January 11, 2023 • 47 mins
Fans of Broadway and Barbra Streisand probably know the name Fanny Brice as the woman who refuses to let anyone rain on her parade in the beloved musical "Funny Girl." But the real Fanny Brice, the original funny girl, was a trailblazing Jewish comedian, who lit up Broadway and created one of the most famous characters on radio. Mo looks back at Fanny's story (The ups! The downs! The nose job!) with biographer Barbara Grossman and talks with culture critic Erick Neher about how Barbra Streisand would ultimately eclipse the star she portrayed.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
On a Sunday night in October nine two once in
a lifetime talents Ye teamed up for an unforgettable duet
on National TV. Twenty one year old Barbara Streisand was
a guest on The Judy Garland Show. Garland was then
(00:27):
forty one. Their medley of Happy Days, Are Here Again
and Get Happy was sheer perfection, an instant classic. Garland,
already in decline, though she didn't sound like it that night,
would die. Just six years later, Streisand was just breaking
(00:47):
out two story ships passing in the night? What'd she do? Snooks?
I've been your books away? Twenty five years earlier, a
very different duet, It was Garland who was on the
(01:10):
rise and singing with an established star. Still a year
away from her trip down the Yellow Brick Road. Teenage
Judy was starting to make a name for herself, appearing
in a movie musical called Everybody Sing. In this number,
she argues in song with a little girl played by
a fortysomething woman named Fanny Bryce, why because because where
(01:38):
you are, Let's play cops and Clothes. At the time,
Fanny Bryce was one of the biggest stars in the country.
Lady and Gentlemen present Miss Fannie Bryce. Fanny Bryce Bryce
had conquered Broadway, headlined movies You're gonna Hear what I've
(02:00):
got to say, and created one of the most popular
characters on radio. Fanny Bryce was also a history maker
in original one of the first great female comedy stars.
She was so famous that one day an entire musical
(02:21):
called Funny Girl would be written about her life, a
musical that would star Barbara Streisand. But while Funny Girl
would help turn Streisand into a supernova, the real Fannie
Bryce would fade from memory. It made people remember her
longer than I'm sure they would have had there not
(02:42):
been a musical. But the life as she lived it
is not the life story that we get in Funny
Girl from CBS Sunday Morning and I Heart I'm Morocca
and this is mobituaries. This moment Fanny Bryce, death of
(03:02):
the original Funny Girl. Don't tell me not to live
just sitting pudder Life's candy in the suns of Balla Budda,
(03:24):
don't bring around a clout to rate on my parade.
That's Barbara streisand knocking them dead. As Fanny Bryce in Broadways,
Funny Girl in Fast forward fifty eight years to April,
Hello Gorgeous and the show's first ever Broadway revival, starring
(03:47):
Beanie Feldstein. Alas, the reviews for this production were less
than stellar, the show was hobbling along until michell Is
getting rave reviews. Lee star Leah Michelle was brought into
play Fanny, and the revival itself was revived. It's ready
for me because I said, I saw Leah and the
(04:23):
show and she was terrific. But make no mistake, the
lead role in Funny Girl is indelibly connected to Really
owned by Barbara streisand people, people need people, Ah the Peple.
(04:56):
After all, she won an oscar when she starred in
the movie version, just to few years after her Broadway run. Now,
to be clear, this is not a mobituary for streisand
I mean, she's kind of immortal. We'll talk more about
her in Act two, but this episode is about the
woman she came to eclipse Fanny Bryce. Funny Girl, in
(05:16):
many ways is a sanitized life story. The story that
the family wanted to tell in Bryce's career was much
more a fever chart, up and down and up and
down and up and down. Barbara Grossman is a theater
professor at Tufts University and wrote an in depth biography
on Bryce entitled Funny Woman. She didn't simply will herself
(05:38):
to be the greatest star and everyone accepted it and
that was it. Well, she willed herself to do it,
but it took her a while to find her footing
and to figure out actually who she was as an entertainer,
and to accept her great comic gifts. Bryce was born
Fannie a Borak to a Jewish immigrant family in As
(06:00):
a small child, she lived in Newark, New Jersey, where
her mother Rose ran a saloon and her father, known
as Pinuckle Charlie, drank and played cards and did pretty
much nothing else. After her parents split up, Fanny moved
with her mother to Brooklyn, where her career began. She
was not yet fifteen when she stepped on stage to
(06:23):
perform at a vaudeville house called Kenney's. It was amateur night,
and she later wrote that when the audience saw a
quote gawky, nondescript girl in a rumpled linen dress and
cheap sailor hat, they started booing and shrieking. This was
the kind of place where they gave performers the hook
(06:44):
literally a big iron one. If the audience didn't like them,
then Fanny began singing a sentimental ballad of the time,
and as the performance went on, the crowd fell silent.
There was just something about that teenage girl singing so seriously.
(07:09):
Banny's brother Lou would later give this rather delightful description.
The theater quieted down like somebody had hung a smallpox
sign over the door. When the crowd started throwing money
at Fanny, she knew she was a hit. She even
got a few laughs while pausing her dramatic song to
pick up her money. Soon after that night at Keeney's,
(07:33):
she quit school to pursue a life in show business.
When she auditioned for one show in nine she was
asked if she had a specialty number. After confidently saying
she did, she didn't, she went running to a young
man named Irving Berlin. Now you might know Berlin as
the writer of White Christmas Easter Parade, God Bless America,
(07:56):
But this was before all that. At that point, he
is writing Italian dialect songs, Irish dialect songs, and he said, Fanny,
with your face, you should do a Yiddish dialect song,
all right, let's talk about her face. Well. She had brown,
curly hair, green eyes, a wide mouth, and a prominent nose.
(08:19):
More on that later, Fanny would describe hers as a
quote Jewish face. She was also tall for the time,
standing five ft six and painfully thin, as she put it,
with legs that looked like two slats. These features made
her stand out and would become tools for her comedy.
She knew she was a site gang, and she played
(08:41):
up that aspect of her physicality. That she knew she
couldn't be the prettiest goal on the stage. She was
going to be the funniest. The dialect songs that Irving
Berlin and others were writing were tied to a boom
in ethnic comedy fueled by the huge numbers of immigrants
coming to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
(09:03):
While some of this material might seem offensive today, immigrant
communities of the time ate it up. One of those communities,
comprised of Eastern and Central European Jews, was a Yiddish
speaking There were Yiddish newspapers and a thriving Yiddish theater scene,
which isn't surprising. Nia means rosadas, bubbs. The Yiddish language,
(09:31):
a combination of German and Hebrew with a few other
linguistic ingredients thrown in. Has a kind of musicality, with
words that are kind of fun to say, like schlamil, schlamozel,
bobby and book kiss. Why did people consider the Yiddish
accent funny? Well, if you don't know Yiddish, it kind
of sounds funny. And if you combine it with gestures
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and manners, I mean, it's like anything you can exaggerate it.
And when you combine it with her zany flair for
physical comedy, it was just an irresistible combination. Fanny took
Irving Berlin's advice and created her own comedic Yiddish accented persona.
(10:19):
How are you to say? How marry you win? You
might be a month. But here's the thing, Fanny didn't
actually know Yiddish. Most people would think, oh, Fanny Bryce,
(10:41):
she probably grew up speaking Yiddish. Well, she liked people
to think that, but she didn't. But she could put
on the accent just like a mask and take it off.
By this time, Fanny was performing in burlesque houses. Burlesque
was I suppose the lowest rung on the show business ladder.
If you're talking about American popular and pertainment. When we
tend to think of burlesque, we think of stripped tease.
(11:04):
But burlesque wasn't just stripped tease. It included singers, dancers,
and comedy acts. For somebody like Bryce who was really
trying to break into show business, it was easier to
get into you didn't have to be quite as pretty.
It's around this time she changed her name from Fannie A.
