The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

“Thanks,” I said, without meaning it.

  “You’re welcome, sir. And again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

  •••

  OUT ON THE sidewalk, I pressed my back up against the hotel’s stone façade to keep out of the way of people who, unlike me, had somewhere to go and knew where they were going. My unease with my aimlessness was exacerbated by the unshakable feeling that I didn’t belong in New York, and Connor did. I was still consumed by the possibility that the script I’d be handed the next day—a script no one had bothered to send me yet—would make me an impostor in my own shot at the big time by calling for a character that only Connor could create. Having traveled this far, what choice would I have but to guess what character Connor would have made and deliver a counterfeit?

  I walked south at a brisk pace of a person doing more than killing time. Only a few blocks away from the hotel, I started scanning for some internationally familiar landmark—the Empire State building, maybe, or Madison Square Garden—but I recognized nothing.

  At Canal Street, I turned onto a stretch of sidewalk narrowed by wheeled racks of scarves and t-shirts and carts of handbags and sunglasses. Between the merchandise stalls were a few small restaurants, ranging from a by-the-slice pizzeria to a candlelit bistro with a menu displayed in a wood-framed glass box beside the door. And at the curb, in front of every store and restaurant and currency exchange, was garbage. Limp heads of lettuce spilled out the mouth of an untied bag, and twisted drywall struts jutted out from plastic cans unevenly dusted with plaster powder. A man in a filthy white apron carried a trash bag up four steps from the lower level of a deli, crossed the flow of foot traffic, and dropped the bag at the curb. In the humid air, I caught the odor of decay mixed with a sweetness, like the aroma of overripe fruit.

  I turned off of Canal onto a quieter street lined on both sides with what appeared to me to be apartment buildings, none more than seven or eight stories tall. The buildings’ first floors—some at sidewalk level, others a short flight of stairs above it—were salons and clothing boutiques and coffeehouses. With fewer pedestrians around, I felt less desperate for purpose and relaxed a little. I slowed down to read proclamations, handwritten on chalkboard easels, of the arrival of fall fashions and Pacific Island coffee blends. I had nearly reached the end of the block when I noticed a small brass plaque clouded with patina and fitted into a brick pillar in front of a four-story brownstone. The embossing read, “The Manhattan Museum of Radio Arts.”

  Instantly, I was certain that I had found a place in New York—maybe the only place—in which I belonged more rightly than Connor did.

  At the top of the front steps, I tried the door. It was locked. To the right of the door was a box with four black, rectangular buttons, and I pressed my thumb against the button labeled “MMRA.”

  The anticipation of a human voice in a doorbell speaker can silence a big city. As I stood waggling before a hexagonal array of aluminum vents, no ambient noise registered with me.

  Then: a young man’s voice. “Yes?”

  “Hi,” I said. “I’d like to tour the museum?”

  “Sorry,” the voice said. “We close in fifteen minutes.”

  I took a short, desperate step toward a microphone I couldn’t see. “I’ll be quick.”

  A pause, then a click. “Do you have a membership?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a fifteen dollar donation,” the voice said. “For fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s fine.” I would have paid twice that rate.

  There was another silence, during which, I imagined, the young man tried to come up with some other way of dissuading me from patronizing the museum so close to its closing time.

  He must have come up short.

  The lock of the brownstone’s door hummed to life, and I entered a foyer. Electric candles in a fixture threw a ghostly, flickering light. Near the first door on the right was a burnished copy of the brass plaque I had seen on the pillar outside. I took another waggle and opened the door into a long room lit by small, halogen bulbs suspended from copper wires. Exhibits were installed at regular intervals along the all-white walls. The only other person in the room was the embodiment of the voice in the speaker.

  The kid looked a few years younger than Connor. He stood slouched behind a white desk with a ring of keys in his hand, dressed in dark jeans, an unzipped black hoodie and a black t-shirt one size too small.

  Without looking at me, the attendant said, “Fifteen dollars.”

  I took a ten and a five out of my wallet and laid the bills on the counter.

