A Ranch Boy Called Frank
Long before the world knew him as Gary Cooper, he was Frank James Cooper, a boy from Helena, Montana, who learned to ride before he learned to act. He was born on May 7, 1901, the younger of two sons of English immigrant parents, Alice and Charles Henry Cooper. His father had come to America from Bedfordshire, England, and built a life as a lawyer in Helena, eventually sitting as a justice of the Montana Supreme Court. His mother had come from Kent, in the south of England. The house in Helena was respectable and comfortable, but the place that shaped Frank Cooper was fifty miles north of town, near Craig, where in 1906 his father bought the Seven-Bar-Nine cattle ranch.
The ranch was six hundred acres of open Montana country, and the Cooper boys spent their summers there learning to ride horses, hunt, and fish. It was not a holiday. Ranch work was real work, and Frank learned it young, alongside cowboys and ranch hands, in weather that did not care whether a boy was tired. He grew up tall and lean, at ease on a horse, and comfortable with silence. The long rides across empty country taught him something that no acting school ever could: how to be still, how to watch, how to wait.
The quiet hero America loved was not an invention of Hollywood. The stillness was real, and the ranch was where it began.
The English Schoolboy
When Frank was eight years old, his mother decided that her sons needed a proper English education. In 1909 she took Frank and his older brother Arthur back to England and enrolled them at Dunstable Grammar School in Bedfordshire. For three years, the Montana ranch boy lived the life of an English schoolboy, studying Latin, French, and English history, and wearing the stiff Eton collars that the school required.
He adapted and learned the manners of an English school, but he never quite belonged there. The rigid class structure of Edwardian England sat uneasily on a boy raised on the open range. When the family returned to Montana in 1912, Frank was eleven, and he had lived in two worlds already. Friends noticed all his life that Cooper carried himself with an old-fashioned courtesy that seemed to come from somewhere older than Hollywood.
Back in Helena, he went to Johnson Grammar School and then to Helena High School, but his schooling was interrupted by an accident. At fifteen, he was injured in an automobile accident that damaged his hip. His doctor recommended horseback riding as a way to recover, and Cooper returned to the Seven-Bar-Nine to heal in the saddle. The riding helped, but the injury left him with a slightly stiff, off-balance walk that he carried for the rest of his life. It became, without anyone planning it, part of his screen presence: that slow, deliberate way of moving, as if every step were considered.
The Artist Who Went West
Cooper left Helena High School after two years, in 1918, and went back to the ranch to work full time as a cowboy. But his father had other plans, and in 1919 he arranged for Frank to finish his schooling at Gallatin County High School in Bozeman. There, an English teacher named Ida Davis saw something in the quiet ranch boy and encouraged him to take part in debating and school dramatics. It was his first taste of performance, and he enjoyed it more than he expected.
He also kept drawing. Art had been his first love, long before acting. While still in high school, he took art courses at Montana Agricultural College in Bozeman, and after graduating in 1922, he enrolled at Grinnell College in Iowa to study art. He dreamed of becoming a commercial artist or a cartoonist. He even worked for a time as a newspaper cartoonist back in Helena. But in February of 1924, he left Grinnell and moved to Los Angeles to try his luck as an artist. His parents had moved there, and the city seemed to offer a future that Montana could not.
Los Angeles did not need another cartoonist. It needed cowboys. Cooper, tall and lean and a genuine horseman, found work as an extra and a stunt rider in silent westerns. But he wanted more than stunt riding, so he paid for a screen test and hired a casting director named Nan Collins to work as his agent. Collins knew that another actor was already using the name Frank Cooper, and she suggested he change his first name to Gary, after her hometown of Gary, Indiana. Cooper liked the sound of it, and Frank James Cooper became Gary Cooper.
His first important film role came in The Winning of Barbara Worth in 1926, and he had a notable supporting part in Wings in 1927, the film that won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. By the end of the decade, with The Virginian in 1929, he was a star. The artist from Montana had become a movie star almost by accident, and he never quite lost the feeling that it had all happened to someone else.
The Quiet Man Off Screen
Fame did not change Gary Cooper, or at least not in the ways it changed most stars. He remained, by every account, a private and reserved man who spoke little and listened a great deal. In an industry built on self-promotion, he was famously uncomfortable talking about himself. Friends called him Coop, and they described a man who was loyal, honest, and kind, but who kept his own counsel.