Borak to Fanny Bryce, but she kept her comedic style,
(11:27):
which would be epitomized by later hits like Secondhand Rose,
about a poor Jewish girl from the Lower East Side.
All that fighting. She was fast making a name for
(11:53):
herself in burlesque, but her big came in when she
was cast in the zig Feld Follies. The Follies started
the greatest entertainers of the day in a live review
that was nothing short of spectacular. You had the zig
(12:14):
Feld Girls, these statuesque women who created in and out
with beautiful costumes. The show was also renowned for its comedians,
the cowboy humorist Will Rogers, the curmudgeon le W C. Fields,
whom my father always loved you like children I do
if they're probably cooked. And the beloved Apostle of pep
(12:37):
Eddie Canter, whose greatest hits I still listen to, How
are you going to keep him down on the farm
after they've seen Harry? How are you going to keep
them away from? I think it was Eddie Cander who said,
when you make it into the Follies, it's like when
you're a baseball player and you make it into the
World Series. It's the top. It's the top of the show.
(12:58):
Is this career? The screw winning movie The Great Zigfeld
starred William Powell as impresario forlorenzig Felt and depicts his
discovery of Fanny Bryce ms Brice. I am really here
to offer you a great opportunity. That's what they all
say in the movie. Fanny plays herself. Everyone was singing
(13:19):
fancyne screening at a wedding yesterday, Heed on his feetle
late some rag time, and after accepting Zigfeld's offer, we
see her make it to the big time. Look at you.
You're working for Zigfelt now and you look like a
million dallars the first time in your life. You clash.
(13:46):
The Folly's made Fanny a major star. By nine six,
the New York Tribune was calling her the funniest woman
on the stage today. Eventually she was pulling in three
thousand dollars a week, making her one the highest paid
women in show business, a yearly income, one newspaper would
later note, said to be an excess of that of
(14:07):
the President of the United States. But more than all that,
she was an original, a great female clown, and a pioneer.
Many of her fans had probably never even met a
Jewish person or a woman of any background who was
so uninhibited by turns, goofy and body, unconcerned with society's
(14:29):
notions of how a lady ought to behave. In contrast
to the statuesque beauties parading across the Folly stage, Fanny
was the anti Ziegfeld girl. She would go on to
satirize performers like modern dancer Martha Graham and theatrical grand
Dame Ethel Barrymore, and she became the master of the
(14:49):
parody number, turning the hit song the Chic of Araby
into the chic of Avenue b Unfanni ahead. How did
Jewish audiences feel about her performances? They loved her Fanny
(15:10):
knew who she was representing and what she wanted that
representation to mean, later saying, I never did a Jewish
song that would offend the race. In anything Jewish I
ever did, I wasn't standing apart making fun of the race.
I was the race. And like my own favorite performers,
she had a natural warmth. You can hear it in
(15:31):
her real voice in a p s A she did
during the Great Depression, encouraging people to help the unemployed.
What are you doing, Fanny didding a sweater? They unemployed?
My relation, all my uncle, not one of them, are
working one more stitching habby even all kidna side folks.
(15:54):
This is really a serious matter. As for her romantic life, well,
if you've seen Funny Girl, you know the name Nick.
What a beautiful, beautiful name. When she's twenty one, she
meets Nick Arnstein. Who is he? That's a good question.
(16:15):
I mean he was basically a gambler, a con man,
a criminal. Was he Omar Shariff good looking? I don't
know that anybody's in Omar Sharif category, but he was
good looking. Egyptian actor Omar Shariff played Nick Arnstein in
the Funny girl movie. Look at pictures of the real
Nick Arnstein, and I'm pretty sure you'll agree that casting
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Shariff was generous. Regardless, Bannie Bryce fell for the real
Arnstein hard. She talks about kind of love at first sight.
He ended up taking her up to his hotel room,
where she saw his monogram bathro even his toothbrush she
found elegant, and she just was really swept up by
this man who appreciated of the finer things in life,
(17:01):
and I think she really did love him. Never mind
that Arnstein was married when they met and didn't obtain
a divorce until Fanny was seven months pregnant with their
first child. That detail isn't in the musical. They ended
up having a daughter and son. Arnstein was also pretty
much constantly engaged in criminal activity, doing time at Sing
Sing for wire tapping and leaven Worth for bank theft.
(17:24):
The two were finally married in nineteen nineteen in between
prison terms. Fanny stood by Nick through most of these
ups and downs, which led to one of her biggest
career moments. When she was in the fallies of ninety one,
it was actually Zigfeld who gave her a number that
became really wonder her signature songs. The song was My Man,
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the English adaptation of a French song made famous by
the great Shantouse Westing Gay. She said to down, the
French version is a much rougher song. I mean, it's
really about a prostitute who's singing about her pimp who
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beats her and you know, abuses her. And the American version,
of course, was sanitized. Call me love it, mamma. Fanny's
performance of my Man was unlike anything else she'd ever done,
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raw and without a Yiddish accent. She wore a torn
dress and leaned forlornly against a lamp post. No cookie
hand gestures, just stripped down, just singing the song. And look,
I'm sure she was singing from her own pain. At
the time Fanny performed the number, Arnstein had been found
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guilty of bond theft and would soon be sentenced. Front
page news. Oh My Lanny's why My Man became Fanny's
(19:22):
signature song, and for several more years, Fanny stood by
her man until she couldn't. I do think that she
would have stayed with him, probably forever, but he committed
the cardinal sin. She learned of his infidelity, and she
was done. She stood by him, she loved him, but
(19:46):
when he was unfaithful to her, she was done. There
was no coming back from No, there really wasn't. My
man was a breakthrough moment for Fanny. It gave her
hope that audiences could see her as more than just
a clown, and to that end, she was about to
make a very big change. I want to how much
what it costs, because these an't fixed stuff. I mean,
(20:08):
by one of those pick surgeons. Well, I wouldn't want
an old carpenter doing it. I have a confession to make.
(20:30):
When I am thinking about Funny Girl, as I often do,
I sometimes forget that it's not the Barbara Streisand story.
Does that make me crazy? No, You're absolutely on target.
In fact, I think it actually is the Barbara Streisand
story in many ways. In some ways, it's more the
Barbara Streisand story than it is the Fannie Bryce story.
(20:53):
This is my friend Eric Near. He's a contributing editor
to the literary and arts journal The Hudson Review, and
he knows more about musical theater than I could ever
hope to know. Will return to the story of the
real life Fanny later in the episode, But first I
wanted to talk with Eric about how with Funny Girl
Barbara streisand came to eclipse the memory of Fanny Bryce.
(21:16):
The depiction of Fanny ultimately ends up being a little
closer to Strei's end than it does to the real
Fanny Bryce. And was that intentional? Well, I don't think. Originally,
Fannie Bryce had been dead for over a decade when
a powerful Hollywood producer named Ray Stark set about telling
her story. Ray Stark happened to be married to Fanny's daughter.
(21:41):
The idea was to create a show about the story
of Fannie Bryce and the broad outlines of her life
working for Ziegfeld and her marriage to Nick Arnstein, which
was of course very troubled, And they went through a
lot of sort of potential Fannies, you know. Carol Burnett
was considered interesting, and Bancroft was attached for why she
was really hot after just winning an oscar for the
(22:02):
Miracle Worker? Did she singing the Miracle Worker? Sullivan singing?
Carol Burnett and Anne Bancroft were already big names, but
Bunny Girl's composer, a man named Julie Stein, was writing
the show's score with a lesser known talent. In mind three,
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what you study Rooster is Dustina. At the time, Barbara
Streisand was just twenty and performing in downtown Manhattan clubs
like The Village Vanguard and the Bonsar described back then
(22:50):
as Kookie. Streisand had stolen the show in her first
Broadway role in two as the secretary Miss Marmelstein and
I can get her or your wholesale Stane, you think
at least missing I could die. Julie Stein saw her
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and said, Okay, here's a girl who can really sing,
who is clearly Jewish and will be convincing playing Fanny Bryce,
and who is also a comic and has a wonderful
sense of humor a wonderful sense of stage comedy. It
was inevitable casting. There was really no one else at
the time who would have been so perfect for the role.
