August 28 - Nancy Kulp

Image courtesy pinterest.com

On this day, in 1921, Nancy Jane Kulp was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The only daughter of a traveling salesman and a teacher, Nancy and her family had moved to the Miami, Florida area by her mid-teens. She graduated from the Florida State College for Women (now known as Florida State University) with a degree in journalism in 1943 and went on to the University of Miami to get a Master’s in English and French. Her academics were interrupted in 1944 when she joined the female arm of the United States Naval Reserve during World War II. She rose to the rank of lieutenant junior grade before being honorably discharged in 1946, returning to school to finish her graduate degree. Nancy married Charles Dacus in 1951 and the couple moved to Hollywood, California where she became part of the publicity department at the MGM studio.

Nancy had barely begun her job at MGM when George Cukor, director of such classics as A Star is Born and My Fair Lady, convinced her that she should be in front of a camera rather than behind a desk. Within months, she made her big screen debut in George’s 1951 comedy The Model and the Marriage Broker. Over the next few years, Nancy appeared in seven more films, mostly comedies, including two more of George’s (The Marrying Kind and A Star Is Born) as well as high profile classics like Shane and Sabrina.  Although she popped up in more than two dozen films over the course of her career, Nancy, like so many character actors of the era, didn’t really shine until she found her way onto our television sets.

Image courtesy cinema.usc.edu

Nancy made her debut on the small screen in 1954 in an episode of the anthology show Lux Video Theatre (they put the word video in there so you wouldn’t confuse it with radio version). By the following year, she was showing off her comedic talents as Pamela Livingstone, a recurring role on The Bob Cummings Show. During the next several years, she had guest appearances on dozens of shows, doing everything from I Love Lucy to Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Maverick. She again enjoyed recurring comedic roles on Our Miss Brooks and Date with the Angels (an early Betty White vehicle). And then, Nancy was lucky enough to discover some bubbling crude and cemented her place in television history.

Image courtesy metv.com

In 1962, when the producers of The Bob Cummings Show were putting together a new project, they fondly remembered working with Nancy and decided to cast her in a main role this time around. They cast her as Jane Hathaway, loyal secretary to greedy banker Milburn Drysdale and needed friend to the newly rich Clampett family, on The Beverly Hillbillies. Although technically a side character, Miss Jane appeared in nearly 90% of the shows 274 episodes and earned Nancy an Emmy nomination in 1967. She stuck with the lovelorn assistant right up until Hillbillies was abruptly cancelled in 1971, in spite of its high ratings. And she was one of only three original cast members to reprise their roles for Return of the Beverly Hillbillies, a mediocre-at-best made-for-television movie in 1981.

Image copyright Disney

Nancy has three entries in the annals of Disneyana. Her first, and most recognizable, came in 1961. She played the beleaguered Miss Grunecker, assistant to camp leader Miss Inch, in the Hayley Mills classic, The Parent Trap. A year later, she had a small role in the comedy Moon Pilot as a space flight nutritionist. Her third and final role with Disney (and her last film role altogether) required her voice only as she brought to life Frou-Frou, the horse that helps get rid of the evil butler Edgar, in The Aristocats.

Image courtesy quantumleap.fandom.com

Nancy’s career began slowing down as the Seventies rolled on. She did nab recurring roles on The Brian Keith Show and Sanford and Son, as well as several guest spots on The Love Boat, but parts were becoming fewer and farther between. In 1980, Nancy made her Broadway debut stepping into the role of Aaronetta Gibbs in the play Morning’s at Seven. She spent several months with the production, finishing the run of the show in August 1981. For the rest of the decade, she made just a handful of television appearances with her final small screen role being a nun on an episode of the classic sci-fi show Quantum Leap.

As she was contemplating the end of her acting career, Nancy decided to dabble in politics. In 1984, she ran as a Democrat for the United States House of Representatives in Pennsylvania's Ninth District, her home at the time. She knew it was a long shot (the district had voted Republican for decades) but she went for it anyways. The experience was marred when Buddy Ebsen, her old co-star from The Beverly Hillbillies, actually volunteered to campaign for her opponent. She was soundly defeated, getting only slightly over a third of the vote. It was probably the exact same outcome whether or not Buddy participated but it caused a decided rift to form between the two. Buddy later claimed to feel terrible about what he did to Nancy and they sort of made up before her death, but the damage to their relationship had definitely been done. 

