Fanny Brice, Part 1

Fanny made a space for herself on stage as a comedian because she felt she could never be pretty enough to be an actress. And her personal life was a complete roller coaster. But she remains the original funny girl, making awkward her brand from the time she was a teenager.

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Episode Transcript

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 d Wilson. Uh, Tracy,
did you watch Can you ever forgive me? I did not.
You should because it's great, But I had watched it

(00:22):
in the lead up to the oscars Um, and in it,
the main character, who's based on a real person, Lee Israel,
claims that she is working on a Fanny Brace biography.
I promised to anybody who has not seen the movie,
this is in no way a spoiler. There is a
minor spoiler I will give you, which is that one
other character says, who the heck cares about Fanny Brice
and I'm like, I do. Uh. So this got me

(00:45):
thinking about how little I actually knew about Fanny Bryce.
I had seen the fictionalized version of her life, which
we'll talk about at the end um. But then I
was like, I wonder how much of that is true?
So then I fell down the research rabbit hole, and
now it's a two part of It was one of
those things where I was like at the word count,

(01:05):
where we would normally start to be like, Okay, this
is about an episode long, and I had barely gotten
through like her childhood. I was like, uh oh um,
So then I just kept writing and then paired some
things down and now it's a two part episode. If
folks have been listening to the podcast for an incredibly
long time. She is mentioned in an old episode about

(01:28):
notable of odd billions, but it's like two and a
half paragraphs, not nearly a thorough look at her at all,
And her life was very fascinating, like one. She really
made a space for herself on stage as a comedian,
primarily because she loved to perform, but she felt that
she was never going to be pretty enough to be
taken seriously as an actress or like as even as

(01:49):
a chorus girl. She was like, I don't fit in
with these women. And her personal life was a complete
and total roller coaster. I made a joke to a
friend of mine while we were talking about me research
watching this that if you made a drinking game where
you drank every time Fanny made a poor choice about men,
you would be utterly hammered by the of her life story.

(02:10):
Please don't do that, because she really would be dangerous
at this point. But she really at the same time
was sort of triumphant, and she remains the original funny girl.
Too many people making awkward kind of her brand from
the time she was a teenager. She was born on
October twenty nine, the third of four children born to

(02:30):
Rose and Charles Borash. Her name when she was born
was Fania or maybe Fanya. Her immigrant family lived on
Manhattan's Lower East Side, and her mother, who had been
born Rose Stern, had moved from Hungary to New York
in eighteen seventy seven when she was ten years old.
She moved to live with an aunt after her mother

(02:51):
died and worked as a laborer in a series of jobs.
Her father, Charles, moved to New York in the eighteen
eighties after serving in the French Army, and it's not
really clear whether he was discharged from military service or
whether he deserted. Rose's and charles relationship wasn't entirely romantic.
Rose had been worried about her prospects with another suitor,

(03:13):
and when Charles, who was a bartender, proposed using his
sister as a messenger of his intentions toward her, Rose
eventually agreed, thinking it was better for her than any
of her other options and not not one of history's
great romances um and related to our recent episode on
cruise ships. Fanny and her family traveled via ocean liner

(03:36):
to France to visit her father's family in and during
that trip, Fanny, who was traveling in steerage, learned that
she could go upstairs to the first class area and
get treats from wealthy passengers by putting on a sad expression,
sort of her first acting job. Not long after that
first visit to France, the family opened a candy and

(03:57):
stationary store in Newark, New Jersey, where they had moved.
They lived upstairs from the business. Rose ran the business
and Charles had an ongoing card game in the back room.
After two years of running the store, Rose open up
bar because that was a much more lucrative business. Rose
started running a lot of other bars as well as
sort of a roving manager, but Charles struggled with alcohol

(04:21):
and he did not work. Yeah, Charles was kind of
nicknamed French Charlie, and he was kind of this really
fun person to have around, but he did not really
have any sort of work ethic to speak of, so
Rose was really shouldering all of the burden of basically
every bit of family business, and despite Charles's lack of ambition,
the family was financially stable thanks to Rose and basically

