The Man with the Barefoot Voice

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

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.

His first two tries at network shows failed. From 1945 through 1959, however, Godfrey seemed inexhaustibly appealing in a medium that overexposes performers almost overnight. Between radio and TV, Godfrey was on the air nationwide nearly ten hours a week, drawing a total audience estimated to have been as large as 82 million. On the eve of the 1960 presidential election, 71% of Americans in a poll identified John Kennedy's face; 91% recognized Godfrey's. The secret of his success, he said, came to him as he lay abed after a near fatal auto accident in 1931: he should not announce to listeners, but talk to them, one to one. Said he: "There is no radio audience, just one guy or one girl in a room. If the audience is ladies and gentlemen' together, they have better things to do than hear me on the radio."

--By William A. Henry III

BORN. To Karen Brown, 35, California model, and Peter O'Toole, 50, Irish-born movie actor (My Favorite Year): their first child, a son; in Dublin. Name: Lorcan (Gaelic for Lawrence, after O'Toole's greatest film role) Patrick. Weight: 7 Ibs. 7 oz.

MARRIED. Melissa Mathison, 32, screenwriter of the top moneymaking movie, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial; and Harrison Ford, 40, star of No. 2 (Star Wars), No. 3 (The Empire Strikes Back) and No. 5 (Raiders of the Lost Ark); she for the first time, he for the second; in Santa Monica, Calif.

MARRIED. David Frost, 43, inquisitive TV personality now appearing on the new (and so far unsuccessful) British morning chat show, TV-am; and Lady Carina Fitzalan Howard, 31; he for the second time, she for the first; in London.

SEEKING DIVORCE. From Werner Erhard, 47, Me-decade messiah of est, the self-realization cult best known for its grueling and expensive seminars: Ellen Erhard, 48, his second wife; after 23 years of marriage, three children; in San Rafael, Calif.

SENTENCED. Richard Jahnke, 16, high school junior convicted four weeks ago of voluntary manslaughter after he ambushed and killed his brutal, ultrastrict IRS-agent father with the help of his sister Deborah, 18; to a harsh 5-to-15-year prison term; in Cheyenne, Wyo. The court received pleas for mercy from hundreds who thought the siblings had been provoked by their father's abuse, but Judge Paul Liamos said no one should be allowed to be prosecutor, judge, juror and executioner.

DIED. Rebecca West, 90, doyenne of British letters who brought erudition, compassion, feminism, high moral stance and ferocious wit to biographies, criticism, history, novels, political commentary and journalism; in London. Born Cicily Isabel Fairfield, she began contributing in 1911 to a radical feminist journal, then to socialist periodicals (taking as her name that of the strong-willed heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm). A precocious book critic, she attacked Writer H.G. Wells in a review, then had a ten-year affair with him and bore their son; in 1930, astonishing those who thought her a bohemian, she married a wealthy banker, with whom she lived happily until his death in 1968. The author of six novels, West employed her technique and psychological insights most trenchantly in nonfiction; in her masterworks, the 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a travelogue-history of Yugoslavia, and 1947's The Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II traitors, she raised reportage to the rank of literature. A vivid phrasemaker who valued intellectual rigor, she mourned in 1981: "It unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.