A Royal Maze story for the 50th anniversary of John’s passing, drawn from the unpublished manuscript of Rosalind Sharpe Wall
Father and son had long been at odds. John Starr Cooke and his father, Clarence Hyde Cooke — the powerful Honolulu banker — pulled in opposite directions almost from the start. So in the summer of 1934, when John was fourteen, his father did what estranged fathers sometimes do: he tried to build a bridge. He took the boy on a round-the-world cruise, hoping the shared voyage might draw them close again. It had a tremendous impact on John — but in the very opposite direction of everything his father intended.
For among the passengers were Cole Porter, Moss Hart, and Monty Woolley, at work aboard ship on a musical comedy. Fate had a curious hand to play: young John Starr Cooke, travelling with his father, found himself on that very cruise, and there he met Cole Porter. The boy from Honolulu was bright, engaging, already a gifted dancer — a potential Fred Astaire in the making — and Porter was charmed. Charmed enough that, as the story has come down, Porter wrote the song “Begin the Beguine” for him — part of the reason John later produced the famous photograph of himself inscribed with the single word “BEGIN.”
The title itself has always been a puzzle. No one quite knows what “Begin the Beguine” signifies or why Porter gave the tune that name — a fitting mystery for a song that would trail John across the decades like a haunting melody.
And haunt him it did. Years later, when John was close to Meher Baba — the East Indian spiritual leader whom his followers held to be the Avatar of the Age — the song reappeared in the strangest way. For it was Meher Baba’s favorite. It was the only song he ever asked to hear. He even called for it as he lay dying — a curious choice indeed for a Piscean mystic who had kept silence for over forty years, promising that when at last he spoke the Word, the whole world would change. He died in 1968 without ever breaking that silence.
But in 1934 none of that was yet written. What Clarence Hyde Cooke wanted was a son drawn back toward him. What he got was a boy hooked, instead, on another world entirely.
When the cruise docked in New York, Porter threw a lavish cocktail party for the fourteen-year-old — inviting all his friends from music and theatre. For John, that was the end of any turning back. Father and son sailed home to Honolulu farther apart than ever, the rift between them now a chasm that would never be bridged.
His father had meant to steer him. Instead the voyage set him loose — and pointed him, one begins to suspect, toward the age that was coming. Begin the Beguine. Begin.
ONE IS IN MOTION!
For more on the story of John Starr Cooke and the Book of T, check out Mark Walker’s YouTube series, The Time of Telling, at https://www.youtube.com/@TimeofTelling.