Fanny Brice's Bratty 1939 Comeback

The Beloved Brat, by James Street, an article on Fannie Brice as published in Radio Guide, week ending Sept 22, 1939. (Many thanks to Pop Tart for scanning & sending!)

Along with photos of Fannie as Baby Snooks, there are photos of Fannie with her children, Frances & Bill, from her marriage to Nicky Arnstein -- including one of Fannie helping Frances "don 'sock and buskin'" for Frances' debut, at the age of 17, in Ziegfeld's "Follies" in 1936.


Sadly, this is just part one of The Beloved Brat, but the article ends on a rather whimsical note (links added for reader assistance):

The character [Baby Snooks] was created eighteen years ago, quite by accident. There was a song called "Poor Pauline" going the rounds. It was a take-off on the "Perils of Pauline," the old movie thriller. Fannie was at a friend's house one night and sang the song as a child might. It clicked, and Moss Hart and Dave Freedman wrote lines for Fannie and she used "Snooks" in the Follies. Today Miss Brice is "Baby Snooks," not the wife who sang "My Man." The giddy era has passed.

At the top of the heap, she married Billy Rose, but that one didn't take. Mr. Rose and Eleanor Holm are betrothed. Miss Holm is working for Mr. Rose at the New York Fair and recently she was late for a cue. Mr. Rose asked how come, and his sweetheart told him she had been laughing so much at a radio program that she forgot the time. The program was "Baby Snooks" singing "The Little Fishes."

And so the woman who made the world cry with "My Man" now plays a brat who amuses the woman who won one of Brice's men.