Fanny Brice: Death of the Original Funny Girl

out two story ships passing in the night? What'd she do? Snooks? I've been your books away? Twenty five years earlier, a very different duet, It was Garland who was on the rise and singing with an established star. Still a year away from her trip down the Yellow Brick Road. Teenage Judy was starting to make a name for herself, appearing

in a movie musical called Everybody Sing. In this number, she argues in song with a little girl played by a fortysomething woman named Fanny Bryce, why because because where you are, Let's play cops and Clothes. At the time, Fanny Bryce was one of the biggest stars in the country. Lady and Gentlemen present Miss Fannie Bryce. Fanny Bryce Bryce had conquered Broadway, headlined movies You're gonna Hear what I've got to say, and created one of the most popular

characters on radio. Fanny Bryce was also a history maker in original one of the first great female comedy stars. She was so famous that one day an entire musical called Funny Girl would be written about her life, a musical that would star Barbara Streisand. But while Funny Girl would help turn Streisand into a supernova, the real Fannie Bryce would fade from memory. It made people remember her longer than I'm sure they would have had there not

been a musical. But the life as she lived it is not the life story that we get in Funny Girl from CBS Sunday Morning and I Heart I'm Morocca and this is mobituaries. This moment Fanny Bryce, death of the original Funny Girl. Don't tell me not to live just sitting pudder Life's candy in the suns of Balla Budda, don't bring around a clout to rate on my parade.

That's Barbara streisand knocking them dead. As Fanny Bryce in Broadways, Funny Girl in Fast forward fifty eight years to April, Hello Gorgeous and the show's first ever Broadway revival, starring Beanie Feldstein. Alas, the reviews for this production were less than stellar, the show was hobbling along until michell Is getting rave reviews. Lee star Leah Michelle was brought into play Fanny, and the revival itself was revived. It's ready for me because I said, I saw Leah and the

show and she was terrific. But make no mistake, the lead role in Funny Girl is indelibly connected to Really owned by Barbara streisand people, people need people, Ah the Peple. After all, she won an oscar when she starred in the movie version, just to few years after her Broadway run. Now, to be clear, this is not a mobituary for streisand I mean, she's kind of immortal. We'll talk more about her in Act two, but this episode is about the woman she came to eclipse Fanny Bryce. Funny Girl, in

many ways is a sanitized life story. The story that the family wanted to tell in Bryce's career was much more a fever chart, up and down and up and down and up and down. Barbara Grossman is a theater professor at Tufts University and wrote an in depth biography on Bryce entitled Funny Woman. She didn't simply will herself to be the greatest star and everyone accepted it and

that was it. Well, she willed herself to do it, but it took her a while to find her footing and to figure out actually who she was as an entertainer, and to accept her great comic gifts. Bryce was born Fannie a Borak to a Jewish immigrant family in As a small child, she lived in Newark, New Jersey, where her mother Rose ran a saloon and her father, known as Pinuckle Charlie, drank and played cards and did pretty much nothing else. After her parents split up, Fanny moved

with her mother to Brooklyn, where her career began. She was not yet fifteen when she stepped on stage to perform at a vaudeville house called Kenney's. It was amateur night, and she later wrote that when the audience saw a quote gawky, nondescript girl in a rumpled linen dress and cheap sailor hat, they started booing and shrieking. This was the kind of place where they gave performers the hook

literally a big iron one. If the audience didn't like them, then Fanny began singing a sentimental ballad of the time, and as the performance went on, the crowd fell silent. There was just something about that teenage girl singing so seriously. Banny's brother Lou would later give this rather delightful description. The theater quieted down like somebody had hung a smallpox sign over the door. When the crowd started throwing money

at Fanny, she knew she was a hit. She even got a few laughs while pausing her dramatic song to pick up her money. Soon after that night at Keeney's, she quit school to pursue a life in show business. When she auditioned for one show in nine she was asked if she had a specialty number. After confidently saying she did, she didn't, she went running to a young man named Irving Berlin. Now you might know Berlin as the writer of White Christmas Easter Parade, God Bless America,

