His eyes were the most fabulous shade of blue and always sparkling, and he had long eyelashes that were curled more outrageously than any girl’s. His hands were long and graceful and beautiful. I think his hands are what I remember most.
Gary Cooper was in the middle of his own long-term deal with Warner Bros., one that had proved to be a lucrative business arrangement but creative dead end. The first project he agreed to do was one of the most curiously flamboyant and deranged pictures of the postwar era. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s 754-page novel, was a proto-Fascist celebration of the capitalist id and a huge bestseller, written by a Russian Jewish immigrant who fled Bolshevism for America in 1926. Alice Rosenbaum had jettisoned her real name as soon as she got to Hollywood, but held tight to her self-sustaining delusions of grandeur. As Hollywood chronicler Otto Friedrich put it, “Ayn Rand was, of course, an Ayn Rand character.”
She signed a deal to write the screenplay, insisting on the stipulation that the studio not change a word without her permission. And she thought Gary Cooper, the epitome of rugged American virility, was the only actor capable of playing Howard Roark, the sexy, egomaniacal architect whose fierce independence and refusal to compromise his artistic vision was at the heart of the story. Cooper agreed, even though his modest screen persona was thousands of miles from Roark’s ludicrous self-regard. For once, Cooper’s instinctive distaste for bombast and pretension failed him. To play Dominique Francon, his narcissistic and sex-obsessed lover, Warners signed an alluring and spirited newcomer, twenty-three-year-old Patricia Neal.
The movie is a camp classic, crammed with painful dialogue and overwrought acting, especially by Neal, who had to recite some of its most pretentious lines. “You’re everything I’ve always wanted—that is why I can never see you again,” she tells Roark in a scene that plays like a satirical parody.
Cooper, a far more experienced performer, struggled gamely with his role, but it was a losing battle. “Gary Cooper seems slightly pathetic with his candor and modesty in the midst of so much pretension,” wrote New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, normally a fan. But one thing happened during the film shoot that shook Cooper’s world: he and Pat Neal fell in love.
It had started with smoldering looks and some discreet hand-holding on the set, and was finally consummated on the night of the wrap party. Cooper was used to carrying on with his leading lady during the shooting of a picture, and with countless other women who crossed his path at the studios where he worked. Even after his marriage to Rocky, he was linked romantically to Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Madeleine Carroll, Paulette Goddard, Anna Sten, Merle Oberon, and Ingrid Bergman, among many others.
It’s unclear what Rocky Cooper knew and didn’t know about these affairs. But she was too intelligent and observant not to be aware of the effect her husband had on women and of his own epic weaknesses. “My mother was very pragmatic,” Maria Cooper Janis recalls. “She had an amazing ability to cut to the chase and say okay, let’s get on with it.” And the Coopers were good companions in so many ways, their daughter says, that they had strong reasons to stay together despite frequent storms. Besides, Rocky was a devout Catholic who did not believe in divorce.
Cooper had usually played the game of flirtation, seduction, and conquest by his own easy-to-navigate rules. But Pat Neal was different. She had grown up in Knoxville, Tennessee, had studied acting at Northwestern University, and was intelligent, ambitious, and self-confident. She wasn’t willing to be the Other Woman and settle for occasional sex. She had wanted Cooper from the moment they met at Jack Warner’s private dining room before the film shoot began; she had wooed him with her earthy, direct style and her voluptuous young body, and once she got him she had no intention of letting him go.
Her autobiography, published nearly four decades later, tells uncomfortable truths even when it makes its author look like an unabashed predator. She writes about first meeting Rocky Cooper on The Fountainhead set and cruelly evaluating her rival as if she were an up-and-coming prize fighter sizing up an aging, vulnerable champion. Rocky, she wrote, “had none of Gary’s down-home charm that endeared him to the common folk in the set … She was clearly a good companion to Gary Cooper. But I reminded myself that I was younger. Her presence that day made one thing clear to me. I had met a worthy adversary.”
Once Neal and Cooper became lovers, they established a secret life at her small apartment at 2148 Fox Hills Drive in West Los Angeles. They cooked meals together, took walks on the beach, went for long car rides, and talked about their past affairs. “Gary was famous for his brief ‘yups’ and ‘nopes,’ but he never stopped talking when he was with me and I never tired of listening to him,” Neal recalls.
