March 20, 2019 • 34 mins
Comedian Fanny Brice's personal life was often a mess even though her onstage personas were all about laughter. Even as her beloved, Nick Arnstein, was in deep legal trouble, she supported him, started a family, and kept her career going.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And before
we get started on talking about part two of Fanny
Brace's life, we should mention again that we are going
(00:21):
to Paris. We are, and that if you're hearing this
you could go with us. You could. So this episode
is coming out towards the end of March, and the
final deadline for people to book the trip is April third. Yeah,
and we would love to have you with us. It's
gonna be so fun. We're staying in this really darling
hotel right near the Moulin Rouge. The neighborhood looks fantastic.
(00:45):
There's lots of cute little restaurants and fun places, and
we're there for long enough it is June two to
the ninth, so that it starts to feel like you're
own little home away from home, which I love. Yeah,
there's gonna be a really good mix of there's a
lot of planned activities, but there's also plenty of free time,
so you won't be glued to a group the whole time.
If you want to go explore on your own. You
have enough time to do that. Yeah. As an introverted person,
(01:07):
I understand the value of some unstructured, potentially solo time.
Uh yeah, but it's gonna be fun. No matter how
you like to travel, we have you covered. If you
are a solo person traveling, great, don't be afraid to
join us because there will be plenty of other solo people.
If you want to bring a friend or a loved one,
also great. We're just gonna have a great time. We're
(01:28):
gonna learn all about the French Revolution and visit lots
of historically significant sites. So if this all sounds like
fun to you, and I promise it's gonna be, you
can come to our website missed in history dot com.
If you look at the menu bar at the top
of the page, there is a link that says Paris
Trip with an exclamation point to convey our deep excitement.
You can click on that. It's going to take you
to all the information, tell you how to sign up.
(01:49):
If that is something that you think you should do,
I think you should do it. It's just gonna be amazing. Uh.
But moving on from that, we're talking today about Fanny
Brice are two the this uh is, like I said,
Part two of our look at the life of comedian
Fanny Brice, whose personal life was often a mess, even
though her on stage personas were all about laughter. If
(02:12):
you have not listened to the first episode, I highly
encourage you to do so, because we are basically jumping
in with part two exactly where we stopped the last time.
So if you are not up to speed on that,
none of this is going to make any sense. When
we left off at the end of part one, Fanny
had decided to join Nick Ernstein on a trip to London,
and the two of them had a great time living
(02:34):
basically as a married couple while Fanny worked on the
London stages and Nick allegedly did some business. Yeah that's
business with air quotes. When Nick and Fanny returned to
New York in the fall, they moved into a new apartment,
and that meant that they were leaving Fanny's mother Rose
behind in the old one. Fanny and her mother had
been living together for a long time. Fanny and Nick
(02:57):
set up their new house on West fifty eight Street,
and their apartment soon became sort of a socializing nexus
where everyone from her mother's poker group, which was like
very small, anti fun too high level politicians would all
come and share drinks and a laugh with the entertainer
and her charming allegedly businessman Paramore. And the two traveled
(03:18):
again to London and Fanny was going to start an
engagement there, but the start of World War One quickly
ended that plan and she and Nick returned to New York.
Nick had used Fanny's money to start a number of
business ventures. All of them started out with great gusto,
and then they slowly fell apart as he lost interest
in them. He'd go away on business trips with only
a vague sense of information and then show up in
(03:41):
whatever city Fanny was touring to try to take her
a dinner after the show. Yeah, he lived a little
bit of a cloak and dagger life. He would just
be like, oh, it's boring business, and not really tell
her any details of what he was doing. A few
years into their relationship, while Fanny was working on a
musical comedy called Hands Up, Nick's illegal means of money
may King got him into very serious trouble. He had
(04:02):
been working with a group of criminals known as the
Gondorf Raing. Those were named for the brothers at the
center of it, and the Gondorf's in this particular instance,
were involved in wire tapping. On June fifteen, Nick was
sentenced to time in Sing Sing after a jury found
him guilty. In all this, Fanny paid not only for
his bail, which was a massive twenty five thousand dollars,
(04:25):
but also for lawyers to mount appeals in the case
She worked, but she primarily stayed in New York rather
than going on tour during this appeals process because she
wanted to be near Nick. Once all the appeals had
run out and Nick was incarcerated. She had used her
influence and every way she could to try to make
his time in prison as easy as possible. She visited
(04:46):
him at least once a week. She always brought him
home cooked meals and fawned over him while he was
in there. Yeah, she had really like her influence as
well as the influence of some of his other um
associates who had a lot of power. Basically made this
as close to like staying in a hotel as you
could be while you were incarcerated. Like he would hang
out with the warden and have dinner with the warden
(05:08):
in his apartment, and it was not a case of
what you would call hard time. It was also during
this time that Fanny started collaborating with Blanche Merrill, a songwriter,
to build on some of the character style singing that
she had done while she was appearing in the Zigfeld Follies. Blanche,
who was a collaborator with her for years after this,
put together numbers that would become Fanny's bread and butter
(05:30):
over the next several years, including Becky's back in the
Ballet and the Yiddish Bride. As she ramped up these
new songs, she got another message from Florenz Zigfeld offering
her a return to the follies at a rate of
two hundred dollars per week. If you will recall from
our previous episode, she had negotiated rates much higher than
(05:51):
that after leaving the follies. Bryce at this point was
easily commanding a thousand dollars a week for her work,
so she replied with a snarky tee agram that read
Fanny Bryce found dead in her room and the hotel stop.
The only clue as a telegram signed by f zig
Felt Jr. Which was clutched in her hand. There are
(06:11):
a number of instances of snarky telegrams back and forth
between them over the years. Sometimes that caused some confusion
and misunderstanding between them, because, as you know, written word
is not always the best way to convey sarkas. So
sometimes one of them would take something seriously when the
other was joking, or sometimes one or the other would
(06:32):
play the fact that there was ambiguity there and then
maybe say something a little bit mean and then later
be like, oh, no, you must understood it was a joke.
So they had a pretty respectful relationship of one another,
but they did play a little rough in their in
their dealings. But Fanny also did not shut zig Field
out completely and they negotiated to more amenable terms. She
ended up rejoining the Follies at the rate of five
(06:54):
fifty dollars a week. That is a lot less than
she was getting elsewhere. However, there was also a lot
prestige to being part of his show, and that was
to her the trade off. The second time around with
the Follies was a triumph for Fanny. The new material
that she had developed with Blanche Merrill was wildly successful.
Fanny was always ambitious in her work, and this continued
(07:16):
to be true. Here she decided that she wanted to
transcend her variety bill roots and make a run at
a true play. Her first play was a show titled
Why Worry, But she should have worried. The play was
a mess, despite several rewrites that followed, just dismal preview reviews,
and Fanny was not great in it. Yeah, it was
(07:36):
just one of those cases where none of the magic
came together. In October nineteen eighteen, just a month after
Why Worry closed, Fanny finally got married to Nick Arnstein
once he had finalized his divorce. At that point, they
had been together six years, and Fanny had insisted that
after she waited through his prison term he had been
pardoned in July of that year, he had to marry
(07:59):
her or the whole thing was over. It was not
an easy road. Nick's wife, Carrie didn't want to grant
him a divorce, but then she was caught with another man,
which gave Nick leeway to pursue a legal divorce, whether
Carrie wanted it or not. Carrie went the litigious route
and sued Fanny for alienation of affections, claiming that Fanny
(08:19):
had stolen her husband. There was a lot of back
and forth and cajoling on Nick's part, including getting Carrie
drunk and having her signed a paper that ended the
whole lawsuit, only to have her withdraw her promise to
drop the whole matter. But she did eventually agree to
a divorce and she left Fanny's name out of it.
