The Unseen Alistair Cooke

Good evening. Both Britain and the United States have been given a black eye in the past week

by things so seemingly slight as a bridge game and a boxing match.

For more than half a century,

Alistair Cooke painted pictures of America for radio listeners in words.

But when he died, a remarkable new record of his life was discovered.

In long-forgotten boxes, and down in the basement of his apartment block,

150 reels of 8mm film.

Home movies telling the story of a journalist's adventures and revealing the man.

They capture his discovery of America,

his passions,

and his friendships.

They uncover the real Alistair Cooke -

worldly, creative, ambitious.

The storyteller with a filmmaker's eye.

Come with me. You are, or imagine yourself to be,

in the passenger seat of a 1933 Model A Ford.

In the driver's seat would be me.

These early travels with his camera

are a flickering archive of his American journey,

and they open one door on the unseen life behind the polished words.

Alistair Cooke arrived in America in 1932.

Before a year had passed,

he had befriended and filmed the most famous man in the world.

No other footage of Charlie Chaplin is so intimate, nor so relaxed.

How did this 24-year-old Englishman,

bred in Blackpool, the son of an iron-fitter,

find himself in Hollywood, so close to those distant stars?

He told the story of coming

to this country in several ways, but what he always emphasises

is that his first impression of Americans

was having American soldiers billeted in the house in Blackpool,

and he thought they were extraordinarily open and gregarious

in ways that that even as a child, he sensed were very different from how English people were.

# That the Yanks are coming

# The Yanks are coming

# The drums rum-tumming everywhere... #

When the Americans came into the war,

Blackpool was 20 miles of sand, and the entire American army,

it seemed to me as a boy, came and trained there, and everybody had to take some in, and we took in -

I don't know, four, five, six, seven Americans.

I think that really decided my life.

He was born in 1908 and christened Alfred Cooke.

His mother ran a boarding house in Blackpool.

It was a devoutly Methodist home.

As he began to grow up, young Alfred found it restrictive.

I think he essentially turned his back on his view of God

and of the church,

in anticipation of the church turning its back on him, and he used to say he did it for three reasons -

one because he had a cowlick and he had to put grease in his hair to keep his cowlick down,

and that would of course be vanity, and he also loved music,

particularly American jazz, which was even worse.

Of course, third, he thought girls were the cutest things ever made,

and if God only knew what he had in mind, God would certainly damn him

to eternal hell, so he kind of said goodbye to religion, goodbye to God

and goodbye to Blackpool,

and off he went to Cambridge to kick up his heels and find his fortune.

CHOIR MUSIC PLAYS

In 1927, he won a scholarship to study English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge.

He was one of only two secondary school boys in his year.

We have a single sheet in his file

which records the whole of his college career.

Cooke's file contains comments from his supervisor, Dr Tillyard.

The first one in 1927 says,

"Well-read, quick, keen, industrious.

"I doubt if he has any real originality."

The later one, 1928,

Dr T reports, "Satisfactory, but a journalist's mind."

So he took part one of the Tripos in 1929 and got a first,

and took part two in 1930 and got an upper second.

The college commented that this was really because he'd been spending far too much of his time on other

activities, such as drama, which we know is perfectly true.

He founded the first Cambridge drama society that allowed women members.

And he did something else.

On his 22nd birthday in 1930,

he changed his name from Alfred, which he'd never liked, to Alistair.

He drew cartoons, played jazz,

became editor of the magazine Granta.

But even after five years in Cambridge, his tutors hadn't lost their grudging tone.

"He has even more drive and much more of a certain kind of ability than I gave him credit for.

"I still believe that he's not really a first-class man,

"but there's no doubt that he has an extraordinary capacity for impressing himself on others.

"He is, I am sure, very much out for himself, and I should sum him up as a clever careerist."

He did have quite a lot of ability, but he wasn't really applying that

ability to the sort of subjects they thought were really important.

Not the ideal reference for the research work or teaching job that he wanted.

But in 1932, he won a generously-funded fellowship

for two years' study on the other side of the Atlantic.

He was off and away.

The magical journey into New York harbour made a deep impression on Cooke.

