Hope Cooke - Later Life

Later Life

With child support from Namgyal and a trust fund from her grandparents, she took 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. 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. She wrote a memoir of her life in Sikkim, Time Change: an autobiography (1981), and, with Jacques D'Amboise, published Teaching the Magic of Dance.

Cooke remarried in 1983 to Mike Wallace, Ph.D, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 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 two 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 remarried, to Yep Wangyal Tobden.

Hope Cooke lives in Brooklyn Heights and is a tour guide and historian in New York City. She was a consultant for PBS's New York: A Documentary Film (1999–2001).