All of the legalities of divorces at this time are
(08:42):
crazy to me, Like there's always like they would, even
couples that were splitting amicably would kind of do these
strange pantomimes where like the man would check into a
hotel with another woman who he wasn't actually involved with
in any way, just so that someone could see him
with another woman to give grounds for divorce because as
that was easier than them like claiming a reconcilable differences,
(09:04):
which I think maybe didn't exist at the time, or
you know, if the wife had maybe had some infidelity,
it would be such a stain on her reputation that
sometimes the husband would take the hit in that way.
It was a little Banana's reading her biographies, they always
mentioned all of this fancy footwork that people do just
to get the divorce done. There had throughout all of
(09:25):
this divorce, madness been a ticking clock on the whole
situation because Fanny was pregnant, and she was getting more
pregnant and more obviously pregnant by the day. Uh. For
a while, she wore like a special undergarment that kind
of concealed her pregnancy on stage, but eventually there was
no way to even do that anymore. Uh. And not
long after the wedding, she and Nick welcome their first child,
(09:47):
a daughter named frances And Fanny had continued to perform
well into her third trimester, and she went back to
stage work as quickly as possible after the baby was born.
But while Francis was still a baby, at a time
when it seemed like their lives might be settling down,
things turned very turbulent again. When Fanny got home from
performing at a late night show in the very wee
(10:08):
hours of February. Her husband was packing a suitcase and
asked if she had been followed. He also told her
that he was innocent, and then he left with no
further explanation. She had no idea where he had gone. Yeah,
this was one of those times where uh. Nick Arnstein,
who always had that ability to remain cool as a
(10:30):
cucumber in every situation, actually appeared visibly stressed and it
really alarmed her, and within days Fanny Bryce was being
interviewed by police. It turned out that Nick was being
accused of bond robbery, working with employees of Wall Street
brokerage houses and their messengers to steal small increments over
the course of six months, totaling to a massive sum
(10:52):
of more than five million dollars. While Nick was accused
of planning the whole thing, in actuality, he was probably
involved with about half of those thefts. Fanny was followed
by police and she was questioned repeatedly, and the hope
was that she would give them some information about where
Nick had gone. She really had no idea though. She
(11:12):
was really open with the authorities and she didn't hide anything.
But she wasn't the least bit meek either. She made
it clear that she found the whole thing irksome and
that she would not let them push her around. She
had no problems sassing police. Uh. Eventually, Nick did reach
out to Fanny by sending a coded note to their
friend W. C. Fields, who she was working with at
(11:33):
the time, and he then shared it with Bryce. And
that note mentioned a brazier shop on Second Avenue, and
after reading it, Fanny knew that she needed to go
to this brazier factory to receive calls from Nick. Once
they communicated, he asserted to her that he was completely innocent,
and Fanny completely believed him. Over the course of the
next several months, Fanny was just consumed with stress. She
(11:57):
lost twenty pounds, she couldn't sleep. The police and press
hounded her everywhere she went. Eventually, Arnstein's attorney convinced him
to come back to New York. He met Fanny and
his attorney on May fift ninety and drove to the
Assistant District Attorney's office to turn himself in. This might
be too much for some women to endure, but apparently
(12:18):
not Fanny, even though it was obviously taking a toll
on her health. We're going to talk about how devoted
she stayed through this whole ordeal after we have a
quick sponsor break. As things continued to unravel and Nick's
highly publicized trial played out, Fanny stood by him. She
(12:42):
and Nick had their second child, William, named after his
father's attorney, during this time, and Fanny took care of
all of Nick's legal fees, just as she had the
first time around. Even though she was shouldering all of
the financial burden in the situation, Arnstein was not particularly
loyal to her during this time. While he was staying
in a hotel in Washington, d C. With his attorney
(13:04):
for months away from Fanny, it became known that the
two men often entertained ladies late into the night, and
they served alcohol in their rooms despite prohibition. But even
as tales of Nick's infidelity reached her, Fanny was still
completely blinded by her love, and she wrote off all
of his bad behavior as just being the result of stress.
(13:25):
Nick's first trial resulted in a hung jury, but he
was ultimately found guilty. He was sentenced the time in
Leavenworth Penitentiary. He was incarcerated for nineteen months starting in
Fanny still stuck with them the whole time. Although the
two had started to fight and really fight for the
first time in the months leading up to his prison sentence,
(13:45):
the adultery was getting to be too much. She was
starting to feel like she had always just been his pawn. Yeah,
she really finally started to get a perspective on things
and was like, wait, you've been using me for like years.
And through all of the legal rankling with Nick and
having their second child and all of this stress, Fanny
still worked consistently. As with her daughter. She had worked
(14:07):
through most of that pregnancy, and she took only the
bare minimum of time away after William was born. The
years that Fanny was married to Ernstein were really productive
despite all these constant distractions. She went back to the
zig Field Follies for several years and appeared in a
number of other shows that were produced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.
She became known as a comedic genius, and she was
(14:31):
savvy enough to make use of her predicament in real life.
To try to optimize her stage time. In she started
singing a song titled My Man, which was far more
serious than her usual stage bits. She opened with the
lines it's cost me a lot, but there's one thing
I've got. It's my Man. The song about a woman
who loves a man despite being treated completely deplorably by him,
(14:54):
really connected with audiences, and they assumed that she was
referencing Nick Arnstein. Fanny, to spite being a very popular
entertainer as the nineteen twenties, started was still longing to
be taken a little more seriously, even as she made
a very nice life for herself as a comic act.
She had gotten good enough reviews for some of her
work that she started thinking about a more serious acting career.
(15:16):
But though she had the talent, she felt like she
didn't really have the looks to be considered for leading
lady parts in dramas or even just slightly more serious
musical comedies, and to that end, she met with a
plastic surgeon in nineteen three. There were a couple of
different factors and Fanny's desire to change her appearance. One
was that she was getting older. She was in her
(15:37):
early thirties and not really seen as an augenu and
to her husband's cheating was really taking a toll on
her self esteem. And three, she worried that her quote
Jewish nose was going to keep her doing essentially sight
gag humor that played off of her looks to perpetuate
racial stereotypes. While that kind of work had made her famous,
(15:57):
there were growing ethnic biases and racism in the United
States that made Fanny worry about the longevity of her career,
and as an assign. There is a really fantastic article
in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the
introduction of that term Jewish knows into scientific literature in
nineteen fourteen and how that has created an ongoing problem
(16:18):
since then around ideas of ethnic identity and beauty uh.
And that article examines how the medical community has contributed
to that problem over the years, in part because some
doctors would offer to fix people by stripping them of
the traits that might suggest anything other than a waspy appearance.
It is a really good read, and I encourage anybody
who's interested in that to check it out. We will
(16:40):
link to it in the show notes. I will note
that Jewish communities are not the only people affected by
this trend within the world of cosmetic surgery at all. No,
absolutely not, and that that article um is it opens,
it uses that as kind of the entree to discuss
the wider issue of like, not everybody has to look
like a white Anglo Saxon Protestant to be pretty. But
(17:02):
we have been teaching people that even within our own ranks.
