August 11 - Phil Harris

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.