THE MASTER OF ‘MASTERPIECE’

The elegant Huntington Hotel sits atop the city’s famous Nob Hill. You expected Alistair Cooke to stay at Motel 6?

The Huntington is where you envision half the male guests being named Alistair, the other half Trevor or Nigel. Mary, who has operated the hotel elevator for 35 years, told me en route to Cooke’s tasteful top-floor suite that he and his wife have been staying there for years when in town from New York. Feigning anger, Mary grumbled that she once had asked Cooke for a copy of “The Americans,” a collection of his weekly radio talks for the British Broadcasting Corp. “He told me to buy it at a bookstore.”

“Oh, yes, Mary ,” Cooke responded a bit later. “She’s famous for her stories, some of which are true.”

Slightly stooped at 77, Cooke looks more like an earl than a career journalist and host of a TV series--”Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS--that is celebrating its 15th year on the air this week. He curled into a blue wingback chair and crossed his legs, as if this were “Masterpiece Theatre.” I sat in a wingback chair opposite him.

He wore his customary button-down shirt, tie and V-neck pullover beneath a tweed jacket. Believing one should look like Alistair Cooke when interviewing Alistair Cooke, I also wore a button-down shirt, tie and V-neck pullover beneath a tweed jacket.

Two hours later, at the conclusion of our interview, Cooke would hurriedly change clothes to visit a friend in the hospital. Off came the jacket, pullover and tie as he headed toward the bedroom, shortly to emerge wearing only a shirt and corduroys. Just as I had dressed as TV’s Alistair Cooke for him, it seemed he had dressed as TV’s Alistair Cooke for me. Now that our business was ended, only I was dressed as Cooke.

Earlier, though, we had sat there, tweed to tweed, penny loafer to penny loafer, as Cooke chain-smoked Vantage cigarettes and spoke animatedly. He was charming and unpretentious. I asked him what it was like to be revered.

“I find it impossible to believe that I’m anybody but me,” said Cooke, who was chief American correspondent for the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian) for 24 years. “My whole life was lived as a reporter, so I still feel a little phony being interviewed. I’ve done so much of it myself, from hobos to gangsters and tattoo artists. The only fun about this recognition business is the variation of human reactions.”

Cooke recalled speaking to a convention of librarians in Las Vegas a few years ago. “There were about 2,000 slot machines in the hotel, and I thought, ‘Well, thank God, this is one place where people are too busy 24 hours a day even to watch television.’ ” He was wrong. A burly casino guard mistook him for Lord Kenneth Clark. “He said, ‘Civilisation,’ and I said, ‘Right on!’ ”

Cooke is such a recognizable institution that it seems unlikely he’d be mistaken for anyone else. His visibility--and credibility--are such that he’s frequently offered glittering sums to make commercials, but rejects them with a brief form letter: “Mr. Cooke does not do commercials.” Period.

No Big Mac endorsements in his future? Why so sniffy? “A man known for his ideas or opinions has absolutely no right to make commercials,” Cooke said. “It’s a form of whoredom, even though the money is grotesque.” Cooke said his secretary was appalled that John Houseman would make commercials for Smith Barney. “She said a truly distinguished actor would never do that. Then I told her about John Gielgud making Paul Masson commercials.”

When Cooke says “we,” he refers to Americans, not the British, although he considers himself an Englishman abroad who just happens to be a United States citizen. It surprises people that the British-born-and-bred Cooke has been a U.S. citizen since 1941. Although a resident for 52 years, he has never bothered to learn the language and seems about as stereotypically American as kidney pie. For 40 years, though, he has shared his perceptive views of the United States on his weekly BBC radio program “A Letter From America.”

Cooke’s U.S. fame evolved during his nine seasons of hosting the erudite “Omnibus” in the 1950s. He was shooting his “America” documentary series in 1970 when he agreed to host a new series that was to be produced by WGBH-TV in Boston and draw upon the best of British TV. It was called “Masterpiece Theatre,” and the rest is delicious history.

Cooke’s literate, informative and chatty intros and closes quickly became the signature of “Masterpiece Theatre,” filling in the gaps for Americans unfamiliar with the literature or history upon which the British dramas were based.

The videotapes come to him in New York from London. After boning up on background, he writes and memorizes his program notes and then tapes them (a 12-part series usually takes him two days) at WGBH. He wears no makeup and uses no crib sheets or TelePrompTer.

His favorite “Masterpiece Theatre” productions have been “Upstairs, Downstairs,” “The Golden Bowl,” “To Serve Them All My Days,” “Lloyd George” and “Edward and Mrs. Simpson.”

The host is no undiscriminating hack, though. Cooke’s book of specially written commentaries on “Masterpiece Theatre” productions was published on the show’s 10th anniversary. Instead of oozing unqualified praise, its essays and measured critiques--Cooke is a fine writer--took some productions gently to task for not being masterful.

And he is equally candid about Nicol Williamson as the lead in the coming (Jan. 26) production of “Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy,” likening it to casting House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill as John F. Kennedy.

“Mountbatten was this spectacular, dashing, colossally arrogant man. Williams is a very good actor, but he’s a lug and he looks like a London School of Economics professor who’s never worn a suit.”

Year in and year out, however, British-bred “Masterpiece Theatre” is the best and brightest period drama available to American TV audiences. When American TV relives history, Looney Tunes usually intervenes, a la ABC’s boffo “North and South” (“the trashiest of the trashy,” Cooke moans) and NBC’s “Love Italian Style” biography of Mussolini.

“American TV is interested in masses, not in getting people to know the history,” Cooke complained. “Usually our American scripts are just not good enough historically because everyone is scared that you’d better have human interest and love interest. They’re superficial and I think they’re done by superficial people.”

On the other hand, “Masterpiece Theatre” has also fed a myth that British TV is beyond reproach, that it’s doing God’s work. In some cases, God awful is more like it.

“They (British TV) have more rubbish than we have,” Cooke said. “Have you ever seen any of their game shows where people put butter on themselves and slide through pillows?”

That was not the Br-r-r-r-ritain that the United States saw last year when the visiting Prince Charles and Diana were the toast of an American media caught up in raging Anglophilia. Often hounded and ridiculed by the British press (Charles has been pictured by cartoonists as a pinhead with elephant ears), the royal couple became an American media obsession that Cooke found both “fascinating and endlessly tedious.” Inexplicably reverent, too.

“What’s interesting is that when President Reagan says ‘no questions,’ you still have Sam Donaldson yelling at him,” Cooke said. “But when they say there are to be no questions to Diana, nobody asks a question.”

The Brits are said to look down on our press when, in fact, theirs is the world’s trashiest. “Yes, and 90% of Britons read papers that make the National Enquirer look like the Los Angeles Times,” Cooke said. “The British are so lucky because American preconceptions about Britain are still that most Britons have Sheraton furniture and that there are country pubs and cops who are nice and sweet, whereas the British think the worst of America.”

Cooke laughed, recalling the words of a Scottish friend: “Never underestimate the British love of the shabby.”

A letter from America.