Hollywood Studio Magazine (May 1972)

since I filled in for a month on “The Story of Dr. Wassell.” We never had been thrown into the same away-from-work social whirl, but he would have remembered me and been kind and warm as he always was. But when Jimmy Stewart was there to accept, I realized how ill Coop must be. Stewart’s emotional crack-up on the video tube sent the press after the story and it was verified. Cooper died shortly after noon on May 14. His friends on the press, and he had scores, should have guessed when his weak, soft, faltering voice came through as narrator for a TV special on the Old West only shortly before. Some critics had said it proved that Gary had to be seen while speaking to get across his charm. Nobody knew how he had suffered while recording that sixty minutes. My classification of Gary Cooper as the eternal man resulted from the fact that he was the first actor I really ever talked with, and I did not know he was a thespian. He directed me through a door and I never knew at the time that I would spend forty years beyond that door to motion picture studio publicity. The first Monday in September of 1927,1 reported to Paramount Studios to start my first job inside a film plant. A tall youngster whom I thought must be an office boy was standing outside a door that said “Mail Room.” I told him I was trying to find the publicity department where I’d been only once, when I got the job. “I guess I’m confused,” I laughed. “In this business everybody is,” he grunted. So I guess you’ll make the grade.” Later, when I pointed the young man out to an ex-college classmate, then a publicist, he told me that was Gary Cooper and he ultimately would become a whopping big star. “He’s a cinch. Females flip over him. He made one movie with Clara Bow, the biggest star on earth, in ‘Children of Divorce’ and she’s off her rocker in love with him.” A few months later, Paramount premiered “Wings” in town as a roadshow at the old Biltmore legitimate theatre and I saw Coop in that tiny poignant scene that left audiences breathless. When I began getting assigned to Cooper vehicles, he remembered that first day of mine at a studio. He used to kid gently. The earliest memorable moment I experienced with Coop was when I took a newspaper man from Chicago onto the set where he was working An interesting photo for movie buffs is this one of Gary Cooper in 1950 standing between Mary Pickford and Marion Davis. It was at a party given by Cooper, who went through a period of being “social.” with Fay Wray in “Legion of the Condemned.” As we stood talking, Gary took a glass vial from his coat pocket and smeared with a glass applicator a streak of colorless fluid along two sides of a cigarette, which he lighted. The newsman asked, “May I ask, Mr. Cooper, what kind of perfume you use on your cigarettes?” I’ll never forget the look on Gary’s face. He felt more pain that if he had been kicked in the belly. He could not have been more chagrined had he been asked if he wore lace underdrawers. “Perfume? Oh, my God,” he moaned. What an abhorent thought. A gigolo or swish might use perfume, but he was a man’s man deluxe. It was menthol he was applying as an aid to clearing a stuffed-up head due to a cold. That was far before mentholated coolness ever started with cigarettes. Gary, of course, was completely an outdoor man, revelling in roles of the west or the frontier. I spent ten weeks on location with him in Sonora, California, country and he hunted every spare hour from the movie. Publicity was foreign to his complete comprehension. He always talked freely with the press but not glibly. It was a chore that needed to be done and he cooperated. And when our picture, “Fighting Caravans,” moved from Sonora up to the Dardenelles in the mountains and an unseasonal snow blocked roads, he was only amused at the story I gave out about us being snowbound. We got headlines and we were snowbound for possibly an hour or so. Gary knew Gary Cooper in the “Virginian” with Mary Brian, the heroine who was a complete favorite of every person who worked on the “old” Paramount lot. how undangerous it all was but when I asked him not to minimize the story back in Hollywood he went along with the pretense. The beautiful thing about Cooper was that he never let anything or anyone deviate him from Frank Cooper, Montana-born. Incidentally, his parents, often seen around the studio, were wonderful people, particularly Judge Cooper, from whom Gary inherited much silent strength and deep wisdom. It was my privilege to see him working with Cecil B. DeMille, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Mary Brian, Fay Wray, Nancy Carroll, Jean Arthur, Ann Harding, Helene Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, Clara Bow, Paulette Goddard and Madeleine Carroll and nobody ever changed him. Not even Lupe Velez did that. I was on the set of “Wolf Song” when all the sparks started for them. I saw him grow boyishly embarrassed at his reaction physically while he was posing in love clinches for photos with Lili Damita. And he held his own co-starring with the flamboyant Tallulah Bankhead and the intense Charles Laughton in their first Hollywood film, “The Devil and the Deep,” for which I did the publicity. None changed him, yet he won Academy Awards in “Sergeant York” and “High Noon,” fine acting jobs. And he always was agreeable for worthwhile things. When I handled “The Texan,” I had to approach him to submit to much posing for Norman Rockwell who painted a cover of Gary 7 Continued on Page 25