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 really, if they merely used her voice? The fogginess about her star quality forced her, for the moment, to return to theatre.
Her connection with several Cole Porter hits in the musical Anything Goes (1934) was another good break for her. She seemed to really connect to Porter's score and delivered magically on stage. When the film version of Anything Goes began casting, Merman was the only Broadway actor who landed a role alongside Bing Crosby - though this was never enough to make her a big star on the screen. She just didn't seem to have that "it" quality that producers looked for to land big dollars for films. She completely dedicated herself to the stage.
In Broadway musicals, Merman earned a reputation for focusing singularly on the audience during her performances. Rarely did she look her fellow actors in the eye when she was singing. Her methods were a bit unorthodox for her time, but they made her a stand-out favorite among theatre crowds. Another trait that characterized an Ethel Merman performance was how loud her voice was. She could belt lyrics on a stage without a microphone so that people far away could still hear them clearly. Even a bout with tonsillitis in 1929 did not dim the volume of her voice. It reportedly had become louder after she had surgery.
Merman enjoyed a string of hits, including Cole Porter's Panama Hattie (1940) and Something for the Boys (1943) and as Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun (1946), where she popularized the hit "There's No Business Like Show Business." Throughout much of World War II, she consistently worked on Broadway and performed for troops and in war bond concerts.
Perhaps Merman will always be remembered for the stunning performance she delivered as Mama Rose in the hit musical Gypsy (1959). Although some critics complain that her dialogue in this play was very mechanical and didn't convince on the stage, her renditions of "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Rose's Turn" have been hailed as two of the finest moments in theatre history. Imagine her disappointment at delivering such a rousing performance and later watching the Tony Award for that year got to the Sound of Music's Mary Martin, who had been her co-star in Annie Get Your Gun.
Broadway and the world of theatre were changing, and Merman had to realize she belonged to a crop of stars whose era was slipping away. People no longer wanted the outlandish comedic plays in which the point was music. They also wanted strong storylines to go along with good songbooks and good music.
Merman did a couple of films - It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and The Art of Love (1965). In 1970, she agreed to take over the lead in Hello Dolly! All the wonderful reviews and adoring fans (as well as sold-out houses) convinced her to stay on for nine months. This was the last big run she would have on the stage.
She continued to make cameo appearances and do small roles in film for the remainder of her life. In one memorable appearance, Merman plays a deranged hospital patient who thinks he's Ethel Merman in the film Airplane (1980). The irony was, it really was Merman playing herself. She sang bits of "Everything's Coming Up Roses" in the role.
She also would join entertainer Bob Hope for a Cole Porter Tribute titled It's De-Lovely and appear on The Muppet Show and sing all of her show tunes with Kermit the Frog and other puppets.
In April 1983, after suffering symptoms doctors initially thought signaled a stroke, she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an inoperable brain tumor. Eventually, she wasn't able to speak or recognize herself on television. Merman died on February 15, 1984.
During her funeral procession, her son, Robert Levitt, Jr. carried her ashes past all the theatres where she had performed. The lights on Broadway were dimmed in remembrance of her.
Sources:
http://www.answers.com/topic/ethel-merma n (Answers.com)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Merm an (Wikipedia Entry on Ethel Merman)
http://www.quazen.com/Reference/Biography/Eth el-Merman-A-Voice-Like-No-Other.35060 ("Ethel Merman: A Voice Like No Other")