A tribute to Alistair

Nick Clarke
Alistair Cooke's official biographer

Alistair Cooke's official biographer Nick Clarke paid tribute to him on his 95th birthday in November 2003.

Alistair Cooke and Nick Clarke

From time to time, as Alistair Cooke's biographer, supplicants used to contact me with messages or requests for the great man.

I duly passed them on, but I had no way of knowing how they were received - any more than I would have if I cast a message in a bottle into the sea on Blackpool beach.

Apart from Letter from America, he was no longer a great correspondent, nor - constrained by nonagenarian aches and pains - did he often emerge from his 15th floor apartment with its stunning view across the reservoir in New York's Central Park.

Stooped figure

My wife and I visited him there in November 2002, and found him bowed but unbloodied. He disliked the fact that age reduced him from an imposing six-foot-plus to a stooped figure several inches shorter. In fact he didn't like much about being old. Most of his contemporaries died decades ago, but many of his younger friends had gone too.

The ever resourceful Patti, secretary, financial adviser, personal organiser made flesh, was the solver of all his professional problems Nick Clarke

He could no longer visit his beloved San Francisco, where he would have been happy to see out his days, if only he could have persuaded his wife to leave her equally beloved house on the cliff-top at the end of Long Island.

Nor could he even pretend any more to play golf, except in the vivid world of his redoubtable memory - where, no doubt, he was still driving straight and true from the first tee, down between the manicured pines of the San Francisco Golf Club.

Enthusiasm undiminished

Yet Alistair Cooke did not sit around moping. His enthusiasm for his work, well into his nineties, remained undiminished, and he could still draw on that vast memory-bank for the characters and stories that enlivened his talks.

And there were other blessings, too, not least his remarkable wife, the painter Jane White, whose portraits of family and friends, displayed on the walls of the apartment, glow with the luminous light of Long Island summers past.

Jane, with sometimes saintly patience, tried to ensure that Alistair's life ran in the calm and predictable way to which he has grown accustomed.

The ever resourceful Patti, secretary, financial adviser, personal organiser made flesh, was the solver of all his professional problems. And, of course, there was his abiding passion: Letter from America, that unique piece of broadcasting folklore, which began in March 1946 and went on to establish new standards of longevity and public affection.

Ground-breaking

In between times, Alistair enjoyed a number of other careers, any one of which would have been a source of pride and satisfaction to the rest of us: a quarter of a century as the Guardian's man in America; a ground-breaking cultural television show - Omnibus - which changed the face of American television in the 1950s; writing and presenting the first full-blown TV history of the United States.

Ultimately, though, it was the Letter which provided the thread of continuity through his life Nick Clarke

This series so impressed his adopted home that the tapes were placed in every public library in the land; a stream of successful books culminating in 'America' which sold two million copies.

Ultimately, though, it was the Letter which provided the thread of continuity through his life - the means whereby Alistair Cooke fulfilled his self-appointed role as the protector of transatlantic relations, and the reason why he continued to ply his trade long after most people had given up the ghost.

And as long as he summoned up the energy each week to pen his Letter, I listened and wondered at this phenomenon.