Charisma, the kind of natural power that a great movie actor exerts by doing nothing, is scary because it’s outside the performer’s control: it comes by the grace of God, and can vanish just as mysteriously.
During the years when Carl Foreman was literally eating peanuts and counting pennies as he struggled to find a foothold as a writer in Hollywood, Gary Cooper was thriving. Contracted to Paramount, one of the best-established of the major studios, he worked with some of the most talented directors of the era, including Josef von Sternberg, Rouben Mamoulian, Frank Borzage, and Ernst Lubitsch. They helped expand his range and repertoire; whereas early in his career he mostly played brooding cowboys and gallant soldiers, now he added society dandies, sexy artistes, and smart-mouthed but affable ladies’ men. He looked as comfortable in top hat and tails as he did in buckskins and blue jeans. In Morocco (1930), dressed in a tight-fitting French Foreign Legion jacket and knee-high boots, he reduced Marlene Dietrich’s sensual cabaret singer to a compliant mound of desert sand.
His social life was about to be transformed as well. At age thirty, he was considered one of the sexiest and most eligible leading men in Hollywood. There were hints of androgyny and rumors of a two-year affair with a devoted male friend. Celebrity photographer Cecil Beaton was said to have slept with him. But women were always on the menu. Author Budd Schulberg recalled that his father, one of the top executives at the studio, “was quick to notice that none of the Paramount stars stirred the hearts of the front-office secretaries—and other parts of their anatomy—like Gary Cooper.”
“All typing stopped, all eyes turned to devour what Father’s main secretary described as ‘the most beautiful hunk of man who ever walked down this hall!’” wrote Schulberg. “My father’s second secretary, the pleasingly plump, happy-dispositioned Jean Baer, carried on a semi-secret affair with Gary for years. He was never a flamboyant swordsman like Errol Flynn or Freddie March. But for all his quiet speech and diffident ways, Coop might have been the Babe Ruth of the Hollywood boudoir league. It was whispered down the studio corridors that he had the endowments of Hercules and the staying powers of Job.”
“Gary kisses the way Charles Boyer looks like he kisses …” recalled Laraine Day, one of his female costars. “Well! It was like holding a hand grenade and not being able to get rid of it. I was left breathless.”
But after sampling a substantial portion of the charms Hollywood had to offer, Cooper declared himself ready for something different. Her name was Veronica Balfe—known to friends as “Rocky.” A New York socialite, she was only nineteen. Her father was a prominent banker, and her uncle, Cedric Gibbons, was the famed set designer who gave MGM’s pictures their distinctively elegant look for three decades. Like Cooper, she was slim and athletic. Once he got past the hurdle of persuading her parents that he was something more than just an uncouth and philandering movie star, they were married in New York in December 1933 in a small private ceremony.
Rocky Balfe was a jagged mix of timid and outspoken, painfully honest with herself and others yet anxious and insecure. She had left Miss Bennett’s School for Girls before completing the program and she never graduated high school nor attended college. She didn’t think she was smart and never thought she was beautiful, although many admirers genuinely believed she was both. “She was almost two different personalities,” her daughter, Maria Cooper Janis, recalls. “Yes, indeed, she was extremely shy but she was very determined to overcome her own insecurities, which were tremendous.” When the couple was at their best, she filled the gaps in Cooper’s personality and experience. She had the metabolism of a hyperactive cruise director, always insisting on going new places and doing new things, forcing him to meet new people; take up tennis, skiing, and scuba diving; visit an art museum. But their greatest joint project was their only child, Maria, born in 1937, the one female whom Cooper eternally and unconditionally loved.
They eventually bought a three-acre mock-Tudor estate on Chaparral Street in affluent Brentwood near Sunset Boulevard, where he built a gun room and a carpentry shop. It was a short drive to the ocean in one of the many fine cars he kept parked out back. Hunting wild game, driving fast cars, eating good food whether from a four-star restaurant in Paris or a campfire in Montana, skiing at Sun Valley in Idaho or at Mont Blanc in the Alps—these were some of Cooper’s fondest pastimes when he wasn’t working. Along the way, he became friends with Ernest Hemingway, another twentieth-century American icon, who had Cooper in mind when he created the character of Robert Jordan, the American volunteer who sacrifices his life in the Spanish Civil War, for the bestselling novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
After he returned from Europe in 1932, Cooper’s name was above the title of every picture he made. His career, already well established, skyrocketed in 1936 with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, his first film directed by Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman. Those two pictures set the character of a masculine, iconic hero, whether on the untamed streets of New York or the high plains of the Wild West. Then in 1939 he began an unprecedented run of critical and box office hits, beginning with Beau Geste (1939) and continuing with The Westerner (1940), North West Mounted Police (1940), Meet John Doe (1941), Sergeant York (1941), Ball of Fire (1941), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and finally, the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).
