By Mary Claire Kendall
Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe (1941)
Cooper’s low-key, it’s-not-all-about-me demeanor, whether playing an inspiring everyman like Longfellow Deeds or a real-life hero like Alvin York, resonated with audiences. In the process, he singlehandedly revived Paramount Pictures’ sagging Depression-era fortunes and, at the pinnacle of his career, was the highest-paid American.
That, and more, defined “Coop,” as his good
friends and peers called him. But, he had one more credit to his name. After suffering years of personal turmoil, when his strengths became weaknesses, he had a spiritual conversion. It was the most consequential subplot in his life journey. But, contrary to frequent reports asserting otherwise, his embrace of religion was not prompted by illness. “No way,” his daughter Maria Cooper Janis told me. “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.”
Groomed for Hollywood — Old West and English Manners
Born in Helena, Montana on May 7, 1901, as the Old West was fading, Cooper was an accidental star, coming to Hollywood to find work as a commercial artist and be closer to his parents. After he landed some stunt work, Cooper was soon “discovered” and, in 1925, began acting in uncredited roles.
His film career, spanning 36 years, took off with
Wings (1928), winner of the first Best Picture Academy Award. His scene was a short one — just two-and-a-half minutes long. But, as Paramount Pictures legend A.C. Lyles described it, “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, as Joseph McBride wrote in Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. “You feel like you’re resting on the Rock of Gibraltar.”
Cooper was most closely identified with the Western, having starred in
The Virginian (1931), the original, standard-setting film of that genre, where good
always triumphed over evil. Later,
High Noon (1952), a flawless Western, considered his greatest film, for which he won his second Oscar, 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… we are brought close to the pioneer people by seeing the Western picture and… realize that our country was and is full of people who believe in America.”
“He always said,” Maria reminisced, “he wanted to make films that showed the best a man could be.” And, there was no one like Cooper to rise to those heights. As Jeffrey Meyers reported in Gary Cooper: American Hero, screenwriter/director Richard Brooks thought 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.”
Quiet Masculinity and Piercing Blue Eyes
Indeed, his cinematic choices perfectly complemented his personal traits. Yet, the theatrical world laid many traps for this elegantly handsome man, whose quiet masculinity and piercing blue eyes made him ready prey for legions of women desiring his companionship.
After some colorful romances with his co-stars, including “It Girl” Clara Bow (Children of Divorce, 1927) — along with Lupe Velez (The Wolf Song, 1929), Marlene Dietrich (Morocco, 1930), Carole Lombard (I Take This Woman,1931) and Tallulah Bankhead (Devil and the Deep, 1932) — Cooper took time off in 1931-32 to recuperate from the stresses of filmmaking, if not his whirlwind romancing. Hollywood had made great demands on their new star, who was ringing up the cash registers as the Hollywood publicity machine cranked up the romances. It all added up to a nervous breakdown for Coop. As he wrote his nephew Howard: “I had drifted, taken advice, let people get at me through my emotions, my sympathy, my affections …”
For solace and healing, he gravitated to Europe, given his fond childhood memories of living in England for two years, some 20 years earlier. During his time away, he began to get a taste of high society as the guest of the Italian Countess Carla Dentice di Frasso.
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| Movie star Gary Cooper's daughter, Maria Cooper Janis poses next to the stamp in tribute to her father, in Los Angeles, California, after a ceremony to unveil the new stamp of the US Postal Service on September 10, 2009. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife) |
Settling Down — Sort Of
Once back in Hollywood, feeling fully rejuvenated, Coop had the good fortune of being introduced to lovely New York socialite Veronica (“Rocky”) Balfe while she was visiting her uncle, Cedric Gibbons, MGM’s Art Director, and his wife, the beautiful Mexican actress Dolores del Rio. Twelve years his junior, Rocky was a Catholic, with refined manners — albeit some detractors criticized her perceived Eastern snobbery. Regardless, she proved a stabilizing and calming influence on him and they wed on December 15, 1933.
But as Ted Nugent, a studio electrician at Paramount who observed him closely, told Meyers, “If he was born for the camera, he was born to make love. … He wanted to satisfy women … enjoyed looking at them, listening to them, pleasing them. … A guy like that does not change.”
Not without grace.
Of their daughter Maria — their only child, married to world renowned classical pianist Byron Janis — Cooper said, “I’ve never known her to do anything that wasn’t right. She is my life.”
