Rest in peace

[*~Mrs. Cooper ~*]

FROM AD SALESMAN TO COWBOY

The world last week learned of the serious illness of Gary Cooper, actor par excellence and loved by all who have seen his film portrayals.
Whether he's the marshal in High Noon, the soldier in Sgt. York or the soft-talking gun-fighter of The Virginian, Cooper always has been only himself. The following article, first of a series of three, relates events of his youth and his introduction to motion pictures.

Heads turned eagerly last week at the Academy Awards ceremony when the time came for Gary Cooper to accept a special, honorary oscar.
A Klieg light picked up a long, lanky man rising from his seat. He loped slowly to the stage, head bowed. A murmur ran through the huge crowd and through millions of America homes when he was recognized. It wasn't Cooper - it was his pal, Jimmy Stewart.
Jimmy Stewart is no softie. A brigadier general in the air force, an outdoorsman, a combat flier, he is as tough or tougher than the actors who portray tough guys on the screen, which he never does.
But now, as he clutched the fabled gold trophy, he choked up.

"We want you to know, Coop," he said, voice thick with emotion, "that we all love you, we all..." and then the voice cracked. When Jimmy got back to his seat, honest tears were staining his face.

STEWART KNEW DREADED SECRET

Tears are as cheap as oranges in Hollywood. The next day, television and movie critics on several big papers criticized Jimmy for what they though was a maudlin, hammy act.
But Jimmy couldn't help it. He knew something nobody else in that star-studded audience knew-that his pa, Big Coop, was at that moment lying in his Bel-Air home, thinking the thoughts that must come to a man when he finds out he has cancer.

The official word had been that Cooper was in traction, suffering from a pinched nerve. But Stewart knew--and Coop knew.
All Hollywood was saddened when the word finally got around. An era is ending out there. It died some then the King, Clark Gable, passed away only five months ago.
"There is very little of the great celluloid age left today. The one star who survived everything, be it depression, war, television or any of the other calamities of our time, has been Gary Cooper."

Deborah Kerr remembers Cooper on the set of The Naked Edge as "a darling man, extremely thoughtful to work with, but he must have already been a very sick man. Sometimes he seemed withdraw and remote, as though he were no longer with us." Shortly after finishing the picture, in December, 1960, Cooper was told that he had inoperable lung cancer. He stoically started to prepare himself for death.

On January 8, 1961, he was honored by his Friar's Club in Hollywood. Audrey Hepburn recited a poem she wrote to him, specially for the occasion. They were all around him: the stars, the directors, the producers. They knew that Cooper was going and that with him a part of Hollywood legend would be irretrievably gone. Then, to a stunned audience of his peers, Cooper said, smiling from the podium just as bravely as in Pride of the Yankees: "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth."

Compulsively, he went on being Coop until there was no more to give. On February, 1961, he flew to New York to narrate The Real West, a television documentary. He could work only a couple hours at a time, returning to his hotel room to lie under an oxygen tent and then come back to the recording studio to read another page of the script. Many doubted he would finish it, but he did. Even as late as April 9, five weeks before his death, he was scheduled to appear on Dinah Shore's television show. This was the one professional date he had to cancel: he just could not go through with it.

Hollywood knew Cooper was dying but the rest of the world was shocked into realizing the truth on the night of April 20, during the Academy Awards presentation. Cooper had been voted a third, honorary Oscar and James Stewart walked on stage to accept it for him. Suddenly, Stewart's voice broke and before millions of televiewers he sobbed: 'We're all very proud of you, Coop, all of us are terribly proud.' On May 13, 1961, six day after his 60th birthday, it was all over.

"They can kill me off." Bogart had once wryly said, "but Cooper can't be killed off at the end." It was true: audiences would not have it, throughout Cooper's thirty-five years of stardom, so full of false reports of his death, improbable rescues, reassuring resurrections.

This time, the unthinkable had happened. Newspapers carried the headline: GARY COOPER IS DEAD.
Or is he?
Last week I met a frightened, harassed friend who was on his way to a crucial confrontation. Not a movie character, but a real man in a bind, facing unjust enemies bent on bringing him down. He had very little going for him, except that he was right. As he sipped his last hurried cup of coffee, he smiled nervously and whispered: "I feel like Gary Cooper in High Noon!" It worked like magic. His shoulders straightened, he raised his chin, adjusted his tie, clutched his briefcase close to his hip, put on a brave grin and strode on, down the canyons of Wall Street. It was Hadleyville once again.

Cooper is gone, but the ideal lives on: he can still be our amulet against despair, fear or adversity. No one dare blame him for the dreams he sold: like Willy Loman's, they came with his territory.


"The qualities that made Cooper a great star had little to do with acting."
--Writer Brendan Gill

On his last phone call to his friend Ernest Hemingway: "Bet you I can beat you to the barn, Papa."
And he did...one month after Cooper's Death, Hemmingway committed suicide.



