Memories of The Great and The Good Read online

  ALSO BY ALISTAIR COOKE

  Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen

  Character

  A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. vs Alger Hiss

  Letters from America

  Christmas Eve

  Around the World in Fifty Years

  Talk About America

  Alistair Cooke’s America

  The Americans

  Masterpieces

  The Patient Has the Floor

  America Observed

  Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke

  Six Men

  EDITOR OF:

  Garbo and the Night Watchmen

  The Vintage Mencken

  Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Alistair Cooke

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-611145-573-1

  For my son,

  John Byrne Cooke

  CONTENTS

  To the Reader

  Acknowledgments

  1 George Bernard Shaw

  2 John Nance Garner: The Frontiersman

  3 Frank Lloyd Wright

  4 Wodehouse at Eighty

  5 FDR

  6 Maker of a President: Eleanor Roosevelt

  7 General Marshall

  8 Dean Acheson

  9 Eisenhower at Gettysburg

  10 Harold Ross

  11 The Legend of Gary Cooper

  12 Robert Frost

  13 Goldwater: Jefferson in the Desert

  14 Chichester: The Master Mariner

  15 Reagan: The Common Man Writ Large

  16 The Duke

  17 Aiken of Vermont

  18 Barbara McClintock: The Gene on the Cob

  19 George Abbott

  20 Scotty Reston: The Maestro from Glasgow

  21 Erma Bombeck: A Rare Bird

  22 The Last Victorian

  23 The Gentleman from Georgia

  TO THE READER

  The great and the good” is a happy phrase that takes in a general appreciation of some people who are great at one thing and other people whose character is the fascinating thing about them.

  The only other point to make about the definition is that a great man or woman is not necessarily a good man or woman. Napoleon was unquestionably a great man and in some conspicuous ways a human monster. There is no need to tease the distinction further for the purpose of this collection, which is to celebrate a variety of well-known people I have met, known, “covered,” admired or liked throughout sixty-odd years of journalism. Most of these pieces tend to find, and rejoice in, what is best about their subjects.

  Many years ago, I should say shortly after I left Cambridge at the age of twenty-three, I swore off what had been a great fashion among those of us with literary ambitions: the belief, practiced to this day by the intellectual wolf pack of London, New York, and Rome, that the business of literary and historical criticism is the cutting down to size of the famous, of the eminent dead in particular. My temperament was unhappy with the clinical scrutiny of I. A. Richards, then the helmsman of the New Wave in English studies at Cambridge. Too often, it seemed to me, he was determined to discover in a literary work what was phony or meretricious rather than what was admirable. So, I suppose, I can be said to have lapsed into the tradition of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s “appreciative” criticism, which Dr. Richards and his pupil William Empson (the first deconstructionist) came along to ridicule and supplant.

  There is another prejudice, or post-judice rather, that may have conditioned my choice of heroes and heroines. For many years, my reading has been mainly in biography and in American and British social and political history. And in the past quarter century or so, I have grown increasingly weary of psychobiographies and, even more, of pornobiographies. It is only very rarely (as, for instance, in the biographies of Presidents Cleveland and Clinton) that a person’s sex life is crucial to his or her public reputation or performance. Otherwise, erotic probing is simply titillation and pruriency, two words that appear to have vanished from the language of criticism. Even some of the most distinguished biographers today seem plagued by the itch to pry into the sexuality, preferably kinky, of their characters. The plague has passed this book by.

  What has made this collection a pleasure to put together is the fact of my having been for all my sixty-odd active years of journalism a foreign correspondent, and for thirty years or more having the privilege of roaming at will around every region of these United States. A foreign correspondent enjoys one or two advantages not given even to distinguished journalists who specialize in one field: labor relations, city hall, the Supreme Court, a sport, and so forth. First is the chance of acquiring what Theodore Roosevelt called “the sense of the continent.” And the great reward of the foreign correspondent’s trade springs precisely from that freedom to rove around a whole continent. It is the opportunity to meet all sorts and classes of humanity in their native habitat. Had I but life enough and time, I could fill another book with a Dickensian-size cast of memorable unknowns of the greatest variety, whose daily lives I came to look into. Casually now, and at random, I recall soldiers and sailors of every rank, small businessmen of great imagination and comicality, a minor gangster forging U.S. graded beef, a burlesque stripper, a Texas sheep sluicer, a modest, illiterate boy from the Carolinas with a genius for leadership in deadly situations in the Second World War.

  Only when I had retired from wandering around America did I make the surprising discovery that the friends of my own friends, and of professional people in general, were invariably people who shared their political prejudices—a drastic method of cutting yourself off from enjoying at least half the human race!

  The last two profiles, of Churchill and Bobby Jones, are set apart because I am more certain of them than of the rest (without offense of judgment) that one truly embodied greatness and the other goodness.

