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Good question. Like him or not he does seem unfairly neglected. I remember Dick Cavett saying that when he was growing up you could walk down the street in his Nebraska town and hear Godfrey's voice coming literally from every radio in town. The only other radio performer I've heard of with that kind of listenership was FDR.
There seemed to have been a number of factors that contributed to Godfrey's decline, and today, relative obscurity. For one thing he made a lot of enemies, especially in the industry he worked in. I remember a sort of muckraking paperback novel on an early television personality that my parents had, called I think The God Of Channel 1, with a picture Godfreyish looking fellow on the cover. There were a lot of Godfrey haters even in his heyday, from what I gather. His ego was apparently tremendous. The firing of La Rosa was as much a symbolic event as the precipitating factor in the professional decline of a man whom many regarded as power-mad. It was for a lot of people the last straw, and he never seemed to have fully recovered from the incident professionally. Then there was the flap over the Miami hotel he owned that bore the sign that read (something like) "no Jews or dogs allowed". He divested himself of the property fairly quickly thereafter, but the damage was done. Then he had the near-fatal plane crash and the bout with cancer. It was a long goodbye for Godfrey. He had been king of radio and early television. By 1960 he was an anachronism.
He survived on radio for quite some time, retiring in the early seventies, rather unceremoniously, I thought, given who he was. I remember him on Tom Snyder's show when his autobiography came out, and he was engaging enough, and looked the same as before. But something was missing. The charisma,--if that's the right word for it--that made him a star. Whatever it was he had, he no longer had it. My recollections of him as a television personality are vague, since he retired when I was quite young. I found him, strangely, intimidating, ukelele and all. He was very much the duke of his domain, as forceful as he w |
I thought that Godfrey droned on and on in his radio shows. I did like the way he fried the sponsors. He kept at Campbell's Chicken Soup challenging listeners to find a trace of a chicken part in the soup! Someone from the soup company showed up on the show with "improved" chicken soup. And Godfrey said that it looked like now they at least have the chicken take a bath in the soup. Fearless he was with sponsors. That is the only character trait of his that I liked -- and that is enough to establish him as memorable.