Fania Borach (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951), known
professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American illustrated song
model, comedienne, singer, theater, and film actress who made many stage,
radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the
top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show. Thirteen years after her death, Brice was
portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the 1964 musical Funny
Girl; Streisand also starred in its 1968 film adaptation, for which she won an
Oscar, and in the 1975 sequel, Funny Lady.
Early life
Fania Borach was born in Manhattan, New York City, the third
child of Rose (née Stern 1867-1941), a Hungarian-Jewish woman who emigrated to
America at age ten, and Alsatian immigrant Charles Borach. The Borachs were
saloon owners and had four children: Phillip, born in 1887; Carrie, born in
1889; Fania, born in 1891; and Louis, born in 1893. Under the name Lew Brice,
her younger brother also became an entertainer and was the first husband of
actress Mae Clarke. In 1908, Brice
dropped out of school to work in a burlesque revue, "The Girls from Happy
Land Starring Sliding Billy Watson". Two years later she began her
association with Florenz Ziegfeld, headlining his Ziegfeld Follies in 1910 and
1911. She was hired again in 1921 and performed in the Follies into the 1930s.
In the 1921 Follies, she was featured singing "My Man", which became
both a big hit and her signature song. She made a popular recording of it for
the Victor Talking Machine Company. The second song most associated with Brice
is "Second Hand Rose", which she also introduced in the Ziegfeld
Follies of 1921.
She recorded nearly two dozen record sides for Victor and
also cut several for Columbia Records. She is a posthumous recipient of a
Grammy Hall of Fame Award for her 1921 recording of "My Man".
Brice's Broadway credits include Fioretta, Sweet and Low,
and Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt. Her films include My Man (1928), Be Yourself!
(1930) and Everybody Sing (1938) with Judy Garland. According to film historian
Richard Barrios, My Man is a lost film. Brice, Ann Pennington, Ray Bolger and Harriet
Hoctor were the only original Ziegfeld performers to portray themselves in The
Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946).
Radio
Brice's first radio show was the Philco Hour in February
1930. Brice's first regular radio show
was probably The Chase and Sanborn Hour, a thirty-minute program which ran on
Wednesday nights at 8 pm in 1933.
From the 1930s until her death in 1951, Fanny made a radio
presence as a bratty toddler named Snooks, a role she premiered in a Follies
skit co-written by playwright Moss Hart. Baby Snooks premiered in The Ziegfeld
Follies of the Air in February 1936 on CBS, with Alan Reed playing Lancelot
Higgins, her beleaguered "Daddy". Brice moved to NBC in December
1937, performing the Snooks routines as part of the Good News show, then back
to CBS on Maxwell House Coffee Time, with the half-hour divided between the
Snooks sketches and actor Frank Morgan.
In September 1944, Brice's longtime Snooks sketch writers,
Philip Rapp and David Freedman, brought in partners, Arthur Stander and Everett
Freeman, to develop an independent, half-hour comedy program. The program
launched on CBS in 1944, moving to NBC in 1948, with Freeman producing. First
called Post Toasties Time (named for the show's first sponsor), the show was
renamed The Baby Snooks Show within short order, though in later years it was
often known colloquially as Baby Snooks and Daddy. On the spinoff version of
Baby Snooks, Hanley Stafford played Daddy, with Reed instead appearing as
Daddy's employer, Mr. Weemish. Stafford eventually became the longest-running
actor to portray the "Daddy" character.
Brice was so meticulous about the program and the title
character that she was known to perform in costume as a toddler girl even
though seen only by the radio studio audience. She was 45 years old when the
character began her long radio life. In addition to Reed and Stafford, her
co-stars included Lalive Brownell, Lois Corbet and Arlene Harris playing her
mother, Danny Thomas as Jerry, Charlie Cantor as Uncle Louie, and Ken Christy
as Mr. Weemish. 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 20 minutes or so, Fanny Brice ceases to exist."
Baby Snooks writer/producer Everett Freeman told Katkov that
Brice did not like to rehearse the role ("I can't do a show until it's on
the air, kid") but always snapped into it on the air, losing herself
completely in the character: "While she was on the air she was Baby
Snooks. And... 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."
Television appearance
and later years
Brice and Stafford brought Baby Snooks and Daddy to
television only once, an appearance in June 1950 on CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of
Stars. This was Fanny Brice's only appearance on television. Brice handled
herself well on the live TV broadcast but later admitted that the character of
Baby Snooks just didn’t work properly when seen.
She returned with Stafford and the Snooks character to the
safety of radio for her next appearance, on Tallulah Bankhead's big-budget,
large-scale radio variety show The Big Show in November 1950, sharing the bill
with Groucho Marx and Jane Powell.[6] In one routine, Snooks asks Bankhead for
advice on becoming an actress, despite Daddy's insistence that Snooks has no
acting talent.
