Word: brice
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...Freedman was writing radio scripts for Fanny, and she kept trying to talk him into doing a "Babykins." Finally sold, he wrote the first Baby Snooks script so named. In other words, Snooks is strictly a Fanny Brice creation, says she, and the Library of Congress can go climb a tree...
...Fanny Brice disagrees. Her version: In 1915 a songwriter named Blanche Merrill did a vaudeville sketch for Fanny called "Poor Little Moving-Picture Baby," a burlesque on one of the child stars of the period. Fanny kept this character in mind for 15 years. About 1930 she suggested it to Moss Hart, who wrote a skit for Sweet & Low about an infant known simply as "Babykins." This was, in effect, the first Snooks script. Billy Rose may well have helped Hart, says Fanny...
...Bantam Barnum." Billy Rose's skyrocket career as a showman began with a miserable fizzle called Corned Beef & Roses. Desperately, he rewrote it, renamed it Sweet & Low. Though it had Fanny Brice in some of the original Baby Snooks routines (which Billy wrote), it thudded again. Billy rewrote the show a second time, renamed it Crazy Quilt, and took it on the road. Billed as "A Saturnalia of Wanton Rhythm Featuring Exotic Divertissements," Crazy Quilt played to packed houses at almost every stop. In nine months, Rose recouped his $75,000 outlay and made $240,000 clear profit...
Eleanor (with the help of four servants) keeps Billy's homes as antiseptically clean as a swimming pool. He calls her "the Sapolio Kid" and "one of the two greatest gals of the century" (the other: Fanny Brice). Eleanor doesn't think much of Billy's paintings, but he takes them as seriously as he has taken all his other equalizers...
...time Jumbo finally opened, after six months of rehearsals, it had cost Whitney a lot more. Though it was a hit, it never paid for itself. But it did put Billy Rose on the map as a showman. It put him, specifically, in Fort Worth, Tex., which hired "Mr. Brice" at $1,000 a day to stage its 1936 Frontier Centennial...