August 23, 2023 • 39 mins
Billie Burke is known today for one iconic movie role, but in the early 20th century, she was incredibly successful and very famous. Her life and marriage are as fascinating and dramatic as any play or film she starred in.
Research:
- “Billie Burke.” Playbill. https://www.playbill.com/person/billie-burke-vault-0000023585
- “Billie Burke and Burkeley Crest.” Hastings Historical Society. Sept. 14, 2009. https://hastingshistoricalsociety.org/2009/09/14/billie-burke-and-burkeley-crest/
- “Billie Burke Dead; Movie Comedienne.” New York Times. May 16, 1970. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/16/archives/billie-burke-dead-movie-comedienne-billie-burke-film-comedienne-and.html
- “Billie Burke Weds.” New York Times. April 13, 1914. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1914/04/13/101431271.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- Burke, Billie. “With a Feather on My Nose.” Appleton-Century-Crofts. New York. 1949.
- Burke, Billie. “With Powder o My Nose.” Coward-McCann. 1959. Kindle edition, 2016.
- “Florenz Ziegfeld Dies in Hollywood After Long Illness.” New York Times. July 23, 1932. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1932/07/23/100837257.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- “’The School Girl’ a Hit.” New York Times. May 10, 1903. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1903/05/10/105052764.pdf
- Tatna, Meher. “Forgotten Hollywood: Billie Burke.” Golden Globe Awards. Dec. 18, 2020. https://www.goldenglobes.com/articles/forgotten-hollywood-billie-burke
- Walford, Jonathan. “What is a Flapper?” The Fashion History Museum. Aug. 30, 2021. https://www.fashionhistorymuseum.com/post/what-is-a-flapper#:~:text=The%20real%20origin%20of%20the,to%20high%2Dspirited%20teenage%20girls.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So I was in
Hollywood a couple months ago for an event, and as
(00:22):
often one does when you're in Hollywood, you look down
at Walk of Fame names, and I was thinking one
that it would be fun to do a series on
some of the lesser known people that show up on
Walk of Fame stars, which might happen. We might have
that as a series, or you know, some of the
ones that don't have long biographies, maybe we'll do an
(00:43):
amalgamated episode. Sure, because some of those are great. But
one of the people that popped up for me this
time that I was like, that's not an unknown person,
but I also know enough about her that I know
she's really interesting, and that is Billy Burke. And she
is known today for mostly one role. And if you
(01:06):
don't recognize her name, you will recognize it when we
get to that role. But that's quite at the end,
and then you'll go, oh her, which would be great.
But as I said, her life quite a ride. She's
very very interesting, and I could talk about her forever
because I she wrote two books or co wrote them
(01:28):
with an assistant, or not quite a ghostwriter, because she's
credited on this stuff. But her way of telling stories
is great, and she is very frank about her life
in those books. So I have really enjoyed them, and
I just thought she would make a fine addition to
our our our storytelling collection. So today it's Billy Burke.
(01:53):
I was in camp oh her. So if you are,
if you're like, I don't know what you're talking about,
do not be embarrassed. I did not recognize the name either,
not at all, which is why we you know she's due. Yeah,
so Ethelbert Appleton Burke was born on August sixth, maybe
eighteen eighty four, maybe eighty five, maybe eighty six. Reported
(02:15):
differently different places, and she claimed different years for herself.
That was in Washington, d c. Her mother, Blanche Baby Hodkinson,
was from New Orleans. Her father, Billy Burke, was a
singing clown. Billy wrote in her autobiography that her father
had wanted to be a chemist, but he cut his
education short to enlist with the Union Army in eighteen
(02:38):
sixty two, when he was eighteen and became a drummer
during the US Civil War. She said her father never
talked about the war, but that she found a disability
discharge certificate for him that was dated April fourth, eighteen
sixty three. She clearly really admired her father. She wrote
about he quote was one of these international clowns you
(03:00):
could play in any country in any language. When Billy
was touring with the Barnum and Bailey circus, he met
Blanche while the show was stopped in Pittsburgh. Blanche was
a mother of four, She was in her forties, and
the two of them very quickly fell in love. They
got married before the Pittsburgh engagement of the circus was over,
(03:21):
and she and the kids left with him. Blanche stopped
for a while in Washington, where her mother lived, and
Billy kept touring. At that point, she was expecting a baby,
and everybody thought it was unwise for her to keep traveling.
So when baby Billy was born, her father, who was
from an Irish family, telegraphed and said, quote, I don't
(03:42):
care whether it's a boy or a girl, but does
it have red hair? And as a joke, James Anthony
Bailey sent a message that read quote, I will make
you a firm offer of one million dollars cash for
the baby, which I suppose if you didn't have a
working relationship with your boss, that might come off as
(04:02):
really horrible, but apparently they all thought it was very funny.
I should mention that those four previous kids of Blanche
kind of drop out of the picture, and we don't
really know what happened there, whether she left them with
her mother or what, but they are not really in
any of the stories that come up afterwards. But when
Billy was eight, her father moved the family by which
(04:25):
I mean himself, Blanche and young Billy, to England to
start a new troupe there called Billy Burke's Barnum and
Greatland and Circus Songsters, and little Billy had gone by
that name Billy from the time she was tiny, and
she later wrote quote, I have always been called Billy Burke,
except for those eighteen improbable glittering years when I was
(04:46):
also missus Floren Ziegfeld Junior. I find it a perfectly
adequate name. It's an especially nice name for the skidter
witted ladies I play on the screen today, and it
suits me too, because I might as well confess here
and now that I I'm not always saner than I seem.
But she also claimed that her name did not officially
become Billy until the family was living in England. So
(05:08):
while they were in London, she met a reverend Kerschbaum,
who actually gave her the name Mary William at her baptism,
making her full name Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke. Billy,
who was just twelve at this time, had told the
reverend that she wanted to be named Billy in honor
of her father, and that he had asked if she
(05:29):
would also take Mary as a favor to him, to
which she happily acquiesced. In her autobiography, she says she
kind of had a crush on this reverend and that
she would have named herself Gorgonzola if he had asked.
You will also see her birth name as Mary William
Ethelbert Appleton Burke. But the way she always told the story,
those first two names were not her name at birth.
(05:51):
They did not become part of her name until she
was baptized and entered into the register at Westminster Abbey.
It was also during her time as a child in
Love then that Billy's stage career began, although this was
a reluctant start. Billy's mother, Blanche, wanted her to go
into the family business, but Billy was really shy and
her father was against it. She later wrote, quote, it
(06:14):
occurs to me that someone ought to do a piece
of scholarly research on the number of girls who have
become stage and movie stars because their mothers pushed them.
Billy had never even shown a lot of interest in
her father's show, let alone any others, but her mother
started taking her to plays enrolled her in acting school,
but both her acting classes in her regular school were
(06:36):
interrupted a lot whenever her father was on tour, because
she and her mother would normally go with him while
they were traveling. Her mother tried to supplement her education
by taking her to museums, which Billy found very boring,
and she later said of all of this, quote, I
doubt if there is a museum in all Europe that
I did not doze in during my adolescence. Billy's first
(06:59):
stage performance was a set of songs that she sang
at Birkenhead while the family was there for a summer holiday.
She was fourteen at this time and She described the
experience as awful and scary, but she did it again
the next day and she did a bit better, and
after that her mother just kept booking her gigs. She
(07:19):
was soon working at the London Pavilion as a weekly performer,
and she described actually starting to have a little fun
once she got over that initial nervousness. She got paid
ten pounds a week for singing, and it was there
at the Pavilion that she was spotted by the composer
Leslie Stewart, and he offered her a small role in
his new play, The Schoolgirl. Billy was a teenager at
(07:42):
this time. She was given the best song in the show,
but that had to be kept secret from the show's
two leads until dress rehearsal because there was concern that
those two actors have become jealous and angry. And when
they heard it a dress rehearsal, both of them were
jealous and angry and threatened to quit, but they stayed,
and when the show opened in May nineteen oh three,
(08:03):
according to the New York Times quote, miss Burke made
the hit of the evening. Billy later recalls that she
was so overwhelmed by the audience's boisterous reaction to her
song that she ran off stage and forgot to bow,
and she bumped into a stage hand and fell, and
the stage manager caught her. Billy misunderstood the situation. She
thought all the noise was because they hated her, but
(08:26):
her stage manager threatened to slap her if she did
not go back on stage and sing it again. That
is terrible, but she later credited that threat with the
creation of her fame, because she became a celebrity pretty
quickly thanks to this play, and people recounted the story
of her debut and her singing it twice frequently. The
(08:46):
schoolgirl ran for two years at the Prince of Wales
Theater and eighteen year old Billy was a London celebrity.
