Sounding American

Some years ago I had the extraordinary experience – in fact for me unique – of appearing as an expert witness before a judge. I immediately hear prim old gentlemen saying, 'And, pray, what expertise can you claim in any field whatsoever?'

A good question. A journalist, a foreign correspondent especially, is expected to pick up something across as wide a range of knowledge as possible. He is, by definition, a jack of all trades and so, to complete the definition, he's assumed to be master of none. But nobody is born a journalist and before I was stricken by the urge to enlighten the general public on every conceivable subject, from medicine to golf, from professors of religion to practitioners of politics, which is about a wide a gamut as exists in our society, I was a scholar in a special field of study. It was linguistics, which is not quite the same as being a linguist.

Linguistics is the scientific study of how languages came about and how they change. Why the Greek K goes over into English as a soft C and kinima turns into cinema. Why do the French put a circumflex accent over the word côte, C-O-T-E, to show that between old French and later French an S got dropped and the original word was the one that passed over to the English as coast. How did it happen that the Spanish looked at the, shall I say, fundamental Roman word for a sheath and turned it into vanilla. Look that up and you're in for a startling discovery!

Well, my special study, pursued under an American linguistic scholar who was, in his time, the American Henry Higgins – and you'll see, in a minute, why that name came up – my special field was the history of the English language in America, following, most obviously, the growth or development of a new vocabulary to describe the new landscape and the effect on English of having daily contact first with Indians and then with the Spanish and the French, then the Dutch and arriving Germans and, in time, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Italians and so on. All of whom contributed words to the English of America.

But the most fascinating part of the year – I spent doing practically nothing else – was the history of the seventeenth-century pronunciation of England among incoming lawyers, divines, carpenters and mechanics. Now, offhand you'd say it would be impossible to know about this because there were no movies, no recording. Well, yes, there was. Not of sound, but we have the written records of the earliest town meetings. Two in Massachusetts, one on Long Island. The town meeting was, still is in almost all small towns and villages, the basic body of democratic government. Anybody could come and have his or her say on any topic that was disturbing or exciting the neighbourhood.

They were conducted in the early days usually by the lawyer or the parson, by the educated types. The record, in longhand, was usually kept by a farmer or mechanic and the pronunciations of the chairman were naturally written down in a rude, phonetic way. So when the English parson or whoever said 'librairy', A-I-R-Y, we know that that's how educated Englishmen of the time spoke the word. That pronunciation, like many another old English pronunciation stayed on in America, while down the years, the centuries, it changed in England. Indeed, more often than not, that was the story, that the Americans retained the old English pronunciations and the English changed them.

Well, to my expert appearance. And old friend of mine, a theatrical lawyer, was planning to revive in New York the masterpiece of his long-time client, the late, I'm sad to say, Alan Jay Lerner. That masterpiece, as at least three continents are well aware, is Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion', 'My Fair Lady'.

Now, whenever you decide to bring an English play to New York or take an American play to London, you instantly have trouble with the actors' unions. The general rule here is that an Englishman will be allowed to play his part in the American production if it can be demonstrated, before the Actors' Union, that he's sufficiently distinguished to be irreplaceable by an American playing the part.

This is not a regulation restricted to actors. It's a regular requirement of the immigration service. Same in England. It applies to a doctor, a carpenter, anyone of foreign citizenship seeking to do a temporary job in the United States. The immigration service gets in touch with the appropriate union and, if the union agrees that the man, the woman, has some skill not likely to be matched by an unemployed American, he/she will be allowed in. And this applies all the way from labourers to nuclear physicists, though it would probably not be hard for the Pentagon and the president's chief scientific adviser to prove or maintain that Herr Schmidt or Joe Parkinson is uniquely qualified to take on the job they have in mind.

For instance, there would be no ban on a nuclear physicist from any country, any non-Communist country, who knew why cockroaches are immune to radiation. And don't think there aren't, in many countries, men bending over test tubes and microscopes and bits of cockroach tissue trying to solve that puzzle!

