Hope Cooke, a poor little rich girl from New York, grew up to marry in 1963 the Crown Prince of Sikkim, a tiny Himalayan country surrounded by India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan. Her autobiography, Time Change, chronicles the circumstances of her life in the East and the political and personal events which kept her from living out the fairy-tale bliss promised by the press coverage of her wedding. Looking back on her life from the comfortable circumstances of summer on Martha’s Vineyard in 1978, she wrote, “I can’t believe what I have endured, yielded in both personal and public matters.” As her story demonstrates, she did endure much, but this first book, which shows the author’s considerable talent, is not told with bitterness or rancor. Instead, Cooke achieves a remarkable semblance of objectivity about her transformation from a somewhat romantic, idealistic young woman into a brave and responsible person.

Cookes Hope Maryland

Looking for books by Hope Cooke? See all books authored by Hope Cooke, including Time Change, and Seeing New York: History Walks for Armchair and Footloose Travelers (Critical Perspectives on the Past), and more on ThriftBooks.com. The story of her engagement and wedding to the Prince and her life in this exotic hidden-away world became the center of international attention and fascination. It is told in full here, for the first time, in Hope Cooke's own voice, with a sharp eye and an uncommon ear for atmosphere and intrigue. 1-16 of 19 results for Books: 'time change hope cooke' Skip to main search results Amazon Prime. Eligible for Free Shipping. Time Change: An Autobiography. By Hope Cooke Jan 1, 1980. Hardcover $360.29 $ 360. $3.85 shipping. Only 3 left in stock - order soon. I was a very young teenager when Hope Cooke married her prince. I was fascinated by what appeared to be a charmed life (wealthy eastern family, beautiful, described as a socialite), and the exotic area of the world in which she would live with her prince. Reading this book, I discovered her life was not so charmed. In 1963, Hope Cooke put a match to her unopened bank statements and bags of old laundry, gave away her folk dresses, and set off—with misgivings, already—to marry the Maharaj Kumar, or Crown Prince, of tiny Himalayan Sikkim. She wanted to belong, after an anchorless, rudderless childhood (socialite mother dead, plebeian father cast out, home an apartment—staffed by a succession of.

Cooke relates events in the present tense, a point of view which gives the reader a sense of the immediacy of recent history, a sense of experiencing the events with her. She begins with her earliest memories at age two or three, when she and her sister came to live with their maternal grandparents after their mother’s death. Although the grandparents were financially well off, Cooke felt the sting of lack of nurture throughout her childhood and adolescence. As the child of her mother’s second marriage, Cooke also felt her grandmother’s disapproval of her Irish father, who gave up guardianship of her to the maternal grandparents with apparent willingness. The grandmother’s disapproving and stern nature seemed to prevent her from providing any emotional solace to the bereaved child, nor could the series of good and bad nannies who reared the girls in an apartment across the hall from their grandparents’ place fill the void in the children’s lives. Even Cooke’s half-sister Harriet, who was three years older and much different from Hope in temperament and personality, provided little companionship for the lonely younger child. At least Cooke escaped the knowledge until adulthood that her mother’s death in a plane crash was probably more suicidal than accidental.

Summer vacations at her grandparents’ summer home in Maine relieved the alienation of Cooke’s childhood to some extent. In Maine she felt free and happy with access to woods and beach. In New York she felt happy in the classroom, where she enjoyed writing and social studies, but she was unhappy at the boarding school in Virginia where she started high school. The death of Cooke’s grandmother when she was about halfway through high school left her homeless again as her grandfather had died several years before. Cooke’s new guardian, her Aunt Mary, then lived in Iran with her diplomat husband, Selden Chapin. In Cooke’s eyes her Aunt Mary, with her vivacious personality and many opportunities to travel to foreign lands, lived a charmed existence. What was to be merely a second summer visit to Iran turned into a prolonged stay for Cooke so that she could finish high school in the Community School in Tehran. Her stay in Iran, where she felt more at home than anywhere she had been, proved to be one of the happiest times of her life. Life in Iran, with the embassy parties and even invitations to one of the Shah’s palaces, provided a liberating change from the bleak boarding-school existence of Cooke’s last few years. Her interest in the foreign culture, however, was far deeper than a mere preoccupation with the social whirl of life associated with the diplomatic corps. Even at sixteen, she was sensitive to social issues: she loved to mix with the local people, saw the diplomatic corps as reinforcing elitist rule, and sensed inevitable revolution. The pinnacle of her stay was a trip into India, which sparked her continuing interest in the Far East even after her return to the United States and enrollment at Sarah Lawrence College, where she...

