Deane Janis

Biography

Born of Swedish-American ancestry, Nadeen Andrews was nicknamed "Deane" from a young age. As a little girl she enjoyed acting in plays with her friends, and eventually joined a local choir. In a 1936 interview she stated that - based on numerology, her high school classmates gave her the professional name "Deane Janis." Within ten years her name was seen on phonograph records, radio logs and in movie theatres. Following graduation, and while visiting an aunt in Chicago, she went to a music publisher to sample some new songs. Upon hearing the young lady sing, a company man encouraged her to get an agent, which led to a radio broadcast from a small Chicago station. Subsequently she was signed a management contract with Music Corporation of America. In the early 1930s she was a featured singer with Hal Kemp's Orchestra at the famous Blackhawk Café in Chicago, during which time Janis made Brunswick records with Kemp's popular dance orchestra. Beginning in May, 1933, her recordings helped to popularize songs such as "Remember My Forgotten Man," "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "Night Owl." During her time with the Kemp band she was heard by Al Siegel, who took her on as a vocal student. Janis was also a featured singer when Kemp made his radio appearances for the Laveena Soap Company. Also with Kemp she sang in the Madhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania, a glamorous job that furthered her career. She told an interviewer: "You see, New York meant all the things in show business that I wanted. It is the hub and the center of the profession I had chosen. I had worked hard. I had had a few good breaks of which I felt I had made the most." Her last phonograph record with Kemp was in December of 1934. In 1935 she was released from her M.C.A. contract and signed for a major CBS radio show, The Camel Caravan, with Walter O'Keefe and the Glen Gray Casa Loma Orchestra. A newspaper article claimed that "Deane Janis was selected as the Camel Caravan feminine soloist after eighty-two other girls-almost all better-known to radio-had been auditioned for this important position. Her warm, contralto voice will come to you every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:00. P.M..." It was during her Camel Caravan show that Janis was recruited by Warner Bros. to star in a film short made in the Brooklyn Vitaphone Studios. The film Roof Tops of Manhattan (1935) included Janis singing the sultry "Restless" and the melodramatic "On The Rooftops Of Manhattan." During a vacation in Los Angeles Janis was booked to sing at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel. Around this time she met a mining engineer named Howard Stanley Paschal, recently divorced from comic actress Inez Courtney. Janis had already experienced two marriages. They were married in 1936 in Santa Barbara, and Walter Winchell (who followed Janis' ascent) in his column, referred to her as "the Camel ciggie song heroine." About her marriage, Janis told a reporter, "Stanley was a success. I felt that I must be a success too." So they made many cross-country trips by train and plane while she became more famous on radio and records. Fortunately there was also work on the west coast, and in 1938 Janis made many radio transcriptions in Los Angeles with the orchestra of Frankie Trumbauer. These discs were played on stations around the country. Her rich contralto voice appealed to Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, who hired her to sing his compositions (including "There' A Small Hotel" and "Spring Is Here") on a series of orchestra recordings made for Columbia records in 1939. On the Rodgers records she shares the honors with singer Lee Sullivan. By 1940 the married couple was living with Paschal's sister at the fashionable Hampshire House apartments on Central Park South. During World War II Janis traveled overseas extensively to entertain the United States military overseas, and during the Korean War she returned to her patriotic duties. Her performing career came to end after a serious back injury. After the death of her husband Stanley, she became the wife of Charles Robert Henshaw, a fellow entertainer who went by the names Bobby Henshaw and "Uncle Uke." Widowed in 1969, Janis worked in Trinity Lutheran Hospital in Independence, Missouri, where she made her home until her passing. She was interred in Bellevue, Nebraska, nearby her parents. Her grave marker states both names: Nadeen Henshaw and, as a salute to her glamorous singing career, Deane Janis.