I go to the movies. Gary Cooper is in the next seat as usual, wearing his badge and Stetson. I am sick and tired of him. He grins and offers popcorn. “What are we going to see tonight?” he asks. “The Sting,” I say, “and this time stay out of it, Coop.”
“Shucks,” says Cooper. “You know me.”
I know Gary Cooper all right. The previous week he embarrassed me at Chinatown. The unprincipled cop was just about to let John Huston get away with murder, on account of Huston’s being a millionaire, when Coop threw his popcorn box on the floor, strode down the aisle and drew his six-shooter on Huston and the cop.
“Get off the screen,” the audience yelled, but Gary Cooper paid them no heed. “I’m takin’ you both down to the U.S. marshal’s office,” he said.
“You can’t do this,” Jack Nicholson objected. “The whole point of this picture is that good guys never win.”
“You better get on your buckboard and get out of town fast, son,” Cooper told him, “before I take you in for interfering with an arrest.”
It was a long speech for Cooper, so without another word he marched Huston and the cop off the screen and the movie ended with Nicholson heading for Laramie.
“I hear this is a real good one,” Cooper says of The Sting.
“Just stay out of it, Coop,” I say.
After a while he begins stirring unhappily. “These fellows are nothing but a bunch of crooks,” he whispers.
“They happen to be Robert Redford and Paul Newman,” I say. “Even if they are crooks, they’re charming and lovable, and the audience loves them, so stay out of it.”
It is too late. He is already striding down the aisle and is up on the screen with the drop on the whole roomful of swindlers, before Newman can get away with the loot.
“Get those hands up,” he says. “We’re all going to take a little walk down to the marshal’s office.”
The audience boos as Cooper rides them all off into the sunset, manacled aboard cayuses. I am fearful that someone will know Cooper was with me and beat me for being an accessory to the triumph of law.
My analyst is no comfort.
“You are merely hallucinating Cooper as an agent for fulfilling a childish desire for heroes who are honest,” he says. He suggests staying away from movies in which criminality and corruption prevail until I become less infantile.
So I go to Deep Throat. Cooper is there. After ten minutes he says, “Whew.”
“Stay out of it, Coop,” I plead. Futilely, of course.
“Miss Lovelace,” says Cooper, towering over her on the screen, “you need a little church training.”
He throws her over his shoulder, covers her with his badge and says, “I’m taking you down to the schoolmarm so she can introduce you to the Ladies Aid Society.”
The audience pelts the screen with comic books and dark glasses.
My analyst loves this report. He asks me to commit myself for study at the Institute of Incredible Sexual Repressions in Zurich. I run.
To the movies, of course. But this time it’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which I know in advance is merely about an ambitious young man.
Cooper is there. He even likes the movie. “This is okay,” he grins as Duddy goes into the business of making home movies of bar mitzvahs. But what is this? Duddy is behaving rudely to grown-ups. Yes, very rudely. He is laughing at them and ordering them off his land. Cooper is in the aisle before I can stop him. “Stay out of it, Coop.”
It is useless. Up on the screen Cooper has Duddy under his gun arm and he is saying, “Young fellow, I’m taking you over to old Judge Hardy’s book-lined den for a man-to-man talk about good manners.” End of picture.
Quickly, I run to see Going Places, figuring Cooper will be tied up giving Andy Hardy some quick-draw tips, but he arrives in time to see the movie’s two utterly charming heroes engage charmingly in burglary, kidnapping, car theft and casual thuggery. “Those fellows are nothing but a pair of skunks,” he says, striding down the aisle.
“Stay out of it, Coop!”
The audience is enraged to see him rescue a lovely mother from ravishment, but Cooper takes the charmers to the marshal’s office anyhow.
My analyst says Gary Cooper is dead and I am too immature to accept reality. Cooper looks at the analyst without expression. “I could take him down to the marshal’s office for taking money for useless explanations,” says Cooper.
“Stay out of it, Coop,” I plead.