Hope Cooke (born June 24, 1940) is an American who was the 'Gyalmo' (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་མོ་, Wylie: rgyal mo) (Queen Consort) of the 12th Chogyal (King) of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal.^[1] Their wedding took place in March 1963. She was termed Her Highness The Crown Princess of Sikkim and became the Gyalmo of Sikkim at Palden Thondup Namgyal's coronation in 1965.^[2]

Palden Thondup Namgyal was to be the last king of Sikkim as a protectorate state under India. By 1973, both the country and their marriage were crumbling; soon Sikkim was annexed by India. Five months after the takeover of Sikkim had begun, Cooke returned to the United States with her two children and stepdaughter to enroll them in schools in New York City. Cooke and her husband divorced in 1980; Namgyal died of cancer in 1982.^[3]

Cooke wrote an autobiography, Time Change (Simon & Schuster 1981) and began a career as a lecturer, book critic, and magazine contributor, later becoming an urban historian. In her new life as a student of New York City, Cooke published Seeing New York (Temple University Press 1995); worked as a newspaper columnist (Daily News); and taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Birch Wathen, a New York City private school.^[4]

Early life and family[edit]

Cooke was born in San Francisco to an Irish-American father, John J. Cooke, a flight instructor, and Hope Noyes, an amateur pilot. She was raised in the Episcopal Church.^[5] Her mother, Hope Noyes, died in January 1942 at age 25 when the plane she was flying solo crashed.^[6][7]

After her mother's death, Cooke and her half-sister, Harriet Townsend, moved to a New York City apartment across the hall from their maternal grandparents, Helen (Humpstone) and Winchester Noyes, the president of J.H. Winchester & Co., an international shipping brokerage firm. They were raised by a succession of governesses.^[6] Her grandfather died when she was 12, her grandmother, three years later. Cooke became the ward of her aunt and uncle, Mary Paul (Noyes) and Selden Chapin, a former US Ambassador to Iran and Peru. She studied at the Chapin School in New York and attended the Madeira School for three years before finishing high school in Iran.^[8]

Marriage to the Crown Prince of Sikkim[edit]

In 1959 Cooke was a freshman majoring in Asian Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and sharing an apartment with actress Jane Alexander. She went on a summer trip to India and met Palden Thondup Namgyal, Crown Prince of Sikkim, in the lounge^[9] of the Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling, India. He was a recent widower with two sons and a daughter and, at age 36, nearly twice her age. They were drawn to each other by the similar isolation of their childhoods. Two years later, in 1961, their engagement was announced, but the wedding was put off for more than a year because astrologers in both Sikkim and India warned that 1962 was an inauspicious year for marriages.^[1]

On March 20, 1963, Cooke married Namgyal in a Buddhist monastery in a ceremony performed by fourteen lamas. Wedding guests included members of Indian royalty, Indian and Sikkimese generals, and the U.S. Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith.^[1] Cooke renounced her United States citizenship as required by Sikkim's laws and also as a demonstration to the people of Sikkim that she was not an 'American arm' in the Himalayas.^[10] She was dropped from the Social Register but the marriage was reported in National Geographic magazine. The New Yorker followed the royal couple on one of their yearly trips to America.^[1] Although her husband was Buddhist, Cooke did not officially convert from Christianity to Buddhism though she had practiced Buddhism from an early age (Henry Kissinger once remarked 'she has become more Buddhist than the population').^[11][12][5] Namgyal was crowned monarch of Sikkim on April4, 1965. However, their marriage faced strains, and both had affairs: he with a married Belgian woman, and she with an American friend.^[1][13]

