[6] On Friday nights, the Zimmermann family took the subway into Manhattan to see the vaudeville show at the Palace Theatre, where Merman saw Blossom Seeley, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, and Nora Bayes.

[8] She eventually was made personal secretary to company president Caleb Bragg, whose frequent lengthy absences from the office to race automobiles allowed her to catch up on the sleep she had lost the previous night when she was out late performing at private parties.

[9] During a two-week engagement at a club in midtown Manhattan called Little Russia, Merman met agent Lou Irwin, who arranged for her to audition for Archie Mayo, a film director under contract at Warner Bros.

[10] While performing on the prestigious Keith Circuit, Merman was signed to replace Ruth Etting in the Paramount film Follow the Leader (1930), starring Ed Wynn and Ginger Rogers.

During the run, theater producer Vinton Freedley saw her perform and invited her to audition for the role of San Francisco café singer Kate Fothergill in the new George and Ira Gershwin musical Girl Crazy.

Upon hearing her sing "I Got Rhythm", the Gershwins immediately cast her, and Merman began balancing daytime rehearsals with her matinee and evening performance schedule at the Palace.

[13] The New York Times noted Merman sang "with dash, authority, good voice and just the right knowing style", and The New Yorker called her "imitative of no one.

During the run of Girl Crazy, Paramount signed Merman to appear in a series of 10 short musical films, most of which allowed her to sing both a rousing number and a ballad.

Producer Buddy DeSylva, who also had written the book and lyrics, was certain it could be reworked into a success, and with a revamped script and additional songs by Vincent Youmans,[16] it opened with the new title Take a Chance on November 26 at the 42nd Street Apollo Theatre, where it ran for 243 performances.

Following the Broadway run, she agreed to join the show on the road, but shortly after the Chicago opening, she claimed the chlorine in the city's water supply was irritating her throat, and returned to Manhattan.

Despite working with a cast including Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard, and Burns and Allen, under the direction of Academy Award-winning director Norman Taurog, Merman was unhappy with the experience, and she was dismayed to discover one of her musical numbers had been cut when she attended the New York opening with her family and friends.

It opened on November 21, 1934, at the Alvin Theatre,[19] and the New York Post called Merman "vivacious and ingratiating in her comedy moments, and the embodiment of poise and technical adroitness" when singing "as only she knows how to do."

"[21] Merman returned to Broadway for another Porter musical, but despite the presence of Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope in the cast, Red, Hot and Blue closed after less than six months.

In 1944, she was set to star as the title character in the musical play Sadie Thompson with a score by Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz, directed and produced by Rouben Mamoulian.

[37] In August 1945, while in the hospital recovering from the Caesarean birth of her second child, Merman was visited by Dorothy Fields, who proposed she star as Annie Oakley in a musical her brother Herbert and she were writing with Jerome Kern.

Merman accepted, but in November, Kern suffered a stroke while in New York City visiting Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (the producers of the show) and died a few days later.

Rodgers and Hammerstein invited Irving Berlin to replace Kern,[38] and the result was Annie Get Your Gun, which opened on May 16, 1946, at the Imperial Theatre, where it ran for nearly three years and 1,147 performances.

[40] Merman lost her role in the film version to Judy Garland (who eventually was replaced by Betty Hutton), but starred in a Broadway revival two decades later at Lincoln Center alongside Bruce Yarnell, who was cast as Frank E. Butler, Annie Oakley's husband and manager.

Merman returned to Broadway at the behest of her third husband, Continental Airlines executive Robert Six, who was upset she had chosen to become a housewife in Colorado following their wedding in 1953.

He urged her to accept the lead in Happy Hunting, with a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (who had written Call Me Madam) and a score by Harold Karr and Matt Dubey.

Merman acquiesced to her husband's demands, although she clashed with the composers from the start and soon was at odds with co-star Fernando Lamas and his wife Arlene Dahl, who frequently attended rehearsals.

Several months into the run, she insisted that two of her least-favorite numbers be replaced by songs written by her friend Roger Edens, who, because of his exclusive contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, credited them to Kay Thompson.

She lost the Tony Award to Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing, and the show closed after 412 performances, with Merman happy to see what she considered "a dreary obligation" come to an end.

Despite the acclaim, Merman lost the Tony Award to her close friend Mary Martin in The Sound of Music, and jokingly quipped "How are you going to buck a nun?"

Russell's husband, theater producer Frederick Brisson (whom Merman later called "the lizard of Roz"),[43] had sold the screen rights to the Leonard Spigelgass play A Majority of One to Warner Bros. on the condition that his wife would star in both films.

Because Russell was still a major box-office draw with the success of Auntie Mame a few years earlier, and Merman having never established herself as a popular screen presence, the studio agreed to Brisson's terms.

On Merman's opening night, her performance was continually brought to a halt by prolonged standing ovations, and the critics unanimously heralded her return to the New York stage.

She appeared in several episodes of The Love Boat (playing Gopher's mother), guest-starred on a CBS tribute to George Gershwin, did a summer concert tour with Carroll O'Connor, played a two-week engagement at the London Palladium, performed with Mary Martin in a concert benefiting the theater and museum collection of the Museum of the City of New York, and frequently appeared as a soloist with symphony orchestras.

Brooks Atkinson summed up her talent:[51] She makes a song seem like a spontaneous expression of her personality, which may be regarded as the ultimate skill in the art of singing songs.Merman was married and divorced four times.

[76] The New York Times reported that she underwent brain surgery to have the tumor removed, but it was inoperable and her condition was deemed terminal (doctors gave Merman eight and a half months to live).