Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type? That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do.
TONY SOPRANO TO DR. MELFI IN THE SOPRANOS, EPISODE 1
In 1914, when Frank Cooper was thirteen years old, his father took him to the state capitol building in Helena, Montana, to see a stunning new mural created by Charles M. Russell, one of the great artist-mythmakers of the Old West. Mounted on the wall behind the desk of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross’ Hole is a twelve-foot-high and twenty-six-foot-wide highly stylized depiction of the historic encounter in September 1805 between the legendary explorers and a hunting party of one of the region’s fiercest Native American tribes. Flathead Indians dominate the canvas, their ponies pivoting wildly in the tall prairie grass while the majestic, snowcapped Bitterroot Mountains hover in the distance. Lewis and Clark and their fellow explorers stand passively to the side, overshadowed by the drama playing out before them.
This was Indian Country, bursting with motion and myth—just the kind of evocative, outsize drama that Russell, a former ranch hand who worked out of a log cabin in Great Falls ninety miles away, believed in and made his fortune from. Some of what it depicted might have been true, but that didn’t really matter. It felt true, and it evoked feelings of excitement and longing for a time and a place and a way of life that had long passed—and it inflamed young Frank’s imagination and ambition. “I was stopped, really nailed in my tracks,” he would recall four decades later. “All I knew then … was that I’d give anything to be able to paint like that.”
From the beginning of his life, Frank Cooper was captivated by the power and beauty of the vast wilderness he had been born into. His parents were immigrants from England, strangers in a strange, half-tamed land that they grew to both adore and fear. Each passed on to their son their sense of awe at the vast, rugged spaces of their adopted home. And he in turn was moved in ways he could barely articulate by this evocative and challenging landscape.
Frank’s father, Charles, had left his native Bedfordshire, forty miles north of London, in 1883 and headed to America, following his older brother Arthur. The Cooper men were drawn to the Montana territory by economic opportunity—first gold, then silver, and finally copper helped power successive financial booms—but also by the romance of Indians and cavalrymen and gunfighters and pioneers. It was, after all, less than a decade since George Armstrong Custer and his men had faced death before an overwhelming force of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at the Little Bighorn in the southeastern corner of the territory. Charles wound up settling in the small town that became Montana’s capital, which had recently changed its name from Last Chance Gulch to Helena. He got a job as an engineer for the Northern Pacific Railway during the day while studying law at night. Then he opened a law practice and dabbled in Republican Party politics, leading to his eventual appointment by President Theodore Roosevelt as U.S. attorney for the newly established state. Prosperity bred respectability, but Helena still honored its frontier past. As late as 1895 the town sent out printed invitations to public hangings in the main square.
Another young Englishman, Alfred Brazier, who had arrived in Helena at around the same time, sent for his younger sister Alice to come join him. She lacked her brother’s uncritical affection for the new territory: as soon as she got to Helena, Alice deposited enough money in a local bank account to cover her return fare to England. When the panic of 1893 ripped the floor out from under the price of silver and Helena’s banks collapsed, Alice consulted Charles Cooper as to how to retrieve her money. But instead of fleeing back to England, she married the young lawyer. A year later she gave birth to a boy they named Arthur, and six years after that, on May 7, 1901, they added a second son—Frank James Cooper—born in a bedroom on the second floor of a modest but comfortable Victorian at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Raleigh Street.
Cowboys, Indians, wolf hunters, and women of uncertain virtue still walked the streets of Helena in 1901, but Charles Russell’s Old West was already more fable than reality. The Coopers lived in a succession of houses just south of the state capitol building for a decade, while Charles built a legal and political career that eventually led to a seat on the state Supreme Court. They spent part of the year on a ranch fifty miles north of town on six hundred acres that Charles bought from the Northern Pacific in 1906. The 7 Bar 9 Ranch was located on the banks of the Missouri River in the foothills of the Big Belt Mountains parallel to the Rockies, an area named “the Gates of the Mountains” by Meriwether Lewis. He and William Clark and the thirty-two-member Corps of Discovery had camped a mile upriver on July 17, 1805, and one hundred years later young Frank Cooper could still explore the same sites and observe the same wildlife as Lewis and Clark: steep volcanic canyons and soaring rock formations, home to bear, deer, elk, mountain lions, bobcats, mountain goats, coyotes, grouse quail, geese, duck, and beaver. Frank would later recall his proper English mother shearing sheep, branding cattle, shoveling manure before dawn, and “swinging an ax at twenty below zero to break open bales of frozen hay.”
