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Post by *~Mrs. Cooper ~* on Feb 7, 2007 12:11:19 GMT -5
It all began in
Helena, Montana
on May 7, 1901.
Frank James Cooper Cooper
was the second son born to British immigrants Charles and Alice, née Brazier. (Charles Cooper would later become a Supreme Court Justice.)
Young Frank and his older brother Arthur loved the 600-acre ranch Charles purchased forty miles out of Helena. But Alice, fearing her sons were becoming too uncivilized through their
association with the rough-and -ready ranchhands, insisted on sending the boys to public school in England. Arthur flourished; Frank, not scholastically inclined, was miserable.
When the United States entered World War I, the Coopers left England and returned to Montana. 16-year-old Frank helped out on the family ranch after brother Arthur enlisted in the Army. "Getting up at 5 a.m. and shoveling manure at forty below ain't romantic," Cooper said later, "but Dad was a true Westerner - and I take after him."
Frank also found he had a flair for drawing cartoons and caricatures, and while attending Grinnell College in Iowa he filled the school newspaper with his artwork.
During the summer of 1920 Frank was in a serious car crash that left him with a fractured hip. During his convalescence on the Cooper ranch, doctors suggested a rather unusual therapy - horseback riding. Young Coop soon became an expert (if pain-ridden) horseman.
In 1924 Charles Cooper resigned from the Supreme Court bench and he and Alice moved to Los Angeles to administer the estate of a cousin.
Broke and somewhat at loose ends, Frank joined his parents in L.A. on Thanksgiving Day, 1924. He hoped to pursue a career as a political cartoonist, but none of the local newspapers were impressed enough with his artistic abilities to give him a job.
Soon Frank was looking for any job he could get. After a stint as a photographer's assistant and then as a curtain salesman (!), Frank happened to meet up with two boyhood friends from Montana. He was intrigued by what they told him about their own jobs - stunt riding as cowboy extras at a movie studio. "In rodeo you're paid to stay on a horse," they said to Frank. "In films, it's for falling off."
And good money it was, for 1925 - $10 a day plus a box lunch; Frank did not hesitate to join his friends on their next rounds to the casting directors.
During 1925 and 1926, Frank never lacked for work - and the more spectacular the falls he pulled off, the more he was paid.
He had a series of photos taken of himself in the styles of Valentino, Ramon Navarro, Tom Mix (all big stars of the day), and also made the acquaintance of Nan Collins, a casting director and actor's agent.
Ms. Collins saw potential in the lanky young man and agreed to work on his behalf. Strange as it may seem, there were already two other 'Frank Cooper's in films, so Nan Collins suggested her new client change his first name. "Nan came from Gary, Indiana and suggested I adopt that name," Cooper said later. "Good thing she didn't come from Poughkeepsie." There is something a little catchy about "Poughkeepsie Cooper", but understandably Frank became Gary that day, and Gary Cooper it would remain.
In the Fall of 1926, when Nan Collins heard that director Henry King was looking for riders in his film The Winning of Barbara Worth, she sent him a screen test of her newly named client. King hired Gary at fifty dollars a week for a small part in the silent film, which starred Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky. But then came the kind of happenstance that is sometimes thought only Hollywood myth: the actor who was to play the pivotal role of Banky's doomed suitor could not get out of a former commitment, and director King gave the role to Cooper.
Cooper's good looks and naturalness on camera were immediately noticed by audiences and critics alike. Variety Weekly even went so far as to say that Cooper "came near taking the stuff away from Colman," and predicted "Cooper is a youth who will be heard of on the screen."
Paramount Pictures agreed - Cooper was offered a contract at $150.00 a week and he accepted.
Coop was also being noticed off-screen, most notably by Clara Bow. Ms. Bow was something of a legend in her own time - the epitome of the uninhibited free-spirited flapper both in her films and in her (not so) private life. She and Cooper entered into a torrid affair, and Ms. Bow insisted on his being cast in her latest movie, "It." Even though his role was only a two-scene bit, publicity about their affair took hold, with the press proclaiming that the "It" Girl had found her "It" Boy.
