Oceans of Empathy

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"And here's that man himself," cried the announcer--"Arthur, the-man-with-the-natural-look, Godfrey !" Wearing his earphones, a swept-up shock of copper hair and a winning, country-boy grin that belied his 46 years, the big-shouldered man at the desk shifted a candy wafer in his mouth and asked plaintively: "Now what am I gonna do with the last half of this Life Saver?"

Before Godfrey, such words on a commercial program (sponsored by Toni, Inc., in this case) might have cost a radio performer his job. No one on the network air ever had the unbuttoned nerve to talk with his mouth full, use sloppy diction, give free plugs to non-sponsoring products or blithely ad-lib whatever popped into mind.

Beyond such calculated flaunting of the rules of radio and TV, the thing that makes Arthur Godfrey remarkable as a hit entertainer is his relative lack of definable talent. He can neither sing, dance, act, nor perform with skill on a musical instrument. Yet today he is the top moneymaker and the outstanding personality on the air. From radio and TV, records, business investments, stocks & bonds, and other odds & ends, he gets close to $1,000,000 a year. He earns $1,500 for every minute he broadcasts. He is seen & heard--and apparently loved--by 40 million people. His homey, cracker-barrel commercials for tea, cigarettes, furniture polish, floor wax, window cleanser, crackers, shampoos, soup, home permanents, hand lotion and hair tonic set cash registers jingling profitably across the nation. He is the greatest salesman who ever stood before a microphone.

Lifted Eyebrow. Not even Godfrey himself can quite explain how he does it. Some students of what the public likes profess to see the answer in the "shine of naturalness" reflected by his use of such words as "doggone," "ain't" and "gotta" --the sort of determinedly rustic phrasing which led Fred Allen to call Godfrey "the man with the barefoot voice." His drawling, "God-gifted" voice has been variously described as "warty," "briery," "wood-raspy," and even "like a shoebox full of bullfrogs."

A few more cynical observers think that Godfrey's greatest audience bait is the faintly smutty double meaning. "Godfrey can do more with the lift of an eyebrow than De Maupassant could with a volume," says one adman. "Whenever he ad-libs he talks himself right into the bathroom." Such scatological shockers as the miniature outhouse he used as a TV prop invariably explode titillated giggles in his studio and television audiences.

Godfrey himself can find but one explanation for his success: "It's because people believe in me. How the hell else can you explain it?" To CBS Board Chairman William Paley, Godfrey "is the kind of guy the average man would like to behe's a wistful projection of the average guy." An NBC vice president says enviously: "Berle's a comedian, but he's only good once a week. Godfrey could go on seven times a week and you'd never get tired looking at him."

Harry Butcher, wartime aide of General Eisenhower and an old friend of Godfrey's, explains earnestly: "Arthur conducts a two-way conversation all by himself. It's more than a soliloquy: it's a great art. What do you call it--? Empathy.* You know, the ability to get inside other people, to understand exactly how they're feeling."

Short-Handled Broom. In California, bag-eyed Fred Allen handed in a sour' minority report. Said Allen (in 1942 Godfrey was dropped from the Allen show after a six-week experiment): "He's sweeping the country, and, Lord knows, it needs to be swept. But I think Arthur must be doing it with a short-handled broom--he's nearer the dirt than most people." To Allen, Godfrey is a sign of the times: "Millions of people think he's the funniest guy alive, but their standards are open to question. This is an age of mediocrity. Anything mediocre is bound to be a success. As we get more regimented, there are fewer Tiffanys and more Woolworths."

Though Arthur Godfrey believes, as did Mark Twain, that half the art of American humor consists in keeping your face straight, he scores heavily with the precision mugging of his Huck Finn features. He is a master of the mildly distasteful grimace, the quizzical brow, the shrug of simulated incomprehension. His personality has elements of other U.S. entertainers who have won a peculiarly affectionate place in American hearts. Like Will Rogers, Godfrey is the embodiment of the homespun debunker; but where Will fired salvos at Congress, Godfrey snipes at the lesser game of admen and pressagents. Like Bing Crosby, he blends urbanity with the slippered ease of a small-town family man. Like George M. Cohan, he is a Yankee Doodle flag waver.

