Two Ethel Merman Bios

A not-to-be-missed post: “They Say She Was Wonderful: Ethel Merman at 100”. N.P. Thompson analyzes two recent biographies of Merman, and discusses (and he’s right on, as far as I’m concerned) Merman’s particular appeal (and her challenges). Seriously, it’s a must-read.

Here’s just one excerpt:

[Brian] Kellow is nicely attuned to the soft/tough dichotomy in Merman. Here was a woman capable of sympathizing with her friend Judy Garland’s illness, yet blind to her own daughter’s needs. “Sensitivity and anguish she didn’t understand and therefore she gave it nothing,” states granddaughter Barbara Geary, by way of explaining how Merman could foot the psychiatric bills for Ethel, Jr., while not quite seeing the 25-year-old’s instability as a danger signal. On August 23, in the Summer of Love, Ethel Levitt Geary, having relocated from the nervous clime of LA to the bucolic-sounding Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, invited her two, young, non-custodial children to spend a holiday with her, and as they slept, she slipped away in a fatal mix of tranquilizers and vodka, much in the manner of her late father. Three weeks after Geary’s “unintentional suicide,” Merman had courage enough to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, singing Gordon Jenkins’s “This is All I Ask.” It was, Kellow writes, “one of the most tender, emotionally connected performances she had ever given…a study in heartbreak.” Kellow doesn’t quote from the lyrics, relying on us to know them. Her choice of this song, at the death of a child, seems not just an exploration of despair, it’s an admission of failure on some level.

Children everywhere, when you shoot at bad men,
Shoot at me
Take me to that strange, enchanted land
Grown-ups seldom understand

Great stuff: Read the whole post.