Arthur Godfrey: 1903-1983
He sang like a frog 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 life-threatening 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 through 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 country-boy 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.