Love & Hate. Close associates say that Godfrey's contrariness is his outstanding characteristic. His Girl Friday, Margaret ("Mug") Richardson, says: "Arthur's contradictions are the only thing close to talent he's got." He is confusingly shy one minute and brash the next, sentimental and savage, generous and stingy, as quick to unreasoning affection as unreasoning dislike. Said one bruised ex-friend: "Arthur either starts off with great loves and then hates people, or with great hates and then loves them." He also has a sense of proportion that is all his own. The man who wept while broadcasting from Washington a moving account of Franklin Roosevelt's funeral procession is capable of equally sincere tears on hearing an all-girl quartet sing Down by the Old Mill Stream.

Every confirmed Godfrey fan knows that from one moment to the next he may erupt into ribaldry, beery pathos or waspish exasperation. When a joke lays an egg, he will pettishly blame his writers. And he reacts sharply to criticism: hearing that William Paley thought the Godfrey TV show "lacked movement," Arthur brought on a line of hula dancers and leered into the TV camera: "Is that enough movement for you, Bill?"

But whether he is tough or teary, Godfrey's special brand of folksiness obviously fills a deep national need. Last week his CBS programs--Arthur Godfrey Time (weekdays, 10:15 a.m., E.S.T., radio), Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts (Mon. 8:30 p.m., radio & TV) and Arthur Godfrey & His Friends (Wed. 8 p.m., TV)--all had Hooperatings within the magic first five. Last month, Chesterfield spread-eagled the CBS network for Godfrey by adding still another evening show, Arthur Godfrey Digest (Sat. 9:30 p.m., radio). Made up of recorded high spots from his morning routine, the Digest promptly scored a highly satisfactory 10.4 Hoop-erating.

Hereford& Arabians. His success, however difficult to explain, is carefully translated by Arthur Godfrey into personal security. After taxes and expenses, whatever is left of his astronomical earnings is plowed into annuities and insurance against the uncertain future. With Godfrey signed to a fat, twelve-year CBS contract, Godfrey's lawyer, financial adviser and good friend, C. Leo DeOrsey, is able to say: "Arthur will never have to worry again in his life, especially since his requirements are no more than the ordinary cop's in New York--and I don't mean a sergeant."

Though Godfrey certainly lives a good deal better than most cops, his standard is modest, considering his income. In Manhattan he has a cluttered two-room penthouse suite at the middle-class Lexington Hotel. His Texas-born, blonde wife Mary, who was originally an NBC secretary in Washington, lives in a ten-room brick and stone house called Beacon Hill Farms on Catoctin Ridge in northern Virginia. With her are the children: daughter Pat, 7; Arthur Jr., 9; and 20-year-old Dick, the son of Arthur's first marriage. The farm's 700 acres are stocked with white-face Hereford cattle and Arabian horses which pay its running expenses. Godfrey, a licensed airman with more than 4,000 flying hours, commutes from New York in his Navion and twin-engine Beech planes, and always buzzes Beacon Hill before landing at nearby Leesburg. He spends about half of each week in the comfortable house, often sprawled on a sofa in T-shirt and slacks, watching rival comics on TV and dozing through "intellectual" shows.

His pace in Manhattan is more feverish and, since TV made his face familiar, has become increasingly unpleasant. "I made my living for years just talking about things I bumped into in life when I was rubbing elbows with real people," he says. "But no more. Every time I go anywhere now it's all phonied up. The minute I walk in, it's 'There's Arthur Godfrey! There's

Arthur Godfrey!' Right away everything changes--nothing's on the level any more."

He also worries because his close friends are far from "average." Depending on his mood, they range from such raffish types as Columnist Robert Ruark, Humorist H. Allen Smith and Singer Morton Downey to such upper-bracket individualists as Eddie Rickenbacker and General Motors President C. E. Wilson.

To escape swarming admirers, Godfrey takes most of his meals in his hotel room or CBS office. When he goes out, it is to such tony restaurants as the Stork Club, where fans do not annoy him. On vacations in Miami, he stays at the "carefully restricted" Kenilworth Hotel ("Nobody knows who I am, there. They never heard of Arthur Godfrey").

"Here We Go Again!" The world first heard the famed Godfrey voice on an August day in 1903 in response to a doctor's postnatal slap. He was the first-born of five children-of Arthur Hanbury Godfrey and the former Kathryn Morton of Ossining, N.Y. Father Godfrey, a freelance writer and expert on horseflesh, claimed to be the son of Sir John Godfrey, onetime Viceroy of India and scion of a wealthy Liverpool brewing family. Arthur recalls that his father was "a raconteur and a gentleman full of old-school aristocratic thinking. Therefore, in business, he stunk." Since none of the ancestral glories have proved verifiable, Arthur now suspects that his father embroidered them to 'compensate for his financial failure in the U.S.

