Review of "Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa…and Me" by Tony Cointreau

Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)

Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa…and Me is Tony Cointreau’s memoir of how a frightened, perfection-obsessed child of privilege grows into a man who spends twelve years caring for destitute men dying of AIDS and singing for Mother Teresa’s poor in Calcutta. Along the way, he is guided by two extraordinary “other mothers” in his life: Broadway legend Ethel Merman, with her brassy humor, fierce loyalty, and quiet hospital volunteering, and Mother Teresa, whose radical simplicity and devotion to the poorest of the poor call him into a life of humble, hands on service.

In other words, this is not your average celebrity memoir. This is the story of a man whose life zigzags from a French liqueur dynasty and Park Avenue glamour to mopping floors in an AIDS hospice and singing in a Calcutta dying room on Mother Teresa’s last Easter. It sounds improbable. On the page, it feels inevitable.

We follow Tony from a childhood in which love seems to hinge on being perfect - the right clothes, the right manners, the right performance - into an adulthood in which he finally learns that the most important thing he can offer is not perfection at all but presence.

We get three big forces shaping that journey: his glamorous and troubled friend Lee Lehman; his tough, funny, soft-hearted “Mom” Ethel Merman; and his tiny, practical, laser focused “Mother” Teresa. Each fills a gap his own family left raw and empty. Each pushes him toward a different understanding of what love looks like.

Where this book shines brightest is in the way it makes that emotional evolution feel real. Tony is not telling us, “I was hurt, then I went to Calcutta and became saintly.” He lets us sit with him in the messy middle.

We see him as a child absorbing his mother’s conditional affection and his teacher’s abuse, coming away with the conviction that any wrong move will cause disaster. We see how that morphs into panic attacks, obsessive cleanliness, a need to control his environment, and a deep, secret shame around being gay in a hostile era. He is painfully honest about all of this, and that honesty gives the later spiritual growth its weight.

The “other mothers” structure is an interesting angle. Lee introduces him to a world of chateaux, private jets, museum-quality art, and also addiction, volatility, and pain. Love here is glamorous but fragile. Ethel Merman, in contrast, is a force of nature. Onstage she can blow the roof off as Mama Rose. Offstage she is blunt, hilarious, and genuinely maternal. She calls him, teases him, feeds him, and quietly models service by showing up at the hospital week after week to sit with the sick. You can see the line from those days at Roosevelt Hospital to his years at Gift of Love.

Maybe the most fascinating thread in the book is the clash of stories about Ethel Merman herself. Was she the warm, loyal, quietly compassionate “Mom” Tony knew, or the rude, abrasive, pushy diva so many outsiders remember?

Cointreau lets both versions exist in the same body, which is what makes her so compelling on the page. We get the booming voice and the no nonsense zingers, the woman who could mow down a producer with a single line, and who did not sugarcoat her opinions for anyone. At the same time, we see the Ethel who called Tony regularly just to check on him, who opened her home and her fridge to him, who sat at hospital bedsides holding the hands of total strangers. The public stories tend to freeze her as the brass lunged battle axe of Broadway. Tony lets us see a mother figure who could bark at you in one breath and then quietly spend hours comforting the sick in the next.

Reading this, we really feel how unfair and incomplete (and sometimes misogynistic) those one note diva stories are. Yes, she could be blunt. Yes, she could steamroll a room when she felt like it. However, she also showed this frightened, perfection haunted young man a version of love that was loud, steady, funny, and always there when he needed it. In a way, the book becomes Cointreau’s act of justice for her. He does not deny the rough edges. He simply insists that the world remember the tenderness and loyalty that rarely made it into the gossip columns.

Then Mother Teresa enters like the final piece of the puzzle. She is not the glowing statue from postcards. She is a tiny woman worried about money, about room rates, about food for the poor, quick to joke about her own face in a photograph, and quicker to insist she is a “pencil” and not the hand that writes. Her spirituality is all practicality. Are the poor fed, clothed, comforted. Are they loved. Her presence strips away the last of Tony’s illusions about what “important” work is.

