Dolly and David

  

“A voice like that comes along just once, and it echoes down Broadway to this day.” - Adam Feldman

 

I've blogged plenty about Ethel Merman before, so I won't riff on and on, but just wanted to add a quick salute this week, to commemorate her on her 113th birthday.

Ethel was born on January 16, 1908 (not 1912 as she used to insist)in her grandmother's house in Astoria, Queens. Her first job was as a stenographer, which gave her evening times to moonlight in nightclubs.
She didn't have to type for long.

Below, with Bob Hope, her co-star in Red, Hot, and Blue.

 

There's No Business Like Show Business, which we'll hear from on Sunday, starred Donald O'Connor, Ethel, Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor, and Johnny Ray (and not to forget Marilyn Monroe!). Ethel was 46 when she did this movie. Of course, she had sung the movie's title song back in Annie Get Your Gun. (Despite the lavish production, the flick was a financial flop.)

Ethel was the 7th Dolly Levi, in 1970. Jerry Herman supposedly wrote the part with Ethel in mind, but she initially rejected the offer, as she was supposedly tired of "spending her life in a dressing room." But 7 years later...she reconsidered.

Ethel was the last diva to play Dolly in this first production. Thanks to her joining the cast, starting in March of 1970, Jerry was able to reinsert two particularly Merman-esque songs that had been cut prior to the show’s opening night: “World, Take Me Back,” and “Love, Look In My Window."

 Her appearance in Dolly was said to be a smash. Great reviews and standing ovations...Walter Kerr of the NYTimes called her voice "exactly as trumpet-clean, exactly as penny whistle-piercing, exactly as Wurlitzer-wonderful as it always was."

She stayed with the production until its closing on December 27th of that year and received a Drama Desk Award. It would be her last Broadway performance.

 

 David Wayne James McMeekan (2 middle names?) was born in Traverse City, Michigan (a town I've actually biked thru!) back in 1914. He first worked as a statistician in Cleveland, whilst moonlighting with a Shakespearean theatre group there (we're talking the mid-1930s here). 

He was too old to join the WWII forces, but ended up volunteering as an ambulance driver with the British Army in North Africa.

In 1947, he debuted on Broadway in Finian's Rainbow, as Og the leprechaun, ANNNND picked up his first of 2 Tony Awards (the second would be for his work in The Teahouse Of The August Moon.  

Roles in The Happy Time, Mister Roberts, Say, Darling and After The Fall followed.

 

The Happy Time, with Michael Rupert and Robert Goulet. I guess David really was "The Life Of The Party"!

Hollywood-wise, David often played best friends, charming cads, or mean-hearted villians! Way at the top, with Marilyn Monroe in How To Marry A Millionaire. In the middle, The Tender Trap, with Celeste Holm, Debbie Reynolds, and Frank Sinatra. And below that, in Adam's Rib with Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn (love that robe, Kate!). 

 And not to forget his tons O'TV roles, on the Twilight Zone, Norby, The Outlaws, Bonanza, and Batman (he played the Mad Hatter on that one).

David passed away in 1995, at the age of 81.