At 66, Arthur's spry mother lives in a Manhattan apartment, and still regrets that she never had a concert career. "She would sing without any provocation whatsoever," says Arthur. "Once in a while she'd go downstairs and start playing the piano at 3 a.m." Father would say 'Oh, dear God, here we go again!' She liked to cut portrait silhouettes, paint with water colors, and bake fancy cakes and cookies, but cook you a decent meal--? No!"

Until he was ten, young Arthur found the world a steady and agreeable place. But as the family fortunes declined, the Godfreys moved from Manhattan to the commuters' village of Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. By the time he was twelve, Arthur had a paper route and was helping out at a bakery after school. During the 1918 flu epidemic, when his employers were bedridden, he ran the bakery virtually single-handed for three weeks. The resulting absence from high school caused him to be dropped as captain and anchor man on the sophomore debating team on the eve of the big contest with the freshmen. Stung by this example of adult unreasonableness and injustice, Arthur quit school.

Free Drinks & Applause. Like thousands of unskilled youngsters before and since, Arthur criss-crossed the continent getting by on such odd jobs as dishwashing and wrestling bricks from kiln to wheelbarrow to freight car. He was befriended in New York by a prostitute with a storybook heart of gold; by a sentimental Irish cop in Akron; by a priest who gave him his first religious instruction. In 1920, to continue his interrupted education, Godfrey joined the Navy, was baptized a. Roman Catholic by his chaplain at Norfolk, and--briefly--was fired by the ambition to become a priest.

Two years later Greece and Turkey were at war in Asia Minor. Having worked hard at correspondence courses, Godfrey finally had to choose between waiting for an appointment to the Naval Academy or shipping as radioman third class on a destroyer flotilla heading for the Mediterranean. "I had missed World War I," he says, "and I wasn't going to miss this one."

Packing the ukulele that a Hawaiian bunkmate had taught him to play, he was off to Constantinople. For the next two years the flotilla plied the Aegean and Black Seas. On every shore leave, Godfrey and his fellow musicians of "Admiral Bristol's Bobo Six" beat out their rhythms in Levantine dives and were paid off in free drinks and applause.

When he finished his Navy hitch in 1924, Godfrey no longer dreamed of the Naval Academy or the priesthood. Eager to elbow himself a place in the bustling business world of the '20s, he brought $2,000 in Navy "winnings" back home to Hasbrouck Heights. But his father had died and the fat roll of bills disappeared in settling family debts. Soon he was in a familiar position--on his uppers in a strange city. The city was Detroit where, desperately answering a blind ad, he found himself a door-to-door salesman of cemetery lots. By drawing heavily on his peculiar assets--the husky Godfrey voice-with-a-personality and the honest-Injun Godfrey face--he made $10,000 in five months. Three months later he had lost it all as the star and backer of a vaudeville troupe that careened from Chicago to Los Angeles and expired among the orange groves.

In his travels, he ran across an old shipmate who had become a commissioned officer in the Coast Guard. He told Arthur: "Any Navy petty officer can make a commission in this hooligan Navy." Godfrey joined up.

Birdseed & Bandages. Radio Technician Godfrey was sent to a Coast Guard Depot outside Baltimore. Searching for some more interesting avocation than drinking needled beer, he turned up on an amateur hour at station WFBR. With his banjo and one-octave voice, he landed a birdseed company as a $5-a-show sponsor. He also picked up another chore--introducing the speeches of Maryland's late, belligerently anti-dry Governor Albert Ritchie. When Godfrey was offered a full-time job on WFBR, the governor helped him get his separation from the Coast Guard.

He soon moved from the radio bush league of Baltimore to an NBC staff announcer's job in Washington. One morning, speeding along Riggs Road to the Congressional Airport for practice at flying a glider, Godfrey had a head-on collision with a truck. He lay in a strait-jacket of bandages and casts for five months. For two years he could not bend his knees. He still walks with a slight limp.

During his long hospitalization, Godfrey spent hours listening to the radio. "Those days we were all talking to the 'ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience.' I decided there wasn't any such audience. There was just one guy or one girl off somewhere listening by themselves. Hell, if they were together, they'd have something better to do than listen to the radio."

Valuable Lesson. It was a revolutionary discovery. Back at NBC he put his new theories to the test on a dawn-till-breakfast show that soon built up a fanatic following among Washington's thousands of live-alone Government girls. Encouraged, Godfrey began applying the same personal approach to his commercials ("Whew!" he would say after reading some copywriter's purple prose advertising lace undies). Everybody was outraged but his listeners, and when the listeners hurried to buy, sponsors and radiomen quickly calmed down. Godfrey had learned a lesson he has never forgotten: "They don't care what you say on the air as long as it sells."

