John Cage, Wilbur Mills and Oliver Franks - 1 January 1993

This time of the year, journalists everywhere as well as politicians feel compelled to look back and come to ripe thoughtful judgements about the big events of the year. Why we should be able on 31 December to say something more sensible about Yugoslavia or Somalia or South Africa then we could two months or 12 months ago, I don't know. I shall resist the compulsion and look back instead to some small events, things that stay in the memory and make us wonder aloud what happened to various people and institutions, where are they now?

There used to be, oh I don't know how many years ago, a feature in an American news magazine, which was started I should guess in the '50s and ran about once a month for several years and then stopped. I don't know why, because the title of the feature was a question everybody asks at some time or another and will go on asking to the end of time. "Where are they now?" was the title and the answer was always a little piece rescuing from oblivion somebody who'd once been famous, somebody to whom today nobody gave a thought, unless it was the passing thought that they must be dead.

I remember the first article of this feature, a name that had only to be pronounced to resound – Gertrude Ederle. Of course, in the 1920s and I'd say for one year at least she was quite possibly the most famous woman on earth or water, she was the first woman to swim the English Channel. So where in the '50s did they find her? Well, there she was unsung, unrecognised and unpretentious working quietly in the bargain basement of a New York department store. What got me started on this game, what brought it back was a fleeting thought on Christmas Day, I wonder where and how Gorby is spending his Christmas? Can you imagine looking back no more than a year or two, there would ever come a time when you didn't know from week to week, let alone from day to day what Mr Gorbachev was up to? The last I heard of him, he was being rudely locked out of his office by none other than Boris Yeltsin and he was very sore about it, I can tell you.

During the last week, a familiar end-of-year feature came up on television that prompted the associated question, not where are they now, but where is it now? It being a hat; let me explain. We were seeing one of those retrospective television pieces about long gone presidents and this clip showed John F Kennedy at his inauguration happy and hatless and on a perishing sub-freezing day at that. Until that January 1961, both the outgoing and incoming presidents had always worn hats, usually toppers. I believe it was Eisenhower who dropped the topper in favour of a black what Americans call a fedora and what my British listeners who can lean back so far called a trilby. Well the effect of Kenney's hatlessness at his inauguration and everywhere else thereafter – Washington, Europe and his father's place in Palm Beach – was literally a disaster for the hat business, a hat company based in Palm Beach for several generations was struck a mortal blow and went out of business. American men everywhere stopped wearing hats.

I recall a good friend of mine, an Englishman on the United Nations staff who had he thought the luck to marry the heiress to that Palm Beach company about three years before Kennedy dealt his mortal blow, and the man said later, "I married into the wrong Palm Beach family".

Well, apart from those lost people in institutions, I did want to mention one or two human beings we shall miss for good, wasn't it WH Auden who commanded us to look shining on new styles of architecture a change of heart and to celebrate the vertical man? That is the living, breathing hero.

But this end of the year is, I think, the best time to remember one or two people we're going to forget because they are no longer with us, I'm thinking of people, who meant something special to Americans, who left us. There was the incomparable Isaac Asimov, probably the greatest, certainly the most prolific popular writer in the history of science about which he knew everything, especially about every form in being and to be of space flight. The nice human thing about Isaac was that he'd never stepped aboard an airplane, he was terrified of flying.

There was Benny Hill, maybe a surprising name to recall in some polite company. It's odd satisfying to me that he became quite a cult figure in the United States and not among the hoi polloi, not among the people in Britain who deplored his goggling eyes and well stacked girls and occasional raw language, but among intellectuals who saw no more mischief in him than a monkey in a barrel who rightly marvelled at his wonderful mimicry of many types and many nations. I know an old lawyer of my vintage who maintains with conviction that Benny Hill in three weeks invented more ingenious sight gags than Chaplain and Buster Keaton in their lifetimes. Well, he did enjoy the considerable virtue of writing all his own stuff, something not done by one famous comic in one hundred.

