“Ethel Merman as Panama Hattie”
If Ethel Merman could famously hold a high-C note for 16 bars, I can write a long rambling blog post that can go on for almost as long… (“I can hold a note as long as the Chase National Bank,” she was to have said.)
The family story goes that Hicks painted a portrait of and for Ethel Merman back in their heyday, and that, once she received the commission, she thought the legs looked too fat and she had Bill retouch them to be visually more appealing. Finding this painting has been a ‘what if’ for me ever since I dove into this project a couple of years ago, as I doubted we’d ever really be able to find it or it’s whereabouts.
Ethel as her Annie character by Rosemarie Sloat
An online search of the words “Ethel Merman” and “painting” just brings up Rosemarie Sloat’s fabulous 1971 portrait of her as the title role in Annie Get Your Gun, now in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
A few months ago, Will reached out and reconnected to the former partner of his late Aunt Lois (William and Mabel Hicks’ youngest daughter). Billie lives in Denver, Colorado - indeed the town where Will’s parents ended up retiring after most of their lives in the New York and Long Island area. Will’s brother and sister and her family also spent some years in Denver. We wanted to get some family stories from Billie, and see if she had any work or ephemera of Bill’s for me to document. She certainly did, and she was ready to pass it on, wondering what was to become of it before Will had reached out. Thus, Will and I decided on a road trip to Denver to fetch this haul and hear some stories, and further confirmation of stories I’d already heard.
Catching up with Billie.
Billie is still a working actor, so it was fun to commune with a fellow creative. As I packaged up a few of Hicks’ etchings safely to travel, she would go find other boxes and things she’d forgotten about. Letters, photos, a death certificate… This was an exciting development - as of yet I had no letters of Bill’s! These were late ones, written toward the end of his life, but better than none at all. I photographed a couple of prints Billie wanted to keep, and packed up the other prints, boxes of letters, and envelopes - just glancing at a few of these things, saving the reading of them for when we were back home and I could spread things out and absorb the information better.
In this collection was an autographed photo from Ethel Merman to Bill, two telegrams from Ethel, and three typed letters from Ethel’s then husband, Robert D. Levitt. Here was proof that the family story was true - down to the January 28, 1942 letter about repainting Ethel’s gams!
(For larger, readable versions of these letters, please see end of blog post.)
“You may imagine with what reluctancy I ask you to compromise your artistic integrity, but my domestic peace is at stake.”
Levitt letter to Hicks, detail, January 28, 1942
After our galavanting to and from Colorado (with resulting adventures too plentiful to discuss here), I processed, archived, scanned, and photographed this newly acquired material, and the big stand-out as far as research direction inspiration was… Ethel, of course.
Will had a phone conversation with his sister, Alice, soon after this roadtrip, and she was reminded that their mother had seen a television interview with Ethel decades ago where she was standing in front of the painting. So to YouTube we went wondering what would come up. Was it something as recent as A&E’s Biography series in the 90’s? Indeed, that came up and Will and I skimmed through that. Then another youtuber-made documentary. I was learning more about Ethel Merman than I ever imagined I would! And then, there it was - an interview of Ethel at home in Denver, Colorado where she lived while married to Robert Levitt, Sr. “Person-To-Person”, from 1955. The first moments of Ethel in the broadcast have her standing next to the portrait on a landing above her living room. The video image is black and white, degraded and low-res, but this is the first time some of us have even seen what the painting even vaguely looks like!
That then got me to thinking, as someone who has looked through his share of design and interior magazines - was Ethel ever featured in, say, Architectural Digest? Why, yes, of course she was! In the July/August 1979 issue of AD - Merman’s New York City apartment. Discovered via a google search, I found a tiny image on AD’s archive of a page that included Ethel’s library, and, there, on the wall, I could just make out the painting. I wasn’t about to pay Conde Nast to view this page larger - sorry - so I jumped on eBay and ordered an old copy of this issue. It also turned out that our big local bookstore, Powells, had a well-used copy of AD’s Celebrity Homes II which had this same spread, so I bought that for a pittance. After getting these two publications in-hand, I have a slightly better visual - a step up from the degraded black-and-white tv moment. I can definitely tell it’s Ethel as Panama Hattie, but details are still very vague, as this is less than a half-page shot of a room, with the portrait hanging in the corner, at an angle to the camera. The painting isn’t mentioned in the article, but an amusing line by its author, Roger Cassell, should be noted here: ‘There are portraits, but they are by ‘amateur’ friends such as Benay Venuta, rather than the professionals of the day.’
The painting in the upper corner of Merman’s NYC apartment library. ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST visits Ethel Merman, July/August 1979
Article photography by Jaime Ardiles-Arce, article text by Roger Cassell
Looking up any offspring for Ethel, her son Robert Levitt, Jr. is still around but keeps a low profile. I found a couple of blogs that seemed to have interviewed him over the last decade or so, but getting through to anyone was nearly impossible. I came across a Tony Cointreau (I think I need a Sidecar cocktail, cheers!) and his partner Jim Russo in some of these blogs. A young Tony was close friends with Ethel when she passed in 1984, and he was left with some of her things. In 2014 he published a memoir that was partially about their friendship, “Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa… And Me”. I found a website for him and the book, and I blindly sent out an email query to a link provided therein to his publicist. A few days later I heard back from her: Tony had no idea what happened to the painting in question, but wished me luck.
