Alistair Cooke has died at 95

[Christiern]

This is sad news. I have admired Alistair Cooke's witty, perceptive observations for many years, not least of all his weekly "Letter From America," which many of us will miss.

March 30, 2004

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Alistair Cooke, British Eye on the
American Scene, Dies at 95

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Alistair Cooke, the urbane and erudite journalist who was a peerless observer of the American scene for almost 70 years, died at his home in New York, the BBC said today. He was 95.

A BBC spokesman said Mr. Cooke's daughter, Susan, had contacted Mr. Cooke's biographer, a BBC reporter, Nick Clarke, to inform him of her father's death at midnight.

Mr. Cooke was widely known to American television audiences as the master of ceremonies on the pioneer cultural program "Omnibus" in the 1950's and later as the mellifluous host of the long-running "Masterpiece Theater" series on public television.

But his multifaceted career went well beyond the television screen. A veteran foreign correspondent and a successful and prolific author, he was celebrated for his "Letter from America," which was broadcast weekly by the BBC to more than 50 countries. Begun in 1946, the program continued with only an occasional break for 58 years, a record unparalleled in radio history. His final broadcast, No. 2869 in the series, was on Feb. 20.

Mr. Cooke wrote out his intentions for the program in a memo to the BBC in February 1946.

"It will be a weekly personal letter to a Briton by a fireside, I shall try to give a running commentary on topical aspects of American life, some of the intimate background to Washington policy, some profiles of important Americans," he said. "The stress will tend always to be on the springs of American life, whose bubbles are the headlines, rather than on the headlines themselves."

The BBC liked the idea and the first program was broadcast on the network's Home Service on March 24, 1946. Writing in The Sunday Times of London on the 50th anniversary of that first column, Paul Donovan said, "Amazingly, almost nothing about the program has changed in half a century; it still goes out on a Sunday, is still between 13 and 14 minutes long, is still composed on a manual typewriter and is still free, uniquely, from BBC editorial control."

Mr. Cooke's weekly radio talks gained him a reputation as one of the most effective interpreters of the American way of life to the world. His observations were not only insightful but also gracefully written and often gently witty.

This was his description of 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 scorecard as Denny Moyer of Portland, Ore., but on closer inspection was that bearded figure with a scythe Sugar Ray had dreaded to meet."

Mr. Cooke first gained a large American audience as the elegant host of "Omnibus," the legendary magazine of the arts that appeared on all three major commercial networks over its lifetime, from 1952 to 1961.

His long association with the public television series "Masterpiece Theater" began in 1971. He was proud that he personally wrote the succinct and often highly informative introductions to those British-made television dramas. Among his favorites were "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves (even though he found it "violent and pornographic"), "The Jewel in the Crown," "The Golden Bowl," "The Charmer" and especially that immensely appealing portrait of British society before and after World War I, "Upstairs, Downstairs."

John O'Connor, the chief television critic of The New York Times, once observed: "The truly remarkable phenomenon for 'Masterpiece Theater' fans is how the memory of each of these productions is so firmly stamped with the personality of a single person: the soft-spoken fellow sitting with a book in his lap, looking up just long enough to tell us what it's all about."

Mr. O'Connor, noting Mr. Cooke's urbanity and grace and his "unique" place" in upscale programming on American television, summed up his career:

"Mr. Cooke became a distinctive television fixture, as immediately recognizable as Lucy Ricardo or Archie Bunker. The 'Masterpiece Theater' routine, with its armchair and, at midpoint, Mr. Cooke's swivel to a second studio camera, evolved into the irresistible stuff of parody. The sophisticated Mr. Cooke found himself fodder for 'Saturday Night Live.' Jackie Gleason turned him into Aristotle Cookie. 'Sesame Street' weighed in with Alistair Cookie (Monster). Harvey Korman came up with Alistair Quince, once more tippy-toeing into your living room.' Even . . . 'Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' let its haughty butler announce on a Sunday night, 'It's 9 o'clock, Master William, and you know what that means.' "

Mr. Cooke not only interpreted America to the world, he also interpreted it to Americans. To mark the American Bicentennial, he supervised, helped write and then narrated "America," a 13-hour survey of American history presented on NBC. The series then became the basis for his best-selling book, "America: A Personal History of the United States."

It was a tribute to Mr. Cooke's admiration for his adopted country that Congress chose him to give the keynote speech for its Bicentennial celebration in 1976.

Alfred Alistair Cooke -- he later reversed his given names -- was born in Salford, a suburb of Manchester, on Nov. 20, 1908, the son of Samuel and Mary Elizabeth Byrne Cooke. His father was a metal craftsman and a Methodist lay preacher who founded a mission in the Manchester slums. His mother was an Irish immigrant.

It was in Manchester that Mr. Cooke's lifelong fascination with America and Americans began. A group of American soldiers was billeted near his home during the First World War. They were, he later recalled, "inordinately kind and outgoing and quite devoid of the joylessness that, in my view, afflicted my own countrymen."

