by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that I watched an
episode of the 15-minute 1954 “Coke Time” show featuring Eddie Fisher — a
holdover from the days of radio in which singers had frequently been given
15-minute time slots to fill in the broadcast day, which carried over into
early TV. This seems to have been done around the same time as Fisher’s
intriguing guest appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour because he sings one of the same songs he sang on
that show: “Fanny,” the title song from the 1954 musical Fanny, based on Marcel Pagnol’s French trilogy of plays
set in and around the docks of Marseilles and basically about a young sailor
torn between wanting to settle down with his girlfriend Fanny and feeling the Call of the Sea that makes him want to
ship out again. Fanny carried
over some of the same personnel as the mega-hit South Pacific, including director Joshua Logan and stars Ezio
Pinza and William Tabbert, but the cast member featured alongside Fisher on
this vest-pocket program was the show’s female lead, Florence Henderson. (In
honor of her most famous role archive.org listed this episode as featuring
“Mrs. Brady.”) She sang the show’s big romantic ballad, “I Have to Tell You”
(at least I think that’s what it was
called), and joined Fisher on the last chorus of “Fanny.” Fisher also sang a
bit of his theme song, “May I?,” a novelty called “Papa Loves Mambo” that had
actually been a hit for his rival Perry Como (the other big-name crooner on RCA Victor in the early
1950’s), and Russ Columbo’s hit “Prisoner of Love,” in which Fisher sang with
unusual soul for him even though either Axel Stordahl’s arrangement or the
sound mix had the orchestra come awfully close to drowning him out.
