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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."