Like many performers burdened with one overwhelming association, Kane's career was actually much more diverse. She was involved with show business for much of her life, not only as a singer but also as an actress in the early-'30s Hollywood films, and a costume designer as well. Kane was a Bronx gal whose real name was Helen Schroeder. Some mildly amusing siblings known as the Marx Brothers were the ones who got her started in show business; she was 17 at the time. She began appearing in Broadway musicals in 1927, and a 1928 show entitled Good Boy was the source of the "boop-boop-be-doop," a musical request entitled I Wanna Be Loved by You, specifically. An aspect of her approach to the song, delivering it in a toddler's voice, in turn became a stylistic trademark of some of the so-called "flapper" tuneage created by singers such as Kane and Annette Hanshaw.
The character of Betty Boop evolved out of all this while Kane was a contract player at the Paramount studio, also the home of animation genius Max Fleischer. It wasn't he who first drew the character, however. The original animator, the pleasant-sounding Grim Natwick, supposedly created Betty Boop by combining attributes of Kane and a French poodle! In a 1950 film biography of I Want to Be Loved by You songwriters Kalmar Ruby, the part of Kane was played by none other than Debbie Reynolds, but it is actually Kane's voice providing the "boop-boop-be-doop." ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi