The Voice Next Door : A knack for projecting personality over radio waves can be worth a bundle to advertisers. Those who do it best seem like old friends.

Their voices move imaginations, widen smiles, even refresh our fantasies.

So we pump up the volume when Casey’s bedroom chuckle and Jack’s easy nuances make foreplay of radio commercials for Shedd’s Country Crock. Or Beringer Wines. Or 3-Day Blinds. Clearly, their marriage must be an endless honeymoon.

In our minds, Tom Bodett is a fictional character. Or he could be an actor taking a cue from Garrison Keillor’s cracker barrel. Maybe he’s the president of Motel 6 looking to break into show biz.

Everybody knows P.C. Modem really is a computer genius and likely an MIT-schooled tech rep for Comp-USA. But we wouldn’t buy a used Apple from his second banana.

Then there’s that droopy guy, the kindergarten commentator who interviews kids about their flexible bones for PacifiCare commercials. He’d get more work if he didn’t sound like Garfield the cat.

Let’s get real.

There is nothing casual, uncalculated or particularly comedic about the radio craft of voice-over and its performers.

Their successful spoken words, those down-home and wheat-field drawls and New Jersey edges, represent six-figure, sometimes million-dollar talents that earn $6 billion a year for America’s 10,000 stations broadcasting to 479 million radios. That’s about two radios per citizen.

Perversely, in a show business that suckles on public acclaim and recognition, voice actors remain a cast of thousands known among themselves--but mainly faceless, nameless and usually fameless to radio audiences.

Yet as we know their sounds, actors acknowledge their stars--also that today’s extraordinary sellers are ordinary voices implying honesty, sincerity and lazy weekends.

That PacifiCare spokesman with the Librium tonsils belongs to Lorenzo Music, 56, of Hancock Park. He’s been doing voice-overs for 15 years and is successful to the point of turning down commercials that might dent his integrity. Or unleash the killer of over-exposure.

Music is a stand-up comic, actor, creator of sitcoms for Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart, an Emmy-winning writer. And he is the dopey voice of Garfield the cat.

P.C. Modem is Jack Riley, 57.

He isn’t an employee of Comp-USA except to cut its radio commercials, and there have been 800 of those since 1989. Riley was mega-neurotic Mr. Carlin back when Bob Newhart was a psychologist and married to Suzanne Pleshette.

The life of Riley has reached from writing for Mort Sahl to appearances on the European stage. To explore his computer literacy, however, is to risk blowing image and client privilege.

“Somebody once asked me what DOS (Disk Operating System) stood for,” Riley says. “I thought it meant (actor) David Ogden Stiers.”

Riley’s perennial sidekick is roly-poly-toned Thom Sharp, 45, of Sherman Oaks.

He is a former Detroit copy writer and another stand-up comic who acts. In 10 years of voice-overs, he has frozen the little buns off termites on radio and filled Glad Bags with angry bees on television.

The head above the face behind the voice is quite bald. Sharp no longer hides it. Not after wearing a toupee on a television commercial for Kellogg Nutri-Grain.

“I looked like I was wearing a member of the animal kingdom,” Sharp remembers. He is famous for wryness, and so his lines flow and familiar tones roll. “There was more fiber in the toupee than in the cereal. You know, Kellogg spent $500,000 on the commercial and $1.80 on the toupee. . . .”

Cut back to Riley. When he’s not P.C. Modem he’s also the husbandly half of the sensuous Country Crock commercials. Also Beringer Wines and 3-Day Blinds. With Casey DeFranco as the wife with the throaty giggle.

Off the air, however, Jack lives in the Hollywood Hills and is inseparably married to Ginger. DeFranco, 44, lives on her six-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley and is happily engaged to Robin.

She accepts The Laugh as her primary talent. It is a natural sound energized by Riley’s humor. So they have teamed on hundreds of commercials for more than 16 years, nine with Country Crock.

“It is a kind of sexy laugh, but non-threatening to women because it characterizes a happily married wife,” DeFranco says. The Laugh also was born by accident. “I was working as a production assistant when someone asked me to read a commercial.

“I’m a pretty shy person and I immediately got nervous. I started to read, Jack made me laugh, and it all sort of took off from there.”

Then there’s Tom Bodett. And there is a Tom Bodett.

He’s a 38-year-old National Public Radio commentator who left southern Michigan to see the world, wandered into Homer, Alaska, and has been living there happily ever after for 16 years.

“Homer is 4,000 people and about the size of Manhattan, only shorter,” he says.

