The Scoop on a Boop

Mae Questel wasn’t the only woman to voice Betty Boop and Olive Oyl for Max Fleischer, but she’s certainly the best known and, no doubt, best loved. But there was someone else, someone who provided Boop-like voices for Van Beuren cartoons as well.

She was Margie Hines.

For a time, she was also Mrs. Popeye. She married the swab who voiced the character, Jack Mercer.

Margaret Louise Hines was born in Queens, New York on October 15, 1909 to Andrew and Cecilia M. Hines. The 1930 U.S. Census lists her occupation as “singer, theatrical.” She had appeared on radio on WMRJ in Jamaica in 1929¹, the same year she won a Helen Kane contest in Brooklyn² (Questel had won the same contest in Manhattan).

The New York Sun’s Eileen Creelman wrote about Miss Boop in its story about Paramount’s short subjects on May 22, 1933, quoting the studio’s overseer of one and two-reelers, Lou Diamond. Margie gets a brief credit, more than she ever got on screen. Notice at the end the deference paid to a certain Mouse cartoon producer on the West Coast about a feature that wouldn’t be on screens for several years.

Newsreels are of course practically a necessity in any picture house. Of the others the cartoons are still the most generally popular.
Audiences like them as much if not more than ever, and producers are pleased because a six-minute cartoon can chop three minutes off the program length of a nine-minute one-reeler. That three minutes repeated several times a day can make quite a difference in the overtime salaries of the theater employees.
That little routine business fact has nothing to do with moviegoers' delight in the antics of Betty Boop and her pen-and-ink friends. Max and Dave Fleischer, veterans of the animated cartoon business, and two brothers are responsible for Betty. She is, Mr. Diamond explains with justifiable pride, the first human figure ever to make a hit with cartoon fans.
"There have been lots of other human figures," said Mr. Diamond, "'Mutt and Jeff and 'Bringing Up Father' among them. They always liked the animals better. Then we made Betty. We didn't think she was anything particular at first, just another novelty."
Her first film ran at the Rivoli. Miss Boop ran out on the screen, bowed and threw a kiss to the audience. To her creators' amazement, the audience replied with a hearty round of applause.
"Then we knew we had something." Mr. Diamond continued. "A cartoon figure that was clapped just for making a bow."
Betty, oddly enough, didn't start off as the pert little flapper she is now. She was drawn originally as a cat [sic], a cat with ears, tail and a kittenish voice. Then the animators began experimenting, subduing the ears a bit, touching up the face, dropping the tail and ears entirely at last, and leaving only the round bright-eyed face. The feline personality called for a childish voice. Marjorie Hines, the first Betty Boop, was succeeded later by May Questel. There is now still a third Betty. All three have sung on the radio under the cartoon name, and no one seems to have noticed the difference.
For all that, Helen Kane is now bringing legal complaint that the cartoon is a burlesque of her. Mr. Diamond seems more amused than worried by the suit.... Novelty, of course, is the great problem of short subject producing. Many a good idea is good only once. And there must be so many new short subjects each season. Mr. Diamond is amused by the idea of a "Betty Boop in Blunderland," carefully named so that it will not interfere with the West Coast feature, "Alice in Wonderland."

To me, Betty looks more doggish than cat-like in Dizzy Dishes. To add to the confusion, Variety called Bimbo “a mouse waiter.”³ So much for the drawings being “clear and effective,” as the trade paper proclaimed.

Diamond referred to the lawsuit by Helen Kane, who basically claimed Paramount and the Fleischer studio stole her persona, affecting her ability to work. Hines, Questel and Bonnie Poe, the other Boop voicer, all showed up in court to watch Kane lose her case; there is an Associated Press photo of them together in an old post on this blog. Hines testified “she won a preliminary contest before she ever heard Miss Kane.”⁴

As for Hines herself, here’s an unbylined story from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of September 22, 1933 about her.

