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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."