Later, he tried to recapture the moment on film.

Even in the midst of the Depression that had descended on America,

it was a land of wonders.

I'd had this imaginitive build-up all my childhood.

America was Bobby Jones, the great golfer, was Douglas Fairbanks,

was the moving pictures, was the pretty girls, and jazz.

You see, I was mad for jazz.

To Americans, the Blackpool boy

seemed something of an English gent, with a cut-glass accent.

Here's how he sounded when he arrived.

I came in September 1932.

I went to the Yale School of Drama,

and the intention was that I should pursue my research there

in direction and in criticism.

But after I'd been there about three months,

I discovered that, though it was a very fine student school,

it didn't really provide for the sort of experimental research I was wanting to do.

Yale wasn't the right place for him,

but Cooke's fellowship provided the opportunity he was looking for.

You were obliged by the terms of accepting this fellowship

to buy a second-hand car, which I did,

for 45, and drive round the United States on your summer holiday.

He flew to Chicago and began his first drive westward,

armed with a 22 cine camera.

One of the things you see in his movies

is his great love of the American landscape, in all of the cross-country trips,

from the very first one that he made in the summer of 1933, where he veered up

above the northern border of the United States into Canada,

and came down through Oregon and California.

He was fascinated by the country itself, by the land and the topography and the geography.

He was just in love with the vast beauty, I think, of the country and the potential.

Some of America was really backwoods in those days.

You didn't get to see

what it was like unless you went and looked at it,

and he was very curious.

He was just hungry to know everything.

Curiosity was one of his driving emotions.

He was so intrigued

by America's people, by the diversity.

That first tour, in the summer of 1933, was a revelation for the young traveller.

Here was a land quite different from the idea of America that he'd grown up with.

Nothing could be more satisfying to a romantic young man bred in cities

than the semi-desert landscape that covers so much of the west.

It is as empty as the horizon

and gleams with splendid melancholy lights and haunting shapes.

Instead of spending another year at Yale studying theatre,

he went to Harvard to study

the American language, and he had begun his studies of America.

He was quick to make the most of the social life that Harvard offered.

Maybe his Cambridge tutor had been right.

He was moving in elevated circles.

In Harvard's exclusive and self-regarding Hasty Pudding Club,

he composed songs for and directed

an all-male show called Hades The Ladies.

But Cooke wasn't going to stay in the theatre now.

That 1933 road trip had given him much more than a sightseer's introduction to America.

A young man used an old trick to find a way into Hollywood.

He wanted to work for The Observer and he wanted to meet Charlie Chaplin.

Neither of which he had under his belt at the time.

So he called up The Observer and said, "I can get you an interview with Charlie Chaplin.

"Do you want me to do this? I could go do that."

Out of what in New York is called chutzpah,

I'd had the audacity to write to the editor of this Sunday paper,

suggesting that, on my summer trip,

since I should be stopping by Hollywood,

how about my writing a series of six pieces on the movies?

Beginning with an interview with Charlie Chaplin, then with the celebrated German director, Lubich.

Of course, I knew none of these magnificoes.

At the same, he wrote to them claiming that he did have a commission from The Observer.

And they agreed to be interviewed.

He did stretch the rules but he got what he wanted, and I think that

that ambition and that energy and that gall essentially set him off in America.

So, in August 1933, Alistair Cooke arrived at the Chaplin Studios to conduct his interview.

There's a sense of

very immediate bonding.

And Chaplin was obviously fascinated by Cooke

and Cooke's ability with words, particularly.

How that happened is very hard to guess, but it clearly happened

instantly from the moment Alistair arrived at the Chaplin Studio, and they connected.

Daddy was just crazy about Charlie Chaplin.

He admired his talent so much.

Then he revealed that he'd been on his yacht

with him and Paulette Goddard, and made his own movie of them!

So we thought that was incredibly cool.

He later described the scene in a book of portraits.

"On a still and brilliant midsummer morning,

"I sat on the deck of a yacht,

"anchored 20-odd miles south-west of the Los Angeles Harbour,

"looking across the shimmering water to the small mountainous island called Catalina.