Rest in peace, Gary Cooper...

www.youtube.com/v/CisaEFW6lJU

[coopfan]

This is a great deal sadder day today than his birthday of a few days ago but no less important as it is when Gary passed away on May 13th 1961. Sadly missed.......

[*~Mrs. Cooper ~*]

Cooper's death marked the end of an era, but his image continued to have a significant impact on literature, politics and the movies. In 1961 the Corriere della Sera had declared: "With him there is ended a certain America, that of the frontier and of innocence, which had or was believed to have had an exact sense of the dividing line between good and evil." The French novelist Romain Gary, who had met Cooper when he was a French consul in Los Angeles in 1959-60, took up this idea in his novel Adieu, Gary Cooper (1969). In a crucial scene the hero, lamenting the death of the actor, associated him with vanished certainties, now swept away by the political and social revolutions of 1968:

"It's finished, Gary Cooper. Finished forever. Finished, the quiet American, sure of himself and of his rightness, who fights the bad guys, is always for the good cause, makes justice triumph and always wins in the end. Goodbye American certitudes. Now, it's Vietnam, the exploding universities, the black ghettoes. ciao, Gary Cooper."

The image of Cooper's rock-like honesty reappeared in moments of national crisis. During the Suez showdown of Novermber 1956 a British cartoonish portrayed Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, as Sheriff Cooper, confronting Nasser and Co. in front of the Suez saloon. During the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon's resignation, Cooper, the man who could sort out and deal with the bad guys, appeared on the cover of New York magazine of August 13, 1973 with the caption "Where Are You, Gary Cooper, Now That We Need You?" In the historic Polish elections in June 1989 the Solidarity union used Cooper's powerful image to emphasize the need to stand together against the Communist government. The movement "unveiled as its final campaign toward the viewer, the unions' red logo emblazoned on the horizon behind him, a simple caption underneather -- High Noon!' "

In the parodic and bitter Midnight Cowboy (1969) Jon Voight, a Texan hustling in New York, is impressed by a woman on a radio program who thinks Cooper is the ideal man. In Dirty Harry (1972) Clint Eastwood plays a vigilante cop who identifies with Cooper and fights criminals on his own. Contemptuous of the legal system, he takes private revenge, then imitates Coope's final gesture in High Noon by throwing his police badge into the water where the killer's corpse is floating.

The most durable of all Hollywood heroes, Cooper began his career in silent films, became a major star in the golden age of the great studios and remained prominent by founding his own companies during the era of independent production. He quickly became a star and -- despite troughs in the mid-1930's, late 1940's and early 1950's -- remained at the peak of his profession. The emotional upheavals of middle age strengthened his acting, and he finished strongly with a series of impressive films. His career, one of the longest in movie history, lasted from 1925 to 1961, and he was one of the leading moneymakers for sixteen years. He headed the popularity polls in the 1940's and appeared in the Motion Picture Herald's Top Ten film personalities from 1936 to 1958.

Rugged in his twenties, romantic in his thirties, distinguished in his forties and poignant in his fifties, Cooper will always be remembered for his greatest scenes: flying to his death in Wings, confronting Walter Huston in The Virginian, gazing languidly at Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, staring upward while wheeled into the operating room in A Farewell to Arms, sliding down the banister in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, defending the desert fort in Beau Geste, massacring the "krauts" in Sergeant York, saying farewell in The Pride of the Yankees, romancing Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls, rock drilling in The Fountainhead, defeating the villians in High Noon and sweeping Audrey Hepburn off her feet in Love in the Afternoon.

Cooper's purity of style and controlling intelligence seemed larger than life. He could touch and move an audience, who always admired success for so long partly because he was beautiful, partly because he has one of the most winning personalities that ever came in front of a camera." In his films, as in his life, Cooper emphasized action over intellect, and combined the heroic qualities of the romantic lover, exotic adventurer, tough fighter and ordinary man. Instead of transforming himself into the character he was playing, the strong silent, charming Cooper gave each part the imprint of his own character. An Everyman in extraordinary situations, he could do in movies what others only dreamed of and became what everyone wanted to be.

The great theme of his films was the conflict between action and reflection. They expressed essential American values: connection with nature, scepticism about experts, distrust of government, independent endeavor, modesty about one's achievements. In close-ups his face - like Jefferson's and Lincoln's -- symbolized the inner qualities of the national hero whom the poet Rupert Brooke had described in 1916: "the tall, thin type of American, with pale blue eyes of an idealistic, disappointed expression." John Updike, defining the spiritual grace and power that the camera captured on film, observed that Cooper's "leathery face, with its baleful Nordic eyes and slightly frozen mouth, so inert-seeming in the cluttered glare of the sound stage, possessed a steady inner life."

