Morgan (Riggins), Helen

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Morgan (Riggins), Helen

Morgan (Riggins), Helen, American torch singer and actress; b. Danville, III, Aug. 2,1900; d. Chicago, III., Oct. 8, 1941. Morgan was the preeminent singer of plaintive romantic ballads in the 1920s. Though she was primarily a nightclub performer, she also appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in films, and she made popular recordings. She was best known for her stage and screen portrayal of the doomed mulatto Julie Dozier in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, in which she sang “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill.”

There are conflicting accounts of Morgan’s early years. Most biographical sources state that she was the daughter of French-Canadian parents and that her father died when she was a child. Her mother then married Thomas Morgan, a railroad fireman, and Morgan took her stepfather’s name. But Gilbert Maxwell, Morgan’s biographer, writes that Morgan’s parents were Americans of Irish descent from N.Y. state, that Thomas Morgan was Helen Morgan’s father, and that, after he deserted his pregnant wife, she found a job as a waitress in a railroad yard in Toronto, where Helen Morgan was born in October 1900. According to Maxwell, Thomas Morgan returned when his daughter was four and the family moved to Danville, III., where he again abandoned them sometime during her childhood.

In 1912, Morgan was discovered singing in the railroad yard in Danville by Chicago Daily News writer Amy Leslie, who booked her into the French Trocadero in Montreal. There she was hoisted on top of an upright piano so that she could be seen, thus beginning a trademark of her performing career. That career was briefly curtailed by the Gerry Society, which discouraged child labor, and Morgan attended high school in Chicago in 1913, after which she worked at menial jobs for a number of years. When she was 18 she returned to performing, at the Green Mill Club in Chicago. She won beauty contests as Miss Illinois and Miss Mount Royal at the 1918 Winter Sports Festival in Montreal, the latter leading to a trip to N.Y., where she studied singing with Edward Petri.

Morgan made her legitimate theatrical debut in the chorus of the hit musical Sally (N.Y., Dec. 21, 1920), produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, which ran 570 performances. After Sally closed in February 1922, she appeared at the Café Montmartre in Chicago and then returned to N.Y., where she sang at the Backstage Club. She was in the 1925 edition of the revue George White’s Scandals (N.Y., June 22,1925) and had a featured part in the 1926 edition of the revue Americana (N.Y., July 26, 1926), in which she sang “Nobody Wants Me” It was during this performance thay she was spotted by Jerome Kern, who was looking for someone to play Julie in Show Boat. That musical was delayed, however, and meanwhile Morgan reached the pinnacle of vaudeville success, playing the Palace in N.Y. in January 1927. She also signed to Brunswick Records and scored a hit in September 1927 with “A Tree in the Park” from the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical Peggy-Ann. By this time Morgan was so successful that her name was used in a succession of speakeasies—Helen Morgan’s 54th Street Club, Chez Morgan, and Helen Morgan’s Summer House—at which she appeared.

Show Boat (N.Y., Dec. 27, 1927) marked the peak of Morgan’s career. The initial production ran 572 performances on Broadway. Morgan had a double-sided record hit with her two songs from the show, “Bill” (music by Kern, lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse) and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (music by Kern, lyrics by Hammerstein). Within days of Show Boat’s opening, her prominence in the speakeasy business led to her arrest for violation of the Prohibition law; she was later cleared, but was arrested again in June 1928, to be acquitted at a jury trial in April 1929. She gave up nightclub performing for the remainder of the Prohibition era.

In May 1929, Morgan was seen in the first film version of Show Boat. She scored a hit record with “Mean to Me” (music by Fred E. Ahlert, lyrics by Roy Turk) in June. She returned to Broadway with Sweet Adeline (N.Y., Sept. 3, 1929), which had been written for her by Kern and Hammerstein, singing “Why Was I Born?” (which she recorded for a hit), “Don’t Ever Leave Me,” and “Here Am I.” Adeline ran 234 performances. Before the end of the year, Morgan had made her dramatic-film debut, starring in Applause; she also appeared in the Ziegfeld-produced film Glorifying the American Girl. Early in 1930 she had another dramatic role, as the star of the film Roadhouse Nights.

Morgan returned to vaudeville after Sweet Adeline closed, again playing the Palace in March 1930 and February 1931. In November 1930 she scored a hit with “Body and Soul” (music by John Green, lyrics by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, and Frank Eyton). She starred in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931 (N.Y., July 1, 1931), which ran 165 performances, then appeared in the first Broadway revival of Show Boat (N.Y., May 19, 1932), which ran 192 performances, followed by a North American tour that starred Morgan and played until February 1933; the show also produced one of the first cast albums ever made, featuring Morgan and Paul Robeson.

Morgan married attorney Maurice Mashke Jr. on May 15, 1933, but divorced him two years later. She returned to nightclub work in N.Y. in November 1933. In 1934 she appeared on the radio program Broadway Melodies, and in May of that year she starred in the play Memory in Los Angeles. She then made several films: she had a starring role in You Belong to Me, released in September, and featured parts in Marie Galante (November 1934), Sweet Music (February 1935), Go into Your Dance (May 1935), and Frankie and Johnny (briefly released in 1935, then given wide release in May 1936).

By the mid-1930s, Morgan’s career was becoming hampered by her alcoholism. She repeated her role as Julie in the May 1936 film version of Show Boat, her final film appearance. She was part of a national tour of George White’s Scandals during the summer and fall of 1936. In 1937 she was a regular on the Ken Murray Show radio series. She toured in vaudeville in 1939 and worked in nightclubs in N.Y. and Miami in 1940 and 1941.

Morgan married car dealer Lloyd Johnson on July 25, 1941, and in September again went on tour with George White’s Scandals. She was hospitalized after only one performance in Chicago and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 41. On April 16, 1957, CBS-TV broadcast a dramatic treatment of her life on its Playhouse 90 series, starring Polly Bergen. The Helen Morgan Story, a largely fictionalized feature film starring Ann Blyth, with her singing dubbed by Gogi Grant, followed in October, and a soundtrack album reached the charts in January 1958.