Column: Betty Boop, now Broadway bound, had many influences. One is a remarkable 1920s South Side Chicago story.

The new Broadway-bound “Boop! The Musical” imagines what might happen if the early 1930s animation film-short sensation, born at Fleischer Studios and distributed by Paramount, found herself in modern-day New York City, where she becomes a key player in mayoral politics, a loving mentor to a Boop-obsessed teenage girl and a bewitched, bothered and bewildered woman falling in first love with a jazz trumpeter.

In the musical we start, and periodically return to, the Fleischer Studios. Betty Boop is the studio’s star attraction, which is historically accurate. In “Boop!” which runs through Dec. 24 at Chicago’s CIBC Theatre in the Loop, she exists in a hermetic, black-and-white universe of fame. Her reason for being is simple: to be “whoever you want me to be” — aviatrix, cowgirl, presidential hopeful — and then move on to the next acting assignment.

But she’s lost inside. And tired of movie scenarios putting her character at sexual risk, even if her storylines rarely tip over into assault. Enough with the “flashbulbs and slobbering men,” she says. It’s time for more.

There’s a distinct element of historical critique going on in “Boop!” Beyond that, there’s a remarkable story of how Max Fleischer created the tiny, gartered flapper girl with the enormous baby head, and then cleaned up her act once the Production Code, Hollywood’s rules and regulations for what it could and couldn’t depict on screen, went into more aggressive enforcement in mid-1934.

Like every landmark cultural figure, Betty Boop was the product of many previous personae and a host of influences. Originals are like that: They have origin stories all their own, yet not entirely their own.

A key early origin story for Ms. Boop and her era-defining, amusingly demure boop-oop-a-doop, is the story of Esther Lee Jones of Chicago, born in 1918 or 1919, on the South Side. A residence at 4544 S. State St. can be found in the 1920 Chicago census. A Black couple named William and Gertrude Jones lived there, and although historical records aren’t complete, this was likely Esther’s home and her parents.

By all reports an exceptional singer, dancer and mimic, Esther went by many stage names: Little Esther. Lil’ Esther. Baby Esther. Farina’s Kid Sister, referring to Farina of the earliest, silent-era “Our Gang” shorts. Also she went by “Miniature Florence Mills,” Mills being a famous Black performer of the day, as Jones would become herself, with astonishing speed.

In Chicago, Esther Jones won a Charleston contest when she was five, maybe six. Then came a nightclub and revue career, managed by her parents. Underage, like so many performers, Esther excelled at the Black Bottom, the Charleston, impressions of Florence Mills and other performers. She developed her act and her performance skills at Bronzeville’s Sunset Club, then in musical revues in the Loop.

Under a new, white manager Lou Bolton (later fired and accused of financial exploitation by Esther’s mother), Esther became known in New York, fast, at the Everglades Club. The Cotton Club. Then, in Europe in London, Berlin, Paris. She played for royalty, including the king and queen of Sweden, and of Norway. In Stockholm, Esther ordered a glass of milk at an American-run restaurant and was refused, because she was Black. The story made the news, and soon enough the restaurant closed.

A 1929 Chicago Defender story with a Berlin dateline reported on the Wintergarten premiere of the “marvelous child artist,” rumored to be “the highest paid child artist in the world.” At her peak, Jones made $750 a week, roughly $13,000 a week today. In stunningly objectifying terms, the Defender correspondent wrote that “her physique is almost perfection itself.” Her skin: “as smooth as velvet … her leg development is astonishing, her eyes shine like black diamonds, and her smile at once makes everybody her friends.”

Variety reported in 1928: “”Lil’ Esther, child (colored) vaude performer, (sic) has been signed for a talking short by Movietone.” A year later came an MGM short, Variety reported. Both films are lost now.

Esther Jones’ intersection with the Betty Boop phenomenon is far easier to map, since it involved a trial and media coverage.

In 1932 singer Helen Kane, wide-eyed and well-known for her own boop-oop-a-doops on stage and in recordings, sued Fleischer and Paramount for “exploiting her image” with a “deliberate caricature”: Betty Boop.

Ms. Boop first appeared in a 1930 Fleischer short “Dizzy Dishes,” and watching it today gives you a pungent taste of the untamed comic universe encompassing both animated and live-action screen comedy in the so-called “pre-Code” era of 1929 through mid-1934. This was before the Catholic Legion of Decency and other nervous, powerful pressure groups exerted their influence on the studios regarding Hollywood’s lax Production Code enforcement.

