Billie Burke is known today for one iconic movie role, but in the early 20th century, she was incredibly successful and very famous. Her life and marriage are as fascinating and dramatic as any play or film she starred in.
Research:
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So I was in Hollywood a couple months ago for an event, and as often one does when you're in Hollywood, you look down at Walk of Fame names, and I was thinking one that it would be fun to do a series on some of the lesser known people that show up on Walk of Fame stars, which might happen. We might have that as a series, or you know, some of the ones that don't have long biographies, maybe we'll do an amalgamated episode. Sure, because some of those are great. But one of the people that popped up for me this time that I was like, that's not an unknown person, but I also know enough about her that I know she's really interesting, and that is Billy Burke. And she is known today for mostly one role. And if you don't recognize her name, you will recognize it when we get to that role. But that's quite at the end, and then you'll go, oh her, which would be great. But as I said, her life quite a ride. She's very very interesting, and I could talk about her forever because I she wrote two books or co wrote them with an assistant, or not quite a ghostwriter, because she's credited on this stuff. But her way of telling stories is great, and she is very frank about her life in those books. So I have really enjoyed them, and I just thought she would make a fine addition to our our our storytelling collection. So today it's Billy Burke. I was in camp oh her. So if you are, if you're like, I don't know what you're talking about, do not be embarrassed. I did not recognize the name either, not at all, which is why we you know she's due. Yeah, so Ethelbert Appleton Burke was born on August sixth, maybe eighteen eighty four, maybe eighty five, maybe eighty six. Reported differently different places, and she claimed different years for herself. That was in Washington, d c. Her mother, Blanche Baby Hodkinson, was from New Orleans. Her father, Billy Burke, was a singing clown. Billy wrote in her autobiography that her father had wanted to be a chemist, but he cut his education short to enlist with the Union Army in eighteen sixty two, when he was eighteen and became a drummer during the US Civil War. She said her father never talked about the war, but that she found a disability discharge certificate for him that was dated April fourth, eighteen sixty three. She clearly really admired her father. She wrote about he quote was one of these international clowns you could play in any country in any language. When Billy was touring with the Barnum and Bailey circus, he met Blanche while the show was stopped in Pittsburgh. Blanche was a mother of four, She was in her forties, and the two of them very quickly fell in love. They got married before the Pittsburgh engagement of the circus was over, and she and the kids left with him. Blanche stopped for a while in Washington, where her mother lived, and Billy kept touring. At that point, she was expecting a baby, and everybody thought it was unwise for her to keep traveling. So when baby Billy was born, her father, who was from an Irish family, telegraphed and said, quote, I don't care whether it's a boy or a girl, but does it have red hair? And as a joke, James Anthony Bailey sent a message that read quote, I will make you a firm offer of one million dollars cash for the baby, which I suppose if you didn't have a working relationship with your boss, that might come off as really horrible, but apparently they all thought it was very funny. I should mention that those four previous kids of Blanche kind of drop out of the picture, and we don't really know what happened there, whether she left them with her mother or what, but they are not really in any of the stories that come up afterwards. But when Billy was eight, her father moved the family by which I mean himself, Blanche and young Billy, to England to start a new troupe there called Billy Burke's Barnum and Greatland and Circus Songsters, and little Billy had gone by that name Billy from the time she was tiny, and she later wrote quote, I have always been called Billy Burke, except for those eighteen improbable glittering years when I was also missus Floren Ziegfeld Junior. I find it a perfectly adequate name. It's an especially nice name for the skidter witted ladies I play on the screen today, and it suits me too, because I might as well confess here and now that I I'm not always saner than I seem. But she also claimed that her name did not officially become Billy until the family was living in England. So while they were in London, she met a reverend Kerschbaum, who actually gave her the name Mary William at her baptism, making her full name Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke. Billy, who was just twelve at this time, had told the reverend that she wanted to be named Billy in honor of her father, and that he had asked if she would also take Mary as a favor to him, to which she happily acquiesced. In her autobiography, she says she kind of had a crush on this reverend and that she would have named herself Gorgonzola if he had asked. You will also see her birth name as Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke. But the way she