(04:42):
middle class because she had a lot of business acumen.
She worked really, really hard, so much so that Fanny
got in the habit of rating the Boresque family pantry
and then taking things from it to the households of
friends who were less fortunate. So she would basically just
go take things out of their pantry and bring them
to a friend's house, and she would tell her friends
that her mother had accidentally bought too much at the

(05:03):
grocery store and that they needed to give it away
or it would go to waste, because she also didn't
want people to feel weird that she was compelled to
give them charity groceries. While this behavior was generous, Fanny
wasn't exactly a model child. Otherwise. She didn't keep her
thievery exclusive to the pantry. She stole money from her
mother as well and from other family friends, and then

(05:24):
from stores. She got caught stealing art supplies from a
department store with her brother, and that scared her straight
on the matter of shoplifting. But she also exhibited an
entrepreneurial spirit. As a kid, she had the classic lemonade
stand to make some cash. She gave sewing lessons to
friends for a small stipend as well, and she kind
of inherited her mother's proclivity to just hustle all the

(05:46):
time and always be trying to make money, which is
really smart and astute. I kind of wish I had
had more of that as a kid. But performing was
also a part of Fanny's early life, so when her
family had Sunday brunch, they would have it in the
bar and she would get up on the counter and
entertain her parents and her siblings. Her performances got applause
and Nichols from her father, Charles, who thought it was

(06:08):
all delightful. Her mother was a little less enthused with
this whole performance. When she was ten, Fanny started working
in a Newark department store as a gift wrapper. It
was a pretty short engagement because Fanny told her coworkers
that her mother had died and that her father was
blind and the whole family was destitute. So her coworkers
organized a clothing drive for her, and that got the

(06:30):
attention of the store management, who contacted her mother. Her
mother naturally was mortified, and then Fanny's job was over. Yeah,
Rose was mortified not just because her daughter had lied
and said she was dead, but also because she was
a regular customer at this store and had worked really
hard to be like a middle class woman, and so

(06:52):
then to have people think she was destitute was horribly embarrassing. Uh,
there were multiple levels of mortification going on there. Fanny's
parents separated. The following year, Rose moved out with the
children and she became a realtor. She left the bar
business behind. Charles became a bookmaker at the local race track,
and while Charles initially visited the children often, those visits

(07:14):
were always pretty brief and carefully timed periods when Rose
was out of the house working, Fanny started her career
as a professional actress, sort of in quotation marks. During
that time, she charged her school friends a penny to
see her perform melodramas in the basement of her house.
I did this in the basement of my house when
I was a child, but I didn't charge people a penny.

(07:37):
I know me too. I'm like I could have been
making bank off of that. They could also bring a
piece of fruit if they did not have a penny,
and she used her acting skills h much the same
way she had on their crossing of the Atlantic to Europe,
to get things like free fares on the trolley to
Coney Island and snacks for herself and her brother Lou

(07:57):
who was her ongoing accomplice, and all of this mischief. Yeah,
they were pros it basically like looking like sad destitute
children and people would be like, oh, do you want
some candy, a sandwich and apple? Like they were always
basically like making free ride vacation days for themselves. She
also answered a job listing to work as a page

(08:18):
in a dress shop running errands in the lake, and
she skipped school to work there every single day until
her mother discovered the situation. But that pattern was already set.
Fanny had been so cavalier about attending school that by
the time she was a teenager, she was four years
behind her peers, which made her not want to go
because that was embarrassing in a pain in the next

(08:38):
trying to catch up, and so she skipped and fell
even further behind. Most people estimate that, really, in terms
of attending school, eighth grade is about as far as
she really got. On a Thursday night in Fanny decided
to try her luck at a Brooklyn Vaudevielle theaters amateur
night sort of. The plan when she went to the
theater was just to watch from the audience, but when

(09:00):
she and her friend got there, they realized they did
not have enough money for tickets, so Fanny lied and
said that they were performing so that they could get
in through the stage door. They figured they would watch
for a while and then leave, but then she got
pushed onto the stage by the stage manager without any warning.
This was initially quite scary for the teenager, and she
nearly started crying. Uh. Fanny was a ham, but she