The Cookes moved to Blackpool where the young Alfred attended Blackpool Grammar School and won a scholarship to Cambridge University provided to future teachers. At Jesus College, Cambridge, Mr. Cooke edited a literary magazine, put on plays and acted in them as a co-founder of the Cambridge Mummers, and pursued a rigorous social life. He was awarded a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1930 and an education diploma in 1931.

It was at Cambridge that Alfred Cooke, with his pronounced accent of the North Country and vague plans for a teacher's life, quietly disappeared. In his place, his name legally changed, appeared Alistair Cooke, campus dynamo and newly minted sophisticate, with the inflections of Mayfair and his eye on the main chance.

While still at Cambridge he began writing stage criticism and articles for Theater Arts Monthly, an American magazine. He was soon granted a Commonwealth Fund fellowship to study theater in the United States. He spent the 1932-33 academic year at the Yale University School of Drama "whipping down to New York to see all the plays and meeting literary types like Thornton Wilder and John Mason Brown."

He also haunted the jazz clubs along 52nd Street in Manhattan where, as a talented pianist, he was occasionally allowed to sit in on impromptu jam sessions. Much later, he recorded a jazz album for Columbia Records.

Mr. Cooke traveled extensively during his first summer in the United States. "That trip was an absolute eye-opener for me," he said. "Even then, even in the Depression, there was a tremendous energy and vitality to America. The landscape and the people were far more gripping and dramatic than anything I had ever seen. It truly changed me. You see, 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 -- namely, America itself."

The next year he was at Harvard, where a course in the history of the English language in America led him to H. L. Mencken, then winding up his career as the reigning American wit but still a respected authority on the American language. They corresponded, became friends and eventually colleagues. Together, they later covered the 1948 presidential conventions in Philadelphia, Mencken for the Baltimore Sunpapers, Mr. Cooke for The Manchester Guardian.

It was that early exposure to Mencken, Mr. Cooke said, that eventually led him to newspaper work. He liked to quote Mencken's pungent observation that being a newspaper reporter was a chance to "lay in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer and a midwife." He later compiled a series of critical essays on Mencken's writings titled "The Vintage Mencken," (Vintage, 1990).

Under the terms of his Commonwealth Fund fellowship, Mr. Cooke was required to return to Britain for a time. In 1934, while still a graduate student in America, he read that the BBC had fired its film critic, Oliver Baldwin, the son of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. He raced back to London and got the job. "I promise to abuse nothing," he said on his first program, on Oct. 8 of that year, "but sometimes my temper is liable to get the best of me."

While reviewing films for the BBC, he took on an additional job with NBC, broadcasting a weekly "London Letter" back to the United States. He covered among other stories the abdication of Edward VIII and the Munich Pact. The program was a precursor to the "Letter From America" that he would begin a decade later. He even found time to write a critical biography, "Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character," which was published in 1937 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1937, after three years back in London, he returned to the United States for good, becoming a citizen in 1941. He settled in New York, where he continued to broadcast for the BBC and write freelance articles for various English newspapers and magazines. In 1945, The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) asked him to report on the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco.

"Each day for nine weeks, I filed 2,000 words for The Guardian and did three broadcasts for the BBC, usually at 2 in the morning," he once recalled. " It was immensely dull, but when you're young, nothing's dull."

In 1947, he became The Guardian's chief correspondent in the United States. He earned $500 a year and was told not to cable if a letter would serve. He stayed with the paper for another 26 years. One of his first Guardian assignments was reporting on the espionage investigation of the former State Department figure Alger Hiss and the subsequent perjury trials that led to Mr. Hiss's conviction and imprisonment. Mr. Cooke turned his reporting into a best-selling book, "A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. vs. Alger Hiss" (Knopf, 1950). The New Yorker's reviewer, Richard Rovere, called it "one of the most vivid and literate descriptions of an American political event that has ever been written."

"Letter to America" began in 1946 as a 13-week experiment. "With the recent ending of Lend-Lease, England was broke," Mr. Cooke recounted in 1999. "But they extended the program for another 13 weeks and then 13 weeks again. I didn't think it would last 5 years, let alone 53."

In the introduction to his book, "America," Mr. Cooke gave some idea of the range of his essays. "I covered everything from the public lives of six presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers, from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood."

He might have added Monica Lewinsky, whose relationship with President Bill Clinton he explored at length. Alluding to the president, he wrote: "Moral authority, as old man Aristotle pointed out 2,000 years ago, resides in a leader because he's a better than average character. Moral authority does not mean sexual behavior; it means the capacity for being trusted, to have the people believe the word of the leader in many things and be ready to follow him when he judges what is the right thing to do."