But this was before all that. At that point, he is writing Italian dialect songs, Irish dialect songs, and he said, Fanny, with your face, you should do a Yiddish dialect song, all right, let's talk about her face. Well. She had brown, curly hair, green eyes, a wide mouth, and a prominent nose. More on that later, Fanny would describe hers as a quote Jewish face. She was also tall for the time, standing five ft six and painfully thin, as she put it,

with legs that looked like two slats. These features made her stand out and would become tools for her comedy. She knew she was a site gang, and she played up that aspect of her physicality. That she knew she couldn't be the prettiest goal on the stage. She was going to be the funniest. The dialect songs that Irving Berlin and others were writing were tied to a boom in ethnic comedy fueled by the huge numbers of immigrants coming to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While some of this material might seem offensive today, immigrant communities of the time ate it up. One of those communities, comprised of Eastern and Central European Jews, was a Yiddish speaking There were Yiddish newspapers and a thriving Yiddish theater scene, which isn't surprising. Nia means rosadas, bubbs. The Yiddish language, a combination of German and Hebrew with a few other

linguistic ingredients thrown in. Has a kind of musicality, with words that are kind of fun to say, like schlamil, schlamozel, bobby and book kiss. Why did people consider the Yiddish accent funny? Well, if you don't know Yiddish, it kind of sounds funny. And if you combine it with gestures and manners, I mean, it's like anything you can exaggerate it. And when you combine it with her zany flair for

physical comedy, it was just an irresistible combination. Fanny took Irving Berlin's advice and created her own comedic Yiddish accented persona. How are you to say? How marry you win? You might be a month. But here's the thing, Fanny didn't actually know Yiddish. Most people would think, oh, Fanny Bryce, she probably grew up speaking Yiddish. Well, she liked people to think that, but she didn't. But she could put on the accent just like a mask and take it off.

By this time, Fanny was performing in burlesque houses. Burlesque was I suppose the lowest rung on the show business ladder. If you're talking about American popular and pertainment. When we tend to think of burlesque, we think of stripped tease. But burlesque wasn't just stripped tease. It included singers, dancers, and comedy acts. For somebody like Bryce who was really trying to break into show business, it was easier to get into you didn't have to be quite as pretty.

It's around this time she changed her name from Fannie A. Borak to Fanny Bryce, but she kept her comedic style, which would be epitomized by later hits like Secondhand Rose, about a poor Jewish girl from the Lower East Side. All that fighting. She was fast making a name for herself in burlesque, but her big came in when she was cast in the zig Feld Follies. The Follies started the greatest entertainers of the day in a live review

that was nothing short of spectacular. You had the zig Feld Girls, these statuesque women who created in and out with beautiful costumes. The show was also renowned for its comedians, the cowboy humorist Will Rogers, the curmudgeon le W C. Fields, whom my father always loved you like children I do if they're probably cooked. And the beloved Apostle of pep Eddie Canter, whose greatest hits I still listen to, How are you going to keep him down on the farm

after they've seen Harry? How are you going to keep them away from? I think it was Eddie Cander who said, when you make it into the Follies, it's like when you're a baseball player and you make it into the World Series. It's the top. It's the top of the show. Is this career? The screw winning movie The Great Zigfeld starred William Powell as impresario forlorenzig Felt and depicts his discovery of Fanny Bryce ms Brice. I am really here to offer you a great opportunity. That's what they all

say in the movie. Fanny plays herself. Everyone was singing fancyne screening at a wedding yesterday, Heed on his feetle late some rag time, and after accepting Zigfeld's offer, we see her make it to the big time. Look at you. You're working for Zigfelt now and you look like a million dallars the first time in your life. You clash. The Folly's made Fanny a major star. By nine six, the New York Tribune was calling her the funniest woman

on the stage today. Eventually she was pulling in three thousand dollars a week, making her one the highest paid women in show business, a yearly income, one newspaper would later note, said to be an excess of that of the President of the United States. But more than all that, she was an original, a great female clown, and a pioneer.

