Fanny Brice - Baby Snooks
Fanny Brice
29th October 1891 - 29th May 1951
Fanny Brice nee Fania Borach was born on October 29, 1891, on the Lower East Side of New York. Her parents were immigrant saloon owners of Hungarian Jewish filiations and she was the third of the family's four children.
In 1908, after the 8th grade, she dropped out of school to work in a burlesque review as a chorus girl. In 1909, she debuted on Broadway in a musical comedy named The College Girls". In 1910, Fanny Brice made her debut in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies at the Jardin de Paris in New York, by singing the Lovey Joe. She starred in the Follies until the 1930s and became well known for her limber grace and beautiful voice.
Fanny fell in love and married con man, Nick Arnstein and their turbulent relationship was the material for her great success in 1921 with her song My Man, in the Ziegfield Follies. The audiences were in tears when Brice was singing But whatever my man is, I am his - forever. My Man became a big hit and it is considered by many as Fanny 's best song procuring her a posthumous Grammy Hall of Fame Award.
Already a star, Fanny became enormously successful portraying on radio the Baby Snooks character, a bratty toddler who was always getting in trouble. Baby Snooks was first heard on 29th February 1936, during the broadcasts of The Ziegfeld Follies Of The Air. Then, the Baby Snooks character became part of the Maxwell House Coffee Time previously known as Good News (of 1938) and finally, in 1944 Fanny Brice was given her own radio show, The Baby Snooks Show.
The show concentrated on Snooks by creating small illustrative sketches through which the humorous potential of the Snooks character could be utilized to the full. Snooks was very good in making minor accidents into major disasters and small parental divergences into a full-scale war. The show also portrayed the family father, Lancelot Daddy Higgins, Snooks’s mother, Mama Higgins, and Snooks’s little brother, Robespierre.
In 1945 Fanny was forced to miss several episodes due to illness and her disappearance was covered up through a story line involving a search for the missing Snooks involving leading stars of the time such as Robert Benchley, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Kay Kyser. The same year saw the first appearance of Leone Ledoux as Snooks's brother Robespierre, who until then had been an off-mike character.
On May 24th, 1951, Fanny Brice suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died five days later, age fifty-nine in Hollywood, California. The final broadcast was a memorial broadcast on May 29th, 1951 with the theme Rockabye Baby.
Happy listening my friends,