At the same time, Sikkim was under strain due to annexation pressures from India. Crowds marched on the palace against the monarchy.^[14] Cooke's husband was deposed on April10, 1975 and confined to his palace under house arrest.^[15] The couple soon separated. Cooke returned to Manhattan, where she raised her children, Palden and Hope Leezum.^[16] In May 1975 Representative James W. Symington (D-MO) and Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT) sponsored private bills to restore her citizenship,^[17] however, after the bill passed the Senate, several members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration objected, and the bill had to be amended to grant her only U.S. permanent resident status before it could gain their support and pass Congress.^[10][18] President Gerald Ford signed the bill into law on June16, 1976.^[19] By 1981 she still had not been able to regain U.S. citizenship.^[20] The royal couple divorced in 1980, and Namgyal died of cancer in 1982 in New York City.^{[21][22][23][24][25]}

Later life[edit]

With child support from Namgyal and an inheritance from her grandparents, Cooke rented an apartment in Yorkville, Manhattan. This time around, she felt 'profoundly displaced' in the city and started going on walking tours and then creating her own.^[26] She studied Dutch journals, old church sermons, and newspaper articles to acquaint herself with the city and lectured on the social history of New York. She wrote a weekly column, 'Undiscovered Manhattan', for The Daily News. Her books include an award-winning memoir of her life in Sikkim, Time Change: An Autobiography (1981), an off-the-beaten-path guide to New York, Seeing New York,^[27] developed from her walking tours, and, with Jacques d'Amboise, she published Teaching the Magic of Dance.^[8]

Cooke remarried in 1983 to Mike Wallace, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.^[8][28] They later divorced. Hope Cooke's son, Prince Palden, a New York banker and financial advisor, married Kesang Deki Tashi and has a son and three daughters. Cooke's daughter, Princess Hope, graduated from Milton Academy and Georgetown University, and married (and later divorced) Thomas Gwyn Reich, Jr., a U.S. Foreign Service officer; she later remarried, to Yep Wangyal Tobden.^{[citation needed]}

Cooke lived in London for a few years before returning to the United States, where she now lives in Brooklyn and currently works as a writer, historian, and lecturer.^[8] She was a consultant for PBS's New York: A Documentary Film (1999–2001).^[29] Cooke is a regular contributor to book reviews and magazines and also lectures widely.^{[citation needed]}

Publications[edit]

• Time Change: An American Women's Extraordinary Story, New York: Simon & Schuster (1981); ISBN0-671-41225-6.^[30]
• Teaching the Magic of Dance (with Jacques d'Amboise), New York: Simon & Schuster (1983); ISBN0-671-46077-3.
• Seeing New York: History Walks for Armchair and Footloose Travelers, Philadelphia: Temple University Press (1995); ISBN1-56639-289-6.
• Cooke wrote several articles for the Bulletin of Tibetology, published by the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology.^[31]

Titles and styles[edit]

• 1963–1980: Her Highness Hope La, the Gyalmo of Sikkim

Honours[edit]