(09:23):
was not expecting any of this to happen, so she
was really ill prepared. But with encouragement that was being
shouted from a few kids in the audience who knew
Fanny and had watched her perform in the neighborhood, she
eventually asked the orchestra to play a ballad that she knew,
and she started singing, and when it was over, the
crowd cheered and Fanny ended up collecting more than four

(09:43):
dollars in coins that have been thrown onto the stage
as well as the amateur night prize, which was ten dollars,
and then the theater owner, Frank Keeney, told Fanny that
she should dry out at other amateur contests as well.
Fanny took this advice and she started performing at other
amateur nights all around Brooklyn. She won the majority of
them that she entered. She also started developing an actual

(10:05):
act with specific songs and an occasional comedy bit. She
would go to these shows to compete and perform, and
she would make as much as thirty dollars a week.
She gave most of this to her mother, but she
realized that she would not be able to be an
amateur forever, and she also felt the pull of Manhattan. Yeah,
that habit of giving her money to her mother lasted

(10:25):
really almost throughout her life. Um Rose also decided to
move herself and the kids to Manhattan, so she was
Fanny was not the only one who was thinking she
would like to move there, and they all relocated to
East eight two Street, and once there, Fanny hustled like
crazy to get a real entertainment career going. She wasn't
even fifteen yet, but she understood that she had to

(10:46):
make connections if she wanted to get anywhere, so if
she hung out where performers did so that she could
make those connections, and through those connections she was able
to forge She and a friend were able to get
bit parts in the play A million Here's Revenge at
the West End Theater. As part of the play, Fanny,
who appeared under the name Jenny Waters, played an artist's

(11:07):
model who popped out of a pie one night when
the play was being staged on tour in Pittsburgh. An
accident tipped the pie stage piece over while Fanny was
still inside of it. She was cut by the lightbulbs
that were part of this piece of scenery. That was
the end of her run in A Millionaire's Revenge. And
We're about to get into the next phase of Fanny's

(11:27):
early work in show business, but first we will pause
for a quick word from one of our sponsors. Realizing
that the amateur night scene in Manhattan wasn't exactly booming,
it wasn't as popular there as it was in Brooklyn,
Fanny got a day job in a movie house and

(11:48):
during the day she sang and played piano along with
the images on screen, but she also did all kinds
of odd jobs for them, like making signs and even
working at the box office. A coworker to Old Fanny
about a show that needed some chorus girls, and so
she had her mother Collin sick for her and she
went to what she thought was an audition, really that
they just looked her over and asked her to leave

(12:10):
some information. She was informed by postcard two weeks later
that she had gotten the job and she needed to
start rehearsals at the new Amsterdam Theater on Broadway. She
annoyed the producers by trying to sing over the other
chorus girls, but then she turned down her himminus to
try to make them more happy then her dancing skills
or lack thereof, she had none. They got her fired anyway,

(12:35):
she could not keep up with the other girls in
the chorus um and she ended up. She was so
embarrassed she told her mom that they had fired her
because her legs were too skinny. Um. She used that
rejection though, as fuel, and she decided that she would
take dancing lessons. But the teacher that she hired was
really just taking on students to fill roles in her
touring theater company, so essentially she was having people pay

(12:58):
her instead of her paying them for the work they
were doing. The students did not get paid and they
had to do off stage work as well. And Fanny
learned really, really quickly through this experience that there were
plenty of people in the entertainment industry who were happy
to use hopeful as with no intention of ever actually
helping them with their careers. Next, she turned to burlesque,

(13:18):
working as a chorus girl. Still, but she still couldn't
dance all that well. She got cast in the Transatlantic Burlesquers. Anyway,
they put Fanny, who was tall and pretty gawky, into
the back where nobody could she see if she got
the steps strong. I'm gonna say this is a technique
that directors were still using when I was in theater.
It's it's the trick as old at time. Yeah, my

