Delicious, Delectable, De-lovely

The Persian Room, part of Manhattan Hotel Plaza, is a kind of Metropolitan Musem for living canvases, where genteel singers, chiefly female. keep the blue-rinse and cufflinks crowd smoothly entertained through dinner, under a ceiling so high that the usual stratum of nightclub-blue smoke rises healthily out of sight. Right now, though the tinkly quiet has vanished, extra chairs have been packed in, and jam ming crowds nightly try to fight their way past the velvet rope-- for the smoke is on the performing floor. Ethel Mer man is there.

No Crooner. At 54, she looks her age, with sunburst wrinkles around her boot-button eyes. But she wears her years with indifference. And age has very little to do with her appeal. She was 21 when she started and brought the house down with I Got Rhythm. But she was never a sex object. She was mostly the hearty hostess, amused by the raucous comedy of life and essentially detached. Her manner suggested that sex wasn't everything, that exuberance could give vitality to even the middle-aged and the homely. She palpably could never see herself as a romantic, and the arranged embrace at play's end with the second-rank character always seemed a little stiff, as if her corsets were binding her.

She stays in character amidst the powdered elegance of the Persian Room. "I've been in nightclubs before," she rasps at the customers, "but I've always been on the other side of the highballs. No holds barred. Anything I miss hasn't been invented yet." But then the great klaxon voice takes over. It sounds 26, or whatever the most magic laryngeal age is, and she hardly needs the frightened little mike she conceals in her brassiere. Those big metallic syllables, perfectly enunciated, come forth like bullets and mow down the crowd. "I must admit," she says, "I don't exactly croon a tune."

On ankles like a college freshman's, she bounces around as she sings, and cuts little dance steps that underpin the structure of her song. And no matter what lines she delivers--"It's delightful, it's delicious, it's delectable, it's delirious, it's dilemma, it's delimit, it's deluxe, it's de-lovely"--she adds no fillips. She enjoys herself too. When a song finishes and she steps for a moment out of the conical spotlight glare, her face puckers like a little girl's in the near darkness and she smiles.

Plans & Sentiments. Thrice divorced --most recently from Bob Six, president of Continental Airlines--Ethel Merman has two grown children, a son who is a student of drama at Carnegie Tech and a daughter who is married to an insurance man in Colorado Springs. She lives in Manhattan's Park Lane Hotel. As a sort of braided-grass widow, she is free to move and move she does. This winter she will be the headliner at London's huge, expensive Talk of the Town, a nightclub that is sort of a big, bustless Latin Quarter. She is lining up concert dates in Japan and Australia. Meanwhile she is all over TV, a frequent guest of people like Bob Hope and Perry Como. Her newest film is It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (see CINEMA). She says she is through with Broadway, which ties her down too much, and her fans will have to take her in solo, concentrated form from now on, in these retrospective nightclub shows.

Her somewhat sentimental sign-off is There's No Business Like Show Business, meaning to indicate that she's damned glad that a girl named Ethel Zimmerman of the Astoria section of Queens once dropped the Zim, quit her job as a secretary to the president of the B. K. Vacuum Booster-Brake Co., and went into show biz. Standing ovations indicate that other people are too.

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