  The attendant picked up the bills and thwacked down in their place a plastic device about the size of my cell phone. Then he reached down below the counter and tossed a set of headphones with foam earpieces—the kind of headphones I had been offered on the airplane—next to the device.

  I picked up the headphones and the device and said, “Thanks.”

  “We close in fourteen minutes.”

  I made my way over creaking floorboards to the tiny museum’s far corner, mostly to put some distance between the attendant and myself. The exhibit occupying that corner was titled “The Battle of the Century,” and it featured a printed reproduction of a photograph of two men wearing high-waisted shorts and standing toe-to-toe in a boxing ring bathed in light. The caption read, “In 1921, Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier fought for the Heavyweight Championship of the World and changed radio forever. Press 094 to hear more.”

  I plugged the headphones into the device the attendant had given me, put the headphones over my ears, and pressed zero, nine, and four on the keypad.

  What I heard was a minute-long audio segment about Dempsey’s defeat of Carpentier and the hundreds of thousands of Americans—many of them New Yorkers—who gathered around their radios to hear it on Hoboken’s WJY. Sound effects—the transistor whine of an old radio set tuning in a signal, a bell announcing the start of a new round, a cheering crowd—rose and fell behind the voice of a female narrator, enhancing her performance, which was, to my ear, straight-announcement work of the highest quality.

  “No single event,” the narrator said of the Dempsey fight, “was more important to radio’s transition from a point-to-point communication system with primarily military applications to a method of reaching and entertaining the masses.”

  The narration faded neatly into a crackling, hissing re-creation of the ringside broadcaster’s climactic call.

  “Seven, eight, nine . . . ten! It’s a knockout! Jack Dempsey is the winner and still world champion!”

  By the time the segment was over, the archival image of Dempsey and Carpentier seemed less authentic—and less significant—than the vivid sensations and three-dimensional images the audio had conjured in me. I hadn’t visited many museums in my life, but I guessed that this was one of the few in which what you observed mattered less than what you heard. I took this as yet another indication that I had found somewhere in this city I belonged and, with my back to the attendant, I smiled.

  The next exhibit, entitled “The General,” was a bronze bust of David Sarnoff, founder of the National Broadcasting Company and chairman of the Radio Corporation of America. I was calling up the accompanying audio program when my eye caught the title of the next exhibit over: “The First Commercials.”

  With an hour to spend in the museum, I might have heard out the Sarnoff piece. With fourteen minutes—More like twelve, now, I thought—I abandoned the paean to executive genius for a piece that seemed more likely to speak to me.

  The visuals of the first-commercials exhibit were limited—an illustration of a radio tower bearing the call letters WEAF, with white semi-circles rippling out from the antenna, and a blown up black-and-white photo of a studio cluttered with nests of wires and ancient analog equipment. I scanned the images in the time it took me to enter 0, 9 and 6 into the audio guide, and then gave my full attention to the voice of the narrator.

  “In 1922,” she began—it was the same wo
man who had done the Dempsey narration—“the Queensboro Realty Company paid one hundred dollars to New York station WEAF for the rights to ten minutes of airtime. They used that time to broadcast a scripted monologue about novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. But the executives of the Queensboro Realty Company weren’t peddling books. They were selling a bucolic ideal of home life in a community far away from the congestion and pollution of the city, and they were using Hawthorne’s writing to do it. The monologue’s sole purpose was to attract potential renters to a new apartment complex in Jackson Heights. The name of the complex? Hawthorne Court.”

  There was nothing wry or ironic in the narrator’s delivery, but I couldn’t help but laugh. It was hard to imagine anyone being taken in by such a hokey, dishonest ploy. I remembered enough of the The Scarlet Letter to know I wouldn’t want Hester Prynne’s neighbors living next door to me. Even harder to accept was the idea that anyone would’ve given ten minutes of attention to one commercial.

  Almost as if she’d heard me think it, the narrator addressed the latter objection.

