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variously as “Baby Polly,” “Pretty Polly,” sometimes “Chicago Polly,” and she recited cute verses, did comic and dramatic monologues, danced with her own shadow in a Pierrot outfit, and worked in living tableaux, until she was too old to be “Baby” anything anymore and she became Babe, which, fortunately, she had the curves to merit. But she didn’t get rid of “Baby Polly” altogether; she made her into a character, a parody of a cute, lisping child who asked risqué questions and supplied her own humorous answers. Babe or Baby, the act was big-time all the way.
    When she and Frankie met in 1930, she was appearing on Forty-second Street at the Julian Eltinge Theatre in her play Lola Magee , and her star was waning. She’d been in several editions of the Follies, Ziegfeld having become intrigued with her Polly character as well as her ability to belt out a song and hit the last row in the balcony. She’d been in editions with Fields, with Will Rogers, even old Trixie Friganza. Fanny Brice had been her nemesis.
    But her current vehicle, Lola Magee , was strictly for the beer-and-pretzel trade. It had boffo laughs, but its main attractions were Babe’s husky voice, her baby-blues, and that rollicking set of curves. In a three-month period Frankie saw the show seventeen times. At that time he was working at a tango parlor on West Forty-sixth Street where you could go and get your exercise in the new imported dance craze. Of all the studs who were available as partners, Frankie was primo , and the girls used to fall over themselves getting his arm around their waist. He was a snaky dancer, smooth and elegant and completely serious about it, as though in exhibiting the subtle but sexual innuendos of the tango he were undergoing some profound metaphysical experience. It was no joke. He was crazy about dancing, he loved displaying his agility and grace—the grace of a black panther, according to some who saw him. He had a wasp waist and wore spray-on pants, so tight he couldn’t sit down, and those yellow pearl-button shoes; spats, too. The girls went cuckoo when he got his thigh in their crotch and rubbed them up until the honey dripped. Between his dancing and his gambling instinct he was pretty well set up for the life work he was already carving out for himself, and in this year of 1930 he had privately decided that a cute little trick named Mabel Osterreich from Cicero, Illinois, was just the meal ticket he was looking for. The way Frankie reasoned things, he had what she wanted, he was perfectly willing to give it to her, and he would make her what is today called a superstar. So he dumped Cora Sue Brodsky on her Brooklyn keester and went all-out for Babe.
    Always a ladies’ man, Frankie had in fact what the girls were looking for, what Cora Sue had panted after. That is to say, though relatively slight of stature, he was hung like a horse. He sometimes referred to that particular portion of his anatomy as his “pride and passion,” and was boastful of his endowment. In fact, he enjoyed showing it off, and in typical Neapolitan style he sincerely believed he was put on this earth to make the opposite sex happy. He didn’t have any name whatever at the time, except as this hot tangoist, but in his tight striped pants, his yellow shoes, his chamois vest, his Borsalino, he cut a dashing figure around Broadway, where the lights were bright.
    One day he made up his mind that he was going to treat Babe to some of his “pride and passion,” and he hiked over to the Eltinge before the matinee and flashed his personal engraved card at the stage door. The obliging doorman carried the card inside, then came back and gave him the gate. This made Frankie angry. But he was always the type of guy to make his own luck when things didn’t fall his way, so he took the bull by the horns, and in the most literal sense. One Wednesday afternoon he waited at the end of the stage-door alley until he saw Babe’s private