Brice, Fanny (1891–1951)

American actress, comedienne, and singer, best known as a star of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and as "Baby Snooks" on radio, whose life served as the basis for the musical and film Funny Girl. Born Fania Borach on October 29, 1891, in New York City; died on May 29, 1951, in California; third of four children of Rose and Charles Borach; married Frank White (a businessman), February 14, 1909 (divorced, 1912); married Nick Arnold (real name, Jules Wilford Arnt Stein), June 11, 1919 (divorced, 1927); married Billy Rose (a songwriter and producer), February 2, 1929 (divorced, 1938); children: (second marriage) Frances Arnold Stark (b. 1919); William (b. 1921).

Began performing in amateur shows in early teens, later appearing in burlesque shows on Broadway as a chorus girl, singer, and dancer; discovered by Florenz Ziegfeld and appeared nearly continuously in his long-running Ziegfeld Follies (1910–23); through touring, gained a national reputation as a comedienne, bolstered by her later film appearances and her most famous role as "Baby Snooks" on radio.

Filmography:

Night Club (1928); My Man (1928); Be Yourself! (1930); The Man from Blankley's (1930); The Great Ziegfeld (1936); Everybody Sing (1938); Ziegfeld Follies (1946).

On a bright early summer day in 1910, pedestrians thronging New York's Great White Way had to make room for a gangly, awkward young woman racing down the crowded Broadway sidewalks. She was waving a piece of paper and shouting something they could barely hear over the clamor of mid-town traffic. As she stopped in front of a burlesque house at Broadway and 47th Street, fellow performers gathered round to look at the piece of paper and hear the amazing news that she, Fanny Brice, had just signed a two-year contract with the legendary Flo Ziegfeld and would be appearing in his Follies of 1910. In the entertainment world of the early 1900s, this was considered the pinnacle of success. It was a hard-won victory for a young Jewish woman from New York's Lower East Side, with little formal stage training.

Fanny Brice was the third of four children born to Charlie and Rose Borach . Both her parents had come to New York from Europe in the late 19th century. Rose Stern had arrived from a small village in Hungary and had worked as a children's nurse as well as a "needle worker" in a fur factory before she met Charles Borach, an Alsatian of French-German descent known around the neighborhood as "French Charlie." Charlie was earning $80 a week as a bartender in a Bowery saloon, a considerable sum in those days, and Rose looked forward to improving their condition and maybe even moving uptown someday. But it was the practical Rose that pulled her family up by its collective bootstraps when Charlie quit his job and embarked on a series of ill-conceived get-rich-quick schemes, while playing pinochle and dreaming of fame and fortune.

Fanny, born in October of 1891, spent her first six years amid the jostle and ethnic diversity of the Lower East Side, and would use much of what she absorbed when she first stepped onto a stage. Her most formative years, however, were spent above a candy-and-cigar store the family bought in 1896, in Newark, New Jersey. Blancey's Theater was just down the street, and it was here, when she was supposed to be in school, that Brice spent much of her time, fascinated by the burlesque, vaudeville, and melodramas she glimpsed from her hiding place in the balconies. Though Rose put a stop to it as soon as she found out, Fanny never forgot the laughter and applause.

While Charlie played pinochle and idled away his days with cronies, an increasingly resentful Rose worked hard enough to allow the family to purchase a saloon on Manhattan's Lafayette Street, the first of a group of seven that Rose would manage for a large brewery. Years later, Brice would remember climbing up on the bar on Sunday mornings, when the saloon was closed, to sing and dance for a delighted Charlie and a disapproving Rose. The estrangement between her parents grew deeper, even as the family's finances improved enough for the first of several trips to Europe to visit relatives; after 16 years of marriage, Rose sold the saloon without telling Charlie and moved with her four children to Brooklyn.

At age 14, Fanny made her first stage appearance when she attended Keeney's Theater in downtown Brooklyn for its weekly Amateur Night. Arriving at the theater with only a quarter, she was informed by the box-office clerk that the 50-cent seats were all that were left. Not to be deterred, Brice told the clerk that she was entered in the show, and she was soon ushered into the stage door for free. Though she fully intended to slip away from the lineup of performing hopefuls and join the audience, Frank Keeney was never one for organization and took his acts willy-nilly, regardless of order of entry. Soon, a terrified Fanny found herself thrust out on stage with nothing prepared. All she could think of was a popular ballad of the time, "When You Know You're Not Forgotten by the Girl You Can't Forget." She sang in the same high, clear voice that had so pleased her father on those Sundays in the saloon on Lafayette Street, and by the time she finished the audience was just as delighted. Four dollars in change lay at her feet, and Frank Keeney awarded her the first prize of ten dollars. Rose, for once, was impressed.

