Commercials: The Voice from Brooklyn

Alexander Scourby, 54, is a television anomaly — a performer who is often heard, but seldom seen. The rich, resonant bass that frets, in the name of Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids, “It’s a dirty world,” is Scourby’s. The voice that expresses Eastern Air Lines’ sentiment, “We want everyone to fly,” is his. He is also the fellow on the tele phone commercial who explains warmly that “We may be the only phone company in town, but we try not to act like it.”

There are nights on the tube when Scourby (pronounced Score-bee) seems to be the only voice in town. He has sold Excedrin and Bufferin, touted Mrs. Filbert’s Margarine and eulogized the Peace Corps. He has lent his narrative authority to TV documentaries from the classic Victory at Sea to the National Geographic special “Amazon” on CBS last month. And even when he is not available, Scourby remains a resident genus on Madison Avenue. Creative directors are constantly demanding of their casting departments, “Get me a Scourby voice,” or “I need the Scourby sound.” The commercial business being what it is, even second-string Scourbys wind up earning more than college presidents.

Upscale. In the old radio days, a commercial announcer was the very embodiment of the product. Jimmy Wallington was Chase & Sanborn. Don Wilson was JellO. Harry von Zell was Ipana. Today the sell is generally softer or more tangential, the product is illustrated, and the salesman is anonymous and generally invisible. “You’re not paying for the name,” explains Chandler Warren, talent-booking boss for the Young & Rubicam ad agency. “You’re paying for the quality that a person brings to the commercial.”

The Scourby quality, says Warren, is “warmth and appeal.” His voice is at once “distinguished, melodic, mellifluous, the kind that makes people stop and listen.” It does so in a soft, unobtrusive, untheatrical way. It bespeaks intelligence and money—old money. His agent, Fifi Oscard, calls it “upscale,” an ad-game adjective that evokes the top social and economic strata.

A Little Dirt. The upscale sound of Alexander Euclid Scourby was bred in Brooklyn, but any vestige of his home borough or his immigrant parents’ Greek accent was drilled out of him by the time he was 19, when he apprenticed with Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theater. Within four years, he was on Broadway as the Player King to Leslie Howard’s Hamlet, and had developed so Shakespearean an intonation that he bombed his first radio auditions. So, he says, “I dirtied it up a little bit and made it sound Amer ican.” Soon he was dovetailing up to five soap-opera parts a day.

As if in compensation for his honey voice, Scourby lacks conventional leading-man looks, so he carved his career in character roles in TV dramas and Hollywood as well as on Broadway. It was his preference for living in the East that finally steered him into commercial work, which alone brings his income to $250,000 a year. The riches embarrass him a little. “I don’t think anybody deserves that much money,” he says. For conscience and kicks, he limits his commercial tapings to about 90 days a year; the rest of the time he records for the blind. He has done 350 talking books so far, including the King James version of the Bible, Shakespeare, a 68-record LP reading of War and Peace and Joyce’s Ulysses. He also does recitations, occasionally with his actress wife Lori March, who is better known as Valerie Ames on the CBS-TV soaper The Secret Storm.

This week he is in Indiana doing a one-man Walt Whitman show, which he has already taken to 23 cities. Then it’s back to Madison Avenue to do an other spot for Eastern. “Frankly,” he says, in the voice that no one dares disbelieve, “I have more respect for the commercials I’m doing than some of the stuff that’s on Broadway.”