Ethel Merman was probably the biggest star Broadway ever produced. Also the loudest, renowned for her bold, brassy voice more than for her looks or acting—she sometimes made a bargain with a costar that she wouldn’t react to his lines if he wouldn’t react to hers. A native New Yorker, she was born Ethel Zimmerman (1908–1984), an only child who enjoyed singing and as a young adult became an almost overnight success. Ethel went from a stenographer who sang at private parties and nightclubs to a Broadway star in the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy in 1930 with maximum confidence.
She reportedly never had to audition, didn’t have to rise through the ranks, and was never “one of the kids” in the chorus, facts which ingrained in her a sense of predestined stardom and privilege. Seemingly nerveless, Merman once said, “Why should I worry? I’m good. If I wasn’t, I’d be an audience, not a star.”
Her low tolerance for “excessive” rehearsal, she explained, was on account of “whenever I open my mouth to sing, it comes out swell.” “The Merm,” as she was often called—sometimes affectionately, sometimes derisively—definitely knew her own worth. In later years, when a TV talk show host commented that Broadway had been very good to her, she shot back, “Yeah, and I’ve been very good to Broadway!”
There were two frequent misconceptions about Merman. One, that she was Jewish. In fact, the lifelong Episcopalian Republican was at times vocally anti-Semitic—also homophobic, misogynistic, penny-pinchingly cheap, greedy (she demanded extra tickets to her shows, which she then “scalped” for considerable profit), and cheerfully vulgar, even obscene.
Two, that she was lesbian. After all, she was nearly as butch as actor Ernest Borgnine, her fourth, final, and least-loved husband. “All men are cheatin’ bastards,” she concluded upon quickly divorcing him. In fact, the Merm was heterosexual, or at least predominantly so. She may have had an affair with obsessive admirer Jacqueline Susann, who after Ethel abruptly terminated their relationship took revenge by closely patterning Broadway villainess Helen Lawson after her in her number-one best-selling novel The Valley of the Dolls.
As early as Anything Goes (1934), Merman had refused to sing Cole Porter’s “Kate the Great” because of its sapphic and clergical references. Due probably to his jittery homosexuality (which unlike, say, Noel Coward, Cole camouflaged with a wife), Porter readily dropped disputed songs. “Merman wasn’t just the star of almost everything she was in, outside of Hollywood,” said actor Keith Prentice, “she was a tyro and a tyrant used to getting her way.” Playwrights, producers, and writers knew that she would put up with only so many dialogue changes while rehearsing a new show; she thereafter became what she called “Miss Birdseye,” for as far as she was concerned, the show was “frozen.” Since she was most always a hit and a money-spinner, associates put up with her habits.
“What she didn’t have was tact,” explained Prentice, who appeared in Gypsy but became known as the handsomest of The Boys in the Band. “Merman could be humorous, she could even compromise, but diplomacy she did not have.… To be fair, she was a perfectionist. She worked damn hard and expected others to. But she did turn off so many people with that confrontational manner.… It didn’t scarcely matter. She didn’t have to refine herself or mend her ways, as it didn’t really hurt her career.”
Nonetheless, the lack of like from many of her peers and the theatre establishment meant that a theater was never named after her, as with Helen Hayes, Lunt and Fontanne, female impersonator Julian Eltinge (after whom an American battleship was also named), and even critic Brooks Atkinson. Elaine Stritch was quoted in the book It Happened on Broadway, “She made a lot of enemies because she wanted to get it right. She was a selfish old broad. Still, it’s a sin that they haven’t named a theater for her.”
“DESPITE IT ALL—and the fans didn’t know the half of it in those days,” believed record and revue producer Ben Bagley, “fans couldn’t help admiring and relishing Ethel Merman. Belting out a song or just owning the stage, no one could touch her.” Strangely, in one of her two memoirs she asserted that her voice was inimitable. On the contrary, hers became one of the most imitated—by women and men, then and now—of singing voices. “Merman was so wrapped up in herself,” said Bagley, “she couldn’t be a good judge or objective about herself.… She knew she wasn’t overly cultured, very educated, but she thought she was a reasonable, regular person.”
