Fanny Brice

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Fanny Brice (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951) was a popular and influential United States comedian, singer, and entertainer, remembered best for her many stage, radio and film appearances, her phonograph records, and as the creator and star of Baby Snooks. After her death she was depicted on stage and film by Barbra Streisand as Funny Girl.

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Death 3 Film tributes 3.1 Film stories versus reality 4 Works about Fanny Brice 5 External links

[edit] Early life and career

Fanny Brice (occasionally spelled Fannie) was the stage name of Fania Borach, born in New York City, the third child of relatively well-off saloon owners of Hungarian Jewish descent. In 1908, she dropped out of school to work in a burlesque review. She is best known for both her association with Florenz Ziegfeld, headlining his Ziegfeld Follies from 1910 into the 1930s, and for her later radio career which lasted a decade and a half.

In the 1921 Follies, she was featured singing "My Man" which became a big hit and is considered Fanny Brice's signature song. She made a popular recording of it for RCA Victor Records. The second song most associated with her is the tune "Second Hand Rose". She recorded nearly two dozen record sides for Victor, and also cut several for Columbia. She is a posthumous recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for her 1921 recording of "My Man."

Trying to leap from stage to screen, Fanny made several films. She appeared in My Man (1928), Be Yourself! (1930), Everybody Sing (1938) (with Judy Garland), The Great Ziegfeld (she, Ray Bolger and Harriet Hoctor were the only original Ziegfeld performers to portray themselves in the 1936 film), and 1946's Ziegfeld Follies. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at MP 6415 Hollywood Blvd.

From the 1930s until her death in 1951, Fanny made a radio presence as a bratty toddler named Snooks, a role she first premiered in a Follies' skit. With first Alan Reed (later known as Falstaff in Fred Allen's famed "Allen's Alley" skits, who would also become known to TV viewers as the voice of Fred Flintstone on the animated sitcom of the same name) and then Hanley Stafford as her bedeviled Daddy, Baby Snooks premiered in Ziegfeld Follies of the Air in February 1936 on CBS. She moved to NBC in December 1937, performing the Snooks routines as part of the Good News show, then back to CBS on Maxwell House Time, the half-hour divided between the Snooks sketches and comedian Frank Morgan, in September 1944. She was back to NBC in November 1948, in a full show of her own, first called Toasties Time but soon enough known as The Baby Snooks Show.

Brice was so meticulous about the show and the title character that she was known to perform in costume as a toddler girl even though none but the radio studio audience could see her. She was 45 years old when the character began her long radio life. In addition to Reed and then Stafford, her co-stars included Lalive Brownell, Lois Corbet, and Arlene Harris playing her mother, future television star Danny Thomas as Jerry, Charlie Cantor as Uncle Louie, and Ken Christy as Mr. Weemish. And she was completely devoted to the character, as she told biographer Norman Katkov:

"Snooks is just the kid I used to be. She's my kind of youngster, the type I like. She has imagination. She's eager. She's alive. With all her deviltry, she is still a good kid, never vicious or mean. I love Snooks, and when I play her I do it as seriously as if she were real. I am Snooks. For twenty minutes or so, Fanny Brice ceases to exist."

One of Brice's Baby Snooks writers, Everett Freeman, told biographer Katkov that Brice didn't like to rehearse the role but always snapped to on the air, and lost herself completely in the character:

"While she was on the air she was Baby Snooks. And after the show, for an hour after the show, she was still Baby Snooks. The Snooks voice disappeared, of course, but the Snooks temperament, thinking, actions, were all there."

Brice had a shortlived marriage in her teens to a local barber, named Frank White. Brice's second husband was the professional gambler Julius "Nicky" Arnstein. During their marraige, Arnstein served 14 months for wiretapping in Sing Sing, where his celebrity wife visited him every week. When he was later sentenced to serve two years at Fort Leavenworth for conspiracy to carry stolen securities into the District of Columbia, a heartsick Brice divorced him. She went on to marry songwriter and stage producer Billy Rose and appeared in his revue Crazy Quilt, among others. Unfortunately, that marriage also failed.

Brice and Stafford brought Baby Snooks and Daddy to Tallulah Bankhead's legendary big-budget, large-scale radio variety show, The Big Show, in November, 1950, sharing the bill with Groucho Marx and Jane Powell, among others, and performing a skit in which Snooks knocks on Bankhead's dressing room door for advice on becoming an actress when she grew up in spite of Daddy's warning that she already lacked what it took.

[edit] Death

Six months after her Big Show appearance, Fanny Brice died in Hollywood, California at the age of 59 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

She is interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. The May 29, 1951 episode of The Baby Snooks Show was broadcast as a memorial to the star who created the brattish toddler, crowned by Hanley Stafford's brief on-air eulogy: "We have lost a very real, a very warm, a very wonderful woman."

[edit] Film tributes

A loosely-based biopic of Brice was released in 1939 entitled Rose of Washington Square, starring Alice Faye and Tyrone Power. The title "Rose of Washington Square," came from the title of a song which Brice popularized by performing it in the Follies. Brice soon found out via gossip columnist Louella Parsons that the film was based on her life and ordered 20th Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck to cut several production numbers.

Barbra Streisand later starred as Brice in the 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl, which made Streisand an overnight sensation. In 1968, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for reprising her role in the film version of "Funny Girl." In 1975, a sequel film, Funny Lady, was produced. Streisand also eventually recorded both "My Man" and "Second Hand Rose," with the latter becoming a Top 40 hit, as well as "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You (Than Happy with Somebody Else)".

[edit] Film stories versus reality

Funny Girl is an example of how films will take liberties with the lives of historical figures and/or events. The Streisand film makes no mention of Brice's first husband at all. It also suggests that Arnstein turned to crime because his pride wouldn't allow him to live off of Fanny; the real Nicky shamelessly sponged off her. The film also suggests Nicky sold phony bonds; he was actually part of a gang that stole $5 million of Wall Street securities. Instead of turning himself in, as in the movie, Arnstein went into hiding. When he finally surrendered, he did not plead guilty, as he did in the movie, but fought the charges for 4 years, taking a toll on his wife's finances. Further, two children were born of the Brice-Arnstein marriage, but only their daughter is depicted in the film (the daughter Frances would marry Ray Stark, producer of both the Broadway musical and the film, while the son, William, became an artist of note).

[edit] Works about Fanny Brice

• Goldman, Herbert, Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl, Oxford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-19-508552-3.

• Grossman, Barbara, Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice, Indiana University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-253-20762-2.

[edit] External links

• [1] Visit a large gallery of images from the career of Fanny Brice
• [2] Brice on eb.web
• [3] Arnold Rothstein, Nicky Arnstein and Fanny Brice
• [4] Fanny Brice article at the Jewish Women's Archive
• Fanny Brice at the Internet Broadway Database
• Fanny Brice at the Internet Movie Database