The Star Who Had Everything Except the Prize
By the summer of 1941, Gary Cooper had everything a movie star could want except the one thing that mattered most. He was forty years old, tall and handsome, and one of the biggest names in Hollywood. He had been a star for more than a decade, since The Virginian in 1929, and he had played the romantic lead opposite Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, the wounded soldier in A Farewell to Arms, and the decent small-town hero of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which had brought him his first Academy Award nomination in 1937. Audiences loved him. The studios trusted him. And yet, for all his fame, Cooper was still thought of as a popular leading man rather than a great actor.
That was the quiet judgment of Hollywood in 1941. Cooper was reliable, he was charming, and he was honest on screen, but the serious honours went to other men. Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, James Stewart and Robert Donat had won the Best Actor Oscar in recent years. Cooper had been nominated once and had lost. He was, in the language of the studios, a star, not an artist, and stars did not win Academy Awards. What he needed was a role that would force the industry to take him seriously, a part with weight and difficulty, a character the audience could not dismiss as just another Gary Cooper hero.
He found it in the story of a Tennessee farmer who had not wanted to be a hero at all.
The Hero Who Did Not Want a Movie
Alvin Cullum York was born in the mountains of Tennessee, in the valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf River, and he grew up poor, hard-drinking, and wild, much like his father before him. Then, in his twenties, he found religion, and he changed his life. He became a devout Christian, a churchgoer, a man who believed that killing was a sin. When America entered the First World War in 1917, York was drafted, and he applied to be registered as a conscientious objector. His claim was denied, and he went to war carrying a Bible and a troubled conscience.
On October 8, 1918, in the Argonne Forest in France, York’s battalion was pinned down by German machine-gun fire. In the fighting that followed, York, almost single-handed, killed at least twenty-five German soldiers and captured 132 prisoners, silencing the machine guns that had been slaughtering his comrades. It was one of the most extraordinary feats of individual bravery in the history of the American army, and it earned him the Medal of Honor and made him the most decorated American soldier of the First World War.
Hollywood had wanted to film his story since 1919, when York was paraded through New York in a hero’s welcome. York refused, again and again. He believed, as he put it, that his uniform was not for sale, and he did not want to become famous for taking lives. Producer Jesse L. Lasky pursued him for more than twenty years. York finally agreed in 1940, as war was once again spreading across Europe, and only on his own terms: his share of the profits would go to building an interdenominational Bible school in Tennessee, the actress who played his wife Gracie must not be a cigarette smoker, and Gary Cooper would play him. The story has it that York insisted on Cooper, the only movie star he knew or liked. Whether the demand came from York himself or from Lasky, who knew a good story when he heard one, Cooper was the choice, and he was the only actor Lasky could imagine in the part.
The Reluctant Star
Cooper said no. He was approaching his fortieth birthday, and York had been thirty-one at the time of the battle in the Argonne. More than that, Cooper was frightened of the role. In screen biographies of long-dead kings and generals, an actor had room to invent. But York was alive, living in Tennessee, and Cooper did not believe he could do justice to him. He told the studio that York was too big for him, that the man covered too much territory. He turned the part down flat.
Lasky would not give up. In August of 1940, he brought York to Hollywood to meet Cooper, and the two men spent their time together talking about almost nothing but hunting. They liked each other at once. Both were outdoorsmen, both were quiet men who distrusted fuss, and both shared a plain, unshowy faith in doing what was right. Cooper later said that what changed his mind was York himself. He agreed to take the part, and the two men remained friends for the rest of Cooper’s life.
There was also a practical problem. Cooper was under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, and Goldwyn had just loaned him to Warner Bros. for Meet John Doe. Getting him for Sergeant York required a trade: Goldwyn wanted Bette Davis, Warner’s biggest star, for The Little Foxes, and Warner, who almost never loaned Davis out, made his one exception. It was the kind of deal that only happened when everyone involved believed a film mattered. Sergeant York mattered, and not only to the men making it.
Playing a Living Man
The film was directed by Howard Hawks, a friend of Cooper’s, and it followed York’s life from his wild youth through his conversion to his moment of decision in the war. Cooper played York as a man of few words and deep feeling, a Tennessee farmer whose faith was not a costume but the centre of his life. It was a performance built on stillness. Cooper did not act the hero. He let the heroism arrive slowly, as it had in York’s own life, out of duty and conscience rather than ambition.
