BRASS DIVA: THE LIFE AND LEGENDS OF ETHEL MERMAN
By Caryl Flinn
University of California Press, 556 pages, $34.95

ETHEL MERMAN: A LIFE
By Brian Kellow
Viking, 336 pages, $25.95

Two biographies of Ethel Merman in the same month? You may think that’s overkill, but you may also think that one biography of Ethel Merman is overkill, considering that there already are two, one of them very recent, plus a pair of autobiographies. The real problem isn’t the duplication; it’s that although she had one of the greatest careers in Broadway history, she was just an uninteresting woman. Even the story of her success is uninteresting: She had no struggle getting to the top and no struggle staying there. Miserable childhood? The opposite. Bad marriages? Only four—but she rode them out with something approaching equanimity. Trouble with her children? Yes, but did she notice?

Her life began as it was meant to go on—easily. No one ever had more loving and supportive parents, and no one ever cared more for parents in return. Even once she became a star, she would go home after her show every night to where they all still lived, in Astoria, Queens. And when she married, she had Mom and Pop Zimmermann (“Merman” was a contraction) living a few floors away from her in a fancy building on Central Park West.

Merman was in 14 Broadway shows over 35 years, including a sensational stretch in Hello, Dolly!, and they were 14 hits. Her voice never gave out. Her fans never abandoned her. Her only professional disappointment was that her movie career never really flourished. (Worst was being screwed—she thought—out of the film version of her greatest role, Gypsy’s Mama Rose.) She was a star from the beginning. She was rich. She had dozens of pals—the Duke and Duchess of Windsor among them. She had a lot of “escorts” (including Walter Annenberg), and a big public romance with the highly conspicuous Sherman Billingsley, millionaire owner of the Stork Club. But did she have real friends?

According to the brilliant lyricist Dorothy Fields, who was fond of her, “She knows all the small talk, but you can’t sit down and talk to her, you just can’t.” Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for Gypsy, found her dumb: “She doesn’t calculate. She doesn’t weigh things. She just blunders ahead.” (Apparently, she never picked up a newspaper, let alone a book.) Pete Martin, the ghostwriter of autobiography number one, said, “Ethel seemed to have little perspective, or insight, into her spectacular career.” The reviews said worse: “It is difficult to believe that Ethel Merman, as dynamic a stage personality as Broadway has ever produced, could possibly be the dull-witted, tiresome egoist offstage that this book makes her appear to be.” Not, perhaps, a good omen for the biographer.

SO WHAT DO Caryl Flinn, author of Brass Diva, and Brian Kellow, author of Ethel Merman, have to contribute to the Merman saga? Very different things, it turns out. Professor Flinn is an academic, at the University of Arizona, and author of The New German Cinema: Music, History and the Matter of Style. This perhaps accounts for the flaws in her otherwise careful and intelligent book. One of them stems from the negative side of her admirably zealous research: too much detail. Do you want to know, for instance, exactly where young Ethel lived in Astoria? “In her first autobiography, she gives 2903 1st Avenue as the place where she grew up; in her second, 31st Avenue. Biographer Bob Thomas claimed it was 359 Fourth Avenue. Saved mail to the family postmarked in November 1931 was received at both 2908 31st Avenue and 3056 30th Street.” Thank you, Professor.

In the same spirit, Ms. Flinn provides extended plot summaries of a series of insignificant and forgotten one- and two-reelers that Merman made for Paramount in the early 30’s. This is material previously untouched by critical hands, and for the sake of grasping Merman’s early performance style I’d love to sample throwaways like Her Future, Ireno and Song Shopping. But reading seven tight pages about them is just too much of a good thing.

And then there’s Ms. Flinn’s insistence on placing Merman sociologically. Issues of feminism, class and culture are constantly put forward: “Ethel was always a lightning rod that reflected changes in the social landscape, and in her (and responses to her), we see evolving attitudes toward family, sex, celebrity, class, and age.” Sorry, but that not what I saw. It’s not that Ms. Flinn plays down Merman the phenomenal performer; it’s that she plays up the idea of finding significance where only achievement matters.

Brian Kellow’s background lies in music and performance (he’s the features editor of Opera News), and therefore he’s more focused on Merman’s actual singing and stage smarts. His fluent book, then, is more useful on the musician, less perceptive about the life.

AND WHAT WAS the life? Ethel Agnes Zimmermann was born on Jan. 16, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1911 or 1912 (the last of which, if true, would have seen her graduating from high school at 12). Her parents—Pop’s background was German, Mom’s Scottish—were hard-working, frugal, serious, churchgoing and musical. Baby Ethel’s voice was huge from the start, and by the time she was 5 she was making public appearances, not only in church choirs but in Pop’s Masonic lodge, pageants, the Women’s Republican Club. (One of her boasts was that she never took a singing lesson in her life.) Cautious and pragmatic like her parents, she chose to take commercial courses in high school in case singing didn’t pan out, which is how she came to be working as a stenographer, first at Boyce-ite (antifreeze), then at BKVacuum Booster Brake Company (power brakes). Meanwhile, she was doing nighttime radio shows. By 1927 she has her photo on sheet-music covers; by 1928 she’s singing at the Democratic convention that nominated F.D.R. as governor and performing in tony nightclubs. By 1930 she’s playing the Palace.