"There were five of us aboard. Chaplin, then 44,

"Paulette Goddard, an enchanting 22-year-old brunette,

"as trim and shiny as a trout,

"whom Chaplin had known for little more than a year.

"Andy, the skipper, a former Keystone Cop.

"And Freddy, a Japanese cook.

"And there was I, a lean, black-haired 24-year-old Englishman

"on a two-year fellowship at Yale.

"I had just bought an 8mm movie camera, and with his

"extended thumbs touching and his palms at the parallel,

"he would fix the frame for me and retreat

"to mime a range of characters he picked up from the headlines

"of the only newspaper we'd brought aboard.

"Jean Harlow had just eloped.

"A famous female impersonator

"had been given a friendly push and drowned.

"The Prince of Wales was seen making a speech.

"Chaplin was so relaxed on that cruise,

"so naturally restless and inventive, that in retrospect,

"I can see he was revealing himself,

"as if describing an endless series of Rorschach ink-blot tests."

Alastair was a great conversationalist.

He was a good communicator,

and certainly Chaplin was too.

That was a nice friendship.

Back on the east coast, Cooke met Ruth Emerson,

the grand-niece of the great American writer and sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Here was this tall, gorgeous model,

affiliated with one of the most prestigious,

intellectually upstanding families in America.

It was sort of like a dream come true, I think, for him, and I don't know that he ever would have

admitted it that way, but I've wondered about that.

He was bright and fun.

He was a nice man.

We had a lot of fun on 52nd Street.

We went nights to listen to jazz jam sessions.

That was great fun.

I didn't know much about jazz. He did.

He certainly educated me.

I got a lot of education with him!

One day in 1934, Chaplin wrote to me -

a miracle, that, he rarely wrote to anyone -

asking me to go out to Hollywood and help him with the script of a projected film on Napoleon.

So that summer, he set off with Ruth and a college friend

to drive once more across America.

They planned to marry near Hollywood, in Pasadena, California.

Cooke asked Chaplin to be his best man, and he said yes.

But when the wedding day came,

Cooke and Ruth waited and waited, but Chaplin didn't appear.

As Cooke always told the story,

it was a terrible shock, but it was less of a surprise to the bride.

Chaplin was going to be the best man

at the wedding. Paulette was Chaplin's girl at the time,

and she liked to have a drink.

She was very made-up.

What else, what do you say?

I didn't imagine my father admiring her.

I had a crazy idea that I could tell Chaplin we didn't want Paulette there!

That was pretty nutty.

He said it was all right,

you could say he was there and even if he didn't come,

that was supposed to solve the problem.

There were problems, too, with the planned film about Napoleon.

One day I went up to the house for dinner and we sat and played

as a duet the song Titina,

which he was then going to use in Modern Times, and did.

He broke off for a telephone call or something, and when he came back,

I remember, he had a toothpick.

He stretched out on a sofa and picked away.

"By the way," he said,

"the Napoleon thing, it's a beautiful idea...for somebody else."

Nothing more was said, ever.

A week later I packed,

and took off east.

The newlyweds travelled back across America by train.

It was time to be practical.

Cooke knew that he needed a proper job -

preferably one that exploited his new-found knowledge of Hollywood.

I was walking in a street and I saw a newspaper headline which said,

"PM's son fights BBC", I bought it, of course.

He was the BBC film critic.

He had a row with the BBC.

The last sentence said, "So now the BBC is looking for another film critic" and I said,

"That's it...that's what I want to be!"

He got the job, and in autumn 1934, he and Ruth arrived in London.

At the BBC, Cooke won over audiences with his conversational style.

If I were inclined at all to talk about the acting of individuals...

which should always make you suspect a movie critic,

I'd be inclined to say that Katherine Hepburn's performance

was just about as high as any actress came last year.

I don't care if her acting was created by a sensitive fellow with a pair of scissors,

standing knee deep in celluloid, or if it was her own unaided posing...

-What shall we talk about, Arthur?

-About you?

Oh, no! Don't let's talk about me, let's talk about you.

What kind of man are you?

He also made pioneering music features.

But he frustrated the BBC with his unwillingness to provide the script in advance...

He used to come in with a few notes, into the studio.

