Customer Reviews

Divas

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Robert Merrill the operatic baritone nominally wrote three books, of which only the first, his autobiography Once More from the Beginning, 1965, is worth reading. This one is the last of the three Merrill books, each one with a different ghostwriter. When I saw this book listed online for a couple of bucks, knowing nothing about it, I assumed it must be some sort of memoir of the various divas Merrill had sung with during his long career, and I ordered it. I was wrong: it's a novel! The chances that RM the high-school dropout could craft a readable 400-page novel are probably about the same as for Donald Duck. I doubt that he had anything more to do with it than putting his name on the cover in hopes that would boost sales of a trashy, gossipy novel in which three operatic sopranos scheme, manipulate, and finagle for a single cushy position as commentator/host for a series of operatic telecasts. The tone of the novel is perhaps established by the fact that it opens with a torrid sex scene on page one. It is competently written but is basically a trashy potboiler.

I read this book in 1980, shortly after it was published. All I can remember is that I, a fan, was embarrassed for Robert Merrill.