It’s at the Brooklyn Paramount that she was approached by a top Broadway producer, Vinton Freedley, who was looking for the second female lead for the new Gershwin show, Girl Crazy. (Ginger Rogers was the ingénue.) He was knocked out by her, and hurried her to George and Ira’s apartment for an audition. They were knocked out too, and in a famous exchange recounted over and over again (usually by her), George said, “Miss Merman, if there’s anything about these songs you’d like to change, I’d be happy to do so.” “They’ll do very nicely,” she replied.

“These songs” included “Sam and Delilah,” “Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!” and, of course, “I Got Rhythm,” which, when she blasted it out at the end of act one, made Broadway history. No one had ever heard a sound like hers, or seen such confidence in someone so young. But then Merman never suffered from stage fright. “What’s there to worry about? I know my lines.”

From then on it was triumph after triumph, including five shows written for her by Cole Porter—most famously, Anything Goes (1934). Then there was Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946), for 1,147 performances, and eventually Gypsy (1959), maybe the greatest of all musicals and the greatest of all star performances. And consider the list of American standards written with Ethel’s voice in mind: “Eadie Was a Lady,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “Ridin’ High,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (and all her other numbers from Annie), “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Only Fred Astaire was as much in demand by the great American songwriters.

How did she sing? The word usually applied to her is “belter,” but it was more complicated than that—more than just a huge voice trumpeting every syllable to the back of the house. Mr. Kellow refers to her vocal production being extraordinarily even throughout her range; to her “naturally forward placement, superb command of breath support” and the solid physique that “helped her to sing like an operatic tenor; the sound moved up through her chest and resonated in her head, with true tenorlike ping on the high notes.” Indeed, the only artist she ever reminded me of was an opera singer—but not a tenor. In 1952 the greatest of Wagnerian sopranos, Kirsten Flagstad, gave her final performances at the Met, in Glück’s Alceste. Portly, in simple powder-blue robes, she planted herself downstage center, opened her mouth, and out came an immense and beautiful column of sound. No acting, no effort—just glory. That was Merman, given the differences between Alceste and, say, Panama Hattie.

Merman always knew exactly what worked for her, and although she listened carefully to directors, she made the important decisions finally for herself—in particular, what songs suited her. She didn’t go in for motivation or analysis. What was there to analyze? When Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim added “Rose’s Turn” to Gypsy, Sondheim tried explaining it to her. She listened politely, then interrupted him. “There was just one thing she wanted to know,” Mr. Kellow reports. “Did ‘Mmmmmm-mmm-Mama’ come in on an upbeat or a downbeat?”

She was a consummate professional—always on time, never missing a show, never allowing her boozing to impinge on her work, never compromising the level of her performance—and she expected the same professionalism from her colleagues and lowered the boom if they disappointed. “This is a job like any other job you go to. It’s like being a plumber or carpenter or anything else. You come to the theater and you come to work.”

She was also efficient and methodical in private life. Proud of her stenographic experience, she typed her own letters and did her own accounts. And nobody took advantage of her. The morning after Annie opened, says Mr. Kellow, “Ethel didn’t have time to look over the notices carefully, for she was on the telephone with the manager of their local grocery store, demanding to know why she’d been charged so much for a can of peaches that hadn’t been delivered the day before.”

THE ONE AREA in which she was vulnerable was her romantic life. Not a very pretty girl, she was robustly sexy onstage rather than erotic or seductive; she was the quintessential good egg, someone you rooted for rather than rooted after. Her first marriage lasted only a few weeks. Her second, to Bob Levitt, was more serious. He was the promotion director for the New York Journal-American, well read and sophisticated. They had two children and for a while got along well, but eventually proved incompatible. As Ethel put it, “Levitt would fuck a snake!” Yet decades after their divorce, long after he’d died, she had his body exhumed and cremated and kept his ashes in an urn in her bedroom.

Number three was Robert Six, founder and head of Continental Airways, headquartered in Denver. Retiring (for the moment) from the stage, Ethel moved to Colorado and set herself up as a traditional wife and mother—gardening, cooking, working for the Boy Scouts. Unfortunately, Six was a womanizer, and violently abusive to Ethel’s kids and to her parents. Goodbye, Denver.

Number four was the notorious and momentary mismatch with Ernest Borgnine.

Not a very happy record. And, given her fraught relationship with her son, Bob Jr. (her daughter, Ethel Jr., had died a drug-related death), there was not much left in life for Ethel. She went on making appearances—in concerts, on TV—but her kind of Broadway vehicle was a thing of the past. She lived alone in hotel suites, finally at the Surrey on East 76th Street, where she had the stove removed, using only a small toaster oven in which, Caryl Flinn reports, she would reheat Chinese takeout or cook chicken hot dogs. All over the apartment she displayed her needlepoint work “alongside her beloved Raggedy Anns and Muppet friends.” In early 1984 she succumbed to an inoperable brain tumor. Before her death, her mental powers had deteriorated, and her fabulous energy and drive were gone.

Twenty-odd years have now past and there’s still no one like her. But what could today’s theater do with her if she were to be reborn? Ethel Merman in Phantom of the Opera or Mamma Mia? Yet she remains an icon. Her too-few records are still in demand and often thrilling, and from the movie of one of her stage hits, Call Me Madam, plus a 1954 telecast of Anything Goes, co-starring Bert Lahr and Frank Sinatra, we still get a sense of her extraordinary talent as a performer. Alas, from these two biographies what we get is a sense of the otherwise mostly empty life she apparently lived.

Robert Gottlieb is the dance critic of The Observer. He can be reached at rgottlieb@observer.com.