Getting a kick

One frequently reads of chaps for whom their epiphany was the first sight and sound of Julie Andrews. Mine happened a good few years earlier, lying bed-bound with polio, just after the war. Someone had sent my mother a boxed set of the Broadway cast of Annie Get Your Gun. Ethel Merman’s flamboyant voice belted from the radiogram. I was entranced, learning every note and word perfectly. From then on all I ever wanted was to be Ethel. Reading this book, which is really a re-hash of Merman’s two autobiographies, reminds me of my childhood ambition, tempered with a certain relief that I did not achieve that particular goal.

Miss Merman was indeed the biggest star of the American musical theatre for over 60 years. The greatest song-writers dreamed of her voice, with its perfect pitch, its hear-it-in-the-gods carrying-power, its crystalline diction and unique vibrato, performing their work. All Tin-Pan Alley, from Irving Berlin via the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim, wrote vehicles especially for Ethel, the latter giving her, in Gypsy, an iconic number, ‘Everything’s coming up Roses’.