The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show
Encyclopedia
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
from 1948 to 1954, evolved from an earlier music and comedy variety program, The Fitch Bandwagon. Singer-bandleader Phil Harris
Phil Harris
Harris and Faye married in 1941; it was a second marriage for both and lasted 54 years, until Harris's death. Harris engaged in a fistfight at the Trocadero nightclub in 1938 with RKO studio mogul Bob Stevens; the cause was reported to be over Faye after Stevens and Faye had ended a romantic...
and his wife, actress-singer Alice Faye
Alice Faye
Alice Faye was an American actress and singer, called by The New York Times "one of the few movie stars to walk away from stardom at the peak of her career." She is remembered first for her stardom at 20th Century Fox and, later, as the radio comedy partner of her husband, bandleader and comedian...
, became the earlier show's breakout stars, and the show was retooled into a full situation comedy, with Harris and Faye playing fictionalized versions of themselves as a working show business couple raising two daughters in a slightly madcap home.
Sunday stars
- Alice Faye: "Oh, Phil, are you ready?"
- Phil Harris: "Darn, you made me swallow a bobby pin!"
Harris had been a mainstay and musical director for The Jack Benny Program
The Jack Benny Program
The Jack Benny Program, starring Jack Benny, is a radio-TV comedy series that ran for more than three decades and is generally regarded as a high-water mark in 20th-century American comedy.-Cast:*Jack Benny - Himself...
; Faye had been a frequent guest on programs such as Rudy Vallée
Rudy Vallée
Rudy Vallée was an American singer, actor, bandleader, and entertainer.-Early life:Born Hubert Prior Vallée in Island Pond, Vermont, the son of Charles Alphonse and Catherine Lynch Vallée...
's. Their marriage provoked a 1941 episode of the Benny show.
In 1946, they were invited to co-host The Fitch Bandwagon, a musical variety and comedy show that had been a Sunday night fixture on NBC since 1938, featuring such orchestras as Tommy Dorsey
Tommy Dorsey
Thomas Francis "Tommy" Dorsey, Jr. was an American jazz trombonist, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader of the Big Band era. He was known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing", due to his smooth-toned trombone playing. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey...
, Jimmy Grier, Harry James
Harry James
Henry Haag “Harry” James was a trumpeter who led a jazz swing band during the Big Band Era of the 1930s and 1940s. He was especially known among musicians for his astonishing technical proficiency as well as his superior tone.-Biography:He was born in Albany, Georgia, the son of a bandleader of a...
, Freddy Martin
Freddy Martin
Frederick Alfred Martin was an American bandleader and tenor saxophonist.-Early life:Martin was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Raised largely in an orphanage and with various relatives, Martin started out playing drums, then switched to C-melody saxophone and later tenor saxophone, the latter the one...
and Jan Savitt
Jan Savitt
Jan Savitt was an American bandleader, musical arranger, and violinist....
and Harry Sosnik. In The Big Broadcast 1920-1950 Frank Buxton and Bill Owen wrote: "Even though many people thought that The Fitch Bandwagon was lucky to be sandwiched in between Jack Benny at 7pm and Edgar Bergen
Edgar Bergen
Edgar John Bergen was an American actor and radio performer, best known as a ventriloquist.-Early life:...
at 8pm on NBC, the [show] pioneered Sunday evening entertainment programming, because prior to its appearance most broadcasters felt that Sunday programming should be of a more religious or serious nature."
The growing popularity of the Harris-Faye family sketches turned the program into their own comic vehicle by 1947. When announcer Bill Foreman hailed, "Good health to all... from Rexall
Rexall
Rexall was a chain of North American drugstores, and the name of their store-branded products. The stores, having roots in the federation of United Drug Stores starting in 1902, licensed the Rexall brand name to as many as 12,000 drug stores across the United States from 1920 to 1977...
!" on October 3, 1948], The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show launched its independent life under Rexall's sponsorship with a debut storyline about the fictitious day the couple signed their sponsorship deal.