always told the story, those first two names were not her name at birth. They did not become part of her name until she was baptized and entered into the register at Westminster Abbey. It was also during her time as a child in Love then that Billy's stage career began, although this was a reluctant start. Billy's mother, Blanche, wanted her to go into the family business, but Billy was really shy and her father was against it. She later wrote, quote, it occurs to me that someone ought to do a piece of scholarly research on the number of girls who have become stage and movie stars because their mothers pushed them. Billy had never even shown a lot of interest in her father's show, let alone any others, but her mother started taking her to plays enrolled her in acting school, but both her acting classes in her regular school were interrupted a lot whenever her father was on tour, because she and her mother would normally go with him while they were traveling. Her mother tried to supplement her education by taking her to museums, which Billy found very boring, and she later said of all of this, quote, I doubt if there is a museum in all Europe that I did not doze in during my adolescence. Billy's first stage performance was a set of songs that she sang at Birkenhead while the family was there for a summer holiday. She was fourteen at this time and She described the experience as awful and scary, but she did it again the next day and she did a bit better, and after that her mother just kept booking her gigs. She was soon working at the London Pavilion as a weekly performer, and she described actually starting to have a little fun once she got over that initial nervousness. She got paid ten pounds a week for singing, and it was there at the Pavilion that she was spotted by the composer Leslie Stewart, and he offered her a small role in his new play, The Schoolgirl. Billy was a teenager at this time. She was given the best song in the show, but that had to be kept secret from the show's two leads until dress rehearsal because there was concern that those two actors have become jealous and angry. And when they heard it a dress rehearsal, both of them were jealous and angry and threatened to quit, but they stayed, and when the show opened in May nineteen oh three, according to the New York Times quote, miss Burke made the hit of the evening. Billy later recalls that she was so overwhelmed by the audience's boisterous reaction to her song that she ran off stage and forgot to bow, and she bumped into a stage hand and fell, and the stage manager caught her. Billy misunderstood the situation. She thought all the noise was because they hated her, but her stage manager threatened to slap her if she did not go back on stage and sing it again. That is terrible, but she later credited that threat with the creation of her fame, because she became a celebrity pretty quickly thanks to this play, and people recounted the story of her debut and her singing it twice frequently. The schoolgirl ran for two years at the Prince of Wales Theater and eighteen year old Billy was a London celebrity. She mentions an interesting theory in her autobiography that she believes her nickname during this time was the origin of the term flapper, applying to young women. She was nicknamed the American flapper in London. Quote. I think this is the origin of the term flapper. Certainly, my red hair flapped, not by theatrical design, but because I was too lazy to fasten it up. I rather liked it that way too. Sadly Billy. Jonathan Walford, writing for the Fashion History Museum in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, traces the first use of the word flapper in print to refer to energetic teenage girls in a nineteen oh three story by Desmond Coke. It was being used colloquially in the UK as early as the eighteen nineties. The Oxford English Dictionary actually puts its first written use in the context of teenage girls in eighteen eighty eight, so way earlier. Yes, you're marvelous, Billy, but you are not the originator. Billy was also aware of the many temptations that London held for a young, pretty, relatively famous actress, but her mother, lanch was very much on hand to prevent any kind of shenanigans. Billy later said that because she worked in the theater, she was immune to the kinds of schoolgirl crushes on actors that most teenagers experienced. Those were her colleagues, and she did not find them appealing in any way. She did date a number of young men, mostly in the military, but although some and it sounds like many, wanted to be quite serious and get engaged, she thought she would probably get tired of them anyway, so she never accepted any of their proposals. As The Schoolgirl was ending its run, Billy had a sense of the direction that her career might take. She knew her singing wasn't good enough to carry a career, and she decided she wanted to go after light comedy roles. She met American theater manager Charles Frohman during this time. He said he would like to produce The Schoolgirl in New York, but that her popular song would be sung by the show's star in that production. So she started going to any and every theater company in the West End that was producing comedies and offered her talents there. She played in a couple more musical theater shows and had what sounds like a marvelous time in a run of The Belle of Mayfair at the