She Had Rhythm and Was the Top

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Ethel Merman: 1908-1984

From start to finish, her life was Broadway legend. She believed in herself so fiercely that as an unknown she pushed her way into a job as a chorus girl in George White's celebrated Scandals.

Then she turned it down, saying she would rather go back to singing at clambakes than be just another face on "the line." She knew she had something special, and soon enough the whole world knew it too. From the opening night of the 1930 George Gershwin musical Girl Crazy, when Ethel Merman, 21, trumpeted out I Got Rhythm--and held a high C for 16 bars--the roar of the crowd was hers forever. When she died last week, after a career that included 14 musicals, and not one singing lesson, Broadway's theaters dimmed their lights for a minute at curtain time. As Merman once said: "Broadway has been very good to me--but then, I've been very good to Broadway."

Her brassy and absolutely clear singing inspired metaphors like "a chorus of taxi horns," but words never quite captured its unique qualities. Her trademark was the seemingly effortless ability to sustain a note so long that the orchestra could play phrase after phrase of the melody. Said the Merm: "I take a breath when I have to." What she called her "take-charge" manner was so unlike the spun sugar of other musical-comedy performers that composers shaped songs for her. Among the standards that still call her voice to memory are You're the Top from Anything Goes (1934), There's No Business Like Show Business from Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Everything's Coming Up Roses from Gypsy (1959), which became her anthem.

Born Ethel Agnes Zimmermann, she trained as a stenographer, and long after becoming a star prided herself that she could still take Pitman shorthand. But she planned to be a singer. Early in life she dropped the first syllable and final letter of her name with a typical explanation:

"If you put Zimmermann up in lights, you'd die from the heat." She always had nerve: before agreeing to appear in Cole Porter's Anything Goes, she insisted that the composer play the score for her and her parents--and then rejected two songs.

Repeatedly she refused to accept last-minute changes in scripts. To one importunate composer she snapped: "Call me Miss Birds Eye. It's frozen." Yet she could ad-lib with the best. During a performance of Annie Get Your Gun, a prop rifle misfired but, on cue, a bird fell from the rafters. Without missing a beat, Merman held up the dead bird and remarked, "What do you know? Apoplexy!"

She attained her goal to "make as much money as I can" (all but two of her shows earned a profit), and at one point lived in a ten-room New York City duplex with a quarter-acre terrace and a waterfall. But her four marriages all ended in divorce; the last, to Actor Ernest Borgnine, in 1964, lasted 38 days. One of her two children, Ethel II, died of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates in 1967. Although she made notable TV shows, especially with Broadway Star Mary Martin, Merman had only modest success in the movies, where her outsize performances sometimes seemed unreal. In perhaps the worst career setback, her role in the film of Gypsy went to Rosalind Russell.

Although Merman retired from Broadway in 1970, after playing the title role in Hello, Dolly, she continued to perform in concerts. Last year she underwent surgery for a brain tumor. Her philosophy to the end: "Always give them the old fire, even when you feel like a squashed cake of ice." --By William A. Henry III

DIED. Tom Keating, 66, ebullient, white-bearded master art forger; of a heart attack; in Colchester, England. A modest art restorer, Keating became the center of a scandal in 1976 when the London Times discovered that he had faked and sold at least 13 works, purportedly by Samuel Palmer (1805-81), the English painter. Keating admitted that he had churned out about 2,500 imitation masterpieces in 25 years--at prices as high as $35,000--including paintings in the style of Degas, Renoir, Turner and Constable. Keating's case went to trial in 1979, but charges were dropped after doctors said he was too ill to testify.

DIED. Julio Cortazar, 69, avant-garde Argentine writer (best-known novel: Hopscotch) and political activist, who supported the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions; of a heart attack; in Paris. Cortazar's subtle humor and sinister sense of fantasy, combined with the themes of identity and reincarnation, moved a fellow novelist to hail him as "one of the greatest creators of Latin American literature."

DIED. Gjon Mili, 79, innovative LIFE photographer whose use of the high-speed electronic flash and multiple-exposure prints to capture movement too fast to be seen by the naked eye influenced two generations of photojournalists; of pneumonia; in Stamford, Conn. "Time could truly be made to stand still," Mili once said. "Texture could be retained despite sudden, violent movement." During his 45-year association with LIFE, the Albanian-born Mili did just that in thousands of stop-action pictures, among them one of Pablo Picasso using a penlight in his darkened studio to carve a drawing out of thin air.

DIED. Anna Anderson Manahan, 82, who spent 62 years trying to prove that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and only survivor of the 1918 execution of the Russian imperial family at Ekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk); of pneumonia; in Charlottesville, Va. Contending that she survived the slaughter by hiding behind one of her dead sisters, "Anastasia" was rejected as an impostor by Romanov relatives. She married Historian John E. Manahan in 1968. Her life became the subject of many books and was the basis of the movie Anastasia.

DIED. Jim ("Grandpa") McCoy, 99, patriarch of the Kentucky McCoys and the last survivor of the violent 19th century feud with the West Virginia Hatfields that took 30 to 50 lives over 30 years; of congestive heart failure; in Liberty, Ky. Although bloodshed between the rural Appalachian clans ceased long ago, it was not until May 1976 that former Coal Miner McCoy and the late Willis Hatfield, then 88, shook hands to end America's most famous misunderstanding, the origins of which are unknown. Last week, to the strains of Amazing Grace, the McCoys gathered to pay their last respects--at the Hatfield Funeral Chapel in Toler, Ky.