Alice Faye: A Life Beyond the Silver Screen

Chapter 1: Broadway Baby

The showers that had fallen off and on throughout the day were the only reliable harbinger of spring in the sea of tenements on the Manhattan West Side neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. Here the unmistakable odors of the neighborhood’s slaughterhouses and factories obliterated the fresh scent of the rain, mingling instead with smoke from the trains that delivered the livestock and the sweat of too many bodies living and working together. Noise in this district began early in the day and continued long into the night: the creaking of pushcarts, the stumbling hoofbeats of half-dead horses, the muted voices of domestic peace, and the shriller outbursts of household violence. Even close to midnight, the newborn girl’s first cries barely disturbed what passed for peace in that quarter of the city. Alice Jeane Leppert was born on Wednesday, May 5, 1915, the third child and only daughter of a New York City cop, Charley Leppert, and his wife, Alice. The future queen of movie musicals entered the world in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City, in a cold-water flat near Tenth Avenue and West Fifty-fourth Street (although in later years neither she nor her mother could recall precisely where). In 1915 Hell’s Kitchen was no longer the kind of place its name implied: a wide-open invitation to vice and ruthless human behavior, where crime lords and abject poverty had flourished since the Civil War. Five years earlier, in 1910, a special police 11 Broadway Baby CHAPTER 1 force had broken the notorious gangs who gave the neighborhood its unsavory reputation, leaving behind what novelist Theodore Dreiser termed “a very ordinary slum neighborhood, poor and commonplace, and sharply edged by poverty.” This grim environment provided the unlikely background for the sweet-faced singer who rose to stardom in the carefree, frothy extravaganzas of Hollywood’s golden age. Alice Faye’s roots were purely working-class, like many of the characters she portrayed on the screen. Her father walked a beat. Her mother took factory jobs to make ends meet. Studio attempts to camouflage her background suggested a privileged childhood of tennis lessons and horseback riding, but Alice Faye was a proud daughter of the proletariat who never spoke ill of her section of the city despite its shortcomings. She took the sting out of her Tenth Avenue background by referring to it as “Double Fifth” and said of Hell’s Kitchen that it “always sounds as though it must have been an awful place to live. But in reality it wasn’t bad at all. Actually, it was reasonably pleasant.” She recalled trips to Central Park, where her brother Sonny would pull her on a sled, and playing in the fire hydrants on hot days in the summer. The plump little girl, whose black playmates called her “snowball,” seemed to take life as it came, enjoying what was available in her neighborhood and not troubling too much about the rest. Alice’s parents, like most other parents in the district, had few advantages to offer their daughter and two older sons, Bill and Charles, whom they called Sonny. Alice said that the Lepperts “had to scratch to survive.” But so did everyone else in a place where poverty was the rule rather than the exception. Like many children, Alice took her surroundings in stride and found them unremarkable. “It wasn’t until years later that I ever heard the phrase ‘deprived child,’ and realized they were talking about kids like me,” she said in 1990. “I guess I was deprived, if you measure deprivation in terms of worldly goods, because we had very little.” Faye claimed for her childhood a reasonably stable standard of living in which she never went hungry, although meals at times were meager. “I was always very comfortable, full of good food, and happy. I never wanted 12 BROADWAY BABY for anything,” Faye asserted. Nevertheless, one of her most remarkable childhood pleasures was warm feet. “I remember equating warm feet with well-being. If my feet were warm all was right in the world,” she said. “If my mom really liked me that day, she’d give me a hot water bottle when I went to bed and I would curl my feet around its delicious warmth. Bliss!” The Lepperts may have been strapped for cash, but they seem to have wrapped young...