In the roaring, topsy-turvy decades between the First and Second World Wars, the name Marilyn and the initials MM signified only one luminary - Marilyn Miller. She was Broadway's premiere musical star, the prized creation of the Great Glorifier, Florenz Ziegfeld, the star of Hollywood extravaganzas, and America's adored, delicately beautiful angel. Warren G. Harris's fascinating biography of this largely forgotten first Marilyn re-creates a gaudy and glorious time in the American theater. It is peopled with names now legendary: Sigmund Romberg, Mary Pickford, Billie Burke, Clifton Webb, Eddie Cantor, Jerome Kern, Fred Astaire, Jack Warner, W. C. Fields, Fannie Brice, Moss Hart, and many others. Revue after dazzling revue was created for her, first by Lee Schubert, who made her a start when she was not yet sixteen, and the by Ziegfeld, who capitalized on her loveliness and her talent as a dancer, singer, and charmer.^

Her appearances on stage and off, her love life (actual and reputed), her clothes, her style, her marriages, her confrontations with Ziegfeld and others, were the stuff of daily news stories and breathless gossip. Behind the dazzlement lay a different story. The youngest child of a classic stage mother and a tyrannical stepfather who managed the family vaudeville troupe, Marilyn began performing when she was five, and spent her childhood on small-town stages across America and Europe. Stardom and wealth had their glories, but she worked brutally hard and her personal life was less than joyous. Her first husband was killed a year after their marriage. Married next to Jack Pickfair, she grew weary of his drinking. Her Hollywood career, briefly glorious, collapsed. Her third marriage to a man much younger than she brought no happiness; and she was haunted by the spectre of aging, of losing the beauty that was her hallmark. It did not happen; she was only thirty-seven when she died.^

No one who ever saw her, whether on stage in such productions as the Ziegfeld Follies, Sally, Sunny, Rosalie, and As Thousands Cheer, or in her films, ever forgot her ethereal loveliness. And for those who missed her, this biography restores to memory the star of a very special era in America's theatrical history. -- from dust jacket.