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With a new, exciting and volcanically talented performer in the role,
the show's focus started to shift, and so Funny Girl
started to bend in a way to be really much
more about Streisand and her talent than it did about
Annie Bryce. Streisand's take on Fanny Bryce was entirely her
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own as she discussed in this backstage radio interview from
the opening night of Funny Girl in four, did you
research the life of Fanny Boys at all? No, I
didn't want to approach it is an invitation or anything
like that. I mean, they hired me because whatever organic
things we had similar, you know, they'll work for themselves.
(24:27):
I understand that you purposely kept yourself away from looking
at movies of hers, hearing programs of hers, and so forth.
I mean, I'm approaching it as a character in a
play who could have been any woman who was torn
between a career marriage and has problems of her own.
As for what the two women had in common, well, Streisand,
like Bryce, wasn't Broadway or certainly Hollywood's definition of beautiful.
(24:51):
Early on, critics had no compunction writing about her nose,
speculating on whether she'd ever get it fixed. Variety even
recommended a quote corrective schnaz Bob Eric says that kind
of criticism may have only made Streisand more determined to
make it, a determination that served her well in the
(25:12):
role of Fanny. What we see and Funny Girl is
Fanny sort of using that insecurity about her looks and
about not being taken seriously and channeling that into this
kind of fierce ambition that is this sort of incredibly
exciting mix of anger and insecurity that drives her on
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and streisand just really embodies that in an incredible way.
Let's listen to streisand as a young Fanny singing, I'm
the greatest star in the movie version of Funny Girl,
Because the greatest star I am by far in a
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case of art imitating life imitating arts, stay with me here,
this number becomes as much a declaration by Barbara streisand
herself as it does by the character she was playing.
That's a fascinating song because it kind of starts a
little bit as if she's trying to please. She's kind
of doing a little sticky stuff and funny voices and
trying to ingratiate herself. Why they're going to hear of
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a silver flute? Belcher reached to a terrific when I exposed.
And then something happens kind of midway through that song
where she kind of steps away from that and just says,
all right, hold on, listen up, I am the greatest star,
and I don't have any qualms about saying that yes,
(26:47):
who's the best year? Yeah, it's a gutsy kind of
(27:16):
thing to say in the heroine's first big number in
the show, because it could come off as you know,
a little egotistical and pushy and a little obnoxious. But
when it's performed in the way it's performed, certainly by
strikes out, as we see in the film, there's no
other response but yes, you're right, which brings us to
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a key difference between the two women they're singing voices.
I don't want to be unfair to Fanny, she's not
here to defend herself. But let's do a little compare
and contrast. Let's listen to Fanny singing my man man
I oh now, let's listen to Barbara's ng my man
(28:11):
so is just as fakay when it takes me and wrong.
(28:35):
Even accounting for differences in audience tastes, there's really no
comparison that's right. The way that Fanny sings it is
full of heart and full of warmth and richness and character,
but it is a style that sounds pretty dated to
us now, and the way that Straison sings my man
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has not dated at all. In fact, it's as powerful
as it was when she recorded it, you know, over
fifty years ago. And the secret to Straysand's power, says Eric,
has more to do with her treatment of the words
than music. She's really acting the song. It's as if
she is making up the song as she goes along.
(29:18):
Strist And really brings together a lot of different kinds
of vocalism and then puts this whole gloss of incredible
sort of sensuality and eroticism over it, which may surprise
people because we don't think of her as being sort
of a sexy performer. But when you hear her sing,
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she is cressing every phrase with an incredibly sensual approachest
of love, soundistan, wist of your love. Only just listen
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to Streisand on a personal favorite of mine, Alan and
Marilyn Bergman and Michelle Legrands, what are you doing the
rest of your life? She is able to open her
voice up at the top of the range in a
way that lets it really blossom into this kind of
soaring sounds. What God. And It's just so important I
(30:36):
think for people to understand that it was knew what
she was doing, like all great artists, was new because
she's such a fact of life. I think it's easy
to take for granted that's absolutely true. And of course
the sad fact is that she had this incredible success
with Funny Girl and then never did a Broadway show again. Indeed,
(30:57):
streisand would go on to conquer Hollywoo what but rather
than replace Fanny Bryce, Eric believes Barbara's performance and Funny
Girl is the reason we remember Fanny Bryce's name at all.
Without Funny Girl, I think she'd be basically a forgotten
a performer at this time. Funny Girl has kept her
name alive in ways that the surviving fragments that we
(31:20):
have of video or audio footage have not. Really who
can we compare Fanny Bryce to that might give people
a sense of the kind of performer that she was.
I think there's definitely a bit of Fanny Bryce and
Bette Midler ther John. So some lastness, my face is
(31:41):
Matt barg that's broke that sense of zane nous and
the broadly funny faces that she makes, combined with a
warmth and good natured nous. Another heir to Bryce, the
aforementioned Carol Burnett, who's long running and completely wonderful variety show,
(32:02):
was big on parody. I love you that that that
gown is gorgeous, thank you Stan Wind and I just
couldn't resist it. No question that Carl Burnett was influenced
by Fanny Brice. You see it in the facial expressions
that she makes, the willingness to put on any kind
(32:23):
of outrageous costume, the willingness to look incredibly silly and ridiculous,
all in the service of humor. To give her her props.
Fanny did do that thing of being a big star
comic who kind of in an act of performance jiu Jitsu,
made you cry with a song like my Man. That's
(32:45):
part of her appeal is that she's zany and cookie
and will do anything of her laugh. But always at
the core there's this sense of a true and real
and kind and loving person behind everything that she does.
Final question. Barbara spells her first name b A R
B R A. When you see younger gay men spell
(33:10):
her name with three a's, how does it make you feel?
It makes me feel a little bit how I feel
when I hear people refer to cast albums as soundtracks. Oouch,
that hurts. It's like a night It's painful, but you know,
What drives Barbara even more crazy is when people mispronounced
her last name. It was a z sound instead of
an asset, right. And perhaps you've heard the story that
(33:33):
when Apple launched Siri, Sirie was pronouncing her name Barbara
streisand Barbara picked up the phone and called Tim Cook
to ask him to fix the pronunciation of her name
by Sirie. And I'm sure they did it right away,
no doubt. When I see that extra a, I mean
to me, it's tantamount to a hate crime. Mmh. You
(34:09):
even made me feel sort of beautiful, you know, for
for a very long time, beautiful. The musical Funny Girl
ends with Fanny Bryce saying goodbye to her gambler ne'er
do well husband, Nicky Arnstein for the very last time.
But that's not where Fanny's story ended. It's around this
(34:32):
time that Fanny did something that stray Sand famously did
not do. In she had what was announced as facial sculpture. Yes,
she had a nose job. She did. That's Fanny Bryce.
Biographer Barbara Grossman. Again, as much as we talked about
she knew who she was, and she knew what she wanted,
(34:55):
and she'd never thought of herself as pretty. She didn't
fit the established beautiful type, and so she saw having
a smaller nose is not just making her pretty, but
allowing her to do the kind of dramatic work that
she thought she would be better suited for if she
looked different. A different, less ethnic look, her thinking went,
(35:20):
might also help her appeal to a wider range of
audiences around the country. Writer Dorothy Parker acidly equipped that
Fanny quote cut off her nose to spite her race.
