Alistair Cooke

Cooke's first visit to the United States was in 1932 on a two-year Commonwealth Fund Fellowship, now Harkness Fellowship to Yale and Harvard, where his acting and music skills came to the fore with visits to Hollywood.[6] Cooke saw a newspaper headline stating that Oliver Baldwin, the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's son, had been sacked by the BBC as film critic. Cooke sent a telegram to the Director of Talks, asking if he would be considered for the post. He was invited for an interview and took a Cunard liner back to Britain, arriving twenty-four hours late for his interview. He suggested typing out a film review on the spot, and a few minutes later, he was offered the job. He also sat on a BBC Advisory Committee headed by George Bernard Shaw for correct pronunciation.[7]

Cooke was also the London correspondent for NBC. Each week, he recorded a 15-minute radio dialogue for American listeners on life in Britain, under the series title of London Letter. In 1936, he intensively reported on the Edward VIII abdication crisis for NBC. He made several talks on the topic each day to listeners in many parts of the United States. He calculated that in ten days he spoke 400,000 words on the subject. During the crisis, he was aided by a twenty-year-old Rhodes Scholar, Walt Rostow, who would become Lyndon B. Johnson's national security advisor.[8]

Cooke replaced Oliver Baldwin as the BBC's film critic on 8 October 1934 and gave his first BBC broadcast: "I declare that I am a critic trying to interest a lot of people into seeing interesting films", he told his audience. "I have no personal interest in any company. As a critic I am without politics and without class." Thus very soon in 1937, Cooke emigrated to the United States; but became a United States citizen and swore the Oath of Allegiance on 1 December 1941, six days before Pearl Harbor was attacked. Shortly after emigrating, Cooke suggested to the BBC the idea of doing the London Letter in reverse: a 15-minute talk for British listeners on life in America. A prototype, Mainly About Manhattan, was broadcast intermittently from 1938, but the idea was shelved with the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

During this time, as well, Cooke undertook a journey through the whole United States, recording the lifestyle of ordinary Americans during the war and their reactions to it. The manuscript was published as The American Home Front: 1941–1942 in the United States (and as Alistair Cooke's American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War in the UK) in 2006.

The first American Letter was broadcast on 24 March 1946 (Cooke said this was at the request of Lindsey Wellington, the BBC's New York Controller); the series was initially commissioned for only 13 instalments. The series came to an end 58 years later in March 2004, after 2,869 instalments and less than a month before Cooke's death. Along the way, it picked up a new name (changing from American Letter to Letter from America in 1950) and an enormous audience, being broadcast not only in Britain and in many other Commonwealth countries, but throughout the world by the BBC World Service.

In 1947, Cooke became a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian newspaper (later The Guardian), for which he wrote until 1972. It was the first time he had been employed as a staff reporter; all his previous work had been freelance.[9] In reporting on the Montgomery bus boycott, begun by Rosa Parks and led by Martin Luther King, Cooke expressed sympathy for the economic costs imposed on the city bus company and referred to Mrs. Parks as "the stubborn woman who started it all ... to become the Paul Revere of the boycott."[10]

In 1968, he was only yards away from Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated, witnessing the events that followed.[11]

In 1952, Cooke became the host of CBS's Omnibus, the first commercial network television series devoted to the arts. It featured appearances by such personalities as Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Gene Kelly and Leonard Bernstein. Jonathan Winters was the first comic to appear on the show.[12]

Alistair Cooke (front row, left) at the bicentennial of the First Continental Congress, September 25, 1974; Barbara Jordan addresses the joint Houses of Congress

In 1966 he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "The Jet Age and the Habits of Man".[13][14]

In 1971, he became the host of the new Masterpiece Theatre, PBS's showcase of quality British television. He remained its host for 22 years, before retiring from the role in 1992. He achieved his greatest popularity in the United States in this role, becoming the subject of many parodies, including "Alistair Cookie" in Sesame Street ("Alistair Cookie" was also the name of a clay animated cookie-headed spoof character created by Will Vinton as the host of a video trailer for The Little Prince and Friends); Alistair Quince, portrayed by Harvey Korman, who introduced many episodes in the early seasons of Mama's Family.[15]

America: A Personal History of the United States (1972), a 13-part television series about the United States and its history, was first broadcast in both the United Kingdom and the United States in 1973, and was followed by a book of the same title. It was a great success in both countries, and resulted in Cooke's being invited to address the joint Houses of the United States Congress as part of Congress's bicentennial celebrations. After the series' broadcast in Ireland, Cooke won a Jacob's Award,[16] one of the few occasions when this award was made to the maker of an imported programme.

