Hope Cooke

Hope Cooke was a wealthy debutante who led a privileged and unusual life. Her Irish father was a flight instructor who left shortly after Hope's birth. Her mother was killed shortly afterward when she crashed her private plane. Hope was raised by a succession of nannies in her maternal grandparents' posh New York apartment. (Her grandfather was president of J.H. Winchester & Co., an international shipping brokerage.) But her grandfather died when she was 12, her grandmother three years later, so Hope became the ward of her aunt and uncle, Mary (Noyes) and Selden Chapin, a former U.S. ambassador to Iran and Peru. Her childhood was cold and isolated, leading her to crave spiritualism and adventure. She finished high school in Iran. In 1959, while majoring in Asian studies at Sarah Lawrence College, she met the recently widowed Palden Thondup Namgyal, the Crown Prince of Sikkim, in Darjeeling, India. Though they had different religious backgrounds and a 20-year age difference, they became engaged, driven toward each other by the similar isolation of their childhoods. They were married in a Buddhist monastery in 1963, and Hope became queen of Sikkim, a tiny mountain paradise with emerald green hills, pandas and snow lions, 500 varieties of wild orchids and the world's largest crop of cardamon. Labeled the "Grace Kelly of the Far East," Queen Hope was a fascination for American reporters, and was regularly profiled in Vogue and The New Yorker, dressed in the traditional ankle-length Sikkimese kho. Hope was infatuated with the prospect of nesting in an (albeit modest) Oriental palace, and becoming the formal, impeccable spouse of an Asian potentate. She bonded with her three stepchildren, also giving birth to a son and daughter of her own. But the Crown Prince, while an enlightened ruler, was a heavy-drinking philanderer with strained finances. Their country, Sikkim, eventually lost its independence to India in 1973, and Hope returned to the United States with her children, while the prince was placed under house arrest. They were divorced in 1980. The prince died of cancer in 1982, and Hope is now remarried. She is a tour guide and historian in New York City, and published a memoir of her life in Sikkim, "Time Change."