Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 37 Gary Cooper was born Frank James Cooper on May 7, 1901, in Helena, the son of English immigrants. Coo- per's family had connections with the state's land and civics as well. His father, Charles Cooper, worked as a lawyer, and eventually served on the Montana Supreme Court. He also kept a ranch outside of Helena, where his son's childhood was spent. The boy's mother, Alice, insisted on sending him to school in England when he was thirteen; he returned at the outbreak of the first World War three years later. After Frank was expelled from Helena High School, supposedly for putting Limburger cheese on the radi- ators, his parents sent him to Bozeman to finish high school. It was in Bozeman that he appeared in his senior class play, The Gibson Upright, his first experience acting. But it wasn't until 1925 that he entered the motion picture business. After an abortive sojourn at Grinnell College in Iowa (he had enrolled to study art, but dropped out after a serious car acci- dent, which gave him a slight limp for the rest of his life), he followed his parents to Los Angeles, where they had retired. Frank found employment as a stunt horseman in motion pictures. After a handful of uncredited extra roles in silent films—including the 1925 version of Ben Hur—the newly rechristened Gary Cooper received top billing in a Western called Arizona Bound (1927). By the time of his first sound film, Victor Fleming's The Virginian in 1929, his screen persona was firmly established. If Cooper's screen persona was stamped from the beginning by Montanan origins, Myrna Loy's image was more mutable. She had relocated to Culver City, California in her late teens with her mother and younger brother (her father died in the 1918 influenza pandemic). After finishing high school, she supported the family by working as a dancer at Grauman's Egyptian Theater, providing the pre-picture entertainment at movie premieres. One of her fellow dancers was another future movie legend, Joan Crawford, with whom she maintained a life-long friendship. She appeared in uncredited chorus girl roles in a few films before being cast as a vamp in What Price, Beauty? (filmed in 1925, though not officially re- leased until 1928). The film was produced by Natacha Rambova, the wife of matinee idol Rudolph Valentino; the couple had seen Myrna at the Egyptian and taken a liking to her. Her onscreen ap- pearances for the next seven years consisted primarily of "exotic" temptress roles; she would be cast as the Javanese island girl or the Chinese prostitute who attempts to lure away the hunky white hero. Appropriately enough, the final Western Gary Cooper starred in was a Montana story, based on a novella by a Montana author. Dorothy M. Johnson published The Hanging Tree in 1957; the film adaptation appeared two years later, directed by Delmer Daves (as well as by Cooper's co-star Karl Malden, who briefly took over when Daves fell ill during the shoot). The film is also notable as the screen debut of George C. Scott. Johnson was the author of several volumes of nonfiction, as well as a few stories that served as the bases for a pair of other classic Western films: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) and A Man Called Horse (Elliot Silverstein, 1970). Cooper reportedly gifted Johnson with a pheasant wishbone, which she had made into a necklace. GARY COOPER OSCILLATED BETWEEN COWBOY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN HERO, WITH SOME VARIATIONS IN BETWEEN. CONTINUED

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