Quotes of the Day

This wasn't supposed to be an Obit. I came to work early this morning hoping to finish a tribute to Alistair Cooke and his BBC series "Letter from America." The weekly chat began March 31, 1946, 58 years ago tomorrow, and continued for 2,869 episodes until last month, making it the world's longest-running program of its kind. When Cooke's retirement was reported on March 2nd, the journalist whom Harold Nicholson had called "the best broadcaster on four continents" issued this statement through the BBC: "I can no longer continue my 'Letter From America.' Throughout 58 years I have had much enjoyment in doing these talks and hope that 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 95.

When I mentioned the news about Cooke to my TIME colleague Richard Lacayo, he said, "This is a classic example of 'you mean he isn't dead?'" Well, I knew Cooke wasn't dead — and not just because it's the job of this column to take EKGs of venerable celebs who'd been around since my youth. (I was a Cooke fan from 1952, when he began hosting the TV arts show, "Omnibus.") For the last few years I'd been a faithful listener to his chats, aired in New York on the National Public Radio station WYNE-FM. I'd also been reading his speeches and dispatches, originally for a possible celebration of his 95th birthday last November, then to write a tribute in case ... something happened.

Indeed, I could have told Lacayo that Cooke had considered the peril of outliving his fame. In 1977, when the author of a 20s novel "The Wild Party" died, nearly 50 years after his brief notoriety, Cooke described a gathering of old-timers, adding, "We were not shocked that Joseph Moncure March was dead, but that until yesterday he had been alive."

So Cooke was very much on my mind and, I suspect, the minds of his 22 million listeners to the BBC World Service. On hearing that he would be stepping down, we naturally expected a valedictory address. Having interested the editors of TIME Europe in a Cooke tribute that week, I tuned in on Friday night for a last blast of oracular nostalgia. No new Cooke — just a rerun of a December 2001 "Letter." Rumors spread that he'd been annoyed by BBC's announcement, that he's wanted to drop the news at the end of his next and last broadcast, and angrily refused to warble his own swan song.

We now realize that Cooke, who had suffered a fall in his Manhattan home last October, was simply too ill to continue. He died last night. And now my surprise is as naive as Lacayo's. He couldn't believe Cooke was still alive. I can't quite accept that the man who has represented civility and urbanity for 70 years is dead. Neither could Nick Clarke, author of a scrupulous Cooke biography published in 1999. "I always assumed he would died in the harness," Clarke said today. "Retirement was a dirty word. He didn't really ever contemplate it, because his mind was so active that he thought he would just go on until he stopped."

THE HEAVENLY HOST

That December 2001 broadcast contained this recollection: "Nearly 50 years ago I had the rare, weird pleasure of introducing the Messiah to Leonard Bernstein." He meant the Handel oratorio, but it would hardly have surprised his listeners if he'd arranged a meeting between the great conductor and Jesus Christ. Cooke, you see, knew everyone. Even before he was famous, which he was for nearly 70 years, he had a charm that magnetized the famous to him. And like any man who had learned self-confidence, he was never afraid to write a letter, ring a doorbell, flash a smile and say, "Might I have a moment?" Being Alistair Cooke, he got it. So when he reminisced about the famous, he was looking back but not up. These were celebrities who might brag that, yes, they knew Alistair Cooke.

As a Yale graduate student fresh from Cambridge University, he took a shine to the richness of American dialects; soon he was helping H.L. Mencken on his monumental study "The American Language." On a vacation, he thought he'd interview some Hollywood stars; in no time, Charlie Chaplin was asking him to collaborate on a script and volunteering to serve as best man at his wedding. (Neither offer was fulfilled, but blame that on Chaplin's mercurial nature.) Later, in New York, he "sat on a love seat and lit, through a long evening, the cigarette chain of Greta Garbo." Bertrand Russell, meeting him in 1950, announced, "I asked you here, Cooke, because I wanted to tell you that whenever I read your pieces in the Guardian I say to myself: That is probably the way it happened." Bogie and Betty paid affectionate tribute to his easy erudition with the nickname Aristotle.

