Marilyn Miller

Marilyn Miller (September 1, 1898 – April 7, 1936) was one of the most popular Broadway musical stars of the 1920s and early 1930s. She was an accomplished tap dancer, singer and actress, and it was the combination of these talents that endeared her to audiences. On stage she usually played rags-to-riches Cinderella characters who lived happily ever after. Her enormous popularity and famed image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, frequent illness, and ultimately her sudden death due to complications of nasal surgery at age 37.

Miller was born Mary Ellen Reynolds in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest daughter of Edwin D. Reynolds, a telephone lineman, and his first wife, the former Ada Lynn Thompson. The tiny, delicate-featured blonde was only four years old when, as "Mademoiselle Sugarlump," she debuted at Lakeside Park in Dayton, Ohio as a member of her family's vaudeville act, the Columbian Trio, which then included her stepfather, Oscar Caro Miller, and two older sisters, Ruth and Claire. They were renamed the Five Columbians after she and her mother joined the routine. From their home base in Findlay, Ohio, they toured the Midwest and Europe in variety for ten years, skirting the child labor authorities, before Lee Shubert discovered her at the Lotus Club in London in 1914.

Miller appeared for the Shuberts in the 1914 and 1915 editions of The Passing Show, a Broadway revue at the Winter Garden Theatre, as well as in The Show of Wonders (1916) and Fancy Free (1918). But it was Florenz Ziegfeld who made her a star after she performed in his Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, with music by Irving Berlin. Sharing billing with Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers and W. C. Fields, she brought the house down with her impersonation of Ziegfeld's wife, Billie Burke, in a number entitled Mine Was a Marriage of Convenience.

Miller followed as a headliner in the Follies of 1919, dancing to Berlin's "Mandy", and reputedly became Ziegfeld's mistress, though this was never proven. She attained legendary status in the Ziegfeld production Sally (1920) with music by Jerome Kern, especially for her performance of Kern's "Look for the Silver Lining". The musical, about a dishwasher who joins the Follies and marries a millionaire, ran 570 performances at the New Amsterdam. In 1921, the still-obscure Dorothy Parker memorialized her performance in verse:

From the alley's gloom and chill / Up to fame danced Sally. / Which was nice for her, but still / Rough upon the alley. / How it must regret her wiles. / All her ways and glances. / Now the theatre owns her smiles, / Sallies, songs, and dances. ...

After a rift with Ziegfeld, Miller signed with rival producer Charles Dillingham and starred as Peter Pan in a 1924 Broadway revival, then as a circus queen in Sunny (1925), with music by Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. A box-office smash, it featured the classic "Who?", and made her the highest paid star on Broadway. In 1928, after reuniting with Ziegfeld, she starred in his production of the successful George Gershwin musical Rosalie, then in Smiles (1930) with Fred Astaire, a rare Ziegfeld box office failure.

Miller's movie career was short-lived and less successful than her stage career. She made only three films: adaptations of Sally (1929); and Sunny (1930); and Her Majesty Love (1931), with W. C. Fields. Her last Broadway show, marking a major comeback, was the innovative 1933-34 Irving Berlin/Moss Hart musical, As Thousands Cheer, in which she appeared in the production number, "Easter Parade".

Miller's appearance in As Thousands Cheer was her last professional outing. She quit the show after her boyfriend and future husband Chester O'Brien – a chorus dancer who served as the production's second assistant stage manager – was fired for allowing the Woolworth department store heir Jimmy Donahue to sneak onstage during a scene in which she was impersonating his cousin, the heiress Barbara Hutton. After her death, this incident gave Irving Berlin the inspiration for a film musical, On the Avenue, for which he received a script credit in addition to writing the songs.

At the time of her death, Miller was described as being in retirement.

Name

Miller's last name was taken from her stepfather, Oscar Caro Miller, while her first name was a combination and adaptation of her birth name, Mary, and her mother's middle name, Lynn. Initially calling herself Marilynn, she would drop one of the "n"s, at the urging of Florenz Ziegfeld.

Census records reveal perhaps a half a dozen "Marilyn"s in the United States in 1900; by the 1930s, following Miller's stardom, it was the 16th most common first name among American females.

