The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show was a comedy radio program which
ran on NBC from 1948 to 1954. It evolved from an earlier music and
comedy variety program, The Fitch Bandwagon. Singer-bandleader Phil
Harris and his wife, actress-singer Alice Faye, 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.
Harris had been a mainstay and musical director for The Jack
Benny Program; Faye had been a frequent guest on programs such as
Rudy 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, Jimmy
Grier, Harry James, Freddy Martin and Jan Savitt and Harry Sosnik.
The growing popularity of the Harris-Faye family sketches turned
the program into their own comic vehicle by 1947. When announcer
Bill Foreman[1] hailed, "Good health to all... from Rexall!" 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. Playing themselves as radio and
music star parents of two precocious young daughters (played by
actresses Jeanine Roos and Ann Whitfield, instead of the Harris' 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.
Legendary character actor Gale Gordon 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.
The Supporting players
Harris's character often as not found trouble because of
buddy-guitarist Frank Remley, played by Elliot Lewis, as he had done
in a lesser take on the role on the Benny show. Remley often behaved
as though his sense of proportion, logic and just plain sense was
left behind---essentially, the kind of character Harris had been 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!"
Child impersonator Walter Tetley 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. 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
appeared as Willy during the final season.
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 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
talent raids of the late 1940s that began when Benny was lured to
CBS and took a few NBC stars (including George Burns and Gracie
Allen) with him. NBC offered the couple (as well as Fred Allen) 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.
Just wild about Harry
When Harris and his band were invited to perform at President
Harry S. Truman'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.
So sit back, and laugh till your sides
hurt with The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show”. With better then 50
hours, and over 120 episodes you can laugh each and every day.
