Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 51, No. 2, June 28, 1930

“Alibi looks on the square, Geogan says. Vince says he left Baa-Baa’s apartment at about four in the morning, after one of their merry rows. He stopped in an apartment on the ground floor, where a party was going on, and had a few drinks. Seven or eight witnesses to that. Coming back to make it up with Baa-Baa when the maid answered his ring, he says.”

Frayne nodded and tucked his racket under his arm, starting briskly for the clubhouse.

“Let’s go, Don.”

Four minutes and fifty seconds later, after having shed tennis flannels and taken a shower and changed into street garb, they were roaring through traffic in Frayne’s private roadster, that had the fastest engine made in America under its hood.

II

Baa-Baa Jackson?

You should ask, as the phrase has it.

Back in the days when Italian table d’hôte dinners, including wine, were fifty-five cents; back when drinks were two for a quarter and name your brand; back before the self-starters could always be counted on to do their stuff; back before the affair at Sarajevo that is said to have precipitated the War To End Wars — back in nineteen hundred and twelve, to be explicit — a little girl had come out of the South.

The newspapers had said she came out of the south anyway — and so did she — although two or three catty souls averred that she had been born and reared and raised up in Herkimer County. They said, furthermore, that Ike Schubel, the New York musical comedy man, had found her in the station of this same up State town. She had, they added, been serving coffee, and pie, and sandwiches from under circular glass cases, in the station restaurant.

Maybe yes; maybe no. Mr. Schubel, at least, had seen her innate possibilities. She had had a more than fair figure; she had had a voice with exactly the correct touch of throatiness; she had had, also, very large black eyes and very natural light golden hair. And that, in itself, as Mr. Schubel stated, is always something to telegraph home about.

Briefly, he hadn’t done any telegraphing. He had signed her on the spot for his next production, and he had taken his two bags from the waiting train. He had caught the next train for Tammany Town, with Baa-Baa in tow.

So the story goes, when it is told by those two or three catty people.

Her first appearance, which nobody noticed, it must be admitted, was when she went through the motions with the rest of the chorus in “Little Fleecy Lamb.”

Just how long she would have kept on kicking up her legs, in company with twenty-three others, can never be definitely ascertained.

Appendicitis was quite fashionable that season, and the second female lead came down with it. She could afford to, having recently annexed what is now known as a big butter and egg man to attend to the tedious task of seeing the landlord on the first of the month.

This little lady had been singing a song that Ike Schubel had thought would be a wow. So had the lyric man and every one else. Only it hadn’t been. That was why they hadn’t been so grieved at the outbreak of appendicitis. They could chuck the number, now, and let it go at that. One salary saved.

But the girl with the golden locks and dark orbs had pleaded to be given a tryout. Just once.

“It costs nothing,” was how Mr. Schubel had argued down the opposition. “Let her she should try it once.”

That is the true history of how “I Want to Be Somebody’s Baa-Baa Lamb” came to be the greatest song hit of the period.

No one can dope it out, for many have tried and all

have failed, yet it happens to be a fact that certain personalities have been able to put over certain things that other equally colorful personalities have flopped on completely.

Baa-Baa Jackson, from that night, was made.

She didn’t have to have appendicitis to break her contract with Ike Schubel; she merely told him to go to hell.

She had quit “Little Fleecy Lamb” for the protection of a great big wolf — one of the Wall Street variety. He had given her very pleasant pastures in which to gambol, including an imported car with a liveried driver and some rather lavish articles of jewelry. She seemed to have had a proper eye for precious stones from the start, too.

Baa-Baa, in short, had gone from one gilded cage to another, for the lady tired easily and seemed to find no difficulty whatsoever in discovering playmates who were not precisely poverty stricken. That is to say, during those first five or six years while the so-called bloom of youth still lasted.

But she didn’t seem to mind her descent in the social grade, so to speak. There were still plenty of suckers, even if they didn’t spend quite so lavishly. She wanted, as the years rolled on, a good time more than anything else. So, at least, she said. Apparently she was having one, according to her standards.