Coop

(See Cover)

The famous Hollywood team of Director Frank Capra & Writer Robert Riskin have wowed the public with several fairly intimate little pictures including It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It With You. They have also wowed the public with whoppers: Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Lost Horizon. Director Capra, working without his Alter Ego Riskin, wowed the public with the heroic scale of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The bigger these pictures have gotten, the simpler have been their basic sentiments. The vast Tibetan spaces of Lost Horizon enclosed the theme BE KIND (Capra's own description). Mr. Deeds went to town to preach LOVE YOUR FELLOW MAN (ditto). Among the marbles of Washington, Mr. Smith found the meaning of LOVE YOUR COUNTRY.

Next week Warner Brothers releases the biggest Capra-Riskin picture to date, Meet John Doe. Capra-Riskin produced it independently, spent seven months on it and $1,100,000. They sat down at a great Hollywoodian organ, used every last stop, smote every key on every manual. Yet they built their music around one of the simplest and oldest of themes: LOVE THY NEIGHBOR.

The Story. Adapted by Writer Riskin from an old Century magazine story called A Reputation by Richard Connell, Meet John Doe begins modestly enough in the office of a newspaper which is firing many tried & true employes. A young girl columnist (Barbara Stanwyck) angrily invents as her last column a letter signed John Doe stating that he will protest against civic and general corruption by jumping from the top of City Hall on Christmas Eve. When the fake is about to be disclosed, the girl gets her job back by suggesting that an appropriate John Doe be hired and interviewed daily. For this purpose the paper engages a gawkingly uncouth but handsome bush-league baseball pitcher who is out of work. John Doe's press and radio utterances, written by the girl, are naive but manly sermons on Love Thy Neighbor, and they touch local and then national hearts.

Doe finally sells himself on the cause when confronted by one of the dozens of mushrooming John Doe Clubs. In a small town he hears the local soda jerker (Regis Toomey) tell how Love Thy Neighbor really works. In this scene a number of Hollywood types give Capra-Riskin some of the best character acting on film. Thereafter Doe makes a nationwide tour, falls in love with the girl writer, acquires such a nationwide reputation that his face appears on the cover of TIME.*

It now appears that the newspaper publisher, a bulky, sinister, pince-nez-polishing fascist (Edward Arnold), has always intended to use the John Doe Clubs to get himself elected President and regiment the U. S. people into some sense. Doe learns this from the newspaper editor (James Gleason), a patriot who has got drunk with the horror of the idea. The notion of having the prime patriotic appeal of the picture delivered by a soused journalist (and ex-soldier) is a crowning piece of Capra-Riskin-Gleason virtuosity.

When Doe tries to warn his convention, the publisher exposes him as a fake and his private storm troopers turn the crowd against Doe. Outcast, Doe decides that he can only convince his following of his sincerity by really jumping off the City Hall tower on Christmas Eve.

At this point Capra-Riskin ran into trouble. In the original version the girl's lovelorn pleading worked. But a preview-audience felt that the ending was not strong enough for what had preceded. For a while Capra-Riskin thought they would have to make Doe jump. They finally landed on the present ending--the girl not only tells Doe of her love but also reminds him that what he is trying to do has already been done, unsurpassably --by Jesus.

The Picture has many excellent, many not so excellent details, and will doubtless accent for millions the virtues of neighborly compassion. Fundamentally there is just one thing wrong with it. When an organist draws on the full resources of his instrument, as have Messrs. Capra & Riskin in invoking almost every great emotional appeal from the Nativity to The Star Spangled Banner, the largest possible music had better come out. Anything else may topple artistically from sheer pompous top-heaviness. When Capra-Riskin open up the cinema organ in Meet John Doe, what comes out is not solid but uncertain musical structure (in the middle of the picture they even fall back on coy effects with a small dog), not so much Bachian power as Lisztian super-schmalz. Their organ often sounds not so much a classic organ as a Mighty Wurlitzer--its tremolos too tremulous, its diapasons too windy. And in treating the theme of Love Thy Neighbor they are competing with some of the noblest products of human art.