When it comes to proving over here that an English actor or actress can play a role with unequalled skill, that is a tougher assignment. There are, after all, not only unemployed American actors who would like to strut their stuff in an English play, but also in and around New York literally hundreds of English actors at large, resting, as they say, who also have the primary requirement of being American citizens.

Well, in this case, in this play, 'My Fair Lady', Mr Lerner and my lawyer friend wanted to bring over Ian Richardson as Higgins and a young Englishwoman who'd been chosen from a series of auditions given in London to over 30 English applicants for the part of Eliza Doolittle. They'd also had extensive auditions here among Americans but couldn't find one as good as the Englishwoman they chose.

The immigration service telephoned the actors' union. The union, after some thought, was quite willing, and quite right too, to let Mr Richardson play Higgins, but they baulked at the Englishwoman. The procedure then is to call for a so-called arbitration meeting at which one arbiter, chosen by the union, will hear the case from the author/producer's side on why the Englishwoman could play Eliza better than any of the Americans who'd been auditioned. The union challenged this assertion.

Came the great day, for the first and only time in my life, of the confrontation, one on one, between the union arbiter and the, quote, 'expert', unquote, that Mr Lerner and his lawyer had decided could best sustain their preference. A few other members of the union, as well as Mr Lerner and his lawyer, were allowed to sit in. The lawyer presented the credentials of the expert, never to the arbiter's surprise and curiosity, never mentioning such things as journalism, broadcasting, only to say that their man had been here for many, many years, had closely followed the theatre in both countries, but mainly because he had started and pursued down the years a special study of British and American speech. Very good. Now proceed!

I was required to detail the work I'd done at Harvard and the field work on a mighty work of sound scholarship, sound in both senses, called the American Linguistic Atlas, and so on. All this led to my contention that I could think of no living American actress who was capable – in a play uniquely about the social significance of spoken English – who was capable of moving, without effort, from genuine Cockney to believable Mayfair.

The arbiter, at the peak of the discussion, called off American actresses he obviously admired and challenged me to question their great gifts. I turned them all down as tactfully as possible while expressing my own passion for his favourites on other grounds.

At last, he looked at me, as the song says, 'square down in the eye' and pronounced a name which he probably never knew was mentioned mockingly on Broadway 50 years ago as the name of a non-actress but who, down the decades, has been elevated into a pantheon all her own. He mentioned the English and Scottish roles she'd played from Mary, Queen of Scots, down or up. How about, then, he said, Katharine Hepburn? 'Impossible!' I said, 'Was never any better than an upper middle-class New Englander trying strenuously to sound British.'

At the end, he thanked me, said he was impressed and he would let us know the verdict within 24 hours. I blushed becomingly and the lawyer and Mr Lerner took me out to a celebration lunch. 'Tremendous!' they said, 'We're in!' And they saw me off with gaudy expressions of admiration and promises of lifelong devotion.

Next day, need I say, the arbiter turned us down. The part would have to be played by an American. And so it was and she was good, at least, more than adequate, but the Cockney was studied and the Mayfair could just as well have been Kensington or Betty Davis.

When it was all over and the three of us met again, we fell to talking about the opposite problem. How to find English actors who can talk American? To Americans, it is an equal problem. Many British actors are wonderful mimics of Cockney, North Country, West Country, whatever. Peter Sellers, Peter Ustinov could do Spanish-English, Italian-English, German-English but the best of them, for some reason, never exactly discovered how to do more than one sort of American and whether they were being a judge, an ambassador, a president, a Southerner, a cab driver, it always came out to Americans sounding like George Raft or some other gangster's henchman.

Well, last weekend, a great friend, an Englishman who has lived here for a dozen years or so, shed a beam of light on this dark problem. 'Even good English mimics,' he said, 'are not prepared to think of Americans as individuals. They think of Americans as one type, a variation on Englishmen. They're always the same. Tough. Midwestern. They act out a theory in their heads, that Americans are nasal and rough-hewn. They don't listen.'

So it was and is and no doubt forever will be. Ah me, and Amen!

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

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.