Letters to the Dead: Things I Wish I'd Said. Ann Palmer

      A Note to Gary Cooper,

      It seems fitting to write to you even though I never met you or worked with you. You were the first really BIG Movie Star I ever saw! Wow! What a thrill it was! It was in Ft. Worth, Texas. You were making a personal appearance for the opening of one of your movies. I have no idea what the movie was or if I ever saw it. All I remember is that I was walking down a street that had major theatres on it when across the street came walking this very handsome man with steel gray hair. I was only about 13, a bit young to have a crush on you at that time.

      I feel you should know the impression you left on a young teen. What I remember most was seeing this unusually handsomely striking man, with your gray hair and beautiful copper-tanned skin, you were wearing a gray suit, gray shirt and gray tie. What a thing to remember – not your talent but what good taste you had in your apparel! It left a lifetime memory.

      As an adult woman, I helped select the clothing for my ex-husband. He, too, was tall, slender with gray hair and wore clothes well. He just never knew how to select them. After a career in the Navy, he wore his clothes like uniforms – the same thing over and over. As he worked long hours and often six or seven days a week, I did his shopping. Always loving the monotone matching I had seen all those years before only once on the street of Ft. Worth, Texas, I shopped for shades of the same color. I brought home a selection and let him pick the ones he liked best, and then took the rest back to the store. While he showered and shaved, I carefully laid out the matching suit, shirt, tie and sox. The men he worked with said he looked as though he stepped out of Esquire. Some men even asked his advice! What a laugh that was! After we separated and I flew back to Florida for a divorce hearing, there he was, back in his old polyester used-car salesman’s taste – ah, but for a while, he was very well-dressed through my taste in men’s clothing which was born when I saw you at my youthful age of 13! I tell you this because I am sure you would never imagine having a life time affect on a woman for your taste in clothing.

      You made films before I was born but during my growing years and beyond, I saw many of your films and you were one of my favorite actors. Millions of women fell in love with Gary Cooper! As a young actress, I was often compared to Grace Kelly – How we all remember the two of you together in “High Noon.”

       GARY COOPER’S WIFE:

      Sandra Shaw (1933-1961)

      one daughter, Maria (1936)

       GENERAL INFORMATION:

      Gary Cooper’s father was Charles Henry Cooper. He left England at age 19 and became a lawyer. When Gary was age five, in 1906, his father purchased the Seven-Bar-Nine, a 600-acre ranch that had originally been a land grant to the builders of the railroad through that part of Montana. His mother had been ill was advised by her doctor to take a long sea voyage in 1910. She stayed in England where Gary and his older brother Arthur went to Dunstable School for seven years. Later, his father became a Justice in the Montana State Supreme Court. Gary worked on his father’s ranch during the war years. Gary schooling included Helena, Montana and Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa. His first stage appearance was in high school and college. Before becoming an actor, he worked as a Yellowstone Park guide for several seasons. Even thought he was always soft spoken and a college graduate, also for a brief time, a newspaper cartoonist, it was his saddle skills, hard won in his Montana youth that in reality got him into movies, It was not his college education or newspaper cartoonist that brought success. It was his ranching and riding skills that got him into the film industry. He first worked as an extra in numerous Hollywood Westerns, then the second male lead in Henry King’s 1926 The Winning of Barbara Worth. His quiet, lanky good looks were scene stealer from his matinee idol Ronald Colman. As a result, Paramount Pictures signed him to a contract.

      Gary Cooper was the archetypal of the strong, silent type or perhaps created it. In the early 1930s, after his doctor told him he was working too hard, he took off for Europe where he stayed longer than planned. “Morocco,” a desert romance, revealed Gary as a handsome Legionnaire that got him out of only Westerns. In spite of his quiet, shy image, he was quite the lady’s man off screen with romances with Claire Bow, Lupe Velez, and others were both numerous and well known.

      He received his first Oscar nomination in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” in 1936. In “Sergeant York”, he portrayed real-life pacifist-turned-WW1 hero Alvin York which brought him Best Actor Oscar. “Ball of Fire” in 1941, directed by Howard Hawks, revealed his comic touch. Another Oscar nomination for portraying of a living legend was “The Pride of the Yankees” in 1942, as baseball great Lou Gehrig. Still another nomination for Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1943.” In April 1961 he won a special, career-achievement Academy Award, which was accepted by his friend James Stewart. By that time he was too ill to accept it with cancer; only a month later he was dead.

      In 1939 Gary Cooper was so well liked that when the U.S. Treasury Department stated that he was the nation’s top wage earner with $482,819 earnings, it did not create any hostility or envy in the industry. Today’s generations cannot know the love audiences had for this handsome, tall, silent hero who was an American icon.