Free Ethel Merman: A Life by Brian Kellow Page A

missed his wife and daughter in Hollywood. “I’ve never gone through a thing like that, where everything was falling apart,” he said later. “I’m writing for pictures now, and it’s much easier.” He begged DeSylva to let him return to California. DeSylva and Ethel both demanded that he stay, but Whiting held firm. “I’ve given you three or four good songs” he said. “Let me go.” When DeSylva refused to take no for an answer, Whiting countered that there was only one composer who could finish the show: Vincent Youmans. With that, he said good-bye to New York and to Take a Chance .
    Youmans was brought in and provided five new songs, including a raise-the-rafters number for Ethel called “Rise and Shine.” Roger Edens, meanwhile, had gone to work on “Eadie Was a Lady,” preparing a hilarious middle section that gave the number even more sardonic bite. In tone it resembled some of Mae West’s risqué songs from the movies. From the first performance, audiences were stunned when Ethel, wearing a red dress and black boa, sashayed onto the set of a New Orleans supper club and began to sing about Eadie, her “sister in sin.”
    By November 5 the still-wobbly production opened in Wilmington, Delaware. The reviews were much better than anyone had expected, with the Wilmington News noting that Ethel “just about walked away with the show.” Then came more reworking in Philadelphia and Newark. But Take a Chance had to face New York sometime, and when it did, at the Apollo Theatre on November 26, the reviews gave no indication of its troubled history. Percy Hammond in the New York Herald Tribune headlined his review “Here Are Happy Days Again” and called Take a Chance “fast on its feet, quick-witted, insolent, and full of pleasing sounds. It contains everything that Broadway craves, from smut to sentiment.” Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times found it “fast, loud and funny…. Ethel Merman has never loosed herself with quite so much abandon into ballads and pagan revival numbers.”
    Take a Chance was a hit, and “Eadie Was a Lady” became the latest song sensation around Broadway. The Times even took the trouble to reprint its lyrics in their entirety.
    Although she didn’t fully grasp it, Ethel had, in just three shows, completely rewritten the rules for girl singers on Broadway. With her cocky, hip-swinging walk, her shoulders rolling from side to side, her hands thrust out as if to grab the audience or, alternatively, thrown up over her head, she was unlike any Broadway star anyone had experienced before. She had a raw energy that up to now had been found only in a handful of male performers. Like Al Jolson, she possessed a genius for selling a song, an infallible instinct for what made a number work. There had been other brassy female singers before, but never one with such a cold-eyed command of the stage, such a powerful vocal apparatus, such a knack for making a song sound like ordinary conversation—admittedly, conversation at earsplitting volume.
    Ethel stayed with Take a Chance until it closed, on July 1, 1933, after 243 performances. That made her record three hits in a row, and for the first time she decided to take a show on the road. A few weeks later, Take a Chance opened in Chicago with the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson standing in for Jack Haley and Sid Silvers. Ethel brought Pop and Mom with her and set them up in an apartment. At the time the city was playing host to the World’s Fair, which had taken for its theme “A Century of Progress.”
    Ethel’s stay in Chicago was short, and she later claimed that the chlorine in the city’s water supply irritated her throat and forced her withdrawal. But she can hardly have been happy about playing opposite Olsen and Johnson—especially Johnson, who, as one critic noted, would take a gag and practically choke the life out of it in his trademark manic style. After two weeks Ethel was happy to head back to New York, where she