And then he'd play the first record, say what he was going to talk about.

While they were playing, he would be looking as to what he was

going to say about the next record

and he'd be turning over quickly and he'd absorb it in his mind

and then speak it at the microphone as though he'd studied it for years, you know.

He said he'd like to take me out to dinner, so I said, that'll be nice.

So we went to a very posh restaurant in Regent Street and there he ordered me fish and chips because

he thought as I was a Cockney, fish and chips was what I wanted.

On the way back in the taxi, He said, "Have you ever thought of emigrating to America?"

So I said, no, why?

He said, "Well I would if I were you."

I said, why? He said, "there's going to be a terrible war and if you

"don't want to be in it, become an American, you know, move over."

That rather impressed me, that two years before it happened, he knew it was going to happen.

In 1937 came the chance that would mould the rest of his life.

While he was with the BBC in London,

he had also broadcast a weekly programme called London Letter

for NBC in the United States. When King Edward VIII abdicated

in 1936 to marry his American divorcee,

Cooke reported the events live to an eager American audience.

The money he earned allowed him to go back there,

determined on a career that might let him span the Atlantic.

With war in Europe on the horizon,

Cooke took his fourth tour across the country.

It was his last with Ruth.

Heading south, they drove through Virginia and the Carolinas,

then down to Louisiana, across to Texas

and on to California.

In the heatwave Summer of 1939, he filmed the journey in colour,

revelling in the natural and the man-made wonders.

From the Hoover Dam to Yosemite National Park.

Hello England, Hello England. This is Alistair Cooke.

Living in New York, he continued to work for the BBC.

A live jam session broadcast home was a particular success.

These noises are coming to you from the roof of the Saint Regis Hotel in NY city.

It's a beautiful, hot sunny day outside, and way up in the mid-70s...

but we'd be plenty hot in here if it was midwinter.

We've managed to get together somehow

under great doubts and difficulties,

a collection in one room of about a score

of the greatest swing players who have ever been assembled anywhere.

On saxophone, Bud Freeman.

On straight soprano saxophone, Sidney Bechet.

Bass, Art Shapiro.

Piano, Jess Stacey, Joe Bushkin and Fats Waller.

For the first number, they're already swapping places.

Onto the rostrum seven players.

Yes, seven of them are going up there.

And they're going to play Keep Smiling At Trouble.

Six days before the United States entered the Second World War in 1941,

Cooke got the American citizenship that he'd decided he wanted.

And soon, he set off on another

five-month journey across the country to document life on the home front,

in words and in still photographs.

He was edging his way into journalism, but it kept him away from his family.

While he travelled, Ruth was left to look after their one-year old-son,

Johnny, at her parents' house on Long Island.

After his travels, Cooke rented an apartment in New York City.

His landlady was Jane Hawkes.

She was married, with two children,

Stephen and Holly.

Well, my mother was a glamourpuss

and she was a bit of a, a tootsie...

as she would put it and, and he used to call her Tootsie.

Cooke found himself falling in love with this bohemian artist.

Then Jane's husband died in the war.

Alistair and Ruth divorced a year later.

In 1946, Jane and Alistair married,

a partnership that would last for 58 years.

Steven, my son, was five years old, so was his son, of course,

they were both the same age.

I can remember Steven rushing out as we came out

of the registry office and turned around and said to Alistair,

"Hi, Daddy", it was very cute.

And then it was very sad because they didn't in fact have a very good relationship.

Alistair wasn't very good with the boys, you know, he just

warmed to the girls and was distant with the boys.

I have one vivid memory from when I was quite small,

maybe five or six years old,

I had my electric train set up on the floor

and he got down on the floor and he filmed my electric trains,

as much as possible making them look like real trains.

And I had a chance to see that reel of film recently,

and I was astonished to find that it is all footage of the trains and there's not a frame of me.

And I thought, if I were visiting my six-year-old boy,

I would shoot the boy as well as the trains.

Cooke had certainly not taken the breakdown of his first marriage lightly.

I think making a break was a very scary thing to do for him.

I mean when, you consider the way he'd been brought up and everything

and all that, sort of, Puritanism in his background,

it must have kicked in.

