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THE RAIN IN SPAIN...

Linguist had wordy role in classic film

BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today

Rex Harrison almost made an enemy when he extinguished his cigarette in Peter Ladefoged’s mouth.

Never mind that the oral cavity was only a dental cast. The distinguished linguist planned to use the plastic replica of his upper jaw in his research on word formation. That is, until Harrison started hunting for an ashtray on the set of the 1964 movie “My Fair Lady.”

“I was rather annoyed,” Ladefoged recalled. “I didn’t want my nice thing all marked up.”

But four decades later, “Rex Harrison’s ashtray” is the second most colorful souvenir of Ladefoged’s stint as technical consultant on the set of the beloved classic about a British phonetician.

In anticipation of this fall’s 40th anniversary of the release of “My Fair Lady,” the dry-witted professor emeritus will dust off his single most colorful souvenir of the experience — his memories — on Feb. 25 in Room 314 of Royce Hall. The 7 p.m. talk is the inaugural event for Friends of Linguistics, a newly formed support group for the most highly ranked department in the UCLA College and the nation’s third-ranked linguistics department, according to the National Research Council.

On the set of “My Fair Lady” (from the left): Actors Rex Harrison and Wilfrid Hyde-White, Professor Peter Ladefoged and director George Cukor.

Ladefoged, now renowned as a champion of the world’s endangered languages, has addressed the experience before a large audience only once: in a textbook on linguistic fieldwork that was published last summer. And the brief reference is in a discussion of the kymograph, an arcane piece of equipment once found in turn-of-the-century linguistics laboratories.

In the early ’60s, legendary director George Cukor tracked down Ladefoged, then an assistant professor, for advice on just such details. Although Cukor had already filmed “The Philadelphia Story” and “Gone With The Wind,” “I had no idea who he was,” said Ladefoged, who had joined UCLA two years earlier.

Ladefoged was more familiar with the kind of tools — like mouth casts — that would have captivated Henry Higgins, the cocky Edwardian linguist who seeks to elevate a common flower vendor by erasing her Cockney accent.

“There were enormous strides made during World War II in analyzing sounds,” Ladefoged said. “But when I was a student in the late 1940s, we still had pre-war-type equipment, which hadn’t changed much since the turn of the century.”

“Pygmalion,” the George Bernard Shaw play on which the Lerner-Lowe musical is based, was also an old friend. “I remember setting students to transcribing parts from ‘Pygmalion’ to learn linguistic notion,” he said.

In fact, it was Ladefoged who produced the linguistic notations that Harrison appears to be making in the opening scene with Audrey Hepburn, as “guttersnipe” Eliza Doolittle. The camera lingers on the linguist’s transcription for 10 seconds, Ladefoged once calculated.

“You wouldn’t have a hope in hell of remembering it,” he said.