Image courtesy wikipedia.com

Following her political loss, Nancy became an artist in residence for a while at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania and taught acting. She later moved to Palm Springs, California and became an active volunteer. In 1989, she admitted in an interview that she was a lesbian, sort of. Her marriage had only lasted a decade, ending a year before The Beverly Hillbillies started. When the interviewer, Boze Hadleigh, went to ask about her sexuality since then, she basically said "The question you're looking to ask is do opposites attract? My answer is that I think birds of a feather flock together." It was the late Eighties and that's about as close to coming out that most celebrities could do at the time. Nowadays, I'm pretty sure she would have been a leader in the LGBTQ community. Timing is everything.

In 1980, Nancy was diagnosed with cancer and underwent treatment for it. Unfortunately, by the beginning of the following year, the disease had spread. On February 3, 1981, it overtook her and the comedienne with the masters degree passed away in Palm Desert, California. She was only 69.

August 11 - Phil Harris

Image courtesy radioclassics.com

On this day, in 1995, Wonga Philip Harris passed away in Rancho Mirage, California. Phil, as he was known professionally, was born in Linden, Indiana on June 24, 1904. His parents were employed with a circus and he spent most of his formative years in Tennessee, which is where he picked up his signature, albeit slight, drawl. It didn’t take long for Phil to get in on the family act. His father was the Big Top’s bandleader and put his young son on drums. Phil honed his skills under the watchful eye of dear old dad until the mid-Twenties, when he packed up the old drum kit and headed west.

Phil’s first long term professional gig was in San Francisco, California. He formed an orchestra with Carol Lofner, expertly called the Lofner-Harris Orchestra, in 1928. They were actually the first band to play the famous Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California but it their reception at the St. Francis Hotel in San Fran turned into a three year contract. The Lofner-Harris Orchestra broke up in 1932 and the following year, Phil was fronting his own band at the Coconut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

At the same time Phil was getting into the swing of things in LA, he began making appearances on film. In 1933, a short comedy was made about him, sort of. He plays a (fairly) fictional version of himself, playing a few songs at the Coconut Grove and having some comedic encounters with people at a country club in between. Called So This Is Harris!, it actually won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Comedy) in 1934. He also starred in the 1933 hit Melody Cruise, the 1936 short Double or Nothing (also nominated for an Oscar) and 1939’s Man About Town with Jack Benny.

Phil broke into radio in 1936 as the musical director for The Jell-O Show starring Jack Benny (it would quickly be renamed just the Jack Benny Show). In between singing songs like his signature That’s What I Like About the South, it became evident that he was good at throwing off one-liners and he was added to the cast as well. He played a hard drinking (“I’ve never endorsed a single kind of alcohol. Wouldn’t want to slight the others.”)  but genial Southerner who had a nickname for everyone. His moniker for Jack Benny, Jackson, even entered the national conscious and became a popular slang word to call someone, along the lines of dude. Phil remained a part of Jack Benny’s show all the way until 1952.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

Phil would often credit radio with giving him the ability to stop doing tours of one-night gigs and settle down. He also said it allowed him to get married but he was talking about his second marriage, the one that lasted 54 years until his death. His first marriage of almost a dozen years fell apart near the beginning of his run with Jack Benny. Phil met his second wife, actress and singer Alice Faye, at a rehearsal for the radio show and actually got into a fistfight with someone over her (they were both married to other people at the time). Both eventually got divorced and married each other in 1941. Alice began to appear regularly on Jack Benny and the couple got their own situational comedy program, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, in 1948 that aired following Jack Benny until 1954.

Following the end of his steady radio presence (which coincided with the general decline of radio in favor of television), Phil continued to record albums and make occasional film appearances. He had a novelty hit song, The Thing, in the early Fifties. He also starred in the movie version of Anything Goes in 1956 with Bing Crosby, starting a lifelong friendship with the fellow crooner. Phil would gladly guest star on Bing’s short-lived television variety show in the Seventies and took over commentating duties for Bing’s annual Pro-Am Golf Tournament after his friend’s death. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Phil made numerous appearances on television programs including The Dean Martin Show, Burke’s Law, The Steve Allen Show and F-Troop.

