Customer Reviews

Ethel Merman: A Life

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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.

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

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.

This is a masterful bio of Ethel Merman. Worthy of 5 stars! After you have finished reading it you will feel like you know "The Merm" as never before. Author Brian Kellow has created what is the definitive work on Ethel Merman. Kellow recreates the world of Broadway in which Merman thrived and by so doing allows the reader to understand just how such a wonderful performer came to exist. Merman is very much a product of her era and vice versa and Kellow clearly tells us why.
The later years of Merman's life are particularly well handled by Kellow and the reader will finish the book quite moved.

Reading this bio has greatly increased my enjoyment of the many Ethel Merman recordings, as we now know the woman behind the music. And Kellow has interviewed scores of people who worked with Merman and we get a glimpse of what it is like to be in a hit Broadway show with such a great star.

Unlike other books on Merman's life, this one is highly accurate, well researched, has great photos and above all is an INTERESTING READ!
I highly recommend this book. You will not be disappointed!

There are several books about Ethel Merman -- two autobiographies (I love her but there's a lot of revision in Ethel's version of her life and times) and three biographies including Brian Kellow's Ethel Merman: A Life. Mr. Kellow's book is the best of the three non-autobiographical books on the market. In the two previous biographies, the late Ms. Merman is portrayed as a drunk and a monster who undercut any performer she saw as a threat. Brian Kellow's portrait of Ethel Merman is thorough and realistic -- warts and all -- about this icon of the 20th century musical theatre. It is the first book to look at Ethel Merman in the context of being a woman in a male dominated business during the first three-quarters of the 20th century. As anyone who reads Opera News knows, Brian Kellow is an excellent writer. Ethel Merman: A Life provides him the opportunity to write tellingly about the non-opera diva who dominated American Musical Theatre for a half-century.It is an excellent book and "must read" for anyone interested in the life and times of the great EM!

As an oldtimer(77) I was always in awe of Merman's extraordinary powerful voice. I did meet the lady once, and became a bigger fan. This book is a wonderful record of her life. It has great detail, is kindly to her - we read how demanding she could be, but rightly so. I loved every page of the book, and also it has some interesting facts about the shows she starred in. I can highly reccomend this book to anyone who was a fan of Ethel. Unfortunately you have to be a "Senior" to appreciate her story. I loved it. !!

I was just faintly familiar with Merman,knowing that she had some great success in the musical theatre ages ago but didn't know much about her.

Author Brian Kellow did some great research and explained circumstances in which Merman grew up,why she became who she became and how important it is to understand she was product of particular time & place,for example that she continued the line of classic musical theatre performers who burned on the stage but could not cross over to the movies (where big gestures did not work) and the flame of their professional genius burned people close to them in private lives. Kellow is intelligent enough not to shy away from Merman's less desirable character qualities but also tries to explain and portrait her as a human being. It would have been too easy to simply describe Merman as a theatre goddess and leave it at that,but Kellow shows hard-working woman faithful to her inner circle and suspicious towards the rest of the world,full of humor and passion for theatre. Curiously enough,she knew instinctively what works best on the stage but made fatal judgements towards husbands and often with disastrous results. Never a big thinker or too intellectual (Stephen Sondheim describes her working technique as a "talking dog" who simply learned her lines and belted them out) she apparently was a child deep inside and singer Margaret Whiting said "One look at that Christmas Three she kept on the hall table, and I knew exactly who she was". The book inspired me to listen some original cast albums with Merman (she played many important roles in what now are known as Broadway classics) and to check out her turn in "The Muppet Show" where she was elderly but still adorable,she truly was happy as a child surrounded with Muppets.

The author is not afraid to quote previous biographies and autobiographies of Ethel, but the amount of research he has done personally is quite amazing. There are quotes from reviews of virtually every show or performance as well as numerous quotes from friends and fellow actors, directors, choreographers, stage managers, and chorus girls and guys. A very enjoyable read, I highly recommend it.

As someone with only a superficial knowledge of Ethel Merman and her place in the American musical theater, this book was a revelation. It's not only a fascinating and lively portrait of this one-of-a-kind show biz icon, the book also provides some terrific insight into how the Broadway musical evolved with the ever changing currents of American culture.

Kellow wisely avoids the biographer's temptation to write an "authoritative" version of his subject's life. He avoids the pitfalls of the academic tome and instead offers the reader a vivid portrait of Merman's professional triumphs and personal failures. Kellow sketches the arc of Merman's life through vivid anecdotes, the memories of those who knew her, and, most importantly, through Merman's own words. For me, the latter was the most enlightening and entertaining. Bossy, brassy, sharp-tongued and often vulgar, Merman was at heart a kid from Queens who, Kellow reminds us, despite her success and the circles she ran in, would never be accused of pretentious affectation.

And to me, that's the real joy of this book. Kellow lets us see Merman warts and all. This is certainly no hagiography, but Kellow clearly has affection and respect for this legend of the musical theatre. His prose is vibrant and evocative as he deftly shows the reader how Merman owned the stage like no one before or since. And Kellow doesn't sentimentalize Merman's ill fortune offstage. In the end, Merman was incapable of being anything but the persona she had created, and in the end, that was all she was left with. Kellow understands that this is the heart of the Merman story-- the monumental achievements onstage and the disappointments, betrayals and tragedies of her life offstage.

Finally, I have to say that there were many hilarious moments in this book. Kellow deftly lets these moments play without embellishment. Often it's Merman in her own words who provides the laughs. But any book about Merman would have to include the incredible number of show biz legends she either knew or worked with. Many of these moments are terrific but one bit in particular concerning a moment onstage between a young Betty Grable and the incomparable Bert Lahr nearly caused me to crack a rib with laughter.

This book is a real page turner and not just for people with an interest in Merman or the American musical theater. You don't need to be a Merman fan or a Broadway fan to thoroughly enjoy this compelling portrait of a time when American power and American culture were ascendant and Ethel Merman was the confident voice of a nation hitting its stride.

I've read three of Mr. Kellows biographies, so I feel I can speak from an informed perspective. His writing is intelligent, introspective and thoroughly researched. He writes, not to the lowest common demominator in the reading public, but rather to bright, educated people who want something more than mind candy or brain fluff.
I've always bought a biography because of the subject, not the author. Well, I can say whole-heartedly that I shall be looking for the next book, regardlesss of subject, by this talented writer.