The Unseen Alistair Cooke

LAURA LINNEY: This is "Masterpiece."

Good evening, I'm Alastair Cooke.

LINNEY: "Masterpiece Theatre's" longtime host began his career exploring America.

COOKE: Go on, impress me.

LINNEY: He filmed his travels, and these movies tell his story and ours.

And I said, "That's it."

LINNEY: "Masterpiece" celebrates Alistair Cooke with a "Masterpiece" special.

"The Unseen Alistair Cooke," right now, on "Masterpiece."

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.

NARRATOR: For more than half a century, Alistair Cooke painted pictures of America for radio listeners in words.

But when he died in 2004, 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 eight-millimeter 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.

COOKE: 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.

NARRATOR: 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, and before a year had passed he'd 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 emphasizes 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 even as a child he sensed were very different from how English people were.

SINGER: ...over there That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming The drums rum-tumming everywhere.

COOKE: When the Americans came into the war, you know, 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.

NARRATOR: He was born in 1908 and christened Alfred Cooke.

His mother ran a boardinghouse 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's 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.

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 good-bye to religion, good-bye to God and good-bye to Blackpool, and off he went to Cambridge to kick up his heels and find his fortune.

(choir singing "Glory to God" from Handel's "Messiah") Glory to God, glory to God Glory to God in the highest NARRATOR: In 1927 he won a scholarship to study English literature at Jesus College, Cambridge.

We have a single sheet in his file which records the whole of his college career.

The first one in 1927 says, "Well-read," um, "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.

NARRATOR: 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.

TUTOR (dramatized): "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 is 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'm sure, very much out for himself, and I should sum him up as a clever careerist."

NARRATOR: Not the ideal reference for the research work or the 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.

COOKE: I'd had this imaginative 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.

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

NARRATOR: Yale wasn't the right place for him.

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

COOKE: You were obliged by the terms of accepting this fellowship to buy a secondhand car, which I did, for $45, and drive round the United States on your summer holiday.

NARRATOR: He flew to Chicago and began his first drive westwards, armed with a $22 cine-camera.

JOHN BYRNE COOKE: 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.

KITTREDGE: 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.

HOLLY RUMBOLD: 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.

NARRATOR: That first tour in the summer of 1933 was a revelation for the young traveler.

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

COOKE: 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.

JOHN BYRNE COOKE: Instead of spending another year at Yale studying theater, he went to Harvard to study the American language and he had begun his studies of America.

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

In Harvard's exclusive 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 theater 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.

KITTREDGE: 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.

COOKE: Out of what in New York is called chutzpah, I'd had the audacity to write to the editor of the 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 magnificos.

NARRATOR: At the same time, he wrote to them, claiming that he did have a commission from the "Observer," and they agreed to be interviewed.

KITTREDGE: You know, 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.

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

There's a sense of very immediate bonding and, uh, Chaplin was obviously fascinated by Cooke, uh, 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.

RUMBOLD: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 southwest of the Los Angeles Harbor, "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."

"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 inkblot tests."

(record crackling) (swing music playing) NARRATOR: Back on the East Coast, Cooke met Ruth Emerson, the grandniece of the great American writer and sage Ralph Waldo Emerson.

KITTREDGE: Well, 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.

We went nights to listen to jazz jam sessions.

That was great fun.

I didn't know much about jazz; he did.

I got a lot of education with him.

COOKE: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

Paulette was Chaplin's girl at the time, and she liked to have a drink.

Plus, she was very made up.

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 even if he didn't come.

That was supposed to solve the problem.

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

COOKE: One day I went up to the house to dinner.

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, 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.

NARRATOR: The newlyweds traveled back across America by train.

It was time to be practical.

Cooke knew that he needed a proper job, preferably one that exploited his newfound knowledge of Hollywood.

COOKE: 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."

NARRATOR: 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.

COOKE: If I were inclined at all to talk about the acting of individuals, which should always make you suspect a movie critic more than anything, I'd be inclined to say that Katherine Hepburn's performance was just about as high as any actress came last year.

NARRATOR: He also made pioneering music features, but he frustrated the BBC with his unwillingness to provide the scripts in advance.

CHARLES CHILTON: He used to come in with a few notes into the studio, and then we'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 they'd be turning over quickly, and he'd absorb it in his mind and then speak 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 thought that would 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."

And 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.

NARRATOR: In 1937 came the chance that would mold the rest of his life.

While he was with the BBC in London, he'd also broadcast a weekly program called "London Letter" for NBC in the United States.

When Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry his American divorce, 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 heat wave summer of 1939, he filmed the journey in color, reveling in the natural and the manmade wonders, from the Hoover Dam to Yosemite National Park.

(swing music playing) COOKE: Hello, England, hello, England.

This is Alistair Cooke.

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

A live jam session broadcast home was a particular success.

COOKE: These noises are coming to you from the roof of the Saint Regis Hotel in New York 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... if it was midwinter.

We've managed to get together somehow a collection in one room of about a score of the greatest swing players who have ever been assembled anywhere.

