Wednesday October 20, 1999

The Guardian

It is dreadful to be an onlooking parent, for the loved child is lost

In the second extract from his new biography of Alistair Cooke, Nick Clarke reveals how the broadcaster's daughters became
entangled in a sinister cult.

For all Alistair Cooke's ability to make, keep and cherish friendships across a broad - if compartmentalised - social spectrum, he
was finding it no easier to deal with relationships closer to home. One of the lowest points was reached in the summer of 1965.
Holly [the daughter of Cooke's second wife, Jane], still living in London, had grown listless and unsure of herself and was attracted
to a small, obscure group known as the Process, run by a pair of self-promoting amateur psychotherapists.

Robert and Mary Ann de Grimston had met through the Church of Scientology and set up their own headquarters in London, soon
gravitating to Mayfair. To begin with, they offered radical sessions of what they called “Compulsions Analysis” in return for fees.
But in due course, their “patients” were sucked into a complete commitment to the group, sometimes handing over large sums of
money, and giving up friends and family. Many years later, The Process would gain international notoriety as the Grimstons
gathered an ever larger group of disciples who were taught that Lucifer, Jehovah and Satan had been reunited: there were reports of
orgies, blood sacrifices and other occult rituals. The cult was also known as the Church of the Final Judgment.

When Holly first became part of the Grimston's inner circle, however, the Process was still comparatively unknown and
comparatively benign. To begin with, she found comfort in the therapy sessions but soon became seriously hooked. Three hundred
sessions later, it was impossible to extricate herself. It took many months - and a visit home to the US - before she was able to break
free, as she explained in a Sunday Telegraph interview given to Duff Hart-Davis in 1966. Gradually, she said, she had become
nauseated by the group's nihilistic and self-centred attitude.

“The central theme of the questions became one's problems in relation to the Process, not in relation to oneself. I lived in an
atmosphere of tremendous guilt. If I ever slacked off and missed some sessions,” she went on, “I was made to feel so evil it wasn't
true. Always someone was being attacked and reviled - the retribution was terrible.” She was bitterly disappointed at the way her
original enthusiasm had been dashed. She lost two stone in weight, reducing her already slim figure to skeletal proportions. “I
could see what was happening to me, but I was completely paralysed.” It was, she realised afterwards, a sort of brainwashing.
Unfortunately, while she was still deeply involved, Susie [Cooke's daughter with Jane] arrived in London on her way to spend the
summer with friends in Paris.

Susie was 16 years old and had just finished her first year at boarding school; she found herself staying with a much admired elder
sister at the heart of “swinging London” and was full of teenage curiosity about the Process. With real reservations, Holly took her
to meet the Grimstons, who welcomed her with open arms.

The first the Cookes knew about the crisis was a telephone call announcing that Susie would not, after all, be going to France. She
intended to remain in London, where - Holly had established - there would be no problem finding her a good school. Cooke was
devastated. Susie, after all, was his baby - the one child with whom he felt he had strong emotional bonds. Suddenly she'd been
stolen from him.

The story that began to emerge was alarming. Susie, having run through all the money that was supposed to see her through her trip
to France, was spending most of her time cleaning the house occupied by the Process. Jane decided that decisive action was
required and commandeered Stephen [her son] to accompany her to London. It was a tense and uncomfortable experience. When
they arrived, the Chelsea flat was empty: a note informed them baldly that Susie and Holly were at a Process session. They waited.
Eventually, the door opened and the two young women came in, greeted them peremptorily and refused to discuss the idea that
Susie should leave.

Jane decided that Holly was in no state to take part in a rational discussion: instead, Jane announced that she and Stephen would
like to experience a session for themselves, and it confirmed their deepest apprehensions. Jane remembers going through the ritual
incantations and “testifying” in front of the group. She emerged with a greater sense of certainty that Susie had to be detached from
Mary Ann de Grimston, whom she dubbed “Cruella De Vil”. Cooke, fretting in New York, had friends in high places, among them
the American ambassador in London, David Bruce. The ambassador informed him that, since Susie was still only 16, her parents
had the inalienable legal right to take her home. Armed with this reassurance, Jane confronted the Process leaders after the session
and had a long and uncomfortable discussion during which they told her that, if Susie was uprooted, it would take her at least two
years to recover. Jane and Stephen ridiculed that threat and prepared to take her home. Cooke met them at the airport in New York
and found Susie a different person from the one to whom he'd waved goodbye a few months earlier. “She had been gay and merry
and twinkling. Now she was just sulky and angry.'

Mary Ann de Grimston's warning proved to be accurate. For more than two years, Susie found it hard to settle down. She went
back to school in London, but continually broke down or fell sick. Holly, meanwhile, came home for Christmas, having finally
managed to disentangle herself. Susie completed her schooling in 1967, but - having been given a job as a proof-reader for the
summer - turned down the opportunity to go to New York university. By the age of 19, at the end of 1968, she was married, just a
month after Holly. Neither relationship lasted. Stephen was the only one whose first marriage - at almost the same time - survived
and thrived.

All those involved in these traumatic events recovered in due course: Holly in London and Susie in Vermont both remarried -
happily; Holly had two children and Susie, five. Stephen and his wife, with three children, set up a vineyard in California on the
Russian river. All three children re-established a strong relationship with their mother and all, with the exception of Stephen, a
good adult understanding with Cooke. Yet the Process left its mark. Cooke, despite his experience of analysis at times of stress,
never found it easy to talk about what had happened. It filled him, he said much later, with horror and revulsion and helplessness. It
was not until 1974 that he found a way of crystallising his feelings. Patty Hearst, kidnapped by the self-styled “Symbionese
Liberation Army”, had been identified as one of those taking part in a bank robbery with her erstwhile jailers. She had then
delivered a series of chilling messages proclaiming that she was no longer a prisoner, but an active and enthusiastic member of the
group. Middle-class America was appalled and comforted itself that she had been “brainwashed”. That sent a chill down Cooke's
spine, as he explained in a Letter from America in April:

“The blanket word that covers a lot of doubt is 'brainwashed', by which a lot of people seem to mean that she has been either
drugged or tortured into an insensibility in which she'll say anything that's spoon-fed to her. Or that she is acting out the tough
guerrilla recruit under threat of having her sister kidnapped, or her family murdered. There is, however, one other definition of the
word 'brainwashed' and I incline to it. Maybe because of an old painful experience with a group not political but pseudo-religious,
skilled at recruiting impressionable young people, able to tap the dynamite of their unconscious, but not to guide it, so that a
daughter, say, that you knew deeply, could explode into an unrecognisable monster giving her all - money, devotion, total belief - to
the movement. And incidentally, renounce and despise the parents in a language and a voice that had its own alien and brutal and
unfamiliar tone. In such cases of what you might call malign conversion it is a dreadful experience to be an onlooking parent, for
the loved child has been brainwashed into a genuine conversion and is for the time being lost. At worst, is lost forever.”

This bleak passage is a very rare example of Cooke allowing his feelings to be exposed in public. The old reluctance to indulge in
any open display of emotion, inherited from his parents, had never been properly shaken off. But he felt he understood something
about the abusive psychological techniques of the SLA that he should, as a reporter, pass on; this enabled him to tell his personal
story with a protective, journalistic gloss.