His growing informality on the air was soon matched by excessive informality off it. Most announcers in the early days were temperamental; some were habitually late to work, and others had trouble with wine and women. Godfrey scored high in all departments. Despite his growing popularity with the listeners, he was finally fired.

Harry Butcher, then manager of the rival CBS station WJSV, was quick to grab him. In the deal, WJSV (now WTOP) got most of Godfrey's morning audience and 80% of his former sponsors. NBC retaliated by bringing down a New York announcer named Don Douglas to buck Arthur. Unreasonably terrified by the threat of big-city competition, Godfrey convinced Butcher that he should stay on the air all night to kill Douglas' first broadcast. Since WJSV closed down at midnight, Godfrey had to broadcast from the transmitter in a swamp near Alexandria, Va., with no other props than a telephone, turntable and some records.

That single all-night show set a pattern that radio is still following. From New York, a lonely girl in the Ritz-Carlton kept phoning him maudlin professions of love. Walter Wirichell was on the phone at 5 a.m., and carried a rave for Godfrey in his column. Just before sunup, Godfrey wished aloud that he had some coffee. About 8,000 Washingtonians got into their cars and drove out with sandwiches and full Thermos bottles.

Godfrey's mail brought him 32 contracts and business proposals, including a certified check for $3,200 from a Manhattan nightclub. Stunned, he went up to New York to ask Winchell's advice. "He was lying in bed being shaved by a barber," Arthur recalls. " 'Boy,' I thought, 'this is real living!'" Winchell recommended that he take the nightclub offer, but Godfrey settled for a network contract with CBS. "I'm eternally grateful to Winchell for discovering me," says Godfrey. "The only thing that Walter forgets is that he dropped me like a hot potato when I flopped."

Back to the Sunsets. The flop was loud and emphatic. When the show he called the "Manhattan Pee-rade" decided to continue without him, Arthur says his final chance on a Chesterfield show "laid a terrible egg."

Fired by both Chesterfield and CBS, Godfrey headed back to Washington. Even there, it seemed his magic had gone. "I had gotten to thinking like a smart-aleck Broadway showman, and people don't want Broadway every day. But little by little, I regained the humility I had lost. I got back to sunsets, fishing, horses. My interest in people returned. The show improved, clients were pleased, and fans began to increase."

He plugged away at his Washington job and, by 1937, made another network bid with shows for Barbasol and Carnation Milk. Though profitable for Godfrey, these shows left the nation unmoved. He was now so firmly labeled a "local boy" that Godfrey had to threaten to go back to NBC before CBS would agree to pipe part of his early-morning show into New York. But this show caught on, and in 1944 he made his third and final assault on network listeners. Keeping his local jobs, he undertook to broadcast over CBS without salary until he had lined up some sponsors. Further, he convinced CBS that he should be left on the air regardless of what the Hooperatings revealed. "It takes a long time to build up loyalty on a daytime show," he says. "I figured I had at least five years' work ahead of me."

For nearly two years listeners and advertisers stayed away in droves. Then, almost overnight, the flood ran the other way. Chesterfield sponsored his daytime show and it began to sprout additional sponsored quarter-hours. Thomas J. Lipton Inc., searching for a new nighttime program, decided to take a chance on Talent Scouts. Godfrey was in.

Mug Says No. His ascent to stardom has not been entirely a one-man show. Considerable credit goes to hardworking, 35-year-old Mug Richardson, who has been with him for 16 years, ever since --as "Miss North Carolina of 1934"--she stopped off in Washington on her way to New York. Arthur, visibly impressed, pays her the highest tribute he can make to womanhood: "She's wholesome." And he adds: "I knew she wouldn't fit into the kind of razzmatazz she was headed for, so

I told her she could have a job with me any time she wanted it."

Beginning as his secretary, Mug moved up to a quasi-partnership in Arthur Godfrey Productions, Inc., and has frequently been subject to fitful bursts of Godfrey generosity. At one time or another he has given her a secretarial education, a sloop, a farm in North Carolina, a Pontiac, a mink coat. Godfrey, referring both to her efficiency and her stubbornness, describes Mug as "my left arm--with my right hand on it." He superstitiously credits her with being a good-luck piece, and is apt to blame failures, like his dismal showing in the 1946 Broadway musical Three to Make Ready, on her periodic resignations.

