Alice Faye: A Life Beyond the Silver Screen

Chapter 3: Scandals

While Alice toured the country, sang on the radio, and coped with her small share of the limelight, her friend Betty King continued to work in the chorus and began dating Alice’s brother Sonny. Alice did not approve. She loved Betty and knew how hard Betty had worked to support her mother and stepfather. Alice wanted the best for her friend, and, to her way of thinking, the best didn’t include Sonny. She loved her brother but displayed an almost ruthless pragmatism when she declared she did not want Betty to get too serious about him. “My brother isn’t making enough money,” Alice said. Betty said that Sonny suffered from arthritis from an early age, and his disability prevented him from working consistently. Sonny was not in a business of any kind, “just doing little things around to make a dollar here and there once in a while,” Betty said. She remembers Alice really putting her foot down. “Betty,” she said, “you are not going to marry my brother. He doesn’t deserve you because he can’t give you the kind of life you should have. You watch, you’re going to meet someone that’s going to be just good, keep you going, and give you a good living .” Shortly thereafter, Alice took matters into her own hands and introduced Betty to Walter Scharf. While she performed at the Embassy Club, Alice was so pleased with Walter Scharf that she had suggested he leave Helen Morgan and join Rudy Vallée’s company. She mentioned him to Vallée, and insisted Vallée 48 Scandals CHAPTER 3 come up to the club, saying, “Rudy, he’s the best pianist in the world. You’ve got to hear him.” Vallée liked Alice’s suggestion, and he hired Scharf as his principal assistant. Vallée’s sense of perfection guaranteed that the work was not easy, but Scharf recognized a good opportunity when he saw one. In addition to the exposure that came with working for someone so famous, Vallée paid his employees double the going rate for musicians at this time, a payroll that included twenty-eight musicians and thirteen entertainers . Scharf earned five hundred dollars a week with Vallée. When Alice introduced Walter to Betty King, the two hit it off immediately. Soon Alice, Betty, Walter, and Rudy were going out and about together. “We were good company,” Betty said. “We dined together quite often, especially after Walter went to work for Rudy.” Alice had briefly returned to her usual spot singing with Vallée and his group at the Hollywood Restaurant once she finished at the Embassy Club. Her newfound popularity packed in the customers for the few nights Rudy Vallée and the Connecticut Yankees continued to play there. But Vallée was already looking ahead to his next professional move. He was leaving Granlund’s Hollywood to accept a new offer from the real Hollywood . Fox Studios planned to film an adaptation of George White’s Scandals as a vehicle for perennially popular Vallée. In true workaholic fashion, Vallée intended to work on the film by day, perform with his band by night, and continue the Thursday broadcast of the Fleischmann Hour from Los Angeles. He knew his presence in southern California might exacerbate tensions in his nasty and drawn-out divorce action against Fay Webb, which was in the California courts. Webb had established legal residence there when she returned home to her father, the police chief of Santa Monica. Personal complications notwithstanding, Vallée wanted a second chance in films. His only previous foray into movies, a poorly received movie called Vagabond Lover, had left him discouraged and anxious for a chance to redeem himself as a screen actor. He accepted Fox’s offer and risked the chance of repercussions in his divorce suit with Fay Webb. SCANDALS 49 In the second week of December 1933, Alice and the rest of Vallée’s forty-person company embarked for Los Angeles. Alice recalled in 1987 that she had had no thoughts of breaking into movies. “I went along because I was singing with the band,” she said, but her memory in this case proved faulty. Vallée had arranged for her to have a small part in the film. From the time he signed his own contract, Vallée had pestered George...