Whether anyone at the time realised it or not, one of the biggest shots in the arm the Jack Benny radio show got was when Phil Harris was hired as the bandleader in 1936.
The programme debuted in May 1932 with George Olsen as the bandleader. Benny’s job, initially, was to provide little monologues between Olsen’s musical numbers. That quickly changed. The comedy became more prevalent, and noticed by the critics. By October, Olsen was gone; a change in networks by the sponsor left him behind. Ted Weems filled the breach, followed by Frank Black, Don Bestor and Johnny Green.
Bestor assumed the role of an intellectual and came across as somewhat drab; the cast joked about his spats. Green, a fine composer and later an Oscar-winner, was kind of a sparring partner to Benny at times, but there are comparatively few available shows featuring him to make a judgment about his character.
When Green ended up on a different Young and Rubicam show (Fred Astaire’s for Packard), Harris was hired. For the first few months, the writers decided Harris should be an antagonist, too. It didn’t work. Jack was a jerk to him and you can hear the discomfort in some of the laughter of the studio audience. However, about the same time, Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow decided to parody Western movie serials and cast Harris as the ingenue’s drunken father. Harris got laughs. Whether the writers had an epiphany, I don’t know, but Harris’ character changed course into a lady-killer (conflicting with flirtatiously-inept Benny) who enjoyed his alcohol, and maybe enjoyed himself even more, while not enjoying a command of the English language.
This new Harris was wildly popular. He was over-the-top, a pre-Dean Martin. Interestingly, he was never actually portrayed as drunk on the show. No slurring words. He would drink on occasion but mainly expounded on the life of being a party hound.
Harris left the show (accounts vary on why) at the end of the 1951-52 season. By then, he had his own radio sitcom for a number of years and was recording novelty songs. Unlike almost everyone else on radio, he doesn’t seem to have been interested in television and limited his time to guest appearances on the tube, trading on his larger-than-life Benny character.
(The placid, pleasant Bob Crosby of CBS’s
Club Fifteen had the fruitless task of replacing the brash Harris. By the end of the radio series, Crosby’s appearances were reduced and his musical stooge role was picked up either by his musicians or arranger).
Radio Stars magazine profiled Philsie in its June 1937 (at the end of his first season with Benny). A good portion of the article focuses on Phil’s first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1940. By then they had adopted a son. It also states that Harris had never heard Bert Williams sing. It seems odd, considering how much of Williams’ repertoire he used in his early years.
SWING THAT MUSIC!
There's romance back of that "swing" rhythm of Phil Harris, maestro of NBC’s Sunday night Jell-O show
By Miriam Rogers
IF you like swing music — or if you like the Jack Benny program — you know Phil Harris. He has been "swinging it" a long time — dancers have tripped the light fantastic to his catchy tunes, from New York to Hollywood. But it is his spot on the Sunday night Jell-O program that really has given him his big chance, put him at the top with dialers as well as dancers.
Somehow you expect a bandleader to be spoiled, especially when he is young, good-looking and successful, and has been labeled, rightly or otherwise, something of a Don Juan. Phil is tall, well-built, with crinkly dark hair and an effective Pepsodent smile — a "natural" for the build-up Jack Benny has given him as a ladies' man — but he is refreshingly unaffected and sincere, enthusiastic about his music, his part in the program, frankly enjoying his success but not in the least vain or complacent about it.
It was Rudy Vallee who said: "You can't go wrong with Phil Harris' orchestra."
And Jack Benny agrees, for Phil's contribution to the Benny program has been not only good music but a colorful personality, increasingly popular with the fans.
Phil grinned self-consciously when reminded of his reputation as a Great Lover. "I’ve been married ten years," he said quietly.
He is a vigorous, healthy individual, full of life and good spirits and the bubbling sort of humor that can laugh at anything, including himself. He takes Benny's ribbing merrily, blushes and laughs when Jack makes public fun of his penchant for maroon shirts and vivid ties. But he takes his part in the weekly skits seriously.
"Being with Jack Benny is an education," he explained earnestly. "He knows all there is to know about comedy, about timing, about reading lines."
And right there we have a clue to one of Phil's secret ambitions. Music has been his life since he was a youngster. Horn in Linton, Indiana, he went to Nashville, Tennessee, when a small lad and the surging rhythms of the South are in his blood. But he always has had a secret urge to be an actor, too. He has had a taste of it in the movies and once went so far as to give up his band, determined to get a part on the stage, if it was only carrying a spear. But a month without the boys, without his music, was a month of increasing mental agony and finally he could stand it no longer and sent out a wild SOS for the band. Actually he gets more out of leading his fifteen musicians than the dancers who dip and sway and hum to his catchy music.