Now I have to confess I didn't even realize people
got nose jobs back then. But plastic surgery had advanced
during World War One as the doctor's developed new methods
(35:43):
to reconstruct the faces of disfigured soldiers. In the years
after the war, those methods would be used for cosmetic surgery,
or what some called facial renovation. When you look at
pictures of Fanny post nose job, the change doesn't look
that dramatic. Still, the procedure made national news, mostly because
(36:07):
Fanny never publicity shy, let reporters see her swathed in
bandages after the surgery. Fanny referred to her nose job
as a return to normalcy, a play on Warren Harding's
presidential campaign slogan. In an interview, Fanny acknowledged it might
take a couple of seasons for the public to get
(36:28):
used to my new nose. But I'm ambitious. Like every actress,
I know I can act, and I want to show
the public what I can do with a new nose
in front of her. Fanny was ready for Hollywood, which
was just entering the sound era with the success of
Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. Wait a minute, Wait a
minute Yet, movie studios were on the hunt for entertainers
(36:52):
who could talk and sing, and so Warner Brothers signed Fanny.
Her first film, My Man, featured her singing the now
famous title tune, plus some new songs. She was even
(37:21):
marketed as the female Joelson, But audiences didn't respond to
Fanny in the same way My Man was a flop.
Did some parts of the country just find her too Jewish? Well?
Variety seemed to think so, writing bluntly and disturbingly in
its review of the film, quote, certain localities are apt
(37:43):
to chill on the stars distinct Hebrew clowning. Now some
of you may be thinking, wait a minute. The Jazz
Singer is the story of a canter son who abandons
the synagogue for show business, only to return in a
climactic scene to chant yam ki poor prayer while his
father is on his deathbed. That was pretty Jewish and
(38:15):
audiences loved it. But that movie may have been more
of an exception to the rule, not to mention it
was ultimately a story of assimilation. Fanny's movie career was
coinciding with what would end up being a disappearance of
sorts of Jews in the stories being told by the
entertainment industry. The nativism and anti immigrant sentiment of the
(38:38):
nineteen twenties and thirties was leading to a desemitizing of
mainstream culture. Studio bosses, many of them Jewish themselves, seemed
to believe that movies playing to the whole country needed
to downplay Jewish faces, accents, and themes. Characters and plots
featuring Jewish people were minimized or ate it entirely. Many
(39:03):
Jewish film actors would leave the business or try to
assimilate as best they could. For example, a decade or
so after Fanny, actress Lauren Bicall born Betty Joan Persky
would be marketed by studio publicists as being from society. Interestingly,
Bicall would play Barbara Streisand's mother in the film The
(39:27):
Mirror Has Two Faces. Mother, I made dinner, Why don't
you put the coffee on? I raised two daughters, I
buried a husband. I've made my coffee. Another issue might
have been Fanny's over the top stage persona. Look, I
love Broadway, but sometimes the energy is just too much
for the big screen. There's a reason why ethel Merman
barely had a movie career. Will you just shut up
(39:50):
and let me talk? Whatever it was, it wasn't working.
Fanny would go on to make just six movies, but
her star would rise again in a print medium. It
was the nineteen thirties radio's golden age, and Fanny had
the perfect character. Yes, Dying Fanny with handle s is
(40:11):
Daddy Baby Snooks was a character Fanny developed for the
stage back in her early performance days, and this is important.
The character didn't rely on a Yiddish accent. You can't
really do Yiddish accent a comedy on the radio because
it's so physical. It demands the gestures, the manners, and
the whole stick if you will, And with Hitler's Germany
(40:34):
posing an increasing threat and anti Semitism rampant on the
home front. Fanny likely reasoned that her Jewishness was not
something to emphasize, not if you were trying to appeal
to a national radio audience. The Baby Snooks show was
pretty standard sitcom fair episodes would revolve around Stooks causing
trouble or asking too many questions, and her ever exasperated
(40:58):
father having to deal with her in Calfornia? Where were
you born in Denver? Mommy? Mommy was born in New York? Dinner?
Her catchphrase became the question she would keep asking throughout
each episode, setting her father over the edge. Why did
(41:19):
I have to put on my new great daddy because
my boss is coming for dinner and listen to Snooks.
You're not to come into the dining room while we're
having dinner, not even if my boss asked you too. Why? Why?
I think in a way, Snooks was easy. It was
bread and butter for her. She didn't have to contort
her body doing acrobatic leaps, and you know, for somebody
(41:43):
who was getting older, it was probably less demanding than
some of her parts, and audiences enjoyed it. Banny and
Snooks were on the radio for over fourteen years. Future
I Love Lucy producer Jess Oppenheimer was a writer for
the Baby Snooks Show and would take some of the
Snooks traits with him when he went to write for
(42:04):
My Favorite Husband, the radio predecessor to I Love Lucy.
Oppenheimer wrote in his memoir that he decided to make
Balls radio character quote a little bit more childlike and
impulsive and short, more like Baby Snooks. Traces of Snooks
(42:27):
carried over to TV when Lucille Ball became Lucy Ricardo.
Sure I wanted him to forget my birthday, but he
forgot my birthday. But while Lucy transitioned to the exciting
new medium of television, Fanny and Baby Snooks would not
make that leap. She had been offered a Baby Snooks
(42:51):
show on television, and she said no because she was
self aware enough to realize that on radio, the audience,
because they didn't have to look at her, they could
just hear and her voice, she could sound like the
Baby Stocks. But on TV it's a cruel I it's
the camera. Fanny was getting tired, bored by the routine
(43:13):
of radio work. She wanted to enjoy life in the
California Sunshine, spend time with her grandkids, and enjoy her
hobbies like painting and interior decorating. She decorated the homes
of friends like Catherine Hepburn and Eddie Cantor. For years,
she was also on her own after another failed marriage.
(43:34):
Following her divorce from Nick Ornstein, she'd married showman Billy Rose.
By most accounts, the two were a mismatch and the
marriage was not a happy one. It also inspired a
sequel to Funny Girl called Funny Lady that We're not
going to talk about. The marriage ended after nine years.
(43:57):
In November newspaper interview, she shared her plans to retire
from show business the following year. You can tell that
the Fannie who had hustled and strived for so long
is gone. The beginning of a career is the most
exciting anyway. It's fun and wonderful. After you get there,
it's tough to stay there. That's when you have to fight,
(44:19):
she says. There's always people to take your place, and
they're always better. Six months later, in May, Fanny Bryce
died following a cerebral hemorrhage. Fanny's Rabbi Max Nossbaum, poignantly
noted Fanny Brice inherited from our tradition not only the
(44:41):
capability of moving people to laughter and two tears, but
also she inherited the heart that ennobled her calling don't
if you want. Thirteen years later, Barbara Streisand would make
(45:06):
Fanny Bryce a household name again when Funny Girl opened
on Broadway. I'm a bagel and a plateful of onion rolls.
If you ask most people today who Fanny Bryce is,
they probably don't know, or they might conflate her story
with Barbara Streisand's. But Fanny was a true comedy pioneer
for women and Jewish entertainers, paving the way for Streisand
(45:31):
and so many others the whole body else. Wouldn't it
be great if one day somebody made a movie about
Fanny Bryce. I certainly hope you enjoyed this mobituary. May
(46:07):
I ask you to please rate and review our podcast.
You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and
you can follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Here all
new episodes of mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts,
and check out Mobituaries Great Lives Worth Reliving the New
York Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook.
(46:30):
It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Zoe Marcus. Our team
of producers also includes Aaron Shrank, Wilcome, Martina Scacero, Ja Curnis,
and me Morocca. It was edited by Moral Walls and
(46:51):
engineered by Josh Hahn, with fact checking by Naomi Barr.
Our production company is Neon Hum Media. Our archival produce
sir is Jamie Benson. Our theme music is written by
Daniel Hart. Indispensable support from Craig Swaggler, Dustin Gervais, Alan Pang,
Reggie Basio and everyone at CBS News Radio. Special thanks
(47:13):
to Jonathan Greenberg and Alberto Robina the Indisputable. Aaron Shrink
is our senior producer. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Steve
Raises and Morocca. The series is created by Yours Truly
and as always undying gratitude to Rand Morrison and John
carp for helping breathe life into Mobituaries.
