Helen Kane

Helen Kane (born Helen Clare Schroeder, August 4, 1904 – September 26, 1966) was an American singer and actress. Her signature song was "I Wanna Be Loved by You" (1928), featured in the 1928 stage musical Good Boy. The song was written for Good Boy by the songwriting team Kalmar and Ruby. Kane's voice and appearance were thought to be a source for Fleischer Studios animators when creating Betty Boop. Kane sued the studio for stealing her signature "boop-oop-a-doop" style, but the judge decided that the proof of this was insufficient, and dismissed the case.

Early life

Kane attended St. Anselm's Parochial School in The Bronx, New York City. She was the youngest of three children. Her father, Louis Schroeder, a German immigrant, was employed intermittently as a wagon driver; her Irish-immigrant mother, Ellen (born Dixon) Schroeder, worked in a laundry.

Kane's mother reluctantly paid $3 (approximately a day's pay) for her daughter's costume as a queen in Kane's first theatrical role at school. By the time she was 15 years old, Kane was onstage professionally, touring the Orpheum Circuit with the Marx Brothers in On the Balcony.

She spent the early 1920s trouping in vaudeville as a singer and kickline dancer with a theater engagement called the "All Jazz Revue". She played the New York Palace for the first time in 1921. Her Broadway days started there, as well with the Stars of the Future (1922–24, and a brief revival in early 1927). She also sang onstage with an early singing trio, the Hamilton Sisters and Fordyce, later known as The Three X Sisters.

Kane's roommate in the early 1920s was Jessie Fordyce. The singing trio act might have become the Hamilton Sisters and Schroeder, but Pearl Hamilton chose Fordyce to tour as a trio act "just to see what happens" at the end of the theatrical season.