Besides her at times scalding tongue, the Merm was very competitive, blunt, and childishly crude. After viewing the unique, not-yet-a-star Carol Channing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), Ethel mirthfully informed her, “You walked like you hadda pee.” Carol was dumbfounded: “That was her complete summary of my portrayal of Anita Loos’s monumental character Lorelei Lee.” In her memoirs, Channing repeatedly professed a fan’s adoration of Merman, who was apparently oblivious to her own impact on others, particularly her often unintentional humor. She would often ask Carol, “What the hell are ya laughin’ at?”
Long after, when Channing was a hit in Hello, Dolly!, she fell out of Merman’s good graces. At one public function, Carol said, “Hello, Ethel,” to no response. Columnist Radie Harris asked, “Don’t you answer Carol when she says hello?”
“Carol who?” said Merman, while Channing thought, “Maybe she doesn’t like hit shows that she isn’t in?”
“Did you see Hello, Dolly!, Ethel?” asked Radie.
“Yeah, I turned that show down,” which was the first Carol heard of it. (Jerry Herman had written it for Merman, who wasn’t interested in working anymore.)
Another time, Carol was invited to Sardi’s restaurant to help hang someone’s caricature in front of the press and photographers. She and Ethel were to do the joint honors. But the Merm declined. “Nope, no picture. Not wit’ Carol.”
Many years after that, the two would work together in Los Angeles on a Love Boat episode. They re-met in a limousine en route to the studio. Channing found that Merman now bore a striking resemblance to silent-movie star Harry Langdon. Silent, however, she was not. In the backseat, she yelled, “Hi, Carol!” then enthused, “I had the strangest airplane trip out here. A passenger was bleeding from the rectum.”
Carol pondered, “Now that’s the first thing she’s said to me since 1964,” and wondered why Ethel was suddenly so chatty after such a long estrangement. Explanation was ventured by Mary Martin: that Merman’s eventually fatal brain tumor had been growing for nobody knew how long. However, Channing thought Ethel’s behavior had never really changed at all.
In any case, Merman had taken it upon herself to diagnose the bloody passenger. “What the hell are ya laughin’ at? I’m a good nurse,” she informed Channing. “I volunteered to serve at Roosevelt Hospital for every Thursday.”
Carol would write, “Now I ask you, if you were strung up in Roosevelt Hospital, wouldn’t you dread Thursdays? I mean, this woman walks into your room … and screams, ‘Ah’m your nurse! Roll over.’ Wouldn’t you? Dread Thursdays?”
While filming the Love Boat episode, Ethel’s jowls were alleviated by hidden rubber bands that pulled her lower face up and gave her a perpetual—until they were released—smile, which made her less intimidating to coworkers. One day, Merman was installed under a large, heavy hair dryer in order to give her extra curls. (Flouncy hairdos and dresses helped mitigate her innate manliness.) A few minutes later, Ethel barked, “Hey, I’m burnin’ up. Come here, you bitch. Get me outta here.” But since she was still smiling, attention wasn’t immediately paid. The upshot was that Merman’s ears got singed and were red and swollen for about a week.
Channing noticed that Ethel’s once “brilliant, electric mind” couldn’t comprehend script changes—for example, two additional lines. Nor could she remember that Channing’s character’s name was Sylvia. “ ‘Hey! Cybill! Sophie! Shirley! Come here, ya dumb cunt!’ And I would come … just like any of us would once we experienced her onstage.”
In 1983 Merman suffered a massive stroke. Tests revealed a malignant brain tumor, and ten months later she died. Friendly rival Mary Martin stated publicly, “I had to be glad that she was gone, because Merman without performing or without sound would never make Merman happy.” She’d deteriorated fast and terribly, cruelly frustrated by her immobility and a limited ability to communicate—also by the cortisone that swelled her face and the chemotherapy that cost her her hair. Carol Channing recalled,“ I went from Ethel’s [room] straight to my lawyer to make out a living will. No one should suffer like Ethel did.”
AWAY FROM THE LIMELIGHT, Merman’s life had often been anything but a bed of roses. Her only daughter died from a drug overdose that Merman insisted was not a suicide. Her only son’s wife, actress Barbara Colby—best remembered as the prostitute Mary meets in prison in The Mary Tyler Moore Show—was mysteriously shot to death. And Robert Levitt, Merman’s second husband, with whom she had two children, killed himself after eventually remarrying.