Listen, kid. I've done everything in the theater except marry a property man.

—Fanny Brice

Over the next six months, Brice sang at other Amateur Nights at Keeney Theaters throughout Brooklyn, walking away with first prize more often than not. She found that the audiences loved something she'd never thought much about—her knack for dialects, especially the Yiddish and German-Irish patios she had heard growing up on the Lower East Side. Equally as important, she began to "read" an audience and give it what it wanted. "I learned to watch its every move," she later said, "and to beat it to that move. When it wanted sentiment, I gave it tears by the bucketful. When it wanted funny stuff, I clowned to the best of my ability." Watching the money roll in, Rose was soon urging her daughter to try her act in Manhattan, where she could earn $50 a night instead of the $30 that Brooklyn offered. "My mother couldn't read or write," Fanny said, "but she could count like a bugger."

Moving to Manhattan's predominantly German Yorkville section, Brice trooped from audition to audition, like the veteran she would become, and landed a bit part as a chorine in a tawdry melodrama, The Millionaire's Revenge, in which she played under the name of "Jenny Waters" and popped out of a giant pie, wearing a flimsy chiffon costume. Next came a bitter disappointment at the hands of George M. Cohan. Fresh from taking Broadway by storm with his Little Johnny Jones, Cohan was casting a new show called The Talk of New York. Brice sang at the auditions and was hired for the chorus line at $18 a week. But dancing was more prevalent in the show than singing, and this proved Fanny's undoing. Never very graceful, it soon became clear that Fanny's future was not as a dancer. Even though she was in the back row, Cohan noticed the tall, gawky 15-year-old clunking through his choreography and was not pleased. "You!" he bellowed. "You with the St. Vitus' Dance! Back to the kitchen!" Fanny was fired.

Still determined, Brice went on the road as an apprentice in the company of Rachel Lewis , a drama-and-dance teacher who made her money by touring shows staffed and acted by pupils who received no pay. Hardly ever on stage, Fanny did seamstress work, cleaned the dingy theaters before show time, and looked after Rachel's dog. But she watched and learned and was clever enough to spot Lewis sneaking out of a hotel in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, about to abandon her troupe and its debts. Brice followed her to the train and forced Lewis to buy her a seat back to New York.

Now 17, Brice finally found a show that would get her noticed: The Girls From Happyland. Using the last name of her mother's best friend because "it sounded classy," she appeared for the first time as Fanny Brice and was put in the front row of the chorus line. The show toured the Eastern vaudeville circuit, and, by the time it played Cincinnati, Brice had advanced to a small acting role that attracted enough notice to get her cast in another road show then preparing in New York, College Girls. During rehearsals, the show's producer convinced her to do a benefit performance at the Friars' Club. Despite Fanny's protests that she had nothing prepared, she took herself off to Tin Pan Alley to find a song.

Seeking out a music publisher she had dealt with before, Brice was introduced to one of its young songwriters, a man by the name of Irving Berlin, who offered her a song he'd just composed. "Sadie Salome, Go Home" was a spoof on the notorious burlesque number "The Dance of the Seven Veils," then being salaciously performed by the legendary and scantily-clad Eva Tanguay . Berlin suggested she do the song with a Yiddish accent, and the two created a comedy routine in which Brice appeared in a white sailor's suit and sang: "Don't do that dance, I tell you Sadie./ Dat's not a business for a lady." She brought the house down. "Before the second verse, it happened," Fanny recalled. "The thing that begins to change your life—the clangor, the first thunder on the mountaintop." What Brice didn't confide, until many years later, was that her ill-fitting costume was scrunched and gathered in a most inconvenient spot, forcing her to writhe and wriggle her hips to relieve the discomfort. Whatever the cause, "Sadie Salome, Go Home" caught the attention of show-business luminaries attending the benefit, and Brice incorporated

it into College Girls when the show finally took to the road. She was given several more solo numbers, putting her name in the leading credits of the playbill and prompting the show-business daily, The New York Clipper, to call her "a major new find and talent."

As the show trouped through New England, Brice noticed a handsome, impeccably groomed gentleman in the audience at several performances who finally introduced himself one evening as Frank White. The first thing that struck Brice was the smell of his aftershave and talcum powder; and indeed, Frank owned a chain of barber shops in Hartford, Albany, and Springfield, Massachusetts, the city in which he chose to propose marriage. Fanny, never secure about her physical appearance and flabbergasted that such a suave Adonis would be attracted to her, accepted. The two were married on February 14, 1909, when Fanny was 18. Forsaking a honeymoon or even a night alone together, Frank went back to his barber shops, Fanny continued touring with the show, and the two never saw each other again until several months later when Fanny returned to New York. By then, what had been little more than a passing fancy on the part of a stagestruck gigolo had soured, and Frank forced himself on a sexually naive Fanny their first night together in a New York hotel. Leaving him, Brice filed for a legal separation, which was finalized in a divorce three years later.

