Carter ratings lowest ever

It would be nice, it would be a sort of summer shower of relief from New York's suffocating heat, if I could settle down and talk about something non political, like, say, the young man, one Jay Birmingham, who limped into Manhattan the other day having run the 2,950 miles from Los Angeles to New York City, a long-distance hero, if ever there was one.

It took him just under 73 days and the most fascinating thing about his marathon jog was his confession of what hampered him most along the way. Put in the form of a question, it might instigate some interesting bets. What, then, do you suppose was his greatest difficulty? He mentioned pains in his shins, which you might guess at, apocalyptic thunder and lightning storms and – what we'd all think of today – the paralysing heatwave that hit him all the way from West Texas through the Upper South and Midwest and on to New York. New York, in fact, in 90 degrees, was almost a relief. He said that most of the last 1500 miles had been like jogging in an oven.

But I'd be surprised if any listener had guessed the main hazard. It was hecklers along the way who tossed beer cans at him. Possibly I imagine, from people who objected to the president's boycott of the Olympics and thought he ought to be doing his stuff in Moscow.

Anyway, let us raise a glass to Jay Birmingham before we move on to topic A. Or rather, I ought to make a short bypass of topic A before we backtrack and mention a little Anglo-American hassle which at any other time might have been the subject of a whole talk.

You surely know that, since the development of trade unions among actors and other show business people, a British actor, an American band leader, cannot automatically book himself into a tour of the other country. In the old days, if the manager of an American vaudevillian, say, got a booking for him in London, he simply sent over and performed.

I remember the first shock of the incoming system way back in the early 1930s when Duke Ellington decided to take his band to London. Paul Whiteman and his large band had done it six or seven years before and taken England by storm with something called symphonic jazz, but when Ellington first tried it he was told that he, as a unique irreplaceable talent, would be very welcome if he agreed to leave his band behind and hire British jazz men to fill in for them. Since, however, what was unique and irreplaceable about Duke Ellington's band was Duke Ellington's band, the entirely new sound that he'd created with it, the tour had to be abandoned.

Well, since then the unions on both sides of the Atlantic have been very watchful of any incoming foreigner – British artists coming into America, Americans going into England – the general principle which governs letting them in or keeping them out is well understood. You have to prove that the talent that you're importing is unique or at least not one that could be matched by a native.

A year or two ago, I found myself appearing before a tribunal of Actors' Equity in New York to give evidence as – if you please won't laugh out loud – as an expert witness. An American producer wanted to put on, in America, a revival of 'My Fair Lady'. He'd been over to London, soon found his Henry Higgins in the person of a well-known British actor and, after auditioning over 30 English actresses, had picked his Eliza.

Actors' Equity in New York said the producer could have one of them but not both The actor was accepted as being unique and irreplaceable but, they said, the Eliza was not. Equity maintained that they should either find an English woman in the United States who was an American citizen or give the part to an American girl.

Several Americans were auditioned and the producer was dissatisfied. Something was wrong with them and I was called in to say what. I made what the producer and his lawyer assured me was an unanswerable case for having an English woman. No American girl, I maintained, could possible speak natural and easy-going Cockney and then switch to natural and easy-going Mayfair.

The tribunal started to heckle me by mentioning American actresses who, on the stage or on the screen, had played English women. 'How about', they said, 'Katharine Hepburn as Mary Queen of Scots?' 'Awful!" I said. 'She only went to show that the daughter of a New England doctor who'd gone to Bryn Mawr should play nothing but the daughters of New England doctors who'd gone to Bryn Mawr.' I also added that the chosen Henry Higgins was dispensable. Lots of naturalised Englishmen living in America could play the part, but Eliza had to be English.

When the hearing was over, the producer and his lawyer took me off to a celebration lunch. They said I had made an overwhelming case. Well, the tribunal was underwhelmed. They decided to let in the Englishman and give Eliza to an American girl. She proved my point, but not before the show had run for three months.