On the civilised principle of speaking ill of the dead, I shall do my best to be charitable about the next great man whose passing provoked full pages of sombre praise in the leading newspapers of London and New York. He was a musician-composer name of John Cage. I first heard of him maybe 40 years ago and hiked off to Princeton to see and hear what he was suddenly famous for, something called the prepared piano, he stuffed a piano with newspapers, sticks, no stones, a tablespoon and other implements intended by their reverberation to extend the musical range of the piano, admittedly a limited instrument. I'm afraid to me what came out was a very stifled sound like, well like a piano that had been stuffed with newspapers, sticks and tablespoons.

However, I do not pretend to stay abreast with the great movements of modern music and it was with a feeling of exhilaration that only a little later I attended a performance in one of New York's great concert halls of what even the Encyclopeadia Britannica called his masterpiece, a concerto or a symphony, a work for any combination of instruments called 4 minutes, 33 seconds, for the excellent reason that's how long it took to play or not to play.

Mr Cage himself came into the concert hall to a shower of admiring applause, sat down at the piano, opened the lid, looked at his watch and sat back in silence. By now, the audience too was sitting back or forward in inquisitive silence. At the end of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, Mr Cage closed the piano lid got up and left to a tidal wave of applause. The point was it seems you made up your own symphony of the sounds you heard around you and perhaps out on the street, I was baffled then and I'm baffled now. Still, he's dead at 79 and the people who ought to know say he is one of the giants of modern music.

The name Wilbur Mills may not ring a loud bell to most of my listeners but it rang out regularly in the 1950s and 60s as one of the most powerful sounds in Washington. Wilbur Mills was an Arkansas boy who came to be the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, though foreign reporters don't write much about it, it is impossible to exaggerate the influence, the decisive influence of that committee and that chairman on any money bill that comes to Congress. At his peak, Wilbur Mills could snap his fingers at the wishes of presidents and bury any money bill he didn't want have passed. One year, he took a very brief fling at a presidential campaign and a day or two after he'd announced, an old friend came to him and said, "Wilbur, what's this about running for the presidency, surely you don't want to give up all that power?"

Poor Wilbur, in October 1974, all his power collapsed. A policeman stopped a weaving car one night in Washington and out of it sprang Mr Mills and a striptease dancer and they both started to dance in the gushing waters of Washington's tidal basin. Wilbur went into alcoholic treatment and retired and recovered his dignity back in his hometown.

I've seem in the past 40 or 50 years to have known every other British Ambassador, every other one I never even met. One I knew well died this past year, the splendid Oliver Franks. During the great early Truman years, the time of the Marshall Plan and the forced-fed recovery of Europe, he was probably as close to an American president as any ambassador has ever been. He was immensely competent, fair and upright. Two odd things I most remember, he once said the most striking thing about America was the range of ingenuous gadgets and shortcuts in domestic private daily life – frozen foods, parking meters, dial telephones, shower curtains and so on – the application as he put it, of intelligence to ordinary living. The other thing, he must be the only ambassador in history who at the age of 10 bicycled from Kensington to Berlin.

I'll end as I began with an example,the most astonishing I know, an answer to the never dying question, where are they now? Somebody of my son's or daughter's generation idly wondered over the holidays about the girls, the forgotten actresses who played opposite actors who went on to become big stars. For instance, what was the name somebody said of the very pretty girl and whatever became of her who played opposite the early Elvis, she was in fact the girl in two of the first three Presley movies, such forgettable items as Loving You and King Creole. Well her name is Delores Hart. At the age of 25, she renounced her movie career, left Hollywood and spent seven probationary years in a nunnery in Connecticut. In 1970, she took her vows as a Benedictine nun and is, at last report Mother Delores, the head of that order in the United States.

On that note of amazing grace, I wish everyone a happy and healthy at the very least a bearable New Year!

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