TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83capmil.7

Text File | 1990-10-09 | 4KB | 71 lines

The Man with the Barefoot Voice

March 28, 1983

Arthur Godfrey: 1903-1983

He sang like a grog and played his ever present ukulele like a hunt-
and-peck typist.  He talked with his mouth full and tossed aside his
script to ad-lib whatever came into his head.  He had no talent but
folksiness.  For Arthur Godfrey, that was enough.  At his peak in the
1950s he was, after President Eisenhower, perhaps the best-loved man
in  America.  Godfrey's daily radio show and two weekly TV shows on
CBS brought the network as much as 12% of its total revenue.  Said CBS
Chairman William Paley of Godfrey in his heyday:  "He is the average
guy's wistful projection of what he would like to be."

Everything about Godfrey seemed to capture the public's imagination.
When he fired his prize discovery, Singer Julius LaRosa, on live
network TV in 1953, purportedly for "lack of humility," the incident
made front pages across the country.  So did another burst of temper
the next year, when Godfrey, an avid pilot, grew angry with the flight
instructions he had been given for his DC-3 and buzzed an airport
control tower in Teterboro, N.J.

In 1959, when doctors discovered that he had lung cancer, he underwent
lifethreatening surgery; waiting for word of his fate amounted to a
national vigil.  Godfrey initially announced his retirement so that he
would not be seen to "waste away."  But he was perpetually rejuvenated
by optimism.  At 65, a decade after the surgery, he said: "The only
things I have given up are cigarettes and tap dancing."  He continued
on daily radio until 1972, and in the next decade made repeated
attempts at a TV comeback before succumbing to respiratory ailments
last week at 79.

The homespun, Main Street appeal of the figure whom Fred Allen called
"the man with the barefoot voice" brought to mind images from a
simpler America:  Will Rogers, Huckleberry Finn.  Sentimental Godfrey
choked up while narrating President Franklin Roosevelt's funeral for
CBS Radio and shed tears on TV while listening to a women's quartet
sing Down by the Old Mill Stream.  He shocked (and delighted)
housewives by using a toy outhouse as a comic prop.  Performing a
chicken noodle soup commercial for one of his TV sponsors, Lipton's,
Godfrey made a cup, spooned through it, and said, "I see lots of
noodles. I do not see any chicken."  Then he tasted the soup and
added, "Yes, that is chicken.  It might have walked though the water
once."  Lipton executives probably winced, but the tongue-in-cheek
salesmanship worked.  Whatever Godfrey sold, he spoofed; and whatever
he spoofed, lipstick or lotion, floor wax or ice cream, sold.

Enemies--and Godfrey made many, especially among former employees--
often labeled the Old Redhead's countryboy manner a fraud; he was born
in Manhattan to a mother who was a frustrated concert singer and an
improvident father who was a self-styled British aristocrat.  Young
Arthur dropped out of high school to support the family at odd jobs.
He started in radio almost by accident, as a banjo player sponsored by
a birdseed company on a station in Baltimore.

His first two tries at network shows failed.  From 1945 through 1959,
however, Godfrey seemed inexhaustibly appealing in a medium that
overexposes performers almost overnight.  Between radio and TV,
Godfrey was on the air nationwide nearly ten hours a week, drawing a
total audience estimated to have been as large as 82 million.  On the
eve of the 1960 presidential election, 71% of Americans in a poll
identified John Kennedy's face; 91% recognized Godfrey's.  The secret
of his success, he said, came to him as he lay abed after a near fatal
auto accident in 1931:  he should not announce to listeners, but talk
to them, one to one.  Said he: "There is no radio audience, just one
guy or one girl in a room.  If the audience is `ladies and gentlemen'
together, they have better things to do than hear me on the radio."

--By William A. Henry III