Vaudeville Theater. It was during that engagement that Charles Hawtrey saw her. He was a theater manager in London, and he went to the show several times before sending her a message asking her for a meeting. He saw in her exactly what he wanted, which was a comedian. Yeah, and that was exactly what she wanted someone to see, so this was a good thing. Coming up, we'll talk about Billy's entry into straight comedy, but first we'll have a little sponsor break. Hawtrey cast Billy in a comedy called Mister George, and for it she had to learn the difference in how to a musical comedy, which she had been doing, versus straight comedy, So she had to learn straight comedy. She later wrote, quote, there is a sharp and enormous difference between playing musical comedy and playing straight comedy, and I think I can explain it best by putting it this way. In a musical comedy, you direct everything to the audience. In comedy, in a play, you know the audience is there and you play to it, but you direct yourself to your fellow players, and act as if you were in a room, not in a theater. Although this role and this time of her life were quite thrilling, she met royalty during this time, and she was invited to fancy parties by London elite. This also came with some sorrow because her father, Billy Burke, had been ill for some time. He for the most part, lived apart from Billy and her mother in Bath for the benefit of his health, whereas they stayed in London for her career and he would visit London to see her act, but he died before Mister George opened. In nineteen oh seven, Billy was cast in a play My Wife Is New York by Charles Browman. That was the person who had told her she could not sing her canoe song in his US version of The Schoolgirl. After she finished one more play with Charles Hawtrey, she took the job. She made five hundred dollars a week, which was a huge sum to her at the time, and she was very well received. She later wrote, quote by degrees, it was born in on me that my wife had made me a star. But to tell the truth, I was rather stupid about it. I honestly didn't realize what had happened. It had all been so much fun and all so easy. Mister George led to a string of other successes on the New York stage from nineteen ten to nineteen thirteen, including Missus Dot Suzanne, The Runaway, The Mind, The Paint Girl, and the Land of Promise. She described this as an incredibly content time in her life, when she had money and security. She was not ambitious, according to her own account, and was happy to be acting in comedies as she had hoped when she was working on The Schoolgirl. She didn't see herself as a great actress, and she had no designs on becoming one. But when she was the top build star in a play called Love Watches, which ran from nineteen oh eighteen nineteen oh nine, she did admit to being a little thrilled at seeing her name in lights. Billy really developed an image of being a bubbly, light hearted woman, and part of that was through her choice of dress. In the john of the twentieth century, a lot of women's fashions still trend in toward dark colors and structured, heavy looking silhouettes. She really favored light, fluttery styles with ruffles. She became known for having fantastic style, and women wanted to emulate it. Billy Burke was not just famous, she was iconic. She was one of the first stage stars who had all kinds of merchandise named after her. Her mother is said to have loved walking into department stores and seeing the Billy Burke dresses, which had wide, flat collars a lot of the time trimmed with lace. She also had a lo of hair clip ons named for her, which let customers get the same long red curls that she had been really known for. Burke was objectively speaking of beauty by the standards of the day, by any standards, but she never seemed to see herself that way. She once commented on the feature that she disliked most about her face, quote, I have a deep and penetrating sorrow my freckles. I have tried everything under the sun, but they cling to me faithfully. But though she may have been keenly aware of what she perceived as flaws, it also did not keep her from living a life that reflected her iconic beauty and style status. When she toured, she had her dressing room redecorated to suit her taste in every city, even if she was only performing for a short period of time somewhere, she wanted everything to be done up in Baby Blue. Billy's routine for her health and beauty was legendary. She had her hair brushed by her maid every morning, She used yellow brand meal in her bath to make the water soft, She used a chalk powder on her nose, and she believed an exercise. She walked five miles a day and worked out her upper body with Barbel's strength exercises and what was called Indian clubs. These are clubs similar to ones you might have seen jugglers used that look kind of like elongated bowling pins. They would add weight and resistance to fluid movements, and they were said to have been invented by soldiers in India for exercise and then adopted by the British military during colonization. Strength training wasn't exactly common for women at the time, so she was kind of ahead of the trends on this one. In nineteen ten, while she was achieving great success with the touring company of Love Watches, Billy Burke bought a huge thirty five acre estate in Hastings, New York. It was the Kirkham