Betty Rhodes

Betty Jane Rhodes (April 21, 1921 – December 27, 2011) was an American actress, singer, and radio performer born in Rockford, Illinois. She began her broadcasting career at the age of eight and went on to work across radio, film, nightclub performance, and eventually Broadway.

Rhodes started performing on children's radio programs in Berkeley, California, and by age twelve was appearing on The Laff Clinic on KHJ in Los Angeles, where she participated in both the musical and comedy segments of the show. She also performed on variety programs on KHJ before joining the staff of KFWB in Los Angeles in 1934, where she was top-billed on the station's Jubilee music and comedy program by August of that year. At fourteen, she sang at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles. In the summer of 1936, she appeared on a program featuring Johnny Green and his orchestra.

Her film career began before she appeared on screen, when she worked at RKO Pictures as a ghost singer, earning $200 per week providing vocals for actresses who lip-synced on camera. Paramount Pictures signed her to her first acting contract at age fifteen, and she made her screen debut in the 1936 film Forgotten Faces, credited as Jane Rhodes. In that film she played an adopted daughter whose father, portrayed by Herbert Marshall, is arrested for killing a man involved in an affair with his wife. Also in 1936, she co-starred in the western The Arizona Raiders, playing the younger sister of Marsha Hunt's character, which marked the first time Rhodes sang on film. By September 1936, Universal Pictures had signed her to a six-year contract at $1,000 per week, with plans for her to take the lead female role in a Jungle Jim serial.

Rhodes became widely recognized by wartime audiences for introducing the song "I Don't Want To Walk Without You" in the 1942 film Sweater Girl. In 2012, Tom Vallance of The Independent described her as having secured her place in the history of popular song through that performance. Her recording work included the 1946 track "You'll Always Be The One I Love," accompanied by Charles Dant's orchestra, which Cashbox designated its "Sleeper of the Week" in its December 16, 1946 issue.

On radio, Rhodes served as the regular singer on Meet Me at Parky's, a series starring Harry Einstein as his character Parkyakarkas, in which she portrayed Betty, the singer at Parky's restaurant. Her first nationwide broadcast came in the summer of 1940 when she sang on the Fred Allen Show during its three-week Hollywood engagement. During the 1950s she hosted her own weekly Saturday night program on NBC, and her television work during that period earned her the nickname "The First Lady of Television." She continued performing in cabaret into the 1960s.

Rhodes appeared on Broadway between 1960 and 1961, with credits in two musicals: Beg, Borrow or Steal and Gypsy. Outside of her professional life, she pursued an interest in archaeology and in 1937 took a course at the University of Southern California focused on the pottery and beads of early southwestern Americans. In 1945, she married Willet Brown, co-founder of the Mutual Broadcasting System; the couple had one child together and Brown brought three children from a previous marriage into the family. Brown died in 1993. Rhodes died on December 27, 2011, at the age of ninety.