Part two..............
She lived in Cincinnati, Ohio for two years and worked at WLW Radio Station. Lots of exposure drew the attention of Paul Whiteman, the orchestra leader. She had felt she was stagnating in Cincinnati and headed for Chicago with only $200 to her name. On the way to an interview at NBC radio studio, she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her ankle. She did not postpone the audition but had herself carried into the studio. She sang song after song and Paul Whiteman hired her on the spot. She performed five evenings a week and the show was broadcast on all NBC stations across the country. Jane Froman was being heard. She was dubbed: “Radio’s loveliest songbird,” but after two years, Jane left Chicago and went to New York.
In New York she sang on The Chesterfield Hour and was characterized as “The lark.” Her mother was not impressed but very disappointed in her abandonment of all the training she had been given in the classics. As Jane said: “She looked down her nose at what was going on in the music world.” Jane landed a spot in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1933 and also made friends with Fanny Brice. She was named the number-one female singer on the air in 1934. Finally Anna succumbed and came to New York to visit. In the meantime Jane had married Don Ross and together they made sure Anna met all the celebrities.
By 1938 the William Morris Talent Agency was guiding her career and she appeared on the cover of LIFE Magazine. As her career grew so did the tensions between she and her husband, Don. By 1940 she was performing with the likes of Helen Hayes, Ray Bolger, Jimmy Durante, Ilka Chase and Jackie Gleason.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 she concentrated on getting Americans to buy war bonds and made appearances all over the country. By 1942 the entertainers were requested by President Roosevelt to travel overseas and entertain the troops. Jane said yes within an hour of being asked. She and six fellow USO members boarded a Pan American Airways seaplane at LaGuardia Field on February 20, 1943. That plane would never reach London and Jane later wrote: “Everything I had worked for, money, jewels, possessions, everything I had, was wiped out in one swift mad crash.”
At 6:46 p.m. on February 22, 1943 the plane plummeted into the dirty, bacteria laden Tagus River near Lisbon, Portugal. Of the thirty-nine people aboard, only fifteen survived. Jane lived, but spent an hour in the river before she was rescued. One of the crew, John Burn stayed near her, both were clinging to floating debris. Jane’s injuries were life threatening and there was talk of amputating her right leg. She insisted she had to be consulted before the Doctors took such action. She remained in the hospital for two months before President Roosevelt arranged for her to come home on a freighter. The trip cost Jane two thousand dollars. The sea was rough and the ship was attacked by German submarines, with torpedoes narrowly missing the boat. When she was carried off the ship she insisted on the stretcher being lowered so she could touch United States soil.
Now she endured operation after operation with stacks of medical bills piling up beside her bed. Doctors told her she would never walk again. They said they would have to amputate her right leg but she stubbornly refused to give up the foot that tapped to music. Through all the pain and turmoil, Jane struggled and was determined to heal and perform once more. The journey from death back to life would not be easy. She fought her way through thirty-nine surgeries and her show business friends stayed with her, even President Roosevelt made attempts to bolster her spirits. She would have to fight the injuries to her body to the day she died.
Performing in nightclubs was nearly impossible but she did return to radio. She went back on stage with the aid of leg braces and in May of 1945 went back to Europe to entertain troops still stationed there. She was a hit with them all, but a real morale booster to the men in hospitals that knew what she was battling to overcome. If a girl could do it, so could they!
The William Morris Agency came forward and paid many of her medical bills. She had another serious bout with infection in her bones from the dirty water of the Tagus River and she and her husband Don, who was actually banned from her hospital room for drunkenness, finally divorced.
John Burn, the crew member that had stayed with her in the river, came to see her and the two, who had remained in contact, were eventually married. New techniques had developed during the war for orthopedic surgeries and Jane finally wound up in the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. John was still a pilot and he left her at the clinic and returned to work. When he came to see her six months later she had a body and a soul that had mended and Jane Froman was on her way back. In the 1950s her career was a blazing star. She was not only a great radio singer but was making many television appearances and beginning to perform in the newest entertainment mecca, Las Vegas.
During the 1930s she had appeared in three different films in Hollywood and now in the 1950s they were again interested in her. They were seeking the rights to her life story. Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights and cast Susan Hayward as Jane in the film, “With a song in my heart.” Through the art of dubbing, Jane sang all the songs and the film premiered in New York in the Roxy Theater on April 4, 1952.
By the late 1950s she sued Pan Am for her additional huge medical bills and lost. Her television show was cancelled and she and John’s fairytale marriage ended in divorce. Later both would remarry but friends told that John had been the love of her life. In 1959 she put together a new, very successful nightclub act but after a few months she wrote in her journal: “I have begun to wonder if it’s all worth it? My heart tells me I don’t belong here anymore.”
At age fifty-three, and after thirty-four years in show business, Jane Froman quit and went home to her mother in Columbia. Her mother, now a widow, was teaching music at Stephens College. She had little money and her life of glitz and glamour was gone but she enrolled in art school and discovered she had inherited her grandmother Barcafer’s talent. So much so that Norman Rockwell offered her a scholarship in his art school.
She renewed a friendship with a newspaper man from the Columbia Tribune, Rowland Hew Smith. Smith was a widower and they were married in June of 1962. Jane was now a housewife and she would busy herself with community charities, especially anything relating to disabilities or mental health. She was showered with awards from all over, from the USO to the Governors of the State. Governor “Kit” Bond once joked he hated to share the platform with her because she got all the attention. On July 25, 1973 the town of Clinton proclaimed the date to be Jane Froman Day and it was part of the twenty-fifth annual Henry County Fair. Jane attended and it was the first time she had been to the town since 1936. In 1976 the town designated her childhood home as a historical site with a marker placed to identify it.
She continued to have health issues and on April 22, 1980, when she did not answer the phone, her husband Rowland rushed home to find her dead in bed from cardiac arrest. She was buried in Columbia Cemetery with her gold cross necklace, the only thing she saved from her tragic plane crash. She had worn it all her life, never taking it off. She had written once in her journal: “Home now, home forever, thank God for giving me the wisdom to find my way when it was time to go home.”
Jane Froman is one of the few celebrities to have more than one star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She has one for radio, one for recordings and one for television. All three were placed when the walk opened in February, 1960.
From age five she battled stuttering and at age thirty-six survived the plane crash and all its debilitating injuries. Either of these would have kept a lesser person from living the life of humanity and gallantry and fighting her way back to a career she might have lost in 1943. She was a courageous woman with a song in her heart. Clinton, Missouri should be proud of its songbird.
