Before Stormy Daniels, there was Canned Peaches

Stormy Daniels wasn’t the first controversial performer to have a Pittsburgh gig canceled before taking the stage here. Daniels is a former adult film star and outspoken Donald Trump critic. Frances “Peaches” Browning was a Prohibition-era child bride and tabloid sensation. In 1927, Frances was supposed to appear at the Flotilla Club, a Pittsburgh nightclub moored in the Monongahela River at the foot of Wood St.

Frances Heenan was a 15-year-old school dropout in 1926 when she married Edward Browning, a 51-year-old millionaire real estate investor. Their whirlwind courtship, marriage, and messy breakup took place in the span of seven months. Newspapers around the country reported on the salacious details that included allegations of pedophilia, gold-digging, and a bedroom goose — the honking kind.

Edward Browning was known as the “Cinderella Daddy” for his sensational attempts to adopt young girls. Browning’s first wife, Adele, ran away to Paris in 1923 with her dentist. They had adopted two daughters. Edward and Adele each kept custody of one after a highly publicized divorce. 

In 1925, Browning wanted a companion for the daughter who remained with him. He placed ads in New York newspapers seeking a “pretty, refined girl, about 14 years old.” The response was enthusiastic: would-be donor parents deluged Browning with more than 1,000 offers to allow him to adopt their daughters. He picked one girl, but learned soon after the adoption that she was much older (and more worldly) than her parents had claimed, and the adoption was annulled.

In 1926, Browning sponsored a high school sorority that held dances in New York City hotels. He met Heenan at one of the dances. The pair began dating and, three weeks later, were engaged. To thwart efforts to prevent the marriage, the couple secretly married in a suburban county north of New York City.

Browning gave Heenan a nickname: Peaches. The press dubbed them “Peaches and Daddy,” and eager readers developed an insatiable appetite for the couple’s exploits. Later writers have described the salacious, sensationalized reporting as a low point in journalism’s history.

The Peaches-and-Daddy combo quickly soured. Six months after their marriage, Frances packed her things and left their suburban home, and Edward filed for divorce. Unlike Pennsylvania, which has the nation’s oldest divorce law, the best that Browning could do under New York law was secure a legal separation without any requirement to pay alimony.

After a New York judge declared that Frances had abandoned Edward and that she wasn’t entitled to any of his wealth, she decamped to Bermuda for some badly needed rest. Uncharacteristically, she declined to speak with reporters about the trip. The nation was grateful. “Peaches Browning refused to be interviewed on her return from Bermuda,” one Indiana newspaper reported. “The public owes her its thanks.”

After her vacation,Frances hired a manager and hit the vaudeville circuit. The Pittsburgh gig was one of several booked nationwide in the spring of 1927.

The Flotilla Club already had achieved a degree of local infamy by the time that owner, Charles Lazaro, announced that he had booked Frances for a brief gig as a hostess and dancer. The floating nightclub began its life in 1923 as Bongiovanni’s Floating Palace. Bongiovanni, who also owned the Nixon restaurant downtown and a McCandless Township roadhouse, lost everything in a 1925 bankruptcy. Lazaro and his brother John bought the floating nightclub and renamed it the Flotilla Club. 

Along with the business, the Lazaros also got the regular raids and attempts by the City of Pittsburgh to sink it — the nightclub, not the boat — that had plagued Bongiovanni.  Morality-minded reformers pounced in March 1927 after Charles Lazaro announced he had booked Frances.

The booking lasted a New York minute — nine hours — and Charles Lazaro didn’t even get a chance to place ads in local newspapers. The day before the news broke in Pittsburgh newspapers that the Flotilla Club wouldn’t be having Frances on its performance menu, the The Pittsburgh Press reported that the Boston city council had blocked an appearance there and that aldermen in Chicago were on the verge of voting to prevent her from appearing there.

The Flotilla Club gig would have lasted a week, and Frances would have gotten $5,000. “Peaches is apparently canned,” wrote the The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A bevvy of city officials and civic and religious organization leaders told local reporters that they vigorously opposed any appearance by Frances in Pittsburgh.

“It would be detrimental to the morals of the community,” said Saul Levine of the Allegheny County PTA.

“I think that Peaches’ scheduled appearance should be stopped,” said St. Patrick’s Church pastor Rev. Dr. James Cox.

The news that city governments were putting the kibosh on Frances convinced Charles Lazaro that the negative publicity and potential problems from local law enforcement officers outweighed the potential profits from a “Peaches” appearance. “After giving the matter serious consideration, we decided her appearance here would not benefit the club,” Charles Lazaro told the Pittsburgh Post.

Frances threatened to sue the Flotilla Club, but no case was ever filed. Her April 1927 Chicago gig went on as planned. Though the club where she appeared escaped official sanction, Frances herself was arrested on disorderly conduct charges.

Newspaper headlines from Oregon to New England preserved Lazaro’s canning of Peaches. Within a couple of weeks, the kerfuffle faded from view. The Harrisburg Patriot newspaper put a lid on the whole canned Peaches episode in an April 1927 editorial. “Barred in Pittsburgh and threatened in Chicago as a night club entertainer, ‘Peaches’ Browning is finding that public sentiment knows where to draw the line on some of the proprieties,” the paper wrote. “The ‘Peaches’ experience ought to be a lesson to others who think that the morbidity of America is beyond the control of the people.”

This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2025.