Sing a Pretty Song: The Offbeat Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years

Broadway and TV star Edie Adams remembers life before and after Ernie Kovacs, whose untimely death cut short their marriage and the groundbreaking comedic collaborations they created

Singer-actress Adams, writing with Windeler ( Shirley Temple ), recalls that her career skyrocketed when she married comic genius Ernie Kovacs. Their marriage lasted 11 years, until his death in an auto accident in 1962 at age 43. This funny, sad memoir of Adams's life with and as the widow of the "mad Hungarian" virtually recreates the couple's idiosyncratic TV skits on classic shows like Three to Get Ready . There is a laudable lack of either bitterness or boasting in the book, although Adams, who found herself straddled with debt following Kovacs's death, has reason for both. We're shown instead her insouciance and talent for soldiering on, as when she summoned her three young daughters to a family party: "This is a big celebration . . . We've just made our big payment on your father's tennis club seized for taxes. Now there's only one million, nine hundred forty-nine thousand to go." Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Small-town girl and Juilliard-trained singer Adams was an odd match for off-the-wall comedian Ernie Kovacs, but they became a team soon after she was hired as singer on his show in 1951. Despite the problems of dealing with Ernie's two daughters as well as his neurotic mother, their happy marriage was troubled only in the last few years in Hollywood, where Ernie's gambling and lavish lifestyle reached epic proportions. The Internal Revenue Service began to close in, according to Adams, because the couple refused to make the customary payoffs to the IRS men. Kovacs's untimely death in a car accident in 1962 left Adams deeply in debt, forcing her to work nonstop for two years. She tells her story in rather flat prose, skimming over details, and ends so abruptly in 1964 that one suspects a sequel in the offing.
- Marcia L. Perry, Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.