Some of these pictures still endure as classics, while others seem stale and faintly ridiculous in retrospect (Hemingway, for one, confessed he was repelled by the perfectly tailored fashion-wear and carefully coiffed, blond-tinted hairstyles of Cooper and his costar, Ingrid Bergman, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, as they purportedly endured the hardships of waging guerrilla warfare in full makeup in the Spanish mountains). But Cooper was always the hero and center of gravity, whether in a snappy Billy Wilder–written comedy like Ball of Fire or a sappy tearjerker in which the handsome young hero dies, like The Pride of the Yankees and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Each one did well at the box office, and Gary Cooper did well, too.
“There is not an actor alive who would not give his all to have just one of these films as a credit,” writes Tom Hanks.
Mr. Deeds and John Doe, two of Capra’s populist fantasies, endure as Cooper’s finest films prior to High Noon. As Longfellow Deeds, a hick poet from Mandrake Falls, Vermont, who goes to New York City after inheriting twenty million dollars, Cooper charms the common folk—and the hard-bitten female newspaper reporter, played by Jean Arthur, who sets out to expose him but falls for him instead. He starts to give away his fortune to unemployed urban-dwellers willing to move to the countryside and start small farms. Then he vanquishes the greedy and corrupt bankers and lawyers who seek to thwart his plans by having him declared insane. He has some great comic moments: after kissing the reporter on her doorstep, he crashes into a garbage can, bangs into an unwary pedestrian, and careens his way around a street corner, giddy with romantic passion. His defense of his own sanity at the climactic court hearing is winningly powerful and persuasive—and proves that Cooper could memorize and perform large chunks of dialogue when he worked at it.
Capra loved his leading man. “Every line in his face spelled honesty,” the master director writes in his autobiography. “So innate was his integrity he could be cast in phony parts, but never looked phony himself.”
Four years later, Capra created a darker, more despairing portrait of America with Meet John Doe. Cooper plays Long John Willoughby, a washed-up former professional baseball player. He impersonates an anonymous letter writer who has announced in the local newspaper that he’s going to commit suicide on Christmas Eve to protest the misery and hypocrisy of American life. The letter has actually been written by a newspaper columnist, played by Barbara Stanwyck, who proceeds to write more articles and speeches that bring “John Doe” to life. “John Doe Clubs” take hold across the land, and Stanwyck’s boss, a fat-cat newspaper publisher, seeks to exploit this new grassroots network to run for president with its support. But Willoughby exposes the fraud, gets the girl, and saves the day. “There you are, Norton, the people,” he tells the corrupt publisher. “Try and lick that!”
There are many reasons for the greatness of these two films: Capra’s deft direction, with its skillful blend of comedy, drama, and sentimentality; the astute scripts by Robert Riskin; and the brilliant performances of Arthur and Stanwyck, two of Hollywood’s most gifted comedians. But Cooper’s work is equally crucial. He manages to play both the comic and melodramatic sides of his characters without falling into pathos. He is never boring, always believable, and he displays great chemistry not just with his two talented female leads, but also with Lionel Stander and Walter Brennan, who play his sidekicks. Cooper emerges, writes New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, as “the honest and forthright fellow—confused, inconsistent, but always sincere—who believes in the basic goodness of people and has the courage to fight hard for principles.” He helps infuse these films with a bristling and infectious populism—a kinder, gentler version of “We’re mad and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
Even after the arrival of Rocky Cooper, Gary Cooper’s multitudinous love life continued, if usually more discreetly. Ingrid Bergman, one of his more memorable conquests, wrote that she had been unimpressed with Cooper at first as an actor and a man. But when she saw the rushes of his work in For Whom the Bell Tolls, she was smitten both professionally and personally. “The personality of this man was so enormous, so overpowering—and that expression in his eyes and his face, it was so delicate and so underplayed,” she recalled. “You just didn’t notice it until you saw it on the screen.” Cooper, wise by now to the fleeting fascinations of Hollywood beauties, took in all the praise with a certain cynicism. After completing a second movie with Bergman he remarked, “Ingrid loved me more than any woman in my life loved me. The day after Saratoga Trunk ended, I couldn’t get her on the phone.”
He was a fashion icon as well as a movie star. When Irving Berlin revised the lyrics to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in 1946, he added an homage to America’s most stylish leading man:
Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper,
Tryin’ hard to look like Gary Cooper,
Super duper.
“His clothing is handsome and not too highly organized, beautifully groomed without being too polished,” reported a correspondent for Flair magazine who got a peek at the famous man’s clothes closet. “Not 200 suits, more like twenty-five outfits, where friendly jeans jostle the casually draped double-breasted suits that Eddie Schmidt of LA cuts for him … Loose-fitting simple sport coats, white silk shirt and moccasin-type shoes specially designed for him by Farkas and Kovacs. Silk striped ties, sportswear from Kerr’s, shoes from Peal of London, generalities from Brooks Brothers and F.R. Tripler.” On his dressing table were three silver-topped brushes. On the shelf, Indian-style moccasins hand-sewn by Cooper himself and soft as butter.
