 She later moved to Manhattan with her sisters and her mother — who seems to have remarried — when she was just 5 years old.A talented student and a gifted singer, she eventually graduated from Columbia University.She was married for a time to a police officer named Henry Simms; as it turned out, Simms was already married to someone else at the time they said "I do" in 1930; he was charged with bigamy in 1935.