  Some of these pieces, as the acknowledging note will testify, were originally daily dispatches to my only paper, the (then) Manchester Guardian. Five of them are the scripts of radio talks done over the BBC’s World Service in my weekly series, “Letters from America.” I had written so many thousands of words about President Franklin Roosevelt, from my first White House press conference in 1937 to his funeral at Hyde Park in 1945, that it seemed best to start again and write a new piece focused entirely on one aspect of him, and that the most vividly memorable to me. The same is true of Churchill. When the late William Shawn invited me to have my definitive say about the great man, I employed William Manchester’s splendid biography to do so, and that piece, a little expanded, is included here much as it first appeared in The New Yorker. The Jones piece was written as the introduction to Martin Davis’s recent anthology, The Greatest of Them All: The Legend of Bobby Jones.

  I cannot end this note without expressing heartfelt gratitude to three people in particular
who helped me at a difficult time during the making of this book. First, to my wife Jane, the rocklike, ever-present nurse, companion, best friend; to my publisher, Richard Seaver, for his sainted patience throughout an anxious summer; and, as much as anybody, my secretary, Patricia A. Yasek, whose devotion, tenacity and indestructible cheerfulness under the most trying circumstances made the book publishable in this century.

  A.C., Summer 1999

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “George Bernard Shaw,” “FDR,” and “Scotty Reston: The Maestro from Glasgow” were written for this volume.

  “John Nance Garner: The Frontiersman,” “General Marshall,” and “Robert Frost” first aired as radio broadcasts in Alistair Cooke’s “Letter from America” series for the BBC and were reprinted in his Talk A bout America, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

  “Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Maker of a President: Eleanor Roosevelt,” and “The Legend of Gary Cooper” first appeared in the Manchester Guardian, and were reprinted in Alistair Cooke’s America Observed, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

  “Wodehouse at Eighty” first appeared in the Manchester Guardian, October 16, 1961, as did “Harold Ross,” December 11, 1951; and “Reagan: The Common Man Writ Large,” December 29,1967.

  “Dean Acheson” and “The Duke” first appeared in Alistair Cooke’s The Americans, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

  “Eisenhower at Gettysburg” first appeared in Alistair Cooke’s General Eisenhower on the Military Churchill: A Conversation with Alistair Cooke, published by W. W. Norton & Co., copyright © 1970 by James Nelson Productions.

  “Goldwater: Jefferson in the Desert” first aired as a radio broadcast in Alistair Cooke’s “Letter from America” series for the BBC on June 5, 1998; as did “Aiken of Vermont” on November 23, 1984; “Barbara McClintock: The Gene on the Cob” on October 21,1983; “George Abbott” on February 4,1995; and “Erma Bombeck: A Rare Bird” on April 26,1996.

  “Chichester: The Master Mariner” first appeared in Alistair Cooke’s Fun äf Games, published in the United Kingdom by Pavilion Books, 1994.

  “The Last Victorian” first appeared in The New Yorker, August 22, 1983, and was revised for this volume.

  “The Gentleman from Georgia” first appeared in Martin Davis’s The Greatest of Them All: The Legend of Bobby Jones, published by The American Golfer, Inc., 1996, and was revised for this volume.

  1

  George Bernard Shaw

  (1999)

  The Scene: A small conference room in Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation, in London.

  The Time: The spring of 1935.

  The Cast: Sitting around a semicircular formation of long rectangular tables were half a dozen or more very eminent men, assuming postures of confidence and relaxation by which men of equal eminence signify that none of them needs to be impressed by the others. Smoking cigarettes, legs crossed or outstretched, exchanging small talk amiably on one elbow. Modest, not a show-off among them. All, apparently, waiting for the chief or the president, the chairman or whoever.

  * * *

  The roly-poly, merry, bespectacled William Temple, Archbishop of York; Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, a regal presence, the last survivor of the Victorian heyday, when an actor was recognizable at a hundred paces; the renowned biologist Julian Huxley, representing Science; Logan Pearsall Smith, a dapper old American expatriate, fashioner of exquisite prose, representing (I suppose) belles lettres, which in the early 1930s was still, in England at any rate, a going profession; and C. K. Og-den, representing—probably—Basic English, for it was unlikely that he had been chosen to serve as the author or explicator of “The Meaning of Meaning,” a writhing thesis that nobody cared to have unraveled, not anyway at these meetings. I can’t recall now who else was present to represent which of the other arts and sciences. But leaning over a sheaf of papers was a porcine, affable man with clean-shaven jowls. Not, in such company, an equally eminent man but in his own circle, which was that of linguists and phoneticians, a giant: A. Lloyd James, professor of phonetics at the University of London. He was here as the secretary of the board or committee. And what was I, an unknown beginning journalist in his mid-twenties, doing in this assembly of magnificoes? I was just back in England after a two-year stint of graduate work (and play) in the United States. The second year of my American fellowship had been spent at Harvard working under Professor Miles L. Hanley (an American Henry Higgins at the time) on the history of spoken English in America, a fascinating field to all, it appeared, but Americans. Registered for this course were three of us, and of the other two one was an Englishwoman. So no assignment could have been more flattering to a novice in a new specialty than an invitation from Professor Lloyd James, who knew about my work, to join this committee as “the referent on American us-age.”