Cooper's reaction to this label can only be imagined, but the publicity certainly did him no harm, especially after he was fired from his next venture, Children of Divorce, because his rushes were so terrible. (He was later re-hired and scenes were re-shot by non other than Josef von Sternberg.)
Cooper's first starring role was next - 1927's Arizona Bound, which was shot in only two weeks. He played a cowboy who saves a gold shipment from bandits, and wins the girl (Betty Jewell) besides.
Paramount next put Cooper into one of their biggest productions, Wings, a WWI story directed by William Wellman.
Coop had one scene in the film, but such was his impact on audiences that after the film's release the studio was flooded with letters asking the name of the pilot who ate a chocolate bar and then jauntily went off to his death in battle. (Wings also has the distinction of being the very first film to win the Academy Award as Best Picture.)
In less than two years, Cooper had gone from cowboy extra to co-star of such luminaries of the day as Fay Wray, Evelyn Brent and Colleen Moore.
In 1928 sound in films was encroaching, rather hesitantly in some cases (Lilac Time ads boasted "Photophone Sound Effects").
With his seventh film released that year, The Shopworn Angel, audiences heard Cooper's voice for the first time in the closing scenes with co-star Nancy Carroll.
Wolf Song (1929) was also a "part-talkie" in that it had two songs preceded by dialogue. Cooper's co-star was "Mexican Spitfire" Lupe Velez, with whom he was living at the time - an arrangement that caused a major sensation in the days when the unwed just didn't do that. Ms. Velez apparently lived up to her nickname, reportedly taking a shot at Cooper when he decided to extricate himself from the affair. (Luckily, she missed.)
Cooper's mother did try to discourage her son's relationship with the fiery Velez; Mrs. Cooper would have preferred another woman to whom Gary was close - actress Evelyn Brent. The two talked of marriage, but eventually drifted apart.
The studio chose Cooper's next film with care - it would be his first all-talking picture. They settled on Owen Wister's The Viginian, which had been filmed twice before. This version, directed by Victor Fleming, was filmed in the High Sierras. Cooper's co-stars were Mary Brian, Richard Arlen, and Walter Huston as the villain, Trampas.
The film was a popular and critical success, and Cooper's future in the new medium of sound movies was assured.
The new decade of the '30s would bring Cooper success he never would have imagined just a few short years before.
1930's Morocco, director Joseph von Sternberg introduced his protege, Marlene Dietrich, to American audiences. Such was his preoccupation with Dietrich that he almost totally ignored his male star.
Cooper's annoyance with his director stood him in good stead as the sullen and moody Legionnaire Tom Brown, a real "love 'em and leave 'em" kind of guy. Audiences loved him as a heel however, and his scenes with Dietrich fairly crackled. There was quite a lot of crackling going on between the star duo off the set as well, which only increased the animosity between von Sternberg and Cooper.
By 1931, Cooper had made an astonishing 28 movies in five years. Exhausted and not in the best of health, he went to Europe for a 'rest cure.'
Cooper went first to Paris, then to Italy, where he met society scion Dorothy di Frasso. Born Dorothy Taylor in Watertown, New York, she had married Count Carlo di Frasso, thirty years her senior. The Countess, renowned for her society connections and elaborate dinner parties, was enthralled by diamond-in-the-rough Gary and set about some extensive polishing.
She taught him social protocol, fitted him with a whole new wardrobe and sense of style, turned him into her debonair and poised escort. Cooper wasn't as comfortable with the situation as the Count, who thought nothing of it.
with Countess DiFrassoWhen Cooper travelled to Africa, Dorothy followed, arriving with a fully-equipped safari. Next came a Mediterranean cruise and Monte Carlo. Cooper gained self-confidence and a taste for wealth that would stay with him the rest of his life.
Eventually, Paramount Studios decided they needed to rein in their wandering star and cabled him some choice offers. They also let it be known that they had a new star waiting in the wings who had already been offered plum parts that might have gone to Coop - a young Englishman named Archibald Leach, who had changed his name to...Cary Grant.
"The guy's got my initials in reverse!" Cooper said - and decided it was time to return to Hollywood.
