The loudest, toughest, biggest star on Broadway. (2024)

Those are the words of a fan, and sentiments with which I heartily agree; I'm a fan, too. But those who didn't like her, didn't like her a lot. "Many in the West, the Midwest, and the South -- people who had never experienced her live, thanks to her dislike of touring -- regarded her from her records and TV appearances as crass, vulgar, and loud -- the vocal equivalent of a rusty saw," Kellow writes. Merman herself knew that she was fully capable of raising the rafters. In 1970, when she was about to succeed Phyllis Diller in the title role of "Hello, Dolly!" she was asked by Diller "if she was going to wear a chest mike -- now a fixture on Broadway." Merman replied, "No, we just want to keep it in the theater."

People who are unfamiliar with pre-1970 Broadway probably know little if anything about Merman, and the loss is theirs. She was the star of five of the biggest musicals in history: "Girl Crazy," "Anything Goes," "Annie Get Your Gun," "Call Me Madam" and "Gypsy." The list of songs that were hers and hers alone is almost endless, so only a few hits must suffice: "I Got Rhythm," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're the Top," "Anything Goes," "Blow, Gabriel, Blow," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "Doin' What Comes Naturally," "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)," "You're Just in Love," "Some People," "You'll Never Get Away from Me" and -- tada! -- "Everything's Coming Up Roses."

She was best at comedy. From the beginning "she had crack comic timing, and . . . she instinctively knew the most important rule of comedy: when you try to make it funny, you usually fall flat; just play it straight, and if the scene is any good at all, it will be funny." She had no formal training in acting -- or singing, either. Indeed, the only training she had was as a stenographer, and she was crack at that, too. She grew up in Astoria on Long Island, the only child of Edward and Agnes Zimmermann, discovered fairly early that she had a natural talent for singing, and worked in various nightclubs until George Gershwin discovered her and put her in "Girl Crazy." Though they never worked together again, he remained her ardent supporter until his sudden, shocking death in 1937, and to the end of her life she spoke worshipfully about him.

Small wonder Gershwin loved her. Caryl Flinn describes her Broadway debut, introducing Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" to a world that has embraced it ever since: "With the song's high ratio of notes to lyrics . . . a singer without Merman's crisp diction or unable to handle fast pacing would sink like a stone. Ethel sailed. With galelike power, she gave it her all, holding on to that I-I-I-I for over sixteen (some say up to thirty-two) measures. . . . First-act closers are traditionally show-stoppers, but that night 'I Got Rhythm' was less a stopper than an explosion. Shell-shocked producer [Alex] Aarons practically collapsed -- he thought a gunshot had gone off -- and then saw that the shot was the roar of the crowd."

She wasn't especially pretty, and both Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, who worked with her on "Gypsy," thought she was dumb. Yet she had what Kellow calls "native shrewdness." Dorothy Fields, the exceptionally gifted lyricist who worked with her on a short-lived show called "Stars in Your Eyes," was powerfully impressed by her. Kellow reports that Fields acknowledged that "Ethel was no towering intellect," but "her first line readings were almost perfect," she "never overplayed her hand in the comedy scenes, making every connection absolutely right," and she "had the greatest discipline of any woman she ever met."

That seems to have been the key: Merman's professionalism wowed everybody. She had it from the beginning, and she never lost it, though as she grew older and began drinking heavily, she grew exceedingly temperamental. In "Girl Crazy," Kellow says, "She showed up punctually at the theater eight times a week, stepped out onstage, knocked the audience dead, then went back home to her parents in Astoria. This was the beginning of a pattern that was to mark her entire career. Much as she loved singing, she approached it simply and matter-of-factly as a job." She was a pro, and she expected everyone else to be the same. Once she reamed out the chorus girls in "Du Barry Was a Lady" for a silly onstage prank. "I don't know what the hell you're doing," she told them. "This is a job like any other job you go to. It's like being a plumber or carpenter or anything else. You come to this theater and you come to work. And you don't pull this kind of [expletive]." Another Merman story, via Kellow, from "Call Me Madam":

"A few days before the opening Ethel uttered a remark that quickly became part of Broadway legend. [Howard] Lindsay and [Russell] Crouse, realizing that the book did not show them at their best, were continuing to refine and polish their lines. They stopped only when Ethel said, 'Boys, as of right now I am Miss Birdseye of 1950. I am frozen. Not a comma!' Always willing to do whatever it took during the rehearsal and out-of-town tryout periods, she knew that sooner or later the show had to be fixed -- otherwise how could she be expected to do her best work? Forever after, when a show was in its final stages of previews, 'Miss Birdseye' became Broadway code for no more tinkering allowed."

She was a pro and a star, but "she was, in certain crucial ways, a case of arrested development: the adored only child whose profound emotional connection to her parents had created in her a kind of childlike view of the world around her," according to Kellow, while Flinn says that "even if she enjoyed having one foot in the high-flying world of celebrity, she kept the other firmly in the lower-middle-class mentality she'd known since birth." Kellow says that she had trouble "developing a genuine, deep adult emotional life." She was able to "forge through" various crises in her personal life "by marching ahead and absorbing herself in work," but "she had little ability to process the transitions in her life on any deeper level. Her reactions were too strong, too instantaneous, too briefly considered, and, in most cases, too irreversible to bring her any genuine level of inner peace and understanding."

The wholly unsurprising consequence was that her romantic life was chaotic and unhappy. A close friend of hers told Flinn that "Ethel was a sitting duck for men." Tough herself -- she eventually acquired a reputation "as the toughest, most ruthless star on Broadway" -- she was drawn to men whom she saw as tough and manly. Her first husband, Bill Smith, Kellow writes, "was tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair and a tough demeanor." The marriage lasted two months. Her second, to Robert Levitt, produced two children whom she adored, but ended after nearly 11 years. Her third, to Bob Six, the president of Continental Airlines, was a seven-year disaster; Kellow is harsh in his portrait of Six, whose "greed and ambition" seem to have been his salient characteristics. Her final marriage, to actor Ernest Borgnine, lasted 38 days, leaving her "deeply embarrassed and hurt."

When she left "Hello, Dolly!" in December 1970, Merman's Broadway career was over, and so was the Broadway in which she had thrived: "The wised-up, straight-shooting, and sentimental musical heroine she represented was a type that had passed out of fashion . . . , supplanted by the creations of Sondheim and his musical age of anxiety, and by the bland, cardboard figures of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who exist only as pawns in a mammoth visual spectacle." For the last decade and a half of her life -- she died in 1984 at the age of 76 -- she got plenty of work on television and in concert halls, and even made a campy, self-satirizing cameo appearance in the movie "Airplane," but "what has come to be known as Broadway's golden age" was over, and the "outsize personalities" who dominated it were no longer.

It's tempting to see her story as ultimately a sad one, but these biographers don't play it that way, and they're right. Kellow's prose doesn't exactly sing (neither does Flinn's), but he has talked to a great many people, and he has painted a vivid portrait of a Broadway diva who shone brighter and sang louder than anyone else; his book is more readable and less exhaustive than Flinn's, whose thorough research is her principal achievement. Both writers no doubt would agree that Merman had some hard times off-stage and suffered a couple of losses from which she never fully recovered, but when she was at center stage -- and she never let herself be placed anywhere else -- she was strictly Top Banana. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.

ETHEL MERMAN

A Life By Brian Kellow

Viking. 326 pp. $25.95

BRASS DIVA

The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman By Caryl Flinn

Univ. of California. 542 pp. $34.95