Gary Cooper (May 7th 1901 – May 13th 1961) was one of the most popular actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood who made his formal on-screen debut in the silent era with the film The Winning of Barbara Worth, and rose to true stardom with his first talking picture, The Virginian. He is famous for his roles in films such as High Noon, Sergeant York, Pride of the Yankees, and Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. Being one of the lucky few who successfully made the transition to talking pictures from silent films, Gary was also a major star during the interval of time between the innovation of talkies in 1927 and the authorization of Hays Code in 1934 known as Pre Code Hollywood. I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to his daughter Maria Cooper Janis about his origin story, the legacy he has left on the world as an artist, and how she started her own art career.
EY: Maria, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today, I purchased your book last year Gary Cooper Off Camera: A Daughter Remembers and you talked about how your father prior to going into motion pictures was an illustrator. Can you tell me more about that?
MCJ: Yes I mean that was his original chosen profession he was aiming for and he discovered that it was a very very hard way to make a living. He also got involved with making political cartoons and was working for some newspapers and doing that. I guess partially because his father was a Montana Supreme Court judge so he grew up hearing a lot about politics and the law with Montana in 1910 of which Helena was a rough and ready town at that point. He was never a political hawk per sé, but he did care about politics, he cared about principles and he cared about decent human behavior.
EY: It’s really notable how tapped in your father was with the art scene of the 20th century from his friendships with Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso for example, to his own visual art ventures. How do you think Gary’s artistic background influenced him as an actor, and as a person?
MCJ: His ability as an artist made him a very keen observer, you know that sort of quotation cliché ‘be aware.’ He was very aware of everything, of nature, of people, of people’s reactions and of people’s behavior. When he was doing a scene he wasn’t so much consumed with what am I going to say you know he was really trying to react to the person at the moment and what was happening spontaneously. That’s why many people didn’t think that he was ‘acting.’ He didn’t really feel he was acting because for him it was a natural spontaneous response to engaging with another human being. He also felt that your eyes and the expression in your eyes should be able to convey a hell of a lot of content that words maybe couldn’t cover. You’re not just acting out a director’s instructions on a piece of paper. When he was very young he was in a car accident with a friend. The young friend had polio and had an especially outfitted car. Helena, Montana was very hilly and the brakes went out, the car turned over, my father was riding with him. He broke his hip which was part of the reason for his unique walk. When he was recovering from the broken hip, he had a lot of forced rest time, and sitting outdoors. He loved sketching, he loved drawing, he always loved art and drawing. Again, the a word, being aware. He was aware of what was going on around him. He was aware of how a bird’s wing worked. He was aware of how an animal stalked a prey and he would capture that in his drawing so I think probably art in a way led him into acting. Although he tried out for the drama class when he was at Grinnell College and they rejected him. Later he came back for some publicity event and the whole school turned out, ‘Oh Gary! Gary!’ all that. And they said:
‘Oh my goodness, how embarrassing we turned you away from the acting class’
And he said: ‘No no no, you were right the first time.’
He had no pretensions about being an actor.
EY: Your father made quite a mark on fashion and particularly experimented with eyeliner in his 1920s and pre-code films, I noticed. From the start to the end of his career, do you think his aesthetic changed or relatively stayed the same?
MCJ: I don’t think eyeliner was his thing. Rather, it was something that was a part of the silent films because again the whole industry was getting born and they were all experimenting and he was part of the experiment you know. Figuring out what makeup is going to fly and what’s gonna look good and what’s not gonna look good. So, yes eyeliner, lipliner and all of that, and some of those look funny. You sort of giggle when you see them. It wasn’t one of the crutches he relied on. He was really natural and a completely simple person, he never had formal dressers as I think maybe it has become the fashion today. He had his own very natural distinctive taste with clothing and he loved putting colors together. I think he just sort of absorbed it because his early very close friends growing up in Montana were the Indigenous tribes and his young playmates were Indigenous children. The whole Indigenous culture which encompassed certainly how they dressed, and the colors that they used to adorn themselves with, that all became a very natural part of his education. Then when he went to Europe he became friends with a woman named the Countess Di Frasso who was a part of Roman high society and she probably dragged him into a few Italian clothing establishments. As I say, he was aware and he picked up in good taste what seemed to suit him. It was really a mixture of the sophistication of European fashion and traditional American fashion. He would always revert to the comfort of blue jeans and a simple Western shirt. He also made his own shoes, moccasins in particular, and he made wonderful leather jackets, sewn with rawhide. He even made me one inspired by Indigenous styles. He was very creative on many levels.
