Family Man

“Gary Cooper Off Camera” is an inviting photo album-scrapbook-reminiscence that contains irresistible black-and-white photographs of the actor on almost every page. They establish Cooper’s apparent love for his family and his relish for the out-of-doors. The tallest man in any group shot, he appeared graceful and debonair whether hunting, fishing, riding, sketching, being chased by a bull, reciting Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to the Yankees (by request) to the troops overseas during World War II, chastising a naughty dog, or sipping champagne in white tie at Romanoff’s. Only in studio stills, with his hair combed just so, does he look artificial.

Cooper was obviously comfortable in a vast variety of circumstances, and his close friends were as diverse as Hemingway, Picasso (pictured in Indian headdress) and a hunting and fishing guide in Colorado called Beartracks.

Because Cooper possessed such a vigorous film presence, and continues to have it, thanks in part to the American Movie Channel, it comes as a shock that he died in 1961 when his only child, Maria, was 21 years old. Born in Montana in 1901, Cooper made silents and two-reelers before he graduated to sound and stardom. Playing so many heroes, he became a national hero. Fred Zinnemann is quoted as saying, “Gary Cooper was the personification of the honor-bound man.” Alvin York chose Cooper to play him in the movie Sergeant York, and Hemingway requested that Cooper play Robert Jordan in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Despite such roles, Cooper never lost his humility. His daughter writes: “My father lived his belief that he was ‘an average Charlie who became a movie star.’ ”

Readers might ask: Didn’t Cooper bring scripts home to study? How did he work on them? Didn’t he struggle, just a little, to achieve his natural portrayals? How did he move so smoothly from silents to talkies and from drama to comedy?

On this topic, Janis remains silent. Cooper seems to have learned to act by studying photographs his mother snapped of him when he experimented with making faces. “Even in the last weeks of his life” when he was gravely ill Janis says, “only once did I ever hear him discuss his profession, and one day he said very simply, but with a great deal of irritation, ‘Damn! Just when I was beginning to understand a little what acting is all about.’ ”

As for family matters, we’re all critics of our parents’ marriage but, while Janis admits that Cooper was a “ladies’ man” and mentions the affair with Patricia Neal that caused him to leave his wife and daughter for three years, she maintains that her father still conveyed his deep love for them. “There were no subjects we couldn’t and didn’t discuss,” Janis says. As if that isn’t enough, she gives photographic evidence that her parents took her everywhere: scuba diving, hunting, skiing, to an audience with the pope and even to meet the Italian girl they had “adopted” via the Foster Parents Plan for War Children.

I can’t, however, help but wonder if Janis is a misguided soul who has fallen for a publicity department’s puffery, a dupe of her father’s grandiosity, or if Cooper was what she describes and she the saint of forgiveness. We will never know in this paean to her father’s goodness, a refreshing rarity in this age of tattle-tale memoirs.