Americans know him as the baronial eminence and emcee of "Masterpiece Theatre" from 1970 to 1992, and as the presenter of "Alistair Cooke's America," the 1972 11-hour series for which he happily hopscotched across this vast nation, then expanded his script by four for a best-selling book version. His renown was such that it was borrowed for "Peanuts" (Alistair Beagle) and "Sesame Street" (Alistair Cookie for "Monsterpiece Theatre). The rest of the world knows him for his BBC series "Letter from America," which ran for 2,958 episodes. In 1968 he wrote: "I was staggered to discover, only four years ago, that these 'Letters' are heard on every continent but this one." His reach was later extended to North America, so the locals could hear what Cooke was saying about us. Nice things, mostly.

The hosting gigs (which he called "an acting job — acting natural") gave America its comfortable image of Cooke: a genial fellow, his skin, jacket and tie often in perfectly matching shades of tan, who used his gift for personalizing literature to soft-sell British TV imports to the PBS audience. But that was Cooke's second job; his third, actually. (No, his fourth, if you include his 20 or more books, most of them collections of his written and spoken journalism, and all available from alibris.com,) As he said of his weekly BBC chat, "The talks were done once a week when I was busy with other things. For twenty-five years I was writing a daily report for The (Manchester) Guardian as its chief correspondent in the United States."

The raconteur was first and always a journalist, though one with the widest brief. Not limited to national politics or the police blotter, this untiring traveler wrote about anyone and anything that sparked his curiosity — and everything did — from an Indian medicine man in Taos to a San Diego tattooist, from autumn in New England to prize fights and the Army-McCarthy hearings.

THE LUCKY JOURNALIST

This laissez-faire agenda allowed Cooke to wander into all manner of terrific stories, which he covered with a novelist's sense of sweep and a portraitist's eye for the telling detail. And when talent or curiosity or connections didn't help rub him shoulders with history, serendipity stepped in.

In the summer of 1931, while in Munich on a college theater tour, he heard Hitler, then a fringe radical, speak before a small outdoor crowd. "A small ambulance standing by seemed [an] unnecessary come-on, but at the end of the twenty-minute speech I heard, two or three women had fainted, for the good neurological reason that he could hypnotize even a small audience with omens of a dire future. He did this not with the hysterical bawling which was all we saw in the newsreels before and throughout the Second World War but with a style of the most artful variation of mood, from tenderness to whimsy to outrage. He convinced me, for one, that we had had it."

For a 1935 broadcast from London that was meant to simulate a Broadway opening night, he needed a phonograph record of Ethel Merman singing "You're the Top." A friend sent him to the apartment of an American who would have the record. She was "a small middle-aged brunette [with] coiled braids pinned above her ears, darting blue-black eyes, and a determined square jaw." Her name was Wallis Simpson, and a year or so later her affair with King Edward VIII would cue the tumultuous end of his reign — an event that NBC radio assigned him to cover in a ten-day, 400,000-word, ad-libbed stint, for which his leg man was a young Rhodes Scholar named Walt Whitman Rostow.

He stumbled into a blind alley at Harvard's 300th anniversary celebration in 1936 and got a shock (and a scoop, if he'd dared pursue it) at his first glimpse of F.D.R. Two Secret Service agents "made several swift and inexplicable passes, like jugglers, toward someone inside the car, and on a count (of three, I suppose) one cried 'Now' and they lifted and held aloft a massive human figure crumpled into a squatting position, since one man had his arm crooked under the figure's knees, and the other under his upper back. It was Franklin Roosevelt, as inert as a sack of potatoes. His head could move and did so as he acknowledged the motions of the third man, who had dived into the car and emerged with a cane and a hat. Roosevelt was then deposited on the ground, his back straightened, the cane was put into his right hand, the hat stuck on his head. With a tug or two from his helpers, he braced himself, linked arms with one man and limped stiff-legged toward the side entrance door. ... All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, a trauma with two strokelets: the first registering the name — the president of the United States! The second, that he was a cripple. The president of the United States was a paraplegic!!"

