Alice Faye: A Life Beyond the Silver Screen

Chapter 11: Return to Radio

As Alice forged her new life, she discovered that through Phil and his work a new niche awaited her in a medium with which she was entirely comfortable : radio. She and Phil had begun performing together on Fitch Bandwagon , sponsored by Fitch Shampoo. The program was initially conceived as a Sunday afternoon bandstand series on NBC to showcase popular music and feature newcomers in the summer months. In 1943, the show shifted its format, dropping the summer band formula and instead signing a big name for an entire season. For the two seasons between September 29, 1946, and May 23, 1948, it featured Alice and Phil and gradually evolved into what would be the Harrises’ own radio show. A family-based sitcom along the lines of Ozzie and Harriet, the Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show endured a rough start. It paralleled the real lives of the two stars, with characters such as Alice’s brother Bill, played by Robert North, and the Harris daughters, played by Jeanine Roose, who had portrayed Alice Jr. on the Jack Benny Show, and Anne Whitfield as Phyllis. The cast also included a streetwise grocery boy named Julius, played by Walter Tetley, a veteran of the long-running The Great Gildersleeve. Alice and Phil played their public selves, just as they had done on Jack Benny. But they quickly learned that the hedonistic character Phil had created for Jack Benny did not adapt well to a domestic comedy. Phil eventually fired the show’s first two writers because their jokes, based on Jack Benny’s ver193 Return to Radio CHAPTER 11 sion of Harris, skirted too close to the edge of propriety for a family show. Writers Ray Singer and Dick Chevillat succeeded them and resolved the problem to a certain extent by building up the character of Frank Remley, the left-handed guitar player in Phil’s band who accompanied Phil and Alice and the Bennys through Europe in 1948. Audiences knew Remley, who had been with Phil’s band since at least the early 1930s, through years of jibes directed at him by Jack Benny. Benny’s agent Irving Fein remembered that “Remley became so famous on the Benny radio show that when Phil Harris started his own radio program with his wife, Alice Faye, the writers created the character of his sidekick Frankie Remley. Remley had the best laugh I’ve ever heard and was even a better audience than Jack,” Fein said, referring to Jack Benny’s well-known appreciation of a good joke. The only problem was that the real Remley couldn’t play on both shows, nor was he a professional actor, so Phil cast actor Elliott Lewis in the role of Remley. Shifting the role of reprobate from Harris to Remley did not constitute a 100 percent solution, as one radio historian noted, because “as a settled-down husband and father, Harris lost some of the comic vinegar on his own show, where he was portrayed as a semi-literate stumblebum.” But it worked well enough. The character of Frank Remley, as writer Ray Singer recalled, “was the backbone of the show—he spoke for us. He became in effect Phil Harris on the Harris-Faye show—a crude, hard-drinking guy that Harris, now a family man with two young daughters, could no longer play on the air.” Together the Harris and Remley characters created by Singer and Chevillat provided a solid comedic foundation of the program. “Elliott and I were like clockwork,” Phil recalled. “It was so easy—it just used to flow.” Jeanine Roose, who portrayed Alice Jr. on the show, remembered Elliott Lewis as a “totally extroverted wild man. He and Phil would play off each other all the time, they had such good rapport , and a genuine liking for each other.” Alice, who critics agreed was pleasant enough but did not possess the comic flair of Gracie Allen or Marian Jordan (of Fibber McGee and Molly), 194 RETURN TO RADIO acted as counterpoint to the mayhem created by Harris and Remley. Her role in the program’s various situations was to introduce the voice of reason into her husband’s preposterous high jinks—and to sing. Audiences who clamored for Alice’s return to the movies could now tune in once a week and hear, if not see, their favorite star give voice to such popular standards of the day...