Belle Baker

Belle Baker, born Bella Becker on December 25, 1893, on New York's Lower East Side, was a Jewish American singer and actress who became one of the most prominent vaudeville and Broadway performers of the early twentieth century. She died on April 29, 1957, in Los Angeles. The third of eight children born to Hyman Becker and Sarah Rabinowitz, Baker came from a Russian Jewish family with roots in Akmene, Lithuania. Raised in extreme poverty, she was unable to attend school and began working in a factory at age six. Her mother suffered from chronic illness throughout Baker's childhood.

Baker began performing at the Cannon Street Music Hall on the Lower East Side at age eleven, where Yiddish Theatre manager Jacob Adler discovered her. Her vaudeville debut came at age fifteen in Scranton, Pennsylvania, under the management of Lew Leslie, who later became her first husband. By 1911 she was performing at Oscar Hammerstein I's Victoria Theatre, and by age seventeen she had become a headliner. Among her earliest notable songs was "Cohen Owes Me $97," and she was also the first to introduce "Eli, Eli" to American audiences. The song had originally been written by a songwriter known only as Schindler for Baker's role as a child in a play, and it was later covered by John McCormack, John Steel, and Dorothy Jardon. Baker also performed in the Ziegfeld Follies during this period.

Her Broadway career brought her to New York in 1926, when she took the lead role in the musical Betsy. In the production, Baker played the eldest daughter of a Jewish family named the Kitzels, whose mother, portrayed by Pauline Hoffman, refused to allow any of her children to marry until Betsy found a husband first. During the run of Betsy, Baker introduced Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," a song she reportedly obtained by calling Berlin directly when the production needed additional material. On opening night, the audience response was so strong that Baker performed the song for twenty-four encores. "Blue Skies" subsequently gained wider fame through Al Jolson's performance of it in The Jazz Singer. Later that same year, Baker introduced "My Yiddishe Momme" to American audiences, a song that later became closely associated with Sophie Tucker and was further popularized by The Barry Sisters. The song was eventually banned in Nazi Germany, and Jewish prisoners in concentration camps were known to sing it.

Baker's film career began with the 1929 talkie Song of Love, in which she starred and performed two songs written by her second husband, Maurice Abrahams: "I'm Walking with the Moonbeams (Talking to the Stars)" and "Take Everything But You." The film has been screened at film festivals but has not been released on DVD. She made two additional film appearances, in Charing Cross Road in 1935 and Atlantic City in 1944, in which she performed "Nobody's Sweetheart."

An early adopter of radio, Baker hosted her own radio program in the early 1930s and in 1932 became a regular on Jack Denny's CBS program. She also appeared as a guest performer on The Eveready Hour, broadcasting's first major variety show, which featured leading Broadway headliners. After the death of her second husband, Abrahams, in 1931, Baker largely confined her performing to radio work throughout the remainder of the decade.

Baker married three times. Her first marriage, to Lew Leslie in 1913, ended in divorce in 1918. In 1919 she married Maurice Abrahams, a Russian-American songwriter and composer known for songs including "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" and "He'd Have to Get Under — Get Out and Get Under (to Fix Up His Automobile)." The couple had one child, Herbert Joseph Abrahams, who later worked as a screenwriter under the name Herbert Baker. Following Abrahams' death, Baker married Elias Sugarman, editor of the theatrical trade publication Billboard, on September 21, 1937; that marriage ended in divorce in 1941. Her final television appearance came in 1955 on This Is Your Life.

Baker was an outspoken Zionist, stating in 1924 her belief that the Jewish people deserved a homeland of their own. In 1935 she hosted a benefit performance in England to raise funds for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution through the United Jewish Appeal, and she later performed at the opening of a Congregation Sons of Israel on Irving Place alongside Rabbi Irving Miller, president of the American Jewish Committee. At the height of her popularity in the 1920s, a poll of more than three million people ranked her and Sophie Tucker as tied for the most popular vaudeville stars in the country. Several of Baker's relatives also entered show business, including her brother Irving Becker, who married stage actress Vinnie Phillips and served as a road manager for a production of Tobacco Road, and her niece, Broadway actress Marilyn Cooper.