Ethel Merman, the Broadway voice Hollywood never knew how to film

Ethel Merman

Photo: ABC Television Uploaded by We hope at en.wikipedia / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 16, 1908 Astoria, Queens, New York City, United States
Died	February 15, 1984 (76)
Occupation	Singer and actress
Known for	Airplane!, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, There's No Business Like Show Business
Awards	2 Tony Award · Golden Globe · Grammy (shared) · Drama Desk

Broadway lore holds that George Gershwin told her never to take a singing lesson. She took one only late in life, and the advice aged well: the voice that came out of Ethel Merman filled a theater without a microphone, delivered every consonant of a Cole Porter lyric to the back row and held one note through an entire chorus of “I Got Rhythm” while the orchestra kept going underneath. Porter put it plainly. “When you write lyrics for Ethel Merman they’d better be good, because everyone’s going to hear them.”

The puzzle is what happened when the cameras arrived. Broadway built show after show around her, and Variety reckoned she had probably starred in more hit musicals than any other performer. Hollywood, meanwhile, handed the screen versions of her two greatest roles to other actresses. The fullest record of Merman’s art is the one audiences could only hear in the room.

Before the marquee there was a stenographer. Ethel Agnes Zimmermann arrived on January 16, 1908, in her maternal grandmother’s house in Astoria, Queens, although she later insisted the year was 1912. The only child of an accountant and a schoolteacher, she was steered by her parents into a commercial course at William Cullen Bryant High School, so she would have secretarial skills to fall back on. On Friday nights the family rode the subway to the Palace Theatre, where she watched Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker, then went home and tried to sound like them. Her own voice kept breaking through.

She took dictation by day and sang at private parties and nightclubs by night. Zimmermann was too long for a marquee, so she cut it to Merman. A job as a torch singer on a bill headlined by Jimmy Durante, who became a lifelong friend, led to a booking at the Palace, where the producer Vinton Freedley heard her. He sent her to audition for George and Ira Gershwin. When she sang “I Got Rhythm” for them, they cast her on the spot.

Girl Crazy opened at the Alvin Theatre in October 1930, and she was a star by the end of the night; The New Yorker called her “imitative of no one.” Cole Porter wrote five musicals for her, starting with Anything Goes in 1934, in which she introduced “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “You’re the Top.” Red, Hot and Blue gave her “It’s De-Lovely,” and Panama Hattie ran past 500 performances. The persona set hard: a brassy, wisecracking dame who could stop a show with one sustained vowel.

Irving Berlin gave her the biggest hit of her life. Annie Get Your Gun opened at the Imperial Theatre in 1946 and ran for 1,147 performances, of which she missed two. Berlin gave her ballads as well as belters, and she said “Irving Berlin made a lady out of me.” One of its songs, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” became an anthem for the whole industry and her signature for the rest of her career. They reunited for Call Me Madam in 1950, and it won her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.

On screen the story was rougher, and the tidy myth of a born star skips it. In the 1936 film of Anything Goes the focus moved to Bing Crosby, the censors sanded down Porter’s lyrics and her showstopper “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” was cut; a New York Herald Tribune critic wrote that she could not register on screen “as magnificently as she does on stage.” She fared better in Alexander’s Ragtime Band and, much later, in the 1953 film of Call Me Madam, which brought her a Golden Globe. Annie Oakley, though, went to Judy Garland and then to Betty Hutton when M-G-M filmed Annie Get Your Gun. The harder loss came a decade later.

As Rose Hovick, the ferocious stage mother of Gypsy, written by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, she found a dramatic register nobody had asked of her before. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times called it “an indomitable performance, both as actress and singer,” and the cast album won a Grammy. She lost that season’s Tony to her friend Mary Martin, who was playing a nun, and shrugged: “How are you going to buck a nun?” The director Mervyn LeRoy kept telling her the film was hers. Warner Bros. gave it to Rosalind Russell, whose husband had tied her casting to another deal with the studio. Merman called it “the greatest professional disappointment of my life.” Gypsy was the last original stage role she ever took.

Offstage she was just as loud and far less in control. She married four times: the agent William Smith; the newspaper executive Robert Levitt, father of her two children; Continental Airlines president Robert Six, who pushed her back onto Broadway in Happy Hunting partly for the publicity it gave his airline; and the actor Ernest Borgnine, a marriage that lasted a matter of weeks in 1964. In her 1978 memoir, the chapter about Borgnine is a blank page. Her daughter, also named Ethel, died of an accidental overdose in 1967.

The later decades revealed a broader, funnier Merman. In 1963 she played Milton Berle’s bellowing mother-in-law in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, one of the year’s biggest box-office hits. She had turned down Hello, Dolly!, though Jerry Herman wrote the score with her range in mind, then joined it in 1970, six years into the run, and stayed until it closed. Walter Kerr found her voice “exactly as trumpet-clean, exactly as penny whistle-piercing, exactly as Wurlitzer-wonderful as it always was.” It was her last Broadway appearance, and a special Tony Award followed in 1972.

In 1979 she recorded The Ethel Merman Disco Album, her standards set to a dance beat. Her final screen role was a joke at her own expense: in Airplane! (1980) she plays a shell-shocked lieutenant who believes he is Ethel Merman and leaps out of bed singing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” until orderlies sedate him. In April 1983, while preparing to fly to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards, she collapsed at home, and doctors found a brain tumor. She died in her Manhattan apartment on February 15, 1984, at 76. That night the theaters of Broadway dimmed their lights at nine o’clock.

The roles keep coming back without her. When Gypsy returned to Broadway in December 2024, Audra McDonald became the first Black actress to play Rose there, and every review still measured the part against the woman who created it. The recordings survive and explain the voice. What they cannot hold is the thing Hollywood never managed to film: a woman standing still on a bare stage and reaching, without amplification, the last seat in the house.

Selected Discography

• Ethel Merman Sings “Annie Get Your Gun” (1974)
• Ethel’s Ridin’ High (1974)
• The Ethel Merman Disco Album (1979)
• An Earful of Merman (1994)
• There’s No Business Like Show Business: The Ethel Merman Collection (1999)
• I Got Rhythm! (2004)
• Merman Sings Merman (2017)

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, singers, Ethel Merman, musical theatre, Annie Get Your Gun

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