November 25, 1999
Alistair Cooke: A One-Man Bridge From U.S. to Britain
By FRANK J. PRIAL
EW YORK -- Alistair Cooke was about to tuck into his lobster
bisque at the Carlyle the other day when a stranger stopped at the
table and said: "You look familiar. Do I know you?"
"I'm Bob Hope," Cooke replied.
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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
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Alistair Cooke, observer and interpreter of American life, in his
Manhattan apartment.
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The intruder backed off in confusion, and Cooke returned to his
soup, chuckling softly. "I've used that since my TV days," he
said. "Works every time. They know I'm not Hope, but they don't
know what else to say."
Even at 91, which he turned last week, Cooke always knows what
to say. He has been doing it, in print, on television and, most
important, on radio, for almost 70 years.
Americans know Alistair Cooke best from his nine seasons, from
1952 to 1961, as master of ceremonies on the pioneer cultural
television show "Omnibus" and from 1971 to 1992 as the elegant
host of "Masterpiece Theater" on public television.
But in Britain, where he was born, and throughout much of the
rest of the world, he is known almost exclusively for his weekly
radio talk, "Letter From America," which the BBC has beamed
everywhere but to the United States for more than 53 years.
In more than 2,600 "Letters," Cooke has touched on every
aspect of American life from major events like the civil rights
movement and the Vietnam War and the small but not so insignificant
happenings that help to illustrate who Americans are and how they
think.
He has reported on everyone from Douglas Fairbanks to Monica
Lewinsky, in what more than one critic has called superb prose.
Here he is on the defeat of the great middleweight boxer Sugar Ray
Robinson at Madison Square Garden in 1962:
"When it was over, Sugar Ray flexed his calves for the last
time and did a little hobbling dance over to embrace the victor,
who was pink and sweaty and very happy, identifiable on the score
card as Denny Moyer of Portland, Ore., but on closer inspection was
that bearded figure with a scythe Sugar Ray had dreaded to meet."
Fortunately for Americans, who cannot hear his broadcasts,
except on shortwave, Cooke has gathered many of his letters in
books. The newest, "Memories of the Great and Good" (Arcade
Publishing), a collection of 23 profiles, was published in October.
Its subjects range from George C. Marshall and Harold Ross to Erma
Bombeck, all originally served up for a British audience.
Released simultaneously in Britain, the book is already in its
fourth printing and a No. 2 best seller there, trailing a book by
former Prime Minister John Major.
Cooke knew from the outset exactly what he wanted his broadcasts
to be. In a 1946 memo to the BBC proposing the program, he wrote:
"It will be a weekly personal letter to a Briton by the fireside.
I shall try to give him some of the intimate background to
Washington policy, some profiles of important Americans. The stress
will tend always to be on the springs of American life, whose
bubbles are the headlines, rather than on the headlines
themselves."
BBC
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Alastair Cooke, in an undated photograph, at the beginning of his career.
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From the first "Letter," which was broadcast on Sunday, March
24, 1946, Cooke has hewed fairly closely to his original brief. The
critic Bernard De Voto wrote that Cooke had "acquired a feel for
American realities surer than that of most native-born writers"
and added, "He has the continental awareness that comes only from
firsthand knowledge of all our regions."
Contrary to legend, the "Letter" has not been broadcast every
week since 1946, nor has it always come from the United States.
During its first decades it was off the air for as long as three
months a year, and even now it may be broadcast from London while
Cooke is there for Wimbledon.
He has not, however, missed a week since 1966, even when
occasional illnesses have forced him to broadcast from his New York
apartment or from a hospital.
When asked who has influenced his elegant prose style, Cooke
cites Mark Twain; H.L. Mencken, who was his friend and mentor; and
E.B. White. But he saves special praise for two scholars, historian
D.W. Brogan and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who taught him English
literature at Cambridge.
"Brogan," Cooke once said, "could give you the most recondite
sort of Harold Laskian analysis of something in government, but he
would cap it with an anecdote from James Farley or some precinct
captain or a lyric from Cole Porter. I think I realized from him
how it could be done."
Quiller-Couch taught him about writing. "I would turn in
something filled with high-flown phrases of which I was
inordinately proud," Cooke said. "Q would cut them out. 'Cooke,'
he once said to me, 'you must learn to murder your darlings."'
Mencken, with whom Cooke corresponded as a student and later
covered the 1948 presidential campaign, impressed upon him the
attractions of the journalist's trade. Cooke can still proudly
recite Mencken's observation that being a newspaper reporter
offered the opportunity to "lay in all the worldly wisdom of a
police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer and a midwife."