“Ours was a unique family togetherness that was obvious and operative,” Maria wrote in her book
Gary Cooper Off Camera: A Daughter Remembers. It included “family traditions” such as the “Sunday swim in the ocean after Mass,” which Maria writes, Rocky and she attended with “bathing suits under our clothes.” Afterwards “we’d zip up the street to our house in Brentwood, get Poppa, who had been studying or working in his gun room or catching forty more winks, pile the dogs in the car, and take off for Santa Monica.”
The marriage reached a crucial turning point in 1946-1947 when the world of Hollywood became too much, as women regularly swooned over Cooper with his wife’s full knowledge. But, whatever stresses the marriage suffered, the Coopers truly loved each other, which gave their union, marked by years of harmony, the resilience to withstand these distinctly challenging years, including a period of separation.
As Richard Widmark summed it up, “Cooper was ‘catnip to the ladies.’” From the start, his leading ladies warmed up quickly to him. But, they were always brief affairs that went with the filmmaking territory, where falling in love on screen simply continued off screen.
A Complicated Situation
The affair with Patricia Neal, 25 years his junior, was different. The two co-starred in The Fountainhead and only became romantic after filming wrapped in October 1948. By Christmas 1951, Cooper realized the affair must end, given its deleterious effect on his family and his health. So, he gave Neal a fur coat and left for Europe — exactly a year after he had taken her to Cuba, seeking his good friend Ernest Hemingway’s approval of this long-term extramarital relationship, which he failed to get.
This “complicated situation,” as Maria described it, was extremely difficult on everyone involved. Cooper suffered debilitating ulcers and his family, along with Neal, endured intense emotional strain, complicated by Neal’s pregnancy, which, to her later regret, she ended.
But, God brought good out of evil.
After separating from his family in May 1951, Coop had come to realize his life’s emptiness. His character Will Kane in High Noon, filmed in the fall of 1951, reflected perfectly the moral conflict he was feeling. As he was coming to terms with his own deeper needs, on cue, the family traveled to Europe in June 1953 for a High Noon publicity tour, including a visit to the Vatican. On June 26, they met Pope Pius XII, which made a lasting impression on Coop. Like the awkwardly shy and endearing “every man” characters he played in his films, his real life persona infused this dramatic moment with some classic ordinariness.
Everyone in Hollywood was begging for a memento. So at the Papal audience, Maria said, “my father had rosaries up his arm” while grasping other mementos. But because of a bad back, he had trouble genuflecting and, as he did, “everything just fell — the medals, and the rosaries and the holy cards…” Everything! While Cooper was scrambling on all fours “suddenly,” she said, he encountered “this scarlet shoe and a robe…”
“There was the American actor Gary Cooper groping around in monumental embarrassment… with Pius XII looking down and patiently smiling.”
In February 1954, when Maria was 16, Coop returned home, ironically after filming Return to Paradise, about a father who returns home to love and nurture his 16-year-old daughter.
After settling back into married life, he strayed again at times, now going for less-refined women — his affair with the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg the most salient example. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he sheepishly told his wife with that classic boyish innocence.
She wasn’t amused.
Settling Down — for Good
Realizing the stress his wandering placed on his family, Cooper began going to church with Rocky and Maria outside of the ordinary Christmas and Easter routine.
Though he never talked about it, Maria senses that, after her father returned home, he started going to church with the family because “he probably was looking for some more stability than he found personally…”
After Sunday Mass together, she said, “we’d joke about” the “very erudite, funny” Fr. Harold Ford — “a real man,” whom her father called “Father Tough Stuff.” But, more than making fun of him, Cooper was intrigued by his message, and said, “Oh, I’d like to hear him some day.” So, Rocky said, “Well, come along.” And, so he did.
Father Ford’s sermons, Maria said, made him think. Some fifteen years after making
Sergeant York — Cooper’s favorite and most memorable role, for which he won his first Oscar — he was walking in York’s footsteps, spiritually.
Contrary to some accounts, Rocky did not engineer her husband’s conversion. “It wasn’t knocking him over the head,” Maria said. “Because, believe me, no one made my father do what he didn’t want to do.”
Soon Rocky invited Fr. Ford over to their home, thinking the two men might share some spiritual reflections. Instead they shared their mutual interest in guns, hunting, fishing and scuba diving! “Father Ford,” writes Maria, “became a scuba buddy and joined us diving in the large marineland of the Pacific tank where we all cavorted with its inhabitants.”
