Alistair Cooke
Alistair Cooke (born Alfred Cooke; 20 November 1908 – 30 March 2004) was a British-American writer whose work as a journalist, television personality and radio broadcaster was done primarily in the United States.[1] Outside his journalistic output, which included Letter from America and America: A Personal History of the United States, he was well known in the United States as the host of PBS Masterpiece Theatre from 1971 to 1992. After holding the job for 22 years, and having worked in television for 42 years, Cooke retired in 1992, although he continued to present Letter from America until shortly before his death. He was the father of author and folk singer John Byrne Cooke.
For the British peer, see Alistair Cooke, Baron Lexden. For the British diplomat, see Alastair Crooke. For the English cricketer, see Alastair Cook.
Alistair Cooke
30 March 2004 (aged 95)
- United Kingdom (until 1941)
- United States (from 1941)
- Journalist
- broadcaster
-
Ruth Emerson(m. 1934; div. 1944)
2, including John Byrne
Early life[edit]
He was born Alfred Cooke in Salford, Lancashire, England, the son of Mary Elizabeth (Byrne) and Samuel Cooke.[2] His father was a Methodist lay preacher and metalsmith by trade; his mother's family were of Irish Protestant origin.[3]
He was educated at Blackpool Grammar School, and won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he gained an honours degree (2:1) in English. He was heavily involved in the arts, was editor of Granta, and set up the Mummers, Cambridge's first theatre group open to both sexes, from which he notably rejected a young James Mason, telling him to stick to architecture.[4]
Cooke changed his name to Alistair when he was 22, in 1930.[5]
Career[edit]
Media beginnings[edit]
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]
Move to the United States[edit]
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 immigrated 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 immigrating, 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.
Journalist[edit]
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]
Omnibus[edit]
In 1952, Cooke became the host of CBS's Omnibus, the first U.S. 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]
Personal life[edit]
Marriages and children[edit]
In 1932 Cooke became engaged to Henrietta Riddle, the daughter of the English actor Henry Ainley and the Baroness von Hütten, but she broke off the engagement the following year while he was in America on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship.[26] 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.[27]
Alistair Cooke divorced Ruth in 1944, and married Jane White Hawkes, a portrait painter and the widow of neurologist A. Whitfield Hawkes,[28] the son of Albert W. Hawkes, on 30 April 1946. Their daughter, Susan, was born on 22 March 1949.[29]
Recreation and interests[edit]
Cooke took up golf in his mid-fifties, developing a fascination with the game, despite never attaining an extraordinary level of skill.[30] 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."[30] 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."[30]
Honours and awards[edit]
In 1973, Cooke was awarded an honorary knighthood (KBE) for his "outstanding contribution to Anglo-American mutual understanding." Cooke was reportedly happy to accept, because in the words of Thomas Jefferson, it did not involve "the very great vanity of a title."[31] Having relinquished his British citizenship during World War II, he could not be called "Sir Alistair".
After Alistair Cooke's death the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism was established as a tribute to the man and his life and career achievements. The award supports students from the United Kingdom to undertake studies in the United States, and for Americans to study in the United Kingdom.[32][33]
The album features Cooke playing jazz standards on piano with accompanying whistle and speaking about his life in America.