Many of her fans had probably never even met a Jewish person or a woman of any background who was so uninhibited by turns, goofy and body, unconcerned with society's notions of how a lady ought to behave. In contrast to the statuesque beauties parading across the Folly stage, Fanny

was the anti Ziegfeld girl. She would go on to satirize performers like modern dancer Martha Graham and theatrical grand Dame Ethel Barrymore, and she became the master of the parody number, turning the hit song the Chic of Araby into the chic of Avenue b Unfanni ahead. How did Jewish audiences feel about her performances? They loved her Fanny knew who she was representing and what she wanted that representation to mean, later saying, I never did a Jewish

song that would offend the race. In anything Jewish I ever did, I wasn't standing apart making fun of the race. I was the race. And like my own favorite performers, she had a natural warmth. You can hear it in her real voice in a p s A she did during the Great Depression, encouraging people to help the unemployed. What are you doing, Fanny didding a sweater? They unemployed? My relation, all my uncle, not one of them, are working one more stitching habby even all kidna side folks.

This is really a serious matter. As for her romantic life, well, if you've seen Funny Girl, you know the name Nick. What a beautiful, beautiful name. When she's twenty one, she meets Nick Arnstein. Who is he? That's a good question. I mean he was basically a gambler, a con man, a criminal. Was he Omar Shariff good looking? I don't know that anybody's in Omar Sharif category, but he was good looking. Egyptian actor Omar Shariff played Nick Arnstein in

the Funny girl movie. Look at pictures of the real Nick Arnstein, and I'm pretty sure you'll agree that casting Shariff was generous. Regardless, Bannie Bryce fell for the real Arnstein hard. She talks about kind of love at first sight. He ended up taking her up to his hotel room, where she saw his monogram bathro even his toothbrush she found elegant, and she just was really swept up by this man who appreciated of the finer things in life,

and I think she really did love him. Never mind that Arnstein was married when they met and didn't obtain a divorce until Fanny was seven months pregnant with their first child. That detail isn't in the musical. They ended up having a daughter and son. Arnstein was also pretty much constantly engaged in criminal activity, doing time at Sing Sing for wire tapping and leaven Worth for bank theft. The two were finally married in nineteen nineteen in between

prison terms. Fanny stood by Nick through most of these ups and downs, which led to one of her biggest career moments. When she was in the fallies of ninety one, it was actually Zigfeld who gave her a number that became really wonder her signature songs. The song was My Man, the English adaptation of a French song made famous by the great Shantouse Westing Gay. She said to down, the French version is a much rougher song. I mean, it's really about a prostitute who's singing about her pimp who

beats her and you know, abuses her. And the American version, of course, was sanitized. Call me love it, mamma. Fanny's performance of my Man was unlike anything else she'd ever done, raw and without a Yiddish accent. She wore a torn dress and leaned forlornly against a lamp post. No cookie hand gestures, just stripped down, just singing the song. And look, I'm sure she was singing from her own pain. At the time Fanny performed the number, Arnstein had been found

guilty of bond theft and would soon be sentenced. Front page news. Oh My Lanny's why My Man became Fanny's signature song, and for several more years, Fanny stood by her man until she couldn't. I do think that she would have stayed with him, probably forever, but he committed the cardinal sin. She learned of his infidelity, and she was done. She stood by him, she loved him, but when he was unfaithful to her, she was done. There was no coming back from No, there really wasn't. My

man was a breakthrough moment for Fanny. It gave her hope that audiences could see her as more than just a clown, and to that end, she was about to make a very big change. I want to how much what it costs, because these an't fixed stuff. I mean, by one of those pick surgeons. Well, I wouldn't want an old carpenter doing it. I have a confession to make. When I am thinking about Funny Girl, as I often do, I sometimes forget that it's not the Barbara Streisand story.

