Robert Merrill.(Obituaries)(Obituary)

Brooklyn, New York, June 4, 1917--New Rochelle, New York, October 23, 2004

It's not only the opera world that mourns the passing of Robert Merrill. He was a citizen of many worlds, including those of baseball, radio, television and the Borscht Circuit. Because of the generous way he treated his colleagues and shared his talent with the public, he earned a place in everyone's long-term memory. Merrill expressed himself easily, whether in music or in company, and his exuberant jokes made light of a life of serious work. He was born Moishe Miller in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish parents, Abe and Lotza Millstein, who took the name Miller when they came to America. Luck gave him a mother who had longed to sing professionally and projected all her unfulfilled ambition in his direction. At first he resisted: classical music would brand him as a sissy among his schoolmates. "How was I to know," he wrote much later in Between Acts (McGraw-Hill 1976, with Robert Saffron), "that the wretched insecurities of my childhood were basic training for the even wilder insecurities of show business?" As a boy, he was overweight and suffered from a stammer--which, he noticed, disappeared when he sang. He did discover a certain aptitude for baseball, which he loved. "In my later teens, I managed to play a lot of sandlot ball ... got $10 a game, which made me a semipro." Dreams of a baseball career were edged aside by his growing admiration for Bing Crosby and

Russ Columbo. The Caruso records he heard at home had done their work too, and his mother had given him basic vocal training. For a while, using the name Merrill Miller, he sang three times a week on station WFOX for no pay. He got a job pushing a Garment District handcart for $8 a week. Passing the Met daily, he overheard live opera singers for the first time, and this moved him to find a teacher--a cantor who nearly wrecked his voice by making him hit high Cs, then a luckier strike in Samuel Margolis, who had a studio in the Old Met building.

Margolis's new pupil had an innate sense of smooth bel canto line. While taking lessons, young Merrill finally got to attend a real opera performance, Il Trovatore, with Martinelli, Bonelli and Rethberg. Armed with the first aria he learned, Figaro's "Largo al factotum," from Il Barbiere di Siviglia, he entered Major Bowes's Amateur Hour and earned a place on a touring group of winners.

Medically unable to qualify for military service in World War II, he sang "The Star Spangled Banner" to introduce newsreels. He found work in Yiddish theater variety shows and in the Catskills, and he worked with the Three Stooges and Red Skelton. "Now that I had worked with several masters of comedy," he quipped, he was ready to audition with "Largo al factotum" for the Met's Auditions of the Air--only to flunk the preliminaries.

Fortune smiled, however, when he was chosen for NBC's Salute to America broadcast series and Radio City Music Hall. In 1944, Mark Warnow, conductor of Your Hit Parade, renamed him Robert Merrill. This was also the ...