Sylvia Froos

Vaudeville and early talkies star known as 'The Little Princess of Song'

Sylvia Froos, singer: born New York 19 April 1914; died New York 28 March 2004.

The singer Sylvia Froos, whose long career encompassed stage, films, radio, television and recordings, was one of the many vaudeville performers to have the word "Baby" affixed to her name. "Baby Sylvia Froos" and, later, "The Little Princess of Song" adorned the bills of most of the big-time two-a-day theatres of the 1920s.

She made her stage début at the age of seven. "I loved vaudeville - the audiences wanted to be entertained. There was no distraction," she told Bill Smith in his book The Vaudevillians (1976). She shared bills with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Jack Benny, Jack Haley, Bob Hope and the Buddy Rogers and Paul Whiteman orchestras. Singing with Whiteman at the time were the Rhythm Boys: Al Rinker, Harry Barris and Bing Crosby. When Smith asked her if she thought then that Crosby would become a big star, she replied, "Don't be silly. I didn't know, and neither did Whiteman or anybody else on the bill."

Six months before the Warner Bros film The Jazz Singer (1927) caused a sensation with its songs and spoken dialogue, Froos appeared in two all-singing two-reel shorts, designed to persuade cinema owners to help Warners finance the high cost of sound installation. One was called The Little Princess of Song.

By the early Thirties, the popularity of talkies and the severity of the Great Depression had rendered American big-time vaudeville virtually extinct. Its last stronghold was the prestigious Palace Theatre in New York, and Froos appeared there in 1931, singing and doing impersonations of such stars as Maurice Chevalier. Topping the bill were the Marx Brothers, who liked her so much that they incorporated her into their act. That year she also signed a recording contract with Victor Records, and recorded such novelty songs as "Who's Your Little Who-Zis?"

Fox's Depression-themed musical fantasy Stand Up and Cheer (1934) advertised "1,001 Surprises! 335 Scenes! 1,000 Players!" One of those players was 19-year-old Sylvia. She sang two songs in the film, but her "Broadway's Gone Hill-Billy" and "This is Our Last Night Together" were overshadowed by "Baby, Take a Bow", a song featuring the five-year-old Shirley Temple. By the end of 1934, Temple was Hollywood's eighth most popular star and Froos was back in New York. "Movies were OK," she said in 1976, "but I really liked to see them more than to be in them."

She found live broadcasts infinitely more interesting, and had her own NBC series. She also made guest appearances on such radio shows as Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight and Al Jolson's Shell Chateau. "In the mid-Thirties, Vaudeville was practically dead here, but in London it was booming," Froos recalled. After appearing at the Victoria Palace in London ("a wonderful theatre with wonderful audiences"), she appeared on English television.

Back in her homeland, she sang in a series of "soundies", which she described as "popular songs on film. You put a dime in a machine and it showed you singers doing numbers - kind of a visual jukebox. A flash in the pan, though." One of her last recordings was a Jewish-dialect duet with the "Hello, Muddah, Hello, Fadduh" humorist, Allan Sherman. A parody on the Guys and Dolls song "A Bushel and a Peck", it was called "A Satchel and a Seck".

After retiring from show business, Sylvia Froos became a volunteer worker for various charities. "I have a good busy life, an active life," she told Bill Smith in 1976. "And while I sometimes miss vaudeville and all the friends I made and all the good times we had - well, it has passed."

Dick Vosburgh