Phil has had only two bands, the first for six years, the present group for the past three years. They are devoted to him and he to them. "It's a personal relationship," he explained. "Not just men who happen to work together, but friends. They mean a lot to me, not only as musicians but as individuals."
Phil's introduction to the movies was the making of a picture called So This Is Harris, a musical short, so artistically and effectively produced by Mark Sandrich of RKO-Radio that it won the Academy prize. Misled by the success of this, they thrust Phil, without further training, into a full length picture. At that, it was moderately successful, though Phil himself was disappointed.
"I didn't know what it was all about, hadn't the vaguest idea of technique ..."
But Phil is to have another opportunity. He was disconsolate over some tests he had made recently, but tests are notoriously bad and out of these has come a part in Paramount's Turn Off the Moon. So perhaps some day, when the night life enforced by his career has begun to pall, he may turn to acting — not in musicals, nor yet in hopes of being another Clark Gable or Robert Taylor. Phil's ambitions are along different lines; Lewis Stone, Adolphe Menjou, Jean Hersholt are the ones in whose footsteps he would like to follow. Meanwhile, a chance to read lines under the able tutelage of Jack Benny is excellent training.
His Nashville background, of course, makes him especially adapted to Southern parts. He has a deep voice, untrained but pleasant — if you have heard him sing, you know how well he does the Bert Williams sort of thing.
He never has heard Williams but his voice is very like that of the famous singer of Negro songs. Phil has a repertoire of about twenty-two of Williams' numbers.
His speaking voice has something of the same appealing quality. He reads lines well — and certainly gets a big kick out of it.
He has that zest for everything, a talent for putting his heart into what he is doing and feeling amply repaid if the crowd enjoys it. That is why he enjoyed his prolonged stay at the Palomar in Los Angeles this winter better than some of his engagements in swankier spots. Instead of the usual two weeks' engagement, Phil stayed tor four months. The dance floor can accommodate a crowd of seven thousand, and the people who dance there are not the blase, satiated Hollywood type but frankly out for a good time, there because they love dancing and appreciate a peppy orchestra. They responded heartily to Phil's music and Phil responded with equal enthusiasm to their obvious enjoyment. The result was swell music and greater fame.
Long engagements are the rule with him, apparently. He spent several years in the East, playing in various New York hotels, on the air three times a day. For seventy-eight weeks he broadcast the Melody Cruise program, for Cutex. On the West Coast, he played for three years at the St. Francis, for two at the Cocoanut Grove, in Hollywood.
But with all the demands of these engagements, interspersed as they were with shorter engagements and much traveling about the country, Phil has found time to build an enduring, happy marriage.
The girl in the case is Marcia Ralston, a beautiful girl and talented actress. She is playing now in a new movie, Call It a Day, and has so impressed the producers with her ability that the part has been added to, built up for her. She looks something like Joan Crawford and had her early dramatic training in her native Australia, where she played leading roles in stock. And she unquestionably would have progressed much further in her own career if she had not ardently believed that Phil's career and their marriage came first.
Since Phil's career made it necessary for him to travel, to be now in the East, now on the West Coast as opportunity offered. Marcia willingly kept herself free to go with him, to make a home for them wherever they might have to be.
"She always knows what to do at the right time," Phil declared earnestly. "She is not only beautiful, she's smart — too smart for me ! She gives up everything."
And so, beacuse Phil insists on it, credit goes to Marcia for their ten years of happy married life — happy in spite of much junketing around, of never having a real home, of the inevitable slighting of Marcia’s own career. Occasionally she has had a chance to work in pictures, once for six months she worked with Phil as a featured dancer. But all that is secondary, it is being together that counts.
"You must have a lot in common," I suggested, "to be so happy."
He grinned. "We get along swell, but we haven't anything in common ! We don't like the same things at all, don't even have the same tastes in food. She is English, I am American. I love horses, she is scared to death of them. She loves to read, I never open a book except when she hands me some special book — like Gone the Wind — and insists on my reading it. She likes bridge — I like ping pong! I attend to my business, she attends to hers — I think it is much better this way," he concluded simply.
And how could he help thinking so, since, for these two, it has worked out so perfectly? For, in spite of diverging interests and opposing characteristics, they have built a deeply satisfying life together. The only lack they admit is the lack of children. They've always wanted them, they still hope to have them. Not adopted, but their very own.
Meanwhile, they work and play with a full measure of enjoyment. They have many friends, mainly among musicians, music publishers and the movie and radio people. Hut they do little entertaining. Their tastes are simple, they work hard and have little time for recreation.
As far as Phil is concerned, he does not mind traveling, although he likes to think of California as home and dreams of settling down there some day. Hut traveling is as much in his blood as jazz itself, for his father was connected with tent shows, and his boyhood, except for school days, was spent touring the country.