Four years and years and years. Despite Nick's opposition to this,
Fanny moved forward with getting a nose job man. The
surgery became a news item itself, and for a while
the papers were really gossiping about that instead of about
Ernstein's legal trouble. But the surgery did not change her
perception in the eyes of the public or casting directors.
(17:25):
Fanny still was not considered to be a beauty, and
theater producers wanted her to be funny and not serious.
This is also sometimes pointed out as like the first
time that she really defied Nick Arnstein because he very
much did not want her to have this surgery, and
she was like, I don't care, I'm doing it. And
when Nick got out of prison, he immediately connected with
(17:46):
some of the guys that he had met while he
was in Leavenworth, intending to go into business together running
a casino. Fanny was mortified by this whole plan. She
wanted Nick to just work as her manager, a job
that she felt would keep him out of trouble. Probably
we would also keep him close to her so she
could keep an eye on his behavior. But he insisted
on this casino in Chicago, and Fanny ended up giving
(18:07):
him money for the venture. Nick also started cheating with
less and less regard for covering it up and seemed
resentful that Fanny was clearly the head of their family. Additionally,
they were ongoing criminal charges against him for his various wrongdoings.
All this was way too much stress on an already
fragile relationship, and in the fall of the two of
(18:28):
them divorced after fifteen years together. In ninety six. Leading
up to the divorce, Fanny started the play Fanny, which
was not in fact about her life, but it was
written for her. The problem was, while she was a
great comedic ham, she wasn't really a good actress actress um.
Even with extensive rewrites and coaching and extra rehearsals, the
(18:48):
reviews were really abysmal, and one reviewer wrote it was
written by Willard Mack and Mr Balasco, and they both
ought to be ashamed of themselves and of each other.
In the late nineteen twenties, Bryce side to try her
look in film after The Jazz Singer came out of seven.
It gave Fanny a unique leg up. She might not
be considered Hollywood beautiful, but she could sing, and after
(19:11):
al Jolson made history singing on film, people wanted more
of that. Warner Brothers, which had produced the jazz singer
put together a screenplay for a film starring Fanny Bryce
titled My Man, and started touting Bryce in the press
as the female Al Jolson. Fanny was thirty seven when
My Man came out in December of and she made
(19:31):
history is the first woman to star in a sound film,
But that movie didn't rocket her to stardom on the
national or global scale. The very skills that had made
her a hit on stage, like her exaggerated mannerisms and
being able to pull off heavy accents, just did not
translate into film, and My Man only got a socio
reception despite being part of this exciting new medium of talkies.
(19:55):
Just a couple of months after My Man opened on screen,
Fanny Fanny married for a third time, this time to
a man named Billy Rose. Billy was a songwriter, and
he started writing songs and putting together musical variety shows
for Fanny to star in. Although they both loved music
in the theater, most of the people who knew Fanny
and Billy thought they weren't really a great match for
(20:16):
each other. But Billy thought Fanny was amazing and once
described her singing as thunder in the mountains. The two
of them had met after Fanny sang a song of
Billy's called Tonight You Belonged to Me, and she loved
it so much that she asked to meet the songwriter.
I want to tell you that's another happy, happy marriage,
but it's not. We'll get to how it all falls apart, uh,
(20:40):
and we'll talk about how Fanny's career played out in
the nineteen thirties, But first we're gonna pause for a
word from one of our sponsors. During the nineteen thirties,
Bryce continued to struggle in the film industry. She made
several more movies after My Man, but success continued to
(21:02):
elude her in that medium. She also continued to work
in the theater, but she ventured into radio, and overall,
even though film was problematic, this was a pretty successful time.
Fanny's story in the nineteen thirties also touches on a
previous podcast subject, which is evangelist Amy Simple McPherson. In
nineteen thirty four, one of the bits Bryce did in
(21:23):
her Zigfeld Follies show was a send up of McPherson
singing I'm soul saving Sadie from avenue, a preaching salvation
and making it pay. The follies appearances that Fanny Bryce
made in nineteen thirty four and ninety six were some
of her most popular. She seemed to have really hit
her stride as a comedian. Yeah, she was at that
(21:44):
perfect nexus where both she was really on top of
her game and her name was big enough that people
already wanted to see her anyway. And it was a really,
really fabulous time. And one of the characters that she
created during this time, called Baby Snooks, became her most amos.
As Snooks, Bryce would appear on stage dressed as a
tiny child, which was inherently funny because she was a
(22:06):
very tall woman, uh speaking in a little girl's voice,
and audience has found this whole thing hilarious. But even
without the visual, Baby Snooks was a success. Fanny took
that character onto radio, and her little girl voice, which
is pretty convincing, i must say, and ceaseless childish questioning,
played perfectly in the audio only format. While Bryce had
(22:28):
been very popular on the stage for a number of years,
as radio expanded her audience, she felt like she was
at last getting a taste of the success that she
had been chasing since she was just a kid. She
started having some health issues in as well. She developed ridiculitis,
which is a spinal inflammation that wasn't serious in her case,
(22:48):
but it did cause her a lot of discomfort. She
also had some dental issues. Many of her teeth were
already gone and she was having problems with the ones
she still had. On the advice that removing the remaining
decaying teeth might help her overall wellness, she had them
all pulled and she wore dentures for the rest of
her life, with special sets for stage eating and socializing. Yeah,
(23:09):
there are stories about the insanely high prices she was
willing to pay for customed dentures into the thousands and
thousands and thousands of dollars. And though her career was
on the rise thanks to radio, her personal life was
once again headed in the opposite direction. Billy Rose, her
third husband, fell in love with Eleanor Holme, an Olympic
(23:30):
swimmer turned entertainer when home worked on an aquatic review
that he had produced. She was also about half his age.
Billy told the press that he wanted to divorce before
he told Fanny, even though Bryce already knew things were
headed that way in his statement. He said, quote, it's
no fun being married to an electric light. Ms Bryce
is one of the brightest and cleverest stars the stage
(23:53):
or screen has ever had. But our careers clash. I
have to travel a lot and I want my wife
by my side. No one has been ousted in this case.
It's just an instance of four bullheaded careers clashing. MS.
Bryce wants her career, Arthur Jarrett wants his. MS Holme
is willing to give up hers for me. I don't
know why, but she is. And that's that. Arthur Jarrett
(24:16):
was Eleanor Holmes's husband who had also filed for divorce,
and that is how Fanny found out she was getting divorced.
When the press then reached out to Fanny for comment
on the situation, she said, quote, I'm not used to
that sort of thing. I guess it's what you call modern.
Billy and Fanny, after almost ten years of marriage, divorced
on October. It was not amicable, as Billy Rose had suggested,
(24:41):
and Fanny routinely spoke ill of her ex husband to
friends and associates. She also gave statements to the press
that she would never marry again, which was in fact true.
For the record. Billy's marriage to Eleanor also ended because
he cheated on her. Fanny, by this point had already
moved to California, and she made new start as her
radio career became the focus of her work. Baby Snooks
(25:04):
became a national star, and Fanny had a regular weekly
radio show with the character. She found a completely new
lifestyle on the West Coast, and she found that she
dropped her old routine as a late rising nighthawk and
started to keep what she called farmer hours. She would
go to bed at ten pm and get up at
eight am, which, for everyone who has ever farmed, that
(25:25):
is not farmer hours. No, it isn't. But basically, she
wasn't doing stage plays at night, so she wasn't doing
that like finish your show at ten or eleven, go
out for late supper, hang out with friends until four
or five am, then start going to bed as the
sun was coming up. But she described life in Hollywood
this way, it's semi tropical, it's like a resort, it's
(25:47):
like being on a vacation. But she also felt that
she lost the mental sharpness she had in New York
as a result of this more relaxed culture and the climate.