Then there was the chinook, the warm wind that raced through the valley in early spring, melting the deep snow and creating a wall of water that barreled down the river gorge and swept away soil and seed, leaving the Cooper ranch stripped to its bedrock.
Alice Cooper never quite overcame her mixed feelings about this wild country and feared its coarse impact on her two sons, and she convinced Charles to take them to her native Kent for a proper English education. They deposited the boys for three years at Dunstable, a boarding school that sanded their rougher edges and subjected them to the rigors of Latin, French, and higher mathematics. It was there that Frank Cooper learned to speak French, solve an equation, wear a top hat, and bow from the waist.
He returned to Montana in 1913, grew six inches in two years, and began filling in his handsome, narrow face, with its sparkling blue eyes and long lashes. He learned to ride a horse with skill and precision, clean and shoot a rifle, hunt game with a bow and arrow, and spend hours alone in the silent landscape, sketching the wilderness in charcoal and pencil. Early in his teenage years, his friend Harvey Markham crashed the family Model T, throwing Frank from the passenger seat. Limping and in pain, he was told it was just torn ligaments, but many years later he found out his hip had been broken and never properly healed. The injury cost him two years of schooling. He entered Grinnell College in Iowa at age twenty, lasted three years, charmed teachers and fellow students with his easy manner and crooked grin, but never graduated. By then his father had left the bench for a lucrative private law practice. A complex real estate case brought Charles and Alice to Los Angeles for an extended period that became permanent. Frank, still hoping to become a commercial artist, came to visit at Thanksgiving 1924. He never left.
At first he looked for a job as a newspaper cartoonist but got nowhere. He drew display ads on commission but sold none. For a few weeks he went door-to-door seeking in vain to convince residents to pay to have their family photos taken, then spent three weeks as a theatrical scene painter. He was living at home with free rent and food—important for a young man who was now six foot three and harbored an endless affection for a square meal any time of the day or night. But his goal of saving up the funds to attend a private art school in Chicago seemed to recede from his grasp.
One day on Vine Street in Hollywood he ran into two pals from back home. They told him that Slim Talbot, a Montana rodeo star, was hiring riders to work as stuntmen in the thriving motion picture business. It was hard work but paid ten dollars a day—exactly ten dollars more than Frank Cooper was making in his artistic pursuits. Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and dozens of imitators were riding the cinematic range, churning out cheap Westerns that relied on stunts, horseback riding, showmanship, and outsize cowboy costumes filmed on a variety of ranches and open-air studio lots on the outskirts of town. Frank had seen few movies, read no fan magazines, knew nothing about how pictures were made or who was making them. But he was a capable and fearless rider who could fall off a horse convincingly upon command, and the camera seemed to love his chiseled face with its thin lips and sculpted cheeks.
Soon he was getting bit parts beyond stunt work. He felt awkward in this strange new line of work. “My wrists were too long, my knees were too pointed, and my shirt looked as though it was draped over a wire coat hanger,” he would recall. “Leading ladies resented playing scenes with me, complaining they had to stand on tiptoe and crane their necks to unladylike angles.”
None of that mattered. His father arranged an introduction to a client, actress-producer Marilyn Mills, who along with her husband was making two-reel Westerns. Frank Cooper was just what they were looking for. She got him a role as a villain in a film called Tricks. Frank liked the work—and the money—enough to resolve to devote the next year to seeing if he could launch a successful career in movies. By now, thanks again to his father’s connections, he had acquired an agent. Her name was Nan Collins and she got him small parts in more than a dozen films. But her most important contribution was to inform him that there were already two other Frank Coopers in the motion picture business and to suggest that he take the name of her hometown in northern Indiana instead.
From now on he would be called “Gary Cooper.”