Upon his return, Cooper's next film was Devil and the Deep, which co-starred him with Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Laughton. Also in a supporting role was none other than Cary Grant, just to keep Cooper in line.
Coop also filmed stories by two great American writers, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner's Turnabout, which was titled Today We Live as a movie. He was working with top stars (Helen Hayes, Joan Crawford) and directors (Frank Borzage,Howard Hawks) and he won a contract dispute with Paramount that granted him a salary more in keeping with his star status.
Coop's dressing room became a kind of meeting place for many Paramount stars. Carole Lombard called it "the Fun House", and remarked that "even Gary talked" at these informal get-togethers. Bing Crosby recalled, "We drifted there before going home for the day - everyone liked the guy."
On Easter Sunday in 1933, Cooper attended a party given by designer Cedric Gibbons and his wife, actress Delores del Rio. The party was in honor of Gibbons' niece, Veronica Balfe, known as "Rocky."
Rocky was the daughter of a New York millionaire; she was elegant, poised and aloof beyond her 20 years. For a short time she pursued a movie career under the name Sandra Shaw, but did not dedicate herself to it with the necessary ambition.
She and Cooper began to be seen about town together, and in November of '33 he asked her to marry him. The answer was Yes. "Rocky is the ideal girl for me," Cooper said. "She can ride, shoot, and do all the things I like to do." They were married on December 15, 1933 and spent their honeymoon at the bride's parents' winter home in Arizona.
Coop next went on loan to MGM for a rather curious Civil War drama, Operator 13, playing a Confederate soldier with whom Union spy Marion Davies falls in love. The filming was not a happy experience for Coop - he did not see eye-to-eye with director Richard Boleslavsky's ideas about 'character motivation', never a big concern for Cooper. Also, Davies' lover, powerful magnate William Randolph Hearst, was constantly on the set, unreasonably jealous and hostile.
It was with relief that Coop returned to Paramount for Now and Forever - although he and costar Carole Lombard were frequently upstaged by that plucky moppet, Shirley Temple.
Although the newly married Coopers did not become reclusive, Gary did do a complete turn-about from his party-boy image that had so delighted gossip columnists.
Rocky gracefully undertook the role of "Star's Wife" yet retained her dignity and her identity, never content to exist in the shadow of her husband's fame. They complemented each other well - she was driving and energetic where he was quiet and casual.
"If I'd married a nice young man in a business suit, none of this would have happened. But he never bores me, and to be bored with the life you lead is the deadliest boredom."
In 1935 two Cooper films were released within weeks of each other. In a rousing adventure, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Coop sported a Gable-esque mustache (which didn't do for him what it did for Clark). Lancers was a huge hit, and one of many directed by Coop's good friend Henry Hathaway.
The Wedding Night introduced Samuel Goldwyn's answer to Greta Garbo, Russian beauty Anna Sten. Although lovely and a competent actress, Ms. Sten failed to fascinate audiences. The Wedding Night did not do well at the box office, although viewed today, it is a haunting, well-done story.
The Coopers moved into a new home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, an estate that covered 4 acres. It sported a sunken living room, a wood-paneled library with leather-bound books and paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and Max Weber, and a showroom for assorted trophies and Western artifacts.
The couple was seldom in Hollywood if Gary was not making a movie. They did the society scene in New York, or camping trips in the Western wilds. Rocky, although a crack skeet-shooter, refused to kill an animal - "I don't hunt. I just go along."
She introduced Coop to tennis, golf and skiing, and he in turn took her fishing. News reporters had to face the loss of what they'd so happily dubbed "Paramount's paramount skirt-chaser" - if Coop was at all still a 'threat' to his leading ladies, he became discreet about it.
The second half of the 1930's gave Cooper a wide diversity of roles, some enduring classics, some almost forgotten now. Of the latter, Peter Ibbetson stands out as perhaps the least characteristic of all Cooper's films - his strong points were never introspection nor the ethereal. But as the star-crossed lover condemned to life in prison for the murder of his childhood sweetheart's cruel husband he gave an understated yet emotional performance. His costar was the elegant Ann Harding, and the exquisite cinematography by Lee Garmes contributed greatly to the mood of the film.