She had been painting as a pastime for a while,
but she got a lot more serious about it while
she was living in l A. Fanny's health had never
really been altogether robust after she started to become ill
(26:08):
a nineteen thirty six, and in July she had a
heart attack. After several months in recovery, she was right
back at the mic, performing Baby Snooks each week for
an audience that was really eager to hear it. Then
she developed sharp and recurring headaches. Yeah, they did some
fancy footwork to like make her absence from the show
(26:29):
because the show still ran about like this search for
baby snooks. Uh. She spent the time after her heart
attacks still working, but also filling her leisure time with
activities like painting, as we mentioned, and also interior decorating.
She got in the habit of like redoing her friends
houses at no charge, just because she liked picking out
furniture and putting together rooms. Her work week at this
(26:50):
point was really quite short and pretty luxurious. The Baby
Snooks show ran on Fridays, and the first read through
of each week's script was on Wednesday, so they would
read through on Wednesday rehearse, rehearse Thursday, do the show Friday.
That's your work week. While Fanny often gave lukewarm reads
and rehearsals, which concerns some people, by the time the
show went live at five pm on Friday, she was
(27:11):
on and she always delivered. In an interview that she
gave in six Fanny reflected on how the entertainment industry
had changed over the course of her forty year career. Quote,
the performer is different today. Years ago, we had a school.
The school was vaudeville and burlesque. You knocked around, so
it seasoned. You made a mention of you, so it
(27:32):
gave you an interesting background before you clicked. Today they
go right into pictures from Nowhere's somebody sees a girl
flipping Hamburgers and a drive in joint, so right away
she gets a screen test and the photographs, and she
photographs good. So they developed her and give her a
face and clothes. But they can't give you a real
personality or give you a natural technique of acting to
(27:52):
hold an audience or your own school. If they had
put me in front of a camera thirty five years ago,
when I was starting out, I had such a kisser,
the camera would have stood up and walked away. In
discussed in Bryce and her show sponsor, General Foods, were
embroiled in an argument over her contract. As television began
(28:13):
its infiltration of the home entertainment market, radio performers were
often renegotiated at much lower rates than they had commanded
before TV, but Fanny was unwilling to take a pay
cut just to keep her show, and she did not
want to try to launch a TV career. She knew
that her character of Baby Snooks only worked as an
audio gag at that point an adult woman, and she
(28:35):
had aged in the decades since she had been doing it.
Trying to do those jokes and a kid's costume on
TV would just not have played. She left radio for
the ninety nine season and decided to compile her memoirs.
But in ninety nine she was back on the radio
with a two season contract for more Baby Snooks. She
planned that it would be her final career move than
(28:57):
once that two years were up, she was going to retire.
She basically was like, I guess I'll do it. I'll
just bank this money and have a little bit more
cushion for retirement. As all of this was going on
her ex husband, Nick Arnstein, so that's her second husband
reached out to her. His wife that he had remarried
after they had separated, had died and he wanted to
get back together with Fanny, but she was no longer
(29:20):
under his spell, and despite many advances, she pretty quickly
shut him down. Two years after Baby Snook's return and
Weekly Radio, with six shows left to finish the season,
Fanny Bryce had a stroke on She never regained consciousness
and died on Me twenty nine. Her funeral was attended
by hundred people. And while Fanny did not finish that
(29:42):
autobiography because she went back to work and didn't have time,
she had roughed it out, and near the ending of
her original rough draft is as good a quote to
sum up her life as I think anybody could ask for,
she wrote, I made most things happen for me, and
if they were good, I worked to get them. If
they were bad, I worked just as hard for that.
But I am not sorry. I will tell anybody that,
(30:03):
and it is the truth. I lived the way I
wanted to live and never did what people said I
should do or advised me to do. In nineteen sixty three.
The Broadway musical Funny Girl was written about Fanny's life
and focusing on her relationship with Nick Arnstein. It debuted
in nineteen sixty four, with Barbara Streisand appearing as Fannie.
In nineteen sixty eight, it was adapted into a film,
(30:24):
also starring Barbara Streisand, and while it plays really fast
and loose with the facts and with the design of
its historical costumes, it is still a fun show. Have
you seen Funny Girl? I love that movie, And you know,
I don't like musical, so it's really like it's a
good movie. Yeah. Um. And it's one of those things
where like Barbara Streisand is so charming in it and
(30:45):
looks incredibly luminous and just lovely, and she's spectacular to
begin with. But like, I uh, she and oh Mar
Sharif are fantastic together. It is really really kind to
Nick Arnstein. Um. It basically kind kind of sets up
his character as like this man who is kind of
(31:06):
beleaguered by living in the shadow of his famous wife,
and he turns to crime because he wants to make
his own money and not depend on her all the time. Yeah,
it's a little it's it's real nice too. It's still
a very fun film. But if you watch it, particularly
after you know the real story, there are a lot
of head scratching moments and they're like I said, it
plays very fast and loose with with the facts. There
(31:30):
are some things that have seeds in reality in the
real story that are kind of like shifted around to
make things work. Like instead of her being born uh
with the last name of Borash, that is one of
her neighbors, they never really explained that she wasn't born Bryce.
She took that from a neighbor that she was. She
was fond of things like that come up and the Again,
(31:51):
the costumes are not historically accurate, but the first costume
she walks on screen in is absolutely spectacular. It's his
beautiful leopard print coat and I want it. I will
stop waxing raptotic about Funny Girl, which is very funny.
By the way, I have a lovely bit of listener
mail from our listener Heather. She sent us a beautiful
(32:14):
card and a bunch of postcards from her new digs.
She writes, Holly and Tracy, thank you again for your
work on stuff you missed in history class. This year,
I was finally able to move back home to Idaho
after twenty plus years. In a bit of an adventurous twist,
my husband and I settled in Idaho City. This area
is full of history, good, bad, and hilarious. I ran
(32:34):
into a problem deciding which postcard descend, so I went
with all of them. Please enjoy this little glimpse of
my home. If you're ever in Idaho, I'll take you
to Trudi's and treat you to the second best piece
of huckleberry cheesecake in the world. My stepmom Helga makes
the best. Can't lose um. I am always up for
cheesecake of any flavor. Um. But yes, So Heather sent
(32:55):
us all of these fantastic postcards UH from Idaho, and
some of them are really fantastic UM historical photographs from
mining tones which are great. There's a lenticular um mountain,
the Lion one that I'm kind of super into. It's
just really sweet and I appreciate that she she took
time to put together a little parcel of postcards for us.
(33:17):
So thank you so much, Heather. I I always say it,
but it bears repeating. I love hearing from our listeners
and when they send us treats like that, it warms
my dark little heart. You would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also find us everywhere on
social media as Missed in History and Missed in History
dot com is our website where every episode of the
(33:38):
show exists, as well as some show notes on the
ones that Tracy and I have been working on for
the last several years. Uh. You can also subscribe to
this show. That sounds like a great idea to me.