The Cowboy and the Ladies. Both the sentimentality and the rhetoric of Meet John Doe profit greatly by its star, whose personality has a great tendency to de-schmalz sentiment and de-rant rhetoric. Tens of thousands of fans know that Gary Cooper is 6 feet 2 3/4 inches tall, 175 pounds heavy, 40 years old, and that if he grew a beard he would look rather like Abraham Lincoln. To his friends he is "Coop." Though special tributes are often paid him where young women gather, he escapes such masculine calumny as sometimes finds its way toward the ears of Clark Gable. Boyfriends and husbands watch him without defensive squirming. Had Coop been a longshoreman he might well have been the most popular, if not the most active, man at the waterfront bars. Had he gone to Yale he might well have been the Most Popular Man in his class. As it was, he went to Hollywood and became the most popular man in the nation--an ideal choice for Capra-Riskin's Meet John Doe.

A popular misconception holds that he was a rootin', tootin' cowboy who suddenly gawked into the klieg lights. This is not strictly true. Although he is at home there, the range was never his profession. His father, Charles Henry Cooper, was a lawyer of Bedfordshire, England, who in 1886 moved to the U. S. and the raucous gold town of Helena, Mont. There he married a local girl, acquired a small cattle ranch, but spent most of his time at law and politics which eventually brought him a justiceship of the Montana Supreme Court.

Gary (christened Frank James) Cooper was born in Helena on May 7, 1901. He went to Helena public schools till he was nine, then for four years to the Dunstable School near the Cooper family home in England (where Cooper pere moved the family for that period), then to the Bozeman, Mont. High School and to Iowa's Grinnell College for two years. Like all healthy young Montanans of the time, he learned to shoot, fish, ride horses and punch cattle for fun, but his ambition was cartooning, and during high school he took drawing lessons four hours a day. After leaving Grinnell in 1924, he tried free-lance cartooning on a Helena newspaper, punched cows on his father's ranch, attempted to invade commercial art in Chicago. The invasion was repulsed. He used up his funds getting to Los Angeles, where "at least I wouldn't freeze to death," took a job selling electric signs and got fired for not selling any.

For a year Coop was a cowboy extra, then Sam Goldwyn saw him in a bit part in a western, gave him the second male lead at $75 a week with Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman in The Winning of Barbara Worth. During the filming he began to get his established reputation as a silent pardner, on and off screen. On location he was tented with a Chinese vaudevillian who threw knives at the gophers, an old hack comedian, and a card-sharping bit player. Coop watched the three playing poker, caught on to the sharper. One night he joined the game and, in the best horse-opera style, wordlessly placed a gun on the table. He won.

After Barbara Worth appeared, Paramount offered him $200 a week. Coop said: "Sure." He bought a jazzy red Chrysler roadster, and Paramount moved him out of the Wild & Woolly into a bit part in the war-flying drama, Wings. He looked into a tent, waved a casual good-by to his pals Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, and gave them a faraway smile suggesting a prescience that he was about to be killed in action. There was so much public comment on this little scene that Paramount gave Coop a long-term contract.

His next half-dozen pictures greatly increased his box-office rating, and Hollywood also began to get a personal line on him. It was noted that the taciturnity and the occasional other-worldly look were accompanied by no little quiet practicality. When a $300 contract ran out, Paramount offered Coop $600. Coop learned that Paramount was already committed to exhibitors for four more Cooper pictures. He went fishing and shooting for a month and let Adolph Zukor think it over. Coop went back to work for $1,750 a week.

It was also noted that Coop's person appealed to Hollywood's ladies as well as to the box-office queues. In Wings was redheaded Clara Bow, a violently impulsive young woman. Hollywood Journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns once wrote that when Clara "decided to root for the U. S. C. football team . . . they never won another game all season." Clara and Coop toured the Hollywood nightspots in his red Chrysler until Lupe Velez, with Latin vehemence, cut in for the better part of three years. Lupe and Coop often invited visitors to a retreat in Hollywood's snug Laurel Canyon, where guests were said to have been intimidated by a pair of caged but live and screaming eagles.