He bought her a new Cadillac, a pearl necklace, and diamond drop earrings from Harry Winston’s, one of Hollywood’s finest jewelers. “He’d been taught by the women in his life how to please them,” Neal purred.
She tried to please him as well. And protect him. Once after midnight they were awakened by a loud crashing sound. She ran outside to find a car wrapped around a telephone pole, with a bleeding man sitting in the street and a woman pinned inside the wreck. Onlookers asked to use Neal’s phone to call the police, but she denied she had one and sent them to the corner gas station instead. She didn’t want anyone to run across Cooper in her apartment. Then, to her dismay, she discovered Cooper standing in the middle of the road, wearing her dressing gown, and watching the scene unfold. When they got back inside, she was appalled that her first thought hadn’t been for the accident victims. “All I really thought of was protecting Gary,” she writes. “No one else mattered.”
In a handful of his letters that have survived, Cooper expresses utter infatuation for his young lover. Brief, simple, and passionate, each one seems to have been dashed off just before he leaves for some other destination, but each has an almost childlike enchantment with his new companion. “Have had one hell of a rush but will write you from the east,” reads one of them. “… I feel awfully good after talking to you yesterday! Please know I adore you and I pray for everything wonderful for you and for all you desire.”
But there was a darker side to Cooper’s passion. He insisted that their affair be kept secret to protect both of their careers, and sometimes she dated other men, out of loneliness and a desire to make him jealous. One night she and actor Kirk Douglas engaged in passionate kisses near an open window in her apartment. After Douglas left, Cooper stormed in and slapped her face hard enough to draw blood. “Baby, I’m sorry, let’s just forget about it,” he pleaded. And they did. Douglas still remembers that night and says Cooper must have struck more than one blow. “She was black and blue,” he recalls.
Cooper and Neal maintained their secret for nine months until Neal joined friends on a trip to Aspen, Colorado, that somehow came to include a visit to the new house the Coopers had built there. Rocky’s finely tuned antennae immediately sensed there was something between her husband and Neal and she confronted him that evening, demanding to know if he was having an affair with Neal and if he loved her. He reluctantly answered yes to both questions. Later that night, as Cooper sat brooding in the next room, Rocky told eleven-year-old Maria what had happened. “My mother said to me ‘your father thinks he’s in love with Patricia Neal,’” Maria Cooper Janis recalls. “And he was in the other room looking out the window and very upset. She said to me, ‘It’s got nothing to do with you, we both love you to pieces, and he’s very upset, go in there and tell him you love him.’ So I did.”
Neal was dumbfounded to learn that Rocky had told Maria about her father’s infidelity. Whatever Rocky’s motive, her decision was enormously painful and embarrassing for Cooper, who desperately feared losing the love and respect of his cherished daughter. Rocky Cooper was a more cunning and formidable opponent than Neal had reckoned.
In October 1950 Neal informed Cooper that she was pregnant. She had hoped this was the event that would finally push him to seek a divorce from Rocky and marry her. Instead, without consulting her, Cooper arranged for an abortion. He drove her to the doctor’s office, handed her an envelope stuffed with cash to pay for the procedure, and waited in the car while she went inside. Later, she was astonished to find out he had told Rocky what had happened. Soon after, he and Rocky agreed to separate, and he moved from their Brentwood home to the Hotel Bel-Air, home for many a wayward Hollywood husband. “At last,” Neal told herself. “At last.”
“If I had been older and wiser,” she writes, “I would have realized that Gary had no reason to tell Rocky about the abortion unless he was going to stay with her.
“He was not going to pick up my option.”
* * *
Throughout the love affair with Patricia Neal and the breakup with his wife, Cooper had a curious ally and confidante: Hedda Hopper, the queen of Hollywood gossip. While he was always wary of her and her archrival, Louella Parsons, Cooper found Hopper could be surprisingly solicitous and discreet. She had known and shared the details of his career, his affairs, and his health issues over an extended period, and she consistently treated him with admiration and respect. No doubt, this was in part because he was Hollywood royalty, and she knew better than to go after him. And no doubt, like a lot of women, she was charmed by the long, tall, self-deprecating Montana boy. But her notes also reveal a genuine warmth between them. “Gary Cooper has always talked very freely to me, especially if he’s allowed to sit down and take the weight off his feet,” she wrote.