If you haven't done it already, you can do that
on the I Heart Radio app, the Apple Podcast app,
or pretty much anywhere you get podcasts. For more on
(34:01):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And before
we get started on talking about part two of Fanny
Brace's life, we should mention again that we are going
(00:21):
to Paris. We are, and that if you're hearing this
you could go with us. You could. So this episode
is coming out towards the end of March, and the
final deadline for people to book the trip is April third. Yeah,
and we would love to have you with us. It's
gonna be so fun. We're staying in this really darling
hotel right near the Moulin Rouge. The neighborhood looks fantastic.
(00:45):
There's lots of cute little restaurants and fun places, and
we're there for long enough it is June two to
the ninth, so that it starts to feel like you're
own little home away from home, which I love. Yeah,
there's gonna be a really good mix of there's a
lot of planned activities, but there's also plenty of free time,
so you won't be glued to a group the whole time.
If you want to go explore on your own. You
have enough time to do that. Yeah. As an introverted person,
(01:07):
I understand the value of some unstructured, potentially solo time.
Uh yeah, but it's gonna be fun. No matter how
you like to travel, we have you covered. If you
are a solo person traveling, great, don't be afraid to
join us because there will be plenty of other solo people.
If you want to bring a friend or a loved one,
also great. We're just gonna have a great time. We're
(01:28):
gonna learn all about the French Revolution and visit lots
of historically significant sites. So if this all sounds like
fun to you, and I promise it's gonna be, you
can come to our website missed in history dot com.
If you look at the menu bar at the top
of the page, there is a link that says Paris
Trip with an exclamation point to convey our deep excitement.
You can click on that. It's going to take you
to all the information, tell you how to sign up.
(01:49):
If that is something that you think you should do,
I think you should do it. It's just gonna be amazing. Uh.
But moving on from that, we're talking today about Fanny
Brice are two the this uh is, like I said,
Part two of our look at the life of comedian
Fanny Brice, whose personal life was often a mess, even
though her on stage personas were all about laughter. If
(02:12):
you have not listened to the first episode, I highly
encourage you to do so, because we are basically jumping
in with part two exactly where we stopped the last time.
So if you are not up to speed on that,
none of this is going to make any sense. When
we left off at the end of part one, Fanny
had decided to join Nick Ernstein on a trip to London,
and the two of them had a great time living
(02:34):
basically as a married couple while Fanny worked on the
London stages and Nick allegedly did some business. Yeah that's
business with air quotes. When Nick and Fanny returned to
New York in the fall, they moved into a new apartment,
and that meant that they were leaving Fanny's mother Rose
behind in the old one. Fanny and her mother had
been living together for a long time. Fanny and Nick
(02:57):
set up their new house on West fifty eight Street,
and their apartment soon became sort of a socializing nexus
where everyone from her mother's poker group, which was like
very small, anti fun too high level politicians would all
come and share drinks and a laugh with the entertainer
and her charming allegedly businessman Paramore. And the two traveled
(03:18):
again to London and Fanny was going to start an
engagement there, but the start of World War One quickly
ended that plan and she and Nick returned to New York.
Nick had used Fanny's money to start a number of
business ventures. All of them started out with great gusto,
and then they slowly fell apart as he lost interest
in them. He'd go away on business trips with only
a vague sense of information and then show up in
(03:41):
whatever city Fanny was touring to try to take her
a dinner after the show. Yeah, he lived a little
bit of a cloak and dagger life. He would just
be like, oh, it's boring business, and not really tell
her any details of what he was doing. A few
years into their relationship, while Fanny was working on a
musical comedy called Hands Up, Nick's illegal means of money
may King got him into very serious trouble. He had
(04:02):
been working with a group of criminals known as the
Gondorf Raing. Those were named for the brothers at the
center of it, and the Gondorf's in this particular instance,
were involved in wire tapping. On June fifteen, Nick was
sentenced to time in Sing Sing after a jury found
him guilty. In all this, Fanny paid not only for
his bail, which was a massive twenty five thousand dollars,
(04:25):
but also for lawyers to mount appeals in the case
She worked, but she primarily stayed in New York rather
than going on tour during this appeals process because she
wanted to be near Nick. Once all the appeals had
run out and Nick was incarcerated. She had used her
influence and every way she could to try to make
his time in prison as easy as possible. She visited
(04:46):
him at least once a week. She always brought him
home cooked meals and fawned over him while he was
in there. Yeah, she had really like her influence as
well as the influence of some of his other um
associates who had a lot of power. Basically made this
as close to like staying in a hotel as you
could be while you were incarcerated. Like he would hang
out with the warden and have dinner with the warden
(05:08):
in his apartment, and it was not a case of
what you would call hard time. It was also during
this time that Fanny started collaborating with Blanche Merrill, a songwriter,
to build on some of the character style singing that
she had done while she was appearing in the Zigfeld Follies. Blanche,
who was a collaborator with her for years after this,
put together numbers that would become Fanny's bread and butter
(05:30):
over the next several years, including Becky's back in the
Ballet and the Yiddish Bride. As she ramped up these
new songs, she got another message from Florenz Zigfeld offering
her a return to the follies at a rate of
two hundred dollars per week. If you will recall from
our previous episode, she had negotiated rates much higher than
(05:51):
that after leaving the follies. Bryce at this point was
easily commanding a thousand dollars a week for her work,
so she replied with a snarky tee agram that read
Fanny Bryce found dead in her room and the hotel stop.
The only clue as a telegram signed by f zig
Felt Jr. Which was clutched in her hand. There are
(06:11):
a number of instances of snarky telegrams back and forth
between them over the years. Sometimes that caused some confusion
and misunderstanding between them, because, as you know, written word
is not always the best way to convey sarkas. So
sometimes one of them would take something seriously when the
other was joking, or sometimes one or the other would
(06:32):
play the fact that there was ambiguity there and then
maybe say something a little bit mean and then later
be like, oh, no, you must understood it was a joke.
So they had a pretty respectful relationship of one another,
but they did play a little rough in their in
their dealings. But Fanny also did not shut zig Field
out completely and they negotiated to more amenable terms. She
ended up rejoining the Follies at the rate of five
(06:54):
fifty dollars a week. That is a lot less than
she was getting elsewhere. However, there was also a lot
prestige to being part of his show, and that was
to her the trade off. The second time around with
the Follies was a triumph for Fanny. The new material
that she had developed with Blanche Merrill was wildly successful.
Fanny was always ambitious in her work, and this continued
(07:16):
to be true. Here she decided that she wanted to
transcend her variety bill roots and make a run at
a true play. Her first play was a show titled
Why Worry, But she should have worried. The play was
a mess, despite several rewrites that followed, just dismal preview reviews,
and Fanny was not great in it. Yeah, it was
(07:36):
just one of those cases where none of the magic
came together. In October nineteen eighteen, just a month after
Why Worry closed, Fanny finally got married to Nick Arnstein
once he had finalized his divorce. At that point, they
had been together six years, and Fanny had insisted that
after she waited through his prison term he had been
pardoned in July of that year, he had to marry
(07:59):
her or the whole thing was over. It was not
an easy road. Nick's wife, Carrie didn't want to grant
him a divorce, but then she was caught with another man,
which gave Nick leeway to pursue a legal divorce, whether
Carrie wanted it or not. Carrie went the litigious route
and sued Fanny for alienation of affections, claiming that Fanny
(08:19):
had stolen her husband. There was a lot of back
and forth and cajoling on Nick's part, including getting Carrie
drunk and having her signed a paper that ended the
whole lawsuit, only to have her withdraw her promise to
drop the whole matter. But she did eventually agree to
a divorce and she left Fanny's name out of it.