Another audience member during the College Girls tour brought Brice better luck; he was a scout for Florenz Ziegfeld, known as the "Emperor of Broadway." Ziegfeld, who had started his professional life managing a circus strongman, had married a statuesque French actress named Anna Held , and then built a sophisticated, tuneful revue around her, which he called The Ziegfeld Follies ("Glorifying the American Girl!"). As he was now planning his 1910 Follies, his scout recommended Brice for a spot on the bill. Ziegfeld was famous for communicating by telegram, even to a close friend a block away, so Fanny was suspicious when she received one asking her to come to his office. Finally convinced it was genuine, she emerged from the meeting waving the precious contract over her head on her dash down Broadway that summer day. Ziegfeld had signed her to a two-year contract, at $75 a week for the first year and $100 a week for the second. When the Follies opened on Broadway a month later, Brice was quickly noticed for her natural, apparently spontaneous performance. "This strange, fantastic young woman of the willowy form and the elastic face," said one reviewer, "doesn't sing her songs at all. She just kind of remembers them."

In 1912, the year her divorce from Frank White was finalized, Brice met Nick Arnold (real name, Jules Wilford Arnt Stein). Sophisticated, charming, and good-looking, Nick Arnold arrived with two drawbacks—a mysterious business life he refused to discuss, and a wife from whom he had been separated for several years. While he told Brice about his wife at the start of their relationship, the nature of his "business" never became clear until three years later, when he was convicted and sentenced on wiretapping charges. "At parties," Fanny remembered nearly 40 years later, "he would be surrounded by people ten minutes after he entered the room. He was a good speaker. Of course, half of the things he would be telling them were lies." During their 15 years together, Fanny would support Nick and raise thousands of dollars in bail by tirelessly trooping show after show on the circuits. She underwent repeated questionings by the district attorney, carried on a clandestine relationship with Nick when he was on the lam from the police, and saw him jailed a second time on a securities fraud conviction. The two were married on June 11, 1919, when Nick finally got a divorce from his first wife. The marriage produced two children—a girl Frances, born in 1919, and a boy William, born two years later. But apart from a few happy years together, with trips to London and an elegant estate on Long Island, the relationship was far from smooth. During the months that led up to the fraud conviction, Nick was in hiding while Fanny was continually dodging police who were on her trail in the midst of a grueling tour schedule. She lost 20 pounds and could only ingest liquids for weeks on end.

But she never stopped working, and by 1915 was earning up to $1,000 a week on the road. Ziegfeld wanted her back for his Follies of 1915 and sent her the usual telegram proposing a salary of $200 a week. The next day, Fanny sent him one in return:

FANNY BRICE FOUND DEAD IN HER ROOM IN THE HOTEL STOP THE ONLY CLUE IS A TELEGRAM SIGNED BY F. ZIEGFELD JR WHICH WAS CLUTCHED IN HER HAND STOP

They settled on $500 a week.

Brice would appear in the Follies for the next eight years and introduce some of her most famous numbers: "Second Hand Rose," "Rose of Washington Square," and a hilarious ballet spoof set to Mendelssohn's Spring Song. Audiences were rapt with attention when she first sang "My Man," clutching her arms to her body and closing her eyes, thinking of the husband that the law kept from her. By now, Brice was a Broadway legend, but, despite the public acclaim, the fancy clothes, expensive hotels and elegant dinners, she never forgot who she really was. The story is told of the night Fanny, waiting in the wings to go on, tried to sell her hat to an admiring chorus girl for $25. When her cue came, Brice told the young woman to stay right there while she went to work. As usual, she brought the house to its feet and had to return for several curtain calls. When she stepped off for the final time, the chorine gushed, "Wonderful, Miss Brice! Just wonderful!" "That's what I was telling you," Fanny said, gesturing at her hat. "For twenty-five bucks, it's a steal!"

By the early 1920s, the strains of her marriage to Nick began to show. In addition to keeping him out of jail while working full-time and raising two children, Brice also discovered Nick's numerous infidelities. The awareness came at a time when she was hoping to break into "legitimate" theater by appearing in a dramatic play written especially for her. Fanny, produced by David Belasco, ran for only eight weeks and was poorly received. No sooner had the show closed than Nick was sentenced to 18 months in Leavenworth on securities fraud charges, creating what would become a permanent separation. After 15 years with Nick, some of them the happiest of her life, Brice divorced him in 1927. She would later confess to an interviewer, "I can only say he was just a fool."