Merman asked friends if she wasn’t a terrible mother. While her children were growing up, she strongly favored Robert over Ethel Jr. (Yet how many mothers name their daughter Junior?) Toward the end of her life, when Merman had to fly to Rio de Janeiro, she telephoned Robert to ask if he’d like to fly down with her. Perhaps unwilling to endure a long flight together, he replied instead that he’d be glad to meet her there. “How do you raise a son so he understands?,” she asked. Mother and son had many ups and downs, but were reconciled when Ethel’s terminal illness was discovered.
Career had long come first and had delayed her getting married, which she did for the first time (in 1940) after breaking off with a married family man. For thirty years Merman was the queen of Broadway, ending on a high note with the popular and critical success of Gypsy (1959). Her Broadway career, which she intermittently resumed, ended in 1970 when she took over the lead in Hello, Dolly!, to carry that production to its 2,844th performance, and the “longest-running Broadway musical” title (held for nine months, before Fiddler on the Roof surpassed it). Merman made her first film in 1930 and her last in 1980, yet she never made many and never became a movie star. She was too large, too much for that close-up medium.
“Ethel was never a beauty,” said Ben Bagley, “and had neither the vulnerability required of a lead actress nor the acting gift required for dramas and romances.”
Merman’s self-absorption and dedication to her work were legendary—to the point that her character’s line in Gypsy, “Sure, I know there’s a war on. I read Variety,” was often attributed to her. Via her long string of musicals, the Merm introduced more musical standards, hits, and now-classics than probably any other American singer, starting with “I Got Rhythm” in 1930.
Unwavering belief in her performing style was another Merman trait. In 1956 she was rehearsing Happy Hunting with Argentine heartthrob Fernando Lamas, who shortly interrupted to ask, over her head, if the actress was going to be reading her lines to the audience while he read his lines to her? Offended, the star asserted, “Mr. Lamas, I want you to know that I have been playing scenes this way for twenty-five years on Broadway.”
The macho foreigner replied, “That doesn’t mean you’re right. That just means you’re old.” Another feud had begun. The hit musical included an inevitable kiss between its unsimpatico costars. Lamas eventually did the unthinkable and unprofessional when after The Kiss he walked to the footlights and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The incident became news, and Mike Wallace asked him about it on TV. Lamas described kissing Merman as “somewhere between kissing your uncle and a Sherman tank.”
The infuriated star filed a protest with Actors’ Equity, which reprimanded the Latin lover.
For Gypsy, Ethel’s male lead was the non-singing Jack Klugman, pre-TV stardom. During his audition he’d feared having to compete with the big Merman sound during their duet, “Small World.” Director Jerome Robbins begged Ethel to for once lower the volume, which she did. “She sang so softly, so un-Mermanly,” offered composer Jule Styne, “that her voice cracked.” She normally sang at full throttle, whether in rehearsal or in performance. Once, after rehearsing “Before the Parade Passes By” in the producer’s office for a TV special, she received applause from an office two doors away.
(Due to the fact that she could carry a show on her own and also because she made each show her own, male stars were generally unwilling to costar with her. Her male leads, who weren’t so much her costars as her characters’ love interests, were typically lesser-known, faded, or foreign actors, who also had to be macho enough not to be overpowered by her.)
Although she lived well into the age of microphones, Ethel Merman declined to soften, lower, or alter her singing style. She advised one pro-mike producer who said, “You don’t have to belt,” “That’s not what I’m all about. What I do is me. That’s what I am.”
DESPITE HER NATURAL COMPETITIVENESS, Merman sometimes encouraged young performers, usually male ones. She comforted an actor-dancer in Gypsy who was nervous before opening, “Honey, if they could do what you do, they’d be up here.”
However, with females of all ages there was an invariable one-upmanship. For instance, at the home of some friends, the family grouped for a photo with “Aunt” Ethel, who often doted on their son. But when their little daughter Trudy stood in front of Merman, the star tartly ordered, “Back up, honey. Nobody upstages your Aunt Ethel.”
Give-and-take came hard to Merman. Despite her wealth, she was notorious for giving cheap gifts for birthdays and Christmas. And though occasionally she agreed to perform for charity, she expected first-class treatment all the way In 1977 she and Mary Martin headlined a benefit for the Theatre and Music Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
Both had starred in Hello, Dolly! and were to wear the famous down-the-staircase red gown. When the producer suggested borrowing the gowns from the David Merrick office, Merman told her, “Are you kidding? You’re asking Mary and me to wear secondhand outfits? We’re stars. You’ll have to make new costumes.” In spite of the plea that expenses were being kept to a minimum, Ethel got her way, with $2,500 added to the charity’s budget.
