Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s

3. Gary Cooper: Rugged Elegance

NOTES 1. Temple is referred to throughout this essay as Shirley because the use of her first name, and the familiarity that it implied, was so significant a part of her star image in the 1930s. 2. All statistics from Motion Picture Herald (12 January, 19 January, 16 March, 23 March 1935, each 60–62). SHIRLEY TEMPLE 65 66 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 3 Gary Cooper Rugged Elegance COREY K. CREEKMUR Gary Cooper—born Frank James Cooper to English parents in 1901 in Helena, Montana—first worked in Hollywood as an extra in 1925, but leapt to the attention of critics and the public through a small but heroic role as a doomed young engineer in director Henry King’s The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926). Under contract to Paramount in the late 1920s, Cooper was often cast in leading roles as a dashing flyer or romantic cowboy (his first starring role was as “The Cowboy” in Arizona Bound [1927]). One of the first major fan magazine articles on Cooper effectively Gary Cooper in Fighting Caravans (1931). Collection of the author. summarized his sudden arrival via its title: “Suffering to Stardom: One Poignant Scene, One Heart-Rending Moment, and Gary Cooper Was There” (Photoplay, April 1927, 75). Offscreen, early gossip about the extraordinarily handsome Cooper centered around his alleged affairs with many of his more famous leading ladies (including Lupe Velez and Clara Bow), and rumors that his rise to fame was supported by older, wealthy female patrons, but these did not prevent him from quickly becoming a favorite of both male and female audiences, as another early article about “That CowPunchin ’ Cinderella Man” (Motion Picture Classic, June 1927, 54) affirmed by pairing photographs of the star dressed in cowboy gear and in a tailored suit, summarizing the nimble balance of rugged elegance that would characterize Cooper’s public image for thirty more years. His long career as a major Hollywood star lasted until his death in 1961, and was acknowledged by Best Actor Academy Awards for Sergeant York (1941) and High Noon (1952). A full assessment of Cooper’s career would thus cover almost four decades, perhaps focusing on additional films from the late 1920s (Lilac Time [1928], The Virginian [1929]) and certainly from the 1940s (The Westerner [1940], Meet John Doe [1941], The Fountainhead [1949]) and the 1950s (Vera Cruz [1954], Man of the West [1958]) as key works in any comprehensive estimation of the star’s extended career. (Biographies of Cooper, of varied quality and trustworthiness, include those by Arce, Cooper, Kaminsky, Meyers, Swindell, and Wayne; basic information on all his films is usefully collected in Dickens.) However, a tighter focus on Cooper’s career during the 1930s vividly illustrates the process of the construction and consolidation of his star image, which remained relatively stable (if progressively more somber) in later decades. If, by the time of his celebrated performance in High Noon, he was (according to Phillip Drummond) “summarizing and revising his long history of cinematic stardom since the 1920s, and generating complex images of troubled masculinity along the way,” in the 1930s Cooper was still setting his stardom into place, crafting an image of idealized American manhood that could be immediately invoked by the actor’s mere presence in later decades (Drummond 9). According to the evidence of the box office, he was most popular between 1941 and 1949, when he consistently ranked as one of the top ten “Money Making Stars” in Motion Picture Herald’s annual poll. But he first entered this list (as well as Quigley’s “Top Ten Moneymakers Poll,” derived from exhibitor’s reports and published annually in the International Motion Picture Almanac) in 1936 and 1937, and remained a consistent box office draw throughout the end of the decade. Even if we recognize the decades after the 1930s as marking the peak of Cooper’s commercial success GARY COOPER 67 and professional acclaim, the earlier period encourages a fascinating, retrospective understanding of how his stardom, like that of comparable stars James Stewart and Henry Fonda and even John Wayne, was first tested and finally consolidated as the basis for a lifelong career and resonant public image. While Cooper’s screen persona was remarkably flexible in the 1930s, his steady climb toward mass popularity and success through the decade affirms that his uniqueness (crucial in distinguishing a star from the ranks of mere actors) was first glimpsed...