Alistair Cooke Signs Off

Alfred—er, Alistair—Cooke has signed off BBC. At 95, he will speak seldomly, if ever, again. He calls scotch, "the wine of Scotland." Well said, Alistair. If this is (fair & balanced) appreciation (for Omnibus, Masterpiece Theater, and Alistair Cooke's America), so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Alistair Cooke Says Farewell From America
By FRANK J. PRIAL

wo weeks ago last Friday, on Feb. 20 to be exact, Alistair Cooke slipped a sheet of yellow paper into his ancient Royal manual and typed, "Letter From America No. 2869." It was to be the last, the 2,869th, of his weekly BBC radio talks. A journalistic odyssey that had begun 58 years earlier was coming to an end. He made no mention of it in that final letter, which incidentally was about Saddam Hussein and the two George Bushes. Mr. Cooke, now 95, was winding up his long, eventful career.

"We were going to announce it after that weekend, when the show had been on the air," he said, "but of course it leaked out. My friends tell me the British papers went crazy." He added with a grin, "One of them said it was as if the queen had died." One of America's favorite Britons was lounging on Thursday in his favorite chair in the handsome Fifth Avenue apartment he has occupied for more than 40 years. His once elegant frame is bent now, he cups a hand over his ear to listen, and he moves slowly when he rises. But he swirled his one evening Scotch, "the wine of Scotland" he calls it, with the elegance that characterized his long years in the public eye.

It was earlier in the week, on Tuesday, that the BBC formally announced to Mr. Cooke's estimated 22 million listeners around the world that he was retiring. The World Service said he had decided to sign off on the advice of his doctors, and that they would broadcast letters from the Cooke archives for several more weeks. "I can no longer continue my `Letter From America,' " he said in a statement. "I have had much enjoyment in doing these talks, and I hope some of it has passed over to the listeners, to all of whom I now say thank you for your loyalty and goodbye."

He was asked, Would he miss his work?

"Well, I was used to the routine," he said. "I would pick my topic on Monday and spend the day researching it. On Tuesday I'd type two or two and a half pages, all my arthritis would allow me. I'd type the rest, another three pages on Wednesday, 1,700 words total — 13 minutes 30 seconds air time.

"Then I'd beat the hell out of it, getting rid of all the adverbs, all the adjectives, all the hackneyed words. Do you know what Mark Twain said about the perfect word? The difference between a perfect word and a near-perfect word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

"On Thursday we'd record the show right here, and on Friday it would be on the air from London. We record here because I haven't left the apartment in two years on doctor's orders."

Illness may have confined Mr. Cooke to his apartment, but he spent much of his earlier life on the road as a reporter. He was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed. "Down on the greasy floor," he stated in his BBC letter that night, "was a huddle of clothes, and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb."

"I was a reporter," he said the other day. "I was never an ideologue." Perhaps not but he admitted that of the 11 presidents he has covered, Franklin D. Roosevelt was his favorite, and he once observed that "Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax." He thought Jimmy Carter was the most intelligent of the presidents he has known.

Were there reports or events he was particularly proud of? He answered: "My favorite column was the one I delivered last Christmas Day, and speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974 was one of the memorable events. It was the 200th anniversary of the First Continental Congress, and nothing like that had ever happened to me before."

Raymond Seitz, a former United States ambassador to Britain wrote: "Cooke was the quintessential foreign correspondent. Politicians and diplomats come and go, but Cooke's weekly lessons have, for half a century, translated one nation for the understanding of another."

Mr. Cooke's formal education included a degree in English with top honors from Cambridge University, but he said he absorbed his prose style from E. B. White, Twain and H. L. Mencken. He once defined Mencken as "a humorist in the classic American tradition, about halfway between Twain and Woody Allen."

While still a student in England Mr. Cooke corresponded with Mencken and later became a colleague and friend. Together they covered the 1948 presidential campaign, Mencken's last.

The elegant apartment Mr. Cooke inhabits with his wife, the portrait painter Jane White, was financed less by the "Letter From America" series, for which he once disclosed he was paid about $1,100 a piece, than by his books, several of which were best sellers, by his lectures, and especially by his years on television. He was the host of "Omnibus," the first important cultural television program, from 1952 to 1961, and of "Masterpiece Theater" on PBS from 1971 to 1992.

Like any television personality, particularly a cultural one, Mr. Cooke was ripe for parody. He became Alistair Cookie (for "Monsterpiece Theater") on "Sesame Street" and was sent up regularly on "Saturday Night Live."

Alistair Cooke was born Alfred Cooke in Manchester, England, in 1908, the son of an ironworker and lay preacher and an Irish immigrant mother. At Cambridge he legally changed his name to Alistair, which he claims had been a nickname until then. He first came to the United States in 1932 on a two-year followship to study theater direction. He spent one summer in Hollywood working on a film about Napoleon with Charlie Chaplin. All that came out of the project was a profile of Chaplin in Mr. Cooke's 1977 book, Six Men.

After several years back in London as a BBC theater critic, he returned to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1941. In 1945 The Manchester Guardian, now The Guardian, hired him to cover the founding of the United Nations. He was the Guardian's United States correspondent for the next 26 years. He worked simultaneously for the BBC and broadcast his first "Letter From America" on March 24, 1946. It told of a voyage he took on the Queen Mary with several thousand war brides on their way to the United States.

Mr. Cooke was a man about town in his younger days, haunting the 52nd Street jazz clubs and playing jazz piano at parties. His circle included figures from the Algonquin Round Table and even now he can regale friends with stories of James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley and the acerbic Brendan Gill.

William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, lived for many years in the same building as the Cookes. "He lived on the third floor," said Mr. Cooke, who lives on the 15th. "He never came up here because he was afraid of heights."

While there were indeed 2,869 letters from America, they were not broadcast every week since their inception, nor did all of them come from the United States. In the program's early years it was off the air for as long as three months at a time and would occasionally emanate from London while Mr. Cooke was there for business or vacation. He did not miss a single show after 1966, however, recording the show from a hospital bed when necessary.

While proud of his reputation as a pundit, a prose stylist and an impressive speaker, Mr. Cooke is prouder still, he says, of his ability to single out the small gesture, the terse quote or the insignificant event that speaks to larger issues. "I think I've lasted," he told William H. Honan of The New York Times in 1988, "because I found out that what people really wanted to know was anything that you notice in life, and especially things that touch everybody, touch a bishop and a farmer."

Not all of his efforts have met with unalloyed enthusiasm. The Times Literary Supplement in London criticized his book Alistair Cooke's America for its "random explanations," and the American historian James Flexner said that the television program based on the same book was "full of historical errors."

An unruffled Mr. Cooke said, "Academics just hate squatters on their territory."

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company