  “In the New York radio market of the early 1920s,” she said, “Queensboro Realty’s one hundred dollars bought something close to a captive audience. There were few stations to tune in and no television sets to turn on. And in an age before standard sixty-second spots and clearly defined commercial breaks, it was difficult for listeners to discern where programming ended and advertising began. Commercials were read by the same men who read the news and made social commentary, and the only hint of a transition from regular programming to a sponsor’s content was the sound of paper being shuffled. In the blurring of these lines, advertisers saw an opportunity they were willing to pay for, and commercial radio was born.”

  The narrator gave way to a second voice, and I recognized its timbre and range immediately. The voice belonged to the same man who had re-created the call of Jack Dempsey’s knockout of Carpentier, but the ringside patter was nowhere to be heard. In its place was the polished diction of a man who would have been considered fit, in the 1920s, to broadcast from the bully pulpit of a New York City radio studio. In just a few syllables, that vocal style—the amplitude of its dynamics, a phlegmy rattle in its lower register, and the vaguely English way in which vowels erased the consonants that followed them—filled out the details of a man’s life. Old money. Boarding-school education. A receding hairline that offended his vanity. A one-pack-a-day smoking habit. Unlike the narrator, whose talent was for the straight announcement I hoped to make my bread and butter, the man in command of this second voice—who could bring to life a boxing play-by-play man one minute and a blue-blooded radio host the next—was a character creator. Like Connor.

  “It is fifty-eight years,” the radio host said, “since Nathaniel Hawthorne, the greatest of American fictionalists, passed away. To honor his memory, the Queensboro Corporation, creator and operator of the tenant-owned system of apartment homes at Jackson Heights, New York City, has named the latest group of high-grade dwellings Hawthorne Court.”

  A second excerpt from the ad began as the first faded out, and a third selection faded in over the end of the second. In this way, the commercial was condensed into what might have been ninety seconds but felt much longer. Even a gifted creator of characters couldn’t make this script live and breathe in the twenty-first century. That said, if I’d been offered a chance to endure the unabridged commercial, I probably would have given it my last ten minutes in the museum, observing some version of the principle my father followed when he watched a one-sided White Sox loss to the final disheartening out.

  Mindful that my time was running short, I scanned a paragraph beneath a headshot of New York actor Joan Alexander, the definitive voice of Lois Lane on the long-running serial The Adventures of Superman, and quickly reviewed a collage of newspaper headlines recounting the panic caused by Orson Welles’ production of War of the Worlds. An installation dubbed “The Death of Radio” displayed a timeline of cultural moments—the invention of television, the introduction of dashboard cassette players, the first MTV telecast, and the arrival of the iPod—at which the demise of radio had been prophesied. I needed no commentary to be reminded of what I already knew: radio survives. It’s the cockroach of media.

  The next exhibit I saw stopped me cold. Printed in blue type across the top of a freestanding, linoleum-coated slab was its title: “Harrison Walz: The Voiceover Artist.”

  I had never heard of Harrison Walz. A single-paragraph biography informed me that he was a commercial announcer in the 1930s and ‘40s for WOR in New York. A black-and-white photo showed Walz in a suit jacket and tie, wearing wooden headphones over thin hair slicked straight back, standing with script in hand before a large microphone branded with his station’s call letters, his countenance frozen in mid-utterance of a long vowel—an a or an i—his eyes smiling, his free arm raised and bent gracefully at the elbow as if he were conducting a symphony.

  Beneath the photograph was a quotation attributed to Walz himself: “I am not an announcer.”

  In the Walz exhibit, I heard a negative echo of my identity as a voiceover artist who only wanted to announce. Why would Walz, billed as the voiceover artist, deny that he was an announcer? I turned to the narrator—my colleague, as I had come to think of her—for answers.

  “Harrison Walz,” the narrator said, “did one voice—his own—and he employed it on behalf of the sponsors of the biggest radio dramas and comedies of his time. In the late 1940s, if you’d asked a New Yorker if he knew Harrison Walz, chances were good she would have said, ‘Oh, sure. The radio announcer.’ Walz was credited as an announcer at the beginning and end of some of the highest-rated broadcasts in radio history.