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| (Photo credit: Gary Cooper Estate) |
Realizing “a little religion wouldn’t do him no hurt”
In the midst of cavorting, the talk occasionally began to drift toward religion. As Alvin York, said, “A fellow can’t go looking for it; it’s just got to come to a fellow.” And, so Fr. Ford and Coop began getting together for longer discussions about faith on drives up to Malibu and elsewhere.
Gradually, Cooper evidently concluded, in Ma York’s famous words, “a little religion wouldn’t do him no hurt” and, on April 9, 1959, he was formally admitted into the Catholic Church.
Close family friend Shirley Burden, himself a convert, served as Cooper’s godfather at his baptism. Burden — Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great-great-grandson, whose wife was Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s niece — met with Cooper several times beforehand to help him understand what it would be like to play this role of a lifetime. Later that year, Cooper explained his conversion, as Barry Norman reported in The Hollywood Greats:
“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. I know. I just haven’t got that kind of fortitude. The only thing I can say for me is that I’m trying to be a little better. Maybe I’ll succeed.”
Putting Faith to the Test
On April 14, 1960, five months after Coop visited Russia with his family and a Hollywood entourage, at the invitation of Nikita Khrushchev, favorably impressed with his humanity and warmth, he had surgery for prostate cancer. While the doctors deemed the operation successful, by May 31, the symptoms recurred and in early June doctors again operated to remove a malignant tumor, this time confident it had been excised. But, it had already begun to spread. On December 27, Rocky was informed the cancer was fatal, but kept this heartbreaking news from her husband until February.
In December 1960, Cooper filmed his last project — a TV program called “The Real West,”
which Maria said, “reflects my father’s great love of the West.” Then, in March 1961, he flew to New York to record the off-camera narration. TV producer Donald Hyatt recalled for Meyers Cooper’s “simplicity and lack of ‘big star’ pretentions,” evident by his reaction when there was no room for his coat on the rack. Cooper said, “Don’t take another coat off: Just throw mine anywhere.”
In April 1961, a visibly moved Jimmy Stewart
appeared at the Academy Awards to accept Coop’s honorary Oscar: “Coop,” he said, his voice trembling. “I’ll get this to you right away. And, Coop I want you to know, that with this goes all the warm friendship and the affection and the admiration and the deep respect of all of us…” The next day, newspaper headlines around the world blared: “Gary Cooper has cancer.”
Visitors started coming, and messages poured in from friends and well-wishers around the world, including Pope John XXIII, Queen Elizabeth, John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, former President Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope, Audrey Hepburn and many others. Even President John F. Kennedy called from Washington, finally getting through after a day of trying.
Friends, expecting to find gloom at the Cooper home, instead found light and sunshine, crisp flowers and cheerful music, as the family faced this profoundly difficult time with faith. As Meyers reported, Billy Wilder “recalled that [Cooper] dressed in stylish pajamas and robe and seemed more composed than his guests.” Rocky later told Hedda Hopper, “He’d been perfectly wonderful throughout the entire illness. What helped him most was his religion.” As the cancer progressed, “He never asked ‘Why me?’ and never complained” and was spiritually enriched by the sacraments and books such as Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul.
“I know,” announced Cooper as he lay dying, “that what is happening is God’s will. I am not afraid of the future.” (The Straits Times, May 6, 1961).
Gary Cooper died of prostate and colon cancer on May 13, 1961, and 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 last heroic days.
Postscript
Initially interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Santa Monica, Cooper’s remains were moved to Sacred Heart Cemetery in South Hampton, Long Island, closer to the family. His gravesite is anchored by a “massive (Montauk quarry) salmon-and-beige-colored stone, probably 316 million years old” that, writes Maria, is “a perfect symbol for what my father loved and stood for.”
And, like so much she held dear in life, Coop’s beloved wife Rocky had to fight for that, too.
Confronted with church rules requiring uniform markers “she flashed her green eyes at the presiding pastor and,” writes Maria, “snorted, ‘Do you mean to tell me that if Jesus Christ said, ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,’ you will now refuse to let me have a rock for a marker for my husband’s grave’…”
She now rests in peace beside her husband, knowing that fight, like all the others, was well worth it.
The West
Coast kickoff of Oasis:
Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends was a whirlwind. From my
base in the Hollywood Hills, the trip lasted from Tuesday, April 28 to Tuesday,
May 5, and included many opportunities to meet key players to lay the groundwork for publicizing the book. 