I never really thought about it before but, um,

I think it must have, you know and he must have felt very guilty

and whenever he felt guilty,

he would always, sort of, hide his feelings, I mean, he was rather like that.

I had two years of psychiatry

and I learned a great deal from old man Freud.

One of them was, trust your unconscious.

It has a logic all its own.

It gave me the courage

to devise a form of doing the talks which was to sit down and write them.

Whatever came to mind.

The 'talks' were of course the Letters From America,

After the seriousness of wartime reporting,

his idea was to broadcast something lighter

about "the springs of American life, rather than the bright headlines themselves", as he put it.

The BBC liked the idea, and in 1946, Letter From America began.

I want to tell you what it's like

to come back to the United States after a sobering month in Britain

and say what daily life feels and looks like by comparison.

I hope the next Letter will be more cheerful than this one

but I thought you'd like to know how it feels to have left austere,

shivery, old England and got back to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!

Letter From America, which started less than a year

after the end of the second war,

is a job he invented for himself - I think that probably gave him more

satisfaction than anything.

We all would like to find a job for which we're perfectly suited and he did it.

What impressed me about his journalism was his...

..his uncanny commitment to...

exactly 2,200 words to describe a situation.

It didn't matter what the historical perspective was,

Give him a typewriter and he could give you 2,200 words

which is exactly the length of time of his broadcast.

If you could start at the beginning

and read through them all, 2,869, I believe,

you would know this country so well, because it wasn't just politics,

it was talking about everyday things.

He had a marvellous capacity to find interest in what happened today,

he didn't have to reach into history though he knew history consummately,

but I think in that sense, he was a true journalist.

I think he was able to convey

the essence of the country as a whole and not just

the Washington scene or the New York scene.

He was able to show that there's an America beyond

which is hugely important and very little understood.

In the Letter, he tried to travel through America in many ways,

either physically through America or in thought or in events.

For me, he does not reveal himself very much in these letters,

he doesn't reveal his thoughts...

He's telling it how he sees it but it doesn't tell you what he thinks of it.

He became Chief American correspondent of the Manchester Guardian in 1947,

and there too, he conformed to a strict code of neutrality.

For someone who made his career in reporting the news in particularly

political events and figures,

he was very close to the chest about his own inclinations

and was very proud of never telling us whom he was going to vote for.

He did have some people in American politics

whom he really admired -

he had great fondness for Adlai Stevenson and great admiration for him,

I can't tell you whether or not he voted for him, I suspect he did.

Well, Alistair was a newspaper man you see, so he interviewed him

and he was a very charming newspaper man

and I was a devoted volunteer for Stevenson, I worked very hard on it.

He broke his rule in supposedly about not consorting with politicians,

he broke that rule as far as Adlai was concerned

because Adlai was so much, I think, in the sort of

same social circle as he travelled in.

Bogie and I were campaigning with Adlai Stevenson,

for Adlai Stevenson in 1952

when he was running for president.

And that's when I met Alistair Cooke who was covering

Adlai for the Guardian,

and, er, we just became instant friends.

When Bogie and I were on Adlai Stevenson's train going from Boston to New York

and I remember Bogie and I were sitting in some compartment

and the door opened and Alistair stuck his head in and said,

"Was it Christ who said 'Be ye perfect'?"

And Bogie and I thought, is he really asking us this question?!

Well, I wish I could help you, guv, but sorry!

But I mean, it's that kind of mentality that...

They also think that you know as much as they know,

I mean, you get caught up in that, you are captured by it.

He was always great with women as you may or may not know,

and most charming of men.

Betty Bacall called Alistair Aristotle and he called her Laureen

just to tease!

We were just a great match, the four of us,

because there was no... how you say, 'BS'!

The Bogarts became a fixture on the Cooke's frequent trips to California.

He filmed one of the visits with Bacall.

Back in New York, he had a strict but enjoyable routine.

Work stopped in time for the 'cocktail hour',

and evenings were kept for pleasure.

I was ready for bed, I'd been up with the children since

I'd gotten them off to school, but I never said no, I'd go.

