The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show: Jack Benny as Santa (NBC, 1948)
In complete contrast to his famed radio persona as a vain skinflint, Jack Benny was probably the most generous and loyal human being in the medium. And that generosity and loyalty gave Phil Harris—well established as Benny’s randy bandleader—a chance to prove that Fibber McGee & Mollywasn’t the only old-time radio show that knew how to spin off a big hit.
That Harris got the chance should have been no surprise. No one in the Benny cast had comic timing closer (some said equal to or superior) to Benny’s than Harris. And none was suited better (Dennis Day got his chance but his exercise was merely pleasant without approaching anything like greatness) to carrying his own exercise.
Harris’s air persona of a hard-drinking, hard-sarcasm, deeply vain bandleader, who could have been tried by jury for murdering the King’s English (not to mention the Queens, the Bronx, the Manhattan, the Staten Island, and just about anywhere else), must have been just begging for a shot on his own. And he got it, when he and his singing actress wife, Alice Faye, were invited to take over a venerable but moribund variety stalwart, NBC’s The Fitch Bandwagon, in 1946.
For Harris, who loved radio because he could do it effortlessly enough with two days a week work while retreating to his
Palm Springs home and touring his band now and then, after years on the touring grind before he made his bones on the Benny show, this had to have been manna. For Faye—who walked out of
Hollywood unapologetically after she felt she’d received a screwing from 20th Century Fox lord and master Darryl F. Zanuck (apparently, she fumed when promises made by Zanuck went up in flames the better to favour Linda Darnell)—radio meant remaining an entertainer with easy work, comfy money, and plenty of time for the couple to raise their two children away from the Hollywood hypocrisies and as normal as possible when Mom and Dad happen to be show business stars.
The couple became the unexpected breakout stars of The Fitch Bandwagon when their little family skits proved such a hit with listeners that they came to take over the show entirely. (Harris’s band often played on the show when they still presided over a variety program.) With a sterling cast—and, in Frank Remley (Elliott Lewis, playing the comic role of a lifetime in a long and distinguished radio career), one of the great instigators in American radio comedy, a guitarist whose real mission in life seemed to be getting his bandleader boss into one after another spot of deep trouble that usually began over a simple problem—Harris and Faye hit a gold vein they couldn’t possibly have struck had Harris remained content merely to stay Jack Benny’s bandleading nemesis.
They had Robert North as
Alice’s snooty milquetoast brother, Willie. They had the remarkable Jeanine Roos and Anne Whitfield playing their young daughters, who were obvious chips off the old sarcastic block. (Unlike Ozzie and Harriet’s precocious real-life sons, who probably had to be dragged away from the spotlight with their fingernails still attached to the bulbs, the Harrises’ real-life daughters seemed not to want to play themselves on the air.) They would have Gale Gordon as their harried sponsor’s representative, when Fitch backed away and drugmaker Rexall stepped in, which is when the show was finally renamed The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. And, they would have the irrepressible Walter Tetley—already well familiar as nephew Leroy in The Great Gildersleeve—as Julius the obnoxious delivery boy, whose determination to put out a Phil-and-Remley fire with gasoline seemed only slightly superior to his implicit, unrequited crush on
Alice.
And they had Jack Benny’s undying support. So long as Benny remained on NBC, there was no question but that Harris would continue his presence as Benny’s sotted bandleader. On his own show, however, the boozy side of the Harris air persona was toned down almost to complete sobriety and Remley became the boozehound. However, the key character traits remained intact: Harris was still incapable of passing by a mirror without stopping to adore his looks and his snappy wardrobe. And he was incapable of squirming out of any given calamity without accepting a slice of humble pie from his tart but loving wife, whose facility for withering sarcasm proved equal to his own.
Harris and Faye would have only a short time to take one further advantage of Benny’s loyalty and generosity, however. A year after the show was renamed in their honour, Benny would jump to CBS, after an NBC contract negotiation showed Benny that the network thought nothing of playing dirty to get him to play ball.