She mentions an interesting theory in her autobiography that she
believes her nickname during this time was the origin of
the term flapper, applying to young women. She was nicknamed
the American flapper in London. Quote. I think this is
(09:08):
the origin of the term flapper. Certainly, my red hair flapped,
not by theatrical design, but because I was too lazy
to fasten it up. I rather liked it that way too.
Sadly Billy. Jonathan Walford, writing for the Fashion History Museum
in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, traces the first use of the
word flapper in print to refer to energetic teenage girls
(09:31):
in a nineteen oh three story by Desmond Coke. It
was being used colloquially in the UK as early as
the eighteen nineties. The Oxford English Dictionary actually puts its
first written use in the context of teenage girls in
eighteen eighty eight, so way earlier. Yes, you're marvelous, Billy,
but you are not the originator. Billy was also aware
(09:53):
of the many temptations that London held for a young, pretty,
relatively famous actress, but her mother, lanch was very much
on hand to prevent any kind of shenanigans. Billy later
said that because she worked in the theater, she was
immune to the kinds of schoolgirl crushes on actors that
most teenagers experienced. Those were her colleagues, and she did
(10:14):
not find them appealing in any way. She did date
a number of young men, mostly in the military, but
although some and it sounds like many, wanted to be
quite serious and get engaged, she thought she would probably
get tired of them anyway, so she never accepted any
of their proposals. As The Schoolgirl was ending its run,
Billy had a sense of the direction that her career
(10:36):
might take. She knew her singing wasn't good enough to
carry a career, and she decided she wanted to go
after light comedy roles. She met American theater manager Charles
Frohman during this time. He said he would like to
produce The Schoolgirl in New York, but that her popular
song would be sung by the show's star in that production.
(10:57):
So she started going to any and every theater company
in the West End that was producing comedies and offered
her talents there. She played in a couple more musical
theater shows and had what sounds like a marvelous time
in a run of The Belle of Mayfair at the
Vaudeville Theater. It was during that engagement that Charles Hawtrey
(11:17):
saw her. He was a theater manager in London, and
he went to the show several times before sending her
a message asking her for a meeting. He saw in
her exactly what he wanted, which was a comedian. Yeah,
and that was exactly what she wanted someone to see,
so this was a good thing. Coming up, we'll talk
(11:38):
about Billy's entry into straight comedy, but first we'll have
a little sponsor break. Hawtrey cast Billy in a comedy
called Mister George, and for it she had to learn
the difference in how to a musical comedy, which she
(12:02):
had been doing, versus straight comedy, So she had to
learn straight comedy. She later wrote, quote, there is a
sharp and enormous difference between playing musical comedy and playing
straight comedy, and I think I can explain it best
by putting it this way. In a musical comedy, you
direct everything to the audience. In comedy, in a play,
you know the audience is there and you play to it,
(12:23):
but you direct yourself to your fellow players, and act
as if you were in a room, not in a theater.
Although this role and this time of her life were
quite thrilling, she met royalty during this time, and she
was invited to fancy parties by London elite. This also
came with some sorrow because her father, Billy Burke, had
been ill for some time. He for the most part,
(12:45):
lived apart from Billy and her mother in Bath for
the benefit of his health, whereas they stayed in London
for her career and he would visit London to see
her act, but he died before Mister George opened. In
nineteen oh seven, Billy was cast in a play My
Wife Is New York by Charles Browman. That was the
person who had told her she could not sing her
canoe song in his US version of The Schoolgirl. After
(13:08):
she finished one more play with Charles Hawtrey, she took
the job. She made five hundred dollars a week, which
was a huge sum to her at the time, and
she was very well received. She later wrote, quote by degrees,
it was born in on me that my wife had
made me a star. But to tell the truth, I
was rather stupid about it. I honestly didn't realize what
(13:29):
had happened. It had all been so much fun and
all so easy. Mister George led to a string of
other successes on the New York stage from nineteen ten
to nineteen thirteen, including Missus Dot Suzanne, The Runaway, The Mind,
The Paint Girl, and the Land of Promise. She described
this as an incredibly content time in her life, when
(13:51):
she had money and security. She was not ambitious, according
to her own account, and was happy to be acting
in comedies as she had hoped when she was working
on The Schoolgirl. She didn't see herself as a great actress,
and she had no designs on becoming one. But when
she was the top build star in a play called
Love Watches, which ran from nineteen oh eighteen nineteen oh nine,
(14:13):
she did admit to being a little thrilled at seeing
her name in lights. Billy really developed an image of
being a bubbly, light hearted woman, and part of that
was through her choice of dress. In the john of
the twentieth century, a lot of women's fashions still trend
in toward dark colors and structured, heavy looking silhouettes. She
(14:34):
really favored light, fluttery styles with ruffles. She became known
for having fantastic style, and women wanted to emulate it.
Billy Burke was not just famous, she was iconic. She
was one of the first stage stars who had all
kinds of merchandise named after her. Her mother is said
to have loved walking into department stores and seeing the
Billy Burke dresses, which had wide, flat collars a lot
(14:56):
of the time trimmed with lace. She also had a
lo of hair clip ons named for her, which let
customers get the same long red curls that she had
been really known for. Burke was objectively speaking of beauty
by the standards of the day, by any standards, but
she never seemed to see herself that way. She once
(15:17):
commented on the feature that she disliked most about her face, quote,
I have a deep and penetrating sorrow my freckles. I
have tried everything under the sun, but they cling to
me faithfully. But though she may have been keenly aware
of what she perceived as flaws, it also did not
keep her from living a life that reflected her iconic
(15:37):
beauty and style status. When she toured, she had her
dressing room redecorated to suit her taste in every city,
even if she was only performing for a short period
of time somewhere, she wanted everything to be done up
in Baby Blue. Billy's routine for her health and beauty
was legendary. She had her hair brushed by her maid
(15:58):
every morning, She used yellow brand meal in her bath
to make the water soft, She used a chalk powder
on her nose, and she believed an exercise. She walked
five miles a day and worked out her upper body
with Barbel's strength exercises and what was called Indian clubs.
These are clubs similar to ones you might have seen
jugglers used that look kind of like elongated bowling pins.
(16:21):
They would add weight and resistance to fluid movements, and
they were said to have been invented by soldiers in
India for exercise and then adopted by the British military
during colonization. Strength training wasn't exactly common for women at
the time, so she was kind of ahead of the
trends on this one. In nineteen ten, while she was
(16:44):
achieving great success with the touring company of Love Watches,
Billy Burke bought a huge thirty five acre estate in Hastings,
New York. It was the Kirkham Estate when she acquired it,
and she changed the name to Berkeley Crest. Blanche managed
a full property renovation and update, including the addition of
(17:04):
a tea house and apple trees, and the laying of
roads to get around the property by car. And though
she was able to afford all of this and was
happy with her salary, when she got an offer from
a Froeman competitor for fifteen hundred dollars a week plus
ten percent of theater profits. She parleyed that into a
similar deal with Froeman. It was also while starring in
(17:27):
Love Watches that one of her high profile romances started.
