Edition: U.S. / Global

One-Man Bridge From U.S. to Britain

Published: November 25, 1999

Alistair Cooke was about to tuck into his lobster bisque at the Carlyle the other day when a stranger stopped at the table and said: ''You look familiar. Do I know you?''

''I'm Bob Hope,'' Mr. Cooke replied.

The intruder backed off in confusion, and Mr. Cooke returned to his soup, chuckling softly. ''I've used that since my TV days,'' he said. ''Works every time. They know I'm not Hope, but they don't know what else to say.''

Even at 91, which he turned last week, Mr. Cooke always knows what to say. He has been doing it, in print, on television and, most important, on radio, for almost 70 years.

Americans know Alistair Cooke best from his nine seasons, from 1952 to 1961, as master of ceremonies on the pioneer cultural television show ''Omnibus'' and from 1971 to 1992 as the elegant host of ''Masterpiece Theater'' on public television.

But in Britain, where he was born, and throughout much of the rest of the world, he is known almost exclusively for his weekly radio talk, ''Letter From America,'' which the BBC has beamed everywhere but to the United States for more than 53 years.

In more than 2,600 ''Letters,'' Mr. Cooke has touched on every aspect of American life from major events like the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War and the small but not so insignificant happenings that help to illustrate who Americans are and how they think.

He has reported on everyone from Douglas Fairbanks to Monica Lewinsky, in what more than one critic has called superb prose. Here he is on the defeat of the great middleweight boxer Sugar Ray Robinson at Madison Square Garden in 1962:

''When it was over, Sugar Ray flexed his calves for the last time and did a little hobbling dance over to embrace the victor, who was pink and sweaty and very happy, identifiable on the score card as Denny Moyer of Portland, Ore., but on closer inspection was that bearded figure with a scythe Sugar Ray had dreaded to meet.''

Fortunately for Americans, who cannot hear his broadcasts, except on shortwave, Mr. Cooke has gathered many of his letters in books. The newest, ''Memories of the Great and Good'' (Arcade Publishing), a collection of 23 profiles, was published last month. Its subjects range from George C. Marshall and Harold Ross to Erma Bombeck, all originally served up for a British audience.

Released simultaneously in Britain, the book is already in its fourth printing and a No. 2 best seller there, trailing a book by former Prime Minister John Major.

Mr. Cooke knew from the outset exactly what he wanted his broadcasts to be. In a 1946 memo to the BBC proposing the program, he wrote: ''It will be a weekly personal letter to a Briton by the fireside. I shall try to give him some of the intimate background to Washington policy, some profiles of important Americans. The stress will tend always to be on the springs of American life, whose bubbles are the headlines, rather than on the headlines themselves.''

From the first ''Letter,'' which was broadcast on Sunday, March 24, 1946, Mr. Cooke has hewed fairly closely to his original brief. The critic Bernard De Voto wrote that Mr. Cooke had ''acquired a feel for American realities surer than that of most native-born writers'' and added, ''He has the continental awareness that comes only from firsthand knowledge of all our regions.''

Contrary to legend, the ''Letter'' has not been broadcast every week since 1946, nor has it always come from the United States. During its first decades it was off the air for as long as three months a year, and even now it may be broadcast from London while Mr. Cooke is there for Wimbledon.

He has not, however, missed a week since 1966, even when occasional illnesses have forced him to broadcast from his New York apartment or from a hospital.

When asked who has influenced his elegant prose style, Mr. Cooke cites Mark Twain; H. L. Mencken, who was his friend and mentor; and E. B. White. But he saves special praise for two scholars, the historian D. W. Brogan and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who taught him English literature at Cambridge.

''Brogan,'' Mr. Cooke once said, ''could give you the most recondite sort of Harold Laskian analysis of something in government, but he would cap it with an anecdote from James Farley or some precinct captain or a lyric from Cole Porter. I think I realized from him how it could be done.''

Quiller-Couch taught him about writing. ''I would turn in something filled with high-flown phrases of which I was inordinately proud,'' Mr. Cooke said. ''Q would cut them out. 'Cooke,' he once said to me, 'you must learn to murder your darlings.' ''

Mencken, with whom Mr. Cooke corresponded as a student and later covered the 1948 presidential campaign, impressed upon him the attractions of the journalist's trade. Mr. Cooke can still proudly recite Mencken's observation that being a newspaper reporter offered the opportunity to ''lay in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer and a midwife.''