Only then did Harris have to back away from the Benny show with his own show a Sunday night hit on NBC. (Harris and Faye benefitted from the network’s bungling of Benny’s contract renewal: when Benny lured a number of his NBC pals to join him at CBS, including Burns & Allen, NBC scurried to whip out lucrative new deals to keep Harris and Faye, Fred Allen, and others on the network.) If the Benny jump did anything else, it gave Harris and Faye a chance to prove that they weren’t just riding Benny’s powerful lead-in and could (and did) pull down an audience in their own right.
Before Benny made the jump, however, he proved his loyalty to his randy bandleader in a memorable way on this Christmas classic—doing the surprising and pleasing job of playing Santa on Christmas Eve, where the Harris children want to stay up to see Santa and not Daddy in costume, not even if Daddy can sing a charming re-arrangement of “Jingle Bells” with a sweet reference to Mommy. It’s a masterpiece of understatement, both Benny’s and his protegees.
And let it be said, too, that Phil Harris and Alice Faye achieved something else you might have thought impossible: unlike a preponderance of show business unions, their marriage (a second marriage for each) endured fifty-three years, ending only when Phil Harris died of a heart attack
Announcer: Bill Forman. Music: Walter Sharp conducting the Phil Harris Orchestra. Director: Paul Phillips. Writers: Ray Singer, Dick Chevillat.
FURTHER CHANNEL SURFING . . .
The Jell-O Program Starring Jack Benny: Little Red Riding Hood (NBC, 1937)—Aside from writing Santa to demand the whereabouts of the sled he asked as a boy, and arguing with Adolphe Menjou over whose bags under whose eyes are bigger, Jack (Benny)---who thinks everyone should be a kid for Christmas---passes out gifts to the cast (Don Wilson, Phil Harris, Mary Livingstone, Kenny Baker), whom he only thinks forgot to give him a gift, before the cast contorts a Christmas story out of the famous fairy tale. Announcer: Don Wilson. Music: Phil Harris Orchestra, Kenny Baker. Writers: Al Boasberg, George Balzer, Milt Josefsberg, Sam Perrin.
Fibber McGee & Molly: Fibber Snoops for Presents in the Closet (NBC, 1944)—Likethat's a big surprise . . . as Fibber (Jim Jordan) is reminded rather rudely, when he sees a don't-even-think-about-it note from Molly (Marian Jordan) before the usual clutter comes clattering down on him. Alice Darling: Shirley Mitchell. Doc Gamble: Arthur Q. Bryan. Beulah: Marlin Hurt. Announcer: Harlow Wilcox. Music: Billy Mills Orchestra, the King's Men, and special treat Marian Jordan (as Teeny) singing the Ken Darby (of the King's Men) arrangement of "Twas the Night Before Christmas." Writer: Don Quinn.
Maxwell House Coffee Time with Burns & Allen: Gracie’s Looking For a Job (NBC, 1946)---George (Burns) has good reason to be shattered when Gracie (Allen) gets a job in a department store's glassware department for a little extra Christmas money. The Happy Postman: Mel Blanc. Additional cast: Sandra Gould, Gale Gordon, Jim Backus. Announcer: Bill Goodwin. Music: Meredith Willson and His Orchestra. Writers: Paul Henning, George Burns.
Box 13: The Sad Night (Mutual, 1948)—A child's copy book dated from 1930 finds its way to Holliday (Alan Ladd), who learns the hard way that it's going to help him find his way to a murder plot. Suzy: Sylvia Picker. Kling: Edmund McDonald. Additional cast: Lurene Tuttle, Alan Reed, Luis van Rooten, John Beal. Writer: Russell Hughes.
Candy Matson, Yukon 2-8209: Jack Frost (NBC, 1949)—A snobbish friend (Helen Klieb) now working as a classy department store advertiser bumps into Candy (Natalie Masters) at the store and asks her to find a missing Santa's helper. Burke: Lou Tobin. Liggett: John Grobert. Watson: Jack Thomas. Mallard: Henry Leff. Writer/director: Monte Masters.