Fanny Brice resided in a house built in 1938 on North Faring
Road in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, designed by architect John Elgin Woolf
(1908-1980).
Personal life
Brice had a short-lived marriage in her teens to a local
barber, Frank White, whom she met in 1910 in Springfield, Massachusetts, when
she was touring in College Girl. The marriage lasted three years and she brought
suit for divorce in 1913.
Her second husband was professional gambler Julius W.
"Nicky" Arnstein. Before their marriage, Arnstein served fourteen
months in Sing Sing for wiretapping. Brice visited him in prison every week. In
1918 they were married after living together for six years. In 1924, Arnstein
was charged in a Wall Street bond theft. Brice insisted on his innocence and
funded his legal defense at great expense. Arnstein was convicted and sentenced
to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, where he served three years.
Released in 1927, Arnstein disappeared from Brice's life and that of his
children. Reluctantly, Brice divorced him on September 17, 1927, soon after his
release. They had two children: Frances (1919–1992), who married film producer
Ray Stark, and William (1921–2008), who became an artist using his mother's
surname.
Brice married songwriter and stage producer Billy Rose in
1929[8] and appeared in his revue Crazy Quilt, among others. Their marriage
failed, with Brice suing Rose for divorce in 1938.
Death
Six months after her Big Show appearance, on May 29, 1951,
Brice died at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood from a cerebral
hemorrhage at 11:15 a.m.; she was 59.
The May 29, 1951, episode of The Baby Snooks Show was
broadcast as a memorial to Brice 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." Brice was cremated, and her ashes were
interred in the Chapel Mausoleum at the Jewish Home of Peace Cemetery in East
Los Angeles, California. Forty-one years later, at the time of Brice's daughter
Frances's death in 1992, Brice's ashes were re-interred at Westwood Village
Memorial Park Cemetery, Los Angeles, some 20 miles west of her original
interment place. Fanny's grave and those of her daughter, son and her
daughter's husband Ray Stark are in an outdoor pavilion.
Legacy
For her contributions to the film and radio industries,
Brice was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame with two stars.
Her motion pictures star is located at 6415 Hollywood Boulevard while her radio
star is located at 1500 Vine Street.
The Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York
(SUNY at Stony Brook) had a Fannie Brice Theatre, a small 75-seat venue which
was used for a variety of performances including a 1988 production of the
musical Hair, staged readings, and a studio classroom space. The building was
razed in 2007 to make way for new dormitories.
The Fanny Brice Theatre is one of three situated in the
University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts Complex, completed
in 2010.
Mexican comedian Maria Elena Saldana was influenced by Brice
and created a character similar to Brice's Baby Snooks, La Guereja.
In 2006, Brice was featured in the film Making Trouble-Three
Generations of Funny Jewish Women, a tribute to Jewish comediennes produced by
the Jewish Women's Archive.
Brice portrayals
Although the names of the principal characters were changed,
the plot of the 1939 film Rose of Washington Square, in which the principal
characters were portrayed by Tyrone Power and Alice Faye, was inspired heavily
by Brice's marriage and career, to the extent it borrowed its title from a tune
she performed in the Follies and included "My Man".[citation needed]
Ms. Brice sued 20th Century-Fox for invasion of privacy and won the case.
Producer Darryl F. Zanuck was forced to delete several production numbers
closely associated with the star.
The 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon Quentin Quail features a
character based on Brice's characterization of Baby Snooks.
Barbra Streisand starred as Brice in the 1964 Broadway
musical Funny Girl, which centered on Brice's rise to fame and troubled
relationship with Arnstein. In 1968, Streisand won an Academy Award for Best
Actress for reprising her role in the film version. The 1975 film-sequel, Funny
Lady, focused on Brice's turbulent relationship with impresario Billy Rose and
was as highly fictionalized as the original film. Streisand also recorded the
Brice songs "My Man", "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You (Than Happy
with Somebody Else)", and "Second Hand Rose", which became a Top
40 hit.
Funny Girl, and its sequel Funny Lady, took liberties with
the events of Brice's life. They make no mention of Brice's first husband and
suggest that Arnstein turned to crime because his pride would not allow him to
live off Fanny and that he was wanted by the police for selling phony bonds. In
reality, however, Arnstein sponged off Brice even before their marriage and was
eventually named as a member of a gang that stole $5 million worth 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, taking a toll on his wife's finances.
In 2010, One Night with Fanny Brice, a one-woman show about
Brice written and directed by Chip Deffaa and starring Kimberly Faye Greenberg
premiered in New Jersey. The cast album, on the Original Cast label (OC-3831),
was released in September 2010. The next production of the show, by the
American Century Theatre Co. of Arlington, Virginia, starring Esther Covington,
was slated to open in November 2010, directed by Ellen Dempsey.
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