Born in 1901 in Baltimore, Md., Anne (Kirk) Cooke was the youngest of three daughters of Henry Child and Edith Huntemiller Kirk. Her father worked for the family business, Samuel H. Kirk and Sons, nationally known silversmiths. Anne attended Bryn Mawr School and the Peabody Conservatory, where she earned a teacher's certificate in piano. In 1928 she married Meyric Reynold Rogers, curator at the Baltimore City Museum. They had two children, Elizabeth and Meyric Kirk. The family lived in St. Louis and in Chicago where Rogers was curator of decorative arts at the Chicago Art Institute. Her problems with alcohol led to a divorce in 1948, and she subsequently joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking. She married and was widowed three more times, all to recovering alcoholics. Her final marriage, to author and journalist Charles Cooke, was in 1956, and the couple moved to Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1970.
Cooke's oldest sister, Edith Buckner Kirk, was married to artist Will Hollingsworth and wrote three books on gardening. Her second sister, Mary was a childhood confidante of Wallis Warfield Simpson who became the Duchess of Windsor. Mary later married Wallis's second husband, Ernest A. Simpson. Anne Cooke wrote an account of her sister's relationship with Wallis Warfield, entitled The Other Mrs. Simpson: Postscript to the Love Story of the Century (1977). After Charles Cooke's death in 1977, she lived with her daughter Elizabeth and they ran a secondhand book store in Cooperstown. She died in Oneonta, N.Y., in 2000.
From the description of Papers, 1905-2000 (inclusive). (Harvard University). WorldCat record id: 122421297