In June 1968, to entertain his hostess on a visit to Los Angeles, he took her to the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary. "Then. Above the bassy boom of the television there was a banging repetition of sounds. Like somebody dropping a rack of trays, or banging a single tray against a wall. Half a dozen of us were startled enough to head for the swinging doors, and suddenly we were jolted through by a flying wedge of other men. ... There was a head on the floor streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down the sides like chocolate sauce on an iced cake. There were splashes of flash bulbs, and infernal heat, and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was wrestling or slapping a young man and he was saying, 'Listen, lady, I'm hurt, too.' And then she was on her knees cradling him briefly, and in another little pool of light 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's effigy on a cathedral tomb. ... Everybody wanted to make space and air, but everybody also wanted to see the worst. By now, the baying and the moaning had carried over into the ballroom, and it sounded like a great hospital bombed and in panic."

He was an institution, yes, and as the decades mounted he dwelt more in reminiscence. But he was always a smart writer with an acute reportorial eye.

SKY WRITING

For much of my youth, I spent Sunday afternoons with Cooke. "Omnibus" was the TV show, and its host called it "the first 90-minute show in this country." That's not true: "Your Show of Shows" preceded "Omnibus" by a few years, and in prime time. But it was, as remains, unique as a showcase for the performing arts. A few highlights, from possibly-faulty memory: a dramatization of Arthur Miller's novel "Focus"; Gene Kelly demonstrating the manly art of ballet using professional athletes (Mickey Mantle, Bob Cousy); the U.S. premiere, before it opened in theaters, of Laurence Olivier's "Richard III"; Edward Albee's one-act play "The Sandbox" (well before his Broadway hit with "Virginia Woolf"); a short comedy film, about a schemer on a train, to the whimsical score of "Swedish Rhapsody."

Cooke's role, as ever, was moderator — between what audiences of the time thought they wanted and what he could persuade them they needed. High art wasn't big at our house; even mid-cult was scraping the ceiling. Opera, ballet, avant-garde theater were medicine to us, but when Cooke held out the spoonful of sugar, we yearned to learn. Decades hence, on "Masterpiece Theater," his presence was the seal of approval for some good, and some not-so-good, British TV. Again he spanned the Atlantic, ladling anecdotes and gentle opinions in graceful, sturdy prose he's probably composed minutes before taping.

Did Cooke ever have writer's block? I doubt it. He could spit out fine prose and cagey opinions, subtly voiced, on any subject — or on the same subject over and over. Consider these two descriptions of his hero Mencken. The first is from a "Letter," written on the occasion of Mencken's death in 1956 and reprinted in the 1968 anthology "Talk About America": "A little man, a stocky man with a bull neck, eyes as blue as gas jets, white hair parted exactly down the middle in the fashion of the early years of this century, and tiny hands and feet that added four surprising grace notes to the solid theme of his body, which was that of an undersized German pork butcher."

The second is from a longer profile in "Six Men," published in 1977: "I suppose I expected to see a florid giant, the local Balzac swiveling his huge bulk to bark at lackadaisical waiters. What I saw was a small man so short in the thighs that when he stood up he seemed smaller than when he was sitting down. He had a plum pudding of a body and a square head stuck on it with no intervening neck. His brown hair was parted exactly in the middle, and the two cowlicks touched his eyebrows. He had very light blue eyes small enough to show the white above the irises, which gave him the earnestness of a gas jet when he talked, an air of incredulity when he listened, and a merry acceptance of the human race and all its foibles when he grinned. He was dressed like the owner of a country hardware store. (On ceremonial occasions, I saw later, he dressed like a plumber got up for church.) For all his seeming squatness, his movements were precise, and his hands in particular were small and sinewy."

If Cooke had borrowed the early sketch for the later portrait, few readers would have noticed. Yet he created a new work, with fresh and vivid details. Did he even remember the 1956 paragraph when it came time to write the 1977? Perhaps he thought it less trouble to write a new, longer portrait than to look up the old one.

CREATING ALISTAIR COOKE

Alfred Cooke. Al Cooke. The names don't sing of cloistered halls and port wine the way Alistair does. But Alfred was his name when he was born, on November 20, 1908, to an iron fitter and his wife in the Manchester suburb of Salford. Along with his studies, the lad feasted, as so many young Brits did, on all things American: "bobbed hair and crossword puzzles, the yo-yo, fresh slang, jazz, electrical recording, the nights leaping with the best tunes of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans, Rodgers and Hart, Ray Henderson and Gershwin."