Betty was a dog at first, in “Dizzy Dishes” and other shorts. Well, nearly; kind of. A dog-woman who was a nightclub singer, and who booped.

Did the Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, steal those boops from Helen Kane? No, said the courts. At the 1934 trial, Kane’s onetime manager, Lou Bolton, stated for the defense that a few years earlier, one of his biggest clients, one Esther Jones, was scatting and, if not precisely boop-oop-a-dooping, then at least “boo-did-do-doo” and “whad-da-da-da”-ing all over the place.

Bolton coached her, he said. And Bolton testified that he was there, in the audience, the night his client Helen Kane caught Jones’ New York City nightclub act. And, apparently, stole key elements of it for her own routines, in the long, undeniable American show-business tradition of brazen theft.

[ Review: ‘Boop! The Musical’ opens in Chicago with a new Broadway star, far from a cartoon ]

On the Fleischer Studios website, prominently featured under the HISTORY tab, there’s a lengthy piece on Esther Jones, framed as one of the “stories behind the stories” of the Fleischer animation heyday. Mark Fleischer, grandson of Betty Boop creator Max, serves as Fleischer Studios chairman and CEO. He has been working on a Betty Boop musical for 21 years.

In a recent interview, Fleischer told me the origins of Betty Boop may sound complex but they’re “actually very simple.” The cartoon character started out half-human, half-dog in 1930. Then she was a human, with big hoop earrings replacing her droopy doglike ears.

“She incorporated the culture of her time,” he says. “And sometimes she led it. She wasn’t inspired by a particular person but by the culture. And the culture was formed by many people, of all races and creeds, and largely by the Black community.”

Fleischer adds: “Baby Esther was, by all accounts, a remarkable and talented performer.” But, he asserts, as proven by the nearly century-old legal challenge brought by Helen Kane, she was one of many performers scatting, baby-talking and Jazz Babying around in those days.

The narrative that Esther Jones was the proto-Betty Boop, Fleischer contends, “does terrible injustice to Esther Jones because she had her own wonderful career. And it’s been eclipsed by this misinformation.” Including a pbs.org website story, exaggerating, in Fleischer’s and many others’ view, the relation between the real Jones and the fictional Boop.

In her movie prime, Betty Boop suffered her own partial eclipse, or something like it, thanks to the Production Code crackdown.

Pre-1934, Betty’s garter strap and thighs were part of her Jazz Baby image. In the 1932 film “Boop Oop A Doop,” set in a circus, Betty is sexually harassed and, by today’s legal standards, assaulted by the drooling ringleader, who at one point, slides his enormous hand up and down her leg. Rebuffed by Betty, he retorts with the line spoken by so many Depression-era, pre-Code scoundrels in positions of power: “Do you like your job?” Threatened with unemployment as a vocalist, Betty pleads with him, in song: “Please don’t take my boop oop a doop away,” the double meaning referring to both her song and her virginity.

After 1934, that sort of thing was gone. Here’s the paradox: Despite some charming exceptions later that decade, the newly sanitized world of Betty Boop became less inventive, less surprising. And less, period. It happened to a very different early ‘30s Paramount star, Mae West, similarly defanged once the Production Code entered its cleanup phase.

“I use Betty Boop as a kind of shorthand in my film studies classes,” says author and educator Katherine Fusco, associate professor of Literature and Film Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. “Basically I say: Here’s pre-Code Betty in a bikini top and bare midriff. And here she is in 1935. The neckline comes up and the hemline comes down.”

Once she left her part-dog incarnation behind in 1932 — “I don’t want to talk about that,” Betty says at one point in the “Boop!” musical — the pre-Code Boops reflected the real world behind the fantasy world, Fusco says. “She’s a working girl, as well as a flapper in all the ways that might mean. She’s sexualized, with that big baby head on top of that womanly body. She’s also working class, which is why she’s in the situations she’s in, surrounded by predators, out in the working world. Then, after 1934, she becomes a housewife. She’s no longer dating the dog (in her half-dog phase, in 1930-31) but taking care of the dog, Pudgy. So a lot changes.”

Fusco, as I do, has mixed feelings about what she calls “the rehabilitation of old objects that are just super weird. It’s a bizarre Surrealist landscape. When that goes away, and Betty’s protected from the chaotic, dangerous energies of the world, she also becomes less of a chaotic and dangerous energy source herself.”

The musical “Boop!” attempts, with up-and-down success, to make sense of all this, and to stress a message of empowerment in musicalizing animation’s first female star. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”-style, Act 1 begins with Betty on her latest film set, delivering “A Little Versatility,” staged by director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell as a solidly rousing ensemble tap number.