EY: It’s interesting you bring up the strong impact Western fashion had on Coop, because cowboy boots are one of the hottest going out shoes today. Western fashion is truly making a comeback nowadays and the girls here at Tulane, myself included, are wearing denim and cowboy boots out all the time… Yet, a lot of people in my generation don’t know who Gary Cooper is, or know a ton about Old Hollywood for that matter. What would you tell someone who hasn’t heard of your father or is not super in touch with old movies about him as well as the time period?
MCJ: You mean who he is as a sex symbol, or who he is as an actor? He had quite a few phases in his life, let’s face it!.. Come on, he was a big lover on the screen with the likes of Rudolph Valentino. He was this great romantic figure. If we were having lunch outdoors, people would come up to him with the whole family and one would say “My grandmother wants your autograph.” It was the grandmother, the mother, and the current generation. So there are three generations, I don’t know which one had the hots for him, but he touched people at many different levels. He was asked what made him choose the roles he chose and he always said he wanted to try to portray the best an American man could be. That sums it up. Are you trying to be the best you can be? Are you trying to be the best woman you can be? The best human being you could be? And he tried to choose those roles that at the end of the day they exemplified. Certainly, the great heroic roles he played, Sergeant Alvin York, the World War I hero, High Noon, then there’s Pride of the Yankees, the two great Hemingway films For Whom The Bell Tolls and A Farewell To Arms. There was a kind of nobility of purpose to his actions. I think the reason why it’s so easy to fall in love with him is because he had both a very masculine and a very feminine side. There was also a vulnerability that he wasn’t afraid to show on the screen. I think that vulnerability appealed across the board whether you’re speaking about Mr Deeds Goes to Town, or Meet John Doe. He was very funny too, he was always frustrated he didn’t make more comedy because he loved it. He loved working with Billy Wilder on Love in the Afternoon and adored Fred Zinnemman. He wanted to be able to intrigue the audience somehow.
EY: Which of your father’s films would you say is most special to you?
MCJ: Certainly Pride of the Yankees, certainly High Noon of course, obviously. A movie that I know he loved was a film called Friendly Persuasion where he played the quaker father. I think certainly Sergeant York. He made some comment at the time, he said cause he didn’t want to do the film he can’t portray Sergeant Alvin York, my God you know the hero like that what are you telling me? He said it was, how do you put it? ‘A role that took almost the best that I could do. It sort of drained me of trying to portray this very extraordinary man. I tried to the best of my ability to do that and to honor him.’ But I think the whole industry has changed so much, as television was non-existent. I mean if you think to yourself psychologically, put yourself in a position where there is no television and your only experience of actors, actresses, big stories and big scenes was what you would experience in a movie theater with a 40 ft long screen and sitting in the dark. The entertainment business has become a whole different medium than it was when my father started. Because he started in the silent movies and then moved into talkies. A lot of big stars, when he was starting out, men who were big stars, when talkies came in they faded because they couldn’t control their voices. And the microphones weren’t as developed technically, so they were unable to cope with the new medium of sound film. A lot of very good actor’s careers sort of faded out, meanwhile that’s where my father came in and his career began to blossom. My father also wanted to make a film adaptation of Don Quixote, which is an interesting hero, different from the western he seemed to gravitate towards every now and again. His career was really cut too short as he died right after his 60th birthday.
EY: Circling back to this discussion of art, I’ve seen some of your artwork on Instagram, and it really does seem art runs in your family across all different walks. I’d love to learn more about what made you want to become an artist, how you developed your own style as well as what made you want to pursue a career in painting.