In later accounts, Gary Cooper would portray himself as a reluctant film idol who accidently and inadvertently fell into stardom. In fact, he plunged into the craft of movie acting with energy and commitment. He started going to the movies every day, studied Rudolph Valentino’s smooth, fluid movements, and observed how the great British actor Ronald Colman used minimal gestures—a faintly raised eyebrow, a slight pursing of the lips—rather than the broad over-emoting of many stage-trained performers. According to Cooper, Colman realized “his audience was no farther away than the camera lens.”
Cooper bought his own makeup kit, which he tried out at home. He would pile on chalk-white face powder, heavy lipstick, and coal-black mascara, then adjourn to the backyard where his mother, an amateur photographer, would take snapshots and develop them immediately. Remember, Marilyn Mills had told him, “you don’t go by how it looks to your mirror. The only judge of how you look is the camera.” Looking at the photos his mother took, Cooper noticed something peculiar: “The more ferociously I scowled, the funnier I looked. On the other hand, if I just looked at the camera impassively, and thought to myself, You treacherous little box, if you don’t make this one good, I’m going to tear you apart with my two hands … the picture of me would come out looking so mean I’d be shocked.”
He also invested sixty-five dollars—a major sum—for his own screen test. He rented a horse and a motion picture camera, hired a cameraman, and set them up in a vacant lot at the corner of Third Street and La Brea. He charged the camera on horseback, made a flying dismount, swept off his hat, and gave what he called “a ghastly grin.” Then he took the reel to the Goldwyn studio, where he had the good fortune to run into a director named Henry King, who liked the graceful riding and easy manner, and cast him in a small part in Ronald Colman’s new picture, The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926). When the actor who was supposed to play Colman’s rival for the love of a young woman had to bow out suddenly, King decided that his lanky Montana boy could do the job. Cooper’s character died in Colman’s arms. “Easy does it, old boy,” the star actor advised him before the camera whirled. Women wept. When he saw the rushes, Cooper said he nearly cried himself.
He was good enough that Paramount Pictures signed him to a contract for $150 a week. The studio’s leading young star, Clara Bow, was entranced by Cooper’s good looks and physique and insisted he be given a bit part in It (1927), her next movie. The Brooklyn-born actress, one of the sexiest and most uninhibited celebrities of the era, had a long list of lovers and paramours, ranging from the dashing director Victor Fleming, to actors Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen, Fredric March, Eddie Cantor, and John Gilbert, to various and sundry members of the UCLA football team. Cooper for a brief time served as her newest companion and was rewarded with the co-starring role in her next film, Children of Divorce (1927). He also got the male lead in Arizona Bound (1927), his first starring role and his first Western, in which he convincingly wore an oversize cowboy hat and did his own stunt work.
But his biggest break came when director William Wellman, at Bow’s urging, cast him in a small role in the aviation epic Wings. It was a tiny part: he played Cadet White, a doomed flight instructor whom two cadet flyers, played by Rogers and Arlen, meet when they first arrive at flight training camp.
His only scene ran just 105 seconds. Cadet White wakes from a nap, climbs out of his cot, pushes his mussed hair off his face, tucks in his shirt, pulls on an overcoat, produces a chocolate bar from the pocket and offers it to his new tent-mates, then heads for the tent door. When the new boys wish him good luck, his face suddenly turns serious. “Luck or no luck, when your time comes, you’re going to get it!” he tells them. Then he gives them a two-fingered salute and a toothy grin and heads off to his destiny—a fatal midair collision.
It required only one take, Wellman would recall. Seventy years later, actor Tom Hanks, one of Cooper’s spiritual heirs as an ingratiating and naturalistic performer, paid tribute. Cooper “does something mysterious with his eyes and shoulders that is much more ‘being’ than ‘acting,’” wrote Hanks. “In this one scene, Cooper somehow crosses a bridge from the artifice of acting to the manner of behavior via a process that eludes most other performers.”
Wings, which won the first Academy Award for Best Picture, helped launch Cooper as a star. His scene was “the most valuable of my life,” he would recall.