All of the legalities of divorces at this time are
(08:42):
crazy to me, Like there's always like they would, even
couples that were splitting amicably would kind of do these
strange pantomimes where like the man would check into a
hotel with another woman who he wasn't actually involved with
in any way, just so that someone could see him
with another woman to give grounds for divorce because as
that was easier than them like claiming a reconcilable differences,
(09:04):
which I think maybe didn't exist at the time, or
you know, if the wife had maybe had some infidelity,
it would be such a stain on her reputation that
sometimes the husband would take the hit in that way.
It was a little Banana's reading her biographies, they always
mentioned all of this fancy footwork that people do just
to get the divorce done. There had throughout all of
(09:25):
this divorce, madness been a ticking clock on the whole
situation because Fanny was pregnant, and she was getting more
pregnant and more obviously pregnant by the day. Uh. For
a while, she wore like a special undergarment that kind
of concealed her pregnancy on stage, but eventually there was
no way to even do that anymore. Uh. And not
long after the wedding, she and Nick welcome their first child,
(09:47):
a daughter named frances And Fanny had continued to perform
well into her third trimester, and she went back to
stage work as quickly as possible after the baby was born.
But while Francis was still a baby, at a time
when it seemed like their lives might be settling down,
things turned very turbulent again. When Fanny got home from
performing at a late night show in the very wee
(10:08):
hours of February. Her husband was packing a suitcase and
asked if she had been followed. He also told her
that he was innocent, and then he left with no
further explanation. She had no idea where he had gone. Yeah,
this was one of those times where uh. Nick Arnstein,
who always had that ability to remain cool as a
(10:30):
cucumber in every situation, actually appeared visibly stressed and it
really alarmed her, and within days Fanny Bryce was being
interviewed by police. It turned out that Nick was being
accused of bond robbery, working with employees of Wall Street
brokerage houses and their messengers to steal small increments over
the course of six months, totaling to a massive sum
(10:52):
of more than five million dollars. While Nick was accused
of planning the whole thing, in actuality, he was probably
involved with about half of those thefts. Fanny was followed
by police and she was questioned repeatedly, and the hope
was that she would give them some information about where
Nick had gone. She really had no idea though. She
(11:12):
was really open with the authorities and she didn't hide anything.
But she wasn't the least bit meek either. She made
it clear that she found the whole thing irksome and
that she would not let them push her around. She
had no problems sassing police. Uh. Eventually, Nick did reach
out to Fanny by sending a coded note to their
friend W. C. Fields, who she was working with at
(11:33):
the time, and he then shared it with Bryce. And
that note mentioned a brazier shop on Second Avenue, and
after reading it, Fanny knew that she needed to go
to this brazier factory to receive calls from Nick. Once
they communicated, he asserted to her that he was completely innocent,
and Fanny completely believed him. Over the course of the
next several months, Fanny was just consumed with stress. She
(11:57):
lost twenty pounds, she couldn't sleep. The police and press
hounded her everywhere she went. Eventually, Arnstein's attorney convinced him
to come back to New York. He met Fanny and
his attorney on May fift ninety and drove to the
Assistant District Attorney's office to turn himself in. This might
be too much for some women to endure, but apparently
(12:18):
not Fanny, even though it was obviously taking a toll
on her health. We're going to talk about how devoted
she stayed through this whole ordeal after we have a
quick sponsor break. As things continued to unravel and Nick's
highly publicized trial played out, Fanny stood by him. She
(12:42):
and Nick had their second child, William, named after his
father's attorney, during this time, and Fanny took care of
all of Nick's legal fees, just as she had the
first time around. Even though she was shouldering all of
the financial burden in the situation, Arnstein was not particularly
loyal to her during this time. While he was staying
in a hotel in Washington, d C. With his attorney
(13:04):
for months away from Fanny, it became known that the
two men often entertained ladies late into the night, and
they served alcohol in their rooms despite prohibition. But even
as tales of Nick's infidelity reached her, Fanny was still
completely blinded by her love, and she wrote off all
of his bad behavior as just being the result of stress.
(13:25):
Nick's first trial resulted in a hung jury, but he
was ultimately found guilty. He was sentenced the time in
Leavenworth Penitentiary. He was incarcerated for nineteen months starting in
Fanny still stuck with them the whole time. Although the
two had started to fight and really fight for the
first time in the months leading up to his prison sentence,
(13:45):
the adultery was getting to be too much. She was
starting to feel like she had always just been his pawn. Yeah,
she really finally started to get a perspective on things
and was like, wait, you've been using me for like years.
And through all of the legal rankling with Nick and
having their second child and all of this stress, Fanny
still worked consistently. As with her daughter. She had worked
(14:07):
through most of that pregnancy, and she took only the
bare minimum of time away after William was born. The
years that Fanny was married to Ernstein were really productive
despite all these constant distractions. She went back to the
zig Field Follies for several years and appeared in a
number of other shows that were produced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.
She became known as a comedic genius, and she was
(14:31):
savvy enough to make use of her predicament in real life.
To try to optimize her stage time. In she started
singing a song titled My Man, which was far more
serious than her usual stage bits. She opened with the
lines it's cost me a lot, but there's one thing
I've got. It's my Man. The song about a woman
who loves a man despite being treated completely deplorably by him,
(14:54):
really connected with audiences, and they assumed that she was
referencing Nick Arnstein. Fanny, to spite being a very popular
entertainer as the nineteen twenties, started was still longing to
be taken a little more seriously, even as she made
a very nice life for herself as a comic act.
She had gotten good enough reviews for some of her
work that she started thinking about a more serious acting career.
(15:16):
But though she had the talent, she felt like she
didn't really have the looks to be considered for leading
lady parts in dramas or even just slightly more serious
musical comedies, and to that end, she met with a
plastic surgeon in nineteen three. There were a couple of
different factors and Fanny's desire to change her appearance. One
was that she was getting older. She was in her
(15:37):
early thirties and not really seen as an augenu and
to her husband's cheating was really taking a toll on
her self esteem. And three, she worried that her quote
Jewish nose was going to keep her doing essentially sight
gag humor that played off of her looks to perpetuate
racial stereotypes. While that kind of work had made her famous,
(15:57):
there were growing ethnic biases and racism in the United
States that made Fanny worry about the longevity of her career,
and as an assign. There is a really fantastic article
in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the
introduction of that term Jewish knows into scientific literature in
nineteen fourteen and how that has created an ongoing problem
(16:18):
since then around ideas of ethnic identity and beauty uh.
And that article examines how the medical community has contributed
to that problem over the years, in part because some
doctors would offer to fix people by stripping them of
the traits that might suggest anything other than a waspy appearance.
It is a really good read, and I encourage anybody
who's interested in that to check it out. We will
(16:40):
link to it in the show notes. I will note
that Jewish communities are not the only people affected by
this trend within the world of cosmetic surgery at all. No,
absolutely not, and that that article um is it opens,
it uses that as kind of the entree to discuss
the wider issue of like, not everybody has to look
like a white Anglo Saxon Protestant to be pretty. But
(17:02):
we have been teaching people that even within our own ranks.
