Who am I? February 2020

 I was born during “The Gilded Age” and passed away during the waning days of “The Jazz Age.” In between I had quite a tempestuous life touring and on the stage. I had 5 husbands along the way and went from being the toast of the town to largely being completely forgotten today.

I was born in Chicago to David and Rachel. Dad was a Jewish immigrant from Poland and mom was from Prussia. Dad ran a saloon in Chicago but years later, long after I left the house, my folks settled in Los Angeles and ran a jewelry business. My household was Jewish Orthodox and very restrictive but my parents allowed me to get some vocal training from the musical director of the Apollo Club in Chicago. My parents thought theatre “represented the lowest form of damnation and mortal sin“ so I knew I had to get out of that house as soon as possible. My chance came when I married the first of my 5 husbands. My early rebellion later led me to become an independent thinker and an advocate for women’s rights. I had a flair for comedy and possessed some singing talent which led me to appear on amateur nights in the Chicago area. I started to get noticed. Helen Cohan (George M.’s mom) encouraged me when I appeared on the same bill as the Cohans. I got a job with a stock company and travelled around the country gaining experience and refining my shtick. I was an alto and sang satirical songs, told self-deprecating jokes, and did funny impersonations.

In the early “aughts” of the last century I became a headliner in Manhattan at the ‘B.F.Keith Theatre’ and at ‘Hammerstein’s Vaudeville Theatre’. As I got better bookings I also got better notices in papers like the San Francisco Call, the Los Angeles Herald and the Washington Post. I appeared at The Palace Theatre in London and was a smash hit. Eventually, I was approached by Flo and appeared in the Follies. I became one of the highest paid women in show business. My dress, my hats and my hair styles were emulated and copied by women. Men, I presume, bought my sheet music not only for the music contained therein but for the hot pictures of me on the cover! For a time I even had an eponymous theater on Broadway.

I recorded a number of sides for Victor in New Jersey and appeared at a new vaudeville theatre in Union Hill, N.J. (Union Hill was a town that existed in Hudson County, New Jersey, before it merged with West Hoboken to form Union City.) My second husband was very inspiring and he helped propel me to the top. You probably know him from some lyrics he wrote concerning baseball. We co-wrote a song that became a title for a 1944 movie which ostensibly told the story of our lives but it was pure fiction! George M. approached me to sing one of the very few songs he hadn’t composed for the musical theater.  He composed it to booster morale for the war effort. Others sang it before me but I was the one who really put it across.

For a time after my stint with the B.F.Keith Circuit I had a series of one-woman shows accompanied by a young pianist who later became famous in his own right. In the 1939 movie, “The Roaring Twenties,” the James Cagney character promoted his heart throb, an aspiring singer, to a nightclub owner by claiming she could sing just like me and would thus attract loads of patrons to hear her. By the mid-1920’s my star was fading. I passed away from cancer before the decade ended. My body lay in a receiving tomb for 18 years but I was eventually interred in an unmarked plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. It wasn’t until 2018, 90 years after my death, that I, at long last, got a headstone! That’s me in the photo below. 

(1a)Who Am I? (1b)How did I choose my family name for the stage? (1c)Who was that musical director that gave me my first training? (2a)Who was my second husband and what lyrics did he write about baseball? (2b)What song did I co-write with husband #2 that later became the title of a 1944 movie? (2c)Who were the 2 main stars in that movie? (3a)What song did George M. Cohan want me to sing and record? (3b) What were 2 subsequent names for my eponymous NYC theater? (4a)Who accompanied my on the piano in my one-woman shows? (4b)What was my last Manhattan address? (5) What did I bid on and win at the May 1918 benefit concert for the American Red Cross in Washington D.C.?