The show was a quick success and its position in that powerhouse NBC Sunday lineup didn't hurt. Playing themselves as radio and music star parents of two precocious young daughters (played by actresses Jeanine Roos and Ann Whitfield, instead of the Harrises' own young daughters), Harris refined his character from the booze-and-broads, hipster jive talker he had been on the Benny show ("Hiya, Jackson!" was his usual hail to Benny) into a slightly vain (particularly about his wavy hair and the dimpled smile that always hinted mischief) and dunderheaded husband who usually needed rescuing by Faye as his occasionally tart but always loving wife. References to his hair and vanity became a running gag.
Harris often passed wisecracks about buddy Frank Remley's taste for the spirits, a contrast to Harris' former Benny character. The show's writers, Ray Singer and Dick Chevillat, also used Faye's experience making the ill-fated film Fallen Angel
Fallen Angel (1945 film)
Fallen Angel is a 1945 black-and-white film noir directed by Otto Preminger, with cinematography by Joseph LaShelle, who had also worked with Preminger on Laura a year before. The film features Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, and Charles Bickford. It was the last film Faye made as a major...
as a source of gags, to say nothing of setting up situations in which Harris was recognized (if at all) as her husband or "Mr. Alice Faye." In the closing, Foreman said, "Alice Faye appears through the courtesy of 20th Century Fox." Gerald S. Nachman (Raised on Radio) and other radio historians believed that was a conscious jibe at the studio, since Faye's contract had been torn up when she walked out rather than abide Darryl Zanuck cutting her scenes in favor of Linda Darnell
Linda Darnell
Linda Darnell was an American film actress.Darnell was a model as a child, and progressed to theater and film acting as an adolescent. At the encouragement of her mother, she made her first film in 1939, and appeared in supporting roles in big budget films for 20th Century Fox throughout the 1940s...
.
Harris's radio character was also scripted as an occasional language and context mangler, six parts Gracie Allen
Gracie Allen
Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen , known as Gracie Allen, was an American comedian who became internationally famous as the zany partner and comic foil of husband George Burns...
and half a dozen parts Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra is a former American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager. He played almost his entire 19-year baseball career for the New York Yankees...
. ("Why, The Mikado never would have been written if Gilbert didn't have faith in Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan
Edward Vincent "Ed" Sullivan was an American entertainment writer and television host, best known as the presenter of the TV variety show The Ed Sullivan Show. The show was broadcast from 1948 to 1971 , which made it one of the longest-running variety shows in U.S...
!") The sardonic humor that laced the show was far beyond the gentility of that other show which featured a bandleader and his singing wife, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is an American sitcom, airing on ABC from October 3, 1952 to September 3, 1966, starring the real life Nelson family. After a long run on radio, the show was brought to television where it continued its success, running on both radio and TV for a couple of years...
.
"Good health to all from Rexall"
Legendary character actor Gale GordonGale Gordon
Gale Gordon was an American character actor perhaps best remembered as Lucille Ball's longtime television foil—and particularly as cantankerously combustible, tightfisted bank executive Theodore J. Mooney, on Ball's second television situation comedy, The Lucy Show...
appeared frequently as Mr. Scott, the slightly pompous and withering fictitious representative of actual sponsor Rexall. Each show was bookended by a serious Rexall commercial, narrated by a sonorous, sober-sounding "Rexall Family Druggist," played by veteran film supporting actor Griff Barnett. One running gag involved Scott's affected disdain for Harris, wondering just how he and Rexall had consented to sponsor this philistine who should have been paying Rexall to appear on the show and not the other way around. Another involved Harris's continuous misidentifications of the Rexall brand (naming the company's trademark colors as pink and purple, rather than their familiar blue and orange, for example)---when he remembered them at all.
Rexall didn't mind the jokes that referred to the company or brought the company briefly into a full scene. It didn't even mind that the Scott character himself could be seen as satirizing the company more than promoting it. This was rare in an era where sponsors didn't always enjoy being zapped on the programs they were paying to produce and sometimes were accused of influencing the content of the shows they sponsored heavy-handedly.