Does that make me crazy? No, You're absolutely on target. In fact, I think it actually is the Barbara Streisand story in many ways. In some ways, it's more the Barbara Streisand story than it is the Fannie Bryce story. This is my friend Eric Near. He's a contributing editor to the literary and arts journal The Hudson Review, and he knows more about musical theater than I could ever

hope to know. Will return to the story of the real life Fanny later in the episode, But first I wanted to talk with Eric about how with Funny Girl Barbara streisand came to eclipse the memory of Fanny Bryce. The depiction of Fanny ultimately ends up being a little closer to Strei's end than it does to the real Fanny Bryce. And was that intentional? Well, I don't think. Originally, Fannie Bryce had been dead for over a decade when a powerful Hollywood producer named Ray Stark set about telling

her story. Ray Stark happened to be married to Fanny's daughter. The idea was to create a show about the story of Fannie Bryce and the broad outlines of her life working for Ziegfeld and her marriage to Nick Arnstein, which was of course very troubled, And they went through a lot of sort of potential Fannies, you know. Carol Burnett was considered interesting, and Bancroft was attached for why she was really hot after just winning an oscar for the

Miracle Worker? Did she singing the Miracle Worker? Sullivan singing? Carol Burnett and Anne Bancroft were already big names, but Bunny Girl's composer, a man named Julie Stein, was writing the show's score with a lesser known talent. In mind three, what you study Rooster is Dustina. At the time, Barbara Streisand was just twenty and performing in downtown Manhattan clubs like The Village Vanguard and the Bonsar described back then

as Kookie. Streisand had stolen the show in her first Broadway role in two as the secretary Miss Marmelstein and I can get her or your wholesale Stane, you think at least missing I could die. Julie Stein saw her and said, Okay, here's a girl who can really sing, who is clearly Jewish and will be convincing playing Fanny Bryce, and who is also a comic and has a wonderful sense of humor a wonderful sense of stage comedy. It

was inevitable casting. There was really no one else at the time who would have been so perfect for the role. With a new, exciting and volcanically talented performer in the role, the show's focus started to shift, and so Funny Girl started to bend in a way to be really much more about Streisand and her talent than it did about Annie Bryce. Streisand's take on Fanny Bryce was entirely her own as she discussed in this backstage radio interview from the opening night of Funny Girl in four, did you

research the life of Fanny Boys at all? No, I didn't want to approach it is an invitation or anything like that. I mean, they hired me because whatever organic things we had similar, you know, they'll work for themselves. I understand that you purposely kept yourself away from looking at movies of hers, hearing programs of hers, and so forth. I mean, I'm approaching it as a character in a play who could have been any woman who was torn between a career marriage and has problems of her own.

As for what the two women had in common, well, Streisand, like Bryce, wasn't Broadway or certainly Hollywood's definition of beautiful. Early on, critics had no compunction writing about her nose, speculating on whether she'd ever get it fixed. Variety even recommended a quote corrective schnaz Bob Eric says that kind of criticism may have only made Streisand more determined to make it, a determination that served her well in the

role of Fanny. What we see and Funny Girl is Fanny sort of using that insecurity about her looks and about not being taken seriously and channeling that into this kind of fierce ambition that is this sort of incredibly exciting mix of anger and insecurity that drives her on and streisand just really embodies that in an incredible way.

Let's listen to streisand as a young Fanny singing, I'm the greatest star in the movie version of Funny Girl, Because the greatest star I am by far in a case of art imitating life imitating arts, stay with me here, this number becomes as much a declaration by Barbara streisand herself as it does by the character she was playing. That's a fascinating song because it kind of starts a little bit as if she's trying to please. She's kind of doing a little sticky stuff and funny voices and

trying to ingratiate herself. Why they're going to hear of a silver flute? Belcher reached to a terrific when I exposed. And then something happens kind of midway through that song where she kind of steps away from that and just says, all right, hold on, listen up, I am the greatest star, and I don't have any qualms about saying that yes, who's the best year? Yeah, it's a gutsy kind of thing to say in the heroine's first big number in the show, because it could come off as you know,