Inevitably the smell of sawdust, the lure of the big top, was felt by the growing boy — so much so that, after a disagreement with his dad, he wrote to one of the bigger circuses asking for a job. But the card turning him down reached his father first and, alarmed at the possibilities, Mr. Harris tried to impress his young son with the hardships, the misery attendant upon a career beneath canvas. And wisely, he sought to divert Phil's interest to something else. Because he himself was a musician, music offered itself as a solution to the problem and Phil was put to mastering the fundamentals.
His first professional engagement was as a drummer, and for several years Phil drummed his way around the country with dance orchestras. It was his drumming, in fact, which led to his eventual engagement to play in Australia and thus indirectly led to his marriage.
It was at the height of the jazz craze and American bands were being taken on tour to the various parts of the globe. Because it was expensive to engage a full band, a leader who was intent on taking a band "down under" picked up representative musicians here and there, a saxophone player, a trumpeter and, of course, a drummer.
"For no particular reason he picked me," Phil explained modestly. He was glad enough to go — why not? He was young and fancy-free. He did not dream that when they returned, a year later, Mrs. Phil Harris would be traveling with them! But from the time he first saw Marcia Ralston, he knew there never would be anyone else for him.
That was ten years ago, and in spite of his varied and colorful career, his popularity in the gayest night spots in Hollywood and New York, his association with movie stars and socialites, the main theme of his life has been unbroken. It is the same Mrs. Harris who recently has been poring over blueprints, excitedly planning their new, and first, home.
They have bought seven and a half acres and set out avacado, lime and lemon trees — and when a bit of unusual weather hit southern California this winter, dumping into its sunny lap a most unexpected freeze, Phil hovered over his little trees, phoned wildly to everyone he could think of to ask for advice and help, bemoaning the fact that he had not been prepared with smudge pots. Some damage was done, but not a great deal. The temperature rose and Phil could breathe easily again!
The house is to be a rambling ranch house of brick and wood, built around a patio. From Phil's point of view, the main feature is the bachelor apartment which he decided upon in place of the more traditional and often unused den.
"It will be finished in knotty- pine, with a big fire-place — there will be twin beds and a bath, so that it will serve as a guest room when needed — and it will have gun racks. . .”
There was a faraway look in Phil's eyes. "I am crazy about guns," he admitted. "I've got every kind you can think of — I’ve carried them all over the country, at great expense, but I never get a chance to use them !" He chuckled, "I am going to have bird dogs, too – they are my favorites. And some day I may actually go hunting again — it's been over two years since I've hunted anything. I've been planning for at least two years to go into Mexico — maybe I'll get there yet!
"Musicians can't plan vacations like other people," he explained, "can't say: I’ll take a couple of weeks off next month,' for instance. For one thing, they are always afraid they might have to take a vacation!" He grinned. "And a long one, at that!"
He likes fishing, too, and riding — he used to play a little polo when he had the time. "I wasn't very good at it," he confessed, "but it's great sport. I don't have time now, of course . . .
"I don't suppose we'll even have a chance to live in our house," he sighed, "but we're having the time of our lives building it. And my mother and father will enjoy it — it will be fun when we can come back to it!"
With the ending of the Palomar engagement in January, the pressure was somewhat relieved. Phil felt the boys needed a rest and planned only occasional one-night stands in nearby towns. In June, when the Benny program closes for the summer, he expects to take his band to New York, to play in theatres in the East, opening up with Jack again in September and returning to the Coast when he does. To the Coast and to the ranch house!
There is nothing swanky about the place, it isn't being built for show, but for a home for two people who have almost, if not quite, had enough of touring, of topsy-turvy living, sleeping by day, working by night.
But if it is arduous, Phil thrives on it. And if you doubt his devotion, if you think a musician, a bandleader would make a poor husband, you may change your mind when you learn that, after playing six nights a week until the wee small hours at a night club, rehearsing Saturday and appearing Sunday on the radio program, Phil Harris makes a practice of taking his wife, not to the theatre or to the movies or to spend a quiet hour with some friends, but to some bright spot for music and dancing, every Sunday night after the program.
"It is our weekly date." he smiled.
"You must like dancing," I commented.
"Like it? How could I like it? I get fed up just watching it!" But he grinned again, a shy, shamefaced grin, almost as if he were embarrassed. "It's the only chance Marcia has to get out, as a rule, the only time we can go together — and after sitting around the house or working in the studio, she needs a change."
So, after all, the giving isn't all on one side. However different they are in non-essentials, they are alike in this, that nothing is more important to either than the other's happiness, than their mutual understanding and the permanence of their marriage.