After the Velez period came the di Frasso period. Countess Dorothy (Taylor) di Frasso, an international cafe socialite and a mature connoisseur of Hollywood juveniles, gradually moved Coop from the nightspots into top-drawer Hollywood society. In 1930 Coop went to Europe with the Countess and a party. She entertained him at her Roman villa, had him spruce himself at The Eternal City's best shops, gave him a social whirl in which his Montana horsemanship and marksmanship deeply impressed the Roman patricians. He came back to Hollywood with improved haberdashery, but otherwise was apparently the same casual, quiet, amiable Coop. Next year he went African big-game hunting with another party including the Countess.

A year later he was back in Hollywood, flat broke, tired of his tailcoat parts and expecting to be fired. But he asked for twice his previous salary and got it. He also began to get many roles that he liked almost as well as millions who watched them. They included: A Farewell to Arms, Desire, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Beau Geste, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. Coop considered his acting more & more. But even when he was "acting to beat hell . . . just pouring it on," his fans praised him for his indestructible naturalness. It is this quality, which almost every American likes to identify with himself, that accounts for Cooper's tremendous appeal to all kinds of Americans. It is also American to believe that the greatest naturalness is to be found in the Great Open Spaces, and to cherish the natives thereof. Years ago, with Tom Mix, Bill Hart and Will Rogers, U. S. moviemakers discovered to their profit these simple truths, and the legend is that a cowboy has saved every studio in Hollywood.

The Cowboy and the Wife. In 1933 at a party at Hollywood Designer Cedric Gibbons', Coop met his host's niece, Veronica Balfe, step-daughter of Governor Paul Shields of the New York Stock Exchange. A striking, vigorous brunette, she was then cinemacting under the name of Sandra Shaw, had first seen Coop in Morocco while she was at the Bennett School (Millbrook, N. Y.). Sandra Shaw appeared in just three pictures, including Blood Money (with Frances Dee and George Bancroft), then became Mrs. Cooper and retired.

The Coopers live in an elaborate white Georgian mansion in Los Angeles' smart Brentwood section. They are surrounded by three and a half acres, a swimming pool, tennis court, dogs, ducks, chickens, a vegetable garden, and a citrus grove that Coop cultivates with a small tractor. Summers the couple usually cross the continent for a couple of months on Long Island, but their Eastern doings, while swank, are in no sense dizzy.

At home their social life consists largely of tennis, bridge or backgammon with cinema people including such special friends as Tyrone Power & Annabella, the Fred MacMurrays, the Robert Taylors, the Joel McCreas. Coop eats enormously, smokes and drinks very little, gets into old clothes whenever possible, sleeps a great deal at home and naps constantly and at will on the lot. Stripped of his Hollywood appurtenances and fan-magazine mysticism, this national phenomenon is what he has been for years--an extremely good-natured Montana sportsman. He is daft about guns (his favorite: a .22 Hornet with a German telescope sight). His mind is encyclopedic as to velocities, trajectories. He and "Rocky"--Mrs. Cooper--hunt coyotes and bobcats together in the mountains near Malibu. In 1939 she won the California Women's Skeet Shooting Championship.

Coop has recently also become a noteworthy family man. Maria Veronica Balfe Cooper was born three years ago. Some time later Mrs. Cooper took the baby to Phoenix, Ariz., when Coop was going on location for the desert picture Beau Geste in the sandy wastes of Arizona's Buttercup Valley, 19 miles east of Yuma. In Phoenix the baby got sick. After working a while, Coop wanted to phone Phoenix about her, but the nearest phone was in Yuma and a wild sandstorm was blocking the wooden road that led out of the Valley to the State road. Coop knew he could hitchhike to Yuma if he could reach the State road. The cowboy reached it on a camel.

* This week on TIME'S 18th anniversary, succeeding (among 938 others) Uncle Joe Cannon, Queen Mary, Charles Lindbergh, Albert Einstein, Al Capone and a bird dog, Gary Cooper as John Doe does appear on TIME'S cover.

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