She celebrated his roots in small-town America and accepted at face value his self-styled, country-boy humility. Talking with Hopper on the set of Good Sam in 1948, Cooper referred to a story she had written about wheat-field workers in the Midwest and recalled how he had harvested wheat in Montana with a pitchfork when he was young. “My hands were calloused from the first knuckle to the middle of my palm,” he told her, triggering this observation in her column: “That quality of Coop’s of not forgetting his hard-working days seems to creep into the characters he portrays on the screen.”
Born Elda Furry, a Quaker butcher’s daughter from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, Hedda Hopper was an ex–chorus girl, real estate saleswoman, and the fifth of six wives of the infamous musical theater actor DeWolf Hopper, twenty-seven years her senior. He brought her to Hollywood in 1915, where she appeared in more than 120 movies over a twenty-year period as a supporting actress. A self-described “chatterbox, doomed to shoot from the hip,” she knew everybody’s business and was even an occasional source of intimate information for Parsons, who worked for William Randolph Hearst’s powerful newspaper syndicate. Hopper got so good at ferreting out information that as she turned fifty and her movie career faltered, she decided to get into the gossip column business herself. Her big break came in 1938 when the Los Angeles Times picked up her column. Within five years, the column, syndicated by the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, was appearing in 110 newspapers with a combined circulation of 22.8 million copies. By then, she and Louella Parsons had become blood rivals.
“The studios created both of them,” said Liz Smith, one of their modern heirs. “And they thought they could control both of them. But they became Frankenstein monsters escaped from the lab.”
Crammed with a dozen or more punchy one-paragraph items, Hopper’s column appeared five days a week, and she turned out a major Sunday feature as well. Each column boasted a photo of Hopper in a different hat; she claimed she spent five thousand dollars a year on her signature headgear. To handle the heavy and demanding journalistic load, Hopper employed two leg men, one rewrite woman, two clerks to handle fan mail, two secretaries, and a business manager. “Hi, slaves!” she’d call out each morning as she sailed into the office. “How’s everybody?” She couldn’t type, so she dictated complete sentences while she paced the floor, smoking incessantly. Those sentences sounded exactly like her: chatty, breezy, corny, coarse, and intimate.
“Duel in the Sun is sex rampant,” she breathlessly informed her readers on January 3, 1947, about the new David O. Selznick production. “Its musical score matches its love-making … [Stars Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck] are hotter than a gunman’s pistol.” And “Henry Fonda’s busier than the proverbial one-armed paperhanger with hives.” And “Frank Sinatra, tanned, rested, and rarin’ to go, dropped by to say hello.”
The headlines were often hokey: TO VICTOR BELONG THE SPOILS (Victor Mature); CLAUDE REIGNS, a portrait of the actor Claude Rains; and SILENCE IS NOT GOLDWYN about studio magnate Sam Goldwyn.
Hopper’s column dished out endless marital and family advice, but mostly it gabbed about stars: their triumphs and their shortcomings. Who’s getting married, who’s pregnant, who’s in the hospital, who’s got a new job or a big starring role, who’s gotten arrested or can’t even get arrested anymore. She knew how to play up to them, and they knew how to play her.
Deep in the files of her papers at the Motion Picture Academy library in Beverly Hills is a telegram she received in November 1940 while on vacation in Tucson. HEDDA, YOU OLD HOP TOAD, it reads. FIRST YOU WENT TO TEXAS. NOW YOU’RE IN ARIZONA. THAT’S COW COUNTRY AND THAT MEANS COWBOYS. AND COWBOYS MEANS LOTS OF FUN FOR ALL AMERICA. SO HAVE A GOOD TIME. BUT FOR GOSH SAKES DON’T FORGET TO COME BACK TO US.
It’s signed by five of the biggest Western stars of the day: John Wayne, William Boyd, Harry Carey Sr., Roy Rogers, and, of course, Gary Cooper.
The political side of Hopper was far less benign. She saw herself as the guardian of Americanism against the onslaught of Communists, New Dealers, and other interlopers who threatened the country’s bedrock values. She claimed to see the struggle as a fight between those who wanted to make good entertainment—people like John Wayne, Clark Gable, Walt Disney, and Gary Cooper—and those who insisted on stuffing dangerous political messages into their pictures. But in truth, she wanted her kind of messages delivered by her kind of people. Jews, émigrés, and other non-Anglo-Saxons were outsiders, tolerated only so long as they understood their place.