Helena, Montana
on May 7, 1901.
Frank James Cooper Cooper
was the second son born to British immigrants Charles and Alice, née Brazier. (Charles Cooper would later become a Supreme Court Justice.)
Young Frank and his older brother Arthur loved the 600-acre ranch Charles purchased forty miles out of Helena. But Alice, fearing her sons were becoming too uncivilized through their
association with the rough-and -ready ranchhands, insisted on sending the boys to public school in England. Arthur flourished; Frank, not scholastically inclined, was miserable.
When the United States entered World War I, the Coopers left England and returned to Montana. 16-year-old Frank helped out on the family ranch after brother Arthur enlisted in the Army. "Getting up at 5 a.m. and shoveling manure at forty below ain't romantic," Cooper said later, "but Dad was a true Westerner - and I take after him."
Frank also found he had a flair for drawing cartoons and caricatures, and while attending Grinnell College in Iowa he filled the school newspaper with his artwork.
During the summer of 1920 Frank was in a serious car crash that left him with a fractured hip. During his convalescence on the Cooper ranch, doctors suggested a rather unusual therapy - horseback riding. Young Coop soon became an expert (if pain-ridden) horseman.
In 1924 Charles Cooper resigned from the Supreme Court bench and he and Alice moved to Los Angeles to administer the estate of a cousin.
Broke and somewhat at loose ends, Frank joined his parents in L.A. on Thanksgiving Day, 1924. He hoped to pursue a career as a political cartoonist, but none of the local newspapers were impressed enough with his artistic abilities to give him a job.
Soon Frank was looking for any job he could get. After a stint as a photographer's assistant and then as a curtain salesman (!), Frank happened to meet up with two boyhood friends from Montana. He was intrigued by what they told him about their own jobs - stunt riding as cowboy extras at a movie studio. "In rodeo you're paid to stay on a horse," they said to Frank. "In films, it's for falling off."
And good money it was, for 1925 - $10 a day plus a box lunch; Frank did not hesitate to join his friends on their next rounds to the casting directors.
During 1925 and 1926, Frank never lacked for work - and the more spectacular the falls he pulled off, the more he was paid.
He had a series of photos taken of himself in the styles of Valentino, Ramon Navarro, Tom Mix (all big stars of the day), and also made the acquaintance of Nan Collins, a casting director and actor's agent.
Ms. Collins saw potential in the lanky young man and agreed to work on his behalf. Strange as it may seem, there were already two other 'Frank Cooper's in films, so Nan Collins suggested her new client change his first name. "Nan came from Gary, Indiana and suggested I adopt that name," Cooper said later. "Good thing she didn't come from Poughkeepsie." There is something a little catchy about "Poughkeepsie Cooper", but understandably Frank became Gary that day, and Gary Cooper it would remain.
In the Fall of 1926, when Nan Collins heard that director Henry King was looking for riders in his film The Winning of Barbara Worth, she sent him a screen test of her newly named client. King hired Gary at fifty dollars a week for a small part in the silent film, which starred Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky. But then came the kind of happenstance that is sometimes thought only Hollywood myth: the actor who was to play the pivotal role of Banky's doomed suitor could not get out of a former commitment, and director King gave the role to Cooper.
Cooper's good looks and naturalness on camera were immediately noticed by audiences and critics alike. Variety Weekly even went so far as to say that Cooper "came near taking the stuff away from Colman," and predicted "Cooper is a youth who will be heard of on the screen."
Paramount Pictures agreed - Cooper was offered a contract at $150.00 a week and he accepted.
Coop was also being noticed off-screen, most notably by Clara Bow. Ms. Bow was something of a legend in her own time - the epitome of the uninhibited free-spirited flapper both in her films and in her (not so) private life. She and Cooper entered into a torrid affair, and Ms. Bow insisted on his being cast in her latest movie, "It." Even though his role was only a two-scene bit, publicity about their affair took hold, with the press proclaiming that the "It" Girl had found her "It" Boy.
