Jessica Dragonette

Jessica Valentina Dragonetti was born on February 14, 1900, in Calcutta, India, where her father, Luigi Dragonetti, had been posted as an engineer. Her mother was Maria Vittoria Rachele Beronio, and both parents were devoutly Catholic and of Italian origin. She joined three older siblings — Nicholas, Fred, and Nadea — before the family was struck by tragedy: by Christmas 1909, Dragonette had been orphaned and was subsequently raised in a Catholic convent school. She completed her secondary education at Catholic Girls' High School in Philadelphia in 1919 and went on to earn a degree from Mt. St. Mary's College in 1923. During her college years she studied voice with Estelle Liebling in New York City, who redirected her away from concert performance and toward radio work. The poet Ree Dragonette was her cousin.

Dragonette made her musical debut at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. In 1924, she contributed an off-screen angel's voice to Max Reinhardt's production of The Miracle, and that same summer she performed with Andra Sherri's Revue at the Lyric Theater in Indianapolis. Her radio career began as early as December 4, 1924, when she sang on WGBS in New York City. She appeared on Broadway between 1925 and 1926, with credits including the 1925 revue Earl Carroll's Vanities and the Grand Street Follies. In the latter production, she and contralto Celia Branz were billed as the Junior Prima Donnas. Also in 1925, she and Branz performed on WLIT radio in Philadelphia and headlined the stage show accompanying a film at the Stanley Theater in that city.

Her radio career expanded steadily through the mid-1920s. She joined the cast of Roxy and His Gang when the program resumed weekly broadcasts on October 30, 1925, over WEAF in New York City and WEEI in Boston. Beginning in 1926, she performed on WEAF in the Musical Comedy Hour, and in 1927 she began appearing on The Coca-Cola Hour as "Vivian, 'The Coca-Cola Girl,'" marking Coca-Cola's first venture into radio advertising. That same year she became the star of The Philco Hour on NBC. In 1930 she joined the Cities Service Concerts program, which became a central vehicle for her radio work over the following years. A national poll conducted by Radio Guide magazine in September 1935 named her the most popular radio performer of the year, and in 1936 the publication awarded her its Radio Guide Medal of Merit. When the Palmolive Beauty Box Theater moved from NBC to CBS in 1936, Dragonette became the host of the program and performed in select episodes. She joined the cast of Saturday Night Serenade on CBS radio in 1941. Over the course of her 22-year radio career, she became closely associated with operettas and semi-classical music, earning the nickname "Princess of Song" from the press. Her popularity drew large crowds to personal appearances, including 15,000 in a Minneapolis auditorium and 150,000 in Chicago's Grant Park.

Dragonette also worked in film and animation. She sang in a segment of The Big Broadcast of 1936 but exercised contractual authority over the final cut of her performance and ultimately chose to have her segment removed. In 1934 she voiced Persephone in the Silly Symphony animated short The Goddess of Spring, and in 1939 she provided the voice of Princess Glory in the full-color animated feature Gulliver's Travels.

During World War II, Dragonette performed for charities benefiting the U.S. armed services and sold a record number of war bonds, efforts that earned her an honorary commission as a colonel. She was voted best female singer in the country in both 1942 and 1943. Pope Pius XII awarded her the Pro Pontifice et Ecclesia Cross. Swiss-American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury, who became a close friend, painted her portrait in 1940 — a work that now hangs at her alma mater, known today as Georgian Court University. Müller-Ury painted her portrait on multiple occasions, including a 1946 work depicting her in a gold fez, and also painted a portrait of her sister Nadea in 1942. A mural titled The World of Radio, 1934, completed by Arthur Gordon Smith and commissioned by Nadea Dragonette Loftus, features Dragonette at the center of its depiction of radio's progress. Measuring more than eight feet high and sixteen feet wide, the work shows her atop a globe in a cityscape and is now held by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

On June 28, 1947, Dragonette married Nicholas Meredith Turner at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in a ceremony performed by Cardinal Francis Spellman. The marriage was her only one, produced no children, and lasted until her death. In the mid-1950s, pinball manufacturer Gottlieb hired her to appear at coin-operated game machine events promoting a game called Dragonette, a title that was a spoof of the television program Dragnet and had no connection to her. Her autobiography, Faith Is a Song, written with the assistance of ghostwriter Arthur J. Burks, was published in 1951 by David McKay Company. Jessica Dragonette died of a heart attack at New York Hospital on March 18, 1980.