Beatrice Benaderet was born on April 4, 1906, in New York City. Her mother, Margaret (née O'Keefe), was Irish American, and her father, Samuel David Benaderet, a Turkish Sephardic emigrant, was a tobacconist who relocated the family from New York to San Francisco in 1915 after his participation in the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. The same year, he opened a smoke shop that operated for 65 years, making it the oldest such retailer in California at the time of its closure in 1980.