Now there's a new row. In the current recession, Actors' Equity is under fire for letting in English performers while Americans go unemployed – and I think I ought to mention, by way of dissuading stage-struck youngsters, that more than 85 per cent of all professional actors and actresses earn less than £1,000 a year.

Well, today, Actors' Equity is getting tougher than ever and the equivalent union in Britain is understandably reciprocating, but not vigorously enough for some Britons.

A correspondent in a London newspaper bemoaned this trend the other day and to demonstrate how desperate, how absurd, things have got he wrote, at least the paper printed, this immortal sentence: 'And now an Englishman is being passed over and an American is being given the intensely English part of Sydney Carton in Lord Grade's "A Tale of Two Cities".'

It just goes to show, among other things, that we can't write anything about America these days without committing a Freudian slip that involves the woeful figure of the President of the United States. And so we come reluctantly to him.

Last week I remarked that presidential nominating conventions have a way of getting out of hand. Not usually with the Republicans but the Democrats... the Democrats have a habit, practically a tradition, of starting out of hand and winding up at dawn on Friday morning all with – hours after the convention is supposed to have ended – with three candidates, one winner and two losers, disguising from the assembled mob their loathing of each other, by clasping their hands and raising their arms high like boxers and showing the convention how wonderfully they're all of one mind.

Whenever, if memory serves, whenever the Democrats have fought in the convention, they've always said that a healthy battle showed how unfettered the party was by the party bosses. But what it showed to the country was that the Democrats were a divided party and they regularly lost.

These habits are worth bearing in mind when we come, as we will on Monday 11th, to the Democratic convention in New York. Less than two weeks away from the nominating convention which is meant to show a united party, another and better way of life than any the Republicans can offer, the Democrats are, as one sad senator put it the other day, 'Running for the lifeboats'.

I don't remember, from my own experience or from the books, any time when a party has approached its convention in such a shambles of despair and disunity. The latest poll shows Ronald Reagan with 51 per cent popular approval, John Anderson, the maverick independent, with 23 per cent and President Carter with only 20 per cent. Not Truman, at his lowest ebb, not Nixon, in the pit of Watergate, ever sank so low in public esteem and this is the man who has to keep up a traditional front and pretend that on Thursday week he will handsomely take a majority of the votes once the balloting gets under way.

I think a great deal will turn on the day that the Democrats' Rules Committee puts its new rules to the floor. The Carter men are in a majority on the Rules Committee and this year, only a week or two ago, they resisted the promised belligerency of Senator Kennedy's crusade for an open convention by writing in a rule which says that if any delegate refuses to vote the way he was instructed to vote when he was chosen in the primary elections he will be replaced by a so-called 'alternate' who will then obediently vote the way the primary said he should.

If this rule carries when it goes to the convention floor, then Carter will have the comfortable majority the primaries gave him, but there is the embarrassment of brother Billy's shenanigans with Libya. This looked to be no more than an embarrassment until it came out on Thursday that the president had, in fact, discussed with his brother, at one time, classified State Department cables about Billy's first trip to Libya.

This new shock, along with Carter's truly appalling plunge in the polls, has caused the Democrats in the Senate to meet in private twice and wonder what to do. The key figure here is Senator Robert Byrd, the president's leader in the Senate. An astute and sober majority leader, he's not so far committed himself to any candidate, not from... not from weakness or indecision, but from the healthy recognition that the Senate majority leader is going to have to get along with the next Democratic president, if there is one, whoever he is – Carter or Kennedy or Muskie or Mondale or some unknown Lochinvar.

But Senator Byrd, we now know, has given serious consideration to a proposal of several leading Democrats that he should ask the president, even at this late date, to step down, at the very least, not to fight for the new rule but magnanimously to suggest its abolition, to be in fact the proposer of an open convention where all the delegates could start again and vote for the man who, today, not last March, seems most likely to beat Reagan.

It might be the shrewdest thing the president could do but, as you know, shrewdness does not seem to be his strong point. He knows that most of the delegates who don't want him want Kennedy less. In a word, the Democrats are running round in circles looking for that elusive, that God-sent third man. Next week we'll have a better idea whether they've found him. Maybe.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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