Alfred Alistair Cooke was born in Manchester in 1898, the son of
Samuel and Mary Elizabeth Byrne Cooke. His father was an ironworker
and a Methodist lay preacher, his mother an Irish immigrant. The
family moved to Blackpool, where the young Alfred won a scholarship
to Cambridge.
At Jesus College he edited a literary magazine, put on plays,
ground out film and theater criticism and pursued a rigorous social
life. He managed, too, to win a first in English and, in 1930, to
receive his degree summa cum laude.
It was at Cambridge that Alfred Cooke, with his stolid accent of
the north and vague plans for a teacher's life, quietly
disappeared. In his place, his name legally changed, stood Alistair
Cooke, campus dynamo and newly minted sophisticate, with the
inflections of Mayfair and his eye on the main chance.
He first came to the United States in 1932, on a two-year
fellowship to study theater direction. During his first summer, he
traveled around the country.
"Even then, in the Depression," he later wrote, "there was a
tremendous energy and vitality to America. From then on, my
interest in the theater began to wane, and I began to take up what
I felt was the real drama going on -- America itself."
The following summer he spent in Hollywood, collaborating with
Charlie Chaplin on a film about Napoleon. The film was abandoned,
but the experience led to a fascinating profile of Chaplin in
Cooke's 1977 book, "Six Men."
In 1934 the BBC fired its drama critic, Oliver Baldwin, who was
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's son, and Cooke, who had been
writing about film in the United States, got the job. After three
years in London, he returned to the United States for good,
becoming a citizen in 1941.
After some precarious years of freelancing, he was hired by The
Manchester Guardian, now The Guardian, in 1945 to cover the
founding of the United Nations. Still stringing for the BBC at the
time, he spent nine weeks in San Francisco, filing 2,000 words a
day for The Guardian and doing two or three radio broadcasts every
night. He was to serve as a Guardian correspondent in this country
for the next 26 years.
His coverage of the Alger Hiss trial in 1949 resulted in a book,
"Generation on Trial: U.S.A. vs. Alger Hiss" (Knopf, 1950). In
The New Yorker, Richard Rovere called it "one of the most vivid
and literate descriptions on an American political event that has
ever been written."
Cooke's reporting in those days earned him a sobriquet that
still rankles. "I was called 'The Liberal Voice of America,"' he
said. "I was not. I was and still am a reporter."
Privately, at least, he defines himself as "a sort of
18th-century libertarian," but of the 11 presidents who have
served during his lifetime, his favorite was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Perhaps his political stance is better reflected by another man,
Adlai Stevenson. In "Six Men," he compared him to "that
estimable order of Americans -- Henry Clay, Robert E. Lee, Norman
Thomas, Learned Hand, perhaps Wendell Willkie -- who left a lasting
impression by the energy of their idealism but who were never quite
strong enough or ruthless enough, in the pit of the political
jungle, to turn goodness and mercy into law or policy."
He wrote, "Adlai Stevenson remains the liveliest reminder of
our time that there are admirable reasons for failing to be
president."
As he always has, Cooke bangs out his "Letter," 1,700 or so
words on an old Royal manual typewriter. "I call it free
association," he said. "I don't correct anything. Then when I'm
finished, I slash hell out of it and get it down to about 13
minutes."
Cooke and his wife, the portrait artist Jane White, divide their
time among an apartment on Fifth Avenue, where he does most of his
work; a summer home on the North Fork of Long Island; and trips to
London and San Francisco. Their daughter is a Congregational
minister who lives in Massachusetts. Cooke's son from his first
marriage lives in Wyoming and writes western novels. A stepson
grows wine grapes in California, and a stepdaughter lives in
London.
"I go to California to see my men friends," Cooke said.
"Everyone I once knew in New York is gone. Dr. Johnson once said,
'A man must repair his friendships.' And I'm afraid I didn't always
do it."
"I don't like New York much anymore," he added. "I loved it
when we were young. I was a denizen of the 52nd Street clubs, a
movie critic, a terrific night owl. Now I can't bear midtown
anymore. Noise is magnified when you're older; the drop of a fork
can be like the World Trade Center going off."
For many years Cooke lectured, usually at colleges and
universities, on what he calls "a short list of American
humorists," from Mark Twain to Calvin Trillin. No longer. Age is
part of it, but also the fact, as he relates a bit sadly, that
"fewer and fewer people know who they are."