By this point I’d also discovered that Christie’s East in New York City had held an auction of Merman’s estate in 1984, a few months after she died. (Christie’s East is no longer an entity but for some years it was where more ‘moderately priced’ artwork and estate collections were sold.) Could our painting have been offered in that sale? I went to Christie’s dot com, but, as I suspected, their digitized “past auctions” didn’t go back that far. I’ve had experience at hunting and gathering auction catalogs on eBay and elsewhere, so I figured this particular publication would not be hard to find. Ha! Nothing. That is, until I finally ended up on my old friend the interlibrary loan system known as WorldCat - World Catalog. There, one copy was found… in the collection of the art library of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. My local librarians in the interlibrary loan office have been great on this larger Hicks project of mine. Microfilm of WWI newspapers from a Wisconsin library brought to Portland for me to view; a needed page scan from the Frick Collection library in NYC have been just a couple of the situations we’ve been through together. But in this case, since it was out of the country, I was provided with a direct email to the V&A library. I thus emailed my query.
I kept searching the Googles as usual, my eyes glazing over. Then I put in - with quotes - “Ethel Merman as Panama Hattie”. I had quoted “Ethel Merman” and “Panama Hattie” together before, but not joined as one phrase. Only three things came up, two of them throw-away. The gold-nugget was a PDF of an unillustrated catalog of a silent auction held as part of Broadway Cares Flea & Auction 2018 fundraising event in NYC. And there it was - page 6, item S-130, 45”x55”, Portrait of Ethel Merman as Panama Hattie, painted by artist William Hicks. Starting bid $50. If Will had been home, he would have heard my audible oh my god!
I immediately looked through whatever pictures of the event I could find online. There were a handful, but no luck in seeing any of the silent auction goodies, no Panama Hattie paintings in the background.
I emailed the info@ contact for Broadway Cares, asking if the information of this sale could be looked-up, and if there was any way to contact the winning bidder to let them know their recent purchase was of research interest. Buyers and sellers at auctions tend to be a hush-hush, slightly guarded topic, so understandably some sensitivity and decorum are important. I also texted my friend Frank who works for one of the big Broadway poster companies in New York. Maybe he knew someone over at BC to help make sure my email got seen. He was eager to help, but Broadway Cares was on top of things!
The next morning, to my delight, I awoke to a wonderfully thoughtful email from Tom Viola, the executive director at Broadway Cares. (Shout-out to Michelle at BC for forwarding my query to Tom - I see you!) He did indeed have the buyers name and info and had already contacted him and gotten the ‘okay’ to bring us together. He did not have any information as to who donated the portrait, but he did have a couple of theories. It may have been from Bob Schear, a stage manager and close friend of Ethel’s. Or possibly from the late Brian Kellow, a friend who wrote the 2007 Ethel Merman - A Life bio. Tom remembers Brian telling him people just gave or sent him all kinds of Merman memorabilia they wanted to get rid of.
Meanwhile, during these exuberant exchanges, Amy at the V&A art library got back to me rather quickly. The painting in question was not to be found in the 1984 Christie’s Merman estate auction catalog. This wasn’t bad news, necessarily. It still gives clues to the provenance possibilities of the painting’s journey.
Ethel Merman as Panama Hattie, painted by Bill in 1941 with some finishing touches in 1942, now happily resides in a home outside of Philadelphia. Michael and his husband won the 2018 silent auction, with no other bidders, at $50. As Broadway-Tom told me in one of his emails, “I hope somewhere in the ‘great beyond,’ Mr. Hicks is more pleased to be remembered than irritated or disappointed in the winning bid.” I have a feeling it would be the former.
William Hicks, Ethel Merman as Panama Hattie, oil on canvas, 1941-2. Photo courtesy of Michael Fortna
Michael had been trying to find out about their purchase over the years, without much luck. Still in its original frame, he tells me the outer portion was on its last leg and had to be removed. This turned out to be fortuitous as an old art show label was revealed. Bill had at some point borrowed the work back from Merman to put in an exhibition. Michael has this label framed with the original Playbill of Panama Hattie - indeed I had come across this Playbill on the internet already and realized Bill must have used it as an image source for the painting composition.
Photo courtesy of Michael Fortna
A closer look at the painting, of which the owner has sent me a good snapshot, seems to reveal where Hicks retouched her legs to appear a bit slimmer. Also, there’s a dent in the canvas in one spot, and some marks (paint?) that could be cleaned off. It’s had a life since 1941! Michael says they looked into having it cleaned and repaired, but with an estimate of $3000, they are holding off for now, understandably.
The plan is to get a good photograph of this painting to use in my forthcoming Hicks book I’m working on. A quick trip to NYC and a day trip down to Philly may be in the cards for me later this year, my best camera in hand.
Further thoughts arise to be researched - how did Bill and Ethel know each other? What show was the painting submitted in? As to the former question, I get a sense after all of my general digging that Bill was rather the social butterfly. He probably knew her through the New York art and social scene at the time, as she loved New York and all the culture it provided. Or maybe he knew Robert Levitt, Sr., and that’s how they became acquainted. Also, Ethel was involved with working with military organizations to help boost troop morale, etc, and Hicks having fought in WWI was involved with the American Veterans Society of Artists at the time. As to the latter research path about the exhibition of the loaned-back artwork - the address on the painting label may offer some clues - 8 Barrow Street. That location has not come up before in my findings. A google search shows that the block was demolished in the 50’s, a condo building now in its place.
Along with some other experiences in this broader research project - my trip to the MET, for example, discussed in my last blog entry - one of my big take-aways is how receptive and helpful people have been. From the “Ivory Tower” of, again, the MET to some of you responding to a strange email from a one Jason Kinney - everyone has been so ready to help if they can. I continue to be grateful and appreciative of all of this! I’m looking forward to more adventures with Hicks - but I have to say, finding a needle in a haystack involving Ethel Merman has been pretty darn fun!
I think she’s still holding that note…