Estate when she acquired it, and she changed the name to Berkeley Crest. Blanche managed a full property renovation and update, including the addition of a tea house and apple trees, and the laying of roads to get around the property by car. And though she was able to afford all of this and was happy with her salary, when she got an offer from a Froeman competitor for fifteen hundred dollars a week plus ten percent of theater profits. She parleyed that into a similar deal with Froeman. It was also while starring in Love Watches that one of her high profile romances started. That was with Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso. He would go see her perforum night after night and throw roses onto the stage every time. He wrote her love notes and sent them backstage. She said of the famous singer quote, he made love and ate spaghetti with equal skill and no inhibitions. He would propose marriage several times each evening. Naturally, I did not take him seriously. On New Year's Eve nineteen thirteen, although she would lay it as happening. At least two hours into nineteen fourteen, Billy and her manager at the time crashed a party at the hotel Astor that changed her life because it was there that she met Flora Zigfeld Junior. She wrote of him quote, he had a Mephistophelian look, his eyebrows and his eyelids lifting curved upward in the middle, Slim and tall and immaculate in full evening dress. He was in black and white, contrast to the rest of the costumed party and so, and for who knows what other reasons I noticed him at once, without speaking, Zigfeld pulled her into a dance, and she described him using his knee to signal her to turn on the dance floor, which she said quote was an odd thing to do, but I rather liked it, and the two of them were soon a couple. This romance got a lot of tongues wagging, but not in a good way. Most people believed that Billy was too good for him and that he would lead to nothing but unhappiness for her. He had been a source of gossip on Broadway and throughout the vaudeville circuit for a long time. Flow Zigfield had started the Zigfield Follies seven years before he and Birke met. He had been married by common law to actress Anna Held from eighteen ninety seven or maybe eighteen ninety nine, depending on the source, until nineteen thirteen. Held had served him with divorce papers for infidelity in nineteen twelve. Everyone who knew them both thought that Flow would break Billy's heart and probably tank her career as well. Charles Frohman was especially adamant that he thought the relationship was a bad idea, and Billy knew the rumors about Zigfeld that he was, in her words, extremely dangerous and cavalier about women. Yeah, Charles Frohman made a lot of ultimatums with her regarding this relationship, but the heart wants it at once. So Billy and Flow continued their romance, although they often tried to keep it on the down low to avoid criticism. She went on record as saying that even if she had known quote precisely what tortures and frustrations were in store for me, I should have kept right on falling in love. She claimed that some of their secret rendezvous even took place in Grant's tomb in Upper Manhattan. Basically, they were doing anything they could to avoid the press, and Billy actually did try to break things off with Flow more than once, and in response to her most declarative note saying as much that she was done, he came to her dressing room after the show that night and said, I want to get married tomorrow. So, after four months in which Ziegfeld wooed Billy by telling her he wanted to be her husband and her manager, and winning over her mother Blanche as well, in April of nineteen fourteen, they went to Hoboken, New Jersey, with Blanche in tow to a lope. They found a parson who was willing to perform the service, but it seems he was a little before the whole thing and especially confused by their names. Billy later wrote of the wedding that the minister had addressed her as Flow and told her where to stand. She replied, he's Flow, I'm Billy. And then the minister turned to Flow and said, oh, all right, then you stand here Bill, and Flow replied I'm Flow, she's Bill. I mean Billy. It's kind of like who's on first. She concluded this story by saying, quote, but he married us, and I am sure it was legal. They were back in Manhattan that night Billy had a show to do. Their marriage news didn't make the press for two days, and at that point it was headlines We're going to get into married life for Billy and Flow, which had a lot of good and bad. But before that, we will pause for a word from our sponsors. Charles Frohman, for whom Billy had worked for several years at this point, died in nineteen fifteen. He was aboard the RMS Lusitania when it sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Having never spoken to Billy again after she married Flow Zigfeld. After Froman's passing, his office put Billy under contract. And that may sound good, like a stable situation, but really it was a way to prevent her from transitioning to movies. For one thing, there was still ongoing animosity with Froman's office that Billy had abandoned her public persona of innocent Aungenoux to Mary Zigfeld, and the company booked her with seventy two back to back one night stand performances, so that for more than two months she would be traveling, and most of it away from