NEW BOOK ON "THE MERM"

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Merman: A big voice and a persona to match

By David Patrick Stearns

No show-business figure left as bizarre a secondary legacy as Ethel Merman. The brassy, song-belting Valkyrie who dominated Broadway for decades and introduced numerous now-classic songs seems nowadays like a wondrous but unimaginably gargantuan personality.

Entire chapters of urban mythology are occupied by speculation - usually by drag artists - as to what progeny might have arisen from loud-mouthed Merman's momentary marriage to rough-hewn actor Ernest Borgnine. San Francisco was assaulted a few years ago by a marauding band of carolers known as The Ethels, whose repertoire was Merman's. Then there are the cryptobiographies. In Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, for one, the hard-boiled Helen Lawson character was supposedly the Merm.

Queens-born Merman grew from the same sexually suggestive soil as Brooklyn-born Mae West, but entered the world trumpeting rather than purring. Hers is a near-extinct personality type that threatens to grow as obscure as that of W.C. Fields, so we can be grateful that actor/comedian/radio personality Geoffrey Mark has taken it upon himself to write Ethel Merman: The Biggest Star on Broadway (Barricade Books Inc., $24.95) while she's still in living memory. Even better, he confirms that she was as strange as we always suspected.

Merman, who died in 1984 of a brain tumor, liked to characterize herself as an everyday girl, eating chopped steak and volunteering every Tuesday at New York's Roosevelt Hospital. Yet in Mark's book, she's such a singular creature that, were she around today, she would be considered hopelessly eccentric and probably crazy.

In the late '90s, when the New York postal department held a Merman impersonation contest connected with a commemorative stamp in her honor, even showbiz veteran and Merman buddy Benay Venuta (one of the judges) concluded that impersonating Ethel "is not a very wholesome activity."

Consider three morsels:

One of the Merm's buddies was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. She was aware of his homosexuality as well as his appetite for cross-dressing. According to Mark, Merman "even helped him go shopping for ladies' apparel at the finest stores." Picture that.

When she was signed to 20th Century Fox in the late 1930s, the studio forced her into a trumped-up romance with Cesar Romero, whom she disliked immensely. In a series of pranks, she sent him a dozen pizzas, sent him a hearse asking to pick up a corpse, and had Lucille Ball, her voice disguised, phone his housekeeper to say that the water was being shut off, so that Romero came home to find all of his pots and bowls full of emergency water.

And the Borgnine marriage? In her 1978 Merman: An Autobiography, she famously titled one chapter "My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine," and left it blank. The account Mark pieced together is fairly simple: They got drunk at their wedding, Borgnine failed to perform, Merman upbraided his masculinity, and they came to blows. That was it.

The book is not the work of a seasoned pro. There are no footnotes, and in a lot of places he says, in so many words, "Just trust me." Some parts are sketchy, and at times Mark's engaging voice is so prominent as to steal focus from his subject. By no means is he immune to hagiography. However, he has the dish that we want and more - did anybody know that Merman dated Walter Annenberg briefly? Mark knew her over many years, well enough to enter the psyche of someone with a spectacular lack of self-awareness.

In other words, Merman requires a biographer who knows her better than she knew herself in order to find cohesion amid the anecdotes. Mark may be as close as anyone will get to that.

In discussing one of her marriage failures, he offers perspective: "Those that make it to the top in an impossible industry become their own warriors by necessity. By the time they are stars, no man can take care of them as well as they can take care of themselves."

Surely, Merman had little impetus for introspection. She was the doted-upon only child of a middle-class family and, with minimal struggle, arrived on Broadway in 1930's Girl Crazy. From there, the book follows her through her near-infallible luck on Broadway with a succession of now-classic shows - Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam, and Gypsy.

On most other fronts, her life was iffy. Though hugely sexual, she had a strange habit of not getting to know her prospective husbands (there were four) very well. She'd fall in love, explore the sex, go do career stuff, and then get married. Husbands misrepresented themselves and sometimes took her money. One ex committed suicide in the years following their divorce; so did their daughter, called Little Ethel.

Merman's film appearances were patchy; the only Broadway role she took to Hollywood was Call Me Madam. She appeared in a ridiculous series of multicolored wigs in the Dick van Dyke film The Art of Love, and in Airplane played a delusional mental patient who thinks he's Ethel Merman.

Her recording career had more misfires than not, ending with the egregiously campy Ethel Merman Disco Album. As author Mark puts it, "It is not true that this album killed disco. Wounded it, perhaps... . "

You have to wonder if Merman was in on the joke. Of course, nobody of her generation can be held up to the standards of self-irony set by Dolly Parton. Consider, though, that Lucille Ball's hard-boiled private persona was probably not much different from Merman's public one, though Ball knew how much or how little of that the public should see.

Then again, would Merman with impulse control still be Merman? The ultra-confident, unembarrassable qualities that allowed her to enter the deep theatrical waters of Gypsy are the same that let her stride into a guest appearance on TV's Batman not realizing how silly she'd look.

Why do we care at all? That's easy. The sheer scale of Merman was so Mount Rushmore - and her manner so lacking calculation, pretension and premeditation - that the bad is nearly as interesting as the good.