On a Sunday night in October nine two once in
a lifetime talents Ye teamed up for an unforgettable duet
on National TV. Twenty one year old Barbara Streisand was
a guest on The Judy Garland Show. Garland was then
(00:27):
forty one. Their medley of Happy Days, Are Here Again
and Get Happy was sheer perfection, an instant classic. Garland,
already in decline, though she didn't sound like it that night,
would die. Just six years later, Streisand was just breaking
(00:47):
out two story ships passing in the night? What'd she do? Snooks?
I've been your books away? Twenty five years earlier, a
very different duet, It was Garland who was on the
(01:10):
rise and singing with an established star. Still a year
away from her trip down the Yellow Brick Road. Teenage
Judy was starting to make a name for herself, appearing
in a movie musical called Everybody Sing. In this number,
she argues in song with a little girl played by
a fortysomething woman named Fanny Bryce, why because because where
(01:38):
you are, Let's play cops and Clothes. At the time,
Fanny Bryce was one of the biggest stars in the country.
Lady and Gentlemen present Miss Fannie Bryce. Fanny Bryce Bryce
had conquered Broadway, headlined movies You're gonna Hear what I've
(02:00):
got to say, and created one of the most popular
characters on radio. Fanny Bryce was also a history maker
in original one of the first great female comedy stars.
She was so famous that one day an entire musical
(02:21):
called Funny Girl would be written about her life, a
musical that would star Barbara Streisand. But while Funny Girl
would help turn Streisand into a supernova, the real Fannie
Bryce would fade from memory. It made people remember her
longer than I'm sure they would have had there not
(02:42):
been a musical. But the life as she lived it
is not the life story that we get in Funny
Girl from CBS Sunday Morning and I Heart I'm Morocca
and this is mobituaries. This moment Fanny Bryce, death of
(03:02):
the original Funny Girl. Don't tell me not to live
just sitting pudder Life's candy in the suns of Balla Budda,
(03:24):
don't bring around a clout to rate on my parade.
That's Barbara streisand knocking them dead. As Fanny Bryce in Broadways,
Funny Girl in Fast forward fifty eight years to April,
Hello Gorgeous and the show's first ever Broadway revival, starring
(03:47):
Beanie Feldstein. Alas, the reviews for this production were less
than stellar, the show was hobbling along until michell Is
getting rave reviews. Lee star Leah Michelle was brought into
play Fanny, and the revival itself was revived. It's ready
for me because I said, I saw Leah and the
(04:23):
show and she was terrific. But make no mistake, the
lead role in Funny Girl is indelibly connected to Really
owned by Barbara streisand people, people need people, Ah the Peple.
(04:56):
After all, she won an oscar when she starred in
the movie version, just to few years after her Broadway run. Now,
to be clear, this is not a mobituary for streisand
I mean, she's kind of immortal. We'll talk more about
her in Act two, but this episode is about the
woman she came to eclipse Fanny Bryce. Funny Girl, in
(05:16):
many ways is a sanitized life story. The story that
the family wanted to tell in Bryce's career was much
more a fever chart, up and down and up and
down and up and down. Barbara Grossman is a theater
professor at Tufts University and wrote an in depth biography
on Bryce entitled Funny Woman. She didn't simply will herself
(05:38):
to be the greatest star and everyone accepted it and
that was it. Well, she willed herself to do it,
but it took her a while to find her footing
and to figure out actually who she was as an entertainer,
and to accept her great comic gifts. Bryce was born
Fannie a Borak to a Jewish immigrant family in As
(06:00):
a small child, she lived in Newark, New Jersey, where
her mother Rose ran a saloon and her father, known
as Pinuckle Charlie, drank and played cards and did pretty
much nothing else. After her parents split up, Fanny moved
with her mother to Brooklyn, where her career began. She
was not yet fifteen when she stepped on stage to
(06:23):
perform at a vaudeville house called Kenney's. It was amateur night,
and she later wrote that when the audience saw a
quote gawky, nondescript girl in a rumpled linen dress and
cheap sailor hat, they started booing and shrieking. This was
the kind of place where they gave performers the hook
(06:44):
literally a big iron one. If the audience didn't like them,
then Fanny began singing a sentimental ballad of the time,
and as the performance went on, the crowd fell silent.
There was just something about that teenage girl singing so seriously.
(07:09):
Banny's brother Lou would later give this rather delightful description.
The theater quieted down like somebody had hung a smallpox
sign over the door. When the crowd started throwing money
at Fanny, she knew she was a hit. She even
got a few laughs while pausing her dramatic song to
pick up her money. Soon after that night at Keeney's,
(07:33):
she quit school to pursue a life in show business.
When she auditioned for one show in nine she was
asked if she had a specialty number. After confidently saying
she did, she didn't, she went running to a young
man named Irving Berlin. Now you might know Berlin as
the writer of White Christmas Easter Parade, God Bless America,
(07:56):
But this was before all that. At that point, he
is writing Italian dialect songs, Irish dialect songs, and he said, Fanny,
with your face, you should do a Yiddish dialect song,
all right, let's talk about her face. Well. She had brown,
curly hair, green eyes, a wide mouth, and a prominent nose.
(08:19):
More on that later, Fanny would describe hers as a
quote Jewish face. She was also tall for the time,
standing five ft six and painfully thin, as she put it,
with legs that looked like two slats. These features made
her stand out and would become tools for her comedy.
She knew she was a site gang, and she played
(08:41):
up that aspect of her physicality. That she knew she
couldn't be the prettiest goal on the stage. She was
going to be the funniest. The dialect songs that Irving
Berlin and others were writing were tied to a boom
in ethnic comedy fueled by the huge numbers of immigrants
coming to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
(09:03):
While some of this material might seem offensive today, immigrant
communities of the time ate it up. One of those communities,
comprised of Eastern and Central European Jews, was a Yiddish
speaking There were Yiddish newspapers and a thriving Yiddish theater scene,
which isn't surprising. Nia means rosadas, bubbs. The Yiddish language,
(09:31):
a combination of German and Hebrew with a few other
linguistic ingredients thrown in. Has a kind of musicality, with
words that are kind of fun to say, like schlamil, schlamozel,
bobby and book kiss. Why did people consider the Yiddish
accent funny? Well, if you don't know Yiddish, it kind
of sounds funny. And if you combine it with gestures
(09:55):
and manners, I mean, it's like anything you can exaggerate it.
And when you combine it with her zany flair for
physical comedy, it was just an irresistible combination. Fanny took
Irving Berlin's advice and created her own comedic Yiddish accented persona.
(10:19):
How are you to say? How marry you win? You
might be a month. But here's the thing, Fanny didn't
actually know Yiddish. Most people would think, oh, Fanny Bryce,
(10:41):
she probably grew up speaking Yiddish. Well, she liked people
to think that, but she didn't. But she could put
on the accent just like a mask and take it off.
By this time, Fanny was performing in burlesque houses. Burlesque
was I suppose the lowest rung on the show business ladder.
If you're talking about American popular and pertainment. When we
tend to think of burlesque, we think of stripped tease.
(11:04):
But burlesque wasn't just stripped tease. It included singers, dancers,
and comedy acts. For somebody like Bryce who was really
trying to break into show business, it was easier to
get into you didn't have to be quite as pretty.
It's around this time she changed her name from Fannie A.
Borak to Fanny Bryce, but she kept her comedic style,
(11:27):
which would be epitomized by later hits like Secondhand Rose,
about a poor Jewish girl from the Lower East Side.