  The committee bore the impressive, and to many people the mysterious, title of: The BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English. And before we cue the assembled cast into “action,” it is necessary to say something about the founding of this exotic committee, for its title and purpose were popularly misunderstood from its inception. So much so that a useful and civilized institution was killed off within five years and never resurrected.

  It had been set up with a single purpose: which was to establish, for the BBC’s news and program announcers, a guide to the uniform pronunciation of names, place-names especially, and other words whose educated pronunciation were at the time arousing controversy (or controversy).

  What made a large part of the population misunderstand the committee’s function was the accent of the announcers. They were a special breed, recruited only after a rigorous test which required them to speak, or at least pronounce, French, German and Italian according to Foreign Office standards. More to the point of the popular complaint, all of them in the London studios were hired because they spoke southern educated English, what was then known to phoneticians and language teachers as Received Standard. “Received by whom?” my headmaster used to intone in a mischievous singsong. With equal monotonous certainty, back came the answer: “The public schools, the Church, the army.”

  Since the BBC was something quite new to civilization: a radio broadcasting company and then the only one in the nation, it was obvious—if not imperative— that the BBC’s spokesmen, the announcers, should not diffuse various forms of educated spoken English. Social democracy had not then invaded England and spread the alien notion that it might be natural for public speech to reflect the variety of regional speech, and that there was no longer any social compulsion to have the educated follow the upper-crust dialect that had evolved from the establishment in the mid-nineteenth century of that most peculiar institution, the English public (i.e. private) school.

  But, as I say, the committee was concerned only with setting a uniform standard of pronunciation—of nouns mostly, proper and improper. The uniformity of the announcers’ accent was taken for granted. However, they were falsely assumed, most conspicuously by the inhabitants of the Midlands and the North, to be “teaching us how to speak.” What the vast majority of midlanders and northerners were hearing from the BBC announcers for the first time in their lives was southern educated speech. By an obvious sleight of mind, what they said they were hearing was “BBC English.” This confusion was sufficiently widespread to spawn vaudeville jokes, newspaper cartoons and enough ridicule to belittle and wound the advisory committee’s reputation. It was killed off by the Second World War, the oncoming invasion of social democracy and the transatlantic doctrine about the health, the naturalness, the inevitable triumph of “multiculturalism” in democratic societies. Today, educated speech in England is changing so rapidly that such exemplars as John Gielgud or Nigel Hawthorne will soon be as antediluvian as the vaudeville baritones of Edwardian England. The BBC no longer demands either a uniform accent or pronunciation (except of foreign place-names) and allows its reporters to speak whatever compound or atonal mix of their native
wood-notes wild comes naturally to them. So what we are flashing back to is, it only now occurs to me, very much a period piece.

  Into this leisurely group—human representatives of the church, literature, the stage, science, belles lettres (no army so far as I can recall), there suddenly intruded an exotic figure indeed, not conceivably a product of the English public school system—a tall, upright, snapdragon old man in an old-fashioned four-button Norfolk tweed suit. He had a glittering eye, and he uttered a peremptory, musically inflected “Gentlemen, let us begin!” It was the chairman himself, George Bernard Shaw. A true British touch was added to this most English institution (not unlike the April-born queen celebrating her birthday in June) by the fact that Shaw himself, who as chairman—and in a tie vote, the supreme arbiter on correct pronunciation—spoke with an unmistakable Dublin brogue and maintained, in the teeth of legions of dissenters, that Dublin was the only place on earth where one could hear “pure spoken English,” whatever that was. (This contention occasionally came up in our discussions of pronunciations, but since it was pointed out, usually by Prof. James, that we were confusing specific or particular pronunciations with questions of accent, the chairman would shrug his shoulders, make some final derisory comment in rich Dublinese and pass on.)

  The meetings were never less than lively, a spirit practically guaranteed by Shaw’s presence and his impish irascibility. (It strikes me, in my own senescence, that perhaps irascibility is a natural reflex of old age: Shaw was, at that first meeting, in his seventy-ninth year.)

  A list of the words to be ruled on was handed out to each member, and we first usually disposed of the place-names. They were not chosen arbitrarily for their peculiarity (Buchleuch—pron. “Buckloo,” Leveson-Gower— prom “Loosen-Gore”), but because they had come up in the news. At one meeting, for instance, we had to pronounce on Marylebone, which had just been the victim of some colorful accident. There was little dispute. It should be noted that most, if not all, of the members were in late middle age, and the old vernacular pronunciation “Marryb’n” was preferred. Shaw accepted the verdict, while noting in a petulant aside that the young, and most people outside London, wouldn’t have a notion what the announcer was talking about.