He especially loved the bounding, stunt-strewn silent comedies of Douglas Fairbanks, which created for him the dream American, "whose delightful gift was to convert the walls and counters and turnstiles of the city into a gymnasium. ... This was my complete picture of America." So in 1917, when the Cookes took in GIs as boarders during the Great War, young Alfred got his first close look at representatives of the country he would live in and love. His infatuation for jazz never waned; he played it at Jesus College, Cambridge, frequented jazz clubs when he got to New York and, in the 50s, recorded an album of jazz piano.

At university, Cooke realized a tendency that would carry him through a long life: a wish to celebrate rather than cauterize. In his introduction to "Memories of the Great & the Good" (and how many other authors would have chosen that title without irony?), Cooke wrote: "My temperament was unhappy with the clinical scrutiny of I.A. Richards, then the helmsman of the New Wave in English studies at Cambridge. Too often, it seemed to me, he was determined to discover in a literary work what was phony or meretricious rather than what was admirable. So, I suppose, I can be said to have lapsed into the tradition of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's 'appreciative' criticism..." Cooke put his temperament to work when he came to America. He was the great appreciator of the country's breadth and energy, its strengths, ironies and contradictions.

It was at Cambridge that Alfred, now with ambitions to become the great theater director of his generation, created the character he would play for the rest of his life. He dubbed himself Alistair, traded in his homely Midlands accent for one closer to Mayfair, and cultivated a posh circle of friends. His supervisor, the critic Eustace M.W. Tillyard, graded Cooke as "Satisfactory, but a journalist's mind." If this was meant as an insult, it soon flowered into prophesy. In between earning his degree (summa cum laude) and co-founding the Mummers (Cambridge's first theatrical troupe to allow women as members), Cooke edited a campus literary magazine and wrote pieces for the American magazine Theatre Arts Monthly.

His eye had turned again across the sea. Horace Greeley's invocation "Go West, young man" applied to Cooke no less than to American pioneers. He was still smitten by the sight and the sound of America — its vigorous movie industry and its raw, enchanting popular music. Golf, his budding passion, was a Scottish sport, but the U.S. just then had a phenom, Bobby Jones, whom Cooke would lionize and often write about. Coming to America, then, was for this budding journalist like being assigned to cover Heaven from the inside.

SCREENING AMERICA

He crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1932, on a Commonwealth scholarship that would take him to Yale and then Harvard. Sailing into New York Harbor, he saw the town's skyscrapers "piled up like the ramparts of some medieval city," as he told his listeners 20 years later. "And this, too, seemed right, for American spectacles — from the Grand Canyon to a night baseball crowd — are always (to a European, at least) bigger than life."

From youth, Cooke's fondness for America was intertwined with what he called "the great popular literature it more or less invented: the movies." He must have realized the truth of a broad generalization — theater is English, movies American — and, having thrown over his ambitions to be a theater director, became a movie critic. He wrote about the adolescent new medium with verve and without prejudice. He talked his way into a reviewer's job at BBC in 1935 and, two years later, edited a volume of film criticism, "Garbo and the Night Watchmen," which for the first time put the writing of Otis Ferguson, Cecelia Ager and Meyer Levin between hard covers.

And Alistair Cooke. If the biographical dish in his contribution comes in his regretful pan of "Modern Times" (just two years after working for Chaplin), the true test is in his dithyramb to Garbo — the great actress of her generation and the one who, inevitability, harvested a critic's ripest prose. ("What, when drunk, one sees in other women," Kenneth Tynan famously wrote, "one sees in Garbo sober.") Cook is in love with her, of course. But watch the writer tuck his attentiveness to behavioral detail into an imposing theory of life, love and the responsibility of the great to care for the merely good:

"Garbo's maturity is not the maturity of her career, it's a wise ageing of her outlook. The old, bold, slick disdain has given way to a sort of amused grandeur. ... For the new Garbo grandeur, this tolerant goddess wraps everybody in the film round in a protective tenderness. She sees not only her own life, but everyone else's, before it has been lived. ... And since the plot is now high hokum, the chief excitement is to watch how perfectly she now sees backwards, like a perpetually drowning woman, not only her life but her part ... the way — years ahead of the acting textbooks — she hides a broken moment not with a cute nose-dive into cupped palms, but with the five inadequate fingers of one bony hand. Her gestures, too, therefore, have the same tender calculation, the same anxiety to treat people with perhaps too much care at the moment, because she knows what's going to happen to them in a year or two."

