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.

Fanny’s “gift,” her talent for “being herself,” becomes apparent in the film when Keeney finally relents and allows her to perform with the chorus in a roller-skating number (“I’d Rather Be Blue”). Woefully incapable of roller skating, Fanny utterly destroys the integrity of the number, but sends the audience into hysterics. She comes out on top in the end, as the stage manager pushes her on to the stage to sing “I’d Rather Be Blue,” still on roller skates. Alone on the stage, she comes alive, demonstrating the star talent she had promised them. Florenz Ziegfeld decides to hire her for his famous Follies and gives her a song, “His Love Makes Me Beautiful,” which Fanny is supposed to sing, dressed as a beautiful bride, against a backdrop of stunning women, all taller, more elegant, and less ethnic-looking than herself. Fanny protests that this will never work, that the audience will laugh at her. He insists that she do it anyway. She agrees, but at the last moment, stuffs a pillow under her dress, pretending she is pregnant and turning the number into a hugely successful comic turn.