Boop, Bluebell and Barbra

It sounds like something in a late-‘50s Paramount cartoon—Olive Oyl as the entertainment director of a seaside resort in New Jersey. The cartoon almost writes itself, right down the last “doouuung!” of Popeye swallowing spinach as a Win Sharples cue is dragged out for the umpteenth time.

But the scenario is true. In a manner of speaking.

In between voicing cartoons and making the rounds of radio and TV shows in New York, the voice of Olive found work at a resort.

The year was 1952 and Mae Questel had been around show biz for two decades. And, as we learn from the Asbury Park Press of July 13, 1952, she seemed busier than ever. Unfortunately for her, not only was radio dying, a lot of television production would migrate from New York to the West Coast with the long-waited installation of the coaxial cable. Questel had inherited radio roles along the way. Betty Garde was the original Hortense on the Morgan show (opposite Arnold Stang) and Shirley Booth was the first of more than a half-dozen Miss Duffys. But both roles were done now, so an entertainment side gig came in handy.

She’s Heard But Not Seen on TV Screen
The Original Betty Boop Is Girl of Many Voices In Films, TV
By Jean Smits
Do you listen to the radio? watch television? go to the movies? Then the chances are you've heard the voice of Mae Questel, director of activities at the Hollywood Hotel, Long Branch. But you've probably never seen her. "I'm heard but never seen," says Miss Questel—just the reverse of the old adage. Miss Questel is the "voice" of Paramount Studio cartoon characters: Little Lulu, Oliveoil [sic], Little Audrey, Casper and the Friendly Ghost [sic], and Betty Boop. She also does TV commercials for Duz, Fab, Ivory Snow (she's the voice of the snow man[)], Colgate's Dental Cream, Clark's candy bar, Scotch tape. "Whenever they want something odd, unusual, or weird, they call on me."
Radio listeners have [heard] Miss Questel as Miss Duffy on "Duffy's Tavern" and "Hortense" of Hortense and Gerard on the Henry Morgan Show. She's also played on the "True Story," "Mr. and Mrs. North," "Perry Mason," and "The Goldbergs" shows.
There's one exception to the heard-but-never-seen rule. Miss Questel recently made a series of television movies with Melvyn Douglas. These are currently on view as the "Hollywood Off-Beat" mystery program every Thursday at 8 P.M. on Channel 7.
Making a movie cartoon is "a piecemeal job," Miss Questel confesses. All the work is done in the Paramount studios in New York City. "In fact," laughs Miss Questel, "the only time I've ever been to Hollywood is this summer"—referring to her job at the West End resort hotel. A cartoon gets under way when a rough draft of a script has been prepared. Miss Questel's job is tops on the agenda, for the pictures aren't drawn until the voices have been recorded. Last of all come sound effects and music. Paramount employs 250 cartoonists, Miss Questel affirms. Yet the output is only about three cartoon shorts a month. That is because each of the thousands of shots in a cartoon must be drawn as a separate picture. Complicated as this business is, it used to be even tougher, Miss Questel will tell you. When the animated cartoon business began, it was customary to draw the picture first, dub the voices in after wards. This meant the actors had to keep an eagle eye on a "beater" to synchronize their words with the movements of the cartoon characters’ lips.
Miss Questel likes her behind-the-scenes acting a lot better than what is called "legitimate dramatic work. She confesses that she was in a Broadway play once. It was called "Doctor Social" and lasted exactly one week at the Booth theater.
She likes to tell about the movies she made with crooner Rudy Vallee. That was before "Betty Boop's" time. Miss Questel played a character called "Betty Coed."
Miss Questel herself was the model for Betty Boop, she reports. The cartoon character mimics her own gestures; "Betty's" fare is a caricature of Miss Questel's.
After the summer season at the Hollywood—where she serves as entertainer, mistress of ceremonies in the Hollywood Shell Room, and manager of guest relations—she will head back to New York City and Paramount studios.
She is also planning an “Appearance”—purely vocal, as usual—on a new television show in the fall. It's called "Baby Talk." Miss Questel and Madelyn Pierce have already made television movies for the new show, Miss Questel reports.
TV movies are the coming thing, she feels. It's easier, more convenient for the actors. "Fluffs"— missed cues, or forgotten lines—can be done over again, so that the program the viewer finally sees is a smoother, more finished job.

