Nobody played the radio. Nobody sang. I developed a love of music independently." He fell in love with theater after he saw Al Jolson perform on Broadway in a musical entitled "Hold Onto Your Hats." "I loved the fact that it was live---that it was real, even though it was all illusion," Ebb told Thompson.
Ebb told Barbara Rowes of People magazine that as a young boy he was an optimist and a daydreamer. He liked to pretend he was a rich boy living in a grand home on Long Island or that he was movie star Cary Grant, signing autographs for fans. "The point is," he told Rowes, "I didn't want to be me." His mother, Anna Evelyn (Gritz), a woman with a more practical bent, tried to bring the boy down to earth. She "used to tell me I looked at the world through rose-colored eyes," Ebb recalled. When Ebb was fourteen years old, his father, Harry, died. After his death, it was discovered that the senior Ebb's best friend had been embezzling from the family's dry goods business for years.
This is a free page. This page contains 182 words. This
biography contains 1,834 words (approx. 6 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Fred Ebb Access Pass.
