Alice Faye Still Going By Carlton Cheney

The Milwaukee Journal – Mar 16, 1941

Alice Faye Still Going

By Carlton Cheney

JUST take a glimpse at Alice Faye if you want to realize how swiftly eight years can spin by. To most of you—and us, too—Alice seems like a mere youngster, who has come along pretty rapidly in the last two or three years. But now let’s look at the record:

Back in 1933—a good eight years—Rudy Vallee publicly asserted: “No, I am not going to marry Alice Faye, that beautiful blond singer in my band.” And Rudy kept his word, too. He never married Alice.

Jump ahead to 1937 and let’s hear a pronunciamento of Miss Faye herself: “I will never marry Tony Martin. I don’t like young actors. They’re too selfish.” Three days later she eloped with the 22 year old singing actor, Tony Martin. She explained a few days after the ceremony: “I guess it was because of a quarrel or something. Tony insisted that I marry him or else. I’m still up the air. Marriage is a kind of letdown to romance. It takes time to know whether it is a success. That’s why I’m going to wait two years before having a baby.”

Well, there has been no baby, the Martin-Faye partnership has gone the way of so many Hollywood ventures, and Alice Faye is heartfree and uncertain to this day, going out one evening with this millionaire, the next with that writer, and so on.

BUT we’re getting ahead of our story. We’re still back in 1937, remember, and Alice Faye is being called “Hollywood’s Umph Girl.” We doubt that Ann Sheridan was cutting much of a figure in the picture life of those days. Incidentally, Alice didn’t like the “umph” term, and it was taken away from her. But she was, and is, quite a personable young lady, and is clicking off one neat role after another, with “That Night in Rio” coming up as her latest starring venture.

Her real name is Alice Leppert, but when she changed to Alice Faye, her whole family followed suit. First Alice decided she wanted to be a schoolteacher. It was watching Marilyn Miller that first gave her the little girl dream of entering show business. Her first professional job came while she was in high school, when a scout picked her for a spot in one of the choruses of the Chester Hale group that used to tour all over the country.

Alice knows 500 songs by heart, but she can’t tell one note from another. Before she got her break she was tried out for a New York show with Buddy DeSylva. He told her then that as a chorus girl she was an absolute natural for a career in stenography and advised her strongly to take it up.

<Alice Faye spins along merrily. “That Night in Rio” is her latest film

She claims she isn’t superstitious but she has her fortune told at every opportunity. Although she’s self-conscious and rather shy, her favorite occupation is looking at herself in a mirror, and her dressing room at home is composed of mirror covered walls.

Her lucky break came when she was signed in George White’s “Scandals” with Rudy Vallee. She was at the time dancing at a place called Hollywood Gardens in New york, and her leap from that honkytonk place to a “Scandals” girl, she felt at the time, was achieving success.

WHEN home voice recording machines were first popular Alice torched “Mimi” at a friend’s party. A friend of Vallee’s heard it and took the record to Rudy, who immediately gave her a spot to sing with his Connecticut Yankees during the run of the “Scandals.” Later, when the show folded, he tried to sell her to his sponsors. They refused and he paid her salary out of his own pocket. After that the sponsors were eager to sign her.

She came to Hollywood when Vallee was engaged to make the movie version of the “Scandals.” She expected to be in Hollywood six weeks. That was seven years ago. She was originally scheduled for a bit part in the movie, but when Lillian Harvey, the European star, walked off the set in a huff, she was given the big role. And that’s how Alice Faye got in the movies.

While on the Fox lot she befriended a young man who made a test there. Later on, the young man, Tyrone Power, fought hard to get her her first dramatic role in “In Old Chicago.” He had paid off his debt. For it opened a new career for Alice. Her favorite actor on the Fox lot is Don Ameche and they are always pulling gags on each other.

Alice claims to have an inferiority complex, but at any gathering of celebrities she is usually the first to take the floor to do one of her murderous imitations. She eats spinach under protest, likes orange ice, hates crowds but loves New York. Her favorite indoor recreation is backgammon. She swims, rides a bicycle and is probably the worst tennis player in Hollywood. She’s crazy about flowers, orders huge quantities for herself and runs a sizeable florist bill sending flowers to all her friends and acquaintances when she’s in the mood.

The whole Faye tribe is now camped in Hollywood and living with Alice. Her brother, Bill, manages her business affairs and other members of her family find plenty to do to earn their keep with their movie star sister.

She still thinks she would have made a whale of a schoolteacher.