And they're going to play "Keep Smiling at Trouble."

(swing music playing) NARRATOR: Six days before the United States entered the Second World War in 1941, Cooke got the American citizenship that he'd decided he wanted.

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

While he traveled, 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.

HOLLY RUMBOLD: Well, my mother was a glamorpuss, and she was a bit of a tootsie as, as, um, she would put it and, and he used to call her "Tootsie."

NARRATOR: 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.

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

Alistair wasn't very good with... 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's all footage of the trains and there's not a frame of me in it.

And I thought, "If I were visiting my six-year-old boy, I would shoot the boy as well as the trains."

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

RUMBOLD: 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.

And whenever he felt guilty he would always sort of hide his feelings.

I mean, he was rather like that.

COOKE: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

COOKE: "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."

JOHN BYRNE COOKE: "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 the job for which we're perfectly suited, and he did it.

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.

HELLA PICK: 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.

YASEK: 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.

NARRATOR: He became chief American correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian" in 1947, and there, too, he conformed to a strict code of neutrality.

KITTREDGE: For someone who made his career in reporting the news and 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 a 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.

KITTREDGE: He broke his rule in, you know, supposedly not consorting with politicians, and 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 traveled 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 we just became instant friends.

He was always great with women, as you may or may not know, and most charming of men.

Betty Bacall called Alistair "Aristotle," that's right, 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"?

(laughs) CHORUS: What delight to be given... NARRATOR: The Bogarts became a fixture on the Cooke's frequent trips to California.

He filmed one of the visits with Bacall.

CHORUS: No longer slinking, respectably drinking Like civilized ladies and men.

No longer need we... NARRATOR: Back in New York he had a strict but enjoyable routine: work always stopped in time for the cocktail hour, and evenings were kept for pleasure.

JANE COOKE: 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.

SINGER: In some secluded rendezvous Whoopee!

That overlooks the avenue With someone sharing a delightful chat Of this or that with cocktails for two As we enjoy a cigarette... RUMBOLD: I used to love it because they'd bring little souvenirs from their nightclubs and, 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.

(laughs) NARRATOR: The Cookes moved into a spacious apartment on Fifth Avenue.

They'd stay there for more than 50 years.

The view over Central Park flavored many of the "Letters from America."

COOKE: 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.

NARRATOR: Visits to family in England were brief and infrequent.

Holly and Susan only went to Blackpool once.

KITTREDGE: 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, humorless woman, um, you know, laid out a great fare for us.

RUMBOLD: When we were going up on the train, Daddy was a chain smoker, and he, he was sitting around fidgeting because he couldn't smoke 'cause 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.

RUMBOLD: 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 to go walk along the seaboard and have a few cigarettes in order to fortify himself for the rest of the evening.

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

You know, I think that 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.

You know, "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 or whatever.

I don't have time to go back."

And he could just dismiss it and really put on blinders.

NARRATOR: He was very busy.

Alongside the "Letter" and the "Guardian" reporting, in 1952, a television producer, Robert Saudek, asked him to present a new American arts program called "Omnibus."

BACALL: I think it was Sunday nights.

The event: "Omnibus."

That was the event.

Such a great show.

"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.

Aye to dance our wedding day Joyous are we give thee greeting whither Whither art thou fleeting.

How about that?

That's very good.

You know, he got Leonard Bernstein to conduct.

(Beethoven's Fifth Symphony playing) 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.

RUMBOLD: That was just incredible 'cause 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 it would to be stupid and confined.

Well, I mean, in terms of hard cash, which I think a lot of people... RUMBOLD: 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.

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.

WEBB: 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 am very privileged to be allowed to look you in the eye for once.

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.

See, 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 he says, "Go on.

Impress me."

(fanfare playing) NARRATOR: "Omnibus" ended in 1961 when the sponsorship dried up.

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

But the 1960s weren't his best years.

RUMBOLD: He had a period when his career was really, you know, sort of stuck in the mud.

NARRATOR: There was some tension with Alastair Hetherington, his editor at the "Guardian."

HELLA PICK: Hetherington was a completely different animal.

Hetherington was a very reserved, rather shy Scot, uh, 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.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last.

(cheering) NARRATOR: Hetherington's criticism centered on one topic: civil rights and Cooke's insistence that even there, a reporter should be impartial.

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

Now, this may be just a function of your character that you're essentially a coward.

Certainly, you're a fence-sitter.

And it's often occurred 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, even... however outlandish they may be.

I personally find the civil rights movement is so immensely complex, so tragic... the... the conflicts are so tragic that, uh, the only people who make me mad are the people who have the answers.

KITTREDGE: 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 sort of got out on the seesaw and balanced out all of those around him.

NARRATOR: The politics of the age also caused discord at home.

There were arguments over Vietnam, and then a more personal disaster.

KITTREDGE: One time that was particularly difficult for him was a time in the '60s when I was visiting my sister in London and she at the time had been involved, um, 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, um, 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 fetal position, um, 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

COOKE: I was never anywhere, except suddenly, in the dreadful year of 1968, I found I was everywhere.

