The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show - Supporting Players

Supporting Players

Harris's character was often led into trouble by his buddy, guitarist, Remley. Frank Remley was the real name of a musician from the Jack Benny Show band, who was often the butt of references to heavy drinking, but in the fictional version played by Elliott Lewis (radio), Remley was portrayed as a cheerful, amoral, incredibly dumb woman-chaser, essentially the kind of character Harris had played 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!"

When Benny moved his show from NBC to CBS in 1949, rights to use references to Remley went with him. However, it wasn't until the new season of the Harris show began in the fall of 1952, when the character "Frankie Remley" suddenly became the character "Elliott Lewis", possibly because the real Remley was beginning to appear in the televised Benny shows. Since the two radio shows ran consecutively, Benny at 5 p.m. Pacific Time, 8 p.m. Eastern, and Harris at 5:30, and since Harris was on both shows, and both were aired live, once Benny switched networks Harris had to run or hop in a waiting car and fight traffic for the two blocks from CBS's studios on Sunset Boulevard at Gower Street in Hollywood to the NBC studios at Sunset and Vine. In the fall of 1951, the series moved to 8 p.m. Eastern Time. During the final season, it aired on Fridays at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

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. The couple's two daughters, 'Baby' Alice and Phyllis, were played on radio by Jeanine Roos and Anne Whitfield.

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.

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. 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: 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 a 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; 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. Nachman and other old-time radio chroniclers have noted the couple shied from television mostly because the pace and complexities of working the new medium would have been too time consuming; radio allowed them, in effect, to work part-time while raising their children full-time.