She was one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Alliance, and when the House Un-American Activities Committee came to Hollywood she would play the role of Madame Defarge of A Tale of Two Cities, cheering from the sidelines as the committee hauled its victims to the guillotine. She welcomed the HUAC hearings in 1947, telling her readers that the main threat of Communism in Hollywood was the subtle injection of “Red propaganda” in movies. She was especially critical of mainstream pictures made by non-Communists whom she believed had been duped into following the party line by working “ceaselessly to destroy the belief of Americans in the processes which make our government function.” Her hit list of subversive films included Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe, both directed by Frank Capra, The Farmer’s Daughter, and The Best Years of Our Lives.
“Emphasizing the negative qualities in our way of life under its present system, and neglecting the good, can be just as effective as waving the Red flag—even more so because its message is hidden,” she warned in a column. “We’ve had many pictures pointing up our racial problems, political corruption in government, the evil of wealth, men driven to crime because of the supposed pressure of our capitalistic system. These are but a few devices which the Commies could use to get inverse propaganda in our films.”
Gary Cooper’s politics were less vituperative than Hopper’s but no less right-wing, and surely that was one of the reasons she was so fond of him. Still, she was mainly interested in his personal life. When he fell in love with Patricia Neal and separated from Rocky, Hopper seemed to have a front-row seat. In a May 1951 phone call, Cooper told her that he and Rocky had not yet reached a divorce settlement. She warned him not to let Rocky take him to the cleaners. “Don’t let her get all your money,” she said. But Cooper defended Rocky. “She’s not like that really,” he told Hopper.
“She’ll have a hard time finding another like you,” said Hopper. “There aren’t any men.”
But Cooper replied frankly and self-deprecatingly. “It’s all my own fault. Too many things during our long marriage were taken for granted. It’s all my doing, but I do want to be free.”
Hopper defended him. “Don’t you think you deserve some happiness?”
Cooper wasn’t buying it. “Listen, after twenty-five years I’ve had a helluva lot of happiness and many things that have been good,” he replied. “Many more than most people get and many more than I deserve. Picture stars are spoiled. They get a little hoggish. They think they’re the best things in the world; they’re not.”
“Don’t think badly of Rocky,” he added. “She’s a good girl.”
Hopper was discreet about the conversation. She used most of what Cooper told her in her next column, but did not disclose that she had spoken directly with him.
“The first night Gary Cooper got back to town, he took his daughter, Maria, to dinner,” she wrote in another item. “His property settlement with Rocky is speeding along. If she won’t agree on a divorce it wouldn’t surprise me if Coop got one himself. He’s looking for happiness.”
When Cooper went to Naples, Florida, to shoot Distant Drums in May 1951, he sent Hopper a horse conch shell “for your mantle.” And when he went into the hospital three months later for a hernia operation, Hopper hovered like a concerned aunt. “He was operated on once before, but before the job healed, he climbed a mountain with Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls,” she wrote. “And the darned thing never did heal properly.”
He felt tired and run-down. He had turned fifty in May but looked ten years older. He was still a formidably handsome man, but it was hard to miss the creases embedded in his face. The two packs of cigarettes he smoked daily didn’t help. His problems were coming together, all of them related, some of them self-inflicted. His career, marriage, and health were all in a downward spiral. He was frustrated and disappointed with the poor quality of the movies he was making—and with the fact that in 1950 he had fallen out of the Top Ten list of male box-office stars for the first time in fourteen years.
His old insecurities as an actor resurfaced. Jeff Corey, the talented supporting actor, was surprised when Patricia Neal brought along Cooper to some of the evening classes Corey taught in Hollywood. “He wanted to be a better actor,” Corey recalled. “He was interested in acting.” Corey once called on Cooper during class and asked his opinion about a scene some of the students were rehearsing. Awkward silence followed, and Corey quickly realized his mistake. “He just wanted to hide.”
Cooper later confided to Corey that he had felt mortified after agreeing to consider doing the Robert Sherwood play Abe Lincoln in Illinois. He loved the writing, he said, but was intimidated by the role and eventually turned it down.
“I have only one or two tricks, at best,” Cooper confessed. “That isn’t enough, is it?”
Hollywood’s brightest star was beginning to fade. In the movies, his character had always triumphed, usually on his own. “If you make me the hero it usually comes out right” wasn’t working for him anymore. In real life, the hero needed a hero of his own.