a little egotistical and pushy and a little obnoxious. But when it's performed in the way it's performed, certainly by strikes out, as we see in the film, there's no other response but yes, you're right, which brings us to a key difference between the two women they're singing voices. I don't want to be unfair to Fanny, she's not here to defend herself. But let's do a little compare

and contrast. Let's listen to Fanny singing my man man I oh now, let's listen to Barbara's ng my man so is just as fakay when it takes me and wrong. Even accounting for differences in audience tastes, there's really no comparison that's right. The way that Fanny sings it is full of heart and full of warmth and richness and character, but it is a style that sounds pretty dated to us now, and the way that Straison sings my man

has not dated at all. In fact, it's as powerful as it was when she recorded it, you know, over fifty years ago. And the secret to Straysand's power, says Eric, has more to do with her treatment of the words than music. She's really acting the song. It's as if she is making up the song as she goes along.

Strist And really brings together a lot of different kinds of vocalism and then puts this whole gloss of incredible sort of sensuality and eroticism over it, which may surprise people because we don't think of her as being sort of a sexy performer. But when you hear her sing, she is cressing every phrase with an incredibly sensual approachest

of love, soundistan, wist of your love. Only just listen to Streisand on a personal favorite of mine, Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michelle Legrands, what are you doing the rest of your life? She is able to open her voice up at the top of the range in a way that lets it really blossom into this kind of soaring sounds. What God. And It's just so important I think for people to understand that it was knew what she was doing, like all great artists, was new because

she's such a fact of life. I think it's easy to take for granted that's absolutely true. And of course the sad fact is that she had this incredible success with Funny Girl and then never did a Broadway show again. Indeed, streisand would go on to conquer Hollywoo what but rather than replace Fanny Bryce, Eric believes Barbara's performance and Funny Girl is the reason we remember Fanny Bryce's name at all. Without Funny Girl, I think she'd be basically a forgotten

a performer at this time. Funny Girl has kept her name alive in ways that the surviving fragments that we have of video or audio footage have not. Really who can we compare Fanny Bryce to that might give people a sense of the kind of performer that she was. I think there's definitely a bit of Fanny Bryce and Bette Midler ther John. So some lastness, my face is Matt barg that's broke that sense of zane nous and the broadly funny faces that she makes, combined with a

warmth and good natured nous. Another heir to Bryce, the aforementioned Carol Burnett, who's long running and completely wonderful variety show, was big on parody. I love you that that that gown is gorgeous, thank you Stan Wind and I just couldn't resist it. No question that Carl Burnett was influenced by Fanny Brice. You see it in the facial expressions that she makes, the willingness to put on any kind of outrageous costume, the willingness to look incredibly silly and ridiculous,

all in the service of humor. To give her her props. Fanny did do that thing of being a big star comic who kind of in an act of performance jiu Jitsu, made you cry with a song like my Man. That's part of her appeal is that she's zany and cookie and will do anything of her laugh. But always at the core there's this sense of a true and real and kind and loving person behind everything that she does.

Final question. Barbara spells her first name b A R B R A. When you see younger gay men spell her name with three a's, how does it make you feel? It makes me feel a little bit how I feel when I hear people refer to cast albums as soundtracks. Oouch, that hurts. It's like a night It's painful, but you know, What drives Barbara even more crazy is when people mispronounced her last name. It was a z sound instead of

an asset, right. And perhaps you've heard the story that when Apple launched Siri, Sirie was pronouncing her name Barbara streisand Barbara picked up the phone and called Tim Cook to ask him to fix the pronunciation of her name by Sirie. And I'm sure they did it right away, no doubt. When I see that extra a, I mean to me, it's tantamount to a hate crime. Mmh. You even made me feel sort of beautiful, you know, for

for a very long time, beautiful. The musical Funny Girl ends with Fanny Bryce saying goodbye to her gambler ne'er do well husband, Nicky Arnstein for the very last time. But that's not where Fanny's story ended. It's around this time that Fanny did something that stray Sand famously did not do. In she had what was announced as facial sculpture. Yes, she had a nose job. She did. That's Fanny Bryce.

