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THE UNSEEN ALISTAIR COOKE
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Cooke's secret horde of home movies included
of TheColumnists.com
Truthfully, I don't spend a lot of time wishing I could live my life over as somebody else, but if I had to, I don't think I'd mind having to live my life over as Alistair Cooke. Somehow I feel he'd have made my life much more sophisticated, made me a lot more money and a great deal more successful with the ladies.
That was never clearer than after I spent a highly enjoyable hour with this Sunday's new edition of PBS' "Masterpiece Contemporary," one of the new guises for what used to be the venerable "Masterpiece Theatre." It plays from 9-10 p.m. in most areas, but check your local TV guide to make sure for your area.
The program is called "The Unseen Alistair Cooke" and it's an absolute gem because it lets us see the late, great former host of "Masterpiece Theatre" as most of us have never seen him before--as a dashing young man, filled to the brim with ambition to make a distinguished career for himself in America. Which, of course, he did--with bells on.
Not exactly born with an obvious manifest destiny--he was the son of an English iron fitter--Alfred Cooke re-designed himself as a young man, changed his first name to Alistair, which he thought sounded a little more respectable, and somehow fashioned himself into an iconic figure who literally stood for culture, good breeding, academic excellence and all the stuff we Americans think all Englishmen come equipped with from the start.
We're able to see him morph into the distinguished communicator he eventually became because he was in the habit of filming whatever he did, using his trusty 8mm camera, much of it in very early color film stock. When the filmmakers started gathering the material to tell his life story, they found he had squirreled away 150 reels of such film--some of it astoundingly rare.
Among my favorite sequences are those in which Cooke hobnobbed with his friend Charlie Chaplin, who apparently loved to clown for Cooke's camera, and Chaplin's lady of the moment, the gorgeous Paulette Goddard, then a winsome 22-year-old. Or perhaps you'd prefer the footage Cooke shot of his close friends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Luckily, Bacall is still around and adds some very charming anecdotal observations about the Cooke we never knew.
The program also has fresh inteviews with Cooke's children and his widow, along with a number of other important people in his life, among them Rebecca Eaton, the producer of "Masterpiece." The children have very insightful comments about their father. The best, as far as I'm concerned, comes after we see the detailed closeup home movies Cooke made of his little boy's new electric train setup and the son remarks that his father just filmed the trains and never included a single shot of the little boy himself.
Though I had seen Alistair Cooke on the TV screen since I was a kid--believe it or not, even as a youngster I loved the early American live TV series "Omnibus," which Cooke hosted--I never came face to face with him until I was in my late 50s and he was in his late 80s. The occasion was an interview in his penthouse suite at the exclusive Huntington Hotel on San Francisco's Nob Hill in 1995.
Right then and there I confirmed what I'd always figured anyway--that Alistair Cooke was the classiest man on Earth, a brilliant conversationalist whose command of the English language was imposing, but who never talked down to me for a moment. All the time I was with him--taping the quotes I needed for the book "Masterpiece Theatre" (KQED Books, 1995)--I had the feeling he was a regular guy who probably drank a beer or two in his day and cozied up to some of the prettiest girls, too.
Cooke, for instance, was delighted when some comedian or other would parody him, as the late Jackie Gleason did with a character called "Aristotle Cookie."
Smiling broadly, he told me, "I have a friend who, to this day, calls me Aristotle because of Jackie Gleason."
Still, I never lost sight of the fact that Cooke was one highly important man. I guess I knew that when I first approached the door of his hotel room and saw that it had no number on it, but rather a plaque saying, "The Alistair Cooke Suite."
As you'll see in the program, Cooke ostensibly came to America to study drama at Yale, but saw a newspaper headline that the BBC was looking for a new film critic to replace Oliver Baldwin, the son of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Cooke had written a few film pieces from Hollywood for The Observer, so he had some credits to use, but essentially he bluffed his way into the job by recording a review of the last movie he'd seen on the very spur of the moment and impressing the BBC with his style as both writer and radio commentator.
In the program, you get a hint of the cheek Cooke displayed in his 20s when he gets himself a chance to meet Chaplin by telling an English newspaper he was going to do an inteview with Chaplin for them, then using their acceptance of his offer to actually arrange the interview he'd never have landed otherwise. On top of that, the great comic genius and Cooke hit it off so well that they became friends and Chaplin even hired Cooke to help him develop a film about Napoleon that never actually was made.
In America, Cooke is best remembered for his long haul hosting "Masterpiece Theatre"--he started as the show's first host in 1971 and stayed with it until his retirement in 1994--or for his two earlier television milestones, "Omnibus" and his signature series "America," which was extremely popular.
But in England Cooke, who became an American citizen in 1941, is best known for his BBC radio broadcast series "Letter From America," which began in 1946 and continued until just before Cooke's death in 2004 at age 95. Cooke gave the home audience a vivid impression of America from an Englishman's point of view and some of his broadcasts are legendary, most memorably his broadcast about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, which Cooke witnessed from just a few yards away.
In fact, I'd say that Cooke's greatest achievement, in his broadcasting or his writing, was his ability to interpret American society for the British--and, conversely, to a lesser degree, his ability to explain complicated British history and culture to American viewers during his many years with "Masterpiece Theatre." I didn't know this until I sat and talked with Cooke, but he did virtually all his own research for his introductory remarks on the PBS drama series.
I think you'll draw the same conclusions after watching this program that I drew after sitting and getting to know Alistair Cooke in 1995: He was an extremely erudite man, but a thoroughly approachable guy who loved to talk and to listen to others talk. When I came away from my time with him, I knew in my heart that I'd just been with a very rare and special human being that I'd never see the likes of again. I think you'll get that same impression after getting to know the young man who grew into the cultural icon of American public television.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photos are courtesy of WGBH and the BBC. This column first posted Nov. 17, 2008.
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