Sybil Bruncheon's Hollywood's Hysterical Histories... Theresa "Tootie" Smith...
/As a very young child, Theresa Smith (born to Alonzo and Anna Smith of St. Louis, Missouri, and nicknamed "Tootie"), began her career singing and dancing even in the cradle. Her first public performances were for friends and neighbors of her family often for holiday occasions where she would team up with her siblings doing impressions and various Vaudeville songs about exotic places or disreputable persons involved in piracy, white slavery, bootlegging, and even cannibalism.
Though seemingly humorous, there were dark undertones to these little showlettes, and frequently little Tootie would end up in some sort of altercation or violence, often in alleyways behind a theatre... or her nursery school. At the tender age of 7 she almost wed an indigent character actor from a local dinner theatre before her parents (usually absent and uninterested) interceded with local authorities to stop the marriage ceremony literally at the altar just before the groom could say, "I do!"... Little Tootie then descended into a bizarre nether-world of carny-shows and cult-films and political scandal... before she finally disappeared from all respectable society.
(Top row L to R: 1) Little Tootie singing with her older sister Esther whom she later hooked on heroin and marijuana and abandoned in a Women's House of Detention. Her brother Lon is seen accompanying the girls on his banjo. He was later drugged, abducted, and sold into white slavery by Tootie's 3rd grade boyfriend, possibly to Arabia, Madagascar, or somewhere in Akron. The banjo was never found. 2) Tootie at the age of 5 rescued by police from her agent (pimp?) after being robbed of her night's salary at Bluestein's Bimbo & Burlesqueerie in Poka-Ma-Hola, Arkansas. 3) Tootie with her almost husband, Edward "Big Ned" Bunsterston seen in this photo just after she pinched his bottom. 4) Tootie photographed with her doll/ventriloquist dummy Madame Shahtzi, a German fraulein known for her suggestive cabaret songs and off-color limericks about sailors and long voyages at sea without women-folk. Bottom row L to R: 5) Tootie with Mr. Ruffski, one of many animals from the local pound that she did cult-films with as the only human in the cast. Eventually church authorities interceded, and many of the animals were rescued to good and loving homes. 6) Tootie at the birthday celebration for the MGM studios. She was told by the secretary to LB Mayer, that if she would wait in his office, he might come by with a piece of cake and she could sit on his lap! 7) Tootie broadcasting as Wee Tootsen Stroodlehoff, the Nurnberg Nightingale, during World War I when she may have been a double-agent for the Kaiser. 8) Tootie reduced to being a hobo when she returned to the United States and was only partially cleared of sedition charges. 9) A photo taken in the 1940s of acclaimed Dr. Mary Edwards Walker... or a stage magician named The Magnificent Mr. Majooski, either of whom may or may not be Tootie disguised to conceal her true identity.)
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