On an evening in the mid-1970s, the actor Carroll O’Connor and his wife took Ethel Merman to hear Bobby Short at Café Carlyle. Merman, who could be strident in her disapproval of other singers, gargled champagne during the set. It was a gesture of hostility too much even for Archie Bunker, and although she and the O’Connors were to remain friends, Merman never had the guest shot on All in the Family that she pined for.
Merman would have been 100 years old on January 16, 2008. To mark the centenary of this Broadway singer and actress, to celebrate her long career that bridged Gershwin, Porter, Berlin and Sondheim, a pair of competing biographies arrive to pull back the curtain, to show us “La Merm” as she was, as separate from the show biz mythology that cloaks our memory of her.
From the East, comes Opera News columnist Brian Kellow’s Ethel Merman: A Life; from the West, Caryl Flinn, a professor of women’s studies at the University of Arizona, rides in on Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman. In casting a scholarly eye on Merman’s stage successes and celluloid frustrations, Flinn not infrequently yields to the uncritical chutzpah of a fangirl (the professor boasts of owning Merman’s 1979 disco album, which she delights in spinning for “unsuspecting” dinner guests). Like any good gender theorist, Flinn emphasizes the “queering” of the former stenographer from Astoria, Queens. She maps Merman’s route from an efficient secretary (who caught naps on the job in order to recoup from moonlighting in nightclubs), to the overnight sensation who held the C above middle C for sixteen bars in “I Got Rhythm” at the 1930 premiere of Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, and eventually to a late-in-life figure regarded, affectionately or not, as camp. To this end, Flinn revels in sprightly, indefatigably chipper prose, a kind of pop academia free association:
In her thirteen musicals, she never played a typical romantic lead. Yes, she often got her man…but usually the affair was too forced to make sense, a point made even through casting…Hollywood had plenty of trouble with Merman’s image, deeming it too brash for the film industry’s more genteel notions of…womanly glamour. Indeed, Merman’s femininity was always bedeviled: a castrato for Toscanini; the fantasy lesbian in the Jacqueline Susann rumor; [playing] the male Lieutenant Hurwitz in Airplane! Her gender never seemed to coincide fully with American norms, but at the same time, it didn’t escape them either…
Flinn’s book culminates in a discussion of drag queens as well as online personae who draw inspiration from “iconic Ethels,” as opposed to the real one. Kellow, his operatic background notwithstanding, eschews the outré. He takes a more conventional approach, and while it would nice to say that one method of biography captures the essence of the singer better than the other, the contradictory Ethel ultimately eludes both authors.
Well before Kellow and Flinn set out to reconstruct her life and times, Merman signed off on two ghostwritten autobiographies. “As told to Pete Martin,” Who Could Ask for Anything More (Doubleday, 1955) pictures the star on the dust jacket cover in Annie Oakley regalia, cresting her triumph in Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun nearly a decade after the hit show opened. Twenty-three years later, a span of time that encompassed her still greater heights in Gypsy, her 1970 comeback/Broadway swansong Hello, Dolly!, an unfortunate marriage to Ernest Borgnine, and the accidental death of her daughter Ethel Geary, Merman returned to the tape recorder “with George Eells,” for Merman—an autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1978).
Although both are penned in the first person, the tones diverge wildly. Martin, a Saturday Evening Post writer who ghosted books for Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, deemed Merman insufficiently revelatory and distorted her voice to a careening pitch. In Martin’s hands, Merman became an endlessly tough-talking “broad,” deriding performers who “use the melody to vocalize instead of just plain singing…Why can’t such people just open their mouths, lay it on the line…That’s where those expensive lessons come in…” That Merman quite famously never had a voice teacher adds an especially condescending touch to the manufactured outrage.
Merman had a sympathetic collaborator in Eells. In his transcriptions, she’s softer, wittier, more measured. Her devotion to her long-lived parents Edward and Agnes Zimmermann emerges, and there’s a warm sense of the comfort she drew from religion, a quality that Flinn ignores almost entirely, after her daughter’s overdose in August 1967. As authentic as the Merman voice sounds in Eells’s pages, there’s much for a biographer to leave out. We learn, for example, that Don Ameche, her co-star from the 1938 film Alexander’s Ragtime Band, had “beautiful teeth,” whereas Tyrone Power’s “weren’t bad, but they weren’t as perfectly formed as Don Ameche’s either.” And yet there can be something endearing about her penchant for irrelevancy and what it obliquely reveals. Of the January 1958 suicide of her second husband Robert Levitt, Merman doesn’t linger on his depression; she instead praises his “marvelous taste” in jewelry and cuff links. A purported openness in discussing her 38-day union with Borgnine (husband number four) somehow drifts to a decision to switch from white mugs to brown when drinking tea.
In the latter half of the 1978 memoir, Merman twice mentions she “always hankered” to play Lady Macbeth. Neither Kellow nor Flinn brings this up. Nor do they mention her encounter with Helene Weigel who, after seeing Merman as Mamma Rose in Gypsy, approached her about playing the title role in Mother Courage. Both biographers are aware that Merman longed to extend her range in dramatic, non-singing roles. Rather than Shakespeare or Brecht, however, she had to settle for Batman and The Love Boat.
Kellow repeats much from the second autobiography, particularly stories concerning Merman’s earliest years; his fastidiously dry retellings of these chestnuts lack the color of the singer’s voice. Even in Eells’s reportage, the personalities who surrounded Merman never came to life. Here, their ghosts are paler still. Kellow speculates on her mother Agnes as a formidable authority figure, yet doesn’t draw this out. In his quest to be a “serious” biographer, he goes too far in the opposite direction from Martin, draining the narrative of jazzy theatrics—the buoyant qualities the book needs. Kellow stodgily contradicts Elaine Stritch’s superbly funny At Liberty reminiscence of Merman leaving the stage in mid-note, during a performance of Call Me Madam, to toss a drunken heckler out of the theatre and into the street. Flinn, sensibly, comes to the legend’s rescue: “The truth is almost immaterial, for by now, after the war, the tale was fully compatible with the toughening Merman image.”