On 2 March 2004, at the age of 95, following advice from his doctors, Cooke announced his retirement from Letter from America—after 58 years, the longest-running speech radio show in the world.[17]

Cooke died at midnight on 30 March 2004, at his home in New York City. He had been ill with heart disease, but died of lung cancer, which had spread to his bones.[18] He was cremated, and his ashes were clandestinely scattered by his family in Central Park.[19]

On 22 December 2005, the New York Daily News reported that the bones of Cooke and many other people had been surgically removed before cremation by employees of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, a tissue-recovery firm.[20] The thieves sold the bones for use as medical-grade bone grafts.[21] The cancer from which Cooke was suffering had spread to his bones, making them unsuitable for grafts. Reports indicated the people involved in selling the bones altered his death certificate to hide the cause of death and reduce his age from 95 to 85.[22] Michael Mastromarino, a former New Jersey-based oral surgeon,[20] and Lee Cruceta agreed to a deal that resulted in their imprisonment.[23] Mastromarino was sentenced on 27 June 2008, in the New York Supreme Court, to 18 to 54 years' imprisonment.[24] The entire story of the theft featured in a documentary aimed at educating the public about modern-day grave robbery.[21] On the morning of 7 July 2013, at age 49, Michael Mastromarino died at St. Luke's Hospital after suffering from liver cancer.[25]

Cooke became engaged to Henrietta Riddle, the daughter of the English actor Henry Ainley. While he was attending Yale University and Harvard University on a Commonwealth fund fellowship, she deserted him. He met Ruth Emerson, a great-grandniece of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1933, and they married on 24 August 1934. Their son, John Byrne Cooke, was born 5 October 1940 in New York City, New York.[26] Cooke's best man at the wedding was the comic actor Charlie Chaplin.

Alistair Cooke divorced Ruth in 1944, and married Jane White Hawkes, a portrait painter and the widow of neurologist A. Whitfield Hawkes,[27] the son of Albert W. Hawkes, on 30 April 1946. Their daughter, Susan, was born on 22 March 1949.[28]

Cooke took up golf in his mid-fifties, developing a fascination with the game, despite never attaining an extraordinary level of skill.[29] He was driven by his love of golf to devote many of his Letter from America episodes to the topic, speaking once of the thrill of learning "how much more awesome was the world of golf than the world of politics."[29] Cooke became close friends with many of the leading golfers of the era: Jack Nicklaus, in the introduction to a compilation of Cooke's writing on golf, recounts his many notable achievements, but describes him as "most of all ... a friend."[29]

In a broadcast talk on the BBC on 2 May 1997, referring to the success of the golfer Tiger Woods, Cooke claimed that "There'll be a spectacular increase in the number of black boys, and I do mean boys, teenagers, who begin to infest the public courses in America."[30]

• Letters from America (1951) Rupert Hart-Davis, London – with introduction "To the British Reader"
• One Man's America (1952) Alfred A Knopf, New York – same chapters as 'Letters from America' (1951), with introduction "To the American Reader"
• Talk about America: Letters from America, 1951–1968 (1968) The Bodley Head; (1981) Penguin Books ISBN 0-14-005764-1
• Letter from America: The Early Years, 1946–1968
• Alistair Cooke's America (22 November 1973) BBC Books, London ISBN 0-563-12182-3; (13 November 2003) Phoenix ISBN 1-84188-229-1 – updated edition with new introduction and final chapter written by Alistair Cooke
• The Americans: Fifty Talks on our Lives and Times, 1969–1979 (Nov 1979) Alfred A Knopf, New York ISBN 0-394-50364-3
• America Observed: The Newspaper Years of Alistair Cooke/selected and edited by Ronald A. Wells (1988) Penguin ISBN 0-14-011509-9
• Letters from America: The Americans, Letters from America and Talk About America
• Letter from America: (1946–2004) (2004) ISBN 1-4000-4402-2
• The Marvelous Mania: Alistair Cooke on Golf (2007) ISBN 978-0-7139-9996-9
• Reporting America: The Life of the Nation, 1946–2004. Allen Lane. 2008. ISBN 978-1-84614-047-1.
  • Review: Saunders, Alan (March 2009). "Last Man Standing". The Monthly. 43: 50–52. Review of Reporting America: The Life of the Nation, 1946–2004.

Cooke also co-authored several "coffee table books".