her new husband. And during this time, rumors started to get back to Billy that Flow was already seeing other women, as had been predicted by basically everyone she knew. Billy had married a cheater, and she didn't like it, But in her later years she spoke really kindly of him still, although she was also frank about the reality of his behavior. She wrote, quote of another thing, I am confidently certain Zigfeld has been portrayed as a man who pursued women. I have even come across a word which in regard to him is not only vulgar, but incredibly inaccurate. The word is chaser by all the pink toad prophets. Flow Zigfeld was never that. Flow never pursued any woman. He was cool and aloof and difficult. But there were times, more times than I prefer to recall, when he made a woman eager for his approval by a mere look or a small expression, or by a slight grasp of her elbow a low mumbling request to dance. That was all the effort he ever had to make. The story of one noted dancing girl about how Flow Zigfeld used to batter down her door is a confection of sheer poppycock. I tell you I know better. She also wrote about him, quote, I hope I can make myself clear about this. There were several things I knew for certain then, and I have never changed my mind. One of the things I knew was that Flow loved me, and that he loved his home and his family. He was what he was. That long two month plus tour ended in Los Angeles and Billy was introduced to Hollywood. In nineteen sixteen, she was offered the lead role in a film called Peggy by Thomas Ince, who offered her a staggering three hundred thousand dollars for one single picture. That's an indicator of how famous she was at this point, even though we don't really think of her as a household name today. Her froman agents in New York got wind of the offers that were being made to her, and she received a telegram while she was still in California that read, if you sign up with Pictures before we see you again, we will not continue with you for another season, and she sent the reply, I have done nothing up to now waiting to have talk with you about pictures, but any more irate telegrams from you and I will sign immediately. They did send another irate telegram, and when she got to New York, she told the froman firm that she was through with them. During production on Peggy, Billy was offered a five year contract, but she felt she couldn't have a career in Hollywood and also hoped to maintain her marriage, so she chose the marriage. Not long after, reports of these infidelities escalated and she asked him to come to California, which he did. They fought about this situation for two days Eventually, they put their issues aside, and Billy started work on a new film with another huge payout, called Gloria's Romance. But Billy also realized her entire marriage was gonna be one where she was instinctively suspicious and jealous of other women that he was connected to. Billy's films were hits, and she made several more that year. Yeah, he was also her manager at this point, so there was like a financial interest in them being like, Okay, yeah, this horrible stuff is going on, but we're also still business partners and we have to work on these movies, which seems like kind of a dangerous position to be in. But on October twenty third, nineteen sixteen, the same year that Billy made a lot of movies, the Zigfelds welcome to daughter, Patricia Burke Zigfeld. Three weeks after she was born. In Manhattan, the family moved together into the lavish Berkeley Crest mansion. Zigfeld had turned the grounds into a landscaped wonderland, and then he started to bring in animals. According to Billy, they had a herd of deer. They had two bears until that became unsafe. They had two lion cubs, At one point there were partridges, pheasants, cockatoos, parrots, an elephant, a pony, at least seven geese. There were lambs, ducks, hundreds of chickens, at least fifteen dogs, two buffalo, and then seven dwarf ponies, which they received as a gift. As many of these animals became unwieldy or unrealistic to take care of, they had to be rehomed. The elephant, for example, ended up with a circus. Flow also started screening movies for his friends at the house because producers were happy to send him the latest features, and he would invite all of his friends from New York and the lavish parties that he hosted there, so they sort of hosted together, but he was really the one driving that bus. Became the stuff of legend as Flow was setting up the ultimate entertainment venue at Berkeley Crest. In nineteen seventeen, Billy went back to her roots and was back on stage in New York. She also started making pictures with the movie studios that had set up shop on the East Coast to take advantage of the available Broadway talent. It wasn't always bliss, but they loved their daughter, and they kind of made the marriage work in its way for several years, although there were plenty of ups and downs. Flows follies were getting more acclaim and money was coming in, although the plays he was producing for Billy to star in weren't doing all that well. Additionally, Billy's mother, Blanch, who was diabetic, was having a hard time with her health. The immense house was really too much for her. It had these huge staircases and vast rooms, so they set her up in a smaller cottage on the property that was less taxing, and then gave