Then the producer explained that to get to rehearsals, “The museum has a taxi service that will be at your disposal.” Merman cried, “A taxi service! Whaddya think we are, a couple of chorus girls? Get us limos.” The limousines upped the budget by a further $2,200.
The ornery Ethel, who told friends Carol Channing was “a vulgar publicity seeker,” also opined that “Dolly was a foolproof part. Look how many gals have done it. Even Betty Grable!”—who had parlayed her Broadway success in Cole Porter’s 1939 musical DuBarry Was a Lady into screen superstardom. Despite having declined to leave the States to play Gypsy in London, Merman was furious when Angela Lansbury played Mama Rose there, to huge box office and critical acclaim. Lansbury said, “Ethel figured Rose was her private property, and I had no right to play the role. She told people that.… Also, I got the Tony [for the role—in 1974, for Gypsy’s first Broadway revival] and she didn’t, although she richly deserved it.”
Merman was more legitimately aggrieved when asked to play a recurring role on Jack Klugman’s TV series The Odd Couple. She’d ordered her agent to “get me some of that dough they’re throwing around at all those second-rate actors out there” in Los Angeles, where she did appear on Batman as villainess Lola Lasagna. Ethel was enraged and stung when she learned, “They want me to play Jack Klugman’s aunt?! Goddamnit, he was my leading man in Gypsy! Why the hell should I play his aunt? It’s insulting.” The producers reconsidered and said she could play Klugman’s older sister. “Absolutely not!” she replied.
Ethel’s coarseness was well known, and though she voted and even campaigned for conservative candidates who made an issue of their “moral values,” she reveled in public shockers. According to biographer Bob Thomas, at one “rather formal reception in a palatial Manhattan residence,” Merman was going up a double staircase while actor-director José Ferrer was going down on the other side. “Hey, Joe!” she suddenly yelled. “Did you hear the one about the Polack who was so dumb he thought Fuck-ing and Suck-king were a couple of Chinese cities?” The embarrassed Oscar winner answered, “No, I hadn’t, Ethel,” and walked on.
She was also partial to risqué greeting cards that dealt an unexpected shock. Like one that read, “Help bring love to the world …” on the front and on the inside “Fuck someone today.” “She collected dirty jokes and nasty stories,” said friend and associate Benay Venuta. “At parties, she was known for telling them … [and] trying to make the hostess blush.… Ethel was received in several of New York’s finest homes—usually once.
“Back in ’72, a mutual acquaintance was at a restaurant party with her. After Ethel exhausted her fund of bodily function jokes, she let someone else talk. So this guy mentions that he’ll be voting for [George] McGovern in the upcoming elections. Ethel was aghast, and couldn’t or wouldn’t keep it to herself. In her book, McGovern’s a ‘Commie,’ so she starts talking up Richard Nixon, actually calling him ‘a fine and noble man.’ Most people already knew not to bring up politics in front of her.”
MERMAN DECRIED MOST OF THE CHANGES sweeping America in the 1960s and ’70s, and many or most of the younger stars. Modern trends and new Broadway plays usually appalled her, but it also hurt that fewer youngsters knew who she was, or who she’d been. Gone were the days when Cole Porter had announced, “I’d rather write for Ethel Merman than anyone else in the world.” Though formerly she’d disapproved of people doing Ethel Merman impressions, toward the end of her life she was glad, even grateful, to hear them.
“There’s practically no great singers today,” she explained in a 1970 interview syndicated in Australia. “You gotta have style and real personality for ’em to imitate you.” About female movie stars, she somewhat hypocritically offered, “Half of ’em are tramps. Nobody acts like a lady anymore.” About Jane Fonda she specifically said, “No one wants to hear an actress’s opinion about politics!” Regarding a young female rock singer, she summed up Grace Slick as “gimmicky but good” (not explaining what the gimmick was), then allowed that she didn’t “get” Janis Joplin (who died later that year):
“That girl has problems.… Bein’ heard ain’t one of ’em; like me, she gives an audience their money’s worth. But when I sing, everything’s comin’ up roses. When she sings, it’s a primal scream, for heaven’s sake!”
