Early Life and Family
Cooke was born in San Francisco, California, to an Irish-American father, John J. Cooke, a flight instructor, who deserted the family shortly after Hope's birth. Her mother was Hope Noyes (the former Mrs. James Mulford Townsend Jr.), an amateur pilot who died in January 1942 at age 25 when the plane she was flying solo crashed.
After her parents' divorce in November 1941, 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. 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 Chapin School, in New York. She attended The Madeira School for three years before finishing high school in Iran.
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