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READERS'CX)RNER Godfrey Attacked and Defended For His Dismissal of La Rosa ^giTggSlGodfreyls Baffled ‘Fuss’ Over Firingfs confined to Godfrey underlings.” Godfrey again suffered a bad press last December, when Larry Puck was dropped as producer of Godfrey’s Wednesday night show, reportedly be¬ cause Puck was planning to marry Marion Marlowe—a report Godfrey emphatically denied. And in April the wholesale dismissal of Miss Marlowe, Haleloke, The Mariners and three writers loosed still another torrent on Godfrey’s greying red head. “Working for Arthur Godfrey these days,” Ben Gross mused, “is about as risky as being a commissar in Mos¬ cow.” And Jack Gould felt that “Ar¬ thur Godfrey has chosen an odd way to start his comeback. His decision to plow under a few of the little God¬ freys is no surprise, but the form of his spring housecleaning would seem to suggest that he is neither the most tidy nor tactful soul in television.” (There has been an occasional breach in this solid wall of anti-God- freyism. Washington’s Bernie Harrison, for instance, commented: “What’s all the fuss about? He tried to handle the dismissals properly this time, with a CBS official by his side . . He was fSodfreu i-,‘doghouse’ JTAov, gg®** Godfrey dog Godfrey Should Stop Acting Like a School-boy ^ eminently correct in his procedure, heartless as it might seem. The won¬ der, to me, is that he didn’t axe some of his performers long ago.”) No man to run from a fight, God¬ frey has done his share of “dishing it out.” He has countered newspaper comment with a barrage of choice in¬ vectives. Among them: “Dope!” (for Ed Sullivan.) “Liar!” (or words to that effect, for columnist-What’s My Line panelist Dorothy Kilgallen and for columnist Danton Walker.) “Fatuous ass!” (for John Crosby.) “These jerk newspapermen!” and “Muckrakers!” (for all and sundry.) On a recent radio broadcast, he labeled most news stories about him¬ self as “pure canard, pure manufac¬ tured lies, no basis in fact at all. It really amuses me what people do to try to make headlines ... I don’t give a—(pause)—what they print!” Just after the “buzzing” incident, Godfrey told Frank Parker on the air: “I’ve learned the hard way . . . Noth¬ ing. I tell them (reporters and pho¬ tographers) nothing. That’s the only thing you can do. If you say anything to them whatsoever, they’ll foul it up.” Yet, some time earlier, Godfrey an¬ nounced gleefully: “Anything I love to do, it’s cross up a newspaper.” Ironically, the same Arthur Godfrey credits a newspaperman with cata¬ pulting him to fame and fortune. Col¬ umnist Walter Winchell heard an all- night Godfrey broadcast when God¬ frey’s future looked bleak. “He had some celebrities with him,” Godfrey recalled years later, “. . . in¬ cluding Billy Rose, Ben Bernie, Ruth Etting and Jimmy Cannon. He asked me to kid Ben Bernie. Next day he had a swell plug for me in his column. Then he put more plugs in and I got 30 offers from Broadway. Put down January 26, 1934, as the luckiest day in my life and Walter Winchell as the guy who made it that way.” ISext ff'eek: Bouquets and Brickbats