Though she took up touring in concerts, Merman became an exile from Broadway. She refused to consider supporting roles, except on the screen, which came calling even less often than before. To a younger generation she became known as the aggressive lady with the booming voice and the very imitable vibrato. “As she got older,” noted conductor Les Brown, “Ethel’s voice remained strong. Yet when she held a note, there was now a vibrato, and it just seemed to get worse, until it became the easiest thing in the world to ‘do’ Ethel Merman just by singing loud and energetically, with an exaggerated, almost comical vibrato.” For many who’d never heard her in her prime, Merman’s voice sounded “funny,” and they questioned her vocal reputation.
Ironically, when she recorded a 1979 album of her hits set to a disco beat, the vibrato was temporarily gone, but The Ethel Merman Disco Album came out at the end of the disco era and appealed to neither her older nor her younger fans, including most gay ones. “I heard nearly every copy that sold, sold to gay men,” said Ben Bagley, “not that many copies sold at all.”
Though not as personally well liked as some other Broadway icons, Ethel Merman shone brighter over the Great White Way than most anyone else. Her career coincided with its years of glory and universal appeal, a time when a Broadway star could be a national star without aid of other media, and when many of the nation’s hit songs came from Broadway shows.
“Talent and charisma made Broadway stars,” said stage actor George Rose. “Not the cosmetic, shallow appeal of Hollywood, but real, in-person qualities. It takes real stamina and natural magnetism to keep an audience captivated and to make them return. When she got on the stage and performed, Ethel Merman crushed any traces of boredom or restlessness.… People might get bored or impatient at a Merman musical, but only when she wasn’t on. When she was, she captured all eyes and ears.
“She grabbed your attention and never let go till after the curtain calls. And she decided when the curtain finally fell.… Nobody else could consistently pull in crowds even to mediocre musicals. Merman was in good ones, bad ones, great ones, and so-so ones. Regardless, you went to see her. Crude or loud, funny, boisterous, she had the true magnetism, that star quality. Ethel Merman just lit up Broadway.” In her heyday, she was Broadway.
“Ethel could see right through people, usually. She could tell if someone wanted to use or exploit her. Except with some of her husbands.… After she saw the movie All About Eve, she kept asking how come a sharp dame like Bette Davis hadn’t seen right through that conniving little Eve?”—friend and co-worker BENAY VENUTA
“The motion picture was It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World—correct me if I’m a ‘Mad’ short. I was the token Englishman; Miss Merman—which I’d imagined was a male mermaid—was the token leading lady. She was merely the most foul-mouthed and loud-mouthed female I have ever had the shock and displeasure of working with.”—TERRY-THOMAS (Stanley Kramer’s 1963 comedy hit also costarred Edie Adams and Dorothy Provine)
“Ethel’s a good egg. I got to see her shy and vulnerable side when she came to see me about Gypsy. I think her bluster was a façade.… She was very eager to please, and always loved applause, always sought that.”—GYPSY ROSE LEE
“A bitch. When Ann Sothern got the screen version of Panama Hattie, I hear Ethel Merman wrote her a poisonous letter.… A lesbian? Not a bit of it! She loathed women.”—ARTHUR TREACHER, who appeared in the 1940 stage musical Panama Hattie
“She liked being one of the boys, but she did wish to be treated like a lady. A great gal. Great voice. On a clear day you could probably hear Merman on Catalina [Island].”—BING CROSBY
“Ethel played my wife in There’s No Business Like Show Business. (The film costarred Marilyn Monroe.) Now, if you don’t think playing Ethel Merman’s husband is acting, let me tell you.… She was about six or seven years older than me, but the emotional, temperamental difference was wider than that.… A very challenging assignment.”—DAN DAILEY
“Playing a love scene with her [in the film of Call Me Madam] was like acting opposite a refrigerator. I felt I was selling a product, with rather chilly resistance from the product.”—GEORGE SANDERS
“She treated her supporting cast like dirt. That’s not what I call the spirit of show business. So when she sings that song and gets to the line about ‘There’s no people like show people,’ I just have to laugh, or try to.”—BETTY GRABLE, who before her screen superstardom worked with Merman onstage
