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The family moved to Detroit when she was eight, but it was still the wrong side of the tracks. "I'd do anything to escape," says Betty. "I got broody and bad. I'd dance and sing on street corners. I never did anything real wrong, but I landed in juvenile hall sometimes." At eleven she played Mae West in a school theatrical, and began doing well on amateur nights in Detroit theaters. At 14, she became a vocalist for a band of high-school boys. At 15, tired of waiting to be discovered, she packed off with some musicians to dazzle Manhattan, which refused to be dazzled. Somebody gave her the fare to get home. After that, Betty, just past her first year in high school, went to school no more.
One night in January 1938, her future finally beckoned. Bandleader Vincent Lopez, playing in Detroit and looking for a new girl singer, saw her performing in a nightclub. He gave her the job at $65 a week, and she celebrated by eating steak for the first time—at breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. But she soon began to worry tearfully that she was not getting over. Then, at dinner one night in Philadelphia, a trombonist in the band confided that she was going to be fired. Betty gulped three brandy-and-benedictines and went to the theater in the reckless conviction that she had nothing to lose.
That night the Hutton style burst upon a relatively powerless world. Between choruses of Dipsy Doodle, she began to throw her body around as if she had no further use for it. She mugged, turned somersaults, hopped on musicians' laps and pulled their hair, fought off imaginary adversaries, tore up sheet music, swung Lopez off his feet, made a flying tackle at the microphone. In a favorite metaphor, Betty says: "I murdered the people."
Lopez decided that his vocalist, whom he had first billed as Betty Jane, deserved a new name. A firm believer in numerology, he let the numbers lead him to "Hutton." "I tried to get a vibration that would make her a lot of money," he says. "It was a five-eight vibration. After that she did fine." By the time the band played Billy Rose's Casa Mañana, Betty had whipped her own vibrations into enough of a frenzy to dazzle Manhattan at last—and to make Rose caution her not to "tear down my theater."
The Dangerous Life. In her new glory as "America's No. 1 Jitterbug" ("As a matter of fact," she says, "I couldn't jitterbug"), Betty worked up to $175 a week for Lopez. Then she quit him, though their contract still entitled him to 20% of her earnings. She went into a Broadway revue, Two for the Show, and got rave reviews.