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The Face That Launched a Thousand Quips
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20680 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1992 |
2,706 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shaprio
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
FANNY BRICE: THE ORIGINAL FUNNY GIRL
Herbert G. Goldman
New York, Oxford University Press, 1992
308 pp., $24.95
In the movie Funny Girl, the story of the entertainer Fanny Brice, Barbara Streisand asked whether "a nose with a deviation is a crime against the nation?" Certainly it was not, at least in Brice's case. Prior to the era of television, Brie was one of America's most popular entertainers, ranking up there with Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen, and Jack Benny. She was successful both on Broadway and radio, although not in movies. Between 1910 and 1936 she was the hit of the Ziegfeld Follies and other Broadways shows. From 1937 to 1951 she starred as "Baby Snooks" on the radio, earning the then magnificent sum of five thousand dollars a week for only three days of work. Streisand herself became a megastar as a result of playing Brice in Funny Girl.
Brice's life is one of the notable success stories in American history and a treatment to the opportunities America offered to those with no status and little money prior to the age of affirmative action and quotas. Born in 1891 in New York, she was raised on the mean streets of New York and Newark, New Jersey, and educated in the college of hard knocks. Brice's parents were lower-middle-class immigrant Jews who owned candy stores and saloons. Brice's enormous ego, ambition, independence, and chutzpah enabled her to overcome her modest beginnings and become the first celebrated "torch singer" and arguably America's greatest comedienne.
Brice's success did not come easy. For her, show business was precisely that, a business, and it required hard work. She was passionate about the opportunities it provided, and not about show business itself. Brice constantly quarreled with producer about money, recognizing the fickle nature of the entertainment world. From 1920s until her death, she was one of the highest-paid women in show business. Money was important to Brice since it would provide for her children and grandchildren the type of life that she had been denied. "I've been rich and I've been poor," she once said. "Rich is better."
Brice began singing in amateur vaudeville competitions in Brooklyn when vaudeville houses of Manhattan while still in her teens. Her break came in 1909, when she brought the house down at a special Friars' benefit show as she sand Irving Berlin's "Sadie Salome, Go Home," the story of a
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