Happy birthday, 1920s star Ruth Etting

It is the birthday of 1920s singer and actress Ruth Etting (1897), who was known as America's sweetheart of song. At 17, she left her small Nebraska hometown to study art in Chicago. She designed costumes at a nightclub there and then sang and danced in the chorus, and eventually became the featured vocalist. She married a gangster named Moe the Gimp, who managed her career and got her a recording contract at Columbia. Her Broadway debut was in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. She appeared in Hollywood movies in the 1930s. Doris Day, Jimmy Cagney and Cameron Mitchell made the 1955 film Love Me or Leave Me based on her life.