For his last public appearance Gary Cooper was among the Hollywood elite of the day at a Friars Club roast in his honor on January 8, 1961, a warm winter’s day in Southern California, twelve days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as president.
In Cooper’s pocket was a speech that linked him to Gehrig and Pride.
Cooper, his wife, Veronica, known widely as Rocky, and their twenty-three-year-old daughter, Maria, stepped into a limousine outside their Holmby Hills mansion for the short ride to the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Cooper looked older than fifty-nine, but still lean and handsome in a tuxedo, his hair slicked back, his bow tie a bit askew.
Cooper was dying of cancer that had infiltrated his bones. Rocky would not tell him of the fatal diagnosis until the end of February, much as Eleanor insisted that she never told Lou that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was going to paralyze him first, then kill him in short order.
“My father allegedly didn’t know,” Maria Cooper Janis said. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure he came to his own summation of what was going on.” But there was no doubt he would attend the roast. “He had committed to it, and he wanted to do it.”
He sat for a few hours of love and insults from actors, comedians, studio bosses, and the white-haired, octogenarian poet, Carl Sandburg, who seemingly had no place in a room with Milton Berle, Dean Martin, and Jack Benny—or singer Tony Martin gently tweaking Cooper with a parody of Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris.”
“I love Cooper as a Sergeant (York),” he began, then continued:
I love him as a sheriff, too.
I love Cooper ’cause his style is so effectual.
And you know that I’m not nearly homosexual.
Audrey Hepburn had just wrapped Breakfast at Tiffany’s and offered a besotted love note that conveyed some lingering affection from Love in the Afternoon, their May-December romantic film from a few years earlier. In her lilting, Belgian-bred voice, she said that when she was asked to speak about Cooper, “I went directly to my encyclopedia to learn exactly what a ‘Gary Cooper’ is.” She described it as “the tallest, finest, thinnest, kindest, most patient, sportiest, quietest… the shootingest, ridingest, handsomest, unsnidiest.” Also as: “bewitching, unaffected, enriching, and unexpected,” “decent, daring, and beautiful,” and “cheerful, charming, charitable, and disarming.”
She did not share in the fixation by many of the speakers on Cooper’s cowboy terseness, specifically his reputation for saying, “Yep.” They piled on, possibly because he gave them so little material, and they would not tread into his past philandering, not at a tribute whose proceeds were going to charity.
Benny: “When the talkies came in, he made the transition so smoothly. He was in talking pictures for five years before anyone realized it.”
George Burns, on trying to find four minutes of material on Cooper: “This is not easy. In Gary Cooper’s entire life he hasn’t talked for four minutes.”
Greer Garson, on the secret of his appeal: “Is it perhaps that you can be understood and enjoyed in all languages all over the world with less dubbing and translation than any other actor on the screen?”
Yet it was Sandburg whose remarks on “yep” had him sounding like an insult comic who had written a multivolume biography of Abe Lincoln. “I think this evening,” he said, “it would be proper to call him ‘America’s most beloved illiterate.’”
Berle broke with the safe tenor of the roast with an unhinged stream-of-consciousness monologue that said, in part, “How can I make jokes about a man that doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t go out with girls? And confirms my first suspicion since I saw him in Wings: I knew he was a fairy.” He then added, “Oh, that shy stuff. Look at him sitting there, so shy. He got his first Green Stamps from Polly Adler”—a Manhattan brothel owner of the 1920s and 1930s.
It is impossible to know if Cooper’s delight at being celebrated for his full career alleviated the melancholy he had expressed that month to a writer from McCall’s magazine. As he recovered from the past year’s cancer surgeries, he revealed his displeasure with much of his output the previous eight years, from Springfield Rifle to The Naked Edge. It was an extraordinary admission for a star of his magnitude, suggesting that he had peaked in 1952 with High Noon.
“I’ve been coasting along,” he said. “Some of the pictures I’ve made recently I’m genuinely sorry about.”
When it was Cooper’s turn to speak, he read from a speech written by his friend, director Billy Wilder, who collaborated on Love in the Afternoon. A witty cynic, Wilder found in Cooper an actor whose work needed to be seen onscreen to be appreciated. “When I shot a scene with Gary Cooper, it didn’t look like anything,” Wilder recalled. “But when you saw it on the screen in the rushes, there was an added something going on—some kind of love affair between the performer and the celluloid.”
Wilder’s words played to Cooper’s image and the theme of the night.
“Well, before I got here, I heard that the betting in Las Vegas was ten to one that if I got up here I would say ‘yep,’” Cooper said. “And that sort of leaves me without much of a speech left.” He sniffled as he said he would not forget the night as long as he lived. At the end, he demonstrated an understanding of a star whose physical presence on film was indelible but whose verbal highlights were few. For the final words he said in public, Cooper merged his screen terseness with the farewell speech by Gehrig that concluded Pride. He did not quote directly from Pride but made a strong reference to the most memorable lines of his career.
“If anybody asks me, ‘Am I the luckiest guy in the world?’” he said, choking up twice. “My answer is ‘Yep.’”
Two months later, he was too sick to accept an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony. His friend James Stewart accepted the statuette for him. Through tears, Stewart said, “Coop, I want you to know this, that with this, goes all the warm friendship and the affection and the admiration and the deep respect of us all. We’re very, very proud of you, Coop.”
On May 13, Gary Cooper was gone.
But his Gehrig—the Gehrig he created in Pride—continues to live.