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Ethel Merman

Getting a kick

Geoffrey Mark
Barricade Legend, 312pp, £20,

Nicholas Haslam

Tuesday, 5th February 2008

Nicky Haslam on Geoffrey Mark's biography of Ethel Merman

By now Merman was not only a huge star, but a major celebrity, at home in a Duchess of Windsor world; she called their mutual friend J. Edgar Hoover, the transvestite head of the FBI, ‘John’. She had a long affair with the Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley, and romances with East Coast establishment gentlemen such as Walter Annenberg and Charlie Cushing.

If she was lucky with flings, she was less fortunate in her four husbands. Her daughter by the first committed suicide. The third she made convert to Christianity, due to her paranoia about being thought Jewish; when asked by show-biz friends to shekheyonu parties, she would wail ‘But wadd’le I eat?’ Her last marriage, to the pug-ugly character actor Ernest Borgnine, lasted less than month. During it, Ethel went for a try-out for a new show. ‘How did it go?’ Borgnine asked. ‘Well,’ Ethel laughed, ‘they were mad about my 35-year-old body, my 35-year-old voice, and my 35-year-old face.’ ‘Is that so?’ said Borgnine. ‘And what did they think of your 65-year-old c**t?’ Ethel glared at him. ‘You weren’t mentioned once.’

Merman died almost in harness, having made an album of the songs she wished had been written for her, and releasing a disco version of her many hits, perhaps the campest record in vinyl’s history. Old timers, such as her sometime understudy Elaine Stritch, the cabaret ‘chantoose’ Marti Stevens, and the present author keep the flame alive, but Ethel Merman’s voice, once the most recognisable in show-biz, is now only an echo to a dwindling few. Her movies, in many of which she is also a brilliant comic, have all but faded from view. And, shamefully, there is no Broadway theatre named after its biggest, ballsiest, brightest star.

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