Ethel Merman: A Life (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "From the beginning of her career, Ethel Merman showed impeccable timing: she came along just when Broadway was ready to embrace her..." (more)
Key Phrases: six acres, New York, Call Me Madam, Ethel Merman (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With dueling Merman biographies being released just prior to her birth centennial in 2008 (see review above of Caryl Flinn's Brass Diva), Kellow's slimmer tome is the livelier of the two with new interviews with friends, family and co-workers bringing vibrant life and clarity to even familiar anecdotes. Kellow (The Bennetts: An Acting Family) is less interested in digging for psychological insights and bluntly paints a more temperamental portrait of the Broadway belter, but readers will be swept up in the colorful eyewitness accounts of her stage triumphs (Anything Goes; Call Me Madam; Annie Get Your Gun; Gypsy; Hello, Dolly!) and her less successful attempts to move from stage to screen (There's No Business Like Show Business; It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). With four failed marriages (including a legendarily short one to Ernest Borgnine—she flew back alone from their honeymoon after just two days), a distant relationships with her son and daughter (who died of an accidental overdose in 1967) and volatile personality, there's plenty of diva drama. She found a younger audience with appearances on Love Boat and a show-stopping cameo in Airplane!, but an inoperable brain tumor finally silenced the bombastic singer in 1984. Testimonies from those who were there during her decline bring an emotional wallop to her final days. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov. 5)
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Review

“A clear-eyed, perceptive take on the reign of Queen Ethel of Broadway.

An editor at Opera News and an entertainment reporter and biographer, Kellow nimbly sidesteps the booby traps other writers have hit while writing about Ethel Merman. Though he gives her temperament its due, he admirably avoids overloading his account with tales of a sometime-outrageous diva. He places Merman's ascendancy and success in the context of 20th-century New York City. Gershwin, Porter, Berlin and others provided the scores, and their confluence created such classics as Girl Crazy, Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun and Gypsy. Content at center stage on Broadway, Merman was less happy out of town. Hollywood, in particular, was not her place, as evidenced by the middling films she lensed at Warner Bros. and Paramount. She did score, at least with city audiences, with the film version of Call Me Madam, but losing the main role in the film adaptation of her Broadway triumph Gypsy to Rosalind Russell was a major career disappointment. For Merman, happiness clearly began when the curtain went up. A headstrong, outspoken only child, Merman, notes Kellow, saw only in black and white, a worldview that gave her considerable force onstage but sabotaged four marriages. Her melancholy demise found her down in the depths of the Upper East Side, alone with the ashes of her parents, one ex-husband and Ethel Jr., a daughter whose death may have been an "accidental suicide."

Kellow displays a keen sense of how and why Merman worked, and his profile of her personal life is an aching refrain worthy of the musical Follies.”
—Kirkus Reviews

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670018295
• ISBN-13: 978-0670018291
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #763,007 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dueling bios, November 26, 2007

By	Bill (Seattle, Washington United States) - See all my reviews

Finally, a worthy biography of Ethel Merman, one of the 20th century's greatest performers, has been published -- two, in fact, in honor of the 2008 centenary of her birth. They supersede all previous attempts. The question now is, which to buy? I've just read both. Here's my take.

If you had the books in front of you, the first thing you'd notice would be the difference in length. "Ethel Merman" by Brian Kellow is 326 pages, including the (rather incomplete) index. "Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman" by Caryl Flinn is a much-weightier 542 pages, including a more-detailed index. That's indicative of their very different approaches. Kellow adeptly hits the highlights of Merman's personal and professional lives, and places them in historical context. Flinn, a university professor, goes for the comprehensive and scholarly approach. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Here's an example. Flinn spends five paragraphs sorting through all the stated dates for Merman's birth, before settling on the correct one: 1908. Kellow simply notes the right date. And that points to Flinn's main shortcoming: Having obviously done a tremendous amount of research for the book, she's loath to exclude anything.