He could afford a less-than-modest wardrobe. In 1941, the Associated Press reported that Cooper, “with a paycheck of $482,820, out-earned the Nation’s industrial bigwigs and the motion picture colony’s as well, in a compilation of 1939 corporation salaries made public today by the Treasury.” The money reflected his value to the film industry: between 1936 and 1959, his name appeared every year on the list of Top Twenty performers in the Quigley Poll, a record exceeded only by John Wayne.
For an amateur actor with no formal training, Cooper had considerable range. He could do drama, adventure, action, and romantic comedy. “It’s astonishing to review his filmography and see how often he played a sly con artist who could talk himself out of any jam or a character who articulates the most important issues of a film,” writes film scholar Jeanine Basinger. “Cooper had impeccable comic timing as well as the capacity to convey deeply felt pain. He could play a real hick—sly and clumsy—or the ultimate sophisticate. He could act cowardly as well as heroic … Unquestionably one of Hollywood’s sexiest men on-screen, but he could make himself believable as a guy who had no idea what to do around a woman.”
“Whatever he did,” concluded director André de Toth, “Gary Cooper was the truth.”
Cooper knew his strengths and weaknesses, but he seemed to find a way to rise above them. His smoldering good looks, his innate sense of timing, and his overall professionalism always seemed to pull him through. The mechanics of filmmaking didn’t distract him; the hurry-up-and-wait process may have annoyed him at times, but he developed coping mechanisms to deal with it. He whittled, he played cards, and he learned to take naps. While Carl Foreman crawled his way forward in Hollywood one foxhole at a time, Gary Cooper soared like a high-flying eagle.
He understood better than anyone the nature of his film persona and was intensely alert for false notes in the dialogue written for him. “Words had to fit him like his own clothes,” recalled screenwriter Jesse L. Lasky Jr. He recalls laboring intensely over two speeches in a scene for Unconquered (1947), until he thought he had captured Cooper’s style. But Cooper took the page of dialogue that Lasky had written and wrote a line through each of the speeches. Opposite one he scrawled “Yep.” Next to the other one he scrawled “Nope.” Lasky thought at first that these were Cooper’s commentary on the lines he’d been given. In fact, they were his rewrites. “He’d reduced his entire dialogue in the scene to those two terse words,” recalled Lasky. “Yep” and “Nope” became his self-mocking calling card when he appeared as a guest on radio shows or in movie cameos.
He had an almost mystical relationship with his own character. Sometimes he talked as if the two—the man and the persona—were in constant communication. He turned down the role of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind because he believed the character known as Gary Cooper lacked the cynicism and insouciance that the role required. “My screen character saw himself emerging from the film as a dashing-type fellow. But I said no. I didn’t see myself as quite that dashing.” And Clark Gable—who played Butler with just the right mix of sophistication and brio—proved Cooper was right.
In Casanova Brown (1944), a rather lame comedy, Cooper and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson dreamt up a hilarious sequence in which he lights a cigarette, has to hide it, and burns his coat, a sofa cushion, and the entire house. But Cooper said his persona had vetoed the scene, and “my screen character was right. The public just wouldn’t believe it. The character they knew as Gary Cooper would never be that dumb.”
Movie-star personas can be tricky things. John Wayne built his piece by piece during the 1930s—the slow-motion, pigeon-toed walk, the hesitant line readings that broke short sentences into two, the lethal smile that preceded a punch in the nose. Humphrey Bogart took a decade to find his own, and the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold roles to go with it. But Cooper seemed to slide into his character almost effortlessly, making the unnatural act of performing before a camera seem like the most natural thing in the world.
“I was always conscious of the influence of the character I was playing. Whether the character was real or fictional, I would read everything I could about his life and times.” For his Western parts, he added, “I have read just about everything on the West that’s worth reading, fact or fiction … By the time I get before the camera, Cooper has less to say about the way he acts than the character he has become.”
“As a persona he’s just a perfect American idea,” says Jeanine Basinger. “John Wayne is a powerful American presence and he’s male and he’s action. But Gary Cooper has the side of ourselves where we’re self-deprecating and we joke and say we don’t like money, don’t like fame, we’re just down to earth. Yet he’s one of the best-dressed men in Hollywood, living in one of the most beautifully designed homes and married to a society woman—not who we think we are. But there was something about him, I do think he’s harder to define and pin down.”
He drifted away from Westerns in the 1930s when the genre fell out of favor due in part to the high production costs of filming on location with larger cameras and extensive sound equipment. Still, he never totally lost touch; by one rough count twenty-five of his ninety-two feature-length films were Westerns, and in another twenty-seven he played soldiers, sailors, or other action heroes. In all of these, he seemed to be a man of the past—“the American Democrat, Nature’s Nobleman as he was defined in our nineteenth-century literature,” writes film critic Richard Schickel. Even in his cowboy outfit, John Wayne was a modern figure, gruff, angry, and alienated, “fuming his frustration with the intractable world he never made and would never much like.” Cooper, by contrast, was Thomas Jefferson’s natural man, a reassuring presence who looked comfortable and graceful riding the open range, “bestirring himself reluctantly to action only when his patience and suppleness went unrewarded or scorned.” And when Westerns made their comeback in the 1940s, and most especially in the 1950s, Cooper was there despite the obvious physical toll of age and illness, still looking authentic astride a horse.