That was with Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso. He would
go see her perforum night after night and throw roses
onto the stage every time. He wrote her love notes
and sent them backstage. She said of the famous singer quote,
he made love and ate spaghetti with equal skill and
(17:48):
no inhibitions. He would propose marriage several times each evening. Naturally,
I did not take him seriously. On New Year's Eve
nineteen thirteen, although she would lay it as happening. At
least two hours into nineteen fourteen, Billy and her manager
at the time crashed a party at the hotel Astor
that changed her life because it was there that she
(18:10):
met Flora Zigfeld Junior. She wrote of him quote, he
had a Mephistophelian look, his eyebrows and his eyelids lifting
curved upward in the middle, Slim and tall and immaculate
in full evening dress. He was in black and white,
contrast to the rest of the costumed party and so,
and for who knows what other reasons I noticed him
(18:31):
at once, without speaking, Zigfeld pulled her into a dance,
and she described him using his knee to signal her
to turn on the dance floor, which she said quote
was an odd thing to do, but I rather liked it,
and the two of them were soon a couple. This
romance got a lot of tongues wagging, but not in
(18:52):
a good way. Most people believed that Billy was too
good for him and that he would lead to nothing
but unhappiness for her. He had been a source of
gossip on Broadway and throughout the vaudeville circuit for a
long time. Flow Zigfield had started the Zigfield Follies seven
years before he and Birke met. He had been married
(19:12):
by common law to actress Anna Held from eighteen ninety
seven or maybe eighteen ninety nine, depending on the source,
until nineteen thirteen. Held had served him with divorce papers
for infidelity in nineteen twelve. Everyone who knew them both
thought that Flow would break Billy's heart and probably tank
her career as well. Charles Frohman was especially adamant that
(19:36):
he thought the relationship was a bad idea, and Billy
knew the rumors about Zigfeld that he was, in her words,
extremely dangerous and cavalier about women. Yeah, Charles Frohman made
a lot of ultimatums with her regarding this relationship, but
the heart wants it at once. So Billy and Flow
(19:58):
continued their romance, although they often tried to keep it
on the down low to avoid criticism. She went on
record as saying that even if she had known quote
precisely what tortures and frustrations were in store for me,
I should have kept right on falling in love. She
claimed that some of their secret rendezvous even took place
in Grant's tomb in Upper Manhattan. Basically, they were doing
(20:21):
anything they could to avoid the press, and Billy actually
did try to break things off with Flow more than once,
and in response to her most declarative note saying as
much that she was done, he came to her dressing
room after the show that night and said, I want
to get married tomorrow. So, after four months in which
Ziegfeld wooed Billy by telling her he wanted to be
(20:44):
her husband and her manager, and winning over her mother
Blanche as well, in April of nineteen fourteen, they went
to Hoboken, New Jersey, with Blanche in tow to a lope.
They found a parson who was willing to perform the service,
but it seems he was a little before the whole
thing and especially confused by their names. Billy later wrote
(21:06):
of the wedding that the minister had addressed her as
Flow and told her where to stand. She replied, he's Flow,
I'm Billy. And then the minister turned to Flow and said, oh,
all right, then you stand here Bill, and Flow replied
I'm Flow, she's Bill. I mean Billy. It's kind of
like who's on first. She concluded this story by saying, quote,
(21:31):
but he married us, and I am sure it was legal.
They were back in Manhattan that night Billy had a
show to do. Their marriage news didn't make the press
for two days, and at that point it was headlines
We're going to get into married life for Billy and Flow,
which had a lot of good and bad. But before that,
we will pause for a word from our sponsors. Charles Frohman,
(22:02):
for whom Billy had worked for several years at this point,
died in nineteen fifteen. He was aboard the RMS Lusitania
when it sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Having never spoken
to Billy again after she married Flow Zigfeld. After Froman's passing,
his office put Billy under contract. And that may sound good,
like a stable situation, but really it was a way
(22:24):
to prevent her from transitioning to movies. For one thing,
there was still ongoing animosity with Froman's office that Billy
had abandoned her public persona of innocent Aungenoux to Mary Zigfeld,
and the company booked her with seventy two back to
back one night stand performances, so that for more than
two months she would be traveling, and most of it
(22:47):
away from her new husband. And during this time, rumors
started to get back to Billy that Flow was already
seeing other women, as had been predicted by basically everyone
she knew. Billy had married a cheater, and she didn't
like it, But in her later years she spoke really
kindly of him still, although she was also frank about
(23:08):
the reality of his behavior. She wrote, quote of another thing,
I am confidently certain Zigfeld has been portrayed as a
man who pursued women. I have even come across a
word which in regard to him is not only vulgar,
but incredibly inaccurate. The word is chaser by all the
pink toad prophets. Flow Zigfeld was never that. Flow never
(23:30):
pursued any woman. He was cool and aloof and difficult.
But there were times, more times than I prefer to recall,
when he made a woman eager for his approval by
a mere look or a small expression, or by a
slight grasp of her elbow a low mumbling request to dance.
That was all the effort he ever had to make.
The story of one noted dancing girl about how Flow
(23:53):
Zigfeld used to batter down her door is a confection
of sheer poppycock. I tell you I know better. She
also wrote about him, quote, I hope I can make
myself clear about this. There were several things I knew
for certain then, and I have never changed my mind.
One of the things I knew was that Flow loved me,
and that he loved his home and his family. He
(24:16):
was what he was. That long two month plus tour
ended in Los Angeles and Billy was introduced to Hollywood.
In nineteen sixteen, she was offered the lead role in
a film called Peggy by Thomas Ince, who offered her
a staggering three hundred thousand dollars for one single picture.
That's an indicator of how famous she was at this point,
(24:38):
even though we don't really think of her as a
household name today. Her froman agents in New York got
wind of the offers that were being made to her,
and she received a telegram while she was still in
California that read, if you sign up with Pictures before
we see you again, we will not continue with you
for another season, and she sent the reply, I have
done nothing up to now waiting to have talk with
(24:59):
you about pictures, but any more irate telegrams from you
and I will sign immediately. They did send another irate telegram,
and when she got to New York, she told the
froman firm that she was through with them. During production
on Peggy, Billy was offered a five year contract, but
she felt she couldn't have a career in Hollywood and
also hoped to maintain her marriage, so she chose the marriage.
(25:23):
Not long after, reports of these infidelities escalated and she
asked him to come to California, which he did. They
fought about this situation for two days Eventually, they put
their issues aside, and Billy started work on a new
film with another huge payout, called Gloria's Romance. But Billy
also realized her entire marriage was gonna be one where
(25:46):
she was instinctively suspicious and jealous of other women that
he was connected to. Billy's films were hits, and she
made several more that year. Yeah, he was also her
manager at this point, so there was like a financial
interest in them being like, Okay, yeah, this horrible stuff
is going on, but we're also still business partners and
(26:07):
we have to work on these movies, which seems like
kind of a dangerous position to be in. But on
October twenty third, nineteen sixteen, the same year that Billy
made a lot of movies, the Zigfelds welcome to daughter,
Patricia Burke Zigfeld. Three weeks after she was born. In Manhattan,
the family moved together into the lavish Berkeley Crest mansion.
(26:29):
Zigfeld had turned the grounds into a landscaped wonderland, and
then he started to bring in animals. According to Billy,
they had a herd of deer. They had two bears
until that became unsafe. They had two lion cubs, At
one point there were partridges, pheasants, cockatoos, parrots, an elephant,
a pony, at least seven geese. There were lambs, ducks,
(26:51):
hundreds of chickens, at least fifteen dogs, two buffalo, and
then seven dwarf ponies, which they received as a gift.
As many of these animals became unwieldy or unrealistic to
take care of, they had to be rehomed. The elephant,
for example, ended up with a circus. Flow also started
screening movies for his friends at the house because producers
(27:13):
were happy to send him the latest features, and he
would invite all of his friends from New York and
the lavish parties that he hosted there, so they sort
of hosted together, but he was really the one driving
that bus. Became the stuff of legend as Flow was
setting up the ultimate entertainment venue at Berkeley Crest. In
(27:33):
nineteen seventeen, Billy went back to her roots and was
back on stage in New York. She also started making
pictures with the movie studios that had set up shop
on the East Coast to take advantage of the available
Broadway talent. It wasn't always bliss, but they loved their daughter,
and they kind of made the marriage work in its
way for several years, although there were plenty of ups
(27:55):
and downs. Flows follies were getting more acclaim and money
was coming in, although the plays he was producing for
Billy to star in weren't doing all that well. Additionally,
Billy's mother, Blanch, who was diabetic, was having a hard
time with her health. The immense house was really too
much for her. It had these huge staircases and vast rooms,
(28:17):
so they set her up in a smaller cottage on
the property that was less taxing, and then gave her
a house staff so she was always attended to. She
died at one point while Billy was on tour, and
that production only stopped for three days. In nineteen twenty two,
Billy won the Motion Picture Popularity Contest, but at that
point she was retired from film. She had starred in
(28:41):
a movie called The Education of Elizabeth Banks in nineteen
twenty one, and then she decided to be a mother
on a more full time basis so she didn't have
to be running out to California or also just spending
long days on set. And then she also took stage
roles in New York when they seemed right. She and
Flow had plenty money, and she just wanted to spend
(29:02):
more time with her daughter. The stock market crash of
nineteen twenty nine hit the Ziegfeld House hard. Flow had
made a lot of speculative investments, and all of a sudden,
the Ziegfelds had lost most of their money. There was
no new money coming in. They had to mortgage their
beloved Berkeley Crest. Billy decided that she would have to
(29:24):
be the full time breadwinner again. After two more years
in New York, during which Billy kept them afloat taking
stage roles, she moved with Patricia to Los Angeles to
pursue a film career. Flow initially stayed in New York
and tried to get his own business interests back on track.