His fling with Clara Bow was the first of many in Cooper’s early days in Hollywood, with a list of actresses that included Evelyn Brent, Marlene Dietrich, and Tallulah Bankhead (who once famously told reporters, “I’ve come to Hollywood to fuck Gary Cooper.” Asked later how it had gone, she replied: “Mission accomplished.”). His most serious entanglement was a tempestuous two-year affair with Lupe Vélez, a passionate, self-destructive starlet whose disastrous taste in men would lead her to commit suicide a decade later. Cooper’s mother took credit publicly for helping break up the romance.
Despite the wave of praise for Wings and other successful early roles, Cooper constantly worried about his lack of acting skills. Unlike many of his peers, he had no prior experience on the stage or in drama school. He described himself as suffering “an agony of self-consciousness … Other actors had had their rough edges smoothed off in dramatic classes or amateur production. I was having mine sledge-hammered off in huge painful chunks, right in front of the finest professional talent in Hollywood.”
Talent and beauty are important ingredients for an actor’s success. But it never hurts to be lucky, and Gary Cooper’s luck was impeccable. He was nearing stardom just as the studios were beginning the treacherous pivot from silents to talkies, a moment of maximum collective anxiety that launched a frantic search for new faces and, just as crucially, natural voices.
Producer Samuel Goldwyn’s wife, Frances, captured the moment of realization among the Hollywood elite in December 1927 when the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, had its West Coast premiere at the Warner Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. She saw the “terror in all their faces … the game they had been playing for years was finally done.”
Which meant a new one was about to begin. The advent of talkies changed the very nature of screen acting. Vanished were the exaggerated gestures and overwrought theatrical style of the silent screen, where emotions had to be physically expressed without benefit of dialogue. They were replaced by a more subtle, naturalistic, and intimate approach, one that was perfect for a “non-actor” like the young Gary Cooper.
Suddenly, actors had voices and voices had to be part of the craft and magic of screen acting. Some performers were quickly and cruelly cast aside. Clara Bow was uncomfortable with microphones and disliked the sound of her own voice, while many stage-trained actors sounded phony and artificial. But Cooper’s slow, emphatic tenor was easy on the ears and quintessentially American in its timbre and tone.
He got his first opportunity to use it as the title character in The Virginian (1929), the third filming of Owen Wister’s classic Western novel. Cooper played a taciturn man of honor from the Old South who had reinvented himself as a cowhand in the West. Although the novel was published in 1902, Wister seemed as if he had Cooper in mind when he described his iconic hero: “a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures … He had plainly come many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed … The weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season. But no dinginess of travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength.”
Cooper not only looked the part, he sounded it as well. When Trampas, the evil cattle thief played by veteran actor Walter Huston, insults him during a poker game, the Virginian growls back menacingly, “If you want to call me that, smile!”
Before his climactic shoot-out with Trampas, the Virginian must first confront Molly, his schoolteacher lover, who pleads with him to leave town with her rather than risk his life. “We can go away—I’ll go with you—anywhere,” she tells him.
“You mean run away?” he replies. “Where could a man go? You can’t run away from yourself.”
Molly accuses him of succumbing to pride “because you’ve got some idea about your personal honor.”
The Virginian can’t explain his feelings, but he knows what he must do. “I don’t know what you call it, but it’s something in the feelings of a man—deep down inside. Something a man can’t go back on.”
The exchange sums up one of the key characteristics of the archetypal Western hero: a sense of honor that he cannot articulate yet must obey. There is a standard of behavior for a man that a woman simply cannot understand or intuit. This is the essence of American masculinity as defined by three generations of Western movie heroes. We will hear those same sentiments, in the same inarticulate language, more than two decades later in High Noon.
Cooper, a son of the modern West, seemed to effortlessly embody the mythic, make-believe past. He made nine Westerns in his first five years at Paramount, which was eager to exploit his talent at projecting authenticity. He had a shrewd taste for publicity. He jumped at the opportunity to be the first movie star to appear on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, in a May 1930 Norman Rockwell portrait entitled Gary Cooper as the Texan, referring to the name of his latest film release. He spent three days at Rockwell’s studio, posing in full cowboy outfit with leather vest, chaps, spurs on his boots, red bandanna, and pearl-handled revolver, sitting atop a saddle while a makeup man applied lipstick to his mouth.