While his acting range was broad, Cooper knew his limits. There was no point stretching to play an unlikeable character, and Cooper—unlike Wayne—never did. Niven Busch, a story editor at the Goldwyn Company, says Cooper once stopped by while Busch was wrestling with a story outline. “Well, Niven,” Cooper told him, “seems to me if you make me the hero it usually comes out right.”
He was wary of playing a living person, worried that his manufactured movie-star persona couldn’t match up to the real thing. He tried to avoid playing Sergeant Alvin York, the real-life World War One hero. York insisted that Cooper was the only actor who could play him authentically, and Cooper traveled to Tennessee to meet with him. Still, Cooper remained reluctant, almost superstitiously so. “I felt I couldn’t do justice to him,” Cooper recalled. “He was too big for me, he covered too much territory.”
In the end, he relented. One of the attractions was working with his good friend Howard Hawks, one of Hollywood’s finest directors. It was a smooth, easygoing partnership, and Cooper wound up winning his first Academy Award for best actor for Sergeant York. The following year, he played Lou Gehrig, another American legend, in The Pride of the Yankees. In both films, Cooper was able to capture the extraordinary skill and courage of real-life heroes, yet at the same time project their vulnerability and anxieties. He had become more than just an actor: his persona captured something powerful and attractive about America’s character, confirming our self-portrait as a moral and honorable nation, reluctant to anger yet unstoppable when provoked, at a time when the country was entering the dangerous passage into another world war.
Even if he didn’t quite understand it, he intuitively grasped how iconic a figure he had become. He was too old to be drafted into World War Two. But in October 1943 he flew across the Pacific to Port Moresby, New Guinea, for the first leg of a U.S. Navy tour that covered 24,000 miles and more than a dozen stops throughout the South Pacific, along with actresses Una Merkel and Phyllis Brooks and accordionist Andy Arcari. Cooper couldn’t sing or dance, so he packed a pile of Jack Benny scripts and sought to provide some comic relief. To his surprise, the troops were eager for anything, even his dumb, awkwardly delivered jokes. “I went over great, and that was a real shock to me. Those boys weren’t just starved for entertainment; they were plumb out of their minds.”
One night there was a thunderstorm and massive downpour, and Cooper figured the show would be canceled. He was dozing in his tent when an officer came to tell him that some 15,000 men had gathered on a muddy slope in the rain waiting for the show to begin. The performers trekked to the water-logged stage.
They were working their way through their hour-long act when a soldier called out, “Hey Coop, how about Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech?”
The men began to chant in unison for the speech. Cooper had not prepared for this, but he was game. “Give me a minute to get it straight,” he told them. “I don’t want to leave out anything.”
The two sexy female stars took over the show while he sat to one side and wrote out the words. “The rain was falling onto the tarps and every now and then a pole would slip and I’d get a gallon of water down my neck,” he later recalled. But he finally got it all down—the last public words of a celebrity athlete who knew he was dying. The raucous crowd fell silent.
“I’ve been walking on ball fields for sixteen years,” he began, “and I’ve never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.” The speech went on to praise the championship players he had played with, as well as “my friends the sports writers” and “the two greatest managers of all time—Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy.
“I have a mother and father who fought to give me health and a solid background in my youth. I have a wife—a companion for life—who has shown me more courage than I ever knew.” And the conclusion: “People all say that I’ve had a bad break, but—today—today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
The audience burst into prolonged applause.
Afterward, Cooper reported, at every camp he visited the troops demanded the Gehrig speech. Young men facing death wanted to hear a movie star speak the words of a famous doomed athlete, and Cooper accepted that it was his duty to oblige them. In his depiction of a man seeking to summon up the courage to meet his fate, the boundary between the real person and the icon seemed to disappear, washed away in an emotional downpour of pathos, heroism, and self-sacrifice. For those few moments, Gary Cooper became Lou Gehrig.
He returned from that marathon USO tour, invigorated but exhausted, to a country that on the surface was strongly united in the campaign to defeat Germany and Japan. The mainstream political parties passionately supported the war effort, as did the small American Communist Party. It suspended its efforts to gain influence in the trade union movement, declared a moratorium on strike actions, and ordered that Communists who entered the military resign from the party so that there could be no confusion over dual loyalties. Then it went one step farther in spring 1944 and put itself out of business for the duration of the war. In its place the party’s leadership established the Communist Political Association, a supposedly nonpartisan institution whose sole purpose was to work for an Allied victory.
But a right-wing backlash was building that would tear the fabric of national unity to shreds. Its components would include conservative elements of both major political parties, big business, citizens’ groups like the American Legion and Knights of Columbus, the right-wing press, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and, in Hollywood, some of the established studios, anti-Communist trade union leaders, and a handful of conservative film directors, screenwriters, and actors—Gary Cooper among them.