Image copyright Disney

Phil burst into the world of Disneyana in a big way in the mid-Sixties. While developing The Jungle Book, Walt met Phil at a party and took a liking to him. Walt suggested that Phil be cast as the ne’er-do-well bear, Baloo, much to the shock of many in his staff who couldn’t figure out why that boozer from Jack Benny should be in a story by Rudyard Kipling. It turned out to be just another case of Walt knowing exactly what he was doing, of course. Phil, for his part, drove the producers crazy with his insistence on ad libbing many of his lines. He said the written ones didn’t feel natural enough. He was born to play the part, however, and that shines through almost every line, especially the scatting duel he has with Louie Prima on I Want to Be Like You.

The appeal of The Jungle Book (and, I suspect, a fear of not wanting to make terribly many changes in the wake of Walt’s death) led to Phil starring in two more Disney animated features in quick succession. His second turn came as Abraham Delacey Giuseppe Casey Thomas O’Malley the Alley Cat in 1970’s The Aristocats. He followed that up in 1973 as Little John in Robin Hood. As fun as the latter two roles can be at points, they both feel an awful lot like retreads of Baloo, at least to my way of thinking. But maybe that’s just because I can’t help but sense that both movies have a desperate we-can-do-this-without-the-boss undertone to them, as well. At any rate, you’d be hard pressed to say disparaging things about either performance and the trio of high profile characters should be enough to elevate Phil to Legendary status, right? Well, surprisingly, not yet, but there’s always next year.

Image copyright Disney

Phil’s last song recording happened in the mid-Seventies, his last television appearance was in 1984 on an episode of This Is Your Life and his final movie role was as the narrator in Don Bluth’s 1991 animated film Rock-A-Doodle. In addition to emceeing Bing Crosby’s charity golf event, Phil and his wife, Alice, established performing scholarships at the high school in his hometown of Linden, Indiana and were big supporters of the civic activities in Palm Springs, California. In August of 1995, the brash performer who was described as one of the quietest guys you’d ever meet in private, suffered a fatal heart attack at home. He was 91.

June 19 - Pat Buttram

Image courtesy imdb.com

On this day, in 1915, Maxwell Emmett Buttram was born in Addison, Alabama. The seventh child of a Methodist minister, Maxwell spent all of his formative years in the sultry heat of the Yellowhammer State (it’s a woodpecker and the state bird). He graduated from Mortimer Jordan High School in Morris, Alabama and rolled on into Birmingham-Southern College, intending to follow his father into ministry. Instead, in an all too familiar story, he caught the acting bug when he was cast in several productions at the college and changed his mind about what he wanted to be when he grew up.

It’s not entirely fair to blame BSC for Maxwell’s change of heart though, although they did help cement it. On a trip to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, Maxwell was selected from the crowd as a typical Southern visitor to be interviewed on radio station WLS. His comedic observations about the fair were a hit with audiences and resulted in a job offer from the network’s Birmingham affiliate. He worked at the radio station throughout his college years, changing his professional name to Pat. Following his graduation from BSC, Pat moved to Chicago and became a regular on the popular National Barn Dance program.

Image courtesy geneautry.com

In the early Forties, Pat moved again, this time out to Hollywood. At first he was put into rotation as a new sidekick to Roy Rogers. The bad part of that plan was that Roy already had two regular partners and when it was quickly determined that a third one wasn’t needed, Pat was out. The good part was that he was free to team up with Gene Autry, who had returned from doing his duty in World War II and needed a new partner. It was a match made in entertainment heaven. Pat joined Gene on his radio show, Melody Ranch, starred in more than 40 movies with him and the pair even made the transition to television together, co-starring on The Gene Autry Show for five seasons.

Following the end of Gene’s show in 1956, Pat became a popular stand-up comedian, appearing several times on The Ed Sullivan Show, spinning fictional yarns about his ‘relatives’ spread throughout the south. He was also in high demand as a toastmaster and after dinner speaker at various functions around Hollywood. His seemingly gentle lampooning of Tinsel Town’s elite kept the stars coming back for more. In 1965, Pat returned to television with a recurring role as Mr. Haney, slippery salesman extraordinaire, on Green Acres, a gig he enjoyed for six seasons.

