You can see traces of his good looks in many stars who came later – young Elvis, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Richard Gere, and even Alec Baldwin in his thinner days – and this just proves his enduring imprint on what we like in men, as idols and as lovers. Charm, confidence, mischievousness, shyness, morality, desire and real honest love all played across his face at once, and you never thought for a second any of it was insincere. Gary Cooper is the archetype – the original tall, dark and handsome – and we fall for everyone who reminds us a little of him, even as the original fades from memory. To paraphrase: it’s the wrong time and the wrong place, it’s not his face but such a charming face, that it’s alright by us.
Unfortunately, what doesn’t come with the new faces is the Man; one with humility and class and high morals, intent on being “a fella who answered the description of a right guy,” to quote Coop himself. What died with him was a calibre of Hollywood, and a calibre of manhood, replaced with reality TV stars, guys who wear trainers to formal events, people who think any press is good press even if it’s humiliating, whose pathetic private lives are the feature show. In Coop’s day, men didn’t walk around dressed like overgrown toddlers, saying more than their little brains could comprehend to anyone who’d listen, just for a few minutes of fame. Back then, when you got dressed, you really got dressed: French cuffs, tailored suits, shoes shined, hair flawless, and you spoke with an awareness of social politesse, or you kept your trap shut.
Hollywood has always functioned on good typecasting – taking the natural, innate qualities of an actor and putting him in roles where those qualities seem real and honest. And if Cooper was typecast to play the lone hero, the last man standing in the face of insurmountable odds, there must have been at least a little of that real hero in him or he wouldn’t be so completely believable in everything he did. As he said, “the general consensus seems to be that I don’t act at all.” Most of his directors and costars have said that he was the most natural actor they’d ever worked with, and that, according to Ingrid Bergman, "you never noticed that he was working." On screen, he makes other immensely talented, iconic actors look like vaudeville slapstick, their elbows up in the air, their affected accents announcing all the time, “I am an Actor!” As the great Charles Laughton said of Cooper: "We act, he is."
Thus, Coop the Lone Hero in his films was also Coop the Lone Hero in life. Not perfect, not always an obvious good guy, but more loveable for his flaws; his shy, unaffected manner drawing people to him, and drawing honest admiration and love from anyone who met him. Sincere, unabashedly bashful, goofy and awkward I'm sure, with a genuine 'aw shucks' kind of friendliness, and probably the least complicated ideals of right and wrong of anyone in Hollywood. Frank Capra says of him, "integrity was etched in his face... honest he looked, and honest he was." And as writer / director John Mulholland said of him, “No other actor in the history of film so personified the ideal of the American male as Gary Cooper. For 35 years and 92 films, Gary Cooper was America's Everyman.” With him died that ideal, that everyman, and even that America.
I think it would have broken his heart to see what Hollywood, and indeed the world, has become since the Golden Era. In hindsight, his life is a tragedy: the bad guys won. All those shiftless, drunken slobs he tried to whip into shape, all the lousy, rotten mean-hearted scoundrels, they've overrun the town and there’s no cool, handsome sheriff on the way to set things right. Mulholland says of him, “he could spot a phony across a country mile.” Well, now those country miles that gave Coop his weathered face, his comfortable Montana drawl and his honest-to-goodness desire to be "a right guy" have been bulldozed and built up into something he probably wouldn't even recognise anymore. I’m glad Gary Cooper died with at least a little of his ideal world still intact, and that he never lived to see how all the phonies finally stole the show.