The backlash had its origins in the America First movement before the war began. Longtime isolationists like senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, Cooper’s home state, and Gerald Nye of neighboring North Dakota proclaimed that powerful forces—including Hollywood’s purportedly Jewish-dominated studios—were secretly working to drive the country into war. In 1940, Wheeler, chairman of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, launched an investigation into the movie industry’s role in encouraging the United States to abandon neutrality. Its first witness was Nye, who accused the film industry of producing pro-British and anti-German propaganda. He refused to name the perpetrators, he said, because most of them sounded Jewish. “Those primarily responsible for the propaganda pictures are born abroad,” he testified. “They came to our land and took citizenship here, entertaining violent animosities toward certain causes abroad.”
In the House of Representatives, Martin Dies, a right-wing Democratic congressman from Texas, operated his own parallel investigation as chairman of the newly formed Special Committee on Un-American Activities. He and his panel made three abortive attempts to investigate Hollywood beginning in 1938, and in 1940 the committee compelled celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Fredric March, and Franchot Tone—all of them staunch FDR supporters—to appear in executive session to deny they were Communists.
Dies got little lasting traction as a Red- and Jew-baiter, and he retired in poor health in 1944. But John Rankin of Mississippi moved that the Dies committee be made a standing committee of the House of Representatives in early 1945. Edward Hart of New Jersey became chairman but Rankin set the committee’s agenda and rekindled Dies’s ugly, Jew-baiting tone. He called New York gossip columnist Walter Winchell a “slime mongering kike.” As for a delegation of women who opposed one of his bills: “If I am any judge, they are communists, pure and simple. They looked like foreigners to me. I never saw such a wilderness of noses in my life.”
Jack B. Tenney, a flamboyant California state senator, led his own inquisition as chairman of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in Sacramento. The panel subpoenaed witnesses and issued exhaustive annual reports, beginning in 1943, tracing the supposed web of conspiracy among alleged Communists and their front organizations. Tenney’s credibility was dubious at best—one of his closest allies was the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, a notorious anti-Semite and conspiracy monger—but the panel’s reports helped lay the groundwork for the Red Scare to come.
The war effort temporarily sidetracked these forces of reaction as Americans of all ideologies banded together against a formidable enemy. But gradually the backlash regained momentum, regrouped, and reasserted their power across America.
In Hollywood its newest and most visible manifestation was the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a citizens’ movement that was born during a series of evening meetings beginning in late 1943 at the leafy Rexford Drive home of James K. McGuinness in Beverly Hills. McGuinness was a senior writer and motion picture executive at MGM who had tried to sabotage the founding of the Screen Writers Guild a decade earlier because he believed Communists were secretly steering its policies. Dore Schary, who worked with him at MGM, described McGuinness as among the “hard-nosed Red-baiters and reckless wielders of verbal shotgun attacks.” He could have added Jew-baiting: McGuinness disparagingly referred to the writers in Schary’s unit at MGM as “the Yeshiva.” Producer David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law and a major prince of the realm, called McGuinness “the biggest anti-Semite in Hollywood” and accused him of organizing “the Hundred Haters” group at the Lakeside Golf Club where he was president. McGuinness was a smart, articulate, and mean-spirited foe. “In this world, some people will ride and some people will walk,” he had once declared. “I’m gonna be one who rides.”
McGuinness brought together his disaffected friends and colleagues on the political right, including actors Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, and Ward Bond, and directors Sam Wood and Leo McCarey. Wood was reputed to carry around a pocket-size notepad in which he jotted down the names of purported subversives. He was a warm and charming man, according to his daughter Jeane, except when It—the Communist conspiracy—came up. “‘It’ invariably transformed Dad into a snarling, unreasoning brute,” she recalled. “We used to leave the dinner table with our guts tangled and churning from the experience.” Screenwriter Borden Chase, another passionate anti-Communist, was also a charter member in the alliance. “For ten years I’ve been sitting back, watching them take over one local after another; one industry after another; one school after another,” he wrote in a local newspaper. “I’ve listened to my own kids mouthing the ABCs of the Communist doctrine as I helped them with their homework. And now, as God is my judge, I’m watching it happen to the motion picture industry…
“They’ve moved into our guilds; into our studios, into our production units, and into our pictures … Once you have bucked that party line, you can smell it at a mile.”
The alliance held its first public meeting in the Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on February 4, 1944, where Sam Wood was elected president and Walt Disney vice president. It was a small but star-studded event. Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers, and Robert Montgomery were there, along with leading directors Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Victor Fleming, and King Vidor. Gary Cooper, who was close to many of the founders, was one of the charter members.
The Left took notice of the alliance’s claims and responded with a statement of condemnation from seventeen Hollywood guilds and unions that branded the alliance as “a subversive and dangerous organization, which comforts the enemy.” In other words, they grandly and disdainfully accused the alliance of the same crime that its members leveled at Communists: treason.
The Motion Picture Alliance eschewed the dime-store anti-Semitism of the rabid right. Instead, it equated Communism with Fascism and warned that Red ideology was seeping into mainstream American movies, due to the machinations of “Communists, radicals, and crack-pots.”