Within his living Northern Exposure, Bodett has found the calm to author four books, host NPR shows and write humor columns for the Anchorage Daily News. In 1986 he was asked to record commercials for Motel 6 and has been leaving the light on for America ever since.

“I’m not an impersonator. I’ve only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays,” Bodett explains. “What you hear is southern Michigan, not a drawl, but a halting kind of speech where you leave spaces when there shouldn’t be any. We take a breath anywhere.”

But the heart of his appeal, he says, “is being sincere, as gloppy as that might sound.

“I’m real. I believe what I’m saying. If Motel 6 wasn’t the type of operation they say it is--and I stay at them when I travel--I wouldn’t do their commercials. That comes through on the radio, and that’s what it’s all about.”

Bodett also has sufficient commercial identity that his voice is imitated. He is not flattered.

“Somebody says, ‘Do a Tom Bodett, a folksy kind of thing,’ and it sounds like something out of ‘Hee Haw,’ very insulting,” says the real Bodett. “They turn wry humor into disparaging sarcasm, and you get what amounts to insulting advertising.”

It all began in 1922 with WEAF in New York.

The announcer is unknown. But the first radio commercial pitched rentals for Queensboro Realty Co. The spot lasted 10 minutes and cost $100, which wouldn’t buy one minute in most markets today.

Baritone barkers, booming graduates of the hard sell and Columbia School of Broadcasting owned the ‘30s and ‘40s. Celebrity endorsers and impersonators of celebrity endorsers had their years. And many business owners--the Lillian Zackeys, the Earl Scheibs, the Mr. and Mrs. Woody Smiths, the Kings of Big Screen--continue to cut costs by cutting their own commercials.

Movie stars once considered radio far beneath their acting dignities. Now they’re part of today’s era of voice-overs. They don’t identify themselves--some contracts even bar advertisers from revealing their names--but enquiring ears know.

That’s Donald Sutherland’s whisper and New Brunswick vowels selling Volvo, Jack Lemmon speaking for Honda and Tom Selleck chatting up AT&T.; Also Kirstie Alley bringing husky appeal to Subaru, and Lauren Bacall--the first lady of sultry--pitching Royal Caribbean Lines. Also Kitty Litter.

Robert (“Beef, it’s what’s for dinner”) Mitchum’s medium-rare growl is used by the National Beef Council. Lynn (“Just another day in California”) Whitfield went to Pacific Bell from winning an Emmy for “The Josephine Baker Story.”

“It is a non-sell, non-hype voice that reeks of honesty,” says Jeff Danis of ICM, who represents Whitfield.

Kathleen Turner--who currently does Dove ice cream bars--once turned down a Japanese car company because she felt it would appear unpatriotic.

But John Corbett of “Northern Exposure” didn’t refuse Isuzu, Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld” didn’t reject Nissan, and Sutherland has no moral objections to promoting Volvo. He has driven Volvos for years.

Agents and casting directors say it’s big, easy money for major personalities and seductive to advertisers who believe a star’s power and presence just might brush off on the product.

“For us, the quality of Donald Sutherland’s voice represents the value of Volvo as a product,” explains Rob Berger of Messner, Vetere, Berger, McNamee and Schmetterer of New York. Berger says he sought Sutherland for Volvo after hearing the actor read poetry. “His voice is intellectual on one hand, self-effacing on the other. It has honesty, humor, a wryness, understanding. . . . It’s an interesting marriage.”

Rewards to stars also are interesting.

Whereas journeymen will earn Screen Actors Guild scale starting at $300 for one spot, a Sutherland, a Mitchum or a James Garner may garner $75,000.

When James Earl Jones contributed his basso to recent commercials for Humvee he received one of the off-road vehicles in partial payment. And for a recent series of Infiniti commercials, Michael Douglas was rumored to have received $3 million.

“It’s a case of having your cake and eating it,” explains Paul Doherty, an agent with Cunningham, Escott, Dipene Talent Agency of Beverly Hills. “Your name is not being exploited to the detriment of your movie career, the money is good, and you don’t have to wear costume or makeup.”

But to really sway buyers from Domino’s to Pizza Hut these days, say the experts, agencies are putting more faith in the believable and less expensive voices of ordinary people in average conversations.

They are called Vanilla Voices. The Midwestern Muddle. The Voice Next Door. Non-Advertising Voices. The No-Reads.

“It seems to conform to what is happening in the ‘90s,” believes Gordon Hunt, a director and voice expert with Hanna-Barbera. “We’re no longer in the high-rolling times that meant hard sell, hype, get rich and everybody climb on the bandwagon.