By that spring, Gary Cooper was a full-fledged star, his name above the title of every movie he made. He starred in seven films that year, often working days on one picture and nights on another. While he ate like a horse, his thin frame could not endure this punishing schedule. He passed out from jaundice and exhaustion and wound up overnight in the hospital. He finished I Take This Woman in May 1931 and then vanished for several months. He was spotted in Europe, at the Lido in Venice, where he sunned himself in relative obscurity. He was not just physically exhausted, but emotionally spent as well, and troubled by his own insecurities as an actor in an industry that puzzled and vexed him. “I began to wonder who I was … ,” he later recalled. “Was I a star simply because I happened to screen well? Was I the figment of a director’s imagination or did I have some stuff of my own? Looking at the question honestly, the answer seemed to favor the directors. Very depressing.”
He was in no hurry to return home. Instead, he traveled to Rome, where he was introduced to Dorothy Taylor, an American heiress and socialite who had married an elderly Italian aristocrat and was using her husband’s connections and his majestic villa to entertain herself and an ever-shifting collection of celebrities, friends, and parasites. The Countess di Frasso, as she called herself, fell helplessly in love with the handsome young actor thirteen years her junior. She turned him into a project, introducing him to good food, fine wine, careful tailoring, great art, and other expensive pastimes, re-molding him as a gentleman of continental tastes without tampering with the innate cowboy sensibility she found both quaint and erotic. She introduced him to friends who invited him to their horse ranch in Tanganyika. There he showed off his Montana-bred skills on a luxury safari in the foothills of Mount Kenya. He could ride and shoot and often seemed more comfortable around animals than human beings. After they bagged an obscene amount of big game, the countess invited her dashing paramour and the rest of the party to relocate to the Riviera. There were sightings in the European press in Monte Carlo, Nice, Cannes, and the Antibes. He heard that Paramount had lost patience with him and had signed a new dashing young man, Cary Grant. “Cary, huh, instead of Gary,” thought Cooper, “and with my initials reversed.” He had also heard that the Depression-conscious studios were cutting back on actors.
Having finally run low on money and nerve, he decided it was time to return to Hollywood and a reckoning with his employer. “Outwardly, I was playing my new role, a poised man of the world,” he would recall. “Inwardly, I was a scared young man. Paramount had shown no signs of wanting me back.”
To his great surprise, they did indeed want him back. Facing economic hard times, the studio heads believed stars were more important than ever, and virtually all of Cooper’s films had made money. He was as close as they could get to a sure thing, and they were willing to pay handsomely for his services. While many other attractive young actors were struggling to get by—John Wayne, for one, spent nearly a decade making cheap B Westerns for “Poverty Row” studios—Cooper led a charmed career. By 1933, he was earning six thousand dollars a week, sleeping with starlets again, and running out of luxury goods worth buying. “I bought a Duesenberg so lengthy I had to start turning corners in the middle of the block,” he wrote. Its color was chartreuse.
As a rising star he sat at the golden apex of a lucrative and well-oiled money-making machine. Having moved indoors and built expensive sound stages to handle the demands of the new technology, Hollywood was rapidly evolving into a quasi-factory system. Paramount was completing a feature-length motion picture every week and developing the bureaucracy to service this process.
“There were departments for everything,” writes film historian Jeanine Basinger of the evolving studio system. “An administrative department … the story department … the art direction department, the makeup department, the cinematography and lighting departments, the sound department, the music department, the casting, publicity, costume, library and research, special effects, legal, purchasing, payroll …”
It was the beginning of Hollywood’s golden age—a three-decade period when the eight biggest studios thrived and dominated, when there were more movie theaters in America than banks, when more than fifty million people went to the movies every week and avid customers lined up for blocks to see the latest hits. Paramount and several of the other major studios had created a classic integrated vertical monopoly: they controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of their products. Paramount alone owned more than 1,200 theaters across the country. It dictated what those theaters showed, compelling them to buy packages of movies that included the best and worst of its pictures, and mandating schedules and ticket prices. Each of the major studios had a different personality, reflecting the values and sensibility of its leaders and most senior producers and the distinctive attributes of its various stars. Warner Bros. was known for its gritty urban dramas, while Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) specialized in glossy, star-driven stories and lavish musicals, and Paramount emphasized sophisticated comedies. Even during the height of the Great Depression, customers flocked to movie houses to escape their troubles and watch beautiful people in evening dress sail through penthouse apartments with cigarette holders and martini glasses in their hands.