Jump ahead 25 years and Questel had been cast as a character in the lucrative world of TV commercials for Scott Towels. She found film work, too (later with Woody Allen), though theatrical cartoons were a thing of the past (she was hired to reprise Betty Boop in Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988).

Here’s a syndicated feature story from August 25, 1978. The animation research in this story, for 1978, is very good.

In her stage show, and in one cartoon, Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame (1934), Questel's Betty impersonated Paramount star Maurice Chevalier. Was Chevalier really a womaniser? Questel can tell you about that.

Still a Bopper
The Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl Continues
By PATRICIA SIMMONS
Washington Star
WASHINGTON — Betty Boop, the mini-skirted cartoon cutie of the ‘30s, that unforgettable girl with the garter, is alive and well.
Her real name is Mae Questel and there’s still a Betty Boop sparkle in the voice. That she’s amply curved and slightly graying these days doesn’t appear to bother Questel a boop-a-doop spitcurl’s worth.
As Aunt Bluebell, the television commercial lady who hawks paper towels, Questel gets a kick out of being recognized by her paper towel fans. "They wave at me. Even in the middle of traffic they want to know ‘Is it really heavier?’”
Questel hands it right back, with a wave and a smile. “Weigh it for yourself, honey!” calls movie and stage comedienne Questel, who even in her vaudeville days never needed a microphone to bounce her voice around New York’s Palace theater.
The many lives of Mae—besides animated queen La Boop and saucy Aunt Bluebell--include a decade of ad-libbing for Popeye’s waterspout-skinny girlfriend Olive Oyl.
"Olive Oyl reminded me of actress Zasu Pitts, so I gave her the same whining, high pitched tones,” recalls Questel. She slows down the interview to throw in a few nostalgically familiar Olive-Oyl sighs.
Her’s was also the overvoice for Max Fleischer’s Sweet Pea., the baby in “Popeye,” and Betty Boop’s cuddly dog Pudgie. It was the Boop-boop-a-doop era of the ‘30s and for most of the world it was depression time. But Questel admits that for her everything was raining dollars.
On the original RCA Victor Betty Boop label Questel was pouting to the music of “Don’t Take My Boop-a-Doop Away.” Mountains of Betty Boop fan mail poured into Paramount and Boopmania moved into the marketplace. There were Betty Boop bathing suits, cigarette cases, Betty Boop pajamas, which retailed at $1 a pair, Betty Boop pocketbooks, nail polish and jewelry. Even a five-cent Betty Boop candy bar.
Artist Grim Natwick had no idea what he was starting when he drew the first Betty Boop cartoon, taking the spit curls from popular singer Helen Kane, who was then working for Paramount. At first Natwick came up with a pair of shapely human legs for his bouncy little dog. It was only later when the dog’s long ears evolved into a pair of fetching earrings that little girl Boop was born.
The year 1932 marked one of her first big hits, "Minnie the Moocher,” in which La Boop cavorted as a princess. Several women had a go at the over-voice in the beginning, but brunette, five-foot-two Questel—“I never walked, I bounced,”— was quickly chosen by Max Fleischer as the permanent ‘Boop Queen.’ She stayed with it until the series ended in 1939.
Come 1934 and Betty Boop was hauled into court as newspaper reporters and the nation awaited the verdict. A suit brought by singer Helen Kane asked $250,000 from Max Fleischer, the Fleischer Studios and Paramount Pictures and charged that the Boop had claimed to marquee fame by stealing Kane’s vocal style.
Fleischer trotted Questel and the four girls, who first did the Boop cartoons, into court. Newspapers ate up the testimony that “boop, boop, a-doop” actually began as "ba-da in-de-do,” then slipped into “do-do-de-o-do” before finally blossoming into “boop, boop, a-doop.” Fleischer and Betty Boop won the case.
When Hayes office censors in the ‘30s decided that Betty Boop’s single black garter was suggesting more than it should, Paramount removed it, only to be deluged with fan mail reading “Put back Betty’s garter!” The Hayes office knuckled under to public pressure. Meanwhile Decca sold two million records featuring Questel’s Betty Boop voice doing Shirley Temple’s hit, “On the Good Ship Lolly Pop” and on the back a recitation called “I’ve Got A Pain in My Sawdust.” Questel also knocked out 70 records for Decca plus "a bunch of ‘Olive Oyl’ ones” for Columbia. And in 1934 a syndicated Betty Boop comic strip bowed.