“Motion pictures are inescapably one of the world’s great forces for influencing public thought and opinion, both at home and abroad,” read the alliance’s inaugural statement of principles. “In this fact lies solemn obligation. We refuse to permit the effort of Communist, Fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs.”
Matinee idol Robert Taylor, who succeeded Sam Wood as president of the alliance, noted that at the time of its founding, more than twenty organizations containing the words Hollywood or Motion Picture in their titles had been listed by the U.S. attorney general, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or Jack Tenney’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee as either Communist-dominated or -infiltrated. “Whenever any of us stepped down from our own ivory tower and traveled elsewhere in the land,” said Taylor, “we were confronted instantly with one question: ‘Why is Hollywood so Red?’”
Most of the big studios stayed away from the alliance, with the exception of Louis B. Mayer’s rabidly Republican MGM and Walt Disney. One FBI report estimated that the vast majority of the alliance’s first two hundred members worked for MGM.
The right-wing press quickly endorsed the alliance’s goals and methods. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was an early supporter, as was Louella Parsons, her main rival. Parsons’ boss, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, also weighed in, bemoaning the alleged influence of Communists and fellow travelers on the content of American movies. In an editorial headlined “Americanize the Movies,” Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner singled out “the subversive minority [that] has connived and contrived to produce A LONG SUCCESSION OF INSIDIOUS AND EVIL MOTION PICTURES TO THE DISCREDIT OF THE INDUSTRY AND TO THE DETRIMENT OF THE COUNTRY. It has made pictures disparaging American history and American heroes and American institutions and traditions … [and] glorifying Communist Russia.”
But the journalist who had the most impact in attacking the alleged Red influence on the movie industry was one of the least well-known outside the city limits of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. W. R. “Billy” Wilkerson was editor and publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, a daily news and gossip tabloid he had launched in 1930. Wilkerson was one of the town’s most colorful and rapacious characters. He sported a waxed mustache, hand-tailored suits, and gray spats; was married six times; owned a custom-built Cadillac and five other cars; and claimed to have discovered blonde bombshell Lana Turner at a luncheonette near his office (her real name was Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner, her real hair color brunette). He also reputedly had the original idea for the Flamingo resort hotel in a seedy desert oasis known as Las Vegas, long before gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and his friends muscled their way in and pushed Billy Wilkerson aside.
A fawning “Dear Irving” letter written in the early 1930s from Wilkerson to legendary MGM studio boss Irving Thalberg shows how Billy walked a fine line between flattery and extortion. Wilkerson tells Thalberg he needs five thousand dollars in cash to buy a small engraving plant for the Hollywood Reporter. Wilkerson writes that he can’t ask other friends for the money because he’s “afraid they will ask me to do things that will neither help them, my paper, or myself. With you I KNOW it will be different … I am safe with you and believe me, you will be safe with me.”
But just to be sure, Wilkerson concludes, “Nobody will ever know this letter is written and certainly no one will ever know of the transaction if it goes through. It would be bad for both of us.” One rarely sees such a naked statement in print of the potential pitfalls of wooing the rich and powerful in Hollywood.
Most of the studio bosses hated Wilkerson: Winfield Sheehan, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, instructed mailroom staff to gather up each morning’s entire delivery of Hollywood Reporters as they reached the studio, pile them in a heap on the street outside his office, and set them on fire. “Winnie liked to look out his window and see the wisps of smoke rising,” reported Marcia Borie, one of Wilkerson’s most loyal longtime employees. Still, his tabloid was a must-read for anyone who had a stake in the industry, as was “Tradeviews,” the front-page column that he knocked out in fifteen or twenty minutes every afternoon while binge-drinking Coca-Colas.
Wilkerson launched his Red-baiting campaign in a July 29, 1946, “Tradeviews” column headlined “A Vote for Joe Stalin.” It named Dalton Trumbo, Howard Koch, and nine other screenwriters as “Communist sympathizers,” and accused them of using the Screen Writers Guild to try to suppress the views of anti-Communist writers. It was the first shot fired in what became the blacklist wars.
Wilkerson had been in combat with the more radical members of the Screen Writers Guild ever since the organization’s formation in the early 1930s. But his real targets, according to his son, W. R. Wilkerson III, were the studio heads who had scorned him and sought to drive him out of business. In a column later in 1946 he accused them of “not only employing but actually pampering ‘Commies’ in their studios, particularly those writers who are out-and-out party members, party-liners, or fellow travelers. They are entrusting to those writers the creation of their scripts, knowing that those babies will do ANYTHING at ANY TIME to put over a point in their creations to further the cause of Moscow…”
On October 17, 1946, Wilkerson wrote that the FBI would soon be delivering a report to the U.S. attorney general documenting the clandestine role of Communist subversives in Hollywood. “We know that Hollywood is tabbed as the second most important center of subversive activity in this country,” wrote Wilkerson. Hollywood deserved to be singled out for investigation “because of the big names connected with the party here, their big cash donations and the enthusiasm with which the press of the country will grab at this shakedown of Communist activity because it’s Hollywood.”
