Helen Kane (born Helen Clare Schroeder) 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.
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 theatre 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.
Kane’s career break came in 1927, when she appeared in a musical called A Night in Spain. It ran from May 3 through November 12, 1927, for a total of 174 performances, at the 44th Street Theatre in New York City. Subsequently, Paul Ash, a band conductor, put Kane’s name forward for a performance at New York’s Paramount Theatre. Kane’s first performance at the Paramount Theater in Times Square proved to be her career’s launching point. She was singing “That’s My Weakness Now”, when she interpolated the scat lyrics “boop-oop-a-doop”. This resonated with the flapper culture, and four days later, Helen Kane’s name went up in lights. In Oscar Hammerstein’s 1928 show Good Boy, she first introduced the hit “I Wanna Be Loved by You”. Then it was back to the Palace, as a headliner for $5,000 a week. Kane blended several fashionable styles of the late 1920s. These included scat singing, a kind of vocal improvisation, and also blending singing and speech. Sprechgesang (“speech-song”) was fashionable at this time in Germany’s Weimar Republic in both nightclubs and in serious music. Kane recorded 22 songs between 1928 and 1930. After 1930 and up to 1951, she recorded four sides for Columbia Records.
In early 1929, Paramount Pictures signed Kane to make a series of musicals at a salary of as much as $8,000 a week. Although Kane was not the “star” of most of her pictures (with Dangerous Nan McGrew being the one exception), she was so popular that in the case of Sweetie, her name appeared over the title on the marquee when the movie premiered at the New York Paramount (although Nancy Carroll was the true star). Kane provided all the fun, and Jack Oakie and she danced to “The Prep Step”, a big hit along with “He’s So Unusual”. They even performed this dance at the first Hollywood Bowl fundraiser on August 7, 1929. Another hit from this picture was Nancy Carroll’s “My Sweeter Than Sweet”. In the opening credits of Pointed Heels, Kane and William Powell are billed on the same line just below the title, with Fay Wray and the rest in smaller letters underneath. She had equal billing with Buddy Rogers in Heads Up!, and their faces appeared in all the ads. In Dangerous Nan McGrew, Kane received top billing in the film’s credits.
With the hardships of the Great Depression biting, the flamboyant world of the flapper was over, and Kane’s style began to date rapidly. After 1931, she lost the favour of the movie makers, who chose other singers for their films. She appeared in a stage production called Shady Lady in 1933, sang weekly on the radio, and made appearances at various nightclubs and theatres during the 1930s.In 1950, she dubbed Debbie Reynolds, who performed “I Wanna Be Loved by You” in the MGM musical biopic of songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, Three Little Words. She did not appear in the film’s credits, but was credited on the soundtrack album and 78 rpm records. Kane appeared on the CBS television program, I’ve Got a Secret, on the July 21, 1954, episode. Her secret was, “I was the boop-boop-a-doop girl”.