Biographer Barbara Grossman. Again, as much as we talked about she knew who she was, and she knew what she wanted, and she'd never thought of herself as pretty. She didn't fit the established beautiful type, and so she saw having a smaller nose is not just making her pretty, but allowing her to do the kind of dramatic work that she thought she would be better suited for if she looked different. A different, less ethnic look, her thinking went, might also help her appeal to a wider range of

audiences around the country. Writer Dorothy Parker acidly equipped that Fanny quote cut off her nose to spite her race. Now I have to confess I didn't even realize people got nose jobs back then. But plastic surgery had advanced during World War One as the doctor's developed new methods to reconstruct the faces of disfigured soldiers. In the years after the war, those methods would be used for cosmetic surgery,

or what some called facial renovation. When you look at pictures of Fanny post nose job, the change doesn't look that dramatic. Still, the procedure made national news, mostly because Fanny never publicity shy, let reporters see her swathed in bandages after the surgery. Fanny referred to her nose job as a return to normalcy, a play on Warren Harding's presidential campaign slogan. In an interview, Fanny acknowledged it might take a couple of seasons for the public to get

used to my new nose. But I'm ambitious. Like every actress, I know I can act, and I want to show the public what I can do with a new nose in front of her. Fanny was ready for Hollywood, which was just entering the sound era with the success of Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. Wait a minute, Wait a minute Yet, movie studios were on the hunt for entertainers who could talk and sing, and so Warner Brothers signed Fanny. Her first film, My Man, featured her singing the now

famous title tune, plus some new songs. She was even marketed as the female Joelson, But audiences didn't respond to Fanny in the same way My Man was a flop. Did some parts of the country just find her too Jewish? Well? Variety seemed to think so, writing bluntly and disturbingly in its review of the film, quote, certain localities are apt to chill on the stars distinct Hebrew clowning. Now some

of you may be thinking, wait a minute. The Jazz Singer is the story of a canter son who abandons the synagogue for show business, only to return in a climactic scene to chant yam ki poor prayer while his father is on his deathbed. That was pretty Jewish and audiences loved it. But that movie may have been more of an exception to the rule, not to mention it

was ultimately a story of assimilation. Fanny's movie career was coinciding with what would end up being a disappearance of sorts of Jews in the stories being told by the entertainment industry. The nativism and anti immigrant sentiment of the nineteen twenties and thirties was leading to a desemitizing of mainstream culture. Studio bosses, many of them Jewish themselves, seemed to believe that movies playing to the whole country needed

to downplay Jewish faces, accents, and themes. Characters and plots featuring Jewish people were minimized or ate it entirely. Many Jewish film actors would leave the business or try to assimilate as best they could. For example, a decade or so after Fanny, actress Lauren Bicall born Betty Joan Persky would be marketed by studio publicists as being from society. Interestingly, Bicall would play Barbara Streisand's mother in the film The Mirror Has Two Faces. Mother, I made dinner, Why don't

you put the coffee on? I raised two daughters, I buried a husband. I've made my coffee. Another issue might have been Fanny's over the top stage persona. Look, I love Broadway, but sometimes the energy is just too much for the big screen. There's a reason why ethel Merman barely had a movie career. Will you just shut up and let me talk? Whatever it was, it wasn't working. Fanny would go on to make just six movies, but

her star would rise again in a print medium. It was the nineteen thirties radio's golden age, and Fanny had the perfect character. Yes, Dying Fanny with handle s is Daddy Baby Snooks was a character Fanny developed for the stage back in her early performance days, and this is important. The character didn't rely on a Yiddish accent. You can't really do Yiddish accent a comedy on the radio because