(13:42):
mother described to me one time as awkward girl at
the back of the chorus. Oh No. At this point
we should note it was not burlesque in the sense
that the word is used now. This was a variety
show that was farcical and irreverence, where Broadway hopefuls would
try to learn their craft strip tease acts that might
be associated more with it today, We're not part of

(14:04):
it then. No, it was still considered really low brown
by a lot of um like Broadway actors, but it
did not have the sexualized connotation that it does today.
Some of their acts were a little bit saucy, but
not not the same thing that you would think when
you say burlesque now. But even in this burlesque circuit,
fanny shortcomings were an issue. Producers and directors who recognized

(14:26):
her really really strong singing talent and her natural abilities
in comedy worked to find ways to use her to
show those talents off. But that usually meant that she
was in sort of a stoogy punchline role, and she
wanted to be a real entertainer. She didn't want her
presence to just be a joke, so she tried to
give herself a fresh start and adopted the last name Bryce.

(14:46):
That was the name of a family that her family
had been close with. She started touring with a new production,
still in a pretty jokey role, and she started every
asking everyone from chorus girls to stage hands to teach
her dance steps. She would trade clothing and small amounts
of money for these lessons. She got good enough in
the first month of touring that she demanded to be

(15:07):
put back into the regular chorus, and then from there
she quickly progressed into the second row and then to
the front row as she got better and the company
shifted with cast members leaving the production. When she finally
got to play small roles, Fanny was actually really good. Yeah,
she had kind of put together her own kind of
performers boot camp, learning how to dance really quickly and

(15:29):
practicing everything, so when she finally did kind of get
a shot at a little bit more, she was completely ready.
And she soon moved on to another touring company. It
was one that her younger brother Lou was working with
and they had needed a quick replacement for a female lead,
and Fanny stepped right in and learned the part in
two days so that they could continue their tour uninterrupted.

(15:50):
From there, Fanny continued to about a career. She worked
with Irving Berlin to develop specialty numbers that would become
her signature songs. So some of these, like Sadie Salom
I Go Home, were sung in a Yiddish accent, and
this was mocking a really popular trend at the time
of actresses doing their own version of the Dance of
the Seven Vales. Fanny developed the safety of this song

(16:13):
into a full character as she performed it, and that
became part of Fanny's comedy repertoire for years. We have
to pause for a little minute here and talk about
the kind of comedy that this was. In putting on
a heavy Yiddish accent, Fanny was joining in on what
was known as dialect comedy, which was really popular at
the time. It would be seen as completely racist today,

(16:35):
but it was very common and popular in the early
half of the twentieth century. And Fanny, whose parents were
Jewish and also who grew up in a very mixed
New York neighborhood where she learned the accents of a
lot of different people, kind of straddled this line between
farce and outright mockery pretty carefully. Even as she was
playing up stereotypes, though, she was really mindful that there

(16:55):
could be Jewish audience members, so she never wanted to
go too far with it. But it seems like it
wasn't so much that she was being culturally sensitive. She
just didn't want the crowd to turn on her. She
was similarly careful in all of her comedy. She would
satirize but never really sharply criticize with her jokes and
her caricatures. The barbs that she had there were barbs,

(17:17):
but they stayed pretty gentle. Yeah. She generally had the
reputation for always being really good natured in making fun
of people, um, never cruel. There's a quote from RuPaul
that I can't say because we don't swear on this podcast.
There's a good one of just you know, it's okay
to be sassy, but don't be mean. That's the difference,
um which carries you today. Although again, these like caricatures

(17:40):
would not be cool today no matter how you did them.
I think. As she improvised through various performances, she also
got really good at letting the accidents that could derail
most performers, for example, like an ill fitting costume that
made her move strangely or making a misstep just become
part of the comedy. So instead of letting an accident
become an awkward embarrassment, she just kind of amplified it

(18:00):
and it became part of the act. And through this
approach she developed a really keen sense of physical comedy.
But she also sometimes irritated her fellow performers as she
would play up accidental gags that got laughs and sometimes
take a scene or a number completely off course in
the process. At seventeen, Fanny was signed to a three
year contract by burlesque theater producer Max Spiegel. He wanted