I used to love it because they'd bring little souvenirs

from their night clubs

and there'd always be a photograph of them together

on the table in the hall for me to see on my way to school.

And I just remember, you know,

the, sort of, smell of liquor and perfume and cigarettes!

The Cookes moved into a spacious apartment on Fifth Avenue,

they would stay for more than 50 years.

The view over Central Park flavoured many of the Letters From America -

I look up and out as usual at the rolling park and am almost blinded

by the ice blue sky, the blazing sun and the landscape of snow.

And chuckle at this deceptive picture,

since the temperature outside is 18 degrees...

14 below freezing,

and no place for yours truly to patter into.

Visits to family in England were brief and infrequent.

Holly and Susan only went to Blackpool once.

Mummy and Daddy and I went to Blackpool in the early summer,

I think, and it was not like anything else I had ever seen in my life.

My grandmother, who was a very intelligent

and strong and to me, humourless woman...

you know, laid out a great fare for us.

When we were going up on the train, Daddy was a chain smoker and he

was sitting around fidgeting because he couldn't smoke cos he didn't want her to smell the cigarettes on him.

I had this recollection that Mummy and I were sort of trying and that

I don't remember where Daddy was during that visit, I mean, where was he?

Then he said, "I think I'll take Holly out to see the tower."

It emerged very quickly that what he really wanted to do was go walk along the seaboard

and have a few cigarettes in order to fortify himself for the rest of the evening.

I have wondered why he didn't attend either of his parents' funerals.

You know, I think there are many reasons, um, not the least of which

is that he felt guilty for not having been before,

that he would only show up at the funeral.

He also, I think, didn't want to go and be the figurehead -

"Oh, here comes the Cooke boy made good, back to Blackpool",

I don't think he relished that role

and he could excuse it and he was very good at self-delusion,

say "Oh, I can't, I have a lecture engagement I have to go to here,

"whatever, I don't have time to go back",

and he could dismiss it and really put on blinders.

He was very busy - alongside the Letter and the Guardian reporting,

in 1952, a TV producer, Robert Saudek,

asked him to present a new America arts programme called Omnibus.

I think it was Sunday nights, the event,

Omnibus, that was the event.

Such a great show.

Omaha, Omelette, Omnibus.

A large number of subjects, all at once. Comprising the same.

Of all forms and kinds of exceeding variety.

Omnis, from omnis all, to or for all.

Well, that's it. Omnibus - something for everybody.

My impression is that he really enjoyed it

because it wasn't the same every week.

# Brightly dawns our wedding day

# Joyous hour, we give thee greeting

# Whither, whither Art thou fleeting? #

About that, now look...

You know, he got Leonard Bernstein to conduct...

He got very good actors to perform plays

and the best thing that I thought,

was when he interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright.

My dear Alistair, it isn't using its own form...

That was just incredible cos Frank Lloyd Wright

was such an old lion and such an old personality

and my stepfather was very interested in his architecture and interested in him.

It would cost you less to be free than to be stupid and confined.

Well, in terms of hard cash, which I think...

But it got going and the director or the cameraman, no-one could stop them

so they had to just roll the credits right over them

and it's the only time that Daddy ever lost control of someone he was interviewing.

But I think he didn't really mind because he was such a great man.

Well, there you have the performer finally being fulfilled

in many ways. He knew how to use the camera, no question.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very privileged

to be allowed to look you in the eye for once...

He spoke to the camera as though he was speaking to one person as I am speaking to you,

and that is something that a lot of people do not understand about camera.

If you look into the camera and talk to it

as though it's a person,

you connect immediately, and he totally connected.

Well, let me tell you the setup,

there's a camera, needless to say, but it looks like no camera that you can buy.

It has three big black eyes and if I want to look you right in the eye,

I look at the bottom one which is a big black circle.

Now the emotional effect of this on somebody like me who's talking to an empty room,

is to be talking at a man at three feet who's wearing a black patch on his eye, and if he has another eye,

it's closed, and he stands like that and says "Go on, impress me".

Omnibus ended in 1961, when the sponsorship dried up.

Now in his 50s, Cook focused once again on his journalism.

But the 1960s weren't his best years.

