Ethel Merman: A Life

How sad to exist in a world where no one younger than you knows about the Best of Broadway, Ethel Merman, a/k/a The Belter. An Astoria, Queens native (and frequently mistaken for being Jewish because of it, making her much less popular outside the New York metropolitan area), Merman starred in such musicals as Annie Get Your Gun (twice, twenty years apart), Anything Goes, Call Me Madam, and her most famous role as Mama Rose in Gypsy. She worked with the finest songwriters - Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Vincent Youmans, and even Sondheim (they did NOT get along) - and her strong and distinctive voice, untrained, unenhanced by amplification (she WAS the amplifier!), made her the Queen of Broadway, when melodies and boy-gets-girl plots show more ruled muscial theater, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The changes in theater and in the country left her as an anachronism before she was ready to leave the stage and the spotlight. The author does an excellent job of balancing her trumphs with her romantic miseries (a pitiful 30 day union with Ernest Borgnine that was ended by his violence towards her, among four total marriages) and, as an only child, her touching closeness to and dependence on her parents. Not an intellectual by any means, Merman's strength was her ability to conquer a song quickly and to know exactly what was right for her voice, her limited acting talent, and which musical numbers would make a show a guaranteed hit. The author's success is in his acknowlegment of her commanding strengths and her debilitating stubborness. This should be a textbook read for any fan of musical theater history and denizens of used bookstores. show less