Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (review)

Drawing on a wealth of materials, including scrapbooks kept by Ethel Merman's devoted father and interviews with those who knew her as co-worker, family member or idolized star, media historian Caryl Flinn provides a detailed reading of Merman's personal and professional lives, from her birth in 1908 (a date she verifies) to her death in 1984. Remaining sensitive to the changing contexts of a five-decade career, Flinn takes Merman, and especially her reception, seriously. What emerges is the first definitive biography of this ordinary and extraordinary American performer.

Especially strong is how Flinn illuminates the tensions between Broadway's live entertainments and touring, and the increasingly homogenized medium of the Hollywood film that gained ascendancy as the 20th century progressed. Merman, while not unsuccessful in Hollywood, was more at home on the New York stage, but by the 1950s had also embraced the new national entertainment of television. After numerous special appearances, she had, as Flinn recounts, hoped to emerge as the star of a situation comedy that would have had her belting out her famous numbers in a kind of mini-musical theater format. It's tempting to think how such a successful Merman vehicle might have bridged the televised white femininities of "I Love Lucy" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

One of many posthumous tributes to Merman, as Flinn notes, was a 1994 postage stamp where she appeared with Ethel Waters, Nat "King" Cole and Bing Crosby as one of four "Popular Singers." While this commemorative set reflects a kind of governmental political correctness (two men/two women; two black/two white; entertainers on par with politicians), it raises salient issues of not only vocal delivery and repertory but also race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and context that surrounds "popularity" throughout the history of American singers and their songs. Merman's "brassy" love-it-or-hate-it voice and long career (she performed at events for the Kennedy and later Reagan inaugurations) present formidable challenges. Flinn, to her credit, has listened carefully to Merman and draws attention to the impeccable diction, ability to sustain notes and sure sense of rhythm, insights that sent me back to my Merman CDs.

Flinn likewise does a good job of understanding Merman within her working class background where as an only child she received both parental support and learned real management skills. She dispatches perhaps too quickly with Merman's relationships to other big-voiced female singers, past and present, whose belting vocality often marked them as off-color and non-normative of white femininity, images rooted in the troubling stereotypes of minstrelsy. Missing is a more nuanced presentation of the shifting landscape of "popular" singers in the 20th century, such as that of Ella Fitzgerald whose best-selling "American Songbooks" overlap with Merman's career, and in some cases Merman's repertory, although without Fitzgerald having had equal access to Broadway or Hollywood. Merman's queer popularity, while not ignored by Flinn, remains undeveloped. Overall, though, Merman comes through in Flinn's detailed telling as an active agent in her own professional business, one that for many listeners was, thankfully, show business.