her a house staff so she was always attended to. She died at one point while Billy was on tour, and that production only stopped for three days. In nineteen twenty two, Billy won the Motion Picture Popularity Contest, but at that point she was retired from film. She had starred in a movie called The Education of Elizabeth Banks in nineteen twenty one, and then she decided to be a mother on a more full time basis so she didn't have to be running out to California or also just spending long days on set. And then she also took stage roles in New York when they seemed right. She and Flow had plenty money, and she just wanted to spend more time with her daughter. The stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine hit the Ziegfeld House hard. Flow had made a lot of speculative investments, and all of a sudden, the Ziegfelds had lost most of their money. There was no new money coming in. They had to mortgage their beloved Berkeley Crest. Billy decided that she would have to be the full time breadwinner again. After two more years in New York, during which Billy kept them afloat taking stage roles, she moved with Patricia to Los Angeles to pursue a film career. Flow initially stayed in New York and tried to get his own business interests back on track. This didn't work out, though, and in the winter of nineteen thirty one, he got the flu and then pneumonia. He spent some time in a sanitarium in New Mexico the following spring, hoping to regain his health before moving to Hollywood to be with Billy and Patricia, But he only lived in California a few days before he died on July twenty second of nineteen thirty two. That cause of death was listed as an attack of pleurisy. Yeah, he never really got over his pneumonia. Billy was not with him when he died, though, although she was on the way home, she had gotten a call and she arrived two minutes after he had died. And while their marriage had not been ideal, Billy grieved deeply, and though she went almost immediately back to work, she described not really knowing how she got through the movie she was working on, which was called A Bill of Divorcement. That was her first appearance in a non silent film, very late in her life. She shared in her writing that she knew that returning to work so soon while she was still grieving may have looked callous to people, but that anyone who knew her understood it was the best way for her to get through that loss. Billy knew she could easily go back to New York and get steady stage work, but she really couldn't bear to go back to a place that held so many memories of both Flow and her mother. She decided to stay in Hollywood. In nineteen thirty three, she appeared in the film Dinner at Eight, which was a huge hit. Got a lot of acclaim for Billy. She had successfully launched a second phase film career in the era of sound dialogue. She was in a lot of movies in the years that followed, really dozens of them. The one film she didn't get to be in was one made in nineteen thirty six about her husband, Flow Zigfield Junior. She wanted to play herself, but the story goes that the studio thought she was too old to play herself in the couple's early marriage. She started working in radio in the nineteen thirties on a variety of programs, including the radio version of the Zigfield Follies. For a while in the nineteen thirties, Billy lived with director Dorothy Arsner, the only woman director in Hollywood at the time and a possible future episode because she is fascinating. There were rumors that the two women were romantically involved, although Burke never mentioned Dorothy in her two autobiographies aside from the films they collaborated on, not even as a friend. So there is a one book that mentions it as though it is an established fact. And I wasn't able to get a copy of that book and hunt down where they were sourcing from so In nineteen thirty eight, she was in the film Merrily We Live, for which she got her only Academy Award nomination because her voice had a unique, slightly warb equality. She also continued to play comedy characters in films, often characters with a ditzy personality. She herself would say that she could be ditzy, but it really seems like she was anything. But it was Billy's nineteen thirty nine role that most people will know her by, appearing opposite Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz as Glinda the Goodwitch. Billy was fifty four when she made that film, although she looks a whole lot younger, no doubt, thanks to her lifelong adherence to her beauty rituals as well as lucky jas. Although the nineteen forties began with the final sale of the Berkeley Crest property, her career continued to grow. She went on to appear in two dozen more films over the next decade, and she also had a wartime Saturday morning radio show called The Billy Burke Show that ran for more than three years from nineteen forty three to nineteen forty six, initially under the name Fashions in Rations, and this is an interesting setup. It was a situation comedy, and she played a fictional version of herself who was always helping her neighbors. It was kind of like a feel good thing to go on during the war. In the nineteen fifties, her movie roles slowed down, but she moved into television. She became one of the first women to host a television talk show that was at Home with Billy Burke, and it ran