• Sikkim:
  • Order of the Precious Jewel of the Heart of Sikkim, 1st class [Denzong Thu ki Norbu] (22 May 1973).^[32]
  • Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal Coronation Medal (4 April 1965).^[32]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcde'The Fairy Tale That Turned Nightmare?'. New York Times. March 8, 1981.
2. ^Cooke, H. (1980) Time Change. Simon & Schuster.
3. ^'Palden Thondup Namgyal, Deposed Sikkim King, Dies'. New York Times. January 30, 1982. Retrieved February 22, 2015. The deposed King of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal, who had been undergoing treatment for cancer in New York, died last night from complications following an operation at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was 58 years old. A family spokesman said his body was to be flown home to Sikkim for the funeral. ...
4. ^'Yale Himalaya'. Archived from the original on October 16, 2013. Retrieved December 4, 2014.
5. ^ ^abPalden Thondup Namgyal, Deposed Sikkim King, Dies - Nytimes.Com
6. ^ ^ab'Being a Queen Didn't Quite Work Out, but on This Cooke's Tour Hope Springs Eternal', People, March 9, 1981, Vol. 15, No. 9.
7. ^IMDb biography
8. ^ ^abcdKaufman, Michael T.'About New York: When East Met West and Walking Around Led to Brooklyn'The New York Times, (February 24, 1993)
9. ^Duff, A. (2015) Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom. Berlinn Ltd
10. ^ ^ab'Hope Cooke seeks to regain U.S. citizenship'. Eugene Register-Guard. June 13, 1976. Retrieved April 8, 2013.
11. ^Wheeler, S. (2015) The story of Sikkim's last king and queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong
12. ^Cooke, H. (1980) Time Change. Simon & Schuster
13. ^Burns, Cherie (March 9, 1981). 'Being a Queen Didn't Quite Work Out, but on This Cooke's Tour Hope Springs Eternal'. People Magazine. Retrieved April 9, 2013.
14. ^Gray, Francine Du Plessix, The Fairy Tale That Turned Nightmare?, New York Times, March 8, 1981.
15. ^'Princess Hope L. Namgyal Is Engaged To Thomas Reich Jr., a U.S. Diplomat', New York Times, February 3, 1991.
16. ^'Books Of The Times; An Adult Fairy Tale' by Anatole Broyard, New York Times, February 28, 1981.
17. ^H.R. 6855 and S. 1699; 90 Stat.2976[1]
18. ^'Once a Queen, She Just Wants To Be an American Citizen'. The Palm Beach Post. June 13, 1976. Retrieved April 9, 2013.^{[dead link]}
19. ^'Hope Cooke allowed to stay'. The Montreal Gazette. June 17, 1976. Retrieved April 8, 2013.
20. ^''Fairy tale princess' is grateful to be back in America'. Chicago Tribune. March 26, 1981. Retrieved April 9, 2013. Miss Cooke seems firmly replanted in the United States, though she has not been able to regain her citizenship
21. ^'Hope Cooke seeks to regain U.S. citizenship'. Eugene Register-Guard. June 13, 1976. Retrieved April 8, 2013.
22. ^'Palden Thondup Namgyal, Deposed Sikkim King, Dies', New York Times, January 30, 1982.
23. ^Ashley Dunn, 'Congress' Ticket for Foreigners: 'Private bills' have granted citizenship or residency to many who were ineligible under U.S. law.', Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1992.
24. ^'Hope Cooke's fate in hands of Ford, fairy-tale life ends'. The Montreal Gazette. June 14, 1976. Retrieved April 8, 2013.
25. ^'Hope Cooke allowed to stay'. The Montreal Gazette. June 17, 1976. Retrieved December 4, 2014.
26. ^'Cooke's Tours', New York Magazine, p.31 (September 26, 1988)
27. ^http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/784_reg.html
28. ^'Mike Wallace', John Jay College of Criminal Justice website; accessed December 3, 2014.
29. ^Hope Cooke on IMDb
30. ^'Review of Time Change', New York Times, February 28, 1981.
31. ^'Index of the 'Bulletin of Tibetology''. Namgyal Institute of Tibetology. April 5, 2017. Archived from the original on April 28, 2016. Retrieved April 5, 2017. Bulletin of Tibetology 1966 No.2- 'The Sikkimese theory of land holding and the Darjeeling grant' by Hope Namgyal and Bulletin of Tibetology 1969 No.1- 'Obituary: Princess Pema Choki' by Hope Namgyal
32. ^ ^abRoyal Ark

Bibliography[edit]

Hope Cooke Daughter

• Crowning of Hope Cook, Sarah Lawrence '63' in Life, April 23, 1965. p. 37
• How is Queen Hope getting along?Life, May 20, 1966, Page 51
• 'Hope Cooke: From American Coed to Oriental Queen'. Sarasota Herald-Tribune (August 2, 1964)

External links[edit]

Time Change Hope Cooke Download For Pc

• 'Where There's Hope', TIME, March 29, 1963
• 'Sikkim: A Queen Revisited', TIME, January 3, 1969
• University of Hawaii Museum. Sikkim – Woman's Informal Ensemble. (Kho dress worn by Hope Cooke in the 1960s, on Flickr).
• Hope Cooke on IMDb

Hope Cooke Now