He had a period, when his career was really,

you know, sort of stuck in the mud.

There was some tension with Alistair Hetherington,

his editor at the Guardian.

Hetherington was a completely different animal.

Hetherington was a very reserved,

rather shy Scot who had very little time for Alistair's flamboyance

and, you know, his, sort of, obvious bonhomie.

He didn't appreciate the following that Alistair had, you know,

he wanted straightforward reporting.

Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Hetherington's criticisms centred on one topic - civil rights.

And Cooke's insistence that, even there,

a reporter should be impartial.

I think, you see, to be a foreign correspondent, you've got to report all sides.

Now this may be just a function of your character,

that you're essentially a coward, certainly a fence-sitter.

It's often occured to me maybe I am, physically, an incredible coward.

The only way, then, is to try and be as fair as possible to all sides,

however outlandish they may be.

I personally find the civil rights movement, the negro problem,

is so immensely complex,

so tragic, the conflicts are so tragic,

that the only people who make me mad are the people who have the answers.

I think he thought of himself as being a pretty left-wing moderate

and because he did not take a stand

and because he was, I think, surrounded by left-wing democrats,

he became the apologist for a more conservative view.

He got on the see-saw and balanced out all of those around him.

The politics of the age also caused discord at home.

There were arguments over Vietnam.

And then, a more personal disaster.

One time that was particularly difficult for him,

was a time in the 60's when I was visiting my sister in London

and she at the time had been involved

in what was later called a cult,

a religious cult, it was an offshoot of Scientology called The Process.

And they were real marksmen at brainwashing

and she had became involved in it, as did I that summer.

Informing my parents that I was not going to come home,

that I was going to stay there.

And it became necessary for them to come and fetch me back from London,

which was impossible for my father to do -

he was so upset, he couldn't do it,

he lay in his bed, curled in a foetal position,

or pacing the halls of the apartment,

he simply couldn't do it, he was so terrified and so worried.

In the end, my mother and my brother came and got me.

The road trips across America had stopped.

There were no more home movies.

But he didn't lose his urge to explain and describe the country to the world.

And from the traumas of '60s America

came some of his finest journalistic moments -

I was never anywhere,

except suddenly, in the dreadful year of 1968,

I found I was everywhere...

He found himself, in particular, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles

on the 5th of June 1968.

He was for once travelling with, with Bobby Kennedy.

For him, Bobby Kennedy had been, I think, a far more important

political figure than his brother.

I think he really felt Bobby had greatness in him.

GUNSHOT RINGS OUT

He was there in the pantry behind the stage

where Bobby Kennedy was shot a few seconds after it happened.

There were flash lights by now and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders.

She was slapping a young man and he was saying "Listen, lady, I'm hurt too".

And down on the greasy floor 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 think it was the fear,

the intensity of it and the necessity for him at that moment,

that night, with a pencil and a rough piece of paper,

to try and scratch out the meaning of this event

and all he could do was talk about the way he'd seen it.

He spoke about the woman screaming in the kitchen,

he spoke about the look on Bobby Kennedy's face,

he talked about Ethel Kennedy in a way that... Most of us would have gone,

"Oh, it was chaotic, it was awful",

and he didn't ever tell it, he showed it.

He was a great writer because he could see.

It had always been Cooke's jewelled observer's eye that set him apart.

Now, almost 40 years after he first arrived at the BBC,

he was given the chance to tell America's story on television.

And then he got that America series and whoof, you know, he took off

like a rocket, and became this star, this television star!

It encapsulated his work for so many years in the sense

that he had always tried to show that there is more to America

than the east coast and Washington -

this was his opportunity,

really, to show it and to describe it and I think he was very, very proud of that.

Cooke began to build his journey through American history

around the favourite haunts from those first early trips across the country.

Once again, he was back on the road.

Well, this may seem to be a very strange place of pilgrimage.

Here in a bar in New Orleans.

He became the interpreter of America, not just to Britain but to Americans themselves.

The book of the series was a phenomenal best-seller.

And he started the job for which he would become

best known to Americans, as the host of Masterpiece Theater,

introducing British period dramas to American audiences on the public television network.