He was happiest outdoors. Hunting, fishing, and riding were not hobbies he took up for publicity photographs; they were the things he had done since childhood, and he did them all his life. He loved cars, too, and owned a fine collection that included a 1930 Duesenberg. In the early 1930s, exhausted from overwork, his doctor ordered him to rest, and he spent a long period in Europe, travelling and recovering.
He was never comfortable with the glamour of Hollywood. He lived well, as a star must, but he did not live loudly. He preferred a small circle of friends to a large crowd, and he preferred a conversation to a party. The strong, silent hero of the screen was not a character he put on in the morning and took off at night. It was, in large part, who he was.
Rocky
The great love of Cooper’s life was Veronica Balfe, a twenty-year-old New York debutante he met on Easter Sunday in 1933 at a party given by her uncle, the art director Cedric Gibbons. Balfe, who had briefly acted under the name Sandra Shaw, was known to her friends as Rocky, and she was unlike anyone Cooper had known. She came from a wealthy New York family, she was clever and spirited, and she was not impressed by Hollywood. Cooper, who had been linked to a string of leading ladies, was smitten.
They were married quietly on December 15, 1933, at her parents’ home on Park Avenue in New York, away from the press. In 1937, they had their only child, a daughter, Maria Veronica Cooper. Cooper adored his daughter. He taught her to ski and to ride a bicycle, and the family spent their happiest times outdoors together. Maria grew up to become an artist herself, studying at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles.
The marriage was not without its troubles. Like many Hollywood marriages, it went through a difficult period, and in 1951 Cooper and Rocky separated. But unlike so many Hollywood marriages, this one survived. They reconciled, and by the summer of 1954 they were building a new home together in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. Rocky was at his side for the rest of his life, and in his final years, Cooper began going to church with his wife and daughter. On April 9, 1959, he was formally received into the Catholic Church, Rocky’s faith. It was a quiet, private decision, made without publicity, like so much else in his life.
The Art Collector
The boy who had wanted to be a cartoonist never stopped loving art. Cooper kept drawing all his life, and he and Rocky built a private collection of modern paintings that would have been the envy of any museum. Their collection included works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and Cooper owned several works by Pablo Picasso, whom he met in 1956. The two men got on well, and Picasso was among the many friends who sent messages of support when Cooper fell ill in his final year.
There was something fitting about it. The Montana ranch boy who had studied art at Grinnell College had grown up to collect the work of the great modern masters, and to count one of them as a friend. Art was the private side of Gary Cooper, the part of him that the cameras never saw. On screen, he was the man of action, the cowboy and the soldier. At home, he was a man who looked at paintings and who drew, who understood that a picture could say what words could not.
The Friends
Cooper’s closest friend in Hollywood was Ernest Hemingway. The two men met at Sun Valley, Idaho, in October of 1940, and their friendship lasted twenty years. They were kindred spirits, both men who loved the outdoors, hunting duck and pheasant, and skiing together in the mountains. When Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was filmed in 1943, the author had wanted Cooper to play Robert Jordan, and Cooper did, earning an Academy Award nomination. In January of 1961, in the last months of Cooper’s life, the two old friends went on a final winter trip to Sun Valley together, hiking through the snow as they had done for twenty years.
James Stewart was another of his closest friends, a friendship built on mutual respect and shared values. Stewart was the man who presented Cooper with his first Academy Award in 1942, and nearly twenty years later, when Cooper was too ill to attend the Academy Awards ceremony in April of 1961, it was Stewart who accepted the Academy Honorary Award on his behalf. John Wayne, too, was a friend and a hunting and fishing companion, and it was Wayne who accepted Cooper’s second Best Actor Oscar for High Noon when Cooper was away filming.
Cooper once said that the only achievement he was really proud of was the friends he had made. It was a modest thing to say, and it was entirely in character. He had won two Academy Awards and become one of the most famous actors in the world, but what he valued most was the company of good people.
The Last Goodbye
Gary Cooper died on May 13, 1961, in Los Angeles, six days after his sixtieth birthday, after a long illness. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1960, and he faced it as he had faced everything else in his life, quietly and without complaint. He kept working as long as he could, filming The Naked Edge in Britain in the autumn of 1960, and narrating a television documentary, The Real West, that December.
The tributes that poured in from around the world spoke of a man who had been, quite simply, trusted. Presidents and popes, fellow actors and old friends, all said the same thing: Cooper had been a gentleman, an honest man, a friend. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eleventh among the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood. But the ranking hardly matters. What matters is that the Montana ranch boy who became Gary Cooper never stopped being Frank Cooper of Helena, the quiet young man who learned to ride on the Seven-Bar-Nine and who carried the ranch with him wherever he went.