"Allen. Allen, baby. Can't you do me this one favor? I'll love you forever, Allen, baby."
So pleaded a producer of TV commercials, asking Actor-Announcer Allen Swift to hurry to a recording session. All sorts of people had collected to praise Chesterfield cigarettes, but no one present had sufficient talent to deliver a certain vital line. Swift hurried the five blocks between his Manhattan office and the recording studio, cleared his throat and said:
"Checked all the way by Accu-Ray, they satisfy the most." He left the studio within 15 minutes, not even asking how much he would be paid. Within six months, for uttering that one line, he received more than $27,000, since performers get paid each time a commercial is used.
Allen Swift, 38, known as the man of 1,000 voices, is the nation's most successful practitioner of the peculiar art of imitation. Thanks largely to endless repeats that bring him in continuing fees, known in the trade as "residuals," he makes about $300,000 a year. He can imitate anything from the cry of a loon to the whining drawl of a mountaineer, run effortlessly through all the categories of voice quality—rasp, strain, fog, nasal, sinus. He can shift ground from tight-lipped British to loose-lipped Brooklynese to American rural, and run analytically through the ages of man, making his voice grow older as he progresses from the breathiness of childhood to the cracking articulations of the elderly.
"I Sen Tout." His own voice, when in use, is faintly Flatbush—full of lines like "I sen tout for coffee" and "I had a friend of mine who . . ." The fourth child of a New York lawyer, he had been an actor, magician, mentalist and hypnotist when he tried his first commercial—as a talking flashlight battery—eight years ago. Soon, for another commercial that was used repeatedly, he got $1,700 instead of the $45 he had expected. He called the agency to see if there had been a mistake and, when told that there had not been, decided to enter the field.
Since then he has done 10,000 commercials, talking as everything from a spark plug to a cereal. He is the entire cast of Tom and Jerry cartoons. He was Captain Swift on TV's Popeye show. During the TV run of the Howdy Doody show, he contributed 50 different characters. For Darryl Zanuck's forthcoming The Longest Day, Swift supplied the sheared-cornflower accents of Dwight David Eisenhower. He is the man who says, "I'm a Newport smoker forever"; who tells viewers to use one dab of Brylcreem, not two; who introduced the Chinese baby who could not eat Jell-O with chopsticks.
He has been the spokesman of more than 350 sponsors, and with 100 different voices has plugged 35 different beers.