On a Cooke’s Tour of L.A., the British hear a minor masterpiece of wireless theatre

As a journalist, Alistair Cooke is many things I am never going to be, including an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire.

Since coming here in 1932 from his native England, Cooke has been Great Britain’s most distinguished American correspondent.

He understands America better than most American journalists do, and he has interpreted it for the London Times, the Manchester Guardian and the British Broadcasting Corp.

His weekly BBC broadcast, “Letter From America,” has run longer than any other program.

We do not hear “Letter From America” here, so I was pleased the other day to receive a transcript of one of Cooke’s recent broadcasts about a visit to Los Angeles.

Unlike so many lesser journalists, Cooke does not merely paste up the usual cliches about Los Angeles; he sees it with the vision of an urbane, English-born observer who became a citizen of the United States in 1941.

Noting that the city is 440 square miles in area, he makes the comment that “a bird wanting to get its famous eye view would have to rise to a cruising altitude of about five miles.”

He points out that Los Angeles is not really enormous in population, not to be compared with Shanghai’s 11 million or with the 9 million of Mexico City, Peking, Tokyo, Calcutta, Bombay and Moscow. And our 3 million are spread thin. Los Angeles does not yet deserve the term teeming. He is not blind to its faults. “As it is,” he says, “by the time the stewardess or hostess or flight attendant tells you to stop smoking, or on most American lines to please extinguish all smoking materials, what you see down there, usually through a thick filter of yellow smog, is a vast, tangled web of intertwining motorways crawling with traffic. A colossus of spaghetti overrun by armies of ants. . . . “

I suspect that Cooke’s note on the language used by flight attendants to terminate smoking is a subtle comment on American verbosity, in contrast to British brevity.

He recalls his first visit in 1933. “You didn’t fly in. You came in by train. Five days and four nights from New York. On my first visit, there was a small, fairly dense downtown, and pretty soon, a few old two-lane roads wending through random suburbs and greenery and continuous stands of exotic trees and buds of every sort of flower. They’re still there.”

He remembers Beverly Hills. “There was no advertising, no visible telegraph poles, no shops, just foliage and roads winding into the hills overlooking large lawns and trimly, disciplined woods around mansions, small and large, of many styles.”

He remembers the bus tours of movie stars’ homes: “You signed up and when the bus was full, the man took off and you went weaving up and through the handsome tree-lined roads and the man would stop at intervals and shout through a megaphone, ‘The colonial house on the left is the home of Clark Gable,’ or Loretta Young or Gary Cooper or some other long-gone idol.”

Loretta Young, he points out, is not long gone. “That creamy, adorable angel is now in her 70s. . . . “ (She still looked creamy and angelic on her recent television show.)

He was sequestered on an old friend’s secluded estate off Sunset Boulevard. “The effect is that of being some scoundrelly Pacific dictator forced into exile . . . finding himself in a small palace overlooking gardens, pools and marvelous tropical trees, bushes, daisies and a cloudless sky and total silence. Very strange and very congenial to deep meditation. Essentially, you have the feeling of being under house arrest.

“If you should want a loaf of bread or a newspaper or a shoelace, it would be necessary to drive out down the winding hills, past the homes of stars or lawyers or agents or whatever, say four miles, to a shop.” Cooke thought of his residence as a “blessed escape” from the nation’s “burning issues” and the “mess in Iran.”

“The fact is,” he said, “unless you are a moron or a deliberate hermit, there is no place to hide.”

In the early days, he observed, the Los Angeles Times was predictably conservative and strictly local, “so city proud and so intensely chauvinistic that an old droll Hollywood screenwriter said, ‘The Los Angeles Times would never report, “Man Bites Dog.” The headline would read, “Man Bites L.A. Dog.” ’ “ (I have always heard that line as “L.A. Dog Chases L.A. Cat Over L.A. Fence.”)

“Well, today,” Cooke goes on, “the Los Angeles Times is, at the least, the second-best newspaper in America and has no superior that I know of in the English-speaking world for its foreign news coverage. . . . “

After a digression on the Iranian mess, Cooke concludes: “So back to the flower beds and the marvelous quiet trees and, as the night comes on, the coyotes squealing in the hills like wounded cats. Good night.”

The transcript of Cooke’s broadcast was made by Video Monitoring Services of America Inc., and it demonstrates how imperfect is the transcription of sound into print.

Among the misspelled words are intertwaining for intertwining , Flippers for the famous Clippers that used to fly to Hawaii, mend for wend , inhabitance for inhabitants , seathing for seething , rod iron for wrought iron , hermet for hermit and relavant for relevant .

It suggests to me that if Albert Hibbs’ vision of our audiovisual future comes to pass, and listening replaces reading and writing, spelling will become a lost art.

If it isn’t already.