Four years and years and years. Despite Nick's opposition to this,
Fanny moved forward with getting a nose job man. The
surgery became a news item itself, and for a while
the papers were really gossiping about that instead of about
Ernstein's legal trouble. But the surgery did not change her
perception in the eyes of the public or casting directors.
(17:25):
Fanny still was not considered to be a beauty, and
theater producers wanted her to be funny and not serious.
This is also sometimes pointed out as like the first
time that she really defied Nick Arnstein because he very
much did not want her to have this surgery, and
she was like, I don't care, I'm doing it. And
when Nick got out of prison, he immediately connected with
(17:46):
some of the guys that he had met while he
was in Leavenworth, intending to go into business together running
a casino. Fanny was mortified by this whole plan. She
wanted Nick to just work as her manager, a job
that she felt would keep him out of trouble. Probably
we would also keep him close to her so she
could keep an eye on his behavior. But he insisted
on this casino in Chicago, and Fanny ended up giving
(18:07):
him money for the venture. Nick also started cheating with
less and less regard for covering it up and seemed
resentful that Fanny was clearly the head of their family. Additionally,
they were ongoing criminal charges against him for his various wrongdoings.
All this was way too much stress on an already
fragile relationship, and in the fall of the two of
(18:28):
them divorced after fifteen years together. In ninety six. Leading
up to the divorce, Fanny started the play Fanny, which
was not in fact about her life, but it was
written for her. The problem was, while she was a
great comedic ham, she wasn't really a good actress actress um.
Even with extensive rewrites and coaching and extra rehearsals, the
(18:48):
reviews were really abysmal, and one reviewer wrote it was
written by Willard Mack and Mr Balasco, and they both
ought to be ashamed of themselves and of each other.
In the late nineteen twenties, Bryce side to try her
look in film after The Jazz Singer came out of seven.
It gave Fanny a unique leg up. She might not
be considered Hollywood beautiful, but she could sing, and after
(19:11):
al Jolson made history singing on film, people wanted more
of that. Warner Brothers, which had produced the jazz singer
put together a screenplay for a film starring Fanny Bryce
titled My Man, and started touting Bryce in the press
as the female Al Jolson. Fanny was thirty seven when
My Man came out in December of and she made
(19:31):
history is the first woman to star in a sound film,
But that movie didn't rocket her to stardom on the
national or global scale. The very skills that had made
her a hit on stage, like her exaggerated mannerisms and
being able to pull off heavy accents, just did not
translate into film, and My Man only got a socio
reception despite being part of this exciting new medium of talkies.
(19:55):
Just a couple of months after My Man opened on screen,
Fanny Fanny married for a third time, this time to
a man named Billy Rose. Billy was a songwriter, and
he started writing songs and putting together musical variety shows
for Fanny to star in. Although they both loved music
in the theater, most of the people who knew Fanny
and Billy thought they weren't really a great match for
(20:16):
each other. But Billy thought Fanny was amazing and once
described her singing as thunder in the mountains. The two
of them had met after Fanny sang a song of
Billy's called Tonight You Belonged to Me, and she loved
it so much that she asked to meet the songwriter.
I want to tell you that's another happy, happy marriage,
but it's not. We'll get to how it all falls apart, uh,
(20:40):
and we'll talk about how Fanny's career played out in
the nineteen thirties, But first we're gonna pause for a
word from one of our sponsors. During the nineteen thirties,
Bryce continued to struggle in the film industry. She made
several more movies after My Man, but success continued to
(21:02):
elude her in that medium. She also continued to work
in the theater, but she ventured into radio, and overall,
even though film was problematic, this was a pretty successful time.
Fanny's story in the nineteen thirties also touches on a
previous podcast subject, which is evangelist Amy Simple McPherson. In
nineteen thirty four, one of the bits Bryce did in
(21:23):
her Zigfeld Follies show was a send up of McPherson
singing I'm soul saving Sadie from avenue, a preaching salvation
and making it pay. The follies appearances that Fanny Bryce
made in nineteen thirty four and ninety six were some
of her most popular. She seemed to have really hit
her stride as a comedian. Yeah, she was at that
(21:44):
perfect nexus where both she was really on top of
her game and her name was big enough that people
already wanted to see her anyway. And it was a really,
really fabulous time. And one of the characters that she
created during this time, called Baby Snooks, became her most amos.
As Snooks, Bryce would appear on stage dressed as a
tiny child, which was inherently funny because she was a
(22:06):
very tall woman, uh speaking in a little girl's voice,
and audience has found this whole thing hilarious. But even
without the visual, Baby Snooks was a success. Fanny took
that character onto radio, and her little girl voice, which
is pretty convincing, i must say, and ceaseless childish questioning,
played perfectly in the audio only format. While Bryce had
(22:28):
been very popular on the stage for a number of years,
as radio expanded her audience, she felt like she was
at last getting a taste of the success that she
had been chasing since she was just a kid. She
started having some health issues in as well. She developed ridiculitis,
which is a spinal inflammation that wasn't serious in her case,
(22:48):
but it did cause her a lot of discomfort. She
also had some dental issues. Many of her teeth were
already gone and she was having problems with the ones
she still had. On the advice that removing the remaining
decaying teeth might help her overall wellness, she had them
all pulled and she wore dentures for the rest of
her life, with special sets for stage eating and socializing. Yeah,
(23:09):
there are stories about the insanely high prices she was
willing to pay for customed dentures into the thousands and
thousands and thousands of dollars. And though her career was
on the rise thanks to radio, her personal life was
once again headed in the opposite direction. Billy Rose, her
third husband, fell in love with Eleanor Holme, an Olympic
(23:30):
swimmer turned entertainer when home worked on an aquatic review
that he had produced. She was also about half his age.
Billy told the press that he wanted to divorce before
he told Fanny, even though Bryce already knew things were
headed that way in his statement. He said, quote, it's
no fun being married to an electric light. Ms Bryce
is one of the brightest and cleverest stars the stage
(23:53):
or screen has ever had. But our careers clash. I
have to travel a lot and I want my wife
by my side. No one has been ousted in this case.
It's just an instance of four bullheaded careers clashing. MS.
Bryce wants her career, Arthur Jarrett wants his. MS Holme
is willing to give up hers for me. I don't
know why, but she is. And that's that. Arthur Jarrett
(24:16):
was Eleanor Holmes's husband who had also filed for divorce,
and that is how Fanny found out she was getting divorced.
When the press then reached out to Fanny for comment
on the situation, she said, quote, I'm not used to
that sort of thing. I guess it's what you call modern.
Billy and Fanny, after almost ten years of marriage, divorced
on October. It was not amicable, as Billy Rose had suggested,
(24:41):
and Fanny routinely spoke ill of her ex husband to
friends and associates. She also gave statements to the press
that she would never marry again, which was in fact true.
For the record. Billy's marriage to Eleanor also ended because
he cheated on her. Fanny, by this point had already
moved to California, and she made new start as her
radio career became the focus of her work. Baby Snooks
(25:04):
became a national star, and Fanny had a regular weekly
radio show with the character. She found a completely new
lifestyle on the West Coast, and she found that she
dropped her old routine as a late rising nighthawk and
started to keep what she called farmer hours. She would
go to bed at ten pm and get up at
eight am, which, for everyone who has ever farmed, that
(25:25):
is not farmer hours. No, it isn't. But basically, she
wasn't doing stage plays at night, so she wasn't doing
that like finish your show at ten or eleven, go
out for late supper, hang out with friends until four
or five am, then start going to bed as the
sun was coming up. But she described life in Hollywood
this way, it's semi tropical, it's like a resort, it's
(25:47):
like being on a vacation. But she also felt that
she lost the mental sharpness she had in New York
as a result of this more relaxed culture and the climate.