After the failure of Fanny, it was time for a new act to take on the road. Hired to help her develop

it was one William Samuel Rosenburg, otherwise known as Billy Rose, a songwriter with several pop standards to his credit, among them: "I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten Cent Store)," and "Paper Moon." In the coming two decades, he would become one of Broadway's most prolific entrepreneurs. Billy Rose was the exact opposite of Nick Arnold. He was short of stature, and pudgy; he dressed badly; and he was often remembered for his scuffed shoes and dirty fingernails. But he was as much a show-business veteran as Fanny, and the two struck up a mutually respectful, later affectionate, relationship. It was Billy who introduced Fanny to Hollywood, although none of her films were successful, and Brice was never comfortable playing in them. "I had such a kisser," she later said, "the camera would stand up and walk away in disgust." And it was in a show that Billy produced for her, Sweet and Low, that Fanny's most beloved character was born. Billy and his writers worked up a skit for Brice in which she appeared as a wise-cracking, worldly infant named "Babykins," complete with frilly bonnet, bib, and baby carriage. The audience loved her. By 1934, "Babykins" had become "Baby Snooks," the character Brice would play on stage and radio for nearly 20 years.

While Baby Snooks was gestating, Billy proposed marriage. "I married Frank because he smelled so good," Fanny recalled, "Nick because he looked so good, and Billy because he thought so good." The two became man and wife on February 2, 1929—the diminutive Billy proudly escorting his tall, thin bride to the altar. At cocktail parties, Fanny would poke fun at her husband's physical appearance. "He's just a little shrimp," she would say, "but mentally he's Gary Cooper." During their eight years together, Billy put the finishing touches on Fanny's stature as a national institution at a time when vaudeville and burlesque were beginning their slow retreat before the onslaught of film, radio and, eventually, television. (Brice would make only one TV appearance, in 1950, as Baby Snooks). But Billy always felt himself to be in Fanny's shadow. It wasn't a comfortable position for one of his ambition, and he took solace in the arms of Eleanor Holm , a swimming sports star of the day for whom he hoped to build a film career. Fanny and Billy Rose were divorced in 1938.

The hectic pace that Brice had maintained for the past 35 years, both personally and professionally, now began to take its toll. Through the 1940s, she would be plagued by numerous health problems and confine much of her work to radio, nearly always as Baby Snooks, in a succession of network radio programs with sponsors such as General Foods, Sanka, and Post Toasties. But she had too many memories of the old days, past glories, bittersweet loves. In 1949, Nick suggested they remarry. She refused. "Love is like a card trick," she told him. "After you see it done once, it loses all of its mystery." It was the last time the two would see each other. Brice spent much of her time in Los Angeles, where she and Billy had bought a house, indulging two of her main interests, interior decorating and landscape painting. She traveled only occasionally to New York. In 1950, she played Baby Snooks for the last time.

Late that year, a young screenwriter was asked to help Brice write her autobiography. But before work on the book advanced very far, Fanny suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at her Westwood home and died five days later, on May 29, 1951, at the age of 60. The writer was left with just a few pages of interview notes. "I lived the way I wanted to live and never did what people said I had to do," she had told him. "And people might open the book and throw it away, and it can be a big flop, my book. But one thing it wouldn't be … a lie." Fanny Brice's life story was hardly throwaway material. In 1963, her son-in-law, producer Ray Stark, presented the musical Funny Girl on Broadway, with a libretto by Isobel Lennart and music by Jule Styne. A young Barbra Streisand brought Brice back to life. Throughout rehearsals, an elderly man sat silently in the darkened theater. He was Nick Arnold, then 84 years old. He disappeared before rehearsals ended and never attended the opening.

sources:

Brice, Fanny. Unpublished and undated memoirs in the Comden-Green Papers, The New York Public Library, Billy Rose Collection.

Goldman, Herbert G. Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl. NY: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Grossman, Barbara. Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Katkov, Norman. The Fabulous Fanny: The Story of Fanny Brice. NY: Alfred E. Knopf, 1953.

related media:

Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand, screenplay by Isobel Lennart, costumes by Irene Sharaff , directed by William Wyler, Columbia Pictures, 1968.

Funny Lady, starring Barbra Streisand, screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Arnold Schulman, directed by Herbert Ross, Columbia Pictures, 1975.

Norman Powers , writer/producer, Chelsea Lane Productions, New York, New York