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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."