The supporting cast was strong. Walter Brennan played Pastor Rosier Pile, the preacher who guided York’s conversion, and Margaret Wycherly played his mother. Joan Leslie, who was only sixteen, played Gracie, York’s wife, and York himself visited the set for a few days, watching the young actors recreate his life. He was, by all accounts, a gentle presence on set, and a shy one. When a crew member asked him how many men he had killed in the Argonne, York began to cry. It was a reminder, if anyone needed one, that the hero of this story had never wanted to be a hero at all.
Cooper understood that. He had spent his career playing decent men, but York was different. York was a real man, still living, and Cooper carried the weight of that responsibility in every scene. He was not playing a type. He was playing a person, and he knew the person was watching.
A Film for a Nation on the Edge
Sergeant York reached the screen in the summer of 1941, at a moment when America was arguing with itself about the war in Europe. Public opinion was still strongly isolationist, and Warner Bros. worried that the film would be condemned as too pro-war. Lasky took care not to market it as a war picture at all, presenting it instead as a story of American character. By the time it opened, Hitler had conquered much of Europe, and the public mood was changing. The film became the top-grossing picture of 1941, and there were stories of young men leaving cinemas and going straight to enlist.
Then, on December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and America was at war. The film that had seemed, a few months earlier, like a plea for a country still on the sidelines suddenly looked like a prophecy. York’s story, the story of a conscientious objector who decided that some wars must be fought, became the story America told itself about why it was fighting. Cooper, who was too old for military service and carried an old hip injury from his youth, could not enlist. But on screen, as Alvin York, he had already made the case for service more powerfully than any speech could.
The film received eleven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Hawks. It was, by any measure, the biggest picture of the year, and Cooper was at the centre of it.
The Night of the Oscar
The 14th Academy Awards were held on Thursday, February 26, 1942, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, honouring the films of 1941. It was a wartime ceremony, held just weeks after Pearl Harbor, and the mood in the room was sombre. When the Best Actor award was announced, the winner was Gary Cooper, for Sergeant York. His friend James Stewart presented the statuette to him.
Cooper’s acceptance speech was short, and it was entirely in character. He thanked the Academy, and then he said that it was Sergeant Alvin York who had won the award, not him. He added, with the modesty that was his trademark, that he had been in the business for sixteen years and had sometimes dreamed he might get one of these things. It was a graceful speech, and it told the truth. The Oscar belonged to York’s story as much as to Cooper’s performance, and Cooper was the first to say so.
Sergeant York won two Oscars that night, Best Actor for Cooper and Best Film Editing, from its eleven nominations. But the numbers hardly mattered. What mattered was that Gary Cooper, the popular leading man, had been recognised by his peers as the finest actor of the year. The star had become an artist, and Hollywood knew it.
Everything After
The Oscar changed Cooper’s career overnight, and it changed it permanently. He was no longer just a reliable leading man. He was an Academy Award winner, and the roles that came to him after 1941 were the roles of a serious actor. In 1942, he played Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, earning another Best Actor nomination for his portrait of the dying baseball hero. In 1943, he played Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the part Ernest Hemingway had wanted him for, and earned a third nomination. He had gone from one nomination in fifteen years to three in three years.
More than that, the Oscar changed what Cooper meant to America. Before Sergeant York, he had been the strong, silent hero of westerns and romances. After it, he was something larger: the embodiment of the American character itself, the decent ordinary man who does his duty when duty calls. It was the image that would carry him through the rest of his career, to High Noon in 1952, where he won his second Oscar, and to the honorary award he received in 1961, in the last weeks of his life.
Cooper himself always said that Sergeant York was his favourite film, not because it won him an Academy Award, but because he liked the background of the picture, and because he was portraying a good, sound American character. He was right to love it. The film had asked him to play a man who did not want to be a hero, and in doing so, it had made Gary Cooper a hero of a different kind: not the hero of the westerns, but the hero of the American conscience. The Oscar was only the proof. The change was in the man, and in the way the country saw him, and it never changed back.