Yet while Hollywood was thriving economically, its culture was complex and contradictory—creativity and inspiration uneasily mixed with coarseness and corruption. Novelist Christopher Isherwood, who arrived in Los Angeles not long after Cooper did and remained there until his death more than forty years later, saw the film studios as sixteenth-century palace societies. “There one sees what Shakespeare saw,” he wrote in his novel Prater Violet, “the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favorites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is the most insane extravagance, and unexpected parsimony over a few pence. There is enormous splendor which is a sham; and also horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery. There are vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows but no one speaks of.”
Hortense Powdermaker, a social anthropologist, came to Hollywood after World War Two to study its society employing the same field techniques she had used to study South Sea aborigines. Her report, published in the book Hollywood: The Dream Factory, reads like a psychiatric evaluation of a prosperous madhouse.
On the surface, Powdermaker writes, the denizens of Hollywood treated each other with “warm words of endearment and great cordiality.” But “underneath is hostility, amounting frequently to hatred, and even more important, a lack of respect for each other’s work … People are property in no uncertain terms … and everyone has his price … Human relationships are regarded as basically manipulative and are lacking in all dignity.” Friendships and love affairs were superficial and impermanent. Even the sex was grim—plentiful and much-discussed but used more as a means of advancement than for enjoyment. “Pretty young girls … are prepared and ready to use sex as a means of getting ahead … This attitude seems more common than the Bohemian one of sex for fun or pleasure.”
Because the movie business was relatively young and was the first popular art form to be turned into an industry, the rules were unclear and the people making them never felt secure, no matter how successful they were nor how much they were paid. “Most people give the impression of Cinderella at the ball, just before the clock strikes midnight,” writes Powdermaker. Status was transitory; because everything they had could be snatched away in an instant, studio heads were obsessed with being in control and quick to suspect subordinates of stupidity, ingratitude, and, worst of all, disloyalty. “Almost no one trusts anyone else, and the executives, particularly, trust no one, not even themselves,” she writes. After all, “trust is impossible to men whose major drive is to exploit and manipulate other human beings.”
Stars, no matter what their status, were no exception to Hollywood’s psychosis. They were seen as pampered, stupid, oversexed, and overpaid, and were treated with a combination of envy and contempt. “Instead of being admired, they are looked down upon as a kind of subhuman species,” she writes. “No one respects them. The cliché that there are three kinds of people—men, women, and actors—is heard over and over again. They are often described as children … immature, irresponsible, completely self-centered, egotistical, exhibitionistic, nitwits, and utterly stupid … Hollywood attitudes towards actors range from pitying condescension to contempt, hostility, and hatred.”
Powdermaker believed the studios were vulnerable in part because their owners didn’t really understand what made a successful motion picture. Still, they treated themselves like gods. Screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. recalled that Darryl F. Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, would conduct a major story conference for each movie-to-be that would include the associate producer, director, writer, and anyone else with responsibility. All were invited to speak freely and fully, while a stenographer took it all down. The next day each participant would receive a transcript of Zanuck’s remarks, “not a word of anyone else’s.”
Even the most astute of the studio heads understood that they were playing a con game. Sometimes you have to fake it, says Monroe Stahr, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, a character based on the brilliant young MGM production chief, Irving Thalberg. “You have to say ‘It’s got to be like this—no other way’—even if you’re not sure. A dozen times a week that happens to me. Situations where there is no real reason for anything, you pretend there is.”
But there was one key reason for their vulnerability that the astute Dr. Powdermaker completely overlooked in her analysis of “The Men Who Play God,” her term for the studio bosses: that the men who founded and operated the country’s most quintessential institution of American popular culture were themselves Eastern European Jews who were for the most part recently arrived immigrants—strangers in the country they now called home.
Cultural historian Neal Gabler notes in his landmark study An Empire of Their Own that Jewish writers, talent agencies, and lawyers dominated Hollywood, while Jewish exhibitors operated the nation’s movie palaces. And at the top of the pyramid Jews ran nearly every major studio and produced the movies these studios made. According to one 1936 study, fifty-three of eighty-six film producers were Jewish.