(18:24):
her mother to sign it because she was only seventeen,
but she lied and said that her mother couldn't right,
so she would have to sign it for herself. She
worked through her first season. She fine tuned her act
to optimize the comedic elements of it, and soon became
one of the productions star performers. Yeah, that's another another
lie that I'm sure Rose would have been really irritated at, Like,

(18:46):
I'm literate, what are you talking about? She did not
enjoy all of these FIBs that Fanny told. That kind
of demeaned her and major seem like she was not
the accomplished when she was At eighteen, Fanny got married
to an entrepreneur named Frank White who owned several barber shops.
This was definitely not a case of a deep and

(19:06):
abiding love. Kind of repeated the family history of like, well,
this seems like an okay idea. Uh, Fanny was generally
kind of distrustful of men. She felt she was not
a great beauty, and so she presumed that men who
acted interested in her were being patronizing or were just
they wanted something and that was it. But Frank had

(19:26):
followed her from city to city while she was on tour,
to see Fanny every night and take her out to dinners,
and even though she did not love Frank, she agreed
to the wedding in part with the encouragement of a
friend of hers who was like, but then you'll be settled.
You'll be a wife and have a life um. The marriage, however,
was as brief as the courtship, and after just a

(19:46):
few days together, Frank left Fanny on the road with
her theater troupe. They never saw one another again. The
marriage was formally ended with a divorce two years later,
and Fanny concentrated on her career. In the interim, in
Fanny heard from Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. Who, at what point,
just as a side note, he had managed Eugen Sandow.

(20:07):
That's the strong man who we talked about in our
previous podcast on Katie Sandwina and once she famously bested
in a strength competition, So Florenz Ziegfeld sent Fanny a
telegram and it read quote, will you come to see
me at your earliest convenience Stop Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld didn't
actually know anything about Fanny, but his colleague Jerry Siegel

(20:31):
had scouted her in her burlesque show and told Ziegfeld
he should snatch her up for the zig Feld Follies.
Siegel had also found out that because Fanny had signed
her own contract at the age of seventeen, it technically
wasn't legally binding, so Ziegfeld wouldn't have to buy her
out of it. Fanny thought the Ziegfeld telegram was a
prank that was being pulled by her cast mates, but

(20:52):
it was real, and after she had a brief meeting,
she was signed to the Ziegfeld Follies for two years.
She was making seventy five ors week for the first
year and a hundred dollars a week for the second year.
Her mother Rose later negotiated that to a hundred dollars
for the first year and a hundred and fifty for
the second. Just sort of evidence that maybe Fanny could

(21:12):
have been relying on her mom instead of lying about
her right, and that's like, uh, kind of touted as
the one time Rose ever got involved in Fanny's contracts,
But clearly she did the right thing, so maybe she
should have been involved more. Um, things did not go
super duper smoothly for Fanny in her new job as
a Zigfeld girl, but we're going to get into that

(21:33):
after we hear from one of the sponsors that keep
stuff you missed in history class going. While Fanny made
a positive impression in rehearsal with her singing, she had
a little problem with lateness that consistently angered director Abe
or Langer. When Erlanger chastised Fanny, she did the unthinkable.

(21:57):
She stood up to him, even though he threatened to
have her fire. She basically like copped to the fact
that she was late, but she's like, nobody gets to
talk to me like this. But when the Follies made
their debut in Atlantic City ahead of moving to Broadway,
Fanny's number got a standing ovation and she told her
Langer that he owed her an apology as she exited
the stage. Both Fanny's first and second season with the

(22:18):
Follies were a little underwhelming in spite of that, really
auspicious start. She was often seen as one of the
anchors of the production, but overall, neither the nineteen ten
or nineteen eleven touring shows were especially huge hits. They
were sort of a mix of uneven material. This was
a time, though, when she was first introduced to the
glamorous aspects of a life and entertainment. She actually spent

