Drake's Diary

Gary Cooper

There’s just no other way to put this. I’ve just published a book about film legend Gary Cooper, Gary Cooper: Enduring Style (and this is very much a plug), and the good folks at Drake’s have allowed me to talk about it a bit here. You can’t ask for better than that. And not entirely irrelevant either, since Cooper was one of those leading men of the Golden Age of Hollywood when style mattered. As Drake’s knows it always does.

What struck me about Gary Cooper was the difference and similarities between the image and the man. After his huge success in the film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town  in 1936, whether he played a cowboy or soldier, ship captain or spy, the audience  came to more and more identify him as an Everyman, an honest and direct man of few words but steadfast courage who could be counted on to fight and sacrifice for a good cause. And in such films as Sergeant York, The Pride of the Yankees, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and High Noon he maintained that image of understated, stoic grace from the last age of unalloyed heroism.

Those who knew Gary Cooper affirmed that those qualities were a part of his character. But not all of it. He was also something of a dandy, had a considerably successful career  (the U.S. Treasury Department counted him was the country’s top wage earner in 1939), and was an accepted member of International Society. All of this was kept rather private. It simply didn’t fit his screen image that he would dine with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, discuss art with Picasso, or holiday with Ernest Hemingway. In the days when there was little irony in Western movies and the only disturbing darkness came from the black hats of the outlaws, what would the public have thought of a straight-shooting cowboy who had been educated at an English private school, had affairs with continental countesses, bought his suits on Savile Row, vacationed in The Hamptons, and loved to paint? Did Roy Rogers go dancing at The Stork Club or El Morocco? But that was very much Gary Cooper too.