“We want people to look us in the eye, to be honest. So we want voice-overs we can believe. Like Tom Bodett.”

But a little distinction added to that honesty, some cinnamon in the vanilla, never hurts.

Remember the Subaru buyer, the schlub with the Chicago-Cincinnati monotone who had enough friends without adding an auto mechanic?

He’s Mark Fenske, who also writes and directs radio and television commercials. Fenske, owner of the Bomb Factory in Venice, says he’s a one-voice talent who doesn’t know how to act.

“But maybe I did introduce a character and a way of talking,” he says.

It was based on a commercial he wrote as one sentence and believed should be read “as if it was somebody describing something that happened and it happened all at once and sounded like just this with words in a row spoken by a guy with a rueful smile on his face.”

There’s the ubiquitous, perennial, nonsensical, infectiously outrageous Mal Sharpe, 57, of Berkeley, whose schtick for two decades has been man-in-the-street interviews. His crackling voice always seems to sit on the cusp of a belly laugh. For Hollywood Park. For Forest Lawn and Big Macs and TV Guide. Now for sellers of Southern California Cadillacs with muscles.

And Bill Heater. Four years ago, as a teasing preamble to the introduction of Infiniti cars, campaign planners decided on a six-month series of commercials without cars. Each script played off the mysticism of nature and the environment with Heater--a copy writer who was the voice of Chef Boyardee and John Hancock--speaking the shamanism.

Despite huge public attention, the spots were a creative disaster. Few people grasped a car commercial without cars. Jay Leno said he went to buy an Infiniti and was sold a box of rocks and twigs. Even commercials for stiff-upper Range Rover parodied the spiritual theme of Infiniti.

“I was called the ‘smarmy swami’ and became a character in a comic strip (“Cathy”) as Cathy’s imaginary heartthrob,” remembers Heater, now moved from Southern California and a partner in a Boston advertising agency.

Heater, however, was in the vanguard of voice-overs that talked the written word--to the point of sprinkling ums and ahs throughout the Infiniti scripts to make them sound ordinary, honest and unrehearsed.

“But financially it was good for me,” Heater says. “I probably earned in the region of $40,000 to $50,000 for about 10 spots.”

Despite the competition of a bloated talent pool, despite the availability of scab voices and unemployed disc jockeys who will work below SAG scale, talent will always out.

DeFranco says her radio earnings bought the ranch in Santa Ynez. Riley says he has made enough to “put my kids through expensive private schools.”

Rita Vennari, a voice agent with Sutton, Barth & Vennari of Los Angeles, says one of her clients--”a bright lad, 29 years old, trained in voice”--earned only $2,800 in 1990, his first year of voice-overs.

“But last year he was up to $38,000,” she says. “The real professionals, those with good reputations and years of experience, usually earn six or seven figures a year.”

To talents like Joannie Robbins, however, any amount for voice-overs is money hard-earned. She has been at it for 20 years, is currently heard on commercials for Dunkin’ Donuts and Canon Copiers, and teaches audio wanna-bes.

Her first lesson: There’s a ton more to it than reading aloud.

“A wonderful sound is only the start,” she advises. “More important, how do you read the copy? How do you take instructions from a casting director? How do you interpret and present the meaning of the writer?

“Can you do a very loving sound for New Diet Frozen Dinners? Then change it to worried by moving to the higher pitch of anxiety? It certainly doesn’t help that a lot of the time, the director and advertiser don’t know what they want until they hear it.”

For many voice actors, success is a quick ear and the ability to play endless permutations of a dozen voices against a hundred accents. For others, livelihood is a matter of a single voice made distinctive by God’s placement of vocal chords, sinuses, and density of the cranial cavity.

Or, notes Lorenzo Music, it helps to be smacked in the nose by a baseball as a kid.

Lack of public recognition and the absence of autograph seekers are a bane for some voice actors. Others covet the anonymity because without a face, without a name, a voice remains ageless and its mystique intact.

Says DeFranco: “Sometimes I’ll go into a store, laugh at something and the checker will ask: ‘Aren’t you the Country Crock lady?’ That’s what I live for.”

Then she laughs at herself.

Bodett is unknown by his face.

It allows him to move freely between motels.

But managers recognize the name when he registers.

“That’s usually good for another towel in the bathroom,” Bodett says. “Or when I check out, the manager will whisper: ‘Keep the soap, Tom.’ ”