by Cherryl Floyd-Miller

Created on: August 19, 2008

There are the provocative details about Ethel Merman's life that some of the illustrious facts of her career might not reveal:

-That her stage surname is a shortened version of her birth surname: Zimmerman.

-She started her career as a stenographer at a local factory making $28 a week.

-She had four marriages over her lifetime. Her marriage to the fourth and final husband, actor Ernest Borgnine, was addressed with a single chapter containing one blank page in her second memoir, Merman. The marriage only lasted 32 days.

-Her daughter, Ethel Levitt (aka "Lil Bit"), died of an overdose of drugs and alcohol in 1967, when she was in her early 20s. Levitt's father (Merman's second husband) was newspaper executive Robert Levitt, and he committed suicide shortly after he and Merman divorced in 1952.

-She was once the guest villain Lola Lasagna on the 1960s TV series, Batman.

-In true myth-making fashion, she openly lied about her age and gave her birth year as anything between 1906 and 1912.

None of these things stopped the voice the world came to know as one of Broadway's greatest, however.

Ethel Agnes Zimmerman was born January 16, 1908 (a date often agreed on by biographers and historians) in a third-floor bedroom of her maternal grandmother's house at 359 4th Avenue in Astoria, Queens, New York. As a child, she often watched silent movie stars go by that house, since it was near the famous Astoria Studios and dreamed of one day being one of them.

Merman's father Edward, an accountant, and her mother Agnes, a teacher, believed in their daughter's talent and ambition, but wanted her to have something solid to fall back on in case the singing dream didn't come to fruition. At their insistence, she trained to be a secretary and took a job at a local factory while moonlighting at private parties and nightclubs.

Soon, the sheer exhaustion of this routine got to her, and her parents supported the move for her to pursue a singing career full-time.

After taking a job at Warner Brothers for $200 a week and then doing some work with accompanist Al Siegel, she got her first big break after auditioning for George and Ira Gershwin with the song "I Got Rhythm," which she ended up performing in the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy in 1930. The attention she received from this performance caught the ears of Hollywood film studios. They hired her to bring strong vocals to songs in movies.

Executives in the film industry still didn't quite know how to categorize Merman, though. Was she a movie start

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