[2] Nan Halperin married the songwriter and vaudeville producer William Barr Friedlander, who composed all the songs she used in her act.

[1] At one time she was the soubrette in Freidlander's musical comedy company playing Forty-five Minutes from Broadway while Jean Weil (mother of the future film director Henry Hathaway) was the prime donna.

[6] In 1916 Halperin began to perform a burlesque "song cycle" in which she depicted the five stages of girlhood, including a child, a bridesmaid and a "blasé divorcée.

"[1] In 1919 she began to perform a song cycle where she acted as a reluctant debutante whose parents make her wear "too many swell clothes … all to catch just one lone man."

[2] Between 13 April and 1 July 1922 Halperin headlined with Eddie Cantor, J. Harold Murray and Lew Hearn in the revue Make It Snappy, which ran for about 90 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway.

On 6 July 1922 she opened with Lew Hearn, Georgie Price and Valeska Suratt in the revue Spice of 1922, also at the Winter Garden.

[5] Halperin starred in the musical farce Little Jessie James, which opened on 15 August 1923 at the Longacre Theatre in New York.

[7] In this show Halperin and Jay Velie introduced the song I Love You by Harlan Thompson and Harry Archer.

She also regularly spoke and sang on radio, where she enacted famous historical women from Lucrezia Borgia to Martha Washington.

By then, as she told the Los Angeles Examiner, vaudeville performers had to "compete with the greatest stars in the world, through talking motion pictures.