Early Life and Career
Born Eleanor "Dora" Goldberg, with Dora being a pet or nickname, to a Jewish family in Joliet, Illinois, Bayes was performing professionally in vaudeville in Chicago by age 18. She toured from San Francisco, California to New York City and became a star both on the vaudeville circuit and the Broadway stage.
In 1908, she married singer-songwriter Jack Norworth. The two toured together and were credited for collaborating on a number of compositions, including the immensely popular "Shine On, Harvest Moon," which the pair debuted in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies of 1908. Bayes and Norworth divorced in 1913.
After America entered World War I Bayes became involved with morale boosting activities. George M. Cohan asked that she be the first to record a performance of his patriotic song Over There. Her recording was released in 1917 and became an international hit. She also performed shows for the soldiers.
Bayes made many phonograph records (some with Norworth) for the Victor and Columbia labels. From 1924 through 1928, her accompanist was pianist Louis Alter, who later composed the popular songs "Manhattan Serenade," "Nina Never Knew" and "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?".
Bayes established her own theater, "The Nora Bayes Theater" on West 44th Street in New York. She was portrayed by Ann Sheridan in the 1944 musical biopic Shine On, Harvest Moon, which focused on her relationship with Norworth, played by Dennis Morgan, and ignored her other husbands.
Read more about this topic: Nora Bayes
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)