This didn't work out, though, and in the winter of
nineteen thirty one, he got the flu and then pneumonia.
(29:46):
He spent some time in a sanitarium in New Mexico
the following spring, hoping to regain his health before moving
to Hollywood to be with Billy and Patricia, But he
only lived in California a few days before he died
on July twenty second of nineteen thirty two. That cause
of death was listed as an attack of pleurisy. Yeah,
he never really got over his pneumonia. Billy was not
(30:10):
with him when he died, though, although she was on
the way home, she had gotten a call and she
arrived two minutes after he had died. And while their
marriage had not been ideal, Billy grieved deeply, and though
she went almost immediately back to work, she described not
really knowing how she got through the movie she was
working on, which was called A Bill of Divorcement. That
(30:30):
was her first appearance in a non silent film, very
late in her life. She shared in her writing that
she knew that returning to work so soon while she
was still grieving may have looked callous to people, but
that anyone who knew her understood it was the best
way for her to get through that loss. Billy knew
she could easily go back to New York and get
(30:51):
steady stage work, but she really couldn't bear to go
back to a place that held so many memories of
both Flow and her mother. She decided to stay in Hollywood.
In nineteen thirty three, she appeared in the film Dinner
at Eight, which was a huge hit. Got a lot
of acclaim for Billy. She had successfully launched a second
(31:11):
phase film career in the era of sound dialogue. She
was in a lot of movies in the years that followed,
really dozens of them. The one film she didn't get
to be in was one made in nineteen thirty six
about her husband, Flow Zigfield Junior. She wanted to play herself,
but the story goes that the studio thought she was
(31:33):
too old to play herself in the couple's early marriage.
She started working in radio in the nineteen thirties on
a variety of programs, including the radio version of the
Zigfield Follies. For a while in the nineteen thirties, Billy
lived with director Dorothy Arsner, the only woman director in
Hollywood at the time and a possible future episode because
(31:53):
she is fascinating. There were rumors that the two women
were romantically involved, although Burke never mentioned Dorothy in her
two autobiographies aside from the films they collaborated on, not
even as a friend. So there is a one book
that mentions it as though it is an established fact.
And I wasn't able to get a copy of that
(32:14):
book and hunt down where they were sourcing from so
In nineteen thirty eight, she was in the film Merrily
We Live, for which she got her only Academy Award
nomination because her voice had a unique, slightly warb equality.
She also continued to play comedy characters in films, often
characters with a ditzy personality. She herself would say that
(32:36):
she could be ditzy, but it really seems like she
was anything. But it was Billy's nineteen thirty nine role
that most people will know her by, appearing opposite Judy
Garland in The Wizard of Oz as Glinda the Goodwitch.
Billy was fifty four when she made that film, although
she looks a whole lot younger, no doubt, thanks to
her lifelong adherence to her beauty rituals as well as
(32:59):
lucky jas. Although the nineteen forties began with the final
sale of the Berkeley Crest property, her career continued to grow.
She went on to appear in two dozen more films
over the next decade, and she also had a wartime
Saturday morning radio show called The Billy Burke Show that
ran for more than three years from nineteen forty three
(33:19):
to nineteen forty six, initially under the name Fashions in Rations,
and this is an interesting setup. It was a situation comedy,
and she played a fictional version of herself who was
always helping her neighbors. It was kind of like a
feel good thing to go on during the war. In
the nineteen fifties, her movie roles slowed down, but she
moved into television. She became one of the first women
(33:42):
to host a television talk show that was at Home
with Billy Burke, and it ran from nineteen fifty one
to nineteen fifty two. She appeared on a brief runt
sitcom called Doc Corkl. Although she did briefly work again
in the theater, she couldn't find any real footing for
a late in life come back to the stage. In
(34:03):
her later life, Burke was still somewhat self effacing when
it came to what had been a very successful multi
decade career. She once said quote, I was never the
great actress type. I generally did light, gay things. I
often had cute plays, but never a fine one. In
nineteen forty nine, Billy published her autobiography With A Feather
(34:24):
on My Nose, which details her early life and career,
but ultimately it is a wartz and all love letter
to her husband Flow. She wrote a follow up to
that book ten years later, titled with Powder on My Nose,
and that covers some additional aspects of her life, tips
on life as a performer, and she talks about why
she never married again. She is really very open in
(34:46):
that second book about her regrets as she looks back
on her life, but she's never self pitying about it.
She's pretty matter of fact and straightforward. Both books were
written with Cameron's ship and both of them are very,
very charming reads. As I said, she's very funny, and
there are even some recipes in that second one if
you want to get historically creative in the kitchen. In
(35:09):
nineteen sixty Billy got a star on the Hollywood Walk
of Fame. It is at sixty six seventeen Hollywood Boulevard. Yep,
you can still see it. Billy Burke died on May fourteenth,
nineteen seventy, in Los Angeles of natural causes. She was
eighty four at the time. Her remains were transferred to Westchester,
New York, where she was buried alongside her husband Flow.
(35:32):
I love her. She's super fu she's super fun I'm
doing a Cornucopia email today. Oh great, because we have
several that are short, and I just wanted to you know,
sometimes the short ones don't make it to air because
they're not, you know, substantial enough that we have a
(35:52):
whole lot to talk about. But sometimes they're worthwhile. I'm
very cute. Sometimes I pick those ones on purpose, and
my episode is running really long. Yes. Absolutely. This first
one is from Page who says, Hey, Holly and Tracy,
I feel like your jinks on living podcast subjects might
have worked too well. Although as of writing Bisexual Icon,
Jonathan the tortoise is still with us. For a hot minute,
(36:13):
he was eclipsed. This is the oldest living thing by
a forty six thousand year old worm, resurrected by scientists
who have apparently never watched a horror movie. I had
seen that, as Page rights, I suspect resuscitated ringworms don't
live very long, and their entries in the record books
definitely have an asterisk attached for all the years they
were frozen. So Jonathan should have his title back soon.
(36:36):
But it was fun slash horrifying while it lasted. Thanks
for the show, and please take these pictures of our cats,
and one video of our tripod Hiccup, who we caught
trying to scratch himself with a phantom paw as payment
for making you think about ringworms page Thank you one,
your cat's are adorable. Two. One of our older gents
has just transitioned to life as a tripod, so it
(36:57):
was actually very very wonderful to get a cute video
of a tripod kitty living his best life, So thank
you for that. And yeah that worm trying to get
in on our Jonathan's title, No, we won't have it.
Katrina also sent us pictures of her elderly kitty, Tuft,
(37:19):
who is nineteen. She's had him since she was twenty
one and he was a stray kitten and how he
has been her rider die since day one. He does
not like dogs, but he'll sleep next to the dog
because the bed is cozy and it's adorable, So Katrina,
thank you. Tracy has black kitties and I have a
(37:39):
soft spot for black kitties, so Tuft is precious, and
please kiss him for us if he's amenable to such things.
Hold on, I think I have one more yes, and
then we have eponymous foods, which always nice, Always keep
being the gift that keeps on giving. This is what
I loved the title to it because it just says
(38:00):
I tried the stroganoffs. This yeah, our listener. I don't
know she pronounces it Kara or Kara, but Kara writes, Hello, ladies.
