Early Life
Whitney was born as Mary Ann Chase in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was adopted by the Whitney family who named her Grace Elaine Whitney. After she moved out, she began to call herself Lee Whitney, and eventually, she became known as Grace Lee Whitney. Whitney started her entertainment career as a "girl singer" on Detroit's WJR radio at the age of fourteen. In her late teens, she moved to Chicago and started to open in nightclubs for such luminaries as Billie Holiday and Buddy Rich, and toured with the Spike Jones and Fred Waring Bands.
Read more about this topic: Grace Lee Whitney
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)