I got the sense while reading Kellow's that he wants to convey the woman behind the image (he succeeds). As a professor of women's studies, Flinn seems to care more about how Merman was perceived, specifically as a woman in a certain time period. If Kellow and Flinn had decided to collaborate on a single book, we might have had the ideal Merman biography.

As it is, Flinn at times tends to overreach in an attempt to deconstruct, as in this doozy after a Merman quote: "Again, this seems less the real Ethel Merman talking than the voice associated with 'Ethel Merman,' the public production, whose iconoclastic toughness was being extended to her body itself, almost a Deep Throat avant la lettre." Ironically, Flinn's book is an intellectualized approach to an admitted non-intellectual. If Merman would have lived to read this, I imagine she would have said something like, "What the hell is she talkin' about, anyway?"

Where Flinn's approach works better than Kellow's is in giving details of Merman's professional productions. For example, she meticulously covers each of Merman's movie shorts, including plot synopses -- that's valuable and interesting information, particularly since the shorts aren't all readily available for viewing (something one can only hope an independent DVD company will eventually rectify). Kellow hardly touches on them at all. On the other hand, as features editor for Opera News, Kellow has a better grasp of the evolution of Merman's vocal style.

Interestingly, despite Flinn's greater focus on the details, Kellow is also the one to set the record straight on certain stories. For example, he convincingly puts forth what he's found to be the real reasons why the "Anything Goes" book by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton was rewritten by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. In this case, Flinn seems to accept the version put forward publicly at the time. In other cases, she tends to list all opinions as to what occurred in a certain situation, rather than try to figure out what actually happened. Again, my sense is this is because, to Flinn, perception and reality carry equal weight.

As you might expect, Kellow and Flinn share many of the same sources. Flinn had at least one advantage: access to Merman's scrapbooks (compiled with her father). They are referenced constantly, but they really add little of note.

In the appendix of his book, Kellow lists Broadway appearances, film appearances, and television appearances. This is where one would like to see more detail. Surprisingly, Flinn's appendix is hardly more extensive. Under stage work, she adds the musical numbers by act, and then she has a filmography.

In the end, Kellow's book is the one to get. But if you're a fervent Merman fan, then you'll also want to get Flinn's for the extra details (albeit too many) and cultural perspective.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There's No Buziness like Merman's Business, January 24, 2008

By	Mark Carroll "music lover" (Dallas, Tx) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been in Show Business all of my life. Still am doing it at 72 years and Merman is one of the very best Show Business Bio's I have ever read. I knew a lot about her Life and Career but this Book tells it all. Great Read.
Mark Carroll

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just in time for the Merman Centannary, January 5, 2008

By	Mark Andrew Lawrence "Theatre Reviewer" (Toronto) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

January 16th, 2008 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ethel Merman. (In her autobiography she claims it was 1912.so to be fair we can celebrate again in 2012.) Brian Kellow offers a well-researched and fairly definitive overview of both her career and personal life.

If you read Ethel's two autobiographies (1955 and 1978) as well as Bob Thomas's I Got Rhythm and Geoffrey Mark's sloppily researched The Biggest Star on Broadway, and combined the best of all of these the result would be what Brian Kellow has accomplished: a thoughtful portrait of a lady who became the top star on Broadway from 1930 to 1970.

At this point there is not a great deal of new information, but Kellow goes to greet lengths to dispel the myth that Merman at the height of her career was little more than a loud, vulgar diva who drank a lot. She was tough in a business that at the time demanded women be tough or else they'd be taken advantage of. Her level of professionalism, however, was enviable. In a 40-year career she missed only a handful of performances due to illness and always gave the same performance closing night as she did opening night.

Kellow's book would have been enhanced had he included a detailed discography, and he repeats the same basic listing of shows (with only the songs Merman sang) and films that appeared in her 1978 book Merman.

All in all it's an enjoyable read and an accurate portrayal of this legendary lady.