He was, to them, the quintessential English gentlemen,

famous enough to appear on Sesame Street!

Pip-pip and good evening.

Alistair Cookie here.

Me delighted to welcome you to Monsterpiece Theater.

I really don't think that he cared much about fame,

that's not to say that he didn't quite enjoy it when it came his way.

People would come up to us when we were in an airplane or something,

he didn't mind, I minded!

He liked it, he liked being famous, he did.

Good evening...

Oh, I'd better not advertise the brand...

He was approached by many big advertising organisations

to use the voice and his presence to advertise product.

Always refused.

In the '70s, he was offered at the time, 250,000,

which was real money then, you know,

to do commercials for one of these big banks and turned it down.

He was one of the most morally upstanding people I've ever met,

he believed that interest was usury.

"Keep your money in a checking account

"because if you get any interest, that's morally wrong."

His security was in his sense of propriety and ethics and yet,

no-one enjoyed a good time better than he did so he lived in that conflict

and, you know, was that the forbidden fruit, is that what makes it so appealing? It probably is.

I think that inside every conservative there is, if not an anarchist,

there is a hellion who'd like to get out and raise a little dust!

He did have quite a number of younger people that he liked to,

surround himself with, and his idea of good night out

or maybe a good night in, depending on how you look at it, was following a routine.

He would have a little 45-minute nap and then get up in time for

the news and getting the ice, because cocktail time was coming.

He was a wonderful host -

of course you couldn't get a word in edgewise, because he held the floor.

One was kind of greedy to hear what he said,

he was always so amusing, so enlivening.

He talked all the time,

he was a terrific talker, not a silent partner!

He had an encyclopaedic store of conversation pieces,

for example, about his passion for golf.

He loved golf, oh, did he love to play golf!

It was his 50s before he started playing golf.

I thought it was a great thing because he...

was not from a generation that took up exercise for one's own betterment.

Jane once said, "He doesn't like the out of doors"!

How extraordinary!

It's absolutely typical of my father

that once he's started learning to play the game of golf,

he would immediately learn its entire history

and thereafter, write about it authoritatively.

In 1992, he retired from Masterpiece Theater,

the end of a 40-year television career.

But it was not the end of his picturing of America.

In hundreds of photographs from his office window and with words,

in his weekly Letter, where he painted his own pictures,

patiently and passionately.

As he got older, the Letter was the focus and he sat down every night

and watched the news and read the papers,

all in preparation for the Letter,

to be thinking about what he might like to write about,

what was piquing his interest

and that was the focus of the week.

The Letter really was Alistair's life

and he said on many occasions,

that the day he stopped doing the Letter

would be the day that he died or was no longer capable or able of recording.

These were from 2004, I believe,

when the news of his retirement from Letter From America

was made known, and lots of people wrote to him

to say how much they would miss

hearing him on Friday night or Sunday morning.

It's amazing that they reached him.

"Alastair Cooke, overlooking Central Park,"

"Alastair Cooke, Letter From America, apartment overlooking the park, New York."

"The famous letter writer, Alastair Cooke, an apartment overlooking Central Park."

It's amazing that the postal service knew who he was, they must have seen these many, many times.

Alistair Cooke announced his retirement in 2004,

at the age of 95.

Four weeks later, he was dead.

He did ask that his ashes be sprinkled in Central Park.

I took that to heart and I realised that, of course,

this was probably not something

that you applied to the City for permission to do.

So when the family was all gathered, I sent them all around the corner

to Starbucks and I said go and fetch 11 white coffee cups with lids.

There we all were on an afternoon and no-one thinks anything about a bunch of people in black

walking with a coffee cup around New York.

My brother John sang a little ballad and I said a prayer and a psalm

and...we scattered the ashes right there.

It's nice to go back now and run past

and wonder at why those particular asters have such vigour!

ALISTAIR COOKE: And so, I just want to say to all those men and women,

a very grateful thank you.

So good night and goodbye.

Just a neat little postcard-sized machine.

Aww.

A la recherche du temps perdu.

# Oh, blue skies

# Smiling at me

# Nothing but blue skies

# Do I see... #

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