Cooper's reaction to this label can only be imagined, but the publicity certainly did him no harm, especially after he was fired from his next venture, Children of Divorce, because his rushes were so terrible. (He was later re-hired and scenes were re-shot by non other than Josef von Sternberg.)
Cooper's first starring role was next - 1927's Arizona Bound, which was shot in only two weeks. He played a cowboy who saves a gold shipment from bandits, and wins the girl (Betty Jewell) besides.
Paramount next put Cooper into one of their biggest productions, Wings, a WWI story directed by William Wellman.
Coop had one scene in the film, but such was his impact on audiences that after the film's release the studio was flooded with letters asking the name of the pilot who ate a chocolate bar and then jauntily went off to his death in battle. (Wings also has the distinction of being the very first film to win the Academy Award as Best Picture.)
In less than two years, Cooper had gone from cowboy extra to co-star of such luminaries of the day as Fay Wray, Evelyn Brent and Colleen Moore.
In 1928 sound in films was encroaching, rather hesitantly in some cases (Lilac Time ads boasted "Photophone Sound Effects").
With his seventh film released that year, The Shopworn Angel, audiences heard Cooper's voice for the first time in the closing scenes with co-star Nancy Carroll.
Wolf Song (1929) was also a "part-talkie" in that it had two songs preceded by dialogue. Cooper's co-star was "Mexican Spitfire" Lupe Velez, with whom he was living at the time - an arrangement that caused a major sensation in the days when the unwed just didn't do that. Ms. Velez apparently lived up to her nickname, reportedly taking a shot at Cooper when he decided to extricate himself from the affair. (Luckily, she missed.)
Cooper's mother did try to discourage her son's relationship with the fiery Velez; Mrs. Cooper would have preferred another woman to whom Gary was close - actress Evelyn Brent. The two talked of marriage, but eventually drifted apart.
The studio chose Cooper's next film with care - it would be his first all-talking picture. They settled on Owen Wister's The Viginian, which had been filmed twice before. This version, directed by Victor Fleming, was filmed in the High Sierras. Cooper's co-stars were Mary Brian, Richard Arlen, and Walter Huston as the villain, Trampas.
The film was a popular and critical success, and Cooper's future in the new medium of sound movies was assured.
The new decade of the '30s would bring Cooper success he never would have imagined just a few short years before.
1930's Morocco, director Joseph von Sternberg introduced his protege, Marlene Dietrich, to American audiences. Such was his preoccupation with Dietrich that he almost totally ignored his male star.
Cooper's annoyance with his director stood him in good stead as the sullen and moody Legionnaire Tom Brown, a real "love 'em and leave 'em" kind of guy. Audiences loved him as a heel however, and his scenes with Dietrich fairly crackled. There was quite a lot of crackling going on between the star duo off the set as well, which only increased the animosity between von Sternberg and Cooper.
By 1931, Cooper had made an astonishing 28 movies in five years. Exhausted and not in the best of health, he went to Europe for a 'rest cure.'
Cooper went first to Paris, then to Italy, where he met society scion Dorothy di Frasso. Born Dorothy Taylor in Watertown, New York, she had married Count Carlo di Frasso, thirty years her senior. The Countess, renowned for her society connections and elaborate dinner parties, was enthralled by diamond-in-the-rough Gary and set about some extensive polishing.
She taught him social protocol, fitted him with a whole new wardrobe and sense of style, turned him into her debonair and poised escort. Cooper wasn't as comfortable with the situation as the Count, who thought nothing of it.
with Countess DiFrassoWhen Cooper travelled to Africa, Dorothy followed, arriving with a fully-equipped safari. Next came a Mediterranean cruise and Monte Carlo. Cooper gained self-confidence and a taste for wealth that would stay with him the rest of his life.
Eventually, Paramount Studios decided they needed to rein in their wandering star and cabled him some choice offers. They also let it be known that they had a new star waiting in the wings who had already been offered plum parts that might have gone to Coop - a young Englishman named Archibald Leach, who had changed his name to...Cary Grant.
"The guy's got my initials in reverse!" Cooper said - and decided it was time to return to Hollywood.