Rexall sponsored The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show through 1950 (then moving to rival CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
' The Amos 'n' Andy Show
Amos 'n' Andy
Amos 'n' Andy is a situation comedy set in the African-American community. It was very popular in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s on both radio and television....
that fall). After a self-sustaining period, RCA Victor picked up the show through the end of 1954. That didn't stop Gordon (who was also a regular as the vain, blowhard high school principal who bedeviled Our Miss Brooks
Our Miss Brooks
Our Miss Brooks is an American situation comedy starring Eve Arden as a sardonic high school English teacher. It began as a radio show broadcast on CBS from 1948 to 1957. When the show was adapted to television , it became one of the medium's earliest hits...
) from continuing his recurring role as Mr. Scott---this time representing RCA Victor and with the same satirical edge.
The sponsorship switch to RCA also brought the Harrises a family pet, a dog---named, naturally, Nipper, a la the familiar Jack Russell Terrier (with an ear cocked to a Victrola horn, in the famous painting "His Master's Voice"
HMV
His Master's Voice is a trademark in the music business, and for many years was the name of a large record label. The name was coined in 1899 as the title of a painting of the dog Nipper listening to a wind-up gramophone...
) that served as RCA's logo for many years. Sometimes, Harris would address the dog with a backhanded allusion to the famous painting: "Sit, boy. Listen to your master's voice."
Supporting players
Harris's character was often led into trouble by his buddy, guitarist, Remley. Frank Remley was the real name of a musician from the Jack Benny Show band, who was often the butt of references to heavy drinking, but in the fictional version played by Elliott Lewis (radio)Elliott Lewis (radio)
Elliott Lewis was active during the Golden Age of Radio as an actor, producer and director, proficient in both comedy and drama. These talents earned him the nickname "Mr Radio"....
, Remley was portrayed as a cheerful, amoral, incredibly dumb woman-chaser, essentially the kind of character Harris had played on the Benny program. "What would you do without me, Curly?" Remley might ask Harris, who would shoot right back, "The same thing you're doing with me---be a moron!"
When Benny moved his show from NBC to CBS in 1949, rights to use references to Remley went with him. However, it wasn't until the new season of the Harris show began in the fall of 1953, when the character "Frankie Remley" suddenly became the character "Elliott Lewis", possibly because the real Remley was beginning to appear in the televised Benny shows. Since the two radio shows ran consecutively, Benny at 5 p.m. Pacific Time, 8 p.m. Eastern, and Harris at 5:30, and since Harris was on both shows, and both were aired live, once Benny switched networks Harris had to run or hop in a waiting car and fight traffic for the two blocks from CBS's studios on Sunset Boulevard at Gower Street in Hollywood to the NBC studios at Sunset and Vine.
Child impersonator Walter Tetley
Walter Tetley
Walter Tetley , an American voice actor, was a child impersonator in radio's classic era, with regular roles on The Great Gildersleeve and The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, as well as continuing as a voice-over artist in animated cartoons, commercials, and spoken-word record albums...
played obnoxious delivery boy Julius, who had sarcastic one-liners for Harris and Remley and a crush on Faye---at least, until he married sponsor rep Scott's daughter. Tetley did a similar role as spunky nephew Leroy on another radio hit, The Great Gildersleeve
The Great Gildersleeve
The Great Gildersleeve , initially written by Leonard Lewis Levinson, was one of broadcast history's earliest spin-off programs. Built around Throckmorton Philharmonic Gildersleeve, a character who had been a staple on the classic radio situation comedy Fibber McGee and Molly, first Introduced to...
. Rounding out the show's usual cast were Robert North as Faye's fictitious deadbeat, humorless but somewhat down-to-earth brother, Willy. John Hubbard
John Hubbard (actor)
John Hubbard was an American television and film actor.-Career:Born in East Chicago, Indiana, Hubbard took acting lessons as a teen at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where he attracted attention and movie offers. He was signed by Paramount in 1937, but his contract was sold to MGM a year later...
appeared as Willy during the final season. The couple's two daughters, 'Baby' Alice and Phyllis, were played on radio by Jeanine Roos and Anne Whitfield.
No episode went without two music interludes, usually an upbeat or novelty number by Harris in his friendly baritone and a ballad or soft swinger by Faye in her affectionate contralto. Occasionally, they switched musical roles, Harris taking a ballad and Faye taking a hard swinger. Walter Scharf
Walter Scharf
Walter Scharf was an American film composer.Born in New York, he was the son of Yiddish theatre comic Bessie Zwerling...
was the program's musical director.