[*~Mrs. Cooper ~*]

In November 1959, before he became seriously ill, Cooper told an interviewer: "I'd say, yeah, I'm afraid of death. I don't want to kick the bucket yet. I got a lot of things to do." But when cancer took hold of his body and brought him close to death, he found comfort in religion, accepted his condition and was not afraid of the future. After great pain, a formal feeling came. "I'd like to be different," he said, "but if that's God's will, that's the way it's meant to be."

When Hemmingway's emissary met Cooper to discuss their plans for the future, Cooper told him: "The medics have given me the word on the operation I had--it was cancer. They say I'm not gonna hang around too long. I hope they're right."

A month later Cooper was "a wasted figure, lying immobile in a darkened room....He was hit by a big pain and his face was 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' -- he moved the crucifix a little closer so that if touched his cheek-- ' tell him it was the best thing I ever did.'"

During the last week of his life Cooper was fed intravenously and remained under heavy sedation. Rocky and Maria could talk to him until the last two days, when he was thoroughly dosed with morphine and drifted in and out of consciousness. Father Ford had moved to another parish; Monsignor Daniel Sullivan, who visited him every day for the last two weeks, administered the last rites the day before his death. Following Bogart in 1957, Flynn in 1959 and Gable in 1960 -- all of whom died prematurely -- Cooper passed away, at home with his family, on Saturday, May 13, 1961 at 12:47 P.M.

Several months earlier Cooper, Rocky and Maria had picked out his burial plot, between pine and fig trees, with an ocean view, in the St. Anne Grotto of Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City. Cooper had cracked jokes about it, and only the undertaker was squeamish and sweaty. Cooper wanted a private burial, but before the police could put up a cordon, a photographer sneaked in, climbed a tree and then fell to the ground. The local newspaper reported that the Beverly Hills police chief, though pleading for decent and restrained behavior at the funeral, correctly predicted: "Private or not, nobody is going to bury a star like Gary Cooper quietly." There will be 70 policemen at the Roman Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd where the Mass will beheld. Hundreds more will line the route to Cooper's home....The sight of star mourners...may turn the occasion into a 'premiere spectacle.' In addition to Cooper's mother, brother, wife and daughter, a great number of celebrities turned out. There were old friends: Buddy Rogers, Joel MrCrea, James Stewart and Cesar Romero; colleagues who had worked with him: Joan Crawford, Audrey Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Dorothy McGuire and Dmitri Tiomkin; social companions: Merle Oberon, Peter and Pat Lawford; and others who came to pay their respects or to be seen paying their respects: Jack Warner, George Cukor, John Ford, John Wayne, Edward G. Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Randolf Scott, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Norma Shearer, Fred Astaire, Walter Pidgeon, James Mason, Alec Guinness, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Some stars protested about where they were seated in the Church and, when not moved to a better place, went off in a huff. Marlene Dietrich, thinking of their distant love affair, "was photographed looking 'stricken'."

The pallbearers included Henry Hathaway and James Stewart (but not Cooper's brother, Arthur) as well as four Jewish friends: Jack Benny, Bill Goetz, Jerry Wald and Charles Feldman. Benny and Goetz, puzzled by the Catholic service, asked: "What's the priest doing with the incense?" Timothy Manning, auxiliary archbishop of Los Angeles, tactfully ignored Cooper's infidelities, delivered the eulogy: "His family life and home were sacred to him....He was immune from the corrupting influences of the publicity and praise which he merited above his fellows. He was unparalleled in the perfection of his art." Throughout the world Cooper was mourned as a symbolic figure. In Stockholm the Svenska Dagbladet described him as "the incarnation of the honorable America"; in Naples the actor-director Vittorio de Sica called Cooper "the greatest actor the screen ever had."

Cooper's will, filed on February 27, 1961 (the day Rocky told him about his illness), left more than $3.5 million. He left half to Rocky and half in trust to his mother and Maria, and made several bequests: $1,000 to Thomas Merton's Our Lady of Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky; $5,000 to Arthur, Georgia and Howard Cooper; and $10,000 to the Motion Picture Relief Fund. If Maria had no heirs, the estate would be divided in equal thirds and given to the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Fund and the Roman Catholic bishop of Los Angeles. Rocky gave Cooper's own hat, chaps, holster and saddle to the Museum of the West in Oklahoma, and donated other Stetsons, guns and saddles from his movies to the Museum of Memorabilia in Hollywood.

Heeding the advice of the agent Swifty Lazar, who told her, "You don't live in Hershey, Pennsylvania, if you're not in chocolate," Rocky moved with Maria to New York. Cooper had always loved the ocean and Long Island. In May 1974 his body was removed from Holy Cross Cemetery and reburied, under a three-ton boulder from a Montauk quarry, in the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Southampton and near his family on the East Coast.