Alfred Alistair Cooke was born in Manchester in 1980, the son of Samuel and Mary Elizabeth Byrne Cooke. His father was an ironworker and a Methodist lay preacher, his mother an Irish immigrant. The family moved to Blackpool, where the young Alfred won a scholarship to Cambridge.

At Jesus College he edited a literary magazine, put on plays, ground out film and theater criticism and pursued a rigorous social life. He managed, too, to win a first in English and, in 1930, to receive his degree summa cum laude.

It was at Cambridge that Alfred Cooke, with his stolid accent of the north and vague plans for a teacher's life, quietly disappeared. In his place, his name legally changed, stood Alistair Cooke, campus dynamo and newly minted sophisticate, with the inflections of Mayfair and his eye on the main chance.

He first came to the United States in 1932, on a two-year fellowship to study theater direction. During his first summer, he traveled around the country.

''Even then, in the Depression,'' he later wrote, ''there was a tremendous energy and vitality to America. From then on, my interest in the theater began to wane, and I began to take up what I felt was the real drama going on -- America itself.''

The following summer he spent in Hollywood, collaborating with Charlie Chaplin on a film about Napoleon. The film was abandoned, but the experience led to a fascinating profile of Chaplin in Mr. Cooke's 1977 book, ''Six Men.''

In 1934 the BBC fired its drama critic, Oliver Baldwin, who was Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's son, and Mr. Cooke, who had been writing about film in this country, got the job. After three years in London, he returned to the United States for good, becoming a citizen in 1941.

After some precarious years of freelancing, he was hired by The Manchester Guardian, now The Guardian, in 1945 to cover the founding of the United Nations. Still stringing for the BBC at the time, he spent nine weeks in San Francisco, filing 2,000 words a day for The Guardian and doing two or three radio broadcasts every night. He was to serve as a Guardian correspondent in this country for the next 26 years.

His coverage of the Alger Hiss trial in 1949 resulted in a book, ''Generation on Trial: U.S.A. vs. Alger Hiss'' (Knopf, 1950). In The New Yorker, Richard Rovere called it ''one of the most vivid and literate descriptions on an American political event that has ever been written.''

Mr. Cooke's reporting in those days earned him a sobriquet that still rankles. ''I was called 'The Liberal Voice of America,' '' he said. ''I was not. I was and still am a reporter.''

Privately, at least, he defines himself as ''a sort of 18th-century libertarian,'' but of the 11 Presidents who have served during his lifetime, his favorite was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Perhaps his political stance is better reflected by another man, Adlai Stevenson. In ''Six Men,'' he compared him to ''that estimable order of Americans -- Henry Clay, Robert E. Lee, Norman Thomas, Learned Hand, perhaps Wendell Willkie -- who left a lasting impression by the energy of their idealism but who were never quite strong enough or ruthless enough, in the pit of the political jungle, to turn goodness and mercy into law or policy.'' He wrote, ''Adlai Stevenson remains the liveliest reminder of our time that there are admirable reasons for failing to be president.''

As he always has, Mr. Cooke bangs out his ''Letter,'' 1,700 or so words on an old Royal manual typewriter. ''I call it free association,'' he said. ''I don't correct anything. Then when I'm finished, I slash hell out of it and get it down to about 13 minutes.''

Mr. Cooke and his wife, the portrait artist Jane White, divide their time among an apartment on Fifth Avenue, where he does most of his work; a summer home on the North Fork of Long Island; and trips to London and San Francisco. Their daughter is a Congregational minister who lives in Massachusetts. Mr. Cooke's son from his first marriage lives in Wyoming and writes western novels. A stepson grows wine grapes in California, and a stepdaughter lives in London.

''I go to California to see my men friends,'' Mr. Cooke said. ''Everyone I once knew in New York is gone. Dr. Johnson once said, 'A man must repair his friendships.' And I'm afraid I didn't always do it.''

''I don't like New York much anymore,'' he added. ''I loved it when we were young. I was a denizen of the 52nd Street clubs, a movie critic, a terrific night owl. Now I can't bear midtown anymore. Noise is magnified when you're older; the drop of a fork can be like the World Trade Center going off.''

For many years Mr. Cooke lectured, usually at colleges and universities, on what he calls ''a short list of American humorists,'' from Mark Twain to Calvin Trillin. No longer. Age is part of it, but also the fact, as he relates a bit sadly, that ''fewer and fewer people know who they are.''

Photos: Alastair Cooke, in an undated photograph, at the beginning of his career. (BBC)(pg. E18); Alistair Cooke, observer and interpreter of American life, in his Manhattan apartment. (Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)(pg. E1)