The Virginian

He was Robert Jordan, dying at his submachine gun in Spain. He was Beau Geste staving off a charge, Sergeant York capturing 132 Germans, Lou Gehrig saying goodbye to the Yankees. And, so often and so well that there are urchins in Marrakech who know his name, he was the tall man--boyish and strong in The Virginian, wind-lined and stronger in High Noon--who walked arrow-straight down the street to meet the killers. Last week the tall man was dead.

During his 60 years, Gary Cooper learned to punch cows (at 13, on a ranch owned by his father, a Montana State Supreme Court justice), to draw (as an art student at Iowa's Grinnell College), to hunt, ski and skindive, and to fob off reporters with half-caricatured one-yup-manship. Some critics have said that he never bothered to learn to act. Actors who have worked with him say this: no one ever stole a scene from Coop.

The "It" Boy. He got his first film job in 1924 when, tired of trying to sell baby photographs in Los Angeles, he heard from Montana ranch buddies that you could get $10 just for falling off a horse. In those days they stretched ankle-high wires across fields to make sure that Indians and horses hit the proper patch of dust. Cooper survived, got a new first name (his own was Frank, but his pressagent was homesick for Gary, Ind.) and a feature part in Sam Goldwyn's The Winning of Barbara Worth. Paramount grabbed him from Goldwyn at $125 a week. Studio pressagents tagged him the "It" boy, and tried to promote a romance with Clara Bow. Coop cooperated: he shied at couches and dimity all his life, but only on-camera.

He became a star with his first facedown, in the picture that created the western. He also became the Virginian. In private, Coop could talk to royalty without fingering his white tie. Onscreen, he guarded his strength-of-ten, a quality that came to be called "bankability" in Hollywood's nervous '50s. For 36 years--a longer span than even Gable's--he was the gaunt good man who did what he had to do. He turned down the fattest male film part ever written--Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind--because he thought he "wasn't quite that dashing," and felt bad about playing the middle-aged rake in Love in the Afternoon. He was right: the Virginian would have thrashed a man who treated Audrey Hepburn that way.

Galahad Suit. Fortune favors her own; Washington did not drown in the Delaware, and Winston Churchill (as his legend has it) escaped from a Boer prison camp a few hours before he would have received a pardon. In 1951 the Virginian was a bashful, 50-year-old boy on whose career the gossipists were already dropping lilies. Then came the most famous walk-down of them all, High Noon, and here was Hollywood in top form: fashioning a Galahad suit of shining corn for an actor who did not have to act--who was.

Coop violated Hollywood tradition in only one way--he was married 27 years to the same woman. In 1959 he created something of a stir when he became a Roman Catholic. Not long ago, he talked to his old hunting pal Ernest Hemingway, who lay ill in Minnesota. Drawled the old cowboy: "I'll bet I reach the barn before you do." It was a line worthy of the Virginian, and only Coop himself could have topped it. A few weeks earlier, at a Friars Club dinner in his honor, he rose, carrying the secret of his cancer, and spoke: "If someone were to ask me, am I the luckiest man in the world, the answer would be--'Yup.' " Coop had made that speech before. Almost to the word, it was Lou Gehrig's farewell in The Pride of the Yankees.

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