Ethel Merman

Ethel Merman's name is synonymous with Broadway. Born Ethel Agnes Zimmerman in Astoria, 1908, Merman shortened her name so it would fit on a marquee. A former stenographer, Ethel Merman got her big break singing in between movies at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater in 1930, when Broadway producer Vinton Freedley saw her potential, and arranged a meeting for her with George and Ira Gershwin. The brothers Gershwin, impressed by her pluck and dazzled by her vocal might, cast her in their show, Girl Crazy, giving her a chance to hold a high C for 16 bars, and causing Palace audiences to wonder "Who the hell is that?" Like so many newsies, Merman belted her way through The Great Depression, starring in Cole Porter's best musical comedies: Anything Goes, DuBarry was a Lady, and Panama Hattie. In the 1940's, she would immortalize the songbook of Irving Berlin, starring in Annie Get Your Gun and There's No Business Like Showbusiness, a revue whose title song one can not imagine being sung by anyone but Merman. But it wasn't until 1959, in a show based on the biography of vaudeville stripper Gypsy Rose Lee with a score penned by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, when Ethel was able to play the role that would make her a Broadway legend—in fact, The Broadway Legend. Arguably the best Broadway musical of all time, Gypsy gave Merman the chance to to reach her full star potential as Mama Rose, singing numbers like "Everything's Coming Up Roses," and "Rose's Turn," and bringing down houses as if they were made of balsa wood and held together with gum. Merman's loss of the 1960 Best Actress TONY to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music was coupled with the face-slap of Rosalind Russell's casting as Mama Rose for the bullshit 1962 Gypsy film. After Gypsy, Merman went on to star in films like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Airplane!, and in television appearances as herself, from The Lucy Show to Love Boat. Her autobiography, Merman: An Autobiography, sheds light on a remarkable life that tragically ended in 1984, soon after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The always outspoken Broadway legend waxed poetic on her opinions of modern shows (She called Torch Song Trilogy a "piece of shit…but the audience laughed and cried, so what the fuck do I know?"), her ego ("I don't want to sound pretentious, but in a funny way I feel like I'm the last of a kind."), and her personal life, including her less-than-one-week marriage to actor Ernest Borgnine, from whom she filed for divorce on the grounds of "Extreme Cruelty." Merman's recounting of the affair warranted a single blank page in her memoirs, leading many Broadway scholars to go ahead and assume that at one point, he must have lit her on fire.