The material turned out by Godfrey's five writers is channeled through Mug, who sits beside Arthur on most of his shows. Items that she finds amusing are passed on. He has great faith that her judgment is in tune with that of "the people." She also acts as a buffer between Godfrey and the advertising men. "Whenever anything's suggested to Arthur, Mug always says no," observes CBS President Frank Stanton. "That gives him time to think. If he decides to do it, he can say he finally talked Mug around. If he decides not to, he can always say Mug won't give in."

The Kids. Other contributors to the Godfrey success story are the "Little Godfreys." Bill Lawrence is a doe-eyed young baritone whose role, says Godfrey, "is to take care of the bobby-soxers in our audience while I take care of the corset crowd." Janette Davis is a nervous, pretty girl with a sexy voice who had her own CBS show before she joined Godfrey. Arthur thinks Janette is "well on her way. She works hard and gets better all the time." Like every other woman who has won Godfrey's favor, Janette is "wholesome." The Chordettes, four plain, pleasant, "wholesome" girls from Sheboygan, Wis., have a remarkable facility for reducing Godfrey to tears ("Their harmony is like a symphony or a sunset"). The Mariners, another quartet, is made up of ex-Coast Guardsmen. Godfrey calls them "the only male quartet in the U.S. that's working regularly." Other valuable stooges and straight men: Announcer Tony Marvin, Orchestra Leader Archie Bleyer, Trombonist Sy Shaffer.

On occasion, Godfrey credits these young people with being the whole show. "I do nothing but introduce the talent," he will say modestly. "I try to stay out of it." More often, he fumes about them like a choleric parent: "I have so much trouble with these kids. They don't know when they're well off ... I only keep them in line because they're all scared I'll get mad."

The Salesman. Whatever he represents to his vast audience, Godfrey is a mile-high stack of blue chips to CBS, to his sponsors and to their advertising agencies. Though admen may wince at a typical Godfrey commercial (plugging a shampoo made of eggs and milk, he cracked: "And if your hair is clean, it makes a fine omelet"), they admit he makes products move.

CBS, which draws nearly $7,000,000 revenue from the Godfrey shows, has no reservations about him as a salesman. CBS Vice President Howard Meighan looks forward to the "millennium" when all CBS announcers will have been made over in Godfrey's image. Board Chairman Paley is impressed by the results of a Videodex survey that gave Talent Scouts top rating in two portentous categories: "most interesting" commercials (85%) and "most believable" (94%). No one else was even close. "He's so sincere he even sells off the air," says Paley. "One day in a conference he started selling me Glass Wax. And I went right home and asked my wife if she'd ever used it."

So valuable is a Godfrey free plug on the air that manufacturers, on the off chance that he will mention them, deluge him with .merchandise ranging from buttermilk to uranium ore to elks. They remember that, on TV, he has often taken a pull at a Coke bottle when he might have been plugging his sponsored products. And they know that Godfrey's fooling around with a ukulele on the air pumped new life into an industry that had been dormant since the early 1930s. Said uke salesman Jack Loeb: "Sales went from nothing to higher than they had been even in the 'flapper' days . . . We can't keep enough ukuleles in stock."

Object Lesson. The listening audience can thank Godfrey for removing much of the starch and stuffiness from radio. He found the medium bustling with split-second efficiency, and slowed a portion of it to a comfortable walk. He helped clean up the high-pressure babble of machine-made commercials, and proved to a nervous, self-conscious industry that informality pays off.

Last week, Godfrey was considering selling a new line. "I want to try to sell race tolerance and the beauty of doing a day's work," he said earnestly. "I've waited until now because I wasn't sure that I had enough stature. Popularity is one thing, but stature is substantial."

He hopes, eventually, to write a syndicated newspaper column and make a movie. "I'd like to do a movie about the joy of flying or the joy in animals or meteorology--something with a great object lesson. People buy my products because they believe that I'm telling the truth. And people like to follow the example of a fellow they believe in, isn't that right? If I could do a movie that would teach kids tolerance and not to be smart alecks, then I'd do it."

But he is firmly resolved "never to just go out there to Hollywood and cash in on my popularity and make money." The way Arthur Godfrey looks at it, at least at the moment, that would be unwholesome.

A discovery made in the far reaches of Webster, which defines it as "imaginative projection of one's own consciousness into another being."

*One of Arthur's two sisters, Mrs. Kathryn Ripley, broadcasts over station KRDO in Colorado Springs, Colo., using her mother's maiden name. With all of his brothers & sisters, Arthur's relations are more often tense than tender.

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