Together they built “a never-never land, a construct,” said playwright Arthur Miller. “These immigrants, these Jews from Eastern Europe, had developed this dream that had blond hair, blue eyes, and a straight nose. It all had to be beautiful. It was a fairy tale, because they were immigrants who saw this country as a fairy tale. It was incredible; it captured the whole country.”
The Jewish studio heads were by and large self-styled patriots who wanted nothing more than to assimilate into American society. Laemmle, Zukor, Schulberg, Lasky, Fox, Mayer, Warner, Loew, Cohn, Schenck, Goldwyn, Selznick, Thalberg—by and large these were cunning and brilliant men, yet they were men without a past whose families had fled a forgotten land and who had reinvented themselves as wise, brave, and powerful. Their aspirations were similar to those of generations of immigrants who came to America seeking economic opportunities and social redemption. But the Jews who ran Hollywood had a special position from which to express and achieve those aspirations. They were indeed uniquely powerful, and yet uniquely vulnerable at the same time to the attacks of anti-Semites who accused them of using the movies to undermine traditional American values. As early as 1921, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent was editorializing against Jewish ownership of the major studios: “As soon as the Jews gained control of the ‘movies,’ we had a movie problem, the consequences of which are not yet visible. It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority.”
Alongside Ford’s virulent hatred of Jews was a more generalized public antipathy that peaked in the 1930s, a time of economic hardship and global instability that many Americans blamed at least in part on Jews. American Jews were banned from or heavily restricted in enrolling in many colleges and universities and entering professions such as medicine and law or joining social clubs and living in certain residential neighborhoods. Public opinion surveys indicated these discriminatory practices had strong popular support. A majority of Americans felt Jews were greedy and dishonest, and a substantial minority believed they had too much power.
These attitudes colored and infected many peoples’ views of Hollywood. When Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president, took control of one of the smaller studios, Film Booking Offices of America, in the mid-1920s, he depicted himself as a white knight who would rescue Hollywood from immoral foreigners. “There was,” writes film historian Garth Jowett, “a basic resentment that this ‘art of the people’ should be in the hands of ‘Jewish ex-clothing merchants’ who sold their product like so many cheap garments.”
Jews were “a rotten bunch of vile people with no responsibility for anything beyond making money,” Joseph Breen, administrator of the Motion Picture Production Code, Hollywood’s board of censors, wrote to a fellow Catholic in 1932. “Here [in Hollywood] we have Paganism rampant and in its most virulent form,” added Breen, a powerful official whose paycheck came directly from the very people he despised. “Drunkenness and debauchery are commonplace. Sexual perversion is rampant … Any number of our directors and stars are perverts. Ninety-five percent are Jews of Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth.”
Given these attitudes, the studio heads felt compelled to tread carefully on what was for them still foreign soil. They tended to vote Republican, clung to what they considered conservative values, and had an almost visceral aversion to their fellow Jews on the political left, whose radicalism they saw as threatening their own stature and security. And most of them ignored or buried deep the fact of their Jewishness both in their private lives and in the content of the movies they made.
So far as the studio system was concerned, stars were made, not born. When the studios’ army of talent scouts rounded up and shipped to Hollywood young people with potential, they were screen-tested and dressed, coiffed by hairdressers and remade by makeup artists. Ronald Reagan in his memoirs recalls that on his first day on the job at Warner Bros. a hair stylist examined him “the way a paleontologist might examine a newly discovered but as yet unidentified fossil plucked from a prehistoric riverbed.” She reconfigured Reagan’s “Harold Teen” haircut—short and parted down the middle—into the genial pompadour he wore for the rest of his life. The Warners makeover team also decided his head and neck were too small and his shoulders too big, and they dispatched him to the same tailor used by James Cagney, who supposedly suffered from a similar affliction, for custom-made shirts to conceal this grievous physical defect.
