Lunch with June Foray

June must have seen me regard my tape recorder regretfully. "This is going to be a wonderful remembrance of California, with the noise," she said. "I'm sorry about that. But it'll be interesting." I was enthused by her go-with-the-flow approach, and soon we finished our food and began talking.

June figures it was her performance as Witch Hazel in the musical Donald Duck cartoon Trick or Treat that got the attention of Warner brothers. "It was Chuck [Jones] who brought me over to do Witch Hazel, on Broomstick Bunny. And when I read the script I couldn't believe it, that they would still call it Witch Hazel, with the same actor, with the same type of voice [as Disney's]!" June was able to find uniqueness in the Warners witch. "I did it for comedy, I think. I didn't make her mean . . . I put a little bit of a British dialect, a cockney, because Halloween started in Great Britain."

Though she worked with Bob McKimson as the voice of Alice in The Honeymousers, June contends that she never got to know him as well as she did Friz and Chuck. "Chuck was tall and handsome. Friz was short and, you know, good looking but . . . I thought Chuck was the intellectual of the animation [business]. He could quote Aristophanes and Mark Twain at the drop of a peg board. He was really terrific. . . . Chuck was such a wonderful director that he didn't direct! He would just give me the dialogue, and I read the dialogue, and he said, yeah, that's right on, and then I recorded it, and then I'd say, 'wouldn't you like another one for protection, we just did one take.' He said, 'no, that's fine, that's fine.' Never directed me. Friz was the same way."

At the same time as she lent her voice to Warner Brothers, June worked with Tex Avery narrating for The Car of Tomorrow. I wondered what he was like in person. "He was very quiet. You would think he was uproarious, the way his films are. But he was a very quiet, introspective sort of man."