I just want to share how your most recent eponymous
foods episode has impacted my life. After learning about the
different varieties of beef stroganoff, I decided to try the
Russian and Chinese variations along with the more traditional version
(38:22):
I usually make, and have my husband and kids vote
in a stroganof off. We like them all, but the
clear winner was the Chinese. She sent the recipes she
was working from. As you recall the Chinese one, it's
usually made with like fish, sauce, et cetera. This is
fascinating to me. I'm embarrassed it didn't even occur to
me to do a similar trick. Now I want to
do that. We'll see if it happens. My husband is
(38:45):
not a big beef feeder, so I might have to
invite a friend over to be the voter. Those are
my three short emails for this week. Thank you so
much to everybody that has written in Again, I always
love the pet picture and food pictures also very welcome,
so keep all of that coming. If you would like
(39:06):
to email us. Some of your food pictures are kiddie
pictures or puppy pictures, or if you have two pet
bears until they become unwieldy, sure pictures of those two.
You can do that at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History, and if you have not subscribed to the
podcast yet, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app
or anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff
(39:34):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So I was in
Hollywood a couple months ago for an event, and as
(00:22):
often one does when you're in Hollywood, you look down
at Walk of Fame names, and I was thinking one
that it would be fun to do a series on
some of the lesser known people that show up on
Walk of Fame stars, which might happen. We might have
that as a series, or you know, some of the
ones that don't have long biographies, maybe we'll do an
(00:43):
amalgamated episode. Sure, because some of those are great. But
one of the people that popped up for me this
time that I was like, that's not an unknown person,
but I also know enough about her that I know
she's really interesting, and that is Billy Burke. And she
is known today for mostly one role. And if you
(01:06):
don't recognize her name, you will recognize it when we
get to that role. But that's quite at the end,
and then you'll go, oh her, which would be great.
But as I said, her life quite a ride. She's
very very interesting, and I could talk about her forever
because I she wrote two books or co wrote them
(01:28):
with an assistant, or not quite a ghostwriter, because she's
credited on this stuff. But her way of telling stories
is great, and she is very frank about her life
in those books. So I have really enjoyed them, and
I just thought she would make a fine addition to
our our our storytelling collection. So today it's Billy Burke.
(01:53):
I was in camp oh her. So if you are,
if you're like, I don't know what you're talking about,
do not be embarrassed. I did not recognize the name either,
not at all, which is why we you know she's due. Yeah,
so Ethelbert Appleton Burke was born on August sixth, maybe
eighteen eighty four, maybe eighty five, maybe eighty six. Reported
(02:15):
differently different places, and she claimed different years for herself.
That was in Washington, d c. Her mother, Blanche Baby Hodkinson,
was from New Orleans. Her father, Billy Burke, was a
singing clown. Billy wrote in her autobiography that her father
had wanted to be a chemist, but he cut his
education short to enlist with the Union Army in eighteen
(02:38):
sixty two, when he was eighteen and became a drummer
during the US Civil War. She said her father never
talked about the war, but that she found a disability
discharge certificate for him that was dated April fourth, eighteen
sixty three. She clearly really admired her father. She wrote
about he quote was one of these international clowns you
(03:00):
could play in any country in any language. When Billy
was touring with the Barnum and Bailey circus, he met
Blanche while the show was stopped in Pittsburgh. Blanche was
a mother of four, She was in her forties, and
the two of them very quickly fell in love. They
got married before the Pittsburgh engagement of the circus was over,
(03:21):
and she and the kids left with him. Blanche stopped
for a while in Washington, where her mother lived, and
Billy kept touring. At that point, she was expecting a baby,
and everybody thought it was unwise for her to keep traveling.
So when baby Billy was born, her father, who was
from an Irish family, telegraphed and said, quote, I don't
(03:42):
care whether it's a boy or a girl, but does
it have red hair? And as a joke, James Anthony
Bailey sent a message that read quote, I will make
you a firm offer of one million dollars cash for
the baby, which I suppose if you didn't have a
working relationship with your boss, that might come off as
(04:02):
really horrible, but apparently they all thought it was very funny.
I should mention that those four previous kids of Blanche
kind of drop out of the picture, and we don't
really know what happened there, whether she left them with
her mother or what, but they are not really in
any of the stories that come up afterwards. But when
Billy was eight, her father moved the family by which
(04:25):
I mean himself, Blanche and young Billy, to England to
start a new troupe there called Billy Burke's Barnum and
Greatland and Circus Songsters, and little Billy had gone by
that name Billy from the time she was tiny, and
she later wrote quote, I have always been called Billy Burke,
except for those eighteen improbable glittering years when I was
(04:46):
also missus Floren Ziegfeld Junior. I find it a perfectly
adequate name. It's an especially nice name for the skidter
witted ladies I play on the screen today, and it
suits me too, because I might as well confess here
and now that I I'm not always saner than I seem.
But she also claimed that her name did not officially
become Billy until the family was living in England. So
(05:08):
while they were in London, she met a reverend Kerschbaum,
who actually gave her the name Mary William at her baptism,
making her full name Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke. Billy,
who was just twelve at this time, had told the
reverend that she wanted to be named Billy in honor
of her father, and that he had asked if she
(05:29):
would also take Mary as a favor to him, to
which she happily acquiesced. In her autobiography, she says she
kind of had a crush on this reverend and that
she would have named herself Gorgonzola if he had asked.
You will also see her birth name as Mary William
Ethelbert Appleton Burke. But the way she always told the story,
those first two names were not her name at birth.
(05:51):
They did not become part of her name until she
was baptized and entered into the register at Westminster Abbey.
It was also during her time as a child in
Love then that Billy's stage career began, although this was
a reluctant start. Billy's mother, Blanche, wanted her to go
into the family business, but Billy was really shy and
her father was against it. She later wrote, quote, it
(06:14):
occurs to me that someone ought to do a piece
of scholarly research on the number of girls who have
become stage and movie stars because their mothers pushed them.
Billy had never even shown a lot of interest in
her father's show, let alone any others, but her mother
started taking her to plays enrolled her in acting school,
but both her acting classes in her regular school were
(06:36):
interrupted a lot whenever her father was on tour, because
she and her mother would normally go with him while
they were traveling. Her mother tried to supplement her education
by taking her to museums, which Billy found very boring,
and she later said of all of this, quote, I
doubt if there is a museum in all Europe that
I did not doze in during my adolescence. Billy's first
(06:59):
stage performance was a set of songs that she sang
at Birkenhead while the family was there for a summer holiday.
She was fourteen at this time and She described the
experience as awful and scary, but she did it again
the next day and she did a bit better, and
after that her mother just kept booking her gigs. She
(07:19):
was soon working at the London Pavilion as a weekly performer,
and she described actually starting to have a little fun
once she got over that initial nervousness. She got paid
ten pounds a week for singing, and it was there
at the Pavilion that she was spotted by the composer
Leslie Stewart, and he offered her a small role in
his new play, The Schoolgirl. Billy was a teenager at
(07:42):
this time. She was given the best song in the show,
but that had to be kept secret from the show's
two leads until dress rehearsal because there was concern that
those two actors have become jealous and angry. And when
they heard it a dress rehearsal, both of them were
jealous and angry and threatened to quit, but they stayed,
and when the show opened in May nineteen oh three,
(08:03):
according to the New York Times quote, miss Burke made
the hit of the evening. Billy later recalls that she
was so overwhelmed by the audience's boisterous reaction to her
song that she ran off stage and forgot to bow,
and she bumped into a stage hand and fell, and
the stage manager caught her. Billy misunderstood the situation. She
thought all the noise was because they hated her, but
(08:26):
her stage manager threatened to slap her if she did
not go back on stage and sing it again. That
is terrible, but she later credited that threat with the
creation of her fame, because she became a celebrity pretty
quickly thanks to this play, and people recounted the story
of her debut and her singing it twice frequently. The
(08:46):
schoolgirl ran for two years at the Prince of Wales
Theater and eighteen year old Billy was a London celebrity.
She mentions an interesting theory in her autobiography that she
believes her nickname during this time was the origin of
the term flapper, applying to young women. She was nicknamed
the American flapper in London. Quote. I think this is
(09:08):
the origin of the term flapper. Certainly, my red hair flapped,
not by theatrical design, but because I was too lazy
to fasten it up. I rather liked it that way too.
