Remembering Mary Martin, the girl who could fly

It's a given that performers are driven, to at least some extent, by a need be recognized. But they're not all drawn to the spotlight by a lack of attention, as we're reminded in David Kaufman's probing, compassionate, revelatory new biography, Some Enchanted Evenings: The Glittering Life and Times of Mary Martin (St. Martin's Press, 420 pp., * * * ½ out of four stars).

Martin, who during musical theater's Golden Age became one of Broadway's and the USA's biggest stars — reaching her greatest heights, probably, as the boy hero of Peter Pan — was a child of privilege in every sense of the word. Born in Weatherford, Texas, in 1913, to well-off parents who adored her, she was a happy kid and a popular teenager, singing at open houses during a stint at finishing school.

That stage was, alas, not big enough. After becoming a mom at 17 (following a probable early marriage, about which details are murky), Martin essentially handed her young son — future Dallas star Larry Hagman — off to her mother, so she could study dance and pursue a career in Hollywood. But it was New York that truly embraced Martin's wholesome but quirky radiance, which Helen Hayes summed up thus: "You cannot analyze Mary Martin's charm any more than you can analyze sunshine."

Kaufman's expansive account is rife with quotes from and anecdotes about such luminaries, capturing what the author describes as "a glorious empire at the height of its cultural splendor." Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who secured Martin's legend with South Pacific and The Sound of Music (in which Martin introduced the role of Maria Von Trapp) are there, as are Jerome Robbins, Yul Brynner, David Merrick and Ethel Merman, the larger-than-life leading lady who emerged as both Martin's brassy foil and admirer.

But Kaufman's most intriguing insights concern Martin's elusive personal life, inextricably linked to her professional one.  After leaving Hagman's father and the notion of any traditional domestic life behind, Martin joined forces with former studio story editor Richard Halliday, "who would serve," the author writes, "as (Martin's) father, her husband, her best friend, her gay/straight 'cover,' and, both literally and figuratively, her manager."

Halliday, who fathered Martin's other child (a daughter, Heller), remained Martin's spouse, protector and enforcer until his death in 1973, agitating colleagues but sustaining her pristine reputation. His homosexuality — and Martin's own rumored bisexuality (approached in a forthright but sensitive fashion) — are less in focus than the fascinating arrangement they informed, in which Martin was able to keep "her libidinal energies...preserved for her career, her mission in life."

Kaufman's rich portrait doesn't reduce his subject's story to one of sublimation, though. His Martin suffers palpably, enduring trials from Hagman's hostile relationship with Halliday to a nearly debilitating car accident late in life. (She died in 1990, at age 76.) Her rare gift was to sustain the illusion of buoyancy, and to lift fans up with her, to where she remains in memories.