(22:40):
a good bit of time was Zigfeld and his girlfriend
at the time, Lillian Lorraine that the entrepreneur found Fanny's
taste ghosh and made Lillian teacher how to select proper
clothing for nights on the town. Apparently, when she got
a little bit of money and started buying her own clothes,
she went complete tropical parrot, which I applaud and thinks
she should have kept forever. But that's just me. As
the follies toured, Fanny became more and more of a

(23:03):
show bizgal. She was always fascinated by and drawn to
anything that she thought was luxurious or sophisticated. At the
end of Fanny's contract with Ziegfeld, he did not use
to renew it. This came at the same time as
news that Fanny's father, Charlie, had died. He had largely
vanished from Fanny's life after he and Rose had split,

(23:23):
but the news still had an effect on his daughter.
Fannie felt isolated during this time. Her mother had hated
her father. By the time Charlie died, she didn't have
anybody else to talk to you about it. Similarly, Rose
just saw the entertainment industry as a job. She did
not understand the heartache that Fanny felt about being dropped

(23:44):
by Ziegfeld, and there is incidentally a little bit of
inconsistency about zig felt dropping Fanny and whether he actually
intended to or not so. The follies company manager Ed
Rosenbaum had told Fanny that Zigfeld did not want to
see her when he was delivering a message to one
of her colleagues that she was with that the producer
did want to have a meeting with He basically said

(24:05):
he wants to see you, not you, and Fanny took
that as like the sign that she was done. But later,
when they talked about it, zig Feld told Fanny that
this had all been a misunderstanding and he thought that
Fanny would have just automatically come to talk to him
about a new contract. The matter was never conclusively settled.
Fanny never fully bought into this idea that she could
have had a contract renewal, and by the time that

(24:28):
this all happened and zig Felt told her that was
not the case, Fanny had already signed a contract elsewhere.
That elsewhere was with the Schubert Brothers. Fanny asked for
and got four d and fifty dollars a week with
the Schubert's. That was way more than she had made
with zig Feld, and she had signed with them just
days after the end of her time with zig Feld.

(24:49):
So while she had money saved up to live comfortably
for at least a year, she didn't need to dip
into her savings that much, just long enough to fill
a really small gap of a few months before her
work with the Huberts started. She ended up taking a
vaudeville job during that time. She was hugely successful there,
with one reviewer saying quote, ms. Bryce's chock full of

(25:10):
function and has a keen sense of travesty. I absolutely
love that line. I wanted on a shirt. What if
we what if we did that? I think we can uh.
Fanny's first show with the Schubert's was the touring version
of World of Society, which had already been on Broadway
starring Al Jolson, and the tour was expected to be
a money maker because Jolson had agreed to stay for it,

(25:32):
so the Shuberts just thought, we're gonna Reka in cash
left and right. Fanny's part was written in for her.
It was a maid named Marcel who spoke with a
heavy Yiddish accent, so it played on that kind of
comedy she had been doing. But she and Jolson had
some friction because he complained about one of her songs,
which she's saying in what she believed was a black
dialect comedy style, and he did not like it. That

(25:54):
song was cut from the show after his complaints. Early
on in her run with the Schubert Troope, Fanny met
a and named Jules Whitford Arnstein, who went by Nick
Arnold when they met. After a performance of Whirl of
Society in Baltimore, Fanny and a friend from the show
went to Nick Sweet with another man named Frank McGee
for dinner the next week when the show was in Philadelphia.

