Helen Kane-A Biographical Synopsis. James D. Taylor Jr.

Описание: Helen’s life span, though too short, was during a captivating portion of world and United States history. She lived from a time when homes first had electricity and many believed that “it would leak out from the wall” to the dawn of the industrial age with the production of the horseless carriage and air planes became fairly common to see in the sky. She witnessed the birth of radio and “talking moving pictures.” Helen saw the invention of the television and how it revolutionized the way we were entertained. She saw the beginning of the space race as satellites and later humans were orbiting our planet. Helen lived through the Balkan War, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the beginning of the Vietnam War and saw the results of two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. She saw the dawn of computers, ten presidents, and five new states accepted into the United States of America.
Helen’s career can almost be described like a bottle rocket. Her very fast rise to fame between 1928 and 1930, during this country’s Black Tuesday stock market crash and the Great Depression, when so many people were struggling just to have food and shelter, is rather amazing. The interpolation for which she will always be best known is the “boop-boop-a-doop” that so many people found cute while surrounded by so much despair.
By now, I hope that I share the opinion with the reader after completing this book that Max Fleisher took notice of Helen’s popularity and based Betty Boop on her. The question that I have been asked the most about this biography is, “Why didn’t Max Fleischer admit to basing Betty Boop on Helen Kane?” The best answer is that had he, he would have had to pay royalties and would not have had complete control over the cartoon character. Mr. Fleischer’s testimony during the trial was carefully choreographed with his answer being that Betty Boop was his sole creation. the full transcript is available, for the first time, in her biography.
The lawyers that handled the case later admitted that Helen made the mistake of charging plagiarism when she should have claimed restraint of trade, which was nevertheless the course Helen chose to follow. The young and rather naive Helen felt violated after that and for the most part withdrew from show business for many years, hoping to live off the fortune she had amassed, but that did not last long. Her marriage to Dan Healy gave her a steady path to follow as they supported each other through thick and thin following the trial.
Had Helen adapted to the ever-changing entertainment industry and not relied solely on her baby-talking boop-boop-a-doop, she very well may have gone on to many years of acting both on stage and in movies. She certainly had the talent and a beautiful voice. I heard only one song that she sang out of character and found it rather surprising that she truly did have a very beautiful voice and articulated well. The movies she did star in, by current standards, are rather corny, but those were the roles she was cast in, and she did play them well.
A couple items sometimes mentioned in short biographical accounts are covered in greater detail in this biography, one being all the cars or Cadillacs that Helen purchased for her friends. That was all that I was able to find on that. Of course, no known records, or at least none that I could locate, of who received what exist. It seems very possible that Helen did buy her closest friends a car; she did comment once that because she had grown up poor, she felt good giving and being able to do so.
The other item is the dozens of homes that Helen owned. I was not able to locate information on the dozens of homes, but I know that she had homes in New York and Beverly Hills, California. Shortly before the end of World War II (1944), Helen shared, “I was rich but I wasn’t having any fun. I bought half a mountain in Beverly Hills with a big mansion and a swimming pool. The place was so big that for two weeks, I didn’t even see some relatives who were living with me.” Helen also rented a house in Hollywood “because it had a fig tree in the yard.” The story also mentions that Helen thought that figs grew underground. It would appear that she rented this home before purchasing the home in Beverly Hills. It was this rented home that she went to court over about unpaid rent.
I can say with certainty that this is the most comprehensive biography about Helen Kane. I hope that this biography will destroy the many pieces of incorrect information that “search bots” spread on the Internet based on those who do not take the time to conduct time-consuming research and to provide a solid platform for anyone wishing to learn the facts about Helen Kane and her influence on Betty Boop and to fulfill the words in Helen’s song “I Wanna Be Loved by You”!