1. Nora Bayes is credited with co-writing the song "Shine On, Harvest Moon" and performed many successful songs during the First World War, including "Over There".
26 Facts About Nora Bayes
1. 2.
Nora Bayes was noted for her independent views and unconventional private life, becoming an early media celebrity.
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Nora Bayes was born in 1880 in Chicago, the daughter of Rachel and David Goldberg, a Polish-born saloon keeper.
4.
Nora Bayes seems to have been given the traditional family name Rachel at birth but was known as Eleonora, or "Dora" as a nickname.
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Nora Bayes grew up in a strict Orthodox Jewish household and moved with her parents to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in her teens.
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Nora Bayes adopted the stage name Nora Bayes: "Nora" as a shortened form of Eleonora and "Bayes" because, according to one story, a local stage manager said that she would not have a good career with the name Goldberg.
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Nora Bayes grew in popularity as a comic actress and singer, and in 1902 started performing Harry Von Tilzer's song, "Down Where the Wurzburger Flows", which she performed at the Orpheum Theatre in Brooklyn and which became her first big success.
8.
Nora Bayes first performed in London in December 1905, and was an immediate success.
9.
Nora Bayes and Gressing divorced in 1907, and soon afterwards she was approached by impresario Florenz Ziegfeld to star in a new theatre show, The Follies of 1907.
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Ziegfeld contributed to her fame by telling the press falsely that Nora Bayes lived on nothing but lollypops to keep her figure trim.
11.
In 1908, Nora Bayes married fellow performer Jack Norworth, and the couple became media celebrities.
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Nora Bayes was the star performer, commanding a much higher salary than Norworth, and sometimes challenging the authority of theatre managers and promoters.
13.
Nora Bayes walked out of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1909 because of a disagreement with Ziegfeld over the billing of a rising new star named Sophie Tucker; Ziegfeld then sued Bayes for breach of contract, which prevented her performing in other theatres for several months.
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In 1910, Nora Bayes made her first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company, and had immediate success with "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly", an Americanised version of a British song.
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One month later, Nora Bayes married Harry Clarke, an actor and dancer; they divorced in 1915.
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Nora Bayes continued to find success on the Keith vaudeville circuit, billed as "The World's Greatest Singing Single Comedienne", before reuniting briefly with Norworth in the Broadway revue Odds and Ends of 1917.
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Nora Bayes then launched her own one-woman show, and starred in the musical Ladies First in 1918, in which she appeared with young piano accompanist George Gershwin.
18.
Nora Bayes returned to recording, and had one of her greatest successes with the patriotic First World War song, "Over There", written by George M Cohan.
19.
Nora Bayes signed a new contract with Columbia Records, and recorded over sixty songs for the label over the next six years.
20.
Nora Bayes married for a fourth time in 1920, to actor and entertainer Arthur Gordon.
21.
Nora Bayes made several trips to Europe in the early 1920s, travelling with her adopted children.
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Nora Bayes was described as "easily the most popular female entertainer in vaudeville for much of the first quarter of the 20th century".
23.
Nora Bayes refused to obey the social mores that ruled expectations of how women should behave.
24.
Nora Bayes married again in 1925 to New York businessman Ben Friedland, the ceremony taking place on board a ship.
25.
Nora Bayes died at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn in 1928, aged 47.
26.
The 1944 movie Shine On, Harvest Moon, starring Ann Sheridan as Nora Bayes, is a highly fictionalized account of her life with Jack Norworth, who was still alive at the time but was not involved in the project.