Questel soon found her personality splitting in every direction. Little Audrey . . . the Wicked Witch in the Land of Oz . . . ‘No. 7’ orphan boy in radio’s “Green Hornet” . . . even the Dragon Lady on “Terry and the Pirates.” “I also did all the voices on CBS’s Saturday morning show, “’Winky Dink,’ like Dusty Dan and Mike McBean,” she adds. But none ever kicked up quite the same stir as La Boop.
Questel remembers that in 1933 “Popeye” made his first guest appearance in a Betty Boop cartoon entitled “Popeye the Sailor” and captured the imagination of the entire country by squeezing a ship’s mast into clothespins.
It wasn’t long before the combined popularity of Olive Oyl and Betty Boop was adding up to $500 a week for Questel. “That was a lot of money in the ‘30s,” she recalls, “and I didn’t have taxes to pay.” She signed a yearly contract with Fleischer “so it didn’t matter” how many, or how few, cartoons she turned out.
Questel pocketed a lump sum of $75,000 for “the later Popeye ones, those that are now being shown on television." There were “big dfferences” in making the early Boops and Popeyes, she explains.
“When we first started there was a bouncing ball right there on the side of the cartoon and we’d follow the ball with our words or lyrics. It took a week to make one cartoon and we had to rehearse for three days.”
By the time the final ones were turned out, she says the voice-over was done first and “animation was added to fit.” That way she could do as many as 10 cartoons in one day. She also turned out a full-length feature film with Nancy Carol and Richard Arlen plus a handful of one-reelers with Rudy Valley—Remember ‘Betty Coed Goes to College?’” she laughs.
Among Questel’s collection of Betty Boop memories there’s one she will never forget—the day Maurice Chevalier visited Paramount. He wanted to meet her and see a Boop cartoon. She and the famed Frenchman, plus a handful of Paramount brass, were ushered into the screening room and she was given the place of honor next to Chevalier. “Sitting in the dark I suddenly felt his arm around my neck. I was 20 years old at the time and I was too frozen to say a word."
When the lights went on Chevalier said: “That was delightful. I would like to take you out to dinner.”He was appearing in a show at the time and wanted her to see it.
“I told him I would be delighted to go to dinner,” Questel says, but added “he didn’t need to pick me up because my husband would do that.” Questel and her husband enjoyed Chevalier’s show. The dinner never came off.
A few years ago Questel appeared on Johnny Carson’s show to plug the movie “Funny Girl,”—in which she played Mrs. Strakosh—and brought down the house when Carson, who was intrigued that she did animals in early cartoons, asked her, “OK—how would you do a rhinoceros?” “Male or female?” Questel smiled sweetly.
Probably the only compliment that ever came close to going to Questel’s head was from Director William Wyler on the “Funny Girl” set. However, the very next day, she recalls, “he had me do a scene over 18 times. Finally, I went to him and said ‘Mr. Wyler, what am I doing that’s wrong?’ He looked at me and said ‘nothing. When I get exactly what I want, then I will print it.’ I watched Barbara Streisand do a take 33 times for Wyler without a murmur,” she says.
The only thing that bothers Questel about commercials are the mothers who ask her how to get their babies into it. You don’t do things like that, she says. "A baby should not have to work under those lights. I always tell them not to do it.”
Cartoons, movies, commercials and all vaudeville—“they’re all easy compared with doing soaps,” says Questel who played the lady who lived in the big house in NBC’s “Somerset” starring Molly Picon. “There’s nothing harder than doing a soap . . . there's no ad-libbing on a soap opera. And you tackle many more pages of script a day than in a movie."
Who else but ‘Betty Boop’ would get excited about discovering a brand new kind of show business at age 60 or more? At a recent Nostalgia Convention in Tucson, Ariz., she shared star billing with former “Tarzans”—Johnny Weismueller and Buster Crabbe—and met an old rival for the first time. "I couldn’t believe it—there he was, the man who did the voice for Donald Duck! After all those years, we finally met. And I just loved him."

Questel managed to ring in the new year in 1998. And that was about it. She died four days later at age 89.