In fact, the FBI’s Los Angeles bureau had been collecting intelligence on the party’s activities throughout the 1940s, part of a fourteen-year investigation it conducted under the code name COMPIC. The bureau’s enduring theme was that the slow accretion of leftists in Hollywood was no accident but rather part of a premeditated conspiracy hatched in Moscow to seize control of the movie business “for the production of pictures which will serve the interests of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.” Communist activities in Hollywood were designed to capture the trade union organizations of both the skilled and unskilled workers, technicians and artisans—actors, writers, and directors. These moves “form part of a gigantic world-wide conspiracy of control which has its origin and direction in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” By 1943 the FBI claimed that Communists controlled half of the industry’s thirty-nine labor unions.
The bureau internally issued and distributed regular reports of “Communist Infiltration of the MPI (Motion Picture Industry).” An FBI memo in October 1944 claimed there were fifty-six known Communist Party members among the screenwriters employed by various studios. A December 12, 1945, report was filled with alarming commentary, including the claim that “the strength of Communist influence … is much greater than was supposed heretofore.” Frank Sinatra, it contended, was then “a full-fledged follower of the party line.” A year later a new report citing an anonymous informant known as “Source A” claimed that top producers like David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, and Walter Wanger “not only employed known Communists … but also protected them whenever their names and reputations have been exposed to public notice.” The Screen Writers Guild, the informant added, was “completely dominated by Communists and sympathizers who to a large extent determine who works when and where.” The same source also claimed that Dore Schary “in all respects has been a follower of the Communist Party line for many years.”
But the FBI went far beyond collecting gossip from willing informants and issuing internal reports for Hoover’s edification. Between 1943 and 1947, bureau records reveal, the FBI staged at least eight illegal break-ins of the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party to photograph membership records and wiretapped alleged members of the L.A. branch. The bureau found no evidence of espionage or conspiracy to overthrow the government, but the materials it gathered would later come in handy when congressional investigators—who, unlike the FBI, didn’t need evidence that would stand up in court before making allegations—began to focus on Hollywood.
The trade union movement was the third leg of the anti-Communist stool. Roy M. Brewer, who became one of the leaders of the Motion Picture Alliance, was the international representative in Hollywood of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a coalition of craft unions with some fifteen thousand members—cameramen, soundmen, and stagehands—that was generally supported by the big studios. A chunky, combative man from Grand Island, Nebraska, Brewer had worked his way up from a ten-dollar-a-week janitor’s job to projectionist at a local movie theater to president of the state Federation of Labor. He fought purported mobsters and Commies and made a reputation as a tough-talking, hard-headed bruiser. After a stint with the wartime Office of Labor Production in Washington, D.C., Brewer was hired to help IATSE consolidate its power in Hollywood.
Brewer’s trade union coalition was locked in a struggle with the Conference of Studio Unions, which had roughly nine thousand members—among them painters, machinists, electrical workers, and plumbers—led by a former boxer named Herbert Sorrell. The two organizations had honored an uneasy truce during World War Two, when neither wanted to be seen as undermining the war effort by violating their no-strike pledge. But in March 1945 set decorators in the CSU walked out at the major studios. The studios summarily fired the strikers, setting off an eight-month work stoppage. In October Sorrell decided to concentrate his forces at Warner Bros., supposedly the most liberal of the big studios. The result was the most violent set of clashes in Hollywood’s labor history. Burbank police and studio security guards wielding nightsticks and fire hoses beat back CSU picketers, who overturned and torched studio cars and used their own makeshift arsenal of blackjacks, chains, and clubs. IATSE thugs joined in the battle with clubs, rubber hoses, and metal cables.
Actor Kirk Douglas, who had just arrived from New York to make his first film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, recalls being driven up to the gates of Paramount studios past angry CSU picketers for his first day of shooting. His driver pointed out a man with a protest sign and said, “That’s Bob Rossen”—the movie’s screenwriter. Once inside, Douglas couldn’t find Lewis Milestone, his director, because Milestone had refused to cross the picket line and instead was spending the day at a restaurant across the street. The picture’s producer, Hal Wallis, insisted that Douglas sleep at the studio for several nights to avoid being locked out until the strike was settled.
The battle went on for weeks until the CSU won a federal labor ruling. But a second CSU strike in 1946 led to more violence and a crushing defeat for Sorrell’s organization. Brewer was determined and skillful at making allies and Red-baiting his opponents, whereas Sorrell was clumsy and belligerent. Brewer managed to portray the labor unrest as part of a Communist plot to seize control of the entire motion picture industry. He used as evidence the fact that known leftists like John Howard Lawson, Rossen, and actors Larry Parks and Lee J. Cobb were seen on the picket lines. One of Brewer’s earliest allies was actor Ronald Reagan, who as president of the Screen Actors Guild supported Brewer’s union coalition and convinced his members to cross the CSU picket lines. Reagan took to carrying a handgun after his life was threatened.