Though their on-air personae were that of a stumbling husband whose wife sometimes wanted to throw up her hands every time she had to rescue him from himself, Harris and Faye's genuine love for each other was evident on the show. Harris often rewrote song lyrics to work in a reference to Faye. Their marriage, a second for both, lasted 54 years until Harris's 1995 death.
Co-writer Ray Singer told Nachman that he and his partner Dick Chevillat thought they had a "writer's paradise" working for Harris and Faye: "Phil was the kind of guy who loved living, and didn't want to be bothered with work or anything else. He left us alone. We never had to report to him. He never knew what was gonna happen. And it was left in our hands. It spoiled us for everybody else."
Harris and Faye stayed with NBC rather than succumb to the CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
talent raids of the late 1940s that began when Benny was lured to CBS and took a few NBC stars (including George Burns
George Burns
George Burns , born Nathan Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor, and writer.He was one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, film, radio, television and movies, with and without his wife, Gracie Allen. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became...
and Gracie Allen
Gracie Allen
Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen , known as Gracie Allen, was an American comedian who became internationally famous as the zany partner and comic foil of husband George Burns...
) with him. NBC offered the couple (as well as Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it...
) a lucrative new deal to stay, though occasionally Harris would allude to Benny's network switch on the Harris-Faye show. (Typically, Harris would crack an odd joke and then say, "I gotta give this one to Jackson! It might bring him back to NBC.") Despite the network conflict and a grueling schedule, Harris continued to appear on Benny's show through 1952.
While several radio programs were being transferred to television during the show's lifetime, one episode ("The Television Test") comically exaggerated how terribly the audience would receive Phil on the small screen:
- Producer 1-"Do you think it's wise to let the public see what Harris looks like?"
- Producer 2-"Oh, he doesn't look that bad."
Harris and Faye were not averse to appearing on radio outside their comic personae. At the height of their radio show's popularity, the couple made a memorable appearance on the CBS mystery hit, Suspense
Suspense
Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead-up to a big event or dramatic...
, in a 1951 episode called "Death on My Hands." This performance was something of a family affair: Elliott Lewis was also the main director of Suspense during this period. The title alluded to an accidental shooting local people assumed to be murder. Harris played a touring bandleader playing a high school dance and accosted back at his hotel by an autograph-seeking girl. As she reached for a photo in an open suitcase, the suitcase fell to the floor, and a pistol inside discharged, shooting her to death and provoking a local lynch mob. Before the dance, he'd bumped into Faye as his former band singer; after the dance, she sought to help him convince the town of the truth.
Harris and Faye also did the occasional stage tour during their radio years, including a tour with Jack Benny in the early 1950s. Nachman and other old-time radio chroniclers have noted the couple shied from television mostly because the pace and complexities of working the new medium would have been too time consuming; radio allowed them, in effect, to work part-time while raising their children full-time.
Just wild about Harry
When Harris and his band were invited to perform at President Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States . As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice president and the 34th Vice President of the United States , he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his...
's inaugural in January 1949, the Harris-Faye writers scripted a playful show in which Harris the character steamed over a lack of invitation to the Inaugural Ball. He wasn't exactly thrilled to hear his wife warbling a Truman-friendly version of "I'm Just Wild About Harry," either. But at the show's end, Harris--who often shed his radio character to speak soberly promoting worthy causes (such as Big Brothers of America, which he saluted at the end of a 1950 show)--spoke humbly about how honored he was to have received the actual invitation, inviting the show's full cast and crew to join him for the festivities.
Well-written and cleverly delivered, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show may have been somewhat ahead of its time for the sardonic side of family life on the air.
Sources
- Jack Benny and Joan Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story (New York: Warner Books, 1990.)
- Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast 1920-1950. (New York: Avon, 1970.)
- Leonard Maltin, The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age (New York: Dutton/Penguin, 1997).
- Gerald S. Nachman, Raised on Radio. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.)
- Arthur Frank Wertheim, Radio Comedy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).