  “But in an interview he gave to The New Yorker in 1953, Walz bristled at the term. ‘I am not an announcer,’ he declared, in what the columnist described as Walz’s ‘signature, clear-as-a-bell baritone.’ Walz went on to explain that ‘an announcer simply vocalizes the text put in front of him, and if he’s any good, he vocalizes well. I do something more. If there is any heart in a sponsor’s script, any humanity at all in the words, I make it the centerpiece of my performance. And the audience can feel the humanity coming through the radio, even if my voice sounds the same as it always has.’

  “For hundreds of Walz’s contemporaries in stations across the country,” the narrator continued, “simply announcing the text put in front of them was good enough to earn a living. And surely Harrison Walz was handed commercial scripts so shallow or coarsely consumerist that he could find no humanity in them. But by digging deep and finding something human in so many of the scripts he performed, Harrison Walz created and played many more characters than the famous radio actors with whom he shared a studio. He made the craft of commercial voiceover an art form, one that many voice professionals would claim to practice, but few truly understand.”

  The audio ebbed into silence. I stood before the exhibit, afraid to move. I had dreamed throughout my long silence of becoming what I thought of as the best kind of voiceover artist: a highly skilled straight announcer. Now, near the end of my accidental pilgrimage to this one-room tribute to radio’s survival, I’d heard emphatic testimony from one of the Great Voices that announcement and voiceover artistry were entirely distinct, that a straight announcer was no voiceover artist at all.

  Worse, I knew deep down that Walz was right. What had made Larry Sellers my hero was the way his voice made me feel when I heard it. Until that moment, though, I hadn’t been conscious that I’d been hearing anything more than the richness and precision of his delivery. They didn’t have names, they didn’t have silly voices, but Larry Sellers had been finding and creating characters—human beings behind the words—for as long as I’d been listening to him. Larry Sellers was a voiceover artist, just as Harrison Walz had been.

  I yearned for the seconds-ago past in which my legitimacy as a voiceover artist seemed to hinge on the kind of script I’d be handed for the New York Red Bulls session. Now I could see
that I was already an impostor: I wasn’t really a voiceover artist. And in that moment, I was certain I never would be. I believed I had as much chance of creating a character on my own as I did of growing six inches taller.

  Even the Manhattan Museum of Radio Arts was a place where Connor belonged and I did not.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find the attendant standing behind me.

  “We’re closed.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I need the docent.”

  I pulled off the headphones and handed them over, along with the audio device. The attendant unclipped a karabiner from his belt loop and pinched a key between his thumb and forefinger. Then he gave me a look that said, Get out.

  I started walking. The attendant followed. Nearing the door, I noticed an exhibit I’d missed on my way in. A triangle of warm, yellow light shone up from behind an old wooden radio cabinet, illuminating the exhibit’s title—“The Voices”—and a dedication: “In honor of the on-air personalities of New York radio.”

  The installation had the collective, anonymous feel of a memorial marking a mass grave, and I understood that hastily buried among the newsreaders and traffic reporters were the practitioners of straight announcement, the soullessly technical virtuosos who had recorded hundreds of commercial scripts without finding even one character lying moribund on the page and reviving her.

  •••

  WHEN I FINALLY got into my hotel room, I didn’t open up my laptop to see if the script for the next day’s session had been sent to me. I dropped my bag in a corner and left the laptop zipped inside it.

  I drew the curtains, blacking out the city lights that were beginning to outdo what little daylight remained. I stood on the heel of one shoe and lifted my foot out of it; the other shoe I wrenched off with my hands. I undid my belt, pulled down my pants, and stepped out of them. When I was out of my t-shirt, too, I stood still alongside the queen-size bed, feeling my sweat evaporate into the cool, stale air. I threw all but one of the bed’s pillows onto the floor, gathered the comforter, blanket and sheets into my hand, and yanked them back. I hadn’t eaten since leaving Chicago, but I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t tired, either. The sensation of rushing into bed without any thought of going to sleep was familiar—I’d done this many times—but this time was different. I had a voice now, and I’d bet everything on it.