All that fighting. She was fast making a name for
(11:53):
herself in burlesque, but her big came in when she
was cast in the zig Feld Follies. The Follies started
the greatest entertainers of the day in a live review
that was nothing short of spectacular. You had the zig
(12:14):
Feld Girls, these statuesque women who created in and out
with beautiful costumes. The show was also renowned for its comedians,
the cowboy humorist Will Rogers, the curmudgeon le W C. Fields,
whom my father always loved you like children I do
if they're probably cooked. And the beloved Apostle of pep
(12:37):
Eddie Canter, whose greatest hits I still listen to, How
are you going to keep him down on the farm
after they've seen Harry? How are you going to keep
them away from? I think it was Eddie Cander who said,
when you make it into the Follies, it's like when
you're a baseball player and you make it into the
World Series. It's the top. It's the top of the show.
(12:58):
Is this career? The screw winning movie The Great Zigfeld
starred William Powell as impresario forlorenzig Felt and depicts his
discovery of Fanny Bryce ms Brice. I am really here
to offer you a great opportunity. That's what they all
say in the movie. Fanny plays herself. Everyone was singing
(13:19):
fancyne screening at a wedding yesterday, Heed on his feetle
late some rag time, and after accepting Zigfeld's offer, we
see her make it to the big time. Look at you.
You're working for Zigfelt now and you look like a
million dallars the first time in your life. You clash.
(13:46):
The Folly's made Fanny a major star. By nine six,
the New York Tribune was calling her the funniest woman
on the stage today. Eventually she was pulling in three
thousand dollars a week, making her one the highest paid
women in show business, a yearly income, one newspaper would
later note, said to be an excess of that of
(14:07):
the President of the United States. But more than all that,
she was an original, a great female clown, and a pioneer.
Many of her fans had probably never even met a
Jewish person or a woman of any background who was
so uninhibited by turns, goofy and body, unconcerned with society's
(14:29):
notions of how a lady ought to behave. In contrast
to the statuesque beauties parading across the Folly stage, Fanny
was the anti Ziegfeld girl. She would go on to
satirize performers like modern dancer Martha Graham and theatrical grand
Dame Ethel Barrymore, and she became the master of the
(14:49):
parody number, turning the hit song the Chic of Araby
into the chic of Avenue b Unfanni ahead. How did
Jewish audiences feel about her performances? They loved her Fanny
(15:10):
knew who she was representing and what she wanted that
representation to mean, later saying, I never did a Jewish
song that would offend the race. In anything Jewish I
ever did, I wasn't standing apart making fun of the race.
I was the race. And like my own favorite performers,
she had a natural warmth. You can hear it in
(15:31):
her real voice in a p s A she did
during the Great Depression, encouraging people to help the unemployed.
What are you doing, Fanny didding a sweater? They unemployed?
My relation, all my uncle, not one of them, are
working one more stitching habby even all kidna side folks.
(15:54):
This is really a serious matter. As for her romantic life, well,
if you've seen Funny Girl, you know the name Nick.
What a beautiful, beautiful name. When she's twenty one, she
meets Nick Arnstein. Who is he? That's a good question.
(16:15):
I mean he was basically a gambler, a con man,
a criminal. Was he Omar Shariff good looking? I don't
know that anybody's in Omar Sharif category, but he was
good looking. Egyptian actor Omar Shariff played Nick Arnstein in
the Funny girl movie. Look at pictures of the real
Nick Arnstein, and I'm pretty sure you'll agree that casting
(16:38):
Shariff was generous. Regardless, Bannie Bryce fell for the real
Arnstein hard. She talks about kind of love at first sight.
He ended up taking her up to his hotel room,
where she saw his monogram bathro even his toothbrush she
found elegant, and she just was really swept up by
this man who appreciated of the finer things in life,
(17:01):
and I think she really did love him. Never mind
that Arnstein was married when they met and didn't obtain
a divorce until Fanny was seven months pregnant with their
first child. That detail isn't in the musical. They ended
up having a daughter and son. Arnstein was also pretty
much constantly engaged in criminal activity, doing time at Sing
Sing for wire tapping and leaven Worth for bank theft.
(17:24):
The two were finally married in nineteen nineteen in between
prison terms. Fanny stood by Nick through most of these
ups and downs, which led to one of her biggest
career moments. When she was in the fallies of ninety one,
it was actually Zigfeld who gave her a number that
became really wonder her signature songs. The song was My Man,
(17:48):
the English adaptation of a French song made famous by
the great Shantouse Westing Gay. She said to down, the
French version is a much rougher song. I mean, it's
really about a prostitute who's singing about her pimp who
(18:09):
beats her and you know, abuses her. And the American version,
of course, was sanitized. Call me love it, mamma. Fanny's
performance of my Man was unlike anything else she'd ever done,
(18:33):
raw and without a Yiddish accent. She wore a torn
dress and leaned forlornly against a lamp post. No cookie
hand gestures, just stripped down, just singing the song. And look,
I'm sure she was singing from her own pain. At
the time Fanny performed the number, Arnstein had been found
(18:55):
guilty of bond theft and would soon be sentenced. Front
page news. Oh My Lanny's why My Man became Fanny's
(19:22):
signature song, and for several more years, Fanny stood by
her man until she couldn't. I do think that she
would have stayed with him, probably forever, but he committed
the cardinal sin. She learned of his infidelity, and she
was done. She stood by him, she loved him, but
(19:46):
when he was unfaithful to her, she was done. There
was no coming back from No, there really wasn't. My
man was a breakthrough moment for Fanny. It gave her
hope that audiences could see her as more than just
a clown, and to that end, she was about to
make a very big change. I want to how much
what it costs, because these an't fixed stuff. I mean,
(20:08):
by one of those pick surgeons. Well, I wouldn't want
an old carpenter doing it. I have a confession to make.
(20:30):
When I am thinking about Funny Girl, as I often do,
I sometimes forget that it's not the Barbara Streisand story.
Does that make me crazy? No, You're absolutely on target.
In fact, I think it actually is the Barbara Streisand
story in many ways. In some ways, it's more the
Barbara Streisand story than it is the Fannie Bryce story.
(20:53):
This is my friend Eric Near. He's a contributing editor
to the literary and arts journal The Hudson Review, and
he knows more about musical theater than I could ever
hope to know. Will return to the story of the
real life Fanny later in the episode, But first I
wanted to talk with Eric about how with Funny Girl
Barbara streisand came to eclipse the memory of Fanny Bryce.
(21:16):
The depiction of Fanny ultimately ends up being a little
closer to Strei's end than it does to the real
Fanny Bryce. And was that intentional? Well, I don't think. Originally,
Fannie Bryce had been dead for over a decade when
a powerful Hollywood producer named Ray Stark set about telling
her story. Ray Stark happened to be married to Fanny's daughter.
(21:41):
The idea was to create a show about the story
of Fannie Bryce and the broad outlines of her life
working for Ziegfeld and her marriage to Nick Arnstein, which
was of course very troubled, And they went through a
lot of sort of potential Fannies, you know. Carol Burnett
was considered interesting, and Bancroft was attached for why she
was really hot after just winning an oscar for the
(22:02):
Miracle Worker? Did she singing the Miracle Worker? Sullivan singing?
Carol Burnett and Anne Bancroft were already big names, but
Bunny Girl's composer, a man named Julie Stein, was writing
the show's score with a lesser known talent. In mind three,
(22:29):
what you study Rooster is Dustina. At the time, Barbara
Streisand was just twenty and performing in downtown Manhattan clubs
like The Village Vanguard and the Bonsar described back then
(22:50):
as Kookie. Streisand had stolen the show in her first
Broadway role in two as the secretary Miss Marmelstein and
I can get her or your wholesale Stane, you think
at least missing I could die. Julie Stein saw her
(23:20):
and said, Okay, here's a girl who can really sing,
who is clearly Jewish and will be convincing playing Fanny Bryce,
and who is also a comic and has a wonderful
sense of humor a wonderful sense of stage comedy. It
was inevitable casting. There was really no one else at
the time who would have been so perfect for the role.