A few years later, Cooke would return to his old hero Fairbanks as the subject of a Museum of Modern Art monograph. The essay had a dry and tentative tone, and I can't help wondering if Cooke, on reseeing the films, had spotted warts on his idol and, not wanting to offend his early enthusiasm, retreated into sociological analysis and critical disinterest. Or perhaps by 1940, with war in Europe and America still in Depression, he realized that his future lay in reviewing stories on the bigger screen — one that stretched from Bangor to Baja California — for a different medium.

ALISTAIR'S AMERICA

He had presented programs before on the BBC. After the film critique, he filed occasional pieces through the late 30s, then a weekly report on the American war effort, and the emceeing of "Answering You," with Americans asking questions of their British allies. Now Cooke's boss at the Beeb had a bigger idea: he should explain America to the world. As Cooke recalled in 1997: "The head man said, 'Why don't you talk about the things you talk to me about? American children, the chemistry of the New England fall, out west, anything." The deal was for 13 weeks with a possible renewal, but, he was told, "at the end of 26 weeks — no more." This was in 1946.

In his first "American Letter" (did the BBC have a weekly report from Paris called "French Letter"?), he recounted his U.S.-bound Queen Mary voyage with 2,000 war brides leaving their homeland for new lives abroad: "Along the entire main deck of the ship the handkerchiefs fluttered in an unbroken line, like washing day in Manchester and Leeds." He spoke of a ride in a broken-down New York taxi whose lack of a reverse gear meant the driver had to circle a block twice to land at the proper address ("This is a useful money-making device which I offer without patent"). In a Manhattan studio he recorded his chat on a 16-in. disc and mailed it off to London. The BBC aired it March 31.

In 1950, the weekly program would be renamed "Letter from America." Advancing technology would allow Cooke to broadcast from wherever his other duties took him. As the years passed, he delivered his letter from the office — or, toward the end, the bed — of his apartment overlooking Central Park. But nothing altered the format or tone: a talk of 13 or 14 mins. on American politics, art, sport and folk customs, enunciated in the silken intimacy of Cooke's lightly adenoidal voice, which made him sound, to the BBC's tens of millions of listeners, like Western Civilization's wisest, blithest, least shockable uncle.

He had a voice made for radio (as he would later have a face made for public television). "A radio engineer once told me that I had a pair of lungs of the lowest decibel volume he had ever monitored." That whisper lent an intimacy to affairs great and small, for Cooke used the microphone to speak the way Bing Crosby used it to sing: with a tone both confident and confidential. He knew that "Radio is literature for, so to speak, the blind." (Note the care with which the ostensibly conversational modifier "so to speak" is introduced into an aphorism about oral communication.) "I suddenly realised there was a new profession ahead. Which is writing for talking. Putting it on the page in the syntactical break-up and normal confusion that is normal talk."

The trick was to keep the talks informal without letting them get sloppy. This Cooke accomplished by trusting his instincts that, when the time came, he'd know what to say. "The talks were, and are, never prepared," he wrote in an introduction to "The Americans: Fifty talks on our life and times," published in 1979. "They offer the relief and the exhilaration of sitting down once a week and writing what comes to mind about the American scene usually no more than a couple of hours before they are taped and flown to London to be broadcast. More often than not, I have little idea, as I sit down at the typewriter, what I am going to talk about. This, I believe, is the proper psychological condition for composing a talk: we do not go out to dinner with a little agenda in our pockets of what the evening's conversation is to be about."

It is said that more than half of all speakers of English use it as a second or third language. That is surely true of the BBC World Service audience. Cooke always had a performer's sense of his audience. The vocabulary of the "Letters" was simple, and he resisted sounding preachy or professorial. "In all these talks," he wrote, "I have gone along on the original theory that people are permanently curious about how other people live, and that all the politicians and propagandists in the world working three shifts a day cannot forever hope to impose their line on two people sitting alone in a room." Understand: that's Cooke talking, the listener attending.