The newcomers also got lessons in acting, singing, and dancing. If they made it to the next level, their names would be changed (Reagan got to keep his only after convincing the studio that his previous career as a sports broadcaster made him a known name in the Midwest) and fake biographies created. Photographs of all kinds were taken, favorable stories were planted, and introductions were made to every publicist in town. Some studios even occasionally arranged marriages to give their young stars backstories of respectability.
“We did everything for them,” said legendary publicist Howard Strickling, who headed public relations at MGM from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. “There were no agents, personal press agents, business managers, or answering services in those days. All these services were furnished by the MGM publicity department.”
Stardom was a strange existence—one that often felt more like a glamorous form of imprisonment than a well-paid aristocracy. A big part of the reason why was the seven-year option contract, which gave the studio total control over an actor’s livelihood and fate. Under the contract, every six months the studio would review the performer’s progress and decide whether to renew his or her option. Every contract also had a morals clause that allowed the studio to cancel if the performer in question engaged in any activity—sexual, political, moral—that damaged the reputation or economic well-being of the studio.
The option contract didn’t just tie the performer to the studio. “It had restrictive clauses that gave the studio total control over the star’s image and services,” writes film historian Tino Balio. “It required an actor ‘to act, sing, pose, speak, or perform in such roles as the producer may designate’; it gave the studio the right to change the name of the actor at its own discretion and to control the performer’s face and likeness in advertising and publicity; and it required the actor to comply with rules covering interviews and public appearances.” If the aspiring star refused an assignment, the “studio could sue for damages and extend the contract to make up for the stoppage.”
The main reason for these sweatshop-style controls was economic: stars were at the heart of the Hollywood business model. They were the most tangible and identifiable indicator of the quality and market value of any particular motion picture. The major studios offered their pictures to exhibitors a season in advance of actual production. At the same time, although the big studios owned many of the theater chains, their ownership tended to be regional: Paramount, for example, was the biggest theater owner by far but its holdings were concentrated in the Midwest. Each studio had to entice theater chains in other parts of the country to rent its pictures. And the maximum rentals inevitably went to the pictures with the biggest stars.
From his earliest days in Hollywood, Gary Cooper seemed to thoroughly understand his role in this vast commercial machinery, its value, and the potential financial rewards he could reap from it. But he also harbored no illusions about the pitfalls of stardom and the damage it could inflict upon his personal life, destroying his privacy while rendering him a manufactured persona rather than an actual human being.
“It’s an odd sort of responsibility that has been loaded on the film actor,” he told a newspaper interviewer in 1929, just three years after entering the business. “Perhaps no other people in the world are permitted to have so little life of their own. It’s natural, I suppose, for the fans to want to know all about us—what we do, what we like, what we don’t like. But it does give you a rather goldfishy sensation, and if you stop to think about it, it is a big responsibility.
“You see, we actors are just a commodity that the studios have for sale. If we do anything that decreases our value, we’ll be replaced by another line of goods.”
He realized early on that he had few friends and no one he could trust. “Kid, stay out of Hollywood,” he warned his nephew Howard in a letter. “It’s a dirty place … Nobody in Hollywood is normal. Absolutely nobody. And they have such a vicious attitude toward each other … and nobody has any real friends.”
The transition to talking pictures had transformed the movie business. It greatly increased the expense of making films. It vanquished a generation of actors and directors who could not adjust to the new needs and sensibilities. The studios embarked on a search for acting talent, raiding Broadway and theater circuits throughout the country for attractive young men and women who not only looked beautiful but sounded good, too. Sound created more intimacy on the screen, removing the distance between the star and the audience. And thousands of young people descended on Hollywood hoping for a break.
But it wasn’t just young actors who were in demand. The call also went out for writers who could produce snappy, realistic, and entertaining dialogue. Even before the first talking pictures, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz had sent a telegram to his pal Ben Hecht, a Chicago newspaperman and novelist, beckoning him to Hollywood. “Millions are to be grabbed out here,” Mankiewicz told Hecht, “and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”
Many famous and accomplished novelists and playwrights headed west seeking fat paychecks and sunny weather, among them William Faulkner, Robert Sherwood, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Elmer Rice, Nathanael West, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But many others were aspiring young, unknown writers with short résumés and unproven talents, bursting out of America’s Depression-ridden cities and trekking west in search of their big break and a piece of the new, celluloid American dream.