(23:41):
With a new, exciting and volcanically talented performer in the role,
the show's focus started to shift, and so Funny Girl
started to bend in a way to be really much
more about Streisand and her talent than it did about
Annie Bryce. Streisand's take on Fanny Bryce was entirely her
(24:04):
own as she discussed in this backstage radio interview from
the opening night of Funny Girl in four, did you
research the life of Fanny Boys at all? No, I
didn't want to approach it is an invitation or anything
like that. I mean, they hired me because whatever organic
things we had similar, you know, they'll work for themselves.
(24:27):
I understand that you purposely kept yourself away from looking
at movies of hers, hearing programs of hers, and so forth.
I mean, I'm approaching it as a character in a
play who could have been any woman who was torn
between a career marriage and has problems of her own.
As for what the two women had in common, well, Streisand,
like Bryce, wasn't Broadway or certainly Hollywood's definition of beautiful.
(24:51):
Early on, critics had no compunction writing about her nose,
speculating on whether she'd ever get it fixed. Variety even
recommended a quote corrective schnaz Bob Eric says that kind
of criticism may have only made Streisand more determined to
make it, a determination that served her well in the
(25:12):
role of Fanny. What we see and Funny Girl is
Fanny sort of using that insecurity about her looks and
about not being taken seriously and channeling that into this
kind of fierce ambition that is this sort of incredibly
exciting mix of anger and insecurity that drives her on
(25:34):
and streisand just really embodies that in an incredible way.
Let's listen to streisand as a young Fanny singing, I'm
the greatest star in the movie version of Funny Girl,
Because the greatest star I am by far in a
(25:57):
case of art imitating life imitating arts, stay with me here,
this number becomes as much a declaration by Barbara streisand
herself as it does by the character she was playing.
That's a fascinating song because it kind of starts a
little bit as if she's trying to please. She's kind
of doing a little sticky stuff and funny voices and
trying to ingratiate herself. Why they're going to hear of
(26:21):
a silver flute? Belcher reached to a terrific when I exposed.
And then something happens kind of midway through that song
where she kind of steps away from that and just says,
all right, hold on, listen up, I am the greatest star,
and I don't have any qualms about saying that yes,
(26:47):
who's the best year? Yeah, it's a gutsy kind of
(27:16):
thing to say in the heroine's first big number in
the show, because it could come off as you know,
a little egotistical and pushy and a little obnoxious. But
when it's performed in the way it's performed, certainly by
strikes out, as we see in the film, there's no
other response but yes, you're right, which brings us to
(27:37):
a key difference between the two women they're singing voices.
I don't want to be unfair to Fanny, she's not
here to defend herself. But let's do a little compare
and contrast. Let's listen to Fanny singing my man man
I oh now, let's listen to Barbara's ng my man
(28:11):
so is just as fakay when it takes me and wrong.
(28:35):
Even accounting for differences in audience tastes, there's really no
comparison that's right. The way that Fanny sings it is
full of heart and full of warmth and richness and character,
but it is a style that sounds pretty dated to
us now, and the way that Straison sings my man
(28:57):
has not dated at all. In fact, it's as powerful
as it was when she recorded it, you know, over
fifty years ago. And the secret to Straysand's power, says Eric,
has more to do with her treatment of the words
than music. She's really acting the song. It's as if
she is making up the song as she goes along.
(29:18):
Strist And really brings together a lot of different kinds
of vocalism and then puts this whole gloss of incredible
sort of sensuality and eroticism over it, which may surprise
people because we don't think of her as being sort
of a sexy performer. But when you hear her sing,
(29:38):
she is cressing every phrase with an incredibly sensual approachest
of love, soundistan, wist of your love. Only just listen
(30:01):
to Streisand on a personal favorite of mine, Alan and
Marilyn Bergman and Michelle Legrands, what are you doing the
rest of your life? She is able to open her
voice up at the top of the range in a
way that lets it really blossom into this kind of
soaring sounds. What God. And It's just so important I
(30:36):
think for people to understand that it was knew what
she was doing, like all great artists, was new because
she's such a fact of life. I think it's easy
to take for granted that's absolutely true. And of course
the sad fact is that she had this incredible success
with Funny Girl and then never did a Broadway show again. Indeed,
(30:57):
streisand would go on to conquer Hollywoo what but rather
than replace Fanny Bryce, Eric believes Barbara's performance and Funny
Girl is the reason we remember Fanny Bryce's name at all.
Without Funny Girl, I think she'd be basically a forgotten
a performer at this time. Funny Girl has kept her
name alive in ways that the surviving fragments that we
(31:20):
have of video or audio footage have not. Really who
can we compare Fanny Bryce to that might give people
a sense of the kind of performer that she was.
I think there's definitely a bit of Fanny Bryce and
Bette Midler ther John. So some lastness, my face is
(31:41):
Matt barg that's broke that sense of zane nous and
the broadly funny faces that she makes, combined with a
warmth and good natured nous. Another heir to Bryce, the
aforementioned Carol Burnett, who's long running and completely wonderful variety show,
(32:02):
was big on parody. I love you that that that
gown is gorgeous, thank you Stan Wind and I just
couldn't resist it. No question that Carl Burnett was influenced
by Fanny Brice. You see it in the facial expressions
that she makes, the willingness to put on any kind
(32:23):
of outrageous costume, the willingness to look incredibly silly and ridiculous,
all in the service of humor. To give her her props.
Fanny did do that thing of being a big star
comic who kind of in an act of performance jiu Jitsu,
made you cry with a song like my Man. That's
(32:45):
part of her appeal is that she's zany and cookie
and will do anything of her laugh. But always at
the core there's this sense of a true and real
and kind and loving person behind everything that she does.
Final question. Barbara spells her first name b A R
B R A. When you see younger gay men spell
(33:10):
her name with three a's, how does it make you feel?
It makes me feel a little bit how I feel
when I hear people refer to cast albums as soundtracks. Oouch,
that hurts. It's like a night It's painful, but you know,
What drives Barbara even more crazy is when people mispronounced
her last name. It was a z sound instead of
an asset, right. And perhaps you've heard the story that
(33:33):
when Apple launched Siri, Sirie was pronouncing her name Barbara
streisand Barbara picked up the phone and called Tim Cook
to ask him to fix the pronunciation of her name
by Sirie. And I'm sure they did it right away,
no doubt. When I see that extra a, I mean
to me, it's tantamount to a hate crime. Mmh. You
(34:09):
even made me feel sort of beautiful, you know, for
for a very long time, beautiful. The musical Funny Girl
ends with Fanny Bryce saying goodbye to her gambler ne'er
do well husband, Nicky Arnstein for the very last time.
But that's not where Fanny's story ended. It's around this
(34:32):
time that Fanny did something that stray Sand famously did
not do. In she had what was announced as facial sculpture. Yes,
she had a nose job. She did. That's Fanny Bryce.
Biographer Barbara Grossman. Again, as much as we talked about
she knew who she was, and she knew what she wanted,
(34:55):
and she'd never thought of herself as pretty. She didn't
fit the established beautiful type, and so she saw having
a smaller nose is not just making her pretty, but
allowing her to do the kind of dramatic work that
she thought she would be better suited for if she
looked different. A different, less ethnic look, her thinking went,
(35:20):
might also help her appeal to a wider range of
audiences around the country. Writer Dorothy Parker acidly equipped that
Fanny quote cut off her nose to spite her race.