Upon his return, Cooper's next film was Devil and the Deep, which co-starred him with Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Laughton. Also in a supporting role was none other than Cary Grant, just to keep Cooper in line.
Coop also filmed stories by two great American writers, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner's Turnabout, which was titled Today We Live as a movie. He was working with top stars (Helen Hayes, Joan Crawford) and directors (Frank Borzage,Howard Hawks) and he won a contract dispute with Paramount that granted him a salary more in keeping with his star status.
Coop's dressing room became a kind of meeting place for many Paramount stars. Carole Lombard called it "the Fun House", and remarked that "even Gary talked" at these informal get-togethers. Bing Crosby recalled, "We drifted there before going home for the day - everyone liked the guy."
On Easter Sunday in 1933, Cooper attended a party given by designer Cedric Gibbons and his wife, actress Delores del Rio. The party was in honor of Gibbons' niece, Veronica Balfe, known as "Rocky."
Rocky was the daughter of a New York millionaire; she was elegant, poised and aloof beyond her 20 years. For a short time she pursued a movie career under the name Sandra Shaw, but did not dedicate herself to it with the necessary ambition.
She and Cooper began to be seen about town together, and in November of '33 he asked her to marry him. The answer was Yes. "Rocky is the ideal girl for me," Cooper said. "She can ride, shoot, and do all the things I like to do." They were married on December 15, 1933 and spent their honeymoon at the bride's parents' winter home in Arizona.
Coop next went on loan to MGM for a rather curious Civil War drama, Operator 13, playing a Confederate soldier with whom Union spy Marion Davies falls in love. The filming was not a happy experience for Coop - he did not see eye-to-eye with director Richard Boleslavsky's ideas about 'character motivation', never a big concern for Cooper. Also, Davies' lover, powerful magnate William Randolph Hearst, was constantly on the set, unreasonably jealous and hostile.
It was with relief that Coop returned to Paramount for Now and Forever - although he and costar Carole Lombard were frequently upstaged by that plucky moppet, Shirley Temple.
Although the newly married Coopers did not become reclusive, Gary did do a complete turn-about from his party-boy image that had so delighted gossip columnists.
Rocky gracefully undertook the role of "Star's Wife" yet retained her dignity and her identity, never content to exist in the shadow of her husband's fame. They complemented each other well - she was driving and energetic where he was quiet and casual.
"If I'd married a nice young man in a business suit, none of this would have happened. But he never bores me, and to be bored with the life you lead is the deadliest boredom."
In 1935 two Cooper films were released within weeks of each other. In a rousing adventure, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Coop sported a Gable-esque mustache (which didn't do for him what it did for Clark). Lancers was a huge hit, and one of many directed by Coop's good friend Henry Hathaway.
The Wedding Night introduced Samuel Goldwyn's answer to Greta Garbo, Russian beauty Anna Sten. Although lovely and a competent actress, Ms. Sten failed to fascinate audiences. The Wedding Night did not do well at the box office, although viewed today, it is a haunting, well-done story.
The Coopers moved into a new home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, an estate that covered 4 acres. It sported a sunken living room, a wood-paneled library with leather-bound books and paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and Max Weber, and a showroom for assorted trophies and Western artifacts.
The couple was seldom in Hollywood if Gary was not making a movie. They did the society scene in New York, or camping trips in the Western wilds. Rocky, although a crack skeet-shooter, refused to kill an animal - "I don't hunt. I just go along."
She introduced Coop to tennis, golf and skiing, and he in turn took her fishing. News reporters had to face the loss of what they'd so happily dubbed "Paramount's paramount skirt-chaser" - if Coop was at all still a 'threat' to his leading ladies, he became discreet about it.
The second half of the 1930's gave Cooper a wide diversity of roles, some enduring classics, some almost forgotten now. Of the latter, Peter Ibbetson stands out as perhaps the least characteristic of all Cooper's films - his strong points were never introspection nor the ethereal. But as the star-crossed lover condemned to life in prison for the murder of his childhood sweetheart's cruel husband he gave an understated yet emotional performance. His costar was the elegant Ann Harding, and the exquisite cinematography by Lee Garmes contributed greatly to the mood of the film.
