‘He Was a FANTASTIC FATHER’
THE STAR PLAYED IDEAL MEN AND WAS A DREAM DAD IN REAL LIFE, TOO
When Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria, was 12, she wanted what all her friends in Hollywood had: a horse. He told her no. Why? “He said, ‘It’s important to have patience. If you still want a horse when you’re 14, we’ll talk about it,’ ” Maria, 79, tells Closer. “Of course, by the time I was 14, I couldn’t care less about getting a horse. That lesson has been so helpful in my life.”
The stoic star didn’t need to stretch to play men of virtue in classic films like Sergeant York, The Pride of the Yankees and High Noon. “To get folks to like you, I figured you had to sort of be their ideal,” he said. “He wanted to show the best a man can be,” adds Maria. “Those qualities translated into his relationships with his family and friends.”
Gary came to playing cowboys naturally, having grown up on a Montana ranch with his Englishimmigrant parents. On a visit to Hollywood, he found work as a stuntman in Westerns and was quickly promoted to leading man. “He was tall, had beautiful blue eyes and this sculpted face,” Glenn Frankel, author of High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic, tells Closer. When silent films gave way to talkies, it helped that Gary had “a really nice voice, too,” Frankel says.
He wed debutante Veronica Balfe in 1933, and Maria was born four years later. Their marriage hit rough spots — Gary had affairs with costars Ingrid Bergman and Patricia Neal, and the couple separated for three years in the ’50s. But they reunited stronger than ever. “They loved and respected each other even more,” Maria tells Closer. “And they handled it wonderfully with me.”
Known as the strong, silent type on-screen, Gary carried himself in a similar manner as a dad. “He taught me more by example than words,” Maria says. “He was a fantastic father. We did a lot of sports activities together as a family.”
The world was shocked when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the early ’60s. “His attitude was, ‘We’ll pray for a miracle,’” Maria recalls. When one didn’t come, “I never heard him complain, but one day, he said, ‘Dammit, just when I was beginning to learn what acting was all about.’ ”
He died at 60 in 1961, but his legacy of doing the right thing on and offscreen lingers. “The way he’s remembered would make him very grateful and happy,” Maria says. “He squeezed a lot out of life, and he put so much back into it.” — Bruce Fretts,
with reporting by Lexi Ciccone
“If you ask me if I’m the luckiest guy in the world, all I can say is, ‘Yup.’ ”
— Gary Cooper, shortly before his death in 1961