Among his many friends, Mr. Cooke counted Charles Chaplin, with whom he collaborated on a never-filmed script about Napoleon; Duke Ellington, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and newsmen as disparate as James B. (Scotty) Reston, Murray Kempton and Westbrook Pegler. One of his best-selling books, "Six Men," was a collection of lengthy profiles of Chaplin, Bogart, Adlai E. Stevenson, Mencken, Edward VIII and Bertrand Russell.

Privately, at least, he defined himself as "a sort of 18th-century libertarian." Of the 12 American presidents who have served during his lifetime, his favorite was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also respected Lyndon B. Johnson ("an appalling man, but a great president").

His political outlook was probably best reflected by 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."

Mr. Cooke was often cited for his elegant prose. Among his admirers was The Times of London, which said: "Somehow he always manages to tell you something you have not heard before, however saturated the coverage. He is both a master essayist and a consummate broadcaster; spare, pithy, wry, the words flowing with seemingly effortless ease, the confiding chattiness never at the expense of authority."

Mr. Cooke disclosed that he wrote his weekly "talk," as he called them, "by free association." He explained: "I just let it rip -- five pages or so on the old Royal manual and I don't correct anything. Then I go back and slash hell out of it and get it down to around 13 minutes."

Along with Mencken, he liked to think he was influenced by Mark Twain and E. B. White. But he saved special praise for two Cambridge scholars, the historian D. W. Brogan and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who taught him English literature. "Brogan," he once told an interviewer, "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," Mr. Cook said. "Q would cut them out. 'Cooke,' he once said to me, 'you must learn to murder your darlings.' "

Over the years, Mr. Cooke published more than a dozen books, many of them collections of his "Letters." Mr. Cooke was the host of "Omnibus" from 1952 to 1961 and "Masterpiece Theater" from 1971 to 1992. He wrote his introductions to all the productions but he had his favorites: "The Jewel and the Crown"(1985), "The Golden Bowl" (1973), "I, Claudius"(1977), even though he considered it "violent and pornographic," and, best of all, "Upstairs, Downstairs" (1974-77), a portrait of British society before and after World War I.

A cricketeer in his youth, he remained a sports enthusiast all his life. Each year he returned to England to watch tennis at Wimbledon. In his middle years, he turned to golf and was still playing in his early 90's. One of his books, "Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke," (Arcade, 1995) was about his golfing adventures and another, "Memories of the Great and the Good" (Arcade, 1999) included a profile of one of his particular heroes, the golfer Bobby Jones.

His first, brief marriage to Ruth Emerson, in 1934, ended in divorce soon after a son, John, was born.

He married again in 1946, and for more than 50 years, Mr. Cooke and his second wife, the artist Jane White, divided their time between an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a summer home on the North Fork of Long Island, and trips to London and San Francisco.

Besides his wife and his daughter Susan, an Episcopal priest in New Hampshire, he is survived by John, who lives in Wyoming and writes Western novels; a stepson who grows wine grapes in California and a stepdaughter who lives in London.

Reminiscing just before his 91st birthday, in 1999, Mr. Cooke noted that one the few activities he had given up in his later years was lecturing. For many years he spoke on what he called "A Short List of American Humorists, from Mark Twain to Calvin Trillin."

"I gave it up," he said. "Fewer and fewer people knew who they are."

Edited March 30, 2004 by Christiern

[catesta]

At least he lived a long full life.

Some great quotes.

RIP Alistair Cooke

Edited March 31, 2004 by catesta

[7/4]

Masterpiece Theater! I remember that show from the '70's.

Catesta is right. 95. Yikes.

[jazzbo]

He just quit his weekly show like what. . . three weeks ago?

R I P big guy! I still have that transatlantic jam session broadcast from thirties to listen to!

[chris olivarez]

The man had a lot of style. He'll be missed.

[BruceH]

He also haunted the jazz clubs along 52nd Street in Manhattan where, as a talented pianist, he was occasionally allowed to sit in on impromptu jam sessions. Much later, he recorded a jazz album for Columbia Records.

Woah!! Way to go Al!

The entire 13-hour "America" series was shown to us in junior high. I really liked it, mainly because the teacher of that history class was a very boring lecturer, and every minute spent watching "America" was that much less time spent listening to the teacher. I still have fond memories of the series. RIP, Mr. Cooke.

[WD45]

One of my business associates produced his Letter From America for a good number of years. It was a sad day indeed.

[SEK]

I remember his weekly "Letter From America" on the BBC (on shortwave radio). It was usually pretty insightful.

I also remember his little spiels on Masterpiece Theatre (where, among other things, he was the first person I can recall who used bed as a sexual verb -- and with such a dry delivery ).

[A Lark Ascending]

Always loved 'Letter from America'. It's broadcast here at 8.45 on a Sunday morning.

In the last few weeks they've been playing reruns. A bit unnerving when you wake up to it in the middle and its from 1968!

A brilliant radio broadcaster. One of the best.