Mother Wore Tights 1947

Set in turn-of-the-century Oakland, California, the teenage Myrtle McKinley Betty Grable is expected to finish high school and enroll in a San Francisco business college. Instead, she joins a traveling vaudeville troupe, where she meets and falls in love with singer-dancer Frank Burt Dan Dailey.

Frank proposes that they marry and perform on stage together, a pairing that quickly wins audiences across the circuit. Myrtle retires from show business after giving birth to daughters Iris Mona Freeman and Mikie Connie Marshall, while her husband goes on tour with another partner.

Years later, a less successful run on the road leads Frank to persuade Myrtle to return to the stage. The girls are cared for by their grandmother McKinley [Sara Allgood] and grandfather McKinley [George Cleveland] as their parents travel and are away for months at a time.

Iris and Mikie are schoolgirls when they are given a trip to Boston to see their parents. Iris meets a well-to-do young man, Bob Clarkman Robert Arthur, and is permitted to attend an exclusive boarding school there. She is embarrassed by her parents’ profession, and worried about how Bob and her new school friends will react when they learn that her parents perform nearby.

Myrtle and Frank take matters into their own hands, arranging with the school to have the entire student body attend a show. To her great relief, Iris is delighted when her classmates adore her parents’ sophisticated act.

By the time Iris finishes school and is ready to marry, she wants to go into show business herself.