The Talented Alice Faye
When Alice Faye left us in 1998, she did more than take with her the redeeming talents of a singer turned actress. Alice Faye emblazoned upon a number of generations the integrity, stamina, and grit of a tough and talented legend.
A child raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Alice Faye advanced early and continuously: a good student, she graduated from public school in New York, and that same year, when she was thirteen, she auditioned for the Earl Carroll Vanities—instead of enrolling in high school. Initially, the mature-for-her-age Faye was grated a place with the troupe, but was turned away when it was discovered she was only thirteen.
Undaunted (by rejection or by fudging birthdates), Faye again tried out, this time for a place in the Chester Hale Vaudeville Unit—where she was accepted after auditioning and after noting on the application forms a birth date that made her eighteen years old. (She was fifteen.) As web masters Roy Bishop and George Ulrich report, Faye would later interview with chuckles over her masking her true age and at how her life was thereafter lived as one older than she actually was.
As a number one talent (and so attest the many Tin Pan Alley and other song-masters), Alice Faye sang and pioneered and ushered he popularity of over twenty songs, songs that she would sing on the radio—in the first years—and then as part of her role as singer-actress—in over thirty-five feature films, TV and other appearances, and filmed events.
But as talented and crowd-pleasing as she was, Alice Faye was also principled and convicted, an independent thinker with a sovereign soul. She resisted allowing her image to be made into the alluring and marketable “cheesecake” type or pin-up girl type. Once married and with children, she followed through with mothering and housewifery in a style that reinforced her attitude toward her family—which was of devotion to them over her career. And when she began to resent the pressures of a 1940’s Hollywood where producers were phasing her out for another up-and-coming starlet (or before she felt resentment), she “left Hollywood on her own terms:” she drove off the lot of a picture in progress and didn’t look back. (Despite the tabloids at the time, which mocked up a rivalry between Alice Faye and Betty Grable, authentic reports show not only was she friends with Grable but she left Hollywood of her own volition, no one else’s.)
While she also returned (seventeen years later), to do one more film, then relegated her work to parts and roles she chose…such as cameo appearances on “This is Your Life,” “The Love Boat,” “The Dean Martin Show,” numerous others, and in roles such as spokesperson for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in support of living “active and healthy senior years.”
Alice Faye left behind the notion that women have a voice, that age is just a number, and that getting out while the getting’s good may not be all that bad a move after all.
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