Letter from America

When Alistair Cooke retired in March 2004 and then died a few weeks later, he was acclaimed by many as one of the greatest broadcasters of all time. His Letters from America, which began in 1946 and continued uninterrupted every week until early 2004, kept the world in touch with what was happening in Cooke's wry, liberal and humane style.

This selection, made largely by Cooke himself and supplemented by his literary executor, gives us the very best of these legendary broadcasts. Over half have never appeared in print before. It is a remarkable portrait of a continent - and a man.

Fred Astaire
26 June 1987

Movie stars don't make it. Nor statesmen. Not Prime Ministers, or dictators unless they die in office. Not even a world-famous rock star, unless he's assassinated. But last Monday, none of the three national television networks hesitated about the story that would lead the evening news. On millions of little screens in this country and I don't doubt in many other countries around the world, the first shots were of an imp, a graceful wraith, a firefly in impeccable white tie and tails.

And for much longer than the lead story usually runs, for a full five minutes on NBC, we were given a loving retrospective of the dead man, ending with the firm declaration by Nureyev that 'He was not just the best ballroom dancer, or tap dancer, he was simply the greatest, most imaginative, dancer of our time.' And the newsmen were right to remind us of the immortal comment of the Hollywood mogul, who, with the no-nonsense directness of an expert, reported on Fred Astaire's first film test: 'Has enormous ears, can't act, can't sing, dances a little.'

That Hollywood mogul, long gone, spent his life ducking round corners, to avoid being identified as the oaf who looked in the sky and never saw the brightest star. However, that expert opinion was, as the lawyers say, controlling at the time and in Astaire's first movies, there was no thought of allowing him to act or sing. But not for long. And thanks to the invention of television, and the need to fill vast stretches of the afternoon and night with old movies, it has been possible for my daughter, for instance, to claim Fred Astaire as her favourite film star from the evidence of all the movies he made fifteen, ten, five, three years before she was born.

When I got the news on Monday evening here, and realized with immediate professional satisfaction that the BBC had smartly on hand a musical obituary tribute to him I put together eight years ago, I couldn't help recalling the casual, comic way this and similar radio obituaries came about.

I was in London at the end of 1979, and Richard Rodgers - one of the two or three greatest of American songwriters - had just died, I believe on New Year's Eve or the night before. Britons, by then, were getting accustomed, without pain, to making what used to be a two-day Christmas holiday into a ten-day much-needed rest. For all laborious research purposes, the BBC was shut up. And there was no retrospective programme on the life and music of Richard Rodgers in the BBC's archives. Of course, in a gramophone library that looks like an annex to the Pentagon, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of recordings of his songs. The SOS went out to a writer, a producer, and - I presume - a man who had the key to the gramophone library. The silent place was unlocked, and the three of them laboured through the day to put together an hour's tribute to Richard Rodgers. It was done. It was competent enough, but rushed to an impossible deadline. This hasty improvisation happened just when my own music producer and I, who had enjoyed working together for six years or so on American popular music, were wondering what we could offer next. We'd done a sketch history of jazz, through individuals. We'd gone through all the popular music of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and were stumped for a new se

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A. Cooke; Alistair Cooke