The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic by Richard Sandomir (review)

The title tells just about all in The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic, which serves to link a real-life baseball legend and a Hollywood megastar who played him in his celluloid biography. Its author, Richard Sandomir, opens his tome by describing The Pride of the Yankees (which was released in 1942, a year after the Iron Horse’s death) as “the first great sports film” (1). On one level, who’s to argue? However, while the story is baseball-centric, its primary emphasis is on a love and marriage that is heartfelt and timeless. So it is for good reason that Irving Berlin’s “Always,” penned in the mid-1920s as a present for his wife Ellin (“I’ll be loving you, always. With a love that’s true, always. …”), populates its soundtrack.

Sandomir, a New York Times reporter, covers assorted angles relating to The Pride of the Yankees and those responsible for its creation. He offers a portrait of Gehrig, focusing on how his career and life were tragically cut short by the disease that came to be named for him. He records the manner in which Eleanor Twitchell Gehrig, his widow, spurred on the production of The Pride of the Yankees and its portrayal of the Iron Horse as a genuinely good man and devoted husband. He includes background information on all the principals, from Samuel Goldwyn, the film’s producer, to Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright (the on-the-rise actress who played Eleanor), and Eleanor herself. He includes the manner in which Babe Ruth came to be cast as himself, observing that the “movie wouldn’t be the same without the Bambino” (60). He covers the film’s pre-production; of special note is the manner in which Cooper, who was notoriously non-athletically-inclined, labored to grasp the baseball basics. He cites other versions of Gehrig’s life and plight, from The Lou Gehrig Story, a 1956 episode of Climax!, a CBS-TV anthology series, to NBC’s Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story, a television movie.

In his best passages, Sandomir offers a detailed examination of the content of The Pride of the Yankees, focusing on what is fact and what is conjured up for the purpose of coherent storytelling. Tellingly, he reports that Eleanor, after seeing the film for the first time, “felt like she had lived her married life all over again—even if many details had been altered—as she watched Cooper, so like Lou in her mind, playing her husband with sympathy and simplicity” (222). And he contrasts Gehrig’s now-legendary July 4, 1939, Yankee Stadium farewell to the manner in which it was presented (and spoken by Gary Cooper) onscreen. Sandomir does not exaggerate when he describes the original as a “magnificent speech” (198) and “not a perfect speech, but it is a great one, notable for its power, structure, generosity, and modesty” (202). He reflects on its instant popularity by reporting that Cooper was urged to recite it for GIs while on tour during World War II. Ultimately, according to Sandomir, Cooper had “achieved what Eleanor and Goldwyn desired: He had made Gehrig his own, allowing fans to see in his portrayal the dignity, decency, and heroism that Gehrig had shown” (219).

Even though he passed away prior to Pearl Harbor, Gehrig’s onscreen depiction directly and purposefully relates to US involvement in World War II: a moment in time when countless Americans who were not that much younger than the Iron Horse would sacrifice their lives for their country. As Sandomir so aptly states, the film “became essential to Gehrig’s afterlife. It pushed (Babe) Ruth—the megastar—to the role of a supporting player. It starred (Gary Cooper), who specialized in playing men of quiet dignity. And it gave perpetual life...