Ziegfeld Florenz Quotes

She won an amateur night at Keeney’s Theater in Brooklyn, singing When You Know You’re Not Forgotten by the Girl You Can’t Forget. Her prize was $10, and she gathered $23 in coins from the floor of the stage. She worked for George M. Cohan but was fired when Cohan learned that she couldn’t dance. After singing with a road show, she appeared in New York musical revues. A struggling young songwriter, Irving Berlin, gave her a musical piece called Sadie Salome and suggested she sing it in Yiddish dialect at the Columbia Burlesque House, where she was working. In the audience that night was Florenz Ziegfeld, whose Follies were at the pinnacle of Broadway entertainment.

It was on Sullivan’s 1932 series that listeners first heard the voices of Jack Benny, Jack Pearl, Irving Berlin, Florenz Ziegfeld, and George M. Cohan. Sullivan’s radio fame was enhanced by his newspaper column, “Little Old New York,” in the New York Daily News. His Toast of the Town (CBS, June 20, 1948–June 6, 1971) was the biggest variety hour of early television.