She had been painting as a pastime for a while,
but she got a lot more serious about it while
she was living in l A. Fanny's health had never
really been altogether robust after she started to become ill
(26:08):
a nineteen thirty six, and in July she had a
heart attack. After several months in recovery, she was right
back at the mic, performing Baby Snooks each week for
an audience that was really eager to hear it. Then
she developed sharp and recurring headaches. Yeah, they did some
fancy footwork to like make her absence from the show
(26:29):
because the show still ran about like this search for
baby snooks. Uh. She spent the time after her heart
attacks still working, but also filling her leisure time with
activities like painting, as we mentioned, and also interior decorating.
She got in the habit of like redoing her friends
houses at no charge, just because she liked picking out
furniture and putting together rooms. Her work week at this
(26:50):
point was really quite short and pretty luxurious. The Baby
Snooks show ran on Fridays, and the first read through
of each week's script was on Wednesday, so they would
read through on Wednesday rehearse, rehearse Thursday, do the show Friday.
That's your work week. While Fanny often gave lukewarm reads
and rehearsals, which concerns some people, by the time the
show went live at five pm on Friday, she was
(27:11):
on and she always delivered. In an interview that she
gave in six Fanny reflected on how the entertainment industry
had changed over the course of her forty year career. Quote,
the performer is different today. Years ago, we had a school.
The school was vaudeville and burlesque. You knocked around, so
it seasoned. You made a mention of you, so it
(27:32):
gave you an interesting background before you clicked. Today they
go right into pictures from Nowhere's somebody sees a girl
flipping Hamburgers and a drive in joint, so right away
she gets a screen test and the photographs, and she
photographs good. So they developed her and give her a
face and clothes. But they can't give you a real
personality or give you a natural technique of acting to
(27:52):
hold an audience or your own school. If they had
put me in front of a camera thirty five years ago,
when I was starting out, I had such a kisser,
the camera would have stood up and walked away. In
discussed in Bryce and her show sponsor, General Foods, were
embroiled in an argument over her contract. As television began
(28:13):
its infiltration of the home entertainment market, radio performers were
often renegotiated at much lower rates than they had commanded
before TV, but Fanny was unwilling to take a pay
cut just to keep her show, and she did not
want to try to launch a TV career. She knew
that her character of Baby Snooks only worked as an
audio gag at that point an adult woman, and she
(28:35):
had aged in the decades since she had been doing it.
Trying to do those jokes and a kid's costume on
TV would just not have played. She left radio for
the ninety nine season and decided to compile her memoirs.
But in ninety nine she was back on the radio
with a two season contract for more Baby Snooks. She
planned that it would be her final career move than
(28:57):
once that two years were up, she was going to retire.
She basically was like, I guess I'll do it. I'll
just bank this money and have a little bit more
cushion for retirement. As all of this was going on
her ex husband, Nick Arnstein, so that's her second husband
reached out to her. His wife that he had remarried
after they had separated, had died and he wanted to
get back together with Fanny, but she was no longer
(29:20):
under his spell, and despite many advances, she pretty quickly
shut him down. Two years after Baby Snook's return and
Weekly Radio, with six shows left to finish the season,
Fanny Bryce had a stroke on She never regained consciousness
and died on Me twenty nine. Her funeral was attended
by hundred people. And while Fanny did not finish that
(29:42):
autobiography because she went back to work and didn't have time,
she had roughed it out, and near the ending of
her original rough draft is as good a quote to
sum up her life as I think anybody could ask for,
she wrote, I made most things happen for me, and
if they were good, I worked to get them. If
they were bad, I worked just as hard for that.
But I am not sorry. I will tell anybody that,
(30:03):
and it is the truth. I lived the way I
wanted to live and never did what people said I
should do or advised me to do. In nineteen sixty three.
The Broadway musical Funny Girl was written about Fanny's life
and focusing on her relationship with Nick Arnstein. It debuted
in nineteen sixty four, with Barbara Streisand appearing as Fannie.
In nineteen sixty eight, it was adapted into a film,
(30:24):
also starring Barbara Streisand, and while it plays really fast
and loose with the facts and with the design of
its historical costumes, it is still a fun show. Have
you seen Funny Girl? I love that movie, And you know,
I don't like musical, so it's really like it's a
good movie. Yeah. Um. And it's one of those things
where like Barbara Streisand is so charming in it and
(30:45):
looks incredibly luminous and just lovely, and she's spectacular to
begin with. But like, I uh, she and oh Mar
Sharif are fantastic together. It is really really kind to
Nick Arnstein. Um. It basically kind kind of sets up
his character as like this man who is kind of
(31:06):
beleaguered by living in the shadow of his famous wife,
and he turns to crime because he wants to make
his own money and not depend on her all the time. Yeah,
it's a little it's it's real nice too. It's still
a very fun film. But if you watch it, particularly
after you know the real story, there are a lot
of head scratching moments and they're like I said, it
plays very fast and loose with with the facts. There
(31:30):
are some things that have seeds in reality in the
real story that are kind of like shifted around to
make things work. Like instead of her being born uh
with the last name of Borash, that is one of
her neighbors, they never really explained that she wasn't born Bryce.
She took that from a neighbor that she was. She
was fond of things like that come up and the Again,
(31:51):
the costumes are not historically accurate, but the first costume
she walks on screen in is absolutely spectacular. It's his
beautiful leopard print coat and I want it. I will
stop waxing raptotic about Funny Girl, which is very funny.
By the way, I have a lovely bit of listener
mail from our listener Heather. She sent us a beautiful
(32:14):
card and a bunch of postcards from her new digs.
She writes, Holly and Tracy, thank you again for your
work on stuff you missed in history class. This year,
I was finally able to move back home to Idaho
after twenty plus years. In a bit of an adventurous twist,
my husband and I settled in Idaho City. This area
is full of history, good, bad, and hilarious. I ran
(32:34):
into a problem deciding which postcard descend, so I went
with all of them. Please enjoy this little glimpse of
my home. If you're ever in Idaho, I'll take you
to Trudi's and treat you to the second best piece
of huckleberry cheesecake in the world. My stepmom Helga makes
the best. Can't lose um. I am always up for
cheesecake of any flavor. Um. But yes, So Heather sent
(32:55):
us all of these fantastic postcards UH from Idaho, and
some of them are really fantastic UM historical photographs from
mining tones which are great. There's a lenticular um mountain,
the Lion one that I'm kind of super into. It's
just really sweet and I appreciate that she she took
time to put together a little parcel of postcards for us.
(33:17):
So thank you so much, Heather. I I always say it,
but it bears repeating. I love hearing from our listeners
and when they send us treats like that, it warms
my dark little heart. You would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also find us everywhere on
social media as Missed in History and Missed in History
dot com is our website where every episode of the
(33:38):
show exists, as well as some show notes on the
ones that Tracy and I have been working on for
the last several years. Uh. You can also subscribe to
this show. That sounds like a great idea to me.
If you haven't done it already, you can do that
on the I Heart Radio app, the Apple Podcast app,
or pretty much anywhere you get podcasts. For more on
(34:01):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works
dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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