Sadly Billy. Jonathan Walford, writing for the Fashion History Museum
in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, traces the first use of the
word flapper in print to refer to energetic teenage girls
(09:31):
in a nineteen oh three story by Desmond Coke. It
was being used colloquially in the UK as early as
the eighteen nineties. The Oxford English Dictionary actually puts its
first written use in the context of teenage girls in
eighteen eighty eight, so way earlier. Yes, you're marvelous, Billy,
but you are not the originator. Billy was also aware
(09:53):
of the many temptations that London held for a young, pretty,
relatively famous actress, but her mother, lanch was very much
on hand to prevent any kind of shenanigans. Billy later
said that because she worked in the theater, she was
immune to the kinds of schoolgirl crushes on actors that
most teenagers experienced. Those were her colleagues, and she did
(10:14):
not find them appealing in any way. She did date
a number of young men, mostly in the military, but
although some and it sounds like many, wanted to be
quite serious and get engaged, she thought she would probably
get tired of them anyway, so she never accepted any
of their proposals. As The Schoolgirl was ending its run,
Billy had a sense of the direction that her career
(10:36):
might take. She knew her singing wasn't good enough to
carry a career, and she decided she wanted to go
after light comedy roles. She met American theater manager Charles
Frohman during this time. He said he would like to
produce The Schoolgirl in New York, but that her popular
song would be sung by the show's star in that production.
(10:57):
So she started going to any and every theater company
in the West End that was producing comedies and offered
her talents there. She played in a couple more musical
theater shows and had what sounds like a marvelous time
in a run of The Belle of Mayfair at the
Vaudeville Theater. It was during that engagement that Charles Hawtrey
(11:17):
saw her. He was a theater manager in London, and
he went to the show several times before sending her
a message asking her for a meeting. He saw in
her exactly what he wanted, which was a comedian. Yeah,
and that was exactly what she wanted someone to see,
so this was a good thing. Coming up, we'll talk
(11:38):
about Billy's entry into straight comedy, but first we'll have
a little sponsor break. Hawtrey cast Billy in a comedy
called Mister George, and for it she had to learn
the difference in how to a musical comedy, which she
(12:02):
had been doing, versus straight comedy, So she had to
learn straight comedy. She later wrote, quote, there is a
sharp and enormous difference between playing musical comedy and playing
straight comedy, and I think I can explain it best
by putting it this way. In a musical comedy, you
direct everything to the audience. In comedy, in a play,
you know the audience is there and you play to it,
(12:23):
but you direct yourself to your fellow players, and act
as if you were in a room, not in a theater.
Although this role and this time of her life were
quite thrilling, she met royalty during this time, and she
was invited to fancy parties by London elite. This also
came with some sorrow because her father, Billy Burke, had
been ill for some time. He for the most part,
(12:45):
lived apart from Billy and her mother in Bath for
the benefit of his health, whereas they stayed in London
for her career and he would visit London to see
her act, but he died before Mister George opened. In
nineteen oh seven, Billy was cast in a play My
Wife Is New York by Charles Browman. That was the
person who had told her she could not sing her
canoe song in his US version of The Schoolgirl. After
(13:08):
she finished one more play with Charles Hawtrey, she took
the job. She made five hundred dollars a week, which
was a huge sum to her at the time, and
she was very well received. She later wrote, quote by degrees,
it was born in on me that my wife had
made me a star. But to tell the truth, I
was rather stupid about it. I honestly didn't realize what
(13:29):
had happened. It had all been so much fun and
all so easy. Mister George led to a string of
other successes on the New York stage from nineteen ten
to nineteen thirteen, including Missus Dot Suzanne, The Runaway, The Mind,
The Paint Girl, and the Land of Promise. She described
this as an incredibly content time in her life, when
(13:51):
she had money and security. She was not ambitious, according
to her own account, and was happy to be acting
in comedies as she had hoped when she was working
on The Schoolgirl. She didn't see herself as a great actress,
and she had no designs on becoming one. But when
she was the top build star in a play called
Love Watches, which ran from nineteen oh eighteen nineteen oh nine,
(14:13):
she did admit to being a little thrilled at seeing
her name in lights. Billy really developed an image of
being a bubbly, light hearted woman, and part of that
was through her choice of dress. In the john of
the twentieth century, a lot of women's fashions still trend
in toward dark colors and structured, heavy looking silhouettes. She
(14:34):
really favored light, fluttery styles with ruffles. She became known
for having fantastic style, and women wanted to emulate it.
Billy Burke was not just famous, she was iconic. She
was one of the first stage stars who had all
kinds of merchandise named after her. Her mother is said
to have loved walking into department stores and seeing the
Billy Burke dresses, which had wide, flat collars a lot
(14:56):
of the time trimmed with lace. She also had a
lo of hair clip ons named for her, which let
customers get the same long red curls that she had
been really known for. Burke was objectively speaking of beauty
by the standards of the day, by any standards, but
she never seemed to see herself that way. She once
(15:17):
commented on the feature that she disliked most about her face, quote,
I have a deep and penetrating sorrow my freckles. I
have tried everything under the sun, but they cling to
me faithfully. But though she may have been keenly aware
of what she perceived as flaws, it also did not
keep her from living a life that reflected her iconic
(15:37):
beauty and style status. When she toured, she had her
dressing room redecorated to suit her taste in every city,
even if she was only performing for a short period
of time somewhere, she wanted everything to be done up
in Baby Blue. Billy's routine for her health and beauty
was legendary. She had her hair brushed by her maid
(15:58):
every morning, She used yellow brand meal in her bath
to make the water soft, She used a chalk powder
on her nose, and she believed an exercise. She walked
five miles a day and worked out her upper body
with Barbel's strength exercises and what was called Indian clubs.
These are clubs similar to ones you might have seen
jugglers used that look kind of like elongated bowling pins.
(16:21):
They would add weight and resistance to fluid movements, and
they were said to have been invented by soldiers in
India for exercise and then adopted by the British military
during colonization. Strength training wasn't exactly common for women at
the time, so she was kind of ahead of the
trends on this one. In nineteen ten, while she was
(16:44):
achieving great success with the touring company of Love Watches,
Billy Burke bought a huge thirty five acre estate in Hastings,
New York. It was the Kirkham Estate when she acquired it,
and she changed the name to Berkeley Crest. Blanche managed
a full property renovation and update, including the addition of
(17:04):
a tea house and apple trees, and the laying of
roads to get around the property by car. And though
she was able to afford all of this and was
happy with her salary, when she got an offer from
a Froeman competitor for fifteen hundred dollars a week plus
ten percent of theater profits. She parleyed that into a
similar deal with Froeman. It was also while starring in
(17:27):
Love Watches that one of her high profile romances started.
That was with Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso. He would
go see her perforum night after night and throw roses
onto the stage every time. He wrote her love notes
and sent them backstage. She said of the famous singer quote,
he made love and ate spaghetti with equal skill and
(17:48):
no inhibitions. He would propose marriage several times each evening. Naturally,
I did not take him seriously. On New Year's Eve
nineteen thirteen, although she would lay it as happening. At
least two hours into nineteen fourteen, Billy and her manager
at the time crashed a party at the hotel Astor
that changed her life because it was there that she
(18:10):
met Flora Zigfeld Junior. She wrote of him quote, he
had a Mephistophelian look, his eyebrows and his eyelids lifting
curved upward in the middle, Slim and tall and immaculate
in full evening dress. He was in black and white,
contrast to the rest of the costumed party and so,
and for who knows what other reasons I noticed him
(18:31):
at once, without speaking, Zigfeld pulled her into a dance,
and she described him using his knee to signal her
to turn on the dance floor, which she said quote
was an odd thing to do, but I rather liked it,
and the two of them were soon a couple. This
romance got a lot of tongues wagging, but not in
(18:52):
a good way. Most people believed that Billy was too
good for him and that he would lead to nothing
but unhappiness for her. He had been a source of
gossip on Broadway and throughout the vaudeville circuit for a
long time. Flow Zigfield had started the Zigfield Follies seven
years before he and Birke met. He had been married
(19:12):
by common law to actress Anna Held from eighteen ninety
seven or maybe eighteen ninety nine, depending on the source,
until nineteen thirteen. Held had served him with divorce papers
for infidelity in nineteen twelve. Everyone who knew them both
thought that Flow would break Billy's heart and probably tank
her career as well. Charles Frohman was especially adamant that
(19:36):
he thought the relationship was a bad idea, and Billy
knew the rumors about Zigfeld that he was, in her words,
extremely dangerous and cavalier about women. Yeah, Charles Frohman made
a lot of ultimatums with her regarding this relationship, but
the heart wants it at once. So Billy and Flow
(19:58):
continued their romance, although they often tried to keep it
on the down low to avoid criticism. She went on
record as saying that even if she had known quote
precisely what tortures and frustrations were in store for me,
I should have kept right on falling in love. She
claimed that some of their secret rendezvous even took place
in Grant's tomb in Upper Manhattan. Basically, they were doing
(20:21):
anything they could to avoid the press, and Billy actually
did try to break things off with Flow more than once,
and in response to her most declarative note saying as
much that she was done, he came to her dressing
room after the show that night and said, I want
to get married tomorrow. So, after four months in which
Ziegfeld wooed Billy by telling her he wanted to be
(20:44):
her husband and her manager, and winning over her mother
Blanche as well, in April of nineteen fourteen, they went
to Hoboken, New Jersey, with Blanche in tow to a lope.