A Cooke's Tour could be circuitous: his mind wandered during his chats, made detours into engagingly irrelevant reminiscence, twisted the topic to include the mandatory reference to golf, his lifelong obsession. But what trips he took his listeners on.

LOVING AMERICA, AND LEAVING IT

From the beginning (the mid-30s), Cooke had his wrangles with the BBC. The bosses did not easily grant the freedom he took as his due. In early days he flooded Bush House with program ideas; later he annoyed the brass and the censors by delivering his copy at the last minute. There were rancorous battles over pronunciation. The word "canine" cued one such skirmish at a 1935 advisory panel meeting chaired by none other than George Bernard Shaw. As Cooke recounts it, Shaw argued: "I believe strongly in following the pronunciation of men who use the word every day in their profession, and my dentist says, 'cane-ine.'" "Then, sir," nipped in the witty Logan Pearsall Smith, "your dentist must be an American." "Of course!" roared Shaw, "how d'you suppose I came to have all my teeth at my age?"

The abiding complaint about Cooke was that he had fallen in love with his beat: was too pro-America. Some members of the BBC thought that Cooke's decision to take American citizenship in 1941, when Britain was waging a lonely war against Hitler, tiptoed toward treason. Over the decades, Cook did defend many of America's more wayward adventures, including last year's Iraq invasion. But this apologist never apologized; his "Letters" were, forthrightly, love letters.

Politically, Cooke was a traditional liberal, close to the policy of The Guardian, which was the official voice of Britain's Liberal Party. He thought F.D.R. a great President for his time, and Lyndon Johnson, whom Cooke admired more than he did John Kennedy, a great and tragic man for his. If "liberal" means open to all ambiguities of human behavior and misbehavior, it applies to Cooke even more clearly. Who else could sit through a two-year trial, and write a book about it, without ever concluding to his own satisfaction whether the man in the dock was guilty or innocent. This was the Alger Hiss case, which Cooke covered like a down blanket for two years in The Guardian and used as the basis for his book "A Generation on Trial."

It's said that liberal is less a state of mind than a time of life: youth and idealistic early middle-age. The age of free love and four-letter words was not congenial to this son of a Methodist lay-preacher. In 1977 he revved himself up for a rare fulmination: "Maybe after years of stumbling in the dark, through the writhing bodies and genitals of filmed and photographed orgies...we shall try again to make a fair and practical definition of freedom of speech that will manage to rid us of the clutter of filth that floats along with the First Amendment and is marketed for lucre in the name of liberty."

He delivered what turned out to be his last letter on February 20th. Here are its last, stark words: "George Bush must be driven from the White House and I'm the man to do it." He was quoting, or paraphrasing, John Kerry, who had in the weeks previous scooted to the head of the Democratic pack; but Cooke stopped short of endorsing the challenge. He had defended the Iraq attack, before, during and after it. He did this in large measure, I think, because of Tony Blair's seemingly enthusiastic and certainly dogged support of the invasion — for reasons all but the top men in both governments know (and the top men may always have known) to be baseless. Cooke argued from the perspective of an old Iraq hand, one appalled by the carnivorous rule of Saddam Hussein. He saw the Iraq invasion as the overthrow of a bad man by men trying to do good.

The first words of that February 20th letter contain its only hint of infirmity — "Propped up there against my usual three pillows ... I was feeling chipper enough to glance across at two bedside piles [of books] and hope for a perfect lullaby before drifting into sleep." — but not enough even to hint that this broadcast would contain his last publicly spoken words.

In many of his last shows, one heard intimations of mortality. Cooke's voice was less robust, the breaths more audible between phrases. But this only added to the intimacy: the old uncle was whispering truths that seemed more precious because they sapped him to speak them. Finally, he may have run out of strength, out of words. Perhaps it took a little bit of heroism to make talking on the radio seem as comfortable as an audio easy chair. If his grieving audience believes, with him, that there are great and good men, then Alfred Alistair Cooke was a good man who built great words, sentences, books — the cogent measure of a turbulent time — out of little "Letters."

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss says goodnight to 'the best broadcaster on four continents'