NARRATOR: He found himself, in particular, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the fifth of June 1968.

PICK: He was for once traveling 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) NARRATOR: He was there in the pantry behind the stage where Bobby Kennedy was shot a few seconds after it happened.

COOKE: There were flashlights 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.

KITTREDGE: 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.

NARRATOR: It had always been Cooke's jeweled 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.

RUMBOLD: And then he got that "America" series.

And... whew, you know, he took off like a rocket and became this star, this television star.

PICK: It encapsulated his work for so many years in the sense that he had always tried to show that there's 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.

NARRATOR: Cooke began to build his journey through American history around the favorite haunts from those first early trips across the country.

Once again, he was back on the road.

(whistling, playing upbeat tune) Well, this may seem to be a very strange place of pilgrimage here in a bar in New Orleans.

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

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

("Masterpiece" theme playing) And in 1971, he started the job for which he would become best known to Americans, as the host of "Masterpiece Theatre," introducing British period dramas to American audiences on PBS.

He was the quintessential English gentleman.

Good evening.

I'm Alistair Cooke.

He was in a unique position to be able to explain a lot of British social history and literature to an American audience, because he knew them both so well.

Two class systems: the Indian and the British.

The British abroad.

Raj meant "rule," and the Raj meant every resident Briton in India.

Alistair started doing the "Masterpiece" intros before there were teleprompters.

He would write his introductions on his little manual typewriter, fly to Boston, come into the studio, and we sort of cordoned off an area where he could work.

And you'd see smoke kind of coming from this corner of the studio.

Smoking away.

And then he would come out, having committed about four minutes of material to memory.

And he would do the introductions completely... one take by memory, and then erase that from his brain and go do another four.

Good evening.

I'm Alistair Cooke.

We're now at the eighth episode in Robert Graves's "I Claudius."

I think the reason Alistair loved doing the introductions so much was that it was finally a chance for him to be an actor.

And he was actually acting, um, a television presenter and a very dignified, erudite man-- which he was, but it was also a little bit of a performance.

And I think that was a lot of the attraction.

Alistair was the glue.

He was the organizing principle.

And he became the signature of "Masterpiece Theatre."

And I'm sure that, um, after a few years, as many people were tuning in to see him and to see what he had to say, as were coming to see the show.

And he became, I would say, sort of the rock star of our audience.

KITTREDGE: 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.

JANE COOKE: 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... he liked being famous, he did.

Good evening.

Oh, I better not advertise the brand.

He was approached by many big advertising organizations to use the voice and his presence to advertise product.

Always refused.

JOHN BYRNE COOKE: In the '70s, he was offered, at the time, a quarter of a million dollars, which was real money then, you know, to do commercials for one of these big banks and turned it down.

KITTREDGE: 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 for it, it'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.

COOKE: I think that inside every conservative there is, if not an anarchist, there is a hellion who would 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.

Um, and his idea of sort of a good night out, or maybe a good night in, depending on how you look at it, was following a routine.

PATTI YASEK: He would have a little 45-minute nap and then get up in time for the news, and getting the ice, 'cause cocktail time was coming.

He was a wonderful host.

Of course, you couldn't get a word in edgewise.

He talked all the time.

He was a terrific talker.

Not a silent partner.

NARRATOR: He had an encyclopedic store of conversation pieces.

For example, about his passion for golf...

He loved golf.

Oh!

Did he love to play golf.

JOHN BYRNE COOKE: I mean, 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 started learning to play the game of golf, he would immediately learn its entire history and thereafter write about it-- authoritatively.

NARRATOR: In 1992, he retired from "Masterpiece Theatre," the end of a 40-year television career.

I don't know if it was hard for him to retire from "Masterpiece" when the time came.

He was not a man to show his feelings.

I think actually, it was much harder for him to retire from "Letter from America," because he always considered that his day job, and "Masterpiece Theatre" was, you know, the second gig, the evening gig.

I don't have many more miles to go, but I do have promises to keep before I sleep, and one or two ambitions.

Among them, an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my golf handicap.

So that I can say, with King Lear, "It is our fast intent to shake all cares "and business from our age, "conferring them on younger strengths while we, unburdened..." crawl toward the practice tee.

KITTREDGE: 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.

YASEK: 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.

"Alistair Cooke, overlooking Central Park."

"Alistair Cooke, 'Letter from America,' apartment overlooking the park, New York."

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

NARRATOR: Alistair Cooke announced his retirement in 2004 at the age of 95.

Four weeks later, he was dead.

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

So I took that to heart and I realized 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 vigor.

COOKE: And so, I just want to say to all those men and women a very grateful thank you.

So good night... and good-bye.

SINGER: Oh, blue skies smiling at me Nothing but blue skies do I see Oh, bluebird, singing your song... SINGER: Oh, blue skies smiling at me ANNOUNCER: Go to our website, listen to our podcast, watch video, and more.

SINGER: Do I see Oh, bluebirds, singing your song Nothing but bluebirds All the day long