Early Life
Born as Helen Clare Schroeder, Kane attended St. Anselm’s Parochial School in the Bronx. She was the youngest of three children. Her father, Louis Schroeder, the son of a German immigrant, was employed intermittently; her Irish immigrant mother, Ellen (Dixon) Schroeder, worked in a laundry.
Kane's mother reluctantly paid $3 for her daughter's costume as a queen in Kane's first theatrical role at school. By the time she was 15 years, 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 theater 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, however Pearl Hamilton chose Fordyce to tour as a trio act "just to see what happens" at the end of the theatrical season.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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