They found a parson who was willing to perform the service,
but it seems he was a little before the whole
thing and especially confused by their names. Billy later wrote
(21:06):
of the wedding that the minister had addressed her as
Flow and told her where to stand. She replied, he's Flow,
I'm Billy. And then the minister turned to Flow and said, oh,
all right, then you stand here Bill, and Flow replied
I'm Flow, she's Bill. I mean Billy. It's kind of
like who's on first. She concluded this story by saying, quote,
(21:31):
but he married us, and I am sure it was legal.
They were back in Manhattan that night Billy had a
show to do. Their marriage news didn't make the press
for two days, and at that point it was headlines
We're going to get into married life for Billy and Flow,
which had a lot of good and bad. But before that,
we will pause for a word from our sponsors. Charles Frohman,
(22:02):
for whom Billy had worked for several years at this point,
died in nineteen fifteen. He was aboard the RMS Lusitania
when it sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Having never spoken
to Billy again after she married Flow Zigfeld. After Froman's passing,
his office put Billy under contract. And that may sound good,
like a stable situation, but really it was a way
(22:24):
to prevent her from transitioning to movies. For one thing,
there was still ongoing animosity with Froman's office that Billy
had abandoned her public persona of innocent Aungenoux to Mary Zigfeld,
and the company booked her with seventy two back to
back one night stand performances, so that for more than
two months she would be traveling, and most of it
(22:47):
away from her new husband. And during this time, rumors
started to get back to Billy that Flow was already
seeing other women, as had been predicted by basically everyone
she knew. Billy had married a cheater, and she didn't
like it, But in her later years she spoke really
kindly of him still, although she was also frank about
(23:08):
the reality of his behavior. She wrote, quote of another thing,
I am confidently certain Zigfeld has been portrayed as a
man who pursued women. I have even come across a
word which in regard to him is not only vulgar,
but incredibly inaccurate. The word is chaser by all the
pink toad prophets. Flow Zigfeld was never that. Flow never
(23:30):
pursued any woman. He was cool and aloof and difficult.
But there were times, more times than I prefer to recall,
when he made a woman eager for his approval by
a mere look or a small expression, or by a
slight grasp of her elbow a low mumbling request to dance.
That was all the effort he ever had to make.
The story of one noted dancing girl about how Flow
(23:53):
Zigfeld used to batter down her door is a confection
of sheer poppycock. I tell you I know better. She
also wrote about him, quote, I hope I can make
myself clear about this. There were several things I knew
for certain then, and I have never changed my mind.
One of the things I knew was that Flow loved me,
and that he loved his home and his family. He
(24:16):
was what he was. That long two month plus tour
ended in Los Angeles and Billy was introduced to Hollywood.
In nineteen sixteen, she was offered the lead role in
a film called Peggy by Thomas Ince, who offered her
a staggering three hundred thousand dollars for one single picture.
That's an indicator of how famous she was at this point,
(24:38):
even though we don't really think of her as a
household name today. Her froman agents in New York got
wind of the offers that were being made to her,
and she received a telegram while she was still in
California that read, if you sign up with Pictures before
we see you again, we will not continue with you
for another season, and she sent the reply, I have
done nothing up to now waiting to have talk with
(24:59):
you about pictures, but any more irate telegrams from you
and I will sign immediately. They did send another irate telegram,
and when she got to New York, she told the
froman firm that she was through with them. During production
on Peggy, Billy was offered a five year contract, but
she felt she couldn't have a career in Hollywood and
also hoped to maintain her marriage, so she chose the marriage.
(25:23):
Not long after, reports of these infidelities escalated and she
asked him to come to California, which he did. They
fought about this situation for two days Eventually, they put
their issues aside, and Billy started work on a new
film with another huge payout, called Gloria's Romance. But Billy
also realized her entire marriage was gonna be one where
(25:46):
she was instinctively suspicious and jealous of other women that
he was connected to. Billy's films were hits, and she
made several more that year. Yeah, he was also her
manager at this point, so there was like a financial
interest in them being like, Okay, yeah, this horrible stuff
is going on, but we're also still business partners and
(26:07):
we have to work on these movies, which seems like
kind of a dangerous position to be in. But on
October twenty third, nineteen sixteen, the same year that Billy
made a lot of movies, the Zigfelds welcome to daughter,
Patricia Burke Zigfeld. Three weeks after she was born. In Manhattan,
the family moved together into the lavish Berkeley Crest mansion.
(26:29):
Zigfeld had turned the grounds into a landscaped wonderland, and
then he started to bring in animals. According to Billy,
they had a herd of deer. They had two bears
until that became unsafe. They had two lion cubs, At
one point there were partridges, pheasants, cockatoos, parrots, an elephant,
a pony, at least seven geese. There were lambs, ducks,
(26:51):
hundreds of chickens, at least fifteen dogs, two buffalo, and
then seven dwarf ponies, which they received as a gift.
As many of these animals became unwieldy or unrealistic to
take care of, they had to be rehomed. The elephant,
for example, ended up with a circus. Flow also started
screening movies for his friends at the house because producers
(27:13):
were happy to send him the latest features, and he
would invite all of his friends from New York and
the lavish parties that he hosted there, so they sort
of hosted together, but he was really the one driving
that bus. Became the stuff of legend as Flow was
setting up the ultimate entertainment venue at Berkeley Crest. In
(27:33):
nineteen seventeen, Billy went back to her roots and was
back on stage in New York. She also started making
pictures with the movie studios that had set up shop
on the East Coast to take advantage of the available
Broadway talent. It wasn't always bliss, but they loved their daughter,
and they kind of made the marriage work in its
way for several years, although there were plenty of ups
(27:55):
and downs. Flows follies were getting more acclaim and money
was coming in, although the plays he was producing for
Billy to star in weren't doing all that well. Additionally,
Billy's mother, Blanch, who was diabetic, was having a hard
time with her health. The immense house was really too
much for her. It had these huge staircases and vast rooms,
(28:17):
so they set her up in a smaller cottage on
the property that was less taxing, and then gave her
a house staff so she was always attended to. She
died at one point while Billy was on tour, and
that production only stopped for three days. In nineteen twenty two,
Billy won the Motion Picture Popularity Contest, but at that
point she was retired from film. She had starred in
(28:41):
a movie called The Education of Elizabeth Banks in nineteen
twenty one, and then she decided to be a mother
on a more full time basis so she didn't have
to be running out to California or also just spending
long days on set. And then she also took stage
roles in New York when they seemed right. She and
Flow had plenty money, and she just wanted to spend
(29:02):
more time with her daughter. The stock market crash of
nineteen twenty nine hit the Ziegfeld House hard. Flow had
made a lot of speculative investments, and all of a sudden,
the Ziegfelds had lost most of their money. There was
no new money coming in. They had to mortgage their
beloved Berkeley Crest. Billy decided that she would have to
(29:24):
be the full time breadwinner again. After two more years
in New York, during which Billy kept them afloat taking
stage roles, she moved with Patricia to Los Angeles to
pursue a film career. Flow initially stayed in New York
and tried to get his own business interests back on track.