(26:15):
Fanny was impressed by the fancy digs, but it was
the bathroom that really captured her heart. Bryce would later
say that she was born again in Nick's bathroom because
she was so completely taken with his monogram silk pajamas
and his fine toiletries and his multiple toothbrushes. Some rewards
say that he had seven toothbrushes. She thought that she

(26:37):
had at last met a man of complete refinement and
good taste, and she became completely enthralled with him. Really
that this man was a mess. He claimed to be
a businessman, at least to Fanny, but in reality he
was a con man, a gambler, and a swindler. He
had an arrest record. He had been taking into custody
several times in various European cities. He told Fanny about

(27:00):
at but not about his wife, Carrie Greenthal. Fanny found
Nick's history, at least what she knew of it, sort
of thrilling and romantic, Oh Fanny. Shortly after the two
met Nick, which he went by normally, he generally just
started going by Nick Arnstein moved into the apartment that
Fanny shared with her mother. Rose was not enthused. Bryce's

(27:22):
mother was instantly suspicious of Nick. She saw through his
whole like I'm a worldly cool guy, trick uh, And
she told Fanny that she thought he was no good.
But Fanny, who had always kept romance at arm's length
prior to this point, fell deeply in love and she
was not hearing any kind of reason. She described this
period of her life as feeling like she was in heaven.

(27:44):
Even as the realities of Nick's life started making themselves known,
Fanny really refused to see him as anything but a cultured,
sophisticated catch of a man. She found out about his wife,
but never brought it up with him. Eventually, Nick told
her about his himself, and she decided she would stay
with him and wait for him to get divorced so
that they could be together. And Fanny paid for everything furniture, clothes, travel,

(28:10):
to the point that she ran out of pocket money.
I had mentioned earlier that she got in the habit
very early on of giving Rose her her income, and
that continued for a long time because while she was
still the primary breadwinner and had largely taken charge of
the family business, at least in terms of being the earner,
Rose still really handled the finances, and Rose put everything
she could have Fanny's income into savings, not to be

(28:33):
touched because she felt really strongly that that was the
only way to build security. Fanny actually ended up pawning
some of her jewelry to surprise Nick by traveling to
London with him for the summer, where he was allegedly
going for business. She basically just showed up and was like,
I'm going on this cruise with you. Fanny also used
this trip, though, to do some business of her own.
Once they got to England, she appeared in several London

(28:55):
shows and she negotiated some very lucrative contracts for her
work to appear there. Fanny was incredibly happy on this trip,
and she felt like she finally had everything that she
wanted in life. So with this happy moment, we're going
to end part one. It's a nice place to end.
That bliss is not going to last into part two though, No,

(29:15):
we'll give We'll give Fanny a couple of days of blissful,
blissful moments before it all falls apart, because it does.
Nick is exactly the person he sounds like, yeah attached
to him. He's terrible, Um I uh oh. Fanny. It's
funny because she seems so savvy in some ways and

(29:35):
then became this strange, naive version of herself the second
she met him. We'll talk about just how deeply he
shifted her life and all of the problems that arose
from it. Uh, next time around. But now I have
listener mail and it's cool. Are you ready, Tracy? I am?
You really are. You don't know that you are, but
you are. We got thanked in a book what uh huh?

(29:58):
And I will read uh. The author, who is Stephanie
moral I or more real, I don't know how she
pronounces it, wrote us a card and sent us copies.
She writes, Dear Tracy and Holly, I imagine you received
packages like this all the time, but I couldn't resist in.
When I listened to your two part episode on Executive
Order ninety sixty six, I was deeply moved. Being a

(30:19):
young adult author, my thoughts turned to the teens whose
lives were interrupted by the evacuation. I thought, what if
an Italian American girl was in love with a Japanese
American boy and when his family was taken away, hers
got to stay. And this turned into the enclosed book. Uh.
So she wrote this book, which is called Within these Lines,
and she very sweetly put a thank you to us
in the back which is nice, just darling, It's very cool.

(30:41):
So um, thank you so much, Stephanie. I'm I'm always
odd by people who chure out books, UM, because I don't.
I've had many stabs at them and then realized that's
not really what I ever want to do. UH, but
would like to write to us, You can do so
at History Podcast at house topworks dot com. You can
also find us across the spectrum of social media as

(31:03):
missed in History. UH. You can also find us at
missed in History dot com. That's our website where we
have every episode of the show that has ever existed,
as well as UH show notes from any of the
ones that Tracy and I have worked on. You can
also subscribe to the show, and we hope that you do.
You can do that on the I Heart Radio app,
at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For

(31:28):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
staff works dot com.