Trivia

According to James Garner's autobiography Cooper developed the habit of paying for everything by check, knowing that people would keep it for his signature and never cash it (it was a trick also used by Pablo Picasso, who once said he had seldom paid for anything--from lunches to cars to houses--because of it.

Was close friends with Ernest Hemingway for 20 years. Hemingway shot himself a month after Cooper's death.

In 1951, after 25 years in show business, his professional reputation declined and he was dropped from the Motion Picture Herald's list of the top 10 Box Office performers. The following year he made a big comeback at the age of 51 with High Noon (1952).

In 1925 he befriended another young, struggling, would-be actor named Walter Brennan. At one point they were even appearing as a team at casting offices, and although Cooper emerged in major and leading roles first, they would work together in the good years, too. Most memorably they starred in The Westerner (1940) together, where the general critical consensus was that Brennan's underplayed performance as Judge Roy Bean had stolen the film from Cooper.

Appeared in 107 movies, 82 of which he starred in. Only 16 of those were filmed in color. And he starred in 14 silent movies.

After James Stewart revealed to the world that Cooper was dying of cancer, messages poured in from such friends and well-wishers as Pope John XXIII, former Vice President Richard Nixon, Henry Fonda, Pablo Picasso, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Princess Grace (Grace Kelly) of Monaco, John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bob Hope, Henry Hathaway, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, William Goetz, Mary Livingstone (Mrs. Jack Benny) and Jack Benny, Gloria Stewart (Mrs. James Stewart) and James Stewart, Charles Feldman and Constance and Jerry Wald. The newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy called from Washington and couldn't get through on the busy Cooper phone, but kept calling. He got through on the second day to talk to Gary for seven minutes.

Often cited James Stewart as his closest friend.

During the filming of Morocco (1930) he was treated dismissively by director Josef von Sternberg. Tensions came to a head after von Sternberg yelled directions at Cooper in German. The 6"3' actor approached the 5"4 director, physically picked him up by the collar and said, "If you expect to work in this country you'd better get on to the language we use here".

In May 1974 his body was removed from Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles and reburied, under a three-ton boulder from a Montauk (NY) quarry, in Sacred Heart Cemetery in Southampton, New York, near his family. His wife explained, "Gary loved Southampton. This is what he would want".

He was originally a painter and artist and had sought to pursue that as a career. His drawings and watercolors were exhibited throughout the dormitory in college, and he was named art editor for the college yearbook. In fact, he started work as an extra with the intention of making money to attend an art course.

In May 1931, after finishing I Take This Woman (1931), the combination of exhaustion, physical illness and the conflict between his possessive mother and jealous mistress led to a nervous breakdown. He had been working 14 to 16 hours a day, sometimes 23, making one film by day and another by night. He suffered from anemia and jaundice, and his weight dropped 30 pounds to a dangerously low 148 lbs.

The pallbearers at the funeral were Cooper's close friends--James Stewart, Henry Hathaway, Jack Benny, William Goetz, Jerry Wald and Charles Feldman. Rocky and Maria walked behind the casket, alongside Cooper's 87-year-old mother Alice Cooper and his brother Arthur, as it was borne through the church to the hearse out on Santa Monica Blvd. Among the top names of Hollywood attending the services were Norma Shearer, Dean Martin, Walter Pidgeon, Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Jimmy Durante, Martha Hyer, John Wayne, Rosalind Russell, Robert Stack, Myrna Loy, Fay Wray, Joan Crawford, Maureen O'Sullivan, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, and Karl Malden. Not one fan broke the lines to ask for an autograph.

Upon seeing him, a professor in the theater department at Grinnell College recorded "shows no promise."

He was in a car accident as a teenager that caused him to walk with a limp the rest of his life.

His appetite was prodigious, but no matter how much he ate, he always remained thin. During his early years in Hollywood, working odd jobs and living with his parents, he said, he said with some comic exaggeration, that his "starvation diet at the time ran to no less than a dozen eggs a day, a couple of loaves of bread, a platter of bacon, and just enough pork chops between meals to keep me going until I got home for supper." His specialty on hunting trips was gargantuan: wild duck covered with bacon strips, enhanced by four eggs and steak. He could eat a cherry pie and drink a quart of milk for lunch.

Both of his parents were immigrants to America from England.

