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."