New ‘Boop-a-Dooper’ Likes the Stage But—
Marjorie (Betty) Hines, Doll-Voiced and Baby-Eyed, Doesn't Crave the Heartaches—Versatile Freeport Miss Happy in Kitchen
Usually it is the young and ambitious girl who craves fame on the stage, while the family protests.
With Marjorie Hines of Freeport the situation is reversed.
On the eve of 21, slender and shapely to the tilt of 98 pounds, dark hair intriguingly curled around a tiny face, and big baby blue eyes, the young miss, who belongs to the boop-a-doop group of entertainers, says:

"Oh, I like the show business. But too many heartaches in it. Too much uncertainty."
Three years-ago the talented Freeport girl who can boop-a-doop with the best of the doll-voiced boop-a-doopers sprang overnight from the family fireside to a place behind the footlights by winning a Helen Kane imitation contest at a local cinema cathedral. She had entered, nervous and. hesitant, only at the urging of her mother and uncle.
Today her family still urge her to take advantage of the opportunities that come her way.
And Miss Hines, still heeding them, continues in the theatrical business, with decided leanings to the movies, radio and phonograph recording. And, between auditions and appearances is happy cooking in the family kitchen at 75 N. Bayview Ave. and, every Monday night, playing bridge with friends in Freeport.
Her talent at the type of singing made famous by the chubby Helen won Miss Hines after the dontest a chance to create the voice of Betty Boop of the movies.
She was the original of Betty, who, in turn, was the original femme in movie cartoons. After that she did a series called Aesop's Fables, imitating goldfish, a cat's meow or, as she said, “most anything they wanted me to.”
Freeport calls her "Betty" because of the character she played.
A boy friend? In love? Marriage?
To the first question, she admitted "Yes." To the others she responded with blushes and silence, though later she confessed that sometimes she thinks marriage and domesticity better than a career.

Why was she dropped as Betty? It couldn’t have been because Fleischer was dissatisfied with her work; the studio hired her once to replace Questel as their female voice artist after the studio moved to Miami in 1938. It could very well be her career got in the way. Variety reported on Feb. 25, 1931 that she was on her way to Omaha for a vaudeville show. She toured with bands for a time; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of Jan. 8, 1934 reported:

Perhaps you’ve heard her with Gus Arnheim and Huston Ray ... If not, and you go to the movies, we’re sure you’ve heard her as the voice behind those Betty Boop flicker cartoons ... That’s the way Marjorie started her career ... since then she has been many things; a baby’s cry, the voice of a gold fish, a cat’s meow! ... And now a featured orchestra singer ... The voice you have often heard in the movies as the birds and bees flitted across the screen is also a cute radio vote.

Hines married Mercer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on March 3, 1939. By now she was voicing Olive Oyl (Betty had been retired by the studio) though her version brought to mind Zasu Pitts more than anyone else. What happened to her after that is pretty much a mystery, at least judging by the popular press. Paramount took over the Fleischer studio, downsized it (it wasn’t in the animated features business any more) and moved it back to New York City. Mae Questel was Olive again.

Two more notes about Hines:

She appeared in the 1932 Vitaphone short The Perfect Suitor starring comedian Benny Rubin. The Variety review of March 22nd that year says “Girl played feebly by Marjorie Hines.” She got a better notice from the paper on December 20th when it revealed: “Larry Cowan, for RKO, has arranged for a personal appearance of Marjorie Hines, the unseen voice of Aesop’s Fables, in connection with a Christmas party at the 86th, New York, for 100 crippled orphans who are to be guests of the house Saturday (24).” RKO released Van Beuren’s Fables cartoon. Hines appeared in a Van Beuren live-action short in 1933 called The Strange Case of Hennessy starring Cliff Edwards, who cartoon fans know as the voice of Jiminy Cricket. The same year, she showed up in a Vitaphone musical short starring composer Harry Warren at a piano playing a medley of his hits, with Hines singing along to some of them.

And to your right, you see a Variety story from Nov. 17, 1931. Whether Margaret Hines is the same as Margie/Marjorie Hines, I don’t know. But it seems appropriate for men to shower the voice of Betty Boop with fineries. It might even make a nice cartoon plot.

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1 NY Herald Tribune, May 23, 1929, pg. 25^↩
2 Variety, Dec. 25, 1929, pg. 34^↩
3 Variety, July 30, 1930, pg. 19^↩
4 United Press story, May 2, 1934^↩