The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show

Alice Faye and Phil Harris were featured in 1947 NBC promotional art by Sam Berman.

The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show is an old-time radio situation comedy which ran from 1948 to 1954 on the NBC radio network. Evolving from their earlier variety show, The Fitch Bandwagon, the show starred singer-bandleader Phil Harris and his wife, actress-singer Alice Faye---both of whom proved excellent comedians---playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves as a working radio and musical couple raising two young daughters in a slightly madcap home. The program was sponsored first by the Rexall drug company and, after a period of self-sustainment, RCA Victor.

Sunday stars

Alice Faye: "Oh, Phil, are you ready?"
Phil Harris: "Darn, you made me swallow a bobby pin!"

Harris and Faye were radio veterans. 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, where she may have met her second husband Harris for the first time. (Their marriage provoked a 1941 episode of the Benny show.) The couple's combined comic talents made them the obvious breakout stars of The Fitch Bandwagon, formed originally to showcase big bands, including Harris's. When announcer Bill Foreman hailed, "Good health to all . . . from Rexall!", The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show launched its independent life under Rexall's sponsorship, with a debut plot that recalled the fictitious day the couple signed their sponsorship deal.

In short order, the show was a success, partially due to being scheduled in NBC's powerhouse Sunday night lineup (Jack Benny and Fred Allen before them, and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy following them). But The Fitch Bandwagon had already made them a Sunday night presence, well before NBC moved other shows to that night. 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's own young daughters), Harris refined his character from a booze-and-broads, hipster jive talker ("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 wavy hair and vanity became a running gag.

Harris often passed wisecracks about buddy Frank Remley's taste for the spirits, a contrast to Harris's former Benny character. The show's writers, Ray Singer and Dick Chevillat, also used Faye's experience making the ill-fated film Fallen Angel as a source of gags, to say nothing of setting up situations in which Harris was recognised (if at all) as her husband or "Mr. Alice Faye." (The show's closing credits included this from announcer Bill Forman: "Alice Faye appears through the courtesy of 20th Century Fox," which some radio historians---such as Gerald S. Nachman in Raised on Radio---believed 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 against his earlier promises.)

Harris's radio character was also scripted as an occasional language and context mangler, six parts Gracie Allen and half a dozen parts Yogi Berra. (Why, "The Mikado" never would have been written if Gilbert didn't have faith in Ed Sullivan!) The sardonic humour that laced the show was far beyond the gentility of that other show which featured a bandleader and his singing wife playing "themselves," The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

"Good mirth to all from Rexall"

Legendary character actor Gale Gordon appeared frequently as Mr. Scott, the slightly pompous and withering fictitious representative of actual sponsor Rexall ("Good health to all, from Rexall!" was the show's invariable opening; 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), making a distinctive relationship between the sponsor and the show. One of the show's running gags involved Scott's affected disdain for Harris, wondering just how on earth 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 colours as pink and purple, rather than their familiar blue and orange, for example)---when he remembered them at all.

Rexall not only didn't mind the scripts' jokes that referred to the company (mostly, without quite integrating the company more fully into a plot) or brought the company briefly into a full scene's worth of a joke, it didn't even mind that the Scott character himself could be seen as satirising 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 even stood accused of influencing the content of the shows they sponsored heavy-handedly.

Rexall sponsored The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show through 1950; after a period of self-sustaining airing, RCA Victor picked up the show through the end of its original run in 1954. That didn't stop Gordon (who was also a regular as the vain, blowhard high school principal who bedeviled Our Miss Brooks) from continuing his recurring role as Mr. Scott---this time, of course, representing RCA Victor, and with the same satirical edge as had been the case when he portrayed the fictitious Rexall rep.

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") 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 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. "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!" In due course, after Harris ceased to be Jack Benny's musical director, the Remley character was changed in name only---to Elliot.

Walter Tetley, a child impersonator (who did the same job playing spunky nephew Leroy on another radio hit, The Great Gildersleeve), played obnoxious delivery boy Julius, who had a pocketful of sarcastic one-liners for Harris and Remley and a crush on Faye---at least, until he married sponsor rep Scott's daughter. Rounding out the show's usual cast were Robert North as Faye's fictitious deadbeat, humourless, but somewhat down-to-earth brother, Willy; and, announcer Bill Foreman.

It was almost unheard of for any episode of the show to go without two music interludes, one an upbeat or novelty number by Harris in his friendly baritone, the other 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.) And 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 (the marriage, a second for both, lasted 54 years until Harris's 1995 death) showed without apology on the show; Harris often rewrote song lyrics to work in a reference to Faye.

Harris and Faye stayed with NBC rather than succumb to the CBS talent raids of the late 1940s that began when Harris's former boss, Jack Benny, was lured to CBS and took a few NBC stars (including George Burns & 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.

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--sort of. At the height of their radio show's popularity, the couple made a memorable appearance on the CBS mystery hit, Suspense, in a 1951 episode called "Death on My Hands." (This performance was something of a family affair: their regular castmate 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 an outback-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, who wandered the country for six years; 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. But by the time The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show left radio in 1954, American radio such as they had helped make memorable had very little time left to live.

Just wild about Harry

Nor were they averse to having a little fun at the expense of the President of the United States. When Harris and his band were invited to perform at President Harry S. Truman's inaugural in 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 once in a while (such as Big Brothers of America, which he saluted at the end of a 1950 show)--spoke humbly about how honoured he was to have received the actual invitation, inviting the show's full cast and crew to join him for the festivities.

The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show remains a popular find for old-time radio lovers; many if not most of its episodes stand the test of time admirably. At its best, it was one of the best written and most cleverly delivered of its genre and may have been somewhat ahead of its time for sardonic family humour.

Listen to

The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show (117 episodes)

External links

References

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).