it's so physical. It demands the gestures, the manners, and the whole stick if you will, And with Hitler's Germany posing an increasing threat and anti Semitism rampant on the home front. Fanny likely reasoned that her Jewishness was not something to emphasize, not if you were trying to appeal to a national radio audience. The Baby Snooks show was pretty standard sitcom fair episodes would revolve around Stooks causing trouble or asking too many questions, and her ever exasperated

father having to deal with her in Calfornia? Where were you born in Denver? Mommy? Mommy was born in New York? Dinner? Her catchphrase became the question she would keep asking throughout each episode, setting her father over the edge. Why did I have to put on my new great daddy because my boss is coming for dinner and listen to Snooks. You're not to come into the dining room while we're having dinner, not even if my boss asked you too. Why? Why? I think in a way, Snooks was easy. It was

bread and butter for her. She didn't have to contort her body doing acrobatic leaps, and you know, for somebody who was getting older, it was probably less demanding than some of her parts, and audiences enjoyed it. Banny and Snooks were on the radio for over fourteen years. Future I Love Lucy producer Jess Oppenheimer was a writer for the Baby Snooks Show and would take some of the Snooks traits with him when he went to write for My Favorite Husband, the radio predecessor to I Love Lucy.

Oppenheimer wrote in his memoir that he decided to make Balls radio character quote a little bit more childlike and impulsive and short, more like Baby Snooks. Traces of Snooks carried over to TV when Lucille Ball became Lucy Ricardo. Sure I wanted him to forget my birthday, but he forgot my birthday. But while Lucy transitioned to the exciting new medium of television, Fanny and Baby Snooks would not

make that leap. She had been offered a Baby Snooks show on television, and she said no because she was self aware enough to realize that on radio, the audience, because they didn't have to look at her, they could just hear and her voice, she could sound like the Baby Stocks. But on TV it's a cruel I it's the camera. Fanny was getting tired, bored by the routine of radio work. She wanted to enjoy life in the California Sunshine, spend time with her grandkids, and enjoy her

hobbies like painting and interior decorating. She decorated the homes of friends like Catherine Hepburn and Eddie Cantor. For years, she was also on her own after another failed marriage. Following her divorce from Nick Ornstein, she'd married showman Billy Rose. By most accounts, the two were a mismatch and the marriage was not a happy one. It also inspired a sequel to Funny Girl called Funny Lady that We're not going to talk about. The marriage ended after nine years.

In November newspaper interview, she shared her plans to retire from show business the following year. You can tell that the Fannie who had hustled and strived for so long is gone. The beginning of a career is the most exciting anyway. It's fun and wonderful. After you get there, it's tough to stay there. That's when you have to fight, she says. There's always people to take your place, and they're always better. Six months later, in May, Fanny Bryce

died following a cerebral hemorrhage. Fanny's Rabbi Max Nossbaum, poignantly noted Fanny Brice inherited from our tradition not only the capability of moving people to laughter and two tears, but also she inherited the heart that ennobled her calling don't if you want. Thirteen years later, Barbara Streisand would make Fanny Bryce a household name again when Funny Girl opened on Broadway. I'm a bagel and a plateful of onion rolls.

If you ask most people today who Fanny Bryce is, they probably don't know, or they might conflate her story with Barbara Streisand's. But Fanny was a true comedy pioneer for women and Jewish entertainers, paving the way for Streisand and so many others the whole body else. Wouldn't it be great if one day somebody made a movie about Fanny Bryce. I certainly hope you enjoyed this mobituary. May I ask you to please rate and review our podcast.

You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Here all new episodes of mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts, and check out Mobituaries Great Lives Worth Reliving the New York Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This

episode of Mobituaries was produced by Zoe Marcus. Our team of producers also includes Aaron Shrank, Wilcome, Martina Scacero, Ja Curnis, and me Morocca. It was edited by Moral Walls and engineered by Josh Hahn, with fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our production company is Neon Hum Media. Our archival produce sir is Jamie Benson. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Indispensable support from Craig Swaggler, Dustin Gervais, Alan Pang,

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