This didn't work out, though, and in the winter of
nineteen thirty one, he got the flu and then pneumonia.
(29:46):
He spent some time in a sanitarium in New Mexico
the following spring, hoping to regain his health before moving
to Hollywood to be with Billy and Patricia, But he
only lived in California a few days before he died
on July twenty second of nineteen thirty two. That cause
of death was listed as an attack of pleurisy. Yeah,
he never really got over his pneumonia. Billy was not
(30:10):
with him when he died, though, although she was on
the way home, she had gotten a call and she
arrived two minutes after he had died. And while their
marriage had not been ideal, Billy grieved deeply, and though
she went almost immediately back to work, she described not
really knowing how she got through the movie she was
working on, which was called A Bill of Divorcement. That
(30:30):
was her first appearance in a non silent film, very
late in her life. She shared in her writing that
she knew that returning to work so soon while she
was still grieving may have looked callous to people, but
that anyone who knew her understood it was the best
way for her to get through that loss. Billy knew
she could easily go back to New York and get
(30:51):
steady stage work, but she really couldn't bear to go
back to a place that held so many memories of
both Flow and her mother. She decided to stay in Hollywood.
In nineteen thirty three, she appeared in the film Dinner
at Eight, which was a huge hit. Got a lot
of acclaim for Billy. She had successfully launched a second
(31:11):
phase film career in the era of sound dialogue. She
was in a lot of movies in the years that followed,
really dozens of them. The one film she didn't get
to be in was one made in nineteen thirty six
about her husband, Flow Zigfield Junior. She wanted to play herself,
but the story goes that the studio thought she was
(31:33):
too old to play herself in the couple's early marriage.
She started working in radio in the nineteen thirties on
a variety of programs, including the radio version of the
Zigfield Follies. For a while in the nineteen thirties, Billy
lived with director Dorothy Arsner, the only woman director in
Hollywood at the time and a possible future episode because
(31:53):
she is fascinating. There were rumors that the two women
were romantically involved, although Burke never mentioned Dorothy in her
two autobiographies aside from the films they collaborated on, not
even as a friend. So there is a one book
that mentions it as though it is an established fact.
And I wasn't able to get a copy of that
(32:14):
book and hunt down where they were sourcing from so
In nineteen thirty eight, she was in the film Merrily
We Live, for which she got her only Academy Award
nomination because her voice had a unique, slightly warb equality.
She also continued to play comedy characters in films, often
characters with a ditzy personality. She herself would say that
(32:36):
she could be ditzy, but it really seems like she
was anything. But it was Billy's nineteen thirty nine role
that most people will know her by, appearing opposite Judy
Garland in The Wizard of Oz as Glinda the Goodwitch.
Billy was fifty four when she made that film, although
she looks a whole lot younger, no doubt, thanks to
her lifelong adherence to her beauty rituals as well as
(32:59):
lucky jas. Although the nineteen forties began with the final
sale of the Berkeley Crest property, her career continued to grow.
She went on to appear in two dozen more films
over the next decade, and she also had a wartime
Saturday morning radio show called The Billy Burke Show that
ran for more than three years from nineteen forty three
(33:19):
to nineteen forty six, initially under the name Fashions in Rations,
and this is an interesting setup. It was a situation comedy,
and she played a fictional version of herself who was
always helping her neighbors. It was kind of like a
feel good thing to go on during the war. In
the nineteen fifties, her movie roles slowed down, but she
moved into television. She became one of the first women
(33:42):
to host a television talk show that was at Home
with Billy Burke, and it ran from nineteen fifty one
to nineteen fifty two. She appeared on a brief runt
sitcom called Doc Corkl. Although she did briefly work again
in the theater, she couldn't find any real footing for
a late in life come back to the stage. In
(34:03):
her later life, Burke was still somewhat self effacing when
it came to what had been a very successful multi
decade career. She once said quote, I was never the
great actress type. I generally did light, gay things. I
often had cute plays, but never a fine one. In
nineteen forty nine, Billy published her autobiography With A Feather
(34:24):
on My Nose, which details her early life and career,
but ultimately it is a wartz and all love letter
to her husband Flow. She wrote a follow up to
that book ten years later, titled with Powder on My Nose,
and that covers some additional aspects of her life, tips
on life as a performer, and she talks about why
she never married again. She is really very open in
(34:46):
that second book about her regrets as she looks back
on her life, but she's never self pitying about it.
She's pretty matter of fact and straightforward. Both books were
written with Cameron's ship and both of them are very,
very charming reads. As I said, she's very funny, and
there are even some recipes in that second one if
you want to get historically creative in the kitchen. In
(35:09):
nineteen sixty Billy got a star on the Hollywood Walk
of Fame. It is at sixty six seventeen Hollywood Boulevard. Yep,
you can still see it. Billy Burke died on May fourteenth,
nineteen seventy, in Los Angeles of natural causes. She was
eighty four at the time. Her remains were transferred to Westchester,
New York, where she was buried alongside her husband Flow.
(35:32):
I love her. She's super fu she's super fun I'm
doing a Cornucopia email today. Oh great, because we have
several that are short, and I just wanted to you know,
sometimes the short ones don't make it to air because
they're not, you know, substantial enough that we have a
(35:52):
whole lot to talk about. But sometimes they're worthwhile. I'm
very cute. Sometimes I pick those ones on purpose, and
my episode is running really long. Yes. Absolutely. This first
one is from Page who says, Hey, Holly and Tracy,
I feel like your jinks on living podcast subjects might
have worked too well. Although as of writing Bisexual Icon,
Jonathan the tortoise is still with us. For a hot minute,
(36:13):
he was eclipsed. This is the oldest living thing by
a forty six thousand year old worm, resurrected by scientists
who have apparently never watched a horror movie. I had
seen that, as Page rights, I suspect resuscitated ringworms don't
live very long, and their entries in the record books
definitely have an asterisk attached for all the years they
were frozen. So Jonathan should have his title back soon.
(36:36):
But it was fun slash horrifying while it lasted. Thanks
for the show, and please take these pictures of our cats,
and one video of our tripod Hiccup, who we caught
trying to scratch himself with a phantom paw as payment
for making you think about ringworms page Thank you one,
your cat's are adorable. Two. One of our older gents
has just transitioned to life as a tripod, so it
(36:57):
was actually very very wonderful to get a cute video
of a tripod kitty living his best life, So thank
you for that. And yeah that worm trying to get
in on our Jonathan's title, No, we won't have it.
Katrina also sent us pictures of her elderly kitty, Tuft,
(37:19):
who is nineteen. She's had him since she was twenty
one and he was a stray kitten and how he
has been her rider die since day one. He does
not like dogs, but he'll sleep next to the dog
because the bed is cozy and it's adorable, So Katrina,
thank you. Tracy has black kitties and I have a
(37:39):
soft spot for black kitties, so Tuft is precious, and
please kiss him for us if he's amenable to such things.
Hold on, I think I have one more yes, and
then we have eponymous foods, which always nice, Always keep
being the gift that keeps on giving. This is what
I loved the title to it because it just says
(38:00):
I tried the stroganoffs. This yeah, our listener. I don't
know she pronounces it Kara or Kara, but Kara writes, Hello, ladies.
I just want to share how your most recent eponymous
foods episode has impacted my life. After learning about the
different varieties of beef stroganoff, I decided to try the
Russian and Chinese variations along with the more traditional version
(38:22):
I usually make, and have my husband and kids vote
in a stroganof off. We like them all, but the
clear winner was the Chinese. She sent the recipes she
was working from. As you recall the Chinese one, it's
usually made with like fish, sauce, et cetera. This is
fascinating to me. I'm embarrassed it didn't even occur to
me to do a similar trick. Now I want to
do that. We'll see if it happens. My husband is
(38:45):
not a big beef feeder, so I might have to
invite a friend over to be the voter. Those are
my three short emails for this week. Thank you so
much to everybody that has written in Again, I always
love the pet picture and food pictures also very welcome,
so keep all of that coming. If you would like
(39:06):
to email us. Some of your food pictures are kiddie
pictures or puppy pictures, or if you have two pet
bears until they become unwieldy, sure pictures of those two.
You can do that at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History, and if you have not subscribed to the
podcast yet, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app
or anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff
(39:34):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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