The revised 1946 lyric to Irving Berlin's song "Puttin' On the Ritz ("Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper/Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper/Super-duper") refers to Cooper in his early sound and pre-cowboy days when he was considered the height of tall, natural American elegance. This persona is best seen in Ernst Lubitsch's version of Noël Coward's play "Design for Living" (Design for Living (1933)), in which he plays a character said to be inspired by Howard Hughes, whom Cooper very much resembled.

He was a close friend and admirer of Pablo Picasso.

He was not a fan of baseball and had never played or even seen a game before being cast as Lou Gehrig in Pride Of The Yankees (1942).

Although he was in failing health, his friend, director Henry Hathaway, had arranged to use him in his segments of How the West Was Won (1962). Upon his death, James Stewart, his best friend, accepted the role.

His father, an English immigrant to Montana who became a wealthy lawyer and rancher, was a judge on the Montana Supreme Court.

In 1940 he actively campaigned for Wendell Willkie as the Republican challenger to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's quest for a third term of office. Cooper believed Roosevelt was already too powerful and would become more so. He told Cecelia Ager, though, that he advocated most of the New Deal reforms and believed the GOP made a mistake by not emphasizing its intention of retaining most of them. He said, "There's no going back to the ways of the Old Guard." Willkie, a well known womanizer, became firm friends with the actor.

Along with Sidney Poitier, he is the most represented actor on the American Film Institute's 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time, with five of his films on the list. They are: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) at #83, Sergeant York (1941) at #57, Meet John Doe (1941) at #49, High Noon (1952) at #27 and The Pride of the Yankees (1942) at #22.

He liked sports and kept in shape with hiking and riding, tennis and golf, archery and skiing, trout fishing and spear fishing, swimming and scuba diving and driving fast cars. He liked boxing.

On 16 April 1958 he entered the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital for a full face-lift and other cosmetic surgery by Dr John Converse, one of the leading plastic surgeons in America. Newspaper articles commenting on the effects of the operation said his face now looked quite different and the procedure had not been successful.

In the early 1930s his doctor told him he had been working too hard. Cooper went to Europe and stayed a lot longer than planned. When he returned, he was told there was now a "new" Gary Cooper--an unknown actor needed a better name for films, so the studio had reversed Gary Cooper's initials and created a name that sounded similar: Cary Grant.

He turned down both Stagecoach (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939).

In the late 1950s his voracious eating habits finally caught up with him. After decades of incomparable thinness, Cooper put on 15 lbs, pushing his weight up to 190 lbs, which on his 6'3" frame was still slender.

In the spring of 1960 he had two operations, one for prostate cancer and another to remove a cancerous part of his colon. The doctors were sure that they had gotten all of it. His body strengthened and he made The Naked Edge (1961) in England, but during production he had a lot of pain in his neck and shoulders. When he returned home from England he went back to the doctor in February 1961 and it was then that he had to be told the cancer had metastasized to his lungs and bones. As he did in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) he took it in stride and said, "If it is God's will, that's all right, too." He opted not to take very much treatment.

Despite his wholesome screen image, he was an infamous (and privately boastful) womanizer in reality, allegedly having had affairs with numerous and sometimes very famous leading ladies throughout his career. This was in spite of the fact that he had a faithful wife, Sandra, and that many of his lovers were also married.

He never intended to become an actor and only began after meeting two friends from Montana when he first came to Los Angeles and, after working a series of odd jobs, was set up with a casting director who gave him work as an extra for five dollars a day and a rider for twice that amount. His intention was to save up enough for an Art course.

Separated from his wife Rocky in May 1951, mainly over his affair with Patricia Neal. They did not live together again until July 1954.

He wasn't present to receive his Academy Award in February 1953, for his portrayal of Marshal Will Kane in High Noon (1952). He asked John Wayne to accept it on his behalf.

Born Frank Cooper, he changed his first name to Gary at the suggestion of his agent, Nan Collins, whose hometown was Gary, Indiana.

At first Cooper didn't want to make Friendly Persuasion (1956), not just because he felt the audience wouldn't accept him as a devout Quaker, but also because he did not want to play a father figure. This was despite the fact that he was now 55. On the set he arranged for his daughter Maria Cooper Janis to date Anthony Perkins, not seeming to realize that the young actor was gay.

His lovers included Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Carole Lombard, Lupe Velez, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich and Patricia Neal. Sir Cecil Beaton also claimed to have had an affair with him.