MCJ: If I had alone time or down time, my parents would sit me down with a lots of pencil and paper, bunch of pads, crayons, galore, and said ‘draw something’ ‘do something’ ‘create something’ And that was wonderful because it gave me a chance to translate the world as I saw it. You know however you draw little stick figures at age five or six. And he loved painting and we had a studio on our property. I mean it was a dog kennel but when they stopped raising dogs, they turned into a studio. We did a lot of painting and then I went to the Chounaird Art Institute which is a wonderful school, it’s now CalArts. Chounaird was a wonderful full service art school, where you did your academic work early in the morning and at night, but the day itself was saturated in drawing, painting, life drawing, advertising, film editing, cartoons, and animation. It was started by Disney, to train animators at Disney Studios. But I love painting, and my father never tried to influence me. As a family we did a lot of we visited a lot of museums saw a lot of artists I mean a lot of works of artists and you know they they weren’t the kind of parents where you know you see the kids are being dragged through a museum and the parents stand for half a minute maybe in front of one painting and then they drag them on to the next. Us, we would really stand and talk about it, analyze it or discuss what I think it meant. We had the great fortune to meet Picasso which was obviously an opportunity of a lifetime. Picasso would pull out paintings and talk being very friendly. My father’s Spanish was not the greatest with a lot of hand gestures going on. But they had an artist sensitivity you know and it was wonderful cause when my father died and Byron and I were married he (Byron) had a lot of concerts in the south of France; we’d always go and visit Picasso.
EY: Lastly, in keeping with this theme of the Golden Age of Hollywood, what it really comes down to in my mind is storytelling and keeping the memories of the films alive. What does this mean to you and what are the most essential parts of your and Gary’s story?
MCJ: It’s really hard to compare, don’t you think? As we’re evolving everyday, to compare the 20s and the 30s to today in terms of values or social interactions. I think it depends on what social level you’re speaking at too. The F Scott Fitzgerald group is one group of people, the man on the street, somebody else and what was the difference for them in terms of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and then the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, it’s very very different. One of the big innovations that my uncle did, Cedric Gibbons, is he gave the ability to move around. You could go in and out one door, come out another and feel there’s a 3D aspect to it.
I think one of the key things that’s for me important that a person can be as big of a star as Gary Cooper was, as much of a film icon and iconic character to the world cause he was an international star, it wasn’t only an American audience; that person can be that big and have that much of a positive inspirational influence. He never lost his basic sense of simplicity. It was not the what about me? you know it was just completely and I don’t mean self-effacing but he wasn’t an ego driven person. He loved the basics, he loved nature, as I say he was very influenced by the Indigenous culture, by their spirituality, and their sense of the earth. I think today he would be going ballistic with the climate crisis. I think there would be a soapbox he would be on today if he were alive because he did love the Earth so much. He had tremendous curiosity. He had friends at Caltech and he’d love to speak with them or astronomers; they would go up to the observatory in Los Angeles, look through the telescopes and speculate about what was beyond. This was only the 1940s and 50s here. A kindness, a consideration of other people, I think he was always thinking of other people. He hated the idea that people would have this oh I’m just a little guy complex. That drove him nuts; he’d say nobody’s just a little guy. He felt everybody had their major song to sing and they must sing it and I hope they do it and you know don’t be intimidated. You gotta have a basic sense of right and wrong.
About Evelyn Young
Evelyn Young is a writer for the Sex and the Crescent City and Entertainment columns of the Crescent. She is a sophomore majoring in Digital Media Practices and French with a minor in Jewish Studies. A resident history buff, Evelyn enjoys frequenting art museums and exploring New Orleans. She also likes traveling, cinema, the theater, sushi, trips to the beach as well as going to Audubon Park with friends. Her love for writing takes her all over the world.
Evelyn Young is a writer for the Sex and the Crescent City and Entertainment columns of the Crescent. She is a sophomore majoring in Digital Media Practices and French with a minor in Jewish Studies. A resident history buff, Evelyn enjoys frequenting art museums and exploring New Orleans. She also likes traveling, cinema, the theater, sushi, trips to the beach as well as going to Audubon Park with friends. Her love for writing takes her all over the world.