That early, tasty promise of a dance-driven musical fades pretty quickly, in favor of composer David Foster’s ‘80s and ‘90s-tinged power ballads. (A 16-time Grammy winner, Foster cowrote “Glory of Love,” among other hits.) The melodic style of “Boop!” will, I suspect, work like mad for some Broadway musical devotees and less like mad for others. And in a storyline where your male lead and love interest (Ainsley Anthony Melham) portrays a retro-hip jazz-devoted trumpeter, and where Betty Boop talks a lot about how much jazz means to her, the score seems defiant about going in a different direction.

Like most musicals in tryout phase, Act 2 struggles more than Act 1. Book writer Bob Martin’s plot has Betty pulling strings for the supporting characters, including the campaign strategist (Anastacia McCleskey) who’s the aunt and guardian of the teenage Betty Boop obsessive (Angelica Hale, terrific) who guides time-traveling Betty through contemporary Manhattan. As for Jasmine Amy Rogers as Betty Boop, she’s really, really good. She’s everything the show asks of her. Ideally, in rewrites, it’ll find ways to ask more.

I asked Mark Fleischer about “Boop!” coming to fruition, with various creative teams coming and going over two decades, at a time when another nostalgic cultural icon just made $1.5 billion at the box office with a story about an epically famous and sought-after female fantasy’s adventures in the real world.

“The big difference between ‘Barbie’ and Betty,” he says, “is that ‘Barbie’ needed to set the record straight. It needed to, in a sense, apologize and admit certain things. Especially anatomically.” (”Barbie” director and co-writer Greta Gerwig addresses the Mattel doll’s genital avoidance in the funniest final line in any 2023 screen comedy.)

Fleischer goes on: “I think what ‘Barbie’ accomplished was very brave, and done very smartly, with humor — which is the most important way to impart any message. But (the musical’s) Betty is not coming from an apologetic point of view. To the extent there’s any apology, it’s for the prejudices of the times. Which exist today to some extent.” The musical, Fleischer believes, captures “what is endearing about Betty. And enduring.” The show, he says, may open as early as April 2024 on Broadway. Or else next season.

Female empowerment is the message behind the musical, Fleischer says, with “Boop!” T-shirts on sale in the lobby at the CIBC Theatre reminding ticket holders: “You are capable of amazing things!”

Nearly a century ago, countless people said the same about Esther Jones. The Chicago girl became one in a long line of baby-talking vamps who played their part in popular culture. In accounts of the 1934 Helen Kane trial, Fleischer Studios and Paramount’s defense included evidence that Kane — the boop-oop-a-doop singer — was just one of many vocalists out there, scatting for their supper. The names are obscure now. The Duncan Sisters. Bonnie Poe. Margie Hines. Little Ann Little.

Peggy Vernier, “The Girl with the Baby Voice,” performed in a musical revue at the Chicago McVickers Theatre in 1926. Esther Jones was in the same show, when she was seven or eight. The McVickers, now demolished, sat a block and a half away from the Majestic, now the CIBC Theatre — the venue for “Boop!”

We do not know the whole, or even the half, of Esther Jones’ story. By some accounts, Jones’ performance years were done by 1940, when she was in her early 20s. She is rumored to have started a dance company in Harlem, and to have lived in New York City until her death in the 1980s.

There’s no determining how many separate people, real or fictional, led to what Max Fleischer dreamed up, and what Fleischer Studios animator Grim Natwick later acknowledged was a doglike woman inspired, in large part, by the widely known Helen Kane, who reportedly caught Jones’ act and started booping soon afterward.

It is not easy to read even sympathetic interviews of Jones in Black publications of the day, at least without a wince. Or without wondering how this girl experienced all she experienced, so young, across such far-flung years of success. From Baltimore’s newspaper, The Afro-American, 1931: “The phenomenal little artist … the little colored star from Chicago” — she had the world at her feet. “Petted by royalty,” one headline read.

The Esther Jones story is a thorny 20th century fairy tale, ripe for retelling as a biopic? A musical? Meantime, Betty Boop’s musical in progress awaits its next chapter of revision. The casting of Rogers, a performer of color, feels right for every reason, every skill set the role of Betty requires.

And there’s this: It’s a spiritual connection to the girl from Bronzeville who, once upon a time, won a Charleston contest and kept on dancing.

Tribune reporter Joseph Mahr and Tribune visual editor Marianne Mather contributed to this report.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune