{"id":7594,"date":"2008-01-15T11:51:30","date_gmt":"2008-01-15T16:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7594"},"modified":"2015-06-05T11:32:01","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T15:32:01","slug":"ethel-merman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7594","title":{"rendered":"Two Ethel Merman Bios"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Merman.jpg\"A not-to-be-missed post: “They Say She Was Wonderful: Ethel Merman at 100”<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Here’s just one excerpt:<\/p>\n

[Brian] Kellow is nicely attuned to the soft\/tough dichotomy in Merman. Here was a woman capable of sympathizing with her friend Judy Garland\u00e2\u0080\u0099s illness, yet blind to her own daughter\u00e2\u0080\u0099s needs. \u00e2\u0080\u009cSensitivity and anguish she didn\u00e2\u0080\u0099t understand and therefore she gave it nothing,\u00e2\u0080\u009d 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\u00e2\u0080\u0099s 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\u00e2\u0080\u0099s \u00e2\u0080\u009cunintentional suicide,\u00e2\u0080\u009d Merman had courage enough to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, singing Gordon Jenkins\u00e2\u0080\u0099s \u00e2\u0080\u009cThis is All I Ask.\u00e2\u0080\u009d It was, Kellow writes, \u00e2\u0080\u009cone of the most tender, emotionally connected performances she had ever given\u00e2\u0080\u00a6a study in heartbreak.\u00e2\u0080\u009d Kellow doesn\u00e2\u0080\u0099t 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\u00e2\u0080\u0099s an admission of failure on some level.<\/p>\n

Children everywhere, when you shoot at bad men,
\nShoot at me
\nTake me to that strange, enchanted land
\nGrown-ups seldom understand<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Great stuff: Read the whole post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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