obsessive admirer Jacqueline Susann, who after Ethel abruptly terminated their relationship took revenge by closely patterning Broadway villainess Helen Lawson after her in her number-one best-selling novel
The Valley of the Dolls
.
    As early as
Anything Goes
(1934), Merman had refused to sing Cole Porter’s “Kate the Great” because of its sapphic and clergical references. Due probably to his jittery homosexuality (which unlike, say, Noel Coward, Cole camouflaged with a wife), Porter readily dropped disputed songs. “Merman wasn’t just the star of almost everything she was in, outside of Hollywood,” said actor Keith Prentice, “she was a tyro and a tyrant used to getting her way.” Playwrights, producers, and writers knew that she would put up with only so many dialogue changes while rehearsing a new show; she thereafter became what she called “Miss Birdseye,” for as far as she was concerned, the show was “frozen.” Since she was most always a hit and a money-spinner, associates put up