“If you talked to her, it took a lot of courage. And if she answered you, it was always like answering the group—she would include everyone. It was always like she was being interviewed. She never said anything about my performance, but she would give me a few taps on the shoulder before I was ready to go on—and that was acceptance.”—SAL VITELLA, who was in the touring company of Call Me Madam
“I remember once, onstage, we were in the middle of the ‘Mr. Goldstone’ scene, and a couple of stagehands were listening to a ball game on the radio and you could hear it all onstage. And suddenly Merman said, ‘Excuse me.’ And she goes off through the set and yells, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Then she comes back onstage and finishes the scene. She wasn’t about to put up with that.”—MERLE LOUISE, who played Dainty June in Gypsy
“When she found out I’d offered her role [as a madam in The Art of Love] to Mae West first, Ethel stopped talking to me. She said she wouldn’t consider being in any more of my pictures. I sent word that I hadn’t considered her for any more of my pictures. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, Merman ran the spectrum of emotions from A to B—or should I say from A to Me.”—producer ROSS HUNTER
“Working with her [on screen], I learned she’s a big mouth, and I refer not solely to her singing. I’d really rather not discuss her.”—movie star RAY MILLAND
“She was not a top-drawer actress … but she wasn’t given the chance until Gypsy. Singing and strutting is what she did best. In Gypsy she got to show some range, at long last. It could have been the start of a new … era for her. But then she decided to retire.”—Gypsy director-choreographer JEROME ROBBINS
“I do not at this time recollect anything of printable value about working with her.”—ALICE FAYE, leading lady of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, a 1938 film whose title song was one of Merman’s hits
“I think the movies we made together were good for Ethel Merman’s screen career, but she was better for her Broadway career, if you catch my drift.”—EDDIE CANTOR
“We were both in Girl Crazy, [but] she stood out. She had a clarion voice and a heck of a song [“I Got Rhythm”]. I went to Hollywood soon after, and I guess Ethel made the most of her talent on Broadway.”—GINGER ROGERS
“She was tough, but in a way she had to be. She could look at a row of balcony lights in a dress rehearsal and tell you the third one on the right should be pink and not yellow—and the guy would say, ‘Oh, shit, you’re right!’ A lot of women in the theater couldn’t do that.” (Nor a lot of men.)—stage and TV star JERRY ORBACH, who worked with Merman in the Lincoln Center revival of Annie Get Your Gun
“What a commotion that woman liked to make! Center of attention or nothing. What nowadays they call a drama queen. Which is funny, because she always struck me as rather a drag-queen type, even when she was younger.… She tried to irritate me by using a Spanish accent when we did a movie at Fox [Happy Landing, 1938]. A regular bigot! She never got to me, because I’m just as American as I am Cuban. Hell, I went to high school in New Jersey!”—CESAR ROMERO
“I think that like most eccentric people, Miss Merman thought all the people around her were strange. She strived to give the impression of being terribly well adjusted, but I’m sure psychotherapy could have helped her.”—VIVIAN VANCE (the I Love Lucy costar, who worked extensively onstage before turning to TV, was a strong advocate of psychiatry)
“She played Dolly Levi—Dolly lost. It was pure showbiz, purely commercial. She wasn’t Dolly up there, she was Ethel Merman in Dolly clothes.… The audiences came, of course; they came to see the Ethel Merman version. But it wasn’t Hello, Dolly! anymore; it was her show.… Channing or Streisand, they were part of a cast, trying to act out a character. But with Ethel Merman—and not just her fault, with the audience, she was such an institution—the rest of us felt like just her chorus boys or her chorus line.”—DANNY LOCKIN, who costarred as Barnaby Tucker in both the stage and film versions
“The explosion in Forty-Fourth Street last evening was nothing to be alarmed by. It was merely Ethel Merman returning to the New York theater.”—BROOKS ATKINSON’S typical welcome-back-Ethel review in the New York Times, on December 7, 1956
“Ethel Merman was New York’s musical version of the Statue of Liberty. She was that big, that famous, that awesome—really a case of they don’t make them that way anymore.”—MICHAEL BENNETT
“A monument is what the Merm was, while she was on the stage. You don’t judge or measure a monument in moral or relative terms. There was nobody else like her. Back then, already people knew and appreciated that fact.”—stage star BURGESS MEREDITH, who costarred with Merman in an episode of TV’s Batman