Image copyright Disney

With his distinctive voice (he once described it as the only part of him that didn’t quite make it out of puberty), it’s no surprise that Pat did a fair amount of voice work for the Walt Disney Company. He started in 1970 as Napolean, the hound dog, in The Aristocats. He then played the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in 1973’s Robin Hood. In 1977’s The Rescuers, Pat was Luke, a resident of the bayou known for his special brews. He followed that up as Chief, another hound dog, in The Fox and the Hound in 1981. Seven years later, he showed up in a small role in Who Framed Roger Rabbit officially named Toon Bullet #1 (it’s the one with the white hat smoking a cigar). His last role with Disney (indeed his last role with anyone) was as the Possum Park MC in A Goofy Movie, released almost a year after his death.

Image courtesy theboot.com

As the calendar turned over into the Eighties, Pat’s acting career was mostly over, with just a handful of projects over the next decade and a half. Which didn’t mean he sat on the front porch drinking lemonade for the rest of his days. In 1982, he founded the Golden Boot Awards to recognize various categories of people who’d worked on Westerns throughout Hollywood’s history. The proceeds from the Golden Boots benefitted the Motion Picture Health and Welfare Fund. He was also active in politics. A lifelong Republican, he became something of a speech doctor for President Reagan, peppering the Gipper’s addresses with down home wisdom and homilies. In 1998, he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Pat remained active most of the rest of his life, until January 8, 1994, when his suffering with renal failure came to an end in Los Angeles, California. His final resting place is in his beloved state of Alabama in, of course, the chapel of a Methodist Church.

December 24 - The Aristocats

Image copyright Disney

On this day, in 1970, Walt Disney Productions 20th animated feature, The Aristocats, is generally released to theaters. The Aristocats began life as an idea for a two part episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. It was also going to be a live action production. The project spent a couple of years being rewritten and reshaped until Walt suggested it could be the studio’s next animated feature. And so, in the Fall of 1966, as production on The Jungle Book wound down, development of The Aristocats started in earnest, making this film the studio’s last movie to bear the personal seal of approval from its founder.

Unlike many of its predecessors, The Aristocats is an original script developed by staff writers, most of the work being done by Tom McGowan and Tom Rowe. The original concept centered on two servants who stood to inherit a fortune once the family brood of cats was disposed of and their ill-conceived antics to try to make that happen. As time went on, one of the servants, the maid, was dropped and the focus of the story shifted to the cats themselves. Following Walt’s death, the emotional parts of the tale were pared down even more and the picture became more of an adventurous caper, similar to One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which is why The Aristocats is often described as Dalmatians except with cats).

Image copyright Disney

Casting the voice roles for the film followed a pattern that had been established with The Jungle Book and would continue with films like Robin Hood: a few splashy big names along with some tried and true Disney stalwarts. While the part of the villainous butler, Edgar, had been written with Boris Karloff in mind when the project was going to be live action, the role ended up going to veteran English actor Roddy Maude-Roxby. Walt had personally asked Phil Harris to play Thomas O’Malley the alley cat. This would be the second of three roles Phil would play in quick succession for the studio. Eva Gabor was tapped as Duchess, the mother cat and unlikely love interest of Thomas O’Malley. The cast was rounded out by Sterling Holloway, Pat Buttram, George Lindsay, Thurl Ravenscroft and Paul Winchell to drop just a few more names.

Image copyright Disney

The Aristocats also marks another last for the studio. It is the final animated picture that the Sherman Brothers worked on as staff songwriters for the Walt Disney Studio. Robert and Richard had been getting increasingly frustrated with how things were being run after Walt’s death and this movie would represent the last straw for them. Only two of their songs made it into the final product, The Aristocats (which enticed Maurice Chevalier to come out of retirement to sing) and Scales and Arpeggios, sung by Marie. The rest of the songs were written by various folks and include classics like Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat and Thomas O’Malley Cat.

The Aristocats was a financial success upon its release, grossing over $17 million worldwide on a budget of only $4 million. The reviews were generally favorable with many critics giving it three out of four stars. My only complaint about the movie is that some of its portrayals of foreign cultures have not aged well at all (I’m talking to you Paul Winchell). Otherwise, The Aristocats is a fun way to spend an hour and half, even if you might not remember too many of the specifics the next day.