Hollywood icon Gary Cooper, known for such classics as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Sergeant York (1941) The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and High Noon (1952), understood, to his core, the art of acting, as few actors have. Born 125 years ago today, his formula was simple yet subtle, his talent and resonance undeniable. He single-handedly revived Paramount Pictures’ sagging Depression-era fortunes and, at the pinnacle of his career, was the highest-paid American.
Yet, this low-key, it’s-not-all-about-me American original loved nothing more than to retreat from the bright lights to be one with nature on the vast plains or against the roaring ocean — to luxuriate in, listen to, observe and paint these natural settings, with family or friends, if not alone. He was an avid hunter and fisher, who loved subduing wild game and piscatorial poundage, and wearing signature garb of his Native American friends from childhood, including feather-bedecked war bonnets and moccasins, which he made himself.
He was also a loyal friend, with a range of intimates including Ernest Hemingway and Jimmy Stewart, his closest friend. But more than anything, he was a devoted husband and father.
This, and so much more, defined “Coop,” as his friends and peers called him. Then, after years of suffering personal turmoil, realizing that his strengths often became weaknesses, he began opening himself up to the truest friend of all and, in the process, had a spiritual conversion. It was the most consequential subplot in his life’s journey. But, contrary to frequent reports asserting otherwise, his embrace of religion was not prompted by illness. “No way,” his daughter Maria Cooper Janis said. “He was coming to this on his own, in his own time … bits and pieces of his own life that he wanted to put together in a new way.”
It was a logical progression. “He had a very real spirituality,” Maria said, “that wasn’t an ‘ism’ … that, I think, he was born with, that he grew up with, living out West in nature (and) having a very strong affinity for the American Indian culture and spirituality.”
Born in Helena, Montana, on May 7, 1901, as the Old West was fading, he was an accidental star.
After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, he moved to Hollywood, arriving on Thanksgiving Day, 1924, at his parents’ new home in that oasis of health. However, jobs were scarce in commercial art, his chosen profession. So he landed stunt work instead and was soon “discovered.”
His film career, spanning 36 years, took off with Wings (1927), the first Best Picture Oscar-winner. His scene was a short one — just two-and-a-half minutes long. But, as Paramount Pictures legend A.C. Lyles said, “When he came on the screen, it just lit up with him.” With only 200 feet of film, Hollywood moguls knew they were looking at a star.
Indeed, they were.
Cooper embodied American goodness and strength, projecting it on the screen with understated brilliance. His upbringing — raised Anglican in the Old West by English immigrant parents, who inculcated in him the manners of a “gentleman” — nurtured in him that unique American combination of rugged individualism and magnanimous selflessness.
“With Gary, there are always wonderful hidden depths that you haven’t found yet,” Mr. Deeds Goes to Town co-star Jean Arthur said. “You feel like you’re resting on the Rock of Gibraltar.”
Cooper was most closely identified with the Western, having starred in The Virginian (1929), the original, standard-setting film of that genre, where good always triumphed over evil. High Noon (1952), his second Oscar-winning film, often considered his greatest, revealed the moral struggle in this victory.
“I like Westerns because the good ones are real,” Cooper said in a 1959 interview. “You feel real when you make them … [and] realize that our country was and is full of people who believe in America.”
“He always said he wanted to make films that showed the best a man could be,” Maria said. And there was no one like Coop to rise to those heights. As screenwriter and director Richard Brooks said, Cooper was a “great movie actor” because “he can make you feel something, something visceral, something deep, something that matters. He is who he plays.”
His is an amazing story told in “Gary Cooper’s Quiet Journey of Faith,” excerpted herein, including how, on April 9, 1959, this handsome heartthrob became a Catholic. As he reflected in an interview with Ruth Waterbury shortly afterwards:
I’d spent all my waking hours … doing almost exactly what I, personally, wanted to do and what I wanted to do wasn’t always the most polite thing either. … This past winter I began to dwell a little more on what’s been in my mind for a long time (and thought), “Coop, old boy, you owe somebody something for all your good fortune.” I guess that’s what started me thinking seriously about my religion. I’ll never be anything like a saint … The only thing I can say for me is that I’m trying to be a little better. Maybe I’ll succeed.
His faith was soon put to the test. On April 14, 1960, Cooper had surgery for prostate cancer. By Christmas his wife Veronica, known as “Rocky,” was informed that the cancer had spread to Coop’s lungs and bones.
On Monday, April 17, a visibly moved Stewart appeared at the Academy Awards to accept his friend’s honorary Oscar. “We’re all proud of you, Coop. We’re all so very proud,” he said, after which, Maria writes, “Jimmy started to break down, and that was the first the public knew that ‘Coop’ was getting ready for his last ride home.”
The next day, newspaper headlines around the world blared, “Gary Cooper has cancer.”
The first week of May, Hemingway memoirist A.E. Hotchner visited Cooper, who appeared, he writes, “a wasted figure, lying immobile in his darkened room.” Coop, who like Hem liked to carry a small wooden crucifix in his pocket, told him “Papa” had called him a couple weeks before to inform him he was sick, as well. As he said this, he kept pausing, Hotchner writes, because it was so painful to speak. Mustering his dwindling energy, Coop said he told Hem, “I bet I beat you to the barn.”
Then, he asked if Hemingway was back at the Mayo clinic, which Hotchner confirmed. With that, the drama heightened. He was hit by a big pain and his face contorted as he fought it off; sweat instantly covered his face. When the pain had passed, Cooper reached his hand over to the bed table and picked up a crucifix, which he put on the pillow beside his head.
“Please give Papa a message. It’s important and you mustn’t forget because I’ll not be talking to him again. Tell him … that time I wondered if I made the right decision” (regarding his conversion) — he moved the crucifix a little closer so that it touched his cheek — “tell him it was the best thing I ever did.”
“I know,” announced Cooper as he lay dying, “that what is happening is God’s will. I am not afraid of the future.”
Gary Cooper died of prostate and colon cancer on May 13, 1961, Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, just six weeks before Hemingway would breathe his last. He is beloved for the indelible portrait he gave us of what it is to be an authentic American hero — a portrait that’s incomplete without the story of his final days.