In the late 1940s, Norma Jeane Baker (née Mortenson) changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, at the urging of Ben Lyon, a one-time actor turned casting director at 20th Century Fox, who said she reminded him of Miller (he had played her love interest in Her Majesty, Love). Monroe would 'become' Marilyn Miller herself when she married the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956.

Engagements and marriages

Jack Pickford and Marilyn Miller

Miller was married to:

• Frank Carter, an actor and acrobatic dancer, whom she married on May 24, 1919 at the Church of the Ascension in New York City. He was killed in a car accident in Cumberland, Maryland, on May 9, 1920. He was portrayed by Gordon MacRae in the Miller biopic Look for the Silver Lining and by Walter Willison in Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women.
• Jack Pickford, an actor and the brother of film star Mary Pickford, and also a drug and alcohol abuser. They were married in 1922, separated in 1926, and divorced in Versailles, France, in November 1927. She had attempted to secure a divorce in the Paris courts in the spring of 1927, but her published comments about how easy it would be to end her marriage in France "stirred the ire of the Paris Tribunal with the result that the court would take no action on Miss Miller's petition". She filed for divorce the following July in the nearby city of Versailles, whose tribunal eventually ended the marriage.
• Jack Donohue, a dancer who went on to become a successful director and choreographer in theater, films, and television. He should not be confused with Jack Donahue, who appeared with Miller in Sunny and Rosalie.
• Chester O'Brien, a chorus dancer, whom Miller married on October 4, 1934, in Harrison, New York. Several years older than him, she reportedly spent more than $56,000 on him during their brief time together. He, who later was known professionally as Chet O'Brien, went on to become a stage manager for such Broadway productions as Brigadoon and Finian's Rainbow. He also was the stage manager and an actor on Sesame Street from the premier of the show in 1969 until 1992.

In 1930, Miller was briefly engaged to Michael Farmer, who later became a husband of Gloria Swanson. In 1932, she announced her intention to marry Don Alvarado, but the wedding did not take place.

Illnesses, alcoholism, and death

The mausoleum of Marilyn Miller in Woodlawn Cemetery

Miller had a long history of sinus infections, and her health was compromised by an increasing dependency on alcohol. According to reports shortly before her death, she entered a New York hospital in early March 1936 in order to recover from a nervous breakdown. Three weeks later, however, she developed a toxic condition and died from complications following surgery on her nasal passages at age 37 in New York City on the morning of April 7, 1936 and was given a funeral at Saint Bartholomew Church on Park Avenue which drew 2,500 people, including former mayor Jimmy Walker, Beatrice Lillie, and Billie Burke.

The procession led to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where Miller was buried alongside her first husband, Frank Carter, in a mausoleum she had constructed to house his remains.

A statue of Miller, in the title role of Sunny, can still be seen atop the former I. Miller (no relation) Shoe Company Building at 1552 Broadway, also addressed as 167 West 46th Street, in Times Square, Manhattan. It is one of four sculpted by Alexander Stirling Calder between 1927 and 1929 for the building's facade, representing famous theatrical professionals of the time. In 2013, after years of neglect, the building and statues were restored.

In the only published biography of Miller, author Warren G. Harris called her "Ziegfeld's most dazzling star" and the premier musical comedy star of the Jazz Age. "She had rivals who may have been better dancers, singers, actresses, or mimics, but no one individual could equal her when it came to combining all those talents."

One of the poems from Patti Smith's 1972 book Seventh Heaven is called "Marilyn Miller".

Film biographies

In 1949, a sanitized biopic, appropriately titled Look for the Silver Lining, starred June Haver as Miller. She was also portrayed by Judy Garland in Till the Clouds Roll By, MGM's biopic of Jerome Kern. In 1978 the story of her tempestuous relationship with Ziegfeld was portrayed in the Emmy winning made for TV biopic Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women, starring Pamela Peadin as her, Paul Shenar as him, and Walter Willison as Frank Carter. Rare film footage of her in the 1929 film version of Sally can be seen in the 2004 PBS documentary series Broadway, the American Musical.

• Sally (1929)
• Sunny (1930)
• Her Majesty, Love (1931)

All three films survive in some form, but Sally, filmed entirely in two-color Technicolor, now exists only in black-and-white except for one fragment – most of the "Wild Rose" musical number – that has survived from an original Technicolor print.