Most anyone alive today knows Rose Marie Mazetta (who died yesterday at 94) mainly from her television years on the Dick Van Dyke Show, Hollywood Squares, etc. But she had a long and storied career as a vaudeville child star, on stage and radio from age four.
It was an age that idolized child stars. “Baby Peggy” Montgomery, almost unknown today, was one of the major movie stars of the 1920s. (She’s still alive at age 99.) Although I don’t know this with certainty, I’ve long suspected that Baby Peggy and Baby Rose Marie were the joint inspirations for the Bette Davis character in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (not the rat serving part, of course).
Baby Rose Marie was not a cloying tyke like Baby Peggy or Shirley Temple a few years later. She had a rich, powerful voice and worked with adult material, infusing it with the world-weary persona of a 1920s torch singer like Ruth Etting. The clip below is from an eight-minute short shown as an opening feature in theaters, showing off not only Baby Rose Marie’s talent but also Warner Brothers’ new Vitaphone sound system (the complete film was previously available on You Tube, but seems to have been pulled).
Since I came across this film several years ago, I’ve rarely missed a chance to show it to friends.