“The Communists had created an impression that I was a Fascist, you know, because I was tough …” recalled Brewer, who considered himself a liberal Democrat—as did Reagan in those days. “There was no namby-pamby with me when I was fighting with the Communists, because that’s how you get murdered … You think you can reason with the Communists. You can’t. They have their own rules and they’re going to play by it.”
Although he was the product of conservative Republican stock, Gary Cooper had generally kept a low profile when it came to politics. But there had been moments when he flirted with right-wing extremists. In 1935 he had joined with author Arthur Guy Empey, a World War One veteran, to form the Hollywood Hussars, a paramilitary polo club that drilled in their spare time at the Hollywood Athletic Club under the supervision of retired army officers and active-duty police officers. The Hussars declared themselves devoted “to the advancement of American ideals,” but some critics detected an aroma of Fascism. The Hussars were “armed to the teeth,” according to the Motion Picture Herald, “and ready to gallop within an hour to cope with any emergency menacing the safety of the community—fights or strikes, floods or earthquakes, wars, Japanese ‘invasions,’ Communistic ‘revolutions,’ or whatnot.” Cooper associated the organization with “Americanism … an unfailing love of country; loyalty to its institutions and ideals; eagerness to defend it against all enemies.” But he quit after just three months; after some motion picture exhibitors protested to Paramount, the studio issued a statement in his name saying he was surprised to learn “that the Hussars are not the social group I had thought but the men behind it are trying to organize a national, semi-military organization of political nature.” The group quickly dissolved.
Four years later, Cooper was falsely accused by left-wing critics of displaying sympathy for Nazi Germany by traveling there with his wife, Rocky. In fact, they had accompanied Rocky’s father, Paul Shields, a strong FDR supporter who was on a mission to investigate the strength of Germany’s finances. Returning home, Cooper told reporters, “There’s no question in my mind that those people want to have a war.” It was a carefully calibrated statement that raised alarms without revealing Cooper’s views as to what the United States should do.
Still, whether home or abroad, Cooper had an instinctive disdain for Communists. Screenwriter Alvah Bessie, a party member who had fought for the Republican side against the “Nationalist” Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, recalls introducing himself to Cooper in the Warners lunchroom after the release of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “I’m one of those guys you played in the picture,” Bessie told him. “I was in the International Brigade.”
“Terrible thing, civil war,” Cooper replied. “Brothers fighting each other.”
Bessie slipped into lecture mode. “It wasn’t really a civil war, Mr. Cooper … It was a war of invasion on the part of Germany and Italy—against the legal government of Spain.”
“That so?” asked Cooper. “That’s what’s so great about this country.”
Bessie looked puzzled.
“What I mean—a guy like you can go and fight in a war that’s none of your business.”
Cooper’s biggest flirtation with the Hollywood right came in March 1944 when he became a member of the executive board of the newly formed Motion Picture Alliance. He most likely joined at the invitation of Sam Wood, a close friend, who had recently directed three films in which Cooper starred: The Pride of the Yankees, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Casanova Brown. Cooper spoke briefly at one of the alliance’s first public meetings, where he scolded “the lukewarm Americans who dally with sedition in the guise of being liberals” and suggested that they would “benefit from careful study of the pledge of allegiance to the flag.”
Later that year, Cooper took an active role in supporting Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey in his campaign against FDR, who was seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office. Cooper agreed to go on national radio at the end of the Bob Hope show two days before the election and read a five-minute statement prepared by the Republican National Committee. The next day the committee bought space in newspapers nationwide and reprinted the speech in half-page ads alongside Cooper’s face. The headline: “I’VE BEEN FOR ROOSEVELT BEFORE … BUT NOT THIS TIME.”
The speech criticized FDR for dishonesty and failure to keep his word, and for maintaining friendships with dubious people and adopting “foreign” ideas: “I disagree with the New Deal belief that the America all of us love is old and worn-out and finished—and has to borrow foreign notions that don’t even seem to work any too well where they come from.” It was, Cooper added, “time for a change.”
One letter writer from Manhattan did not miss the strong aroma of intolerance in Cooper’s seemingly ghostwritten remarks: “The great shock I received was when I heard the word foreign come from your mouth. For some reason or other I always felt you were a real American. Mr. Cooper, just what constitutes a ‘foreigner’? Can you explain? Personally Mr. Cooper, my own parents came here from Romania more than sixty years ago. I consider myself a true and good American.”
There is no record of Gary Cooper’s reply.
The avowed goal of the right-wing press and the prominent directors, writers, and performers who supported the Motion Picture Alliance was to persuade or intimidate the Hollywood establishment into ridding itself of the Communist menace that was supposedly seeking to take control of the film industry. “Despite the evidence before their eyes, producers as a whole have played ostrich so long that their tails are sunburned,” declared one pamphlet published by the alliance. “… Unless we clean up our own mess, we are certain to have it cleaned up for us—and outside cleaners are never as careful as members of the family.”
But the net effect of the alliance’s campaign was to extend an embossed invitation to the FBI and congressional investigators to come to Hollywood to root out the evil and take the credit for themselves.
It was an invitation that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was unable to resist.