Now I have to confess I didn't even realize people
got nose jobs back then. But plastic surgery had advanced
during World War One as the doctor's developed new methods
(35:43):
to reconstruct the faces of disfigured soldiers. In the years
after the war, those methods would be used for cosmetic surgery,
or what some called facial renovation. When you look at
pictures of Fanny post nose job, the change doesn't look
that dramatic. Still, the procedure made national news, mostly because
(36:07):
Fanny never publicity shy, let reporters see her swathed in
bandages after the surgery. Fanny referred to her nose job
as a return to normalcy, a play on Warren Harding's
presidential campaign slogan. In an interview, Fanny acknowledged it might
take a couple of seasons for the public to get
(36:28):
used to my new nose. But I'm ambitious. Like every actress,
I know I can act, and I want to show
the public what I can do with a new nose
in front of her. Fanny was ready for Hollywood, which
was just entering the sound era with the success of
Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. Wait a minute, Wait a
minute Yet, movie studios were on the hunt for entertainers
(36:52):
who could talk and sing, and so Warner Brothers signed Fanny.
Her first film, My Man, featured her singing the now
famous title tune, plus some new songs. She was even
(37:21):
marketed as the female Joelson, But audiences didn't respond to
Fanny in the same way My Man was a flop.
Did some parts of the country just find her too Jewish? Well?
Variety seemed to think so, writing bluntly and disturbingly in
its review of the film, quote, certain localities are apt
(37:43):
to chill on the stars distinct Hebrew clowning. Now some
of you may be thinking, wait a minute. The Jazz
Singer is the story of a canter son who abandons
the synagogue for show business, only to return in a
climactic scene to chant yam ki poor prayer while his
father is on his deathbed. That was pretty Jewish and
(38:15):
audiences loved it. But that movie may have been more
of an exception to the rule, not to mention it
was ultimately a story of assimilation. Fanny's movie career was
coinciding with what would end up being a disappearance of
sorts of Jews in the stories being told by the
entertainment industry. The nativism and anti immigrant sentiment of the
(38:38):
nineteen twenties and thirties was leading to a desemitizing of
mainstream culture. Studio bosses, many of them Jewish themselves, seemed
to believe that movies playing to the whole country needed
to downplay Jewish faces, accents, and themes. Characters and plots
featuring Jewish people were minimized or ate it entirely. Many
(39:03):
Jewish film actors would leave the business or try to
assimilate as best they could. For example, a decade or
so after Fanny, actress Lauren Bicall born Betty Joan Persky
would be marketed by studio publicists as being from society. Interestingly,
Bicall would play Barbara Streisand's mother in the film The
(39:27):
Mirror Has Two Faces. Mother, I made dinner, Why don't
you put the coffee on? I raised two daughters, I
buried a husband. I've made my coffee. Another issue might
have been Fanny's over the top stage persona. Look, I
love Broadway, but sometimes the energy is just too much
for the big screen. There's a reason why ethel Merman
barely had a movie career. Will you just shut up
(39:50):
and let me talk? Whatever it was, it wasn't working.
Fanny would go on to make just six movies, but
her star would rise again in a print medium. It
was the nineteen thirties radio's golden age, and Fanny had
the perfect character. Yes, Dying Fanny with handle s is
(40:11):
Daddy Baby Snooks was a character Fanny developed for the
stage back in her early performance days, and this is important.
The character didn't rely on a Yiddish accent. You can't
really do Yiddish accent a comedy on the radio because
it's so physical. It demands the gestures, the manners, and
the whole stick if you will, And with Hitler's Germany
(40:34):
posing an increasing threat and anti Semitism rampant on the
home front. Fanny likely reasoned that her Jewishness was not
something to emphasize, not if you were trying to appeal
to a national radio audience. The Baby Snooks show was
pretty standard sitcom fair episodes would revolve around Stooks causing
trouble or asking too many questions, and her ever exasperated
(40:58):
father having to deal with her in Calfornia? Where were
you born in Denver? Mommy? Mommy was born in New York? Dinner?
Her catchphrase became the question she would keep asking throughout
each episode, setting her father over the edge. Why did
(41:19):
I have to put on my new great daddy because
my boss is coming for dinner and listen to Snooks.
You're not to come into the dining room while we're
having dinner, not even if my boss asked you too. Why? Why?
I think in a way, Snooks was easy. It was
bread and butter for her. She didn't have to contort
her body doing acrobatic leaps, and you know, for somebody
(41:43):
who was getting older, it was probably less demanding than
some of her parts, and audiences enjoyed it. Banny and
Snooks were on the radio for over fourteen years. Future
I Love Lucy producer Jess Oppenheimer was a writer for
the Baby Snooks Show and would take some of the
Snooks traits with him when he went to write for
(42:04):
My Favorite Husband, the radio predecessor to I Love Lucy.
Oppenheimer wrote in his memoir that he decided to make
Balls radio character quote a little bit more childlike and
impulsive and short, more like Baby Snooks. Traces of Snooks
(42:27):
carried over to TV when Lucille Ball became Lucy Ricardo.
Sure I wanted him to forget my birthday, but he
forgot my birthday. But while Lucy transitioned to the exciting
new medium of television, Fanny and Baby Snooks would not
make that leap. She had been offered a Baby Snooks
(42:51):
show on television, and she said no because she was
self aware enough to realize that on radio, the audience,
because they didn't have to look at her, they could
just hear and her voice, she could sound like the
Baby Stocks. But on TV it's a cruel I it's
the camera. Fanny was getting tired, bored by the routine
(43:13):
of radio work. She wanted to enjoy life in the
California Sunshine, spend time with her grandkids, and enjoy her
hobbies like painting and interior decorating. She decorated the homes
of friends like Catherine Hepburn and Eddie Cantor. For years,
she was also on her own after another failed marriage.
(43:34):
Following her divorce from Nick Ornstein, she'd married showman Billy Rose.
By most accounts, the two were a mismatch and the
marriage was not a happy one. It also inspired a
sequel to Funny Girl called Funny Lady that We're not
going to talk about. The marriage ended after nine years.
(43:57):
In November newspaper interview, she shared her plans to retire
from show business the following year. You can tell that
the Fannie who had hustled and strived for so long
is gone. The beginning of a career is the most
exciting anyway. It's fun and wonderful. After you get there,
it's tough to stay there. That's when you have to fight,
(44:19):
she says. There's always people to take your place, and
they're always better. Six months later, in May, Fanny Bryce
died following a cerebral hemorrhage. Fanny's Rabbi Max Nossbaum, poignantly
noted Fanny Brice inherited from our tradition not only the
(44:41):
capability of moving people to laughter and two tears, but
also she inherited the heart that ennobled her calling don't
if you want. Thirteen years later, Barbara Streisand would make
(45:06):
Fanny Bryce a household name again when Funny Girl opened
on Broadway. I'm a bagel and a plateful of onion rolls.
If you ask most people today who Fanny Bryce is,
they probably don't know, or they might conflate her story
with Barbara Streisand's. But Fanny was a true comedy pioneer
for women and Jewish entertainers, paving the way for Streisand
(45:31):
and so many others the whole body else. Wouldn't it
be great if one day somebody made a movie about
Fanny Bryce. I certainly hope you enjoyed this mobituary. May
(46:07):
I ask you to please rate and review our podcast.
You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and
you can follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Here all
new episodes of mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts,
and check out Mobituaries Great Lives Worth Reliving the New
York Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook.
(46:30):
It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Zoe Marcus. Our team
of producers also includes Aaron Shrank, Wilcome, Martina Scacero, Ja Curnis,
and me Morocca. It was edited by Moral Walls and
(46:51):
engineered by Josh Hahn, with fact checking by Naomi Barr.
Our production company is Neon Hum Media. Our archival produce
sir is Jamie Benson. Our theme music is written by
Daniel Hart. Indispensable support from Craig Swaggler, Dustin Gervais, Alan Pang,
Reggie Basio and everyone at CBS News Radio. Special thanks
(47:13):
to Jonathan Greenberg and Alberto Robina the Indisputable. Aaron Shrink
is our senior producer. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Steve
Raises and Morocca. The series is created by Yours Truly
and as always undying gratitude to Rand Morrison and John
carp for helping breathe life into Mobituaries.
Host
Mo Rocca
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