The book is also full of scenes that lodge in your brain:

We remember him dressed too brightly on his first day at Gift of Love, scalding his arms in bleach water as he tries to keep up with the sisters and quietly panics that he has already messed up the medications. We remember him kneeling on hardwood stairs, scrubbing each step as if he can scrub away his fear of not being enough.

We remember the banter and gallows humor of “my kids” in the hospice, men who have every reason to despair but still crack jokes about how they got sick or what their families will say. There is one who wants to die and says so bluntly, and one who has never really been loved and has no idea how to receive it, and Tony sits with both, not trying to force a neat Hallmark ending.

We remember the balcony conversations with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, half logistics, half theology. She asks him what his room costs. She calculates how many poor people she could feed for that rate. She gently turns his attention again and again to Christ in “the poorest of the poor.”

And of course we remember that Easter morning at the Home for the Dying, with bright yellow dresses, simple decorations, and music rising over a room full of people who may not live to see another holiday. It is the sort of scene you can tell will never leave him, and it is unlikely to leave the reader either.

The writing itself is clean and approachable. Tony does not bury you in theological jargon or technical show business language. He explains enough that you always know where you are - boarding school, a French chateau, Park Avenue, Calcutta, a hospice kitchen - but he mostly stays focused on the emotional truth of each moment.

Here's where it stumbles a little:

For us, the weaknesses are mostly structural, not emotional.

The narrative can wander. There are detours into social detail, name dropping, and side friendships that, while interesting, do not always feel essential to the main arc. At times there is a slight sense of looping, of circling back to the same feelings from a slightly different angle. Readers who want a very tightly plotted memoir might find those sections slow.

There is also a carefulness around some people and conflicts that occasionally leaves us wanting more. Tony is understandably protective of certain private details that are not strictly his to tell, especially around his “kids” and some family members. The respect is admirable. Artistically, there are moments when it keeps a few emotional beats at arm’s length.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of this book actually comes from having read Tony Cointreau's other memoir, A Gift of Love, then reading this and comparing them side-by-side. A Gift of Love is simply a better written, more captivating read. We never wanted to put A Gift of Love down. We never wanted it to stop. By contrast, this memoir has a real start-and-stop, choppy feel to it. It doesn't help that—if you already read A Gift of Love--the last third of this book can seem incredibly redundant. We already read about Cointreau's incredible work in Calcutta and about Mother Teresa from the previous book.

A large part of us just wanted the narrative to focus more on Ethel Merman rather than scattering attention amongst Tony himself and Mother Teresa. In a lot of ways, it unfortunately seems like Ethel Merman gets overshadowed in her own book.

With that said, if you're reading this book in isolation and/or it's your first ever Tony Cointreau book, you may be impressed. It's an interesting approach.

These are relatively small quibbles compared to how much the book gets right.

What really lingers is the way this memoir reframes what counts as a “successful” life.
Tony has the kind of curriculum vitae that would impress almost anyone: wealthy lineage, world travel, connections to leaders in finance, art, and entertainment, a legitimate performing career, a decades long loving relationship. In many books, that would be the arc. Start in privilege, stay in privilege, maybe learn to be slightly nicer.

Instead, the story keeps bending back toward the bedside. The most meaningful things here are rarely the glamorous ones. They are the nights he spends sitting next to someone who is frightened and in pain. They are the loads of laundry, the diapers changed, the faces wiped, the stupid jokes shared in the kitchen. They are the moments when he breaks his own pattern of perfectionism and simply shows up as a human being with another human being.

There is also a powerful queer spiritual thread. Tony does not beat the reader over the head with theology or activism. He simply exists as a gay man whose life of faith and service is shaped by women who love him as he is, including a future saint of the Catholic Church. For readers who have been told that their orientation and a life of faith cannot coexist, that quiet witness may mean a lot.

Finally, the trauma narrative is handled thoughtfully. The abuse by Mr. Fuller is neither sensationalized nor minimized. We see its long shadow and the painstaking work of therapy and self honesty it takes to say, “This was not my fault,” and actually believe it. The book becomes a testament to the idea that healing is possible even late in life, and that some of that healing can happen while we are busy loving other people.

We'll close by saying this: WHAT A LIFE!
Seriously, what a remarkable, incredible, fascinating life Tony Cointreau has lived!
Read all about it!

Check it out on Amazon!