He was originally supposed to play the leading role in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), but Harry Cohn refused to loan Cooper out so James Stewart was cast instead.

His reputation as a conservative seems largely overstated. Though he appeared as a "friendly witness" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, he carefully avoided naming any people he suspected of having Communist sympathies within the Hollywood community. He later starred in High Noon (1952), a western that was an allegory for blacklisting in Hollywood, and strongly defended blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman from attacks by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Foreman later credited Cooper as the only major star in Hollywood who tried to help him. His mistress Patricia Neal, who did consider herself a liberal, said Gary was "conservative" but "you couldn't call him right-wing". Cooper showed a sense of humor by asking John Wayne to collect his Oscar for him in 1953, after Wayne had criticized High Noon (1952) as "anti-American".

Was an acting mentor to Kirk Douglas.

Often played the love interest of a significantly younger woman. A notable example is High Noon (1952) in which he and Grace Kelly played newlyweds. He was 51 and she was 22.

In 1943 Cooper was one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, called merely "the Alliance" in the film community. Its other early leaders included Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Sam Wood, Norman Taurog, Clarence Brown, and Walt Disney. Clark Gable, thought of as one whose apolitical inclination was even more pronounced than Cooper's, was also a member. The Alliance's cheerleader was Lela E. Rogers, mother of Ginger Rogers.

He was voted the 42nd Greatest Movie Star of all time by Premiere Magazine.

He was a close friend of Bing Crosby, who named his eldest son after Cooper.

He blew the harmonica and strummed the guitar; played backgammon and bridge; grew corn and avocados on the Encino ranch he bought in the early 1930s and loved to work with his tractor in the garden.

In 1944 he formed his own production company, International Pictures, with Samuel Goldwyn. His partners were Leo Spitz, William Goetz (who'd recently been ousted from 20th Century-Fox) and Nunnally Johnson. They only produced nine movies, two of which starred Cooper, Casanova Brown (1944) and Along Came Jones (1945). Then in 1946 they sold International Pictures to Universal Pictures, which changed its name to Universal-International.

With the critical and commercial disaster You're in the Navy Now (1951), the word got out that Cooper was finished. He couldn't even sell a good picture that was a sure-fire formula to begin with--or once had been. He had disappeared completely from the Motion Picture Herald's annual survey of the top ten box office stars. He had been on the list for nine successive years, moving up and down but always there, proof that he was still a guarantee if only as a commodity star. Now he had lost even that. As the host of It's a Big Country: An American Anthology (1951), Cooper got fabulous press coverage during filming but after a few engagements it was withdrawn out of embarrassment. It wasted a warehouse of first-rate talent: Fredric March, William Powell, Gene Kelly, Ethel Barrymore, Janet Leigh, Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn and others. Cooper made another routine western, Distant Drums (1951), and then made the picture that would prove to be an enormous comeback vehicle for him: High Noon (1952).

Writer Ayn Rand worked as an extra in Hollywood when she came to the U.S. from Russia, and she promptly became a fan of Cooper. When her novel "The Fountainhead" was made into a film, Rand was thrilled that Cooper was starring. Cooper's speech in a courtroom is one that Rand worked on for a very long time. When filming was over, Cooper admitted to her that he hadn't understood it.

He was fond of dogs. At various times he owned boxers, Dobermans and Great Danes. He and his wife also raised Sealyhams.

During the 1944 presidential election the phrase, "I've been for Roosevelt before . . . but not this time!" was personally attributed to Cooper, forming the basis of full-page advertisements in major newspapers, paid for by the Republican National Committee. Cooper was extremely active on behalf of the Republican candidate, New York's governor Thomas E. Dewey. He gave speeches, did entertaining for fund raisers, met with Dewey in Los Angeles and did some personal campaigning in the film community. Whether Cooper had ever been "for Roosevelt before" is questionable. Possibly he voted for him in 1936 during the second-term landslide. If so, it was not publicly disclosed. Cooper's activities were as unpopular as Democrat Humphrey Bogart's endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt that year. The studio called in both stars and told them to stop antagonizing fans who did not share their political beliefs.

Met Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at a luncheon organized by Charles Feldman at Twentieth Century-Fox on September 19, 1959. Khruschev personally invited Cooper and his wife and daughter on a six-day, United States Information Agency-sponsored trip to Moscow and Leningrad. After Cooper entertained some Soviet dignitaries at his house in Hollywood, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper publicly denounced him as "soft on Commies".