from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty two. She appeared on a brief runt sitcom called Doc Corkl. Although she did briefly work again in the theater, she couldn't find any real footing for a late in life come back to the stage. In her later life, Burke was still somewhat self effacing when it came to what had been a very successful multi decade career. She once said quote, I was never the great actress type. I generally did light, gay things. I often had cute plays, but never a fine one. In nineteen forty nine, Billy published her autobiography With A Feather on My Nose, which details her early life and career, but ultimately it is a wartz and all love letter to her husband Flow. She wrote a follow up to that book ten years later, titled with Powder on My Nose, and that covers some additional aspects of her life, tips on life as a performer, and she talks about why she never married again. She is really very open in that second book about her regrets as she looks back on her life, but she's never self pitying about it. She's pretty matter of fact and straightforward. Both books were written with Cameron's ship and both of them are very, very charming reads. As I said, she's very funny, and there are even some recipes in that second one if you want to get historically creative in the kitchen. In nineteen sixty Billy got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It is at sixty six seventeen Hollywood Boulevard. Yep, you can still see it. Billy Burke died on May fourteenth, nineteen seventy, in Los Angeles of natural causes. She was eighty four at the time. Her remains were transferred to Westchester, New York, where she was buried alongside her husband Flow. I love her. She's super fu she's super fun I'm doing a Cornucopia email today. Oh great, because we have several that are short, and I just wanted to you know, sometimes the short ones don't make it to air because they're not, you know, substantial enough that we have a whole lot to talk about. But sometimes they're worthwhile. I'm very cute. Sometimes I pick those ones on purpose, and my episode is running really long. Yes. Absolutely. This first one is from Page who says, Hey, Holly and Tracy, I feel like your jinks on living podcast subjects might have worked too well. Although as of writing Bisexual Icon, Jonathan the tortoise is still with us. For a hot minute, he was eclipsed. This is the oldest living thing by a forty six thousand year old worm, resurrected by scientists who have apparently never watched a horror movie. I had seen that, as Page rights, I suspect resuscitated ringworms don't live very long, and their entries in the record books definitely have an asterisk attached for all the years they were frozen. So Jonathan should have his title back soon. But it was fun slash horrifying while it lasted. Thanks for the show, and please take these pictures of our cats, and one video of our tripod Hiccup, who we caught trying to scratch himself with a phantom paw as payment for making you think about ringworms page Thank you one, your cat's are adorable. Two. One of our older gents has just transitioned to life as a tripod, so it was actually very very wonderful to get a cute video of a tripod kitty living his best life, So thank you for that. And yeah that worm trying to get in on our Jonathan's title, No, we won't have it. Katrina also sent us pictures of her elderly kitty, Tuft, who is nineteen. She's had him since she was twenty one and he was a stray kitten and how he has been her rider die since day one. He does not like dogs, but he'll sleep next to the dog because the bed is cozy and it's adorable, So Katrina, thank you. Tracy has black kitties and I have a soft spot for black kitties, so Tuft is precious, and please kiss him for us if he's amenable to such things. Hold on, I think I have one more yes, and then we have eponymous foods, which always nice, Always keep being the gift that keeps on giving. This is what I loved the title to it because it just says I tried the stroganoffs. This yeah, our listener. I don't know she pronounces it Kara or Kara, but Kara writes, Hello, ladies. I just want to share how your most recent eponymous foods episode has impacted my life. After learning about the different varieties of beef stroganoff, I decided to try the Russian and Chinese variations along with the more traditional version I usually make, and have my husband and kids vote in a stroganof off. We like them all, but the clear winner was the Chinese. She sent the recipes she was working from. As you recall the Chinese one, it's usually made with like fish, sauce, et cetera. This is fascinating to me. I'm embarrassed it didn't even occur to me to do a similar trick. Now I want to do that. We'll see if it happens. My husband is not a big beef feeder, so I might have to invite a friend over to be the voter. Those are my three short emails for this week. Thank you so much to everybody that has written in Again, I always love the pet picture and food pictures also very welcome, so keep all of that coming. If you would like to email us. Some of your food